Her car is the last one parked in front of the church. Joe sucks his pacifier; he’s overtired, and I’m eager to get him home. The sun has been lost to a glaze of clouds, and there’s a strange heavy feeling in the air. My mother drives out of town at her usual quick pace and crosses the railroad tracks into the countryside, heading for Horton, passing feral farmland, rickety corncribs, old clapboard houses. Laundry trembles on drooping wash lines—corsets, undershirts, yellowing slips—the undergarments of widows who are the last living members of farm families that could once sit down to a noon dinner of fried chicken, potatoes, squash, bread and butter, sauerkraut, and rhubarb pie. Now a single light shines in each window, and it is easy to imagine the meager supper laid out on the table before it gets dark, to save the few cents on electric. Hot cereal, overripe bananas. Day-old bakery from Becker’s Foodmart. I see an old dog moving arthritically up the steps of a porch. I see a swaybacked horse grazing a slow circle around two derelict trucks in a pasture gone wild. As we approach the site of the cannery fire, I turn my face away just like my mother always did, thinking about getting Joe fed and bathed and put down to sleep for the night. Thinking about Adam and how good it will be to get back to New York. Thinking about how sorrow is like a vaguely familiar scent, dissipating if you try too hard to identify it, reappearing to return you to places and people you thought you’d left for good. The car slows, and the unexpected motion tugs me forward in my seat.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
My mother has turned down the service road leading to the cannery. She parks behind the burned-out foundation. In the distance, the dark line of the freight tracks follows the highway, playfully, dipping close, curving away. “I used to come here sometimes,” she says. “When you and Sam were kids. I’d stop on my way home from work and sit for a while, think about things. I always worried that someone would drive by and see me.” She opens her door. “Do you want to walk around? There’s something I want to tell you.” The wind comes in gusts that rock the car like a cradle.
She waits while I lift Joe out of the car seat, and then we follow her into the scorched foundation of the cannery, stepping over crumbling cinder blocks, charred pieces of wood, broken glass. It’s hard not to imagine the snap and snuffle of flames in our footsteps. It’s hard not to imagine we are walking on the remnants of bones. Perhaps what we hear are not the close cries of gulls blown in off the lake but the ghost voices of the cannery girls, high and shrill, filled with pain. The air tastes of ash. My mother stops beside a pile of blackened metal doors, stacked like outdated magazines.
“This is from the investigation still,” she says. “These doors were supposed to be the exits, but the company kept them locked. There used to be one door where you could see, here”—she touches the bald, scarred face of the top door—“where they’d scratched and beat at it, trying to get out, but that one disappeared years ago. Everything else is here, though, the way that it was. People come,” she says, gesturing at the scattering of crushed beer cans, fast-food wrappers, bottle caps, “but they don’t seem to take anything with them. I guess by now there’s nothing left to take.”
The rolling clouds absorb the daylight. I imagine dropping to my knees, crawling blindly beneath the dusky layer of smoke. The press of bodies in front of me. The push of bodies behind.
“All these years, I was certain we’d find Sam back somehow,” my mother says. “But I thought that when he was found, there’d be a way to make sense of everything, maybe even put things right. All day I’ve been waiting for a revelation, a sign, I don’t know—” The wind whisks her words into the fields, scatters them as easily as cinders. “I have this strange feeling that none of this is really happening. Like I’m standing far away from myself. Like nothing’s quite real. Have you ever had a feeling like that?”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer.
“They say that’s how a person feels during a violent attack. I keep thinking that maybe I’m feeling what Geena Baumbach felt. Like all of this is happening outside myself. I wonder if I’ll feel this way for the rest of my life. Like nothing matters. Like it doesn’t not matter either. Like it just…is.”
What did my aunts and the other girls do when they first realized they would not be rescued? Did they continue to beat and pound and scratch and sob against the doors? Did they fall into each other’s arms, wait in silence for their lives to flicker out? There’s a low groan of thunder, then another, and I see the high walls of the cannery collapse, hear the explosions of the machinery, the roof buckling, slapping everything beneath it to the ground.
“Mom,” I say. “I lied to the detectives. I knew Sam had that knife.”
“I knew it too,” my mother says. “It was your father’s. It came from the war. He gave it to Sam when he was eleven or so, and it looked like such a dangerous thing that I hid it in my dresser drawer. I figured I’d give it back when Sam was older, but he must have found it, snooping—or maybe Gordon did. Anyway, one day it was gone.
“For years, I’ve prayed for forgiveness. Each night, I asked God, What else can I do? How can I atone? And then, last night, after we went to bed, I understood what I had to do. It came to me as clearly as if it had been spoken. Baptize the baby. I got out of bed and I heard it again. Baptize the baby. It began to make sense: This was the test I’d been waiting for, and if I did what God asked, He’d forgive me everything. He’d give me the reasons I needed so that all of this would finally make sense. I got the holy water from my nightstand and went into your room. I could see everything as clearly as if it was day. It was like God was helping me see.”
“You baptized Joe?” I say. I’m so angry I can barely speak. “You sneaked in and baptized my baby?”
“You don’t understand,” my mother says. “There were times when faith was the one thing I could give you, the only thing your father couldn’t control. Nobody could, not even the priests, not even the Pope or any of those men—and God knows they do try. But I gave it to you, and it’s there if you need it, and don’t get mad at me for saying that, sweetheart, because I don’t mean the Catholic Church, or even God, I mean”—she pauses, searching for the right words—“faith. The ability to believe. The ability to see beyond the place where you are. Do you understand how important that is? Because Sam couldn’t do that. And neither could your father. You could, and now you’re the only one I have left.”
