The Sisters (21 page)

From her bed in the corner, Grace began to cry, and it was only then that any of them noticed the three-year-old was awake, sitting bolt upright, her eyes wide and streaming with tears.

“You come on with me,” Mother said, lifting Grace into her arms. “You can sit with your grandpa on the porch.”

Grace sniffled and rubbed at her eyes, then laid her head on her grandmother’s shoulder. “Can I chase lightning bugs?”

“They’ve all gone to bed, sugar,” Mother said. “But you can listen for the whip-poor-wills and whistle back to them, like Grandpa taught you.”

“Will Grandpa sing?” Grace asked.

Daddy nodded. “You take her on out, Bertie,” he said. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

Lynn’s body had at last relaxed into stillness, and she breathed steadily again, but Rainey continued to rock her. She looked up at her father, and then, feeling her tears coming, turned her head away. “What am I going to do, Daddy? I can’t…” There were too many ways to end that sentence, all rushing at her at once.
I can’t let him keep taking her. I can’t stop him. I can’t protect her. I can’t
not
protect her.

Daddy reached for Rainey’s hand, gave it two quick squeezes, and hobbled back toward the front of the house. She knew he wanted to help, knew he would give everything he had to help, but he didn’t know any more than she did about what to do, where to start. Even Mother had been trying her best, being kinder to Rainey these last few months, ever since Carl had turned up again, insisting on having his visits with Lynn—a right, the lawyer had told Rainey, that was still legally Carl’s, despite his never having exercised it before. No one, it seemed, could untangle the mess she’d made.

Rainey eased her daughter back onto the bed and tidied the sheets as best she could. In the dim light that filtered from the hallway, she could see Lynn’s face—a face now twisted and creased with worry, the face of an old woman, not of a child barely eight.

This, too, was her fault—all the scars of her mistakes, written on her little girl’s forehead.

No good could come of wishing backwards, she knew, but sometimes her mind would slip off before she could catch it—wishing she’d never taken up Carl’s first offer to drive her home, wishing she’d never met him, wishing even that she had never gotten her job at the Burger Chef. When those thoughts came, she pushed hard at them, driving them down again, for to wish away Carl would be to wish away Lynn, and Rainey didn’t want that. But if one day she rubbed a lamp and a genie appeared before her, she knew exactly what she would ask—to go back to that night in the car with Daddy when she told him she wanted to marry Carl. If she were granted that wish, Rainey would grab her silly nineteen-year-old self and shake some sense into her, stop her from saying “Yes,” stop her from declaring to Daddy—and to herself—that she was in love when she wasn’t.

Though she had long forgotten how it had felt to love Carl—she supposed she had, for a few weeks that summer—she did remember how it had felt to be nearly four months pregnant, standing beside him in the judge’s office, dreaming of their future, seeing herself slipping her fingers through his hair, long after it had gone silver. What a strange sensation, remembering how at the time she had thought the day a happy one, and yet also remembering how it had really been, just as if she were two different people with two different experiences of the same hour.

Carl had been late. He’d arrived with his mother, a pruny woman with home-dyed hair the color of withered marigolds, who, when she entered, looked away and refused to return Rainey’s greeting. Mother had talked all the way downtown in the car about the disgrace, but once they’d stepped inside the City-County Building, she’d hushed up, answering any question, when she was forced to, with a gesture or a step forward. Daddy had driven more slowly than usual, not once looking up at Rainey in the rearview mirror to roll his eyes at something her mother had said, and when they walked across the parking lot, Rainey had had to grasp his arm to steady him.

After the wedding, nothing was like she’d ever imagined it would be. There was no cute little apartment with flowered curtains, no afternoons fixing herself up while the dinner cooked, no romantic evenings curled together in an armchair, talking about what their baby might be like. There was his parents’ ramshackle farm lined with tumbledown fences, nasty chickens and pigs rutting up the yard, big red dogs that Carl’s father bred for fights, snarling and hurling themselves at the pen day and night, and for the newlyweds a tiny damp room in the basement filled with greasy car parts and racing magazines. Never in her life had Rainey believed it was possible to miss Newman, but she did. Siler was less than an hour across the state line, but it might as well have been on the far coast of Hell.

