The Good Sister

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Not that she has a particular affinity for janitors, but . . . well, at least he’s not dating one of the other girls. Not that she wants to date him, because he’s too old for her and they have nothing in common but Ray Bradbury and finding themselves in the same little corner of the world at the same time, and he’s probably not interested anyway, but . . .

  She just happens to like the fact that he was obviously reading the Bradbury book because he wanted to. Not because he had to for an assignment.

  She began not just to notice him, but to look for him. She figured out, for example, that on the first Monday of every month, he can always be found outside by the big signboard in front of the school. It’s his job to change the listing of events using the big black letters he carries with him in a plastic case. She liked how in December, he wrote “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!” using plenty of exclamation marks.

  When she worked up the courage to compliment him on that one day, he told her that he would have used more, “But that was all they had in the box.”

  On the last day before Christmas break, he saw her in the hall and called, “Merry Christmas! I hope you can tell I said that with lots of exclamation!”

  She laughed longer and harder than she should have.

  Today, there’s no sign of Johnny in the hallway. Just the usual crowd of uniformed girls making their way to classrooms, and the occasional habited nun hustling them along or waiting in doorways to greet them.

  “Hi, Carley!”

  She turns, surprised to have been greeted—by name!—by a pair of passing girls from her social studies class.

  “Oh . . . hi.”

  She rounds a corner and another girl spots her and waves. “Carley, what’s up?”

  “Not much.” Carley waves back and walks on, feeling a smile playing at her lips. Maybe, at long last, she’s starting to fit in here. Mom promised that it would take some time but would eventually happen. “You’ll see, Carley, before you know it, you’ll feel as much at home at Sacred Sisters as you did at Saint Paul’s.”

  She doubted that. After all, Saint Paul’s was within walking distance of her house in Woodsbridge, not way up here in the city. And she was enrolled there from kindergarten through eighth grade, year after year, in the same building with the same kids and the same teachers who weren’t all nuns like they are at Sisters—well, almost all of them, anyway. And at Saint Paul’s, the nuns didn’t wear habits as they do here, where they’re part of a more conservative religious order.

  Plus . . .

  Nicki was at Saint Paul’s.

  Carley’s smile fades. She doesn’t want to think about Nicki right now. Not on a day that’s started out so well, despite the stormy weather outside.

  In homeroom, she greets Sister Thomas Katherine, who’s standing at the chalkboard writing something.

  “Good morning, Carley!” Sister Thomas Katherine is cheerful, as always, and Carley’s mood lifts another notch as she heads down the row to her seat.

  “Hi, Carley.” The girl in front of her, a pretty blonde named Renee, turns around. “How was your weekend?”

  “Oh—it was pretty good, thanks.”

  “That’s good.” Renee faces forward again before Carley remembers that she should have asked, in turn, how Renee’s weekend was.

  “The best way to make new friends,” Mom coached her at the beginning of the year, “is to ask people about themselves.”

  So far, that’s been easier said than done. You can’t just walk up to someone who doesn’t know you exist and ask if she has any hobbies.

  Mom can’t relate to that particular problem, though. She’s the kind of person people notice—and like—right away. Dad calls her a social butterfly. Carley’s younger sister, Emma, is the same way: never at a loss for words and completely at ease wherever she goes, even surrounded by strangers.

  It must be nice to have that kind of confidence. Carley would trade places with Emma or Mom any day.

  But now, for the first time since she started high school, she wonders if her loneliness might be temporary after all, like her mother said. Weird the way it seems to have happened overnight, though. Or maybe friendliness is contagious: several other classmates say hello to her before it’s time to stand for the Pledge and morning prayer, read over the loudspeaker by a pair of seniors.

  Listening absently to the morning announcements, Carley decides February isn’t so bad after all.

  It’s definitely looking better than the fall months, when she was so new here she couldn’t find her way from her locker to homeroom without consulting her photocopied map.

  And it’s better than December and January, too, by far. Nicki’s absence in her life made the holidays—always Carley’s favorite time of year—seem oddly depressing this year. The lake-effect snow hurtled across the frigid waters of Erie and Ontario seemed even crueler than usual without her best friend around to coax her into sledding or brownie baking when blizzards canceled school.

  “And last but not least,” the girl on the PA system is saying, and her voice makes Carley picture her as petite, ponytailed, and bubbly, “this morning, the Spring Fling elections will be held in homeroom. Winners will be announced on Friday.”

  The other senior joins her to deliver the usual signoff in unison: “Have a blessed day!”

  The intercom clicks off, and an excited buzz goes up in the room.

  Carley first heard about Spring Fling from her mother, who also attended Sacred Sisters, along with Carley’s four aunts. The dance, a longtime tradition, is a collaborative affair between Sisters and Cardinal Ruffini, held annually on a March weekend in the gym of one school or the other. There’s a royal court, consisting of one princess and one prince chosen from each grade, along with a senior queen and king.

  Naturally, Mom was voted princess her sophomore year.

  “Why not freshman year?” Emma wanted to know, the night Mom shared that memory at the dinner table.

  “I was a late bloomer. Freshman year, the prettiest girl in the class got elected.”

