Two Sisters Times Two

by Jeffrey Anderson

14

  The rain gradually tapered off as Leah navigated the sedan through the marshes deserted by all except the occasional long-legged white egrets dutifully probing the mud flats, and had stopped entirely by the time she reached civilization in the form of the four-lane highway flanked by the obligatory used-car dealerships, fast-food joints, and pawn shops. Ahead of her on the western horizon, a thin line of blue sky appeared, waiting to be turned golden by the sun still hid by thick clouds. She took that as a promising sign for her journey and her destination. But just as quickly she felt a twinge of anxiety for Jodie, by now midway across the choppy sound on her lurching top-heavy ferry, bound for an even more perilous homecoming of sorts. She missed her niece desperately and instinctively glanced in the rearview mirror, wanting—indeed, willing—Jodie’s image to materialize out of the bank of solid rain clouds rising above the trailing cars. Instead, she spotted there a rainbow, brilliant against the slate gray background. She grinned broadly, felt Jodie’s presence in the car and in her heart.

  But all of that hope and strength had disappeared by the time she pulled into her parents’ drive in the tidy subdivision of single-story retirement cottages. The sky had continued to clear from the west, was now one-third blue; and the sun had found its way out from behind the clouds to light the glittering yard and Father’s neat rose garden—the perfectly pruned canes putting out the first tentative green shoots—along the drive. She saw Momma standing at the kitchen window washing their dinner dishes—“Why use a dishwasher when God gave me these capable hands?” They each smiled and waved through the two layers of glass and the intervening spring evening.

  By the time Leah had reached the carport’s side entrance, Momma had finished her dishes and was standing at the open inside door with a dish towel over her shoulder and one hand on the walker she’d set to the side. She was dressed primly (as ever) in pressed black slacks and a floral print blouse. Her hair was still entirely black (with the help of the hairdresser) and neatly permed. She let go of the walker only after Leah had opened the storm door and extended both arms to embrace her. Standing one step below on the concrete, Leah’s head was at Momma’s height and their arms interlocked naturally—Leah’s below around Momma’s chest, Momma’s above around Leah’s neck. Even so, Momma’s body felt very slight and frail, seemed little more than brittle bones and shrinking muscle tissue. As they slowly separated after about ten seconds, Momma placed her normal welcome kiss squarely on Leah’s forehead. Despite knowing the kiss was coming, the gesture wrenched a spasm of sadness from the pit of Leah’s stomach and tears sprung to her eyes such that she looked down and tried to blink the drops away as Momma stood upright and again grabbed the walker.

  Leah said, “Let me get my bag from the car” without looking up, and turned away. Though she knew it was rude, the choice was a better option than letting Momma see her face at just that instant.

  When she returned to the doorway her eyes were dry and she had a smile willed across her features.

  Momma was still standing there, now with the walker in front of her like a defensive shield and both hands gripping its handles. “Drive O.K.?”

  Leah nodded.

  “Jodie island-bound?”

  Leah checked her watch. “Should be there by now,” then wondered that she’d not got a text or call confirming the fact.

  “I’ve never quite got used to sending her out there all alone,” Momma said, gazing east in the direction of Shawnituck. “I still fear she won’t come back.”

  Leah wasn’t quite sure how literally to take her meaning. “She’s thirty-five, Momma—can take care of herself.”

  “She could ‘take care of herself’ at age two. That’s been my fear—that she’d choose to stay out there and there’d be nothing we could do.”

  “Brooke didn’t.” Leah meant that Brooke didn’t stay on Shawnituck but briefly wondered at a different meaning—did her sister ever fear, as Momma, that her eldest daughter might fight to stay with her biological father?

  “No, but Jodie might,” Momma said, interrupting Leah’s musing.

  “Her home’s on the west coast now, a lot farther than Shawnituck Island.”

  “But safer.”

  Leah wondered if that were indeed true, but understood Momma’s fear. She’d never quite recovered from Brooke’s non-negotiable announcement that she was pregnant (at age twenty), marrying Onion Howard, and moving (permanently, she’d said) to Shawnituck Island to live in a shack beside her husband’s parents’ cottage. She might as well have said she was moving to Mars as far as Momma was concerned. “Where’s Father?” Leah asked.

  “In the den watching the evening news. I yelled to him you’d arrived, but I doubt he heard over the TV.”

  Leah could hear the drone of television voices in the background. “I’ll go say hi.”

  Momma nodded slowly then whispered, “Don’t be alarmed if he seems a little confused. Today’s not one of his good days.”