In Siler, nobody ordered Rainey to do the cooking, the scrubbing up, or the laundry, but she saw right away that if she didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done—and for the most part, when she was in her last month and couldn’t be on her feet long, it didn’t. It was just the same when it came to Carl’s finding a job. From one day to the next, he didn’t turn a hand toward it, and it wore Rainey out to be the only one who seemed to think he ought to be looking, so just as soon as she could after the baby came—several weeks sooner than the doctor would have liked—she hitched a ride into town and found a job clerking at the drugstore. When she got back, she told Carl he had to teach her to drive.

It knotted her stomach to leave Lynn behind in that house, but working was the only way she could see for getting them out. Every day when Rainey got back, she was sure to find Lynn screaming with hunger and lying in a foul wet diaper, but after she got her cleaned up and soothed, she whispered to her baby, promising that soon, soon, she would take her away.

For eight months, Rainey saved every penny of her pay, and then, one day on her lunch hour, without a word to Carl, she rented a small house in town and called a woman about sitting for Lynn during working hours. Before leaving the drugstore that evening, she filled the car with empty boxes from the stockroom, and as soon as she got back to the farm and tended to Lynn, she started throwing all their things—hers and Lynn’s—into the cartons. When she was finished, she set three or four empty boxes on the bed and went out to the old barn where Carl was messing with one of the half-dozen cars that would never run again, told him the address of the house and said he could come with them, but if he didn’t have a job within two weeks, he’d have to go.

Three days—three glorious days—she and Lynn had the house to themselves. When Carl showed up, he’d already gotten a job selling furniture. He’d bathed and shaved, had bought some new clothes, and while he still couldn’t be called handsome, he looked nice enough to introduce as her husband. At first, she thought maybe it was going to be okay with them, because he seemed as happy as she was about being away from the farm, but soon he was ignoring Lynn like before and treating Rainey like she had the brains of a caterpillar, calling her stupid and mocking the idea that she could ever have been a bookkeeper when she had trouble balancing the checkbook, making a dunce cap for her out of a sheet of newspaper when she forgot to put a new bag in the sweeper after taking out the full one.

She was unhappy, but what was there to do but make the best of it? She couldn’t think past that thought then. He was her husband, simple as that, so she had to find a way to live with him. It wasn’t as if they spent all that much time together. Most nights, after he swallowed his supper, he’d leave again and stay out until past midnight. After a while, Rainey didn’t even wake up when he fell into bed beside her. In the morning, just before she headed out the door with Lynn, she’d nudge Carl and tell him the coffee was ready and that he had to be at work in an hour.

If the drugstore hadn’t flooded, they might have gone on like that for years without her knowing what Carl really was. A pipe had burst in the employees’ restroom, but no one had realized it until a customer waved a bottle of Vicks Formula 44 above his head and shouted that he was nearly ankle-deep in water. The manager shooed all the customers out and locked the door, and the employees waded through the stockroom, trying to find a shutoff valve. When at last the water was stopped, someone called a plumber, and the manager told them all to go home and not to come back to work until he called in a day or two.

Rainey’s first thought had been the money, how she and Carl couldn’t afford to lose any of her pay, so to save the couple of dollars that would have gone to the sitter for the afternoon’s work, she stopped on her way home to pick up the baby. Lynn was cranky, having been woken from her nap, and Rainey was so busy trying to settle her, she didn’t notice, when she parked in front of the house, that Carl’s El Dorado was three or four spaces further up.

She was hoping to get Lynn back to sleep, and she was glad, once she was home, that she could lie down with her daughter and maybe get a little nap herself. She set Lynn on the living room floor, handed her a teddy bear, tossed her purse onto the couch, kicked off her wet shoes, and went to turn down the covers.

And there was Carl, wearing nothing except the white shirt he’d put on that morning, feet on the floor, chest on the bed.

And the naked man curled over him, thrusting—all Rainey could think of in that first paralyzed instant was that he had blond hair, a beard, and she didn’t know him.

