The Sister Season

by Scott, Jennifer

  But then she saw him. He almost seemed to pop up in front of her out of nowhere. He was flailing, his eyes wide and panicked. He was holding out his arms toward her like a toddler wanting to be picked up. His lips were pursed tight, small bubbles leaking out of them and floating over his head. His eyes seemed to be telling her that he couldn’t hold his breath much longer, and that he couldn’t get up top again for more. More important, they told her that he wanted out. He wanted to live.

  She kicked extra hard, reaching for him, feeling like she was going nowhere through the water.

  Just hang on, Eli, she pleaded inside her head, the fear and dread she’d been feeling before now looming so large it almost felt as though it was pulling her down. Please hang on!

  She stretched so far her shoulders ached, her fingers splaying and grabbing until they found his hands, his elbows, his shoulders. She gripped him, praying that her fingers would bend and clutch and not let go. To her relief they curled and she was able to drag him toward her.

  She pulled him up against her chest with one arm, noticing for the first time how thin he was. Still just a boy, really.

  And as she got her feet onto the ground underneath her and pushed herself back up toward that light spot in the ice, her lungs full to bursting, wanting to take a breath so badly, mightily pulling through the water with her free hand, everything in her world seemed to slow down.

  Fronds and sediment floated around her, unmoving. Fish wove through the weeds nearby. Sounds, muted and melted, drifted down into the water in bangs and creaks. Eli’s hair drifted up in front of her face; his scarf waved like a flag.

  And she realized, with something akin to a punch to the chest, that this was the first time she’d ever held him. Her nephew. Her sister’s little boy. Her blood. She’d never gathered him into a sticky hug as a toddler, and here he was turning into a young man. A very troubled young man. And she wanted nothing more than to turn back the calendar pages, to go back to when Eli was born, to be there for her sister. For both of her sisters. Time had marched in on the wave of anger and grudge, had swept an opportunity out of her hands like a finger snap, and had left her empty before she’d even realized that it was ticking.

  The thought filled her with horror. How many things had she lost over the past ten years? How much love, how much warmth would she never get back? How many more things would she lose if she kept herself closed off from love?

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go through life alone like this. She wanted Michael. She wanted love. She wanted time to leave her with sweet memories, not empty handfuls of missed ones.

  She broke through the surface of the water without even really trying. Automatically her chest heaved in a breath and expelled it back out again, and thank God for involuntary bodily responses, because she may have never breathed again.

  Breaking through the water was like walking into a chaotic room. There was screaming—Molly’s and Julia’s—and sirens in the distance, though Claire thought they might be heading across the old soy field toward them. There was a rough coughing, frayed around the edges, and Claire realized only vaguely that the sound was coming from Eli, who was frantically clawing at the ice around the hole. Julia was lying on the ice in front of him, sobbing, pulling on his arms, trying to free him without breaking the ice further, and Claire, still in the water, was pushing him, though she had no foothold to give her any strength. There was shouting coming from Elise and hands reaching and Eli sliding on his belly across the ice to safety and Maya repeating, “Oh, thank God, thank God, oh, thank God . . .”

  And Elise called, “Back here!” to the paramedics who had finally arrived and were slogging through the tree line with their equipment.

  Claire pulled herself out of the water, not caring when the ice she was clutching broke loose and dumped her back in. Barely even noticing how big the hole had gotten as she pulled herself up again and this time freed herself, breathing heavily, shivering, unsure exactly what had just happened and who had saved whom.

  He was still alive.

  Not that he cared.

  Not that he wanted to be.

  Not that he should have been.

  But he knew he was because he could hear the clock from his bedroom ticking all the way in the den and he could feel the tag of his flannels scratching up against the small of his back and he could still feel a little bit of a tingle in his pinkie finger. Frostnip, the doctor had called it. Made him sound like he belonged in a freaking Christmas carol.

  He was breathing. In, out. In, out. His heart was beating. Ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud. He was alive.

  They had tried to keep him in the hospital, but he’d begged his mom not to make him stay. He was fine. He was cold, but he was warming up and he was fine.

  He’d heard her repeat those very words to his dad on the phone later. He’d given them a hell of a scare. Nobody knows what they were doing on the ice, no. It was just an accident. A very frightening accident and they were all very lucky. And he was a hero! He’d saved his cousin’s life!

  But he knew better. He knew he was no hero. He knew it wasn’t an accident. He knew he’d caused it. And he was fine.

  Goddamn it!

  He was fine and his little cousin was still in the hospital and they were saying things like hypothermia and frostbite and needing to watch him for a couple of days and there was nothing he could do to take it all back.

  Nobody could get ahold of Uncle Bradley. Aunt Maya had tried. She’d called his cell phone over and over and he hadn’t answered it. She’d begged him on his voice mail to call her back.

  “Please,” she’d cried into the phone. “Something has happened. Will’s in the hospital. Please, Bradley. Call me.” But he didn’t, and they had all eventually left her and Will there at the hospital and gone home and just slowly drifted off toward their beds.

