Winter Sisters

by Robin Oliveira

  Mantel and Van der Veer stepped outside, into the hallway, out of Harley’s sight. The nurse was asking Harley whether he was still nauseated. He was, but it was no longer due to the effects of the anesthetic. She set about her work, tsking and fretting as she dabbed his neck and bandaged him, saying he was to keep his hands away. She offered him a sip of sarsaparilla and a pill to swallow—something for the pain—and helped him to lie back down again.

  The promise of an imminent release from pain soothed his grave worry of whether or not the girls were dead. Or maybe that was the morphine talking. Mantel had been furious, but the captain was furious most of the time. It’s what made him so good at his job. After all, through force of will, the man had managed to dissuade the Stipps that their girls were alive. That had been extremely helpful. And Harley would do anything now to keep up that fiction. If only he could stay awake, but the morphine was already warming his stomach and spreading to his bones.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Upstairs in the Stipps’ house, Emma and Claire lay asleep under the light covers of a white sheet in the lying-in room Amelia maintained for the odd woman in labor who didn’t want to deliver in her own home. The two girls were in Claire’s bed, where Emma had crawled earlier, and where they had fallen, as Mary had hoped they would, under the narcotic spell of the morphine pills she had given them. The room had gone humid with their deep sleep. Flung outside the sheets, Emma’s bruised and abraded arms encircled Claire’s tiny body. Claire’s mouth was slightly open, and her hands clasped Emma’s.

  Their sleep was not so much sleep as an exhausted swoon.

  Mary dropped to one knee beside their bed. She did not notice Amelia unlocking a window and cracking open its bottom sash. Nor did she hear William pacing outside the door, impatient to learn the girls’ condition but unwilling to breach their modesty. As was she. But she was certain that the girls would not be able to tolerate what she was about to do if they were conscious. They were too devastated, too crippled by fear. But she had to examine them, not only to ascertain the state of their health, but also to catalogue for the police the extent and nature of their injuries. Under any other circumstance, she would never commit the intrusion, but this was no ordinary situation.

  First Mary ran a cursory gaze over the sleeping forms, confirming that the girls’ nail beds were pink. If either of them were bleeding internally, they would be white. Their skin, though, was as pale as bleached linen, though it was not the alarming pallor of acute anemia; instead, it seemed only as if they hadn’t seen the sun in a long while. Their breathing, too, was even and not depressed, indicating that they were tolerating the morphine well. They showed no signs of acute starvation. She and William had treated some of the survivors of Andersonville years after their release from the deadly Confederate prison, but the girls evinced none of the dry, cracked skin, atrophied muscles, or sunken cheeks of malnourishment.

  Now Mary began her formal exams. She started with Claire, easing back the top sheet, taking care not to wake either of them as she inched Claire from Emma’s protective grasp. She inspected every inch of Claire’s body, hunting for clues, taking her time, turning her gently so that she did not waken. Claire’s body betrayed no marks, no signs of intrusion, nary even a bruise, only an insignificant rash on the underside of one forearm. Mary, intent on thoroughness, opened Claire’s mouth, ran her hands along her scalp, felt along the length of her neck and under her arms for swollen lymph nodes, palpated her abdomen for resistance that might reveal swelling or damage, moved all her limbs in succession to assess for breaks or sprains, and finally propped her legs up in a V and hunted for signs of intrusion. There were none. Claire’s body was fully intact.

  Mary tucked the soft white cotton of Claire’s nightgown around her sleeping body and circled the bed to kneel beside Emma. It took a moment to splice together the specter of Emma’s youth with the extent of the assault. As had been clear during her bath, an array of bruising—yellowing and purple—marred one of Emma’s shoulders, and the bruising extended to either side of her rib cage, along the crests of her pelvic bones, and down her back, where more abrasions marred her scapulae and spine. Scratches traveled up the length of her spindled thighs. A long splinter was embedded in the flesh of the right inner thigh.