Behind her, Lynn called, “Mommy!” and Rainey swung round, ran back to the living room, scooped up her child, and didn’t look back.

What she had seen in the bedroom flashed in her head over and over like a slide stuck in a projector, and each time, she took in new details: Carl’s shorts—the ones flecked with the tiny brown shields—clinging to the edge of the mattress; one of the pair of pictures with the finches and the ferns knocked almost sideways on the wall behind the bed; the alarm clock on the nightstand facedown; an open jar of Vaseline tipped over on her pillow. She looked and looked, not understanding what she saw or what it meant any more than if her baby had transformed into a hissing cobra before her eyes: incomprehensible, horrible.

She had no recollection of getting Lynn into the car, or of picking up the exit for the expressway on the other end of town, or even of having decided where she was going. One minute she had stood frozen in the doorway of her bedroom in Siler and the next, four hours later, she was in the doorway of Sally’s apartment in Indianapolis, Lynn shivering in her arms, yowling, her red corduroy pants soaked through with urine.

“Rainey, your shoes,” Sally said while Rainey shook her head, saying, “I was afraid to stop,” as if that explained why she wore none and why her stockings were splotched with black, pilled and torn around the toes. She still had on her blue smock from the drugstore, the sleeves and shoulders streaked with makeup from where she had scrubbed away her tears as she drove.

With the help of half a bottle of wine, Rainey finally choked out the scene to Sally, but it was Sally who had to explain its meaning, because Rainey couldn’t fathom how men could do such things. The next day, carrying a purse stuffed fat with tissues and wearing a borrowed dress, she’d found a job and, a couple of hours later, a divorce lawyer. She’d tried then to arrange it so Carl couldn’t get near Lynn, but because she couldn’t bring herself to tell the lawyer what had really happened, there wasn’t anything he could present as grounds to deny regular visitation.

That was another mistake, piled on a great wobbly stack of them, but at the time, it didn’t seem to matter. As bad as her three years with Carl had been, the solution appeared to roll right out before her, a kind of red carpet reward for having made it through. When she told Carl she wouldn’t be asking for any money, he told her he wouldn’t challenge the divorce. When she told him the Chevy wouldn’t hold up to driving Lynn down to Siler every two weeks, he told her he didn’t want to waste his weekends coming to Indianapolis. That first Christmas after she left, when she took Lynn back to Newman to see Mother and Daddy, Rainey had held her breath whenever the phone rang or a car passed the house, but she never heard or saw a sign of Carl. Plainly, he had made up his mind to forget all about Lynn, so Rainey made up her mind that Lynn would forget him too. Rainey never mentioned his name, never showed Lynn any pictures of Carl or told her any stories about him—and it worked. It wasn’t until Lynn started kindergarten that she even began to notice that other children had two parents, and when at last she asked where her daddy was, Rainey told her daughter that her father was a bad man who had never loved them or wanted them. “You won’t ever have to know him, sweetie,” Rainey said, certain Carl would never be anything more than her own private, sickening memory.

It had all worked better than she could have hoped, and even though she and Mother argued and fussed, even though her paycheck was always spent weeks before it was earned, Rainey told herself she was lucky—right up until five or six months ago, when Carl had called the house, saying he wanted to start having Lynn with him every other weekend. Things had changed, he told her. He’d gotten himself a good job with the county, working for the road department. In another year or two, he’d probably be a supervisor—or so he claimed. Since he didn’t know if he would marry again—Rainey snorted at this, but Carl ignored her—Lynn would probably be the only child he would ever have, and ever since his mother had died, his father had been asking about Lynn, saying how he wanted to know her. Rainey told him to go to hell and slammed the phone down—she couldn’t imagine how he’d found out they were in Newman again—and when he didn’t call back, she let herself believe the crisis was over, but a few days later, she got a letter from a lawyer, saying that if Rainey didn’t abide by the original visitation agreement, Carl would take her back to court. In the letter, there was even a day and a time set for when Carl expected to pick Lynn up for her first visit.