The Good Sister

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  As for her figure—nothing is as taut as it used to be. The pounds have crept on over the years, settling around her hips and thighs. She’s not obese by any stretch, but she’s hardly the super-fit middle-aged woman she’d always assumed she’d become. Losing five, ten, fifteen pounds is no longer the no-brainer it was back when she was getting rid of postpregnancy flab. Somehow, it takes a hell of a lot more diet and exercise to get rid of far less weight. And somehow, she’s not very motivated these days. As long as she’s healthy, do her looks truly matter?

  Not most days. And on days when she finds that her appearance actually does matter to her, she’s careful never to vocalize self-criticism when she looks in a mirror—not if her impressionable girls are in earshot.

  Does Carley even care about her own looks, though? She doesn’t ever talk about it, and Jen doesn’t dare bring it up.

  I’m her mom. I’m supposed to think she’s beautiful, no matter what.

  And I do, she reminds herself hastily. I just don’t want others hurting her because they don’t agree.

  But again—she doesn’t know if what happened has anything to do with the fact that Carley doesn’t conform to the other girls’ standards of physical beauty; she’s only using her own past experience as a frame of reference.

  When she was at Sacred Sisters, the only girls she remembers being teased and taunted were—to put it kindly—rather unconventional in appearance. And certainly what happened to them was nowhere near as disturbing as what happened to Carley.

  Although there was one—

  No. Jen doesn’t like to think about that.

  Sensing that her daughter is about to bolt for the stairs and disappear behind closed doors for the remainder of the afternoon, she returns her focus to the conversation, determined to keep it going, even if it is mainly one-sided.

  “Oh, before I forget to tell you—guess what?”

  “What?” Carley asks in a monotone.

  “Guess who’s coming to visit next weekend?”

  “Who?”

  “Your godmother.”

  “Aunt Frankie? Really?” Carley’s brown eyes, behind her glasses, connect with Jen’s at last.

  Encouraged by the spark of interaction, Jen nods vigorously. “She called me today”—actually, it was the other way around—“and she said she’s been thinking it’s been too long since she’s visited.”

  In truth, Jen reached out to her closest sister—in age, friendship, and proximity, as Frankie lives in Albany—and updated her on the situation with Carley. Not only is Frankie a social worker, but as both godmother and childless aunt, she adores Jen’s daughters.

  “What can I do?” she asked immediately.

  “Is there any way you can come this weekend? Maybe Carley will open up to you more than she has to me.”

  “I have to go to Long Island for a conference. But I’ll be there next weekend—Ma’s doing Saint Joseph’s table on Sunday, remember?”

  Somehow, Jen had forgotten. Saint Joseph’s Feast Day is right up there with Thanksgiving and Christmas in their family. They used to celebrate on the actual day, March 19, but now that everyone is scattered, her parents gather everyone on a weekend before or after. That means Jen will be spending the days leading up to it in her mother’s kitchen as usual, helping to prepare the labor-intensive feast.

  “When is Aunt Frankie coming?” Carley asks now.

  “Friday, as soon as she gets out of work. She wants to take you out to the Cheesecake Factory”—that’s Carley’s favorite restaurant—“and maybe to a movie.”

  “Me and Emma?”

  “Just you.”

  Carley digests that. “How come?”

  “Because you’re charming and adorable,” she quips, hoping her daughter will crack a smile.

  Nope.

  “Is Aunt Patty coming, too?”

  Patty is Frankie’s longtime significant other. A rotund woman with a magnetic personality and an easy laugh, she might be just what the doctor ordered for Carley right now. But alas—

  “She’s working next weekend, Aunt Frankie said.”

  Carley looks disappointed. “She’s always working.”

  “It seems that way, doesn’t it?”

  Patty, a paramedic, seldom has enough time off to make the four-hour drive to Buffalo with Jen’s sister.

  “Aunt Frankie is always working, too. I bet they wish they could trade places with you and do nothing all day every day.”

  Carley’s comment is intended to be innocent enough, Jen knows, but it stings nonetheless. She’s tempted to point out to Carley that she’s hardly a lady of leisure.

  It’s all she can do to keep up with the housework around here, making sure everyone has everything they need on a daily basis, like prescription refills and permission slips and today, a last-minute egg carton for Emma’s overdue science project . . .

  Jen hastily emptied the eggs right onto the refrigerator shelf and sent Emma on her way. But when she opened the door again to grab the coffee creamer, several loose eggs rolled into each other, then onto the floor.

  No surprise there. She’s always dropping things, a lifelong klutz. Clumsiness goes hand in hand with impetuousness. But so, for Jen, does resourcefulness.

  Rather than let the eggs—which cracked, but didn’t actually break—go to waste, she started baking. First, she made a sponge cake to bring to the people who just moved in two houses down the street.

  Well, not just. It’s been a few weeks since she spotted the moving van in the driveway, but she wanted to give the new residents—a single dad and his teenage son, according to Carley, who babysits for the Janicek family next door to them—some time to settle in before showing up to welcome them to the neighborhood. She’s been hoping to catch them coming or going so that she can introduce herself, but so far, that hasn’t happened. Not that she’s noticed, anyway. She’s been distracted by what happened to Carley at school.