  In her life and practice, Mary had grown accustomed to a great deal, bearing witness to more pain than most, but now her hands were shaking. She admonished herself to be methodical, disciplined, objective. She palpated every joint and bone, percussed every inch of Emma’s abdomen, turned her neck and head, looking for spinal problems. She auscultated Emma’s lungs, worried about pneumonia, reminded herself to do the same for Claire. She turned Emma this way and that, tested her reflexes, ran her hands over the worst of the bruises and discovered to her relief that the bruising, while extensive, was superficial. Luckily, Emma had suffered no broken bones, damage to any internal organs, or bumps on her scalp to indicate concussion.

  She still had the last of the exam to do. Again, she propped open Emma’s legs and steeled herself.

  The tissue was swollen, inflamed, torn, typical of the kind of injury rendered during repeated traumatic entry. No, she berated herself, that medical term was too evasive. She needed to use the real word. During rape. She also needed to stay focused. She needed to note everything. No gonorrheal exudate, no chancres indicative of syphilis, something to be grateful for. And Emma was not yet in puberty, a relief of such immense proportions that the cuts and tears seemed a dispensation in comparison to the disaster pregnancy would have been. At some point, Amelia had left and returned with a Dieffenbach needle-holder, toothed forceps, sutures, and gauze. Now Mary took a deep breath, pushing away a sudden wave of fury. From the second she had begun, she had had to stifle her anger, and she still had to now, or her hands would not be able to do their meticulous work.

  Shut your mind, Mary told herself. Shut your mind and do not think of who or what this is. Think only: layer by layer, rebuild from the bottom up, use enough but not too many stitches, be conservative, do no further harm, preserve tissue and function.

  Mary shot a despairing but determined look at her mother, took up her instruments, and began the work of putting Emma back together.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  They had once again taken refuge around the dining table. It was five o’clock, six weeks since the blizzard, twenty hours since the ice had broken, nine hours since Emma and Claire had materialized on the veranda, two since Mary had finished the heartrending work of repairing Emma. Vera had made a roast of lamb and potatoes, cooling untouched on a platter in the middle of the table. Upstairs, Emma and Claire were sleeping. Mary had given them a second dose of morphine when they began to emerge from the first, and they again fell safely under its narcotic, amnesiac tide. Throughout the afternoon, Amelia and Mary had looked in on them and found them buried beneath the sheets, softly breathing. They were all tired. None of them had slept since returning from the hospital. From the scullery came the sound of Vera washing pots and pans; from time to time, she broke down sobbing. Mary had finally relieved herself of her tight button boots, donning slippers in their place. She still wore the evening dress that she had worn to the party and toiled in all night and day.

  William fixed his gaze on his wife. She had relayed the unimaginable details in a desultory way, her usual fierceness dimmed by what he would determine, in anyone else, to be shock. Now, he reached for Mary’s hand and laid down his fork. He could not eat, though he could not remember the last time he or any of them had eaten. Mary was gazing at him with that same flat expression she had greeted him with at the door when he returned from the Van der Veers’. Until today, he had never seen her this way—not when she had assisted him at his first amputation at the Union Hotel Hospital, nor at Antietam, either, where he had taught her to perform the operation herself out of the overwhelming imperative to save men’s lives. Mary had seen the worst of everything, and yet this was worse
still. War had found them all. Again.

  Amelia, as always, allowed them their moment, holding back her own suffering, though her eyes were glazed and red rimmed. She had moved through the afternoon like an apparition. Amelia, whom Albany relied on to deliver their babies, who had worked all her life for good, who tirelessly went wherever need beckoned, now stared unseeing across the table. For women who rushed headlong into the disasters of others, there was no one now to rush headlong into theirs. They had only each other.