  “You mean she wasn’t you?” Dad shook his head. “I don’t buy that for a second.”

  Mom laughed. “I know it’s hard to believe, but not everyone fell in love with me at first sight. Just you.”

  At that, Emma rolled her eyes at Carley, who—the older she gets—finds it more sweet than disgusting when her parents get flirty. Maybe someday, she’ll be grown up and sitting at the dinner table with her own kids and a husband who fell in love with her at first sight. Maybe she’s a late bloomer, too.

  “Listen up, ladies,” Sister Thomas Katherine calls from the front of the room, brushing chalk dust from her black habit. “Before we each write down the name of the girl we’d like to represent the class at Spring Fling, we’re going to go over some of these points I’ve written on the board. This is not a beauty contest or a popularity contest.”

  Sure it is, Carley thinks. It’s a beauty contest and a popularity contest, because (a) those two things go hand in hand, and (b) who wants an ugly nobody as Spring Fling princess?

  For weeks now, her fellow freshmen have been talking about the obvious choice: Melissa Kovacs, the prettiest girl in the class.

  Also the meanest.

  Carley figured that out on the first day of school, when she heard Melissa mocking an elderly cafeteria lady’s speech impediment within earshot of the poor woman.

  “Let’s go over the qualities we want to see in our princess,” Sister Thomas Katherine is saying.

  Chin in hand, Carley scans the list on the board: good citizenship, solid morals, impeccable manners, intelligence, a charitable heart . . .

  Melissa Kovacs possesses none of the above. She might win, but it won’t be a unanimous vote, Carley decides, as Sister Thomas Katherine walks up and down the aisle, handing out ballots.

  The sky beyond the windowpane is dism
al as ever this morning, pulsing blue-black clouds pushed by a gusting west wind that tosses icy pellets against the glass like slingshot gravel. But nothing, not even western New York weather, can put a damper on this glorious day.

  Yet another phase of the plan has been set into motion. At last, it’s all coming together.

  Nineteen months.

  It’s been nineteen months since the black marble notebook, with its papery brown shards of pressed flower petals, surfaced in the old house on Lilac Street.

  Nineteen months since the terrible truth was revealed.

  Nineteen months since Sandra Lutz became the first to pay for the sins of the past—though not her own sins. No, she merely got in the way. Said too much, knew too much . . .

  But the others—the original trio of sinners—are about to discover what it means to truly suffer.

  The bell rings, signifying the end of homeroom period. In exactly four minutes, another bell will announce the start of first period. A minute after that, a distant whistle will blow, bells will clang, and a freight train will burst onto the grade-level track a few blocks from the school, rattling along its route to Cleveland and on to Detroit, maybe, or Chicago. Ten, fifteen minutes later, a brown UPS truck will pull into the big parking lot alongside the yellow brick building and the driver will climb out with the day’s packages. In the big industrial kitchen adjacent to the cafeteria, plain-faced women in hairnets chop tomatoes and shred lettuce. Monday is always taco day.

  You get to know the rhythm of a place after a while. Week after week, month after month, the same routine, marred only by winter storms that warrant school closings or the occasional fire drill, though not in a while, and not today for sure. No one wants to stand around the parking lot, coatless, on a morning like this.

  Today will be unremarkable, with one exception.

  But I’m the only one who knows about that.

  With a scraping of chairs and excited female chatter, the girls of Sacred Sisters leave their homerooms to fill the drably tiled hallways of the old school, oblivious to the tragedy that started to unfold here almost three decades ago this very day—or to their own unwitting roles in the new one about to begin.

  Entry from the marble notebook

  Monday, October 7, 1985

  Today is my birthday. Sweet sixteen—what a joke. There is nothing sweet about it. Nothing sweet about my life.

  Father came to my room after midnight saying he had a special present for me. He was laughing. I hate him. If I could figure out a way to get away with killing him, I would. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail, and I don’t want to go to hell for committing a mortal sin.

  Before he left my room, he said I have to go down to Motor Vehicles to get my driving permit tomorrow, because he and Mother need me to start doing my share around here. As if I’m not already their slave. They want me to take over the grocery shopping and running errands. Usually I’m glad to get out of the house for any reason but I don’t want to drive if he’s the one who’s going to teach me. I begged him to wait until spring, at least, when the other sophomores will start turning sixteen and I can take driver’s ed through school, but he won’t let me.

  I hate being older than the rest of my class—it’s because they held me back a year in school when we moved here from California. It’s just one more thing to set me apart from everyone else.

  We don’t do birthday cakes in our house, but on Adrian’s fifth birthday last winter, I got him a Hostess cupcake, put a candle in it, sang to him, and told him to make a wish when he blew out the candle. That night when I tucked him in, he told me he had wished that I was his mom instead of her. I reminded him that you’re not supposed to tell what your wish is, or it won’t come true.

  Today, Adrian was crying because he couldn’t figure out how to get me a cupcake and a candle so that he could sing to me and give me a wish. I told him we would make believe. When I blew out the pretend candle, he told me I had to make a wish.