  While the sponge cake was in the oven, she mixed a batch of peanut butter cookies, Carley’s favorite.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time. Probably because that’s how her own mother always shows her love or handles a crisis: by feeding people. It’s a wonder Jen and her sisters weren’t overweight, growing up—especially Frankie, a notorious junk food fanatic.

  But kids were so much more active back then. These days it’s all about technology and screens—television, smart phones, e-readers, laptops . . . they don’t even call each other on the phone anymore so that they can hear each other’s voices; they just send text messages back and forth . . .

  “I have to go do homework.” Carley is on the move, brushing past Jen, heading for the stairs.

  “On a Friday afternoon?”

  “Math test Monday.”

  “Wait, Car, guess what? I made some peanut butter cook—”

  “No, thanks.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not hungry.” Carley bounds up the steps. Seconds later, her bedroom door closes—not gently, but not hard, either.

  Jen finds herself wishing her daughter would just slam the damned door. Good old-fashioned healthy adolescent anger—she’d welcome that any day over this . . . this preternatural calm.

  Door slamming isn’t Carley’s style, though. She isn’t the household hothead by any stretch. That honor belongs to Emma—or perhaps to Jen herself.

  Aside from her looks, Carley takes after Thad’s side of the family.

  “In other words, she’s quiet and reasonable and sane,” Thad used to tease Jen whenever she mentioned the similarities between him and their firstborn.

  “Hey! Are you accusing me of being loud and unreasonable and insane?”

  “Absolutely,” he’d say, or he’d raise an eyebrow at her—just one—and the conversation would invariably end in a few more traded quips and grins.
>
  Around here lately, though, lighthearted moments have become as scarce as . . . as . . .

  As songs played on that piano, Jen thinks as she passes it on her way back to the kitchen. Back before the girls’ lessons got lost in the busy household shuffle, Emma complained constantly and could barely bang out a scale. But Carley seemed to have some actual talent.

  Maybe she should get back into music, Jen muses, moving on down the hall. Maybe that will help somehow.

  Back in the kitchen, she eyes the trays of cookies cooling on the breakfast bar.

  Maybe those will help somehow.

  Maybe something, somehow, will help.

  You can’t just fix everything, Thad’s voice reminds her.

  No? Watch me.

  She grabs a rubber spatula, slides the edge under a cookie, and starts to move it from the still-hot baking sheet to a waiting plate. She’ll take a couple up to Carley’s room with a glass of milk and see if she wants to talk.

  She won’t. But at least she’ll know I’m there for her if she needs me. At least she’ll know she’s not alone. And sooner or later, she’ll—

  As she tilts the spatula, the cookie, still too hot, lands on the plate in an accordion heap of crumbly goo.

  “Crap!”

  Shaking her head, Jen tosses the spatula aside in frustration.

  Once again, she was too impulsive. Once again, she forgot to think things through before she acted.

  When, Jen asks herself, will you ever learn?

  A quick visual inspection assures Carley that her lavender and white bedroom is just as she left it this morning before school: bed neatly made; books, binders, folders, and note cards stacked just so on her desk; closet door and dresser drawers slightly ajar—just slightly, so that it’ll be easier for her to tell whether anything is amiss.

  Nothing is.

  Good.

  Now that Carley has moved on to high school, she has to catch a metro bus that departs half an hour before Emma leaves for Saint Paul’s. That’s a problem in a house without any locks on the interior doors. Sometimes her sister sneaks in after she’s gone and snoops around or borrows something. Usually not clothes, of course—Emma is one of those petite girls who will never be more than a size two, while Carley, already a twelve, is the same size as Mom.

  Too bad that doesn’t keep Emma from rifling through her things, helping herself to accessories or school supplies or, more often, to Carley’s secret chocolate stash. No matter where she hides it, Emma usually manages to sniff it out.

  Not today, though. It’s a pretty good bet Emma’s not going to go browsing on Carley’s bookshelves. She’s always making fun of her for keeping dog-eared copies of Charlotte’s Web, Amelia Bedelia, and the Little House series.

  After removing two fat hardcover volumes of the Hunger Games trilogy from her bookshelf, Carley takes the bag of miniature Twix out from behind them.

  When, she wonders as she reaches into the bag, was the last time she devoured a book as fervently as she did these? Back when she was in parochial school, she read the entire trilogy one title right after another, lost in a futuristic world where terrible things happened to kids just like her.

  If only it were so simple to escape the real world now. If only terrible things happened just to fictional kids. If only . . .

  If only I didn’t have to spend so much time thinking if only this or if only that.

  She counts out three candy bars, starts to return the bag to the shelf, then grabs one more Twix. No, two more.

  It’s been a rough day. She deserves it.

  She crams the bag back into its spot, replaces the books, unwraps a candy bar, and pops it into her mouth.

  Another if only: If only chocolate could make it all better.

  If only something, someone, could make it all better.

  Someone . . . like who?

  Nicki, her ex-best friend?

  Aunt Frankie, who won’t be here for another whole week?