  And he was here. Alive. Reliving what had happened in his mind over and over again. His cousin’s coat coming off just when he got him to the top of the water. And his cousin splashing back down into the pond again, leaving him there clutching a stupid empty coat and crying like a baby. Watching his cousin sink to the bottom of the pond and going back underwater after him, his arms and legs feeling like they’d been plugged with lead. And finding his cousin again and dragging him up by one arm and pushing his cousin out of the water but unable to pull himself out no matter how hard he tried. And then drifting down, which should have been exactly what he wanted, should have made him happy and calm because it was finally going to happen. But instead of letting death take him, he’d panicked and headed back up to breathe, over and over again, until his body physically couldn’t do it anymore. He’d swum toward his aunt Claire, afraid, afraid, afraid of dying, and being thankful.

  Thankful to be saved.

  Fuck.

  Everyone was asleep. Nobody left their bedrooms tonight.

  Except him.

  He couldn’t sleep.

  He was alive and he shouldn’t have been.

  He curled up onto his side and felt the wool of the recliner press into his cheek. He stared out the window, where the moon shone down brightly onto the head of the snowman he’d built with his little cousins earlier that day. Tears snaked out of the corners of his open eyes.

  He stayed that way until morning.

  December

  27

  The Day of the Funeral

  “He was only surprised for a

  few minutes.”

  Twenty-one

  Elise didn’t expect Maya to come to the funeral. She figured her daughter would stay at the hospital by Will’s side, waiting for news on whether or not the cold had done any permanent damage.

  Elise had cried herself to sleep the night before. The poor boys. Her poor daughter. She’d lost Bradley, almost lost her son. Tragedy upon tragedy, and what if she’d never manipulated the girls? What if she hadn’t been greed
y about getting them all in the same house for Christmas? What if she’d told them the truth, that the funeral had always been set for the twenty-seventh? Would this have not happened? Would they have shown up last night, tired and jet-lagged and whole? Instead, her lie had brought them in early. A family had arrived five days ago, but only one of them—Molly—remained at the house this morning. A family damaged, depleted.

  In this way she felt responsible for the things that had happened with Maya this week. And a loop of should-haves and might-haves and could-haves filled her brain all night long. She should have told the truth. She should have had the pond filled in years ago. She should have been watching the kids more closely. Not to even mention the biggest should-have of all, the one about the night Robert died—what she should have done that night—but she still wasn’t ready to face that one.

  But whether she should have or not, she didn’t do any of those things, and that was the important part.

  Out of habit, she rolled over to her left side to avoid Robert’s snoring in her face, then once again caught herself, remembering that he was gone. He wouldn’t ever be snoring in her face again. Or making her have sex during her period. Or smacking her for some perceived wrong. When would she stop forgetting this? When would it be just a normal fact of life that her husband was gone? She forced herself to turn over to her other side and look at his pillow. To touch the sheets on his side of the bed. She picked up the pillow and held it to her face, smelled it. It still smelled like him, and the scent stirred up feelings in her.

  She missed him. As crazy as that sounded, she did. Not the mean bastard she’d been married to for so long, but the boy who’d wooed her with wood carvings and wildflowers plucked from their field and lavish dates where she felt like royalty. Had he been planning to bring that boy back? Was that what the necklace had been about? She wished she knew.

  He had been good to her. For a long while, he’d been good to her.

  But the drinking had started and the girls had been born and he’d been so stressed and angry all the time and he’d been bad to her. For an even longer while. So would it really have mattered if the pendant was an apology? She guessed not. There was such a thing as too little, too late, and she supposed Robert had passed that point long, long ago.

  She pulled herself out of bed and took a quick shower, then dried her hair and slipped into a black dress, the same one she’d worn to her mom’s funeral years ago.

  When she got to the kitchen, she was surprised to see Maya sitting at the table, erect and vacant-eyed, dressed in a beautiful black pantsuit neatly pressed and hugging her curves. She was sipping a coffee and staring out into space. Elise could hear Molly playing in the den, the Christmas tree rattling every so often.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to be here,” Elise said, pouring her own coffee. “Surely you’re not going to the funeral today.”

  Maya’s eyes barely shifted. She didn’t move. “My father died,” she said flatly. “I have to go.”

  Elise joined her at the table. “Honey,” she began. “Will—”

  “He’ll be fine for a couple of hours,” Maya interrupted, her eyes finally meeting her mom’s. “He’s sleeping anyway. They’ve got him on pain medication. His fingers are still hurting pretty bad. And his ear. The one that was pressed down on the ice.”

  “What are the doctors saying?”

  “That it’s possible he could lose some of his left pinkie and some of that ear. It’ll take a few weeks to know for sure.”

  Elise nodded, sipped her coffee. It seemed horrible to her, how a little boy could be perfectly healthy one minute and losing fingers the next. But he was alive. At least he was still alive.

  “We’re going back to Chicago tomorrow morning as planned. Bradley is already there, which is why he wasn’t answering last night. He was on a flight . . .” She trailed off, went back to her stare, but Elise noticed that her daughter was swallowing, and swallowing again. “I’ve got . . . an appointment . . . on Thursday, and now this, and Bradley’s already moving his things out . . . How am I ever going to do all of it by myself?”

