The Sisters (40 page)

“Stop avoiding the issue. You just told me the article says ‘free and open to the public.’ That’s you. Surely you’ve got a sick day you haven’t used yet. Go.”

“But why? To do what?”

“Curiosity. To say hello. To reignite the flame. How should I know? You’re the one who called me.” Sally sighed, “You can always tell anyone who asks that you just want to learn something about archaeology.”

“Oh, Sally.”

“I know you’ve been thinking about it all day. Tell me.”

“Really,” said Rainey. “I doubt he’d remember me.”

“Why would he forget? He might not recognize you, but you could always remind him.”

Rainey had recognized Marshall instantly—the eager eyes and the same slight build that somehow gave the impression of great height. Though the photograph was in black and white, she could see the Arizona sun had baked his skin to taut leather. It was perhaps this more than anything else that had made her know him even before she read the caption. He looked like Grace, who worked her body lean in the sun.

“Why Newman, anyway?” Sally asked. “It’s such a small school. I bet they don’t even teach archaeology.”

In spite of its brevity, the article had been very thorough. “Some other guy who teaches there apparently knew him in college. He found out somehow that Marshall was going to speak at IU, so he invited him to come here, too.”

“There goes the reunion-show fantasy,” Sally said.

Rainey shivered at the thought. “I hate those things.” Seemed like a person couldn’t turn on a talk show these days without seeing somebody crying about how they felt incomplete for never having known one or both parents. Then, after the host had wrung out every detail of the sad story, he would say,
Karen
or
Leon
—followed by a big pause—
we have a surprise for you
! The camera would catch the tearful face, looking around desperately, and then the lost person would step out from backstage, arms open. Rainey wondered if anybody else ever noticed that the lost one, recently found by a detective hired by the talk show, nearly always looked resistant and anxious, not at all joyful as the audience demanded. It was an epidemic, these programs. She feared the day would come when she would turn on the television and see Grace in the interview chair, weeping over the father she’d never known.

“So what else does the article say about him?” Sally prodded. “Anything personal?”

“Just that he lives with his wife—a social worker. And his sons—one a sophomore at Arizona State, the other a graduate student in thermodynamics. Whatever that is.” She wondered if Marshall’s parents had ever been able to build their house near Flagstaff, or if, after all these years, he still spent his summers digging up the property.

“So—no daughter?”

“Stop it, Sally.”

“I’m just saying … I mean, you never know.”

“I wouldn’t do that to him,” Rainey said. “It wouldn’t be fair. He’s got a family. What would he think? And why should he even believe me?”

“Come on, Rainey. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. He’s a big boy—all grown up. Maybe hooking them up would help things between you and Grace.”

“I think it’s probably too late for that,” Rainey said. So much had come between them, so much more than her steely silence about Grace’s father. For one, Rainey hadn’t been able to hide her disappointment that all her life Grace had let Lynn show her up in school. Grace was every bit as smart as Lynn—smarter in a lot of ways—but she’d thrown it all away on that strange man. Rainey had never liked Ken. After he killed himself, there might have been a chance to repair the rift with Grace, to get her back to Newman where she belonged, to get her straightened out, but Rainey had made the mistake of saying too much too soon: “Now that you’re free of your burdens,” she had said, stroking Grace’s arm after the funeral, “there’s nothing to stop you. You’re still young. You can be anything you like.” She hadn’t meant it quite the way it came out—hadn’t meant to suggest she didn’t realize her daughter was grieving—but she couldn’t take it back and expect to be believed. Even now, now that it was impossible to change what had happened, Rainey wished she had insisted on staying with Grace after the funeral—at least for a few days—whether Grace wanted her or not, but the moment she had spoken the words, she felt her daughter stiffen against her, and she lost her courage, afraid anything else she might say would open the ground between them even wider, so wide, perhaps, that it would swallow them both.

Grace hadn’t asked about her father in years—Rainey couldn’t even remember the last time—but it was Grace’s way to go quiet when she was angry or troubled. Now that Rainey had some real information, something more than just a name and a few memories, would Grace want to know? Would it help her find her path? Perhaps she could just mail Grace the clipping with a little note saying, “See—this is what you come from.” Would that knock some sense into her, make her realize there was something more for her than the half a life she was living in that place with the absurd name—a place nobody had ever heard of? Nothing but fields and trees and cattle as far as you could see.

“Who can say when it’s too late for anything?” Sally said. “I think you should just go. I know you want to. You don’t have to make up your mind absolutely before you get there. Maybe you’ll introduce yourself and maybe you won’t. Just go and see what feels right.”

It was well past midnight when Rainey hung up the phone. She had thought it would help when she admitted that Sally was right—yes, she did want to go, she did want to see Marshall—but it hadn’t helped, because no matter how much they talked, Rainey couldn’t say exactly why she wanted to see him. Again, Sally had urged her to go to the presentation, and, once there, to follow her instincts. But that was just the problem: She didn’t know what her instincts were. How was she supposed to separate her instincts from fantasy and nostalgia, from selfishness and fear? At times, she even felt jealous—but of whom? Of his wife? Or of Marshall? And for what? She did feel an intense longing to see Marshall again, but she also felt just as intensely that going would be wrong in every way.