  Elizabeth was staring into the distance. Amelia had shadowed her granddaughter all afternoon. For a while, Elizabeth had been inconsolable, though more than twice she raged that her weeping was of no help. Why? she kept asking. But Amelia had no answer for the perpetual, unanswerable question of Why? Nor did William, who had long ago decided that humanity never learned anything at all and that philosophy failed at everything necessary: solace, explanation, reparation. Mary could only shake her head. Whatever presence of mind had driven her meticulous repair of Emma had now deserted her.

  The enormity of the abomination had paralyzed them all.

  Separately, they were each recalling the events of the last several days. On Wednesday morning, they had buried David and Bonnie and erected the stone for the girls. On Thursday, one of the prostitutes had revived their hopes that the girls might be alive. For four nights running, Mary and William had roamed through Albany’s streets, searching for them. Last night, they had braved a social outing at the Van der Veers, worked all night at the hospital, and then this morning, Tuesday, miraculously, the girls had come home. Time had stretched seven days into an illusion of weeks and weeks.

  Amelia was picking at a seam on the sleeve of her dress, loosening a thread. “Our girls,” she whispered, her voice subdued and pained.

  “Morphine,” Mary said dazedly. Medicine was her comforting familiar. She could face anything in the calm recitation of medical facts. “I’ll have to wean them from it.” She was speaking in measured, preoccupied tones. “They can’t stay on the drug long. I could use chloral, if they need to sleep. Then willow bark tea for Emma until she heals. I’ll keep watching for syphilis and gonorrhea”—at this, Amelia shuddered—“but I saw no indication of either, and if they aren’t fulminant now, it’s unlikely they’ll develop. Her molesters must have been fastidious. Safes, etc.”

  “Mary,” Amelia said. “Have a care for Elizabeth.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Thank you, Grandmama, but I am not a child.”

  “Whatever possessed you, Lizzie,” Amelia said, “to think of playing for the girls? We’re so grateful to you.”

  “I didn’t think.” Elizabeth said she had no memory of disinterring her violin from its dusty case under the bed, or of rubbing rosin on the bow. She had come to herself on the veranda, grasping the violin by its neck, her fingers automatically turning its pegs to tune the instrument. And then music had floated through the air and the blank, terrified look had disappeared from Emma’s and Claire’s eyes.

  “Lost in a blizzard, saved by a flood,” William mused. He turned to Mary. “Claire was really untouched?”

  “Yes,” Mary said. She pushed away her empty plate. “I think it’s possible that she was deliberately spared.”

  They all tried to come to terms with the malevolent deliberation necessary to spare one girl while harming another, and couldn’t.

  “It’s odd, though, isn’t it?” William said, shaking his head.

  “It’s no mystery,” Mary said. “Emma is ten. She’s at the age of consent.”

  Amelia removed her spectacles and laid them on the table. She had seen a lot in her years of intimacy with the world. In houses high and low, many private terrors had revealed their secrets to her. But none like this. “The horror of it,” she whispered. She looked outside, where the gloaming had burned itself out. “We are none of us innocents, the three of us,” she said. “We know what happens. We should have looked harder.”

  “I wanted to,” Elizabeth said.

  “But we did look,” William said.

  His pronouncement was not enough absolution for any of them, though it was hard to imagine how much harder they could have looked without forcing their way through every door in Albany. Still, it was impossible to escape the devastation of having, in essence, buried the girls, when they had been alive and in desperate need. All four privately entertained the appalling notion that they were glad that Bonnie was dead, because they didn’t think she could have faced this.

  “Where could they have been all this time?” Elizabeth said.

  William shook his head. Earlier, before he’d been called away to the Van der Veers, he and Officer Farrell had discussed that very thing. Farrell already had plans to ask around in the Pastures, since that was where he had found the girls, but he warned William that the floodwaters would likely wash away any evidence.

  “And Bonnie and David,” Amelia said, her voice catching. She felt the need to tally every wrong, to list every insurmountable hurdle ahead. “We have to tell Emma and Claire.” She dreaded telling them. They all did. How to tell brutalized children that the people they most wanted, most needed, were no longer alive? Mothers who birthed stillborns asked about their dead infants only when they were ready to hear what they already instinctively knew. When Emma and Claire might be ready to learn they were orphans, no one could imagine. Amelia tried to picture telling them and couldn’t even conjure the words.