  “I’ll help you,” Elise said. “I’ll try to get a flight in the morning. So I can be there. Do what you need.”

  Maya seemed to be struck by this offer. She shook her head. “I don’t know what I need anymore.”

  Elise reached over and touched her daughter’s elbow. “I know, honey.”

  Maya jerked her elbow away, pulling it to her side protectively. “No, you don’t know.” She leveled her gaze at her mom again. “Mom, my appointment is radiation treatment. I have breast cancer.”

  Maya’s face began to crumple with grief, but all Elise could do was sit back in shock. Cancer? On top of everything else, Maya had cancer? How did she not know this? Why had no one told her? Forget everyone else—why hadn’t Maya told her?

  “Oh, my God, Maya,” she whispered.

  Maya blinked, her head making fast little shaking movements as she lifted her face upward to try to keep the tears from falling over her lower lids. She swallowed, took a deep breath, used the pads of her fingers to dab at the corners of her eyes, and gathered herself.

  “I’ve lost everything,” she said. “I’m being punished and I don’t know why.”

  “You haven’t lost everything,” Elise said, though she knew her words would fall on deaf ears. Of course Maya felt as though she’d lost everything. Wouldn’t she herself feel the same way? “You still have the kids. You have to be there for the kids.”

  “What if I can’t? What if the cancer is worse than they think?”

  Elise had no answer for that.

  Last night, sitting in the uncomfortable vinyl hospital chairs, a jittery Julia had confided to Elise that Eli had been trying to commit suicide. Julia had wondered aloud if that was why he’d been on the ice, if this had been a suicide attempt and Will had just innocently gotten mixed up in it. Eli wasn’t talking and nobody knew exactly what had happened, but still Julia worried.

  Elise had been dumbstruck that one of her grandchildren was contemplating killing himself, and even more dumbstruck that this was knowledge that one of her daughters had and hadn’t shared with her.

  Now to find out that Maya had cancer . . . it was almost as if her wondering about her daughters had been answered. There were secrets. Tons of them. What more did her daughters keep unrevealed? What more were they sitting on? Keeping her out of? What other secrets would she discover?

  And would they find out hers?

  Twenty-two

  The funeral home was more crowded than Elise would have thought. She’d had no idea her husband had so many friends, although she had often, over the years, wondered if some of the old cronies that clogged up the funerals out there in the boonies were actually friends of Joe Dale and if he didn’t beg them to come out to make a good showing. A ministry to the hopelessly unloved, if you will.

  Clem Hebert and his wife and the other ladies who’d taken them to dinner at Sharp’s were there, as were a couple of men she recognized as having helped Robert fix some fencing a few years ago. Others she recognized from in town but didn’t know their names. She supposed he knew some from poker games, some from restaurants or bars, and some from the farm store that he frequented. She supposed that no matter what brand of son of a bitch you were, you still gathered a handful of followers by the time you were sixty-seven years old.

  Joe Dale greeted them at the front door with a smooth “Good afternoon, Elise, ladies,” and a small, contrite bow of the head perfected by years of handling the grieving. “Right this way.”

  He led them into the little chapel room where Robert’s casket was, shining under the lights and surrounded by flowers and plants. She could see his forehead and nose poking out over the lip of the open casket and immediately felt woozy and as if she’d better sit down before she fell down.

  “Mom? You okay?” Julia
said softly, putting her hands on the small of Elise’s back. “You look a little wobbly.”

  “I’m fine,” Elise said, trying to smile away the queasiness that had settled in. She glanced at her daughters.

  Claire had appeared in the kitchen this morning in her Hollywood sunglasses and had not taken them off since. The doctor had checked her out and released her. He had not given her anything to help her sleep, to rest, and Elise doubted that she had done either of those things last night. In many ways, her youngest daughter seemed more distraught by what had happened than anyone else had.

  Maya had sat down in the last pew, her arms and legs crossed primly, her gaze straight ahead.

  “If you’d like to spend a few moments with the departed,” Joe Dale said, “you will have some time after all the guests leave.”

  Elise nodded somberly, and as calmly as she could, she strode to the front of the room. She looked down into the casket. Gazed at him—at his tie, at the rouge on his cheeks—and tried to feel something, anything other than shame. And then she realized . . . she didn’t even really feel that.

  She touched his lapel, smoothed it with her palm. “Oh, Robert,” she whispered. “I guess I should apologize. I do feel bad about the way it all ended. But I really do think I would do it again, that’s the thing.”

  Soon Julia was standing next to her, her hand resting on the small of Elise’s back once again. “He looks like a wax figure,” Julia said. “Not that I expected him to look good or anything.”

  “He looks so small in there, don’t you think?” Elise whispered. “He always had such big shoulders. But he looks like a little old man in there.”

  “I don’t know, Mom. He looks the same size to me. Just not angry. Maybe that’s what’s throwing you off.”