  Leah registered the wince around her mother’s eyes. She suppressed an urge to bolt—turn with her bag and head for one of those sleazy flea-bag motels out on the highway—and said as calmly as she could manage, “Maybe I can cheer him up.”

  Momma spoke with her eyes Cheering is not what he needs but said with her voice, “I’ll have your dinner ready time you get done” and slowly turned with her walker.

  Leah slid past soon as the doorway was clear.

  After dropping her bag in the guestroom and stopping in the bathroom to pee and compose her face, she paused outside the den’s doorway, closed her eyes, and slowly counted backwards from ten in her head, a habit she had from her deaf days to allow her to retreat to an always stable center. In those days, deprived of sound and willing away sight, she had nowhere to go except into herself. But tonight an advertiser’s jingle from the blaring TV blocked her exit and unsettled her even more. In frustration she opened her eyes on a framed photo hanging beside the door. It was of her and Brooke, Momma and Father posed on the Bogue Beach pier when she was eight, Brooke ten. It had been taken by her brother Matt in the midst of his junior-high photography craze, just before he descended into the dark turmoil of puberty from which he never fully emerged. She was grinning serenely at the camera, Brooke had the start of a scowl across her face, ever annoyed by having to stand still and look presentable. Above them, Momma leaned naturally into Father who, ramrod straight and a foot taller than anyone else in the photo, seemed the pillar against which they all leaned. Though about as different in personality as four from the same family could be, the photo clearly showed they were also bound together, invisibly but incontrovertibly. But bound by what? Leah wondered. Love surely, as all-encompassing as the hazy sky in the background, as immoveable as the pier’s staunch railing. And if so, what of that had changed? Wasn’t love still binding them against all threats, the same immutable defense as then? If so, why was she so scared? She told herself she needn’t be; and if she needn’t be, then she told herself she wasn’t. With that, she walked into the den.

  She stepped between Father’s recliner and the TV.

  His first response was a frown of annoyance, perhaps thinking the body Momma’s. But once he looked up to her face, he smiled broadly. “Hello, Sprite,” he said.

  She found the use of his childhood nickname for her simultaneously consoling and unsettling, then realized it was the first time she’d actually heard the name. How different it felt from only seen, registered through the eyes. She recovered enough to say, “Hi, Dad,” then waited a fraction of a second to see if he would stand. When he made no move, she leaned over and gave him a hug from above. The gesture was awkward and she briefly lost her balance, leaning heavily on his neck.

  “Whoa, Sprite,” he said, his voice loud in her left processor. He stood, lifting both of them upright without struggle. From there he pulled her face into the hollow between his neck and shoulder and patted her head softly.

  She held for some long seconds on his chest, then lifted her face,
kissed him on the cheek, and slowly pulled away. “It’s good to see you, Dad,” she said when she was again standing on her own. They waded through an uneasy pause, the news anchor’s voice filling the silence, until Leah realized that Father, ever the proper gentleman, was waiting for her to sit before returning to his seat. She grinned at this formality and backed up to Momma’s Queen Anne’s chair at a diagonal to his recliner and sat. This freed him to fall back into his seat. As he did so, she reached out and turned down the old tube TV salvaged and somehow kept operable from their childhood home.

  When she turned to face him, he said, “So tell me how school is going,” speaking the words slowly and directly to her eyes and annunciating clearly. He also interspersed sign language for some of the key words.

  “Dad, you don’t have to sign. I can hear now.”

  His eyes clouded. “You can?”

  She tried to laugh but the sound died in her throat. “Nearly fifteen years now.”

  “That’s wonderful,” he said, but still signing. “I’ll have to tell Peg.”

  “Momma knows,” Leah said, her voice trailing off and her eyes finding first the floor then the muted news anchor’s taut but calm face. The world beyond at least was in good hands. She looked again to Father.

  “So how’s Brooke?” he asked, no longer signing.

  Leah’s heart lifted. “She’s doing real well. She’s home now. Dave’s taking good care of her. I’m planning to stop and see her tomorrow.”

  Father’s face was momentarily confused, but it quickly regained its long ago patient stability and determination. He stared at her calmly. “You tell your sister that whenever she gets tired of that boy, she and the baby can come stay with us.” He nodded to her with paternal munificence. “Make sure she knows that, please.”

  Leah took a deep breath and released it slowly. Her gaze never faltered from her father’s adamant stare as she said, “I’ll let her know, Dad. I’m sure she will be grateful for the offer.”

  He nodded to her, then picked up the remote and turned up the volume on the TV.