My mother flinches as if something has struck her, and now I feel a rap on my head, my shoulder, the back of my hand. Hail is falling, the size of buttons, pennies, the sterling-silver charms the girls in my high school wore for luck. Shielding Joe with my body, I run back toward the car; my mother gets there first, opens my door so I can get him safely inside. Hailstones bounce off the roof, the windshield, and the world around us disappears beneath a flurry of pounding white fists. Will the glass break? I glance at my mother; she’s wide-eyed, pressed back in her seat. I cup Joe’s head with my hand, twisting to shield him, and it occurs to me how fragile all our lives are, how at any moment the sky can open and drown us, the earth can open and swallow us. I think of all the intricate ways our bodies can betray us, the accidents and atrocities, the missteps and misunderstandings. Joe hiccups, a sure sign he’s ready to cry, and I feel him tensing up, the slow burn of rage balling his fists. What will happen the first time he looks beyond the concrete hungers of the body? What if he sees nothing but this frail shelter, bones and breath and skin, without the comfort of imagination, transcendence, hope? The hailstorm passes over us as suddenly as it came, and in the silence, I hear my mother take a deep, ragged breath. She turns on the engine, starts the windshield wipers. We watch the cloud move across the fields, the long shadow fluid beneath it, and a part of myself I realize I will never leave behind—the teenage girl singing for the congregation, the child still praying to be chosen—wants to see more than what’s actually there: a message, a confirmation. Perhaps I’m only seeing a reflection of myself when I search for possibility in everyday thing
s. But it’s better self, a bigger self. I turn to face my mother. I’m not angry anymore.
“I just want so much for Joe to grow up with faith in something,” she says. “To have what you had when you went to the church, or sat down at the piano. All the things Sam didn’t.”
“You want him to grow up with—grace,” I say. “So do I. But you have to trust I can find my own way to give him that. And I will. I promise.” I reach for her arm, but she shrugs my hand away.
“No, don’t,” she says quietly. “People have been touching me all day, and it doesn’t help a bit. In fact, I think it makes it worse.”
“I won’t touch you, then.”
“We’ll never know anything more about Sam than we do right now, will we?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I feel like God has let me go. It’s like I’m falling from His hand. It’s like one of those dreams where you just fall and fall, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
Joe begins to cry, and my mother turns the car around, pulls back onto the highway. All the way home and long into the evening, he cries and cries, sleeps fitfully, wakes up and cries again, as if he’s crying for us all. My mother and I take turns walking him. I offer him my breast, the pacifier, my finger. We sing to him, rock him. None of it is enough. When he finally abandons himself to sleep, it’s more a result of his own exhaustion than anything we have done. We make hot chocolate and sit at the table, sipping that sweetness, too tired to speak. I can’t stop hearing the sound of his crying; I’m raw with it. When my mother finally stands up, the scrape of her chair makes me jump. Hot chocolate sloshes across the tablecloth.
“Sorry,” I say automatically, but my mother nods, understanding.
“Such a terrible sound,” she says, and I know she’s seeing my brother’s face, “when you hear your child crying and you don’t know what to do.”
Acknowledgments
The first half of this book was written during my time as the George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy, and I’d like to thank the English Department in general, and Peter Greer in particular, for many kindnesses. I’d also like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the University Research Council at Vanderbilt University for their generous support.
My thanks, again, to the critics: Sylvia J. Ansay, Kim Dionis, Stewart O’Nan, and to my agent, Deborah Schneider. Thanks to Claire Wachtel and the people at William Morrow for believing in this book. And special thanks to Jake Smith for technical support.
Chapter Ten is dedicated to Janet Schrunk Ericksen and David Ericksen, with gratitude for warmth and light during a long dark year.
Finally, I thank Kelly Allen and Leah Stewart for their fresh, fast eyes. I owe you.
About the Author
A. Manette Ansay’s critically acclaimed first novel, Vinegar Hill, won a Friends of American Writer’s Prize and was listed as one of the Best Books of 1994 by the Chicago Tribune. Her story collection, Read This and Tell Me What It Says, was awarded the Associated Writing Program’s Short Fiction Series Prize. In 1992, she won the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Prize and the following year she was a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The North American Review, Story, and The Pushcart Prize XIX: Best of the Small Presses. Ansay lives with her husband in Nashville, Tennessee, and teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors
More praise for A. Manette Ansay and SISTER
“A moving, convincing, and compassionate account of our common humanity.”
—James McConkey, author of Stories of My Life With Other Animals
“Intense and deeply affecting…this heartbreaking novel resonates with wisdom about life’s hard truths.”
—Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“Beautifully written and utterly absorbing, this is a novel to sink into as into thought or a hospitable armchair.”
—Kelly Cherry
“Chilling and memorable…strikingly rendered…the characters are vivid, the reconstruction of events suspenseful and convincing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Ansay’s dramatic rendering of people and events…lends a powerful edginess to her prose…Sister carves out some new, interesting terrain.”
—Boston Globe
“[Ansay writes] with honesty, insight, and great grace.”
—Ann Hood, author of The Properties of Water
“Quietly powerful and masterfully written.”
—Nashville Banner
“A must read…Ansay’s story rings poignantly true.”
—Mademoiselle
Other Avon Books by
A. Manette Ansay
READ THIS AND TELL ME WHAT IT SAYS
RIVER ANGEL
VINEGAR HILL
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SISTER. Copyright © 2006 by A. Manette Ansay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JUNE 2006 ISBN: 9780061853005
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
Sister Page 22