  Mary lifted her head, her gaze direct, new life showing in her eyes. “How did we miss them that day?”

  “What do you mean?” William said.

  “The teacher said she let the students out around noon. We left the house about then. How did we miss seeing them? They couldn’t have made it far, not on their own.”

  William shook his head. “And?”

  “They didn’t get lost, William.” She rose from the table as the anger she’d held at bay all day washed over her. “Someone took them. Someone deliberately took them.”

  There was a knock at the front door, and a tearful Vera went to answer it.

  “We should tell no one,” William warned. “I didn’t tell the Van der Veers earlier. We don’t want to expose the girls to more scrutiny than is necessary. And we don’t know who did it. We need to keep them safe.”

  And besides, they all thought, how did one announce a resurrection?

  Vera returned and said that Jakob Van der Veer was at the door.

  “Jakob?” William said, rising. “Is he ill?”

  “No. He wants to speak to Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth?”

  They all turned to her. “Do you want to, Lizzie?” Amelia said.

  She did. She went to the door and slipped outside onto the veranda, where Jakob was sitting on the swing, bundled in a woolen topcoat, a thick muffler wrapped around his neck, black leather gloves covering his hands. He rose when she came out.

  “What is it?” Jakob said. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it? During the flood?” He took her by the elbow and drew her to him, a gesture that yesterday would have been a liberty, but in this newly upended life, seemed more than permissible. They sat down together on the swing. “Did you lose someone?”

  She shook her head.

  “Tell me, please?” he asked.

  “Someone I love is hurt . . .”

  “Your aunt, uncle? Not your grandmother?”

  “No. Not them.”

  “I’m happy to hear that. I like them all very much. But I am sorry about whoever this is. Will they be all right?”

  That was the question. The essential thing. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I am sorry. I don’t mean to—” He pulled a handkerchief from his coat and handed it to her.

  “Thank you. I’ve gone stupid with weeping. You will think I weep all the time.”

  He shook his head. “Of course n
ot.”

  The sun was going down. She shut her eyes against the tears, but they came anyway. She dabbed at her eyes with his handkerchief. He did not ask her any more questions, and she was grateful for his reticence. They sat swaying on the swing together.

  Elizabeth turned suddenly. “I forgot. Uncle William told us about your ordeal. How are you? Are you well?”

  Jakob indicated his muffler with his gloved hand. “Still frozen. But I’m fine. No lasting effects that I can tell.”

  “He said you ran across the ice.”

  “I did. The office seemed about to cave in. I thought I had to, if I wanted to live.”

  “Did you have to?”

  “I don’t know. Father hasn’t been down yet to inspect the damage. There are reports that the river is already receding. We’ll know soon enough whether I was foolish or prudent. Father was hurt, too, though he went out this afternoon. Where, I’m not sure.”

  “I can’t believe you crossed the ice.”

  “Desperation breeds action.” His smile was self-deprecating, endearing. He glanced away and then back again. “There is something else, too. Something I want to tell you.”

  The night watchman was crossing the street, a lantern and a duffle in his hands. He set them down on the sidewalk and hauled the creaking wrought iron park gates shut. From the duffle he pulled out a long chain and padlock and went to work closing up the park.

  Jakob said, “Now I’ll have to walk around.”

  “It seems so.”

  “Elizabeth, when I was stranded on that rooftop, I thought only of two people. My mother, and you. I don’t know whether I was about to die or not. I may never know. But all night, all I could think about was what a shame it would be if I didn’t get to see you again. And this afternoon, all I could think was that I wanted you to understand that. Under any other circumstance, what I am about to say would be too forward. But now I’ve learned how brief a thing life can be. I think you are extraordinary—”