  Mom, down there in the kitchen baking Carley’s favorite peanut butter cookies?

  The house smelled so good that her mouth started watering the moment she opened the door. But she didn’t dare make a detour to the kitchen. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting there eating cookies with her mother’s eyes on her, pitying her.

  “How was school?” Mom asked, like Carley is just some regular kid. How would her mother react if she told her the truth?

  I sat alone at lunch, alone at Mass, alone at the assembly. Oh, and I also sat on a thumbtack someone put on my chair in earth science, and it really hurt, but I pretended I didn’t notice anything and I left it there, sticking out of the back of my skirt, until I could get to the girls’ room after class. Even though I could hear them all laughing about it behind my back when I walked down the hall. Oh, and I was the last one picked for volleyball in gym.

  Actually, it was worse than that.

  So much worse.

  Ever since she started freshman year, Carley has always been the last one chosen in gym—that’s bad enough. She’s never exactly been a star athlete. Who can blame the competitive team captains for picking the best players?

  But only recently—since the Spring Fling debacle—has she been tripped by her own teammates, or pegged so hard with the ball that her back is bruised. The other girls actually aim it right at her. If Mr. Klerman—hardly the warm and fuzzy type—catches them, he blows the whistle and glares at everyone, including Carley.

  “This is volleyball, ladies,” he shouts, “not dodgeball!”

  A couple of times, he benched the offender. But no one ever minds that, not even the jocks. There are worse things than having to sit out a volleyball game on a bench behind the teacher’s back, where you can text and check your Peopleportal page from the cell phone smuggled in your shorts pocket, even though phones are supposed to be left in the locker room during gym.

  Yes. There are far worse things than any of that.

  What happened to Carley at school was unbearable. She still isn’t over it. She’ll never get over it.

  But I have to stick it out. I have to, because . . .

  “What are you going to do, Carley? Leave school? Let them win? Wouldn’t you rather hold your head high and show them that they can’t get the better of you?”

  “But . . . I can’t. I just . . . I can’t . . .”

  “You can’t hold your head high? Sure you can, if you grow a spine . . .”

  She just didn’t understand. No one understands.

  But maybe she was right. Maybe it’s time to grow a spine. Carley’s been trying to do just that—when she isn’t dwelling on what happened, replaying scenes over and over in her head like a horror movie that keeps you tossing and turning long after the final credits.

  Why, oh why, wasn’t Carley suspicious when she found out that she’d been elected Spring Fling princess?

  Because it was the biggest thrill—the best surprise—of your life, that’s why.

  Because you thought things were finally starting to turn around after what happened with Nicki.

  You thought you were going to be popular after all, and maybe have a group of friends, like a normal high school girl, like Mom promised.

  You thought they must have voted for you because you embody all the qualities Sister Thomas Katherine said a Spring Fling princess should have: good citizenship, solid morals, impeccable manners, intelligence, a charitable heart . . .

  To think Carley actually got tears in her eyes—happy tears—when she heard her name over the loudspeaker during the morning announcements. “And now, we have the election results for the royal court at the Spring Fling dance. Representing the freshman class will be Carley Archer . . .”

  Sitting there in homeroom, she gasped aloud.

  That can’t be right! she thought wildly, surrounded, as she was, by
over a dozen girls whose names she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear—except maybe Kendra Hyde’s.

  Kendra is what Mom would call “a little rough around the edges.” She wears eyeliner and big earrings and sometimes she smells faintly of cigarette smoke, and she seems much older than she is. Carley heard that her mother died when she was little, and she lives alone with her dad, who isn’t exactly hands-on.

  She isn’t Spring Fling princess material by any stretch, but Carley had written her name on the ballot anyway, the prior Monday morning. At least she’s kind of friendly, unlike snotty front runner Melissa Kovacs.

  But then Carley’s name was announced, and she knew that it had to be real because everyone was congratulating her, and they seemed so sincere . . .

  Stupid. It’s your own fault for being so stupid, so gullible.

  Everywhere she went, people were smiling at her. That’s what she thought, anyway.

  Smiling at you? They were laughing at you. Laughing right in your face, and you made a fool of yourself, telling them how happy and excited you were . . .

  She floated through school that day, even working up the courage to give Johnny, the janitor, a flirtatious grin and hello when she saw him in the basement hallway on her way to the computer tech lab. He had his book and apple and was just about to open the door to the custodian’s storage closet, skirting around several cans of red and black paint that blocked his way, along with a trio of gigantic papier-mâché ladybugs the decorating committee had been working on for Spring Fling.

  Spring Fling! I’m Spring Fling princess!

  “Ready any good books lately?” a newly emboldened Carley asked Johnny.

  He looked surprised—pleasantly so—and nodded. “A bunch. How about you?”

  “Not really. Maybe you could recommend something to me.”

  “I just finished A Farewell to Arms for a lit class,” he said as he flicked on the storage closet light. “Do you like Hemingway?”

  “You’re taking a lit class? Are you . . . I thought . . .”

  “I’m getting my GED at night,” he said, reaching into the closet toward a shelf right beside the door. It was lined with cleaning supplies, but he plucked a pocket knife from among them.