Rainey turned out the lights and pressed the pillow into a perfect cradle for her head, but she couldn’t sleep. She imagined walking into the auditorium, taking a seat near the front, but off to one side. She would sit at attention in her chair, and then, when Marshall came in, laid his papers on the podium, and began to talk, he would glance her way and she would smile, nod reassuringly. She could see him sorting through his memory as he continued his lecture, finally looking at her again with warm recognition. The ice broken, she would wait patiently until the crowd of students wanting to ask questions had dispersed, and Marshall would come toward her, clasp both her hands, hold her at arm’s length to say how little she had changed, and then embrace her, whispering an invitation to dinner, where he would ask about Lynn, and nod in shared pride as Rainey said, “She’s a judge now. Married to another lawyer. Last year they adopted a child—a little girl. Taylor.” When he asked Rainey about herself, she would smile and shake her head—
no, I never remarried
—and he would assume there were no more children, so how could she tell him of Grace? If she did manage to find the words—saying how she hadn’t realized she was pregnant until months after he’d left, explaining how she’d decided not to contact him, not wanting even to risk that he would give up graduate school to provide for them—would it shame him, a university professor, to know his daughter had squandered her chance to go to college to run off with a crazy ex-soldier who didn’t deserve her? Or would it be better not to speak of Grace at all? Perhaps there would be no need—this was only catching up between friends, after all. But if she didn’t tell, what would she do if he wanted to keep in touch, if he asked to see her again?

Rainey twisted furiously in the bed.
Dinner. Another meeting
. The scenario was ridiculous. If he recognized her, his reaction might be far from warm. There wouldn’t be any reason for him to be hostile. But indifferent? That was very likely. And why shouldn’t he be? Thirty-five years ago, they’d known each other for three months. How many men since had she dated—some of them for nearly a year—men she’d slept with that she would be neither happy nor unhappy to see if she unexpectedly ran into them? If she stayed behind then, to reintroduce herself, Marshall’s indifference might quickly turn to alarm. How would she explain why she had come? Just because his picture was in the paper? Why him, after all these years? What would he think? That she was stalking him? And then if he became upset and tried to get away from her, would she lose control, get upset too, demand he listen, and shout after him as he tried to push out the door with his host,
And what about our daughter
?

Perhaps she could sit in the back of the auditorium, pretend to take notes, drape her hand over part of her face whenever she looked up, and when he was finished, she could get lost in the crowd and slip out, make it all the way to her car before he was even able to get to the door.

Insanity
. Rainey sat up in bed and flung her pillow across the room. If she wasn’t going to speak to him, why go at all? What was she hoping to gain, anyway? Her memories of Marshall were lovely. In his company, she had felt beautiful and desirable, capable and smart. Seeing him now might damage those memories somehow, replace them with new and less satisfying images.

But that had happened already. Now that she’d seen the photograph, now that she knew he’d married and had sons and an important career—none of it having anything to do with her—she wasn’t sure she would she be able to remember the darling, nervous young man who had made her feel for a time that almost anything was possible. Once, when they’d been together for about a month, they’d sat in the courtyard of her apartment building on a warm afternoon, watching Lynn practice her somersaults. She kept rolling to the left, getting more and more frustrated, until Marshall got up to help her, laying one hand on her left knee, guiding her over until she began to feel the balance in her own little body. In a few moments, the somersaults were perfect, and Lynn couldn’t stop, in her success forgetting all about the adults and the attention she usually demanded from them.

“You’ll be a wonderful father,” Rainey had said. “So patient.”

Marshall shrugged but looked out at Lynn. “Did you always just want to get married?” he asked after a long while. “Have a family?”

She looked at him, astonished. “No,” she said, as though he ought to know better, but then she realized he knew almost nothing about her. She told him then about Carl, about that first job she’d loved, her classes at the junior college, and her hopes of someday being an independent woman with the freedom to marry—or not. “I never wanted to feel like I had to get married just to have a man to take care of me,” she said. “My sister did that.” She looked at Lynn, her dress and panties stained with grass, her face red with the joy of effort. “I messed things up pretty bad. A child. No husband. No education. Barely getting by.”

Marshall’s silence terrified her. She ought not to have been so frank. Did he think she was trying to trap him? What could she say to make him understand that she knew he wasn’t going to marry her, that she didn’t expect it, or even want it? That she just wanted to enjoy what time with him she could?

At last he took her hand, lightly squeezing her fingers. “You can still have your independence, Rainey.” He laughed when Lynn leapt up in triumph from a particularly fine somersault. “You have it now.” He looked at her. “You really don’t know how strong you are, do you?”

Rainey hadn’t thought of that in years. Hadn’t thought of it, she was sure now, since the moment Marshall had said it. She had raised her girls—perhaps imperfectly, but she had raised them. She had taken care of everything Mother either couldn’t understand or had been too upset to deal with when Daddy was dying. And then for years after that, she had taken care of Mother, seeing to it that all the bills got paid, supplementing the Social Security check with her own small income, always finding some other way to cut the budget when she was sure they were at bare bones.

That long-ago afternoon, while Lynn, newly confident in her somersaults, entertained herself by chaining them in combinations with hopscotch and jumping jacks, Rainey had asked Marshall, “Why archaeology?”

“Two things,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he brought out a small drawstring pouch, and from that, a flat stone the color of a desert sunset. He laid it in her palm. “This is the first fossil I ever found—I must have been seven or eight.” He placed a fingertip on the stone and said, “See here? It’s a beetle. For weeks after I found it, I couldn’t think about anything else except that beetle. How it must have died. How it must have gotten trapped, maybe suffered. But then how, if it hadn’t died this way, locked in the mud, it wouldn’t be here in my hand, making me think about my life. About all life.”

Rainey looked harder at the stone, as if she could look deep enough to see beyond the beetle to find Marshall as a scrawny boy of eight. “You said two things.”

“I found the fossil while I was collecting potsherds. I didn’t really know what they were then—no idea how old they were, or even that they were bits of old pottery,” he said. “I had noticed one on the ground one day, saw that it had a design on it, and decided to find all I could—a shoe box full—you know how kids do? Collect things without any reason to collect them?”