  I wished that my father were dead. That’s not the same thing as killing him. It’s not a sin. You can wish anything you want.

  Adrian warned me not to tell him what I wished because it wouldn’t come true. I didn’t tell him, of course. But it doesn’t matter. It was a fake cupcake and a fake candle and anyway, none of my wishes have ever come true.

  Chapter 4

  “How was school?” Jen Archer asks Carley as she blows in the door on a damp March gust.

  Seeing the look on her daughter’s face, she immediately regrets the question that had impulsively escaped her mouth, as words so often seem to do.

  Way to go there, Mom.

  How was school?

  How do you think it was?

  Sometimes, it seems that Jen has spent the better part of her life reminding herself to think before she speaks—or trying to undo the inevitable fallout when she forgets.

  Growing up the youngest of the five Bonafacio sisters, each more outgoing than the next, she was known by the childhood nickname “the Yapster.” She never quite outgrew her loquaciousness; in fact, it served her well in her postcollege career as a sales rep for a packaged goods corporation.

  Not so well, though, as a stay-at-home mom to two daughters whose moods go awry based on the slightest inflection—real, or imagined—in Jen’s tone.

  “Carley, I—”

  “Mom, school was fine.” The last word lands as heavily as the backpack she drops on the polished hardwood floor, fiercely walloping Jen with maternal protective instinct.

  For Carley, school wasn’t fine today. It hasn’t been fine for weeks now, as far as Jen knows. Probably a lot longer.

  But it’s been two weeks, exactly, since the Friday morning when she got the phone call from Sister Linda, the school’s part-time social worker. Two weeks since Jen and her husband, Thad, found out that their fifteen-year-old freshman has become the target of vicious bullying.

  Jen bends to pick up the backpack and move it to a cushioned bench. “This weighs a ton, sweetie. Doesn’t it make your back hurt?”

  “Yes, but what am I supposed to do? Not worry about homework at all, like Emma?”

  Conscientious Carley dutifully hauls around a stack of thick textbooks every day, unlike her slapdash eighteen-months-younger sister, Emma, whose eighth-grade assignments—if she remembers them at all—are usually crumpled in her school uniform pocket with a litter of Juicy Fruit wrappers.

  Not that Emma’s even allowed to chew gum with her braces on.

  Not that she cares.

  That her daughters are extreme opposites used to give Jen pleasure. “They balance each other out,” she’d say when they were younger, “and opposites attract, right?”

  Right. That was back in the good old days when Carley and Emma were so close that they walked around holding hands, completely of their own accord. Strangers would smile and say, “Awww . . .”

  Now that the girls are both teenagers, opposites most certainly don’t attract; they repel. When they’re actually speaking to each other, they’re arguing.

  Jen can’t help but think this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. She and her four older sisters didn’t always get along perfectly, but at least they all had similar personalities and temperaments and grew up to be good friends. Whenever they actually see each other—which isn’t as often as anyone would like since Jen is the only one still living in western New York—conversations are laced with laughs and the camaraderie of women who view the world from similar perspectives.

  She can’t imagine that ever happening with Carley and Emma, given their extreme personalities. If they could just find a happy medium once in a while, life would be so much . . . well, happier.

  Happy. When was the last time Carley was happy?

  Yesterday, Jen reminds herself. Yesterday she almost smiled, for a moment there . . .

  Yes, because when
Carley came home yesterday, Jen greeted her not with questions about school, but with a funny account of the fat, persistent squirrel who’d invaded the backyard birdfeeder, only to be repeatedly chased off by a tiny, bossy bird. Jen embellished the story into a Disney-esque romp—anything to see her daughter’s face light up the way it used to.

  Carley’s always been passionate about anything having to do with nature, particularly animals. Jen will never forget the pure pleasure—or resulting heartache—of surprising her on a long-ago birthday with a tiny white kitten. When she and Thad decided on the gift, they had no idea yet that Emma was asthmatic with a fierce allergy to cat fur. All fur, actually, and feathers, too.

  The kitten—whom Carley had named Cutie Pie—had to go.

  “Why can’t she go?” Carley had sobbed, cradling the purring ball of fluff and glaring at Emma, whose eyes were equally swollen and teary, courtesy of said fluff.

  In the end, Cutie Pie went to live a few miles away with Jen’s sister Bennie and her family. Carley took solace in being able to visit any time she wanted—until Bennie’s husband was transferred to California. She didn’t return the cat—Emma was still allergic—but she did give the Archers her piano.

  “Consolation prize?” Jen asked wryly.

  “Maybe your girls can learn to play it. My kids were never interested and I didn’t want to force lessons on them the way Mom did on us.”

  “But we actually liked piano lessons, remember?”

  “Not really. We just liked Marie Bush,” Bennie pointed out, and Jen smiled, recalling the vivacious teacher who would come to the Bonafacio house on Wednesdays and teach one sister after another to play scales and eventually Beethoven.

  Jen accepted the cast-off upright from her sister, and Cutie Pie moved to the West Coast. Following an extended mourning period, Carley survived the loss and started piano lessons. She hasn’t mentioned the cat in a long time now, though she remains affectionate toward furry creatures.