The Sisters (10 page)

Crazy how he’d taken her in like that, right off the street—more than fifteen years now—a thin girl in a dirty coat who’d never even touched a camera. She’d spent most of the three days after Wallace disappeared wandering around Union Station, answering every boarding call to search for him in the crowd. Finally, after she’d taken to sleeping on a bench beneath the arching skylight in the Great Hall, the manager came with a couple of guards and told her vagrants weren’t allowed and that she’d have to leave. “I’m just looking for my family,” she said. “I have a room.” The manager didn’t believe her, just humored her by saying, “Then you’d best go back there and get some sleep.”

She’d been telling the truth about the room, but by the time she was forced out of the terminal, it was as good as lost because she wouldn’t be able to pay the week’s rent. There was no point in even showing her face at the grocery, since Mrs. Winniver had reminded her every day she’d worked there that plenty of others would like to have her job. Working for Mrs. Winniver had been like stepping round a bobcat for twelve hours a day, and Mabel would have quit except that the bruised apples, scuffed carrots, limp greens, and sprouting potatoes she got to take home with her pay on Mondays were mostly what she and Wallace lived on, saving everything they could trying to bring Bertie to them.

But Bertie hadn’t come.

That first day in Chicago, Mabel had survived the long hours of waiting for Bertie’s train by imagining their embrace—how she would notice the strong breadth of Bertie’s back, how she would breathe in the sweet smell of her sweat and marvel at the softness of her hair, as if at once she were holding her sister in her arms for the first and the last time.

Wallace had returned just before the train was due. He carried apples in his pockets—three lovely apples to celebrate his having found a large room for them, clean and cheap, rented by a landlady willing to believe his story that they were all siblings, doing their best to stay together now that their father had died.

They stood for a long time after the train had departed, looking up and down the platform and all through the station, trying to persuade themselves that Bertie had gotten off and was waiting for them on a bench in a dark corner somewhere. “She probably missed the connection in Louisville,” Wallace said at last. “You know how that train’s always late getting into Juniper.”

“Is it?” Mabel had never known it to be—for years she had used the faint whistle of the 10:45 coming into the station as her signal to mark her page, lay her book aside, put out her light, and kiss her sister’s dreaming cheek—but she wanted to believe Wallace. “Yes,” she said. “That must be it.”

Wallace shrugged. “Let’s go find out the schedule from Louisville.”

They’d gone back to their room to sleep, but they hadn’t slept at all, fearing they would miss the first train, due just before six o’clock. Bertie wasn’t on that train. Or the next. She wasn’t on any of them—this they knew for certain, because for the next four days, one or both of them met every train that came out of Louisville, Indianapolis, and every other possible connecting stop between Juniper and Chicago.

They had no money then to send for another ticket, so they wrote to her:
Darling B—We will send train fare with instructions by July 15. We’ll meet you at the station and will explain everything. Forgive us. Stay quiet. Love M & W.
No return address, in case anyone in Juniper was looking for them, sent to Bertie at General Delivery.

In July, they sent the money and waited for the train. In August, they sent more money and waited again for the train, and so on in September, October, and November, always with the clearest instructions they could give:
Take the 8:35 out of Louisville to Chicago on the 19th
—or whatever day they had singled out.

Though she could see Wallace dissolving by degrees, Mabel refused to give up hope. One or more of the letters might have been lost, she told herself, or the money stolen. It might not occur to Bertie to check with the post office at first, but after a while it would—or the postmaster would ask around until he found her—and there the letters would be, waiting for her, and if she’d missed the latest date, she would understand that in another month, another letter would come and she would take the train then. Mabel was so sure that they would all be together again by Christmas that, without telling Wallace, she had put back a little money to buy some cherry cordials, Bertie’s favorite. In January, she would see to it that Bertie started back in school, and then when Bertie graduated, the first high school graduate in the family, if Bertie and Wallace still felt the same—and why wouldn’t they?—they’d be married.

Imagining sitting by a fire with Bertie and Wallace’s children at her feet, listening as she read to them the books their mother had read to her and Bertie—
The Secret Garden, Idylls of the King, A Girl of the Limberlost
—had pulled Mabel through all the hard days since June, but now what did she have? In their letters, they had said only as much as they dared—that Wallace still loved Bertie, that there was nothing but friendship between him and Mabel—but Bertie would not forgive them; her failure to come had made that clear. And understanding this, Wallace had left.

At first, Mabel didn’t realize he had gone. She’d come back to their little room around 6:30, as usual, ready to heat up a mix of vegetables for their supper before Wallace headed out for work. She thought he must have gone in early, taken half the day janitor’s shift, as he sometimes did for a little extra money, but when the next morning came and Wallace didn’t return, she knew. He’d taken his coat, but his spare shirt still hung on the peg beside his bed. The pencil that had been in his pocket when they caught the train from Juniper was on the washstand. Beside it, overlooked the night before, lay his room key. Nothing else—no note, not even a fragment started and thrown away. Nothing except the memory of how Wallace had seemed a little smaller every time he came by the store from the station, his hair stringy and wet from melting snow, to say Bertie once again hadn’t gotten off the train. That, and the memory of those terrifying times Mabel would wake in the early-hour dark to hear Wallace weeping on the other side of the screen, calling for Bertie and moaning, “Lord, forgive me.”

That morning, Mabel had picked her way around icy snowdrifts, looking for Wallace everywhere they’d ever gone together or apart in Chicago, tracing over and over her route to the grocery and his to the office building he swept and mopped every night, describing him to anyone who would stop long enough to listen. Finally, exhausted and chilled through, she settled in at the train station. For a while she had let herself hope that Wallace had taken the risk of sneaking back into Juniper to fetch Bertie himself, but if that had been his plan, he would surely have taken his clean shirt and left her a note saying what he’d done. If he’d gone anywhere at all, with or without Bertie, to start another new life, he would have told her. Wouldn’t he? By the third day, Mabel had given up praying for everything except some sign that Wallace was safe, even if he chose to be alone. But there was no sign.

Evicted from the depot, she wandered up one street and down another, winding through town, paying no attention to where she was going, looking in shop windows, seeing nothing. That’s what she was doing when Paul spotted her and came out of the studio, pulling a dusty brown cardigan over his dingy white shirt, wanting to take her picture. “Please,” he said. “You’re so pretty—so pretty and so sad all at once.”

The very idea of standing again before a photographer paralyzed her even as she longed to run. “I don’t like to have my picture taken,” she said, eyeing the big, grinning, red-faced man before her. He was old enough to be her father. Old enough to be Jim Butcher. But not like either of them. Not being like Butcher would have been enough. This man didn’t have her true father’s quiet ease, though he didn’t seem to mean her any harm. Still, she wasn’t sure she could trust her instincts. “Why do you want a picture of me?”

“Nice samples are good for business,” he said. “Customer comes in, sees a photograph of a pretty girl, he thinks, This fella’s mighty good.” He laughed, pushing his single lock of hair back from his forehead, and then the laugh became a cough that shook his shoulders. He turned away a little and covered his mouth with a handkerchief pulled from his pocket. Then, when the fit was over, he turned back to her and picked up as if it had never happened. “It’s easy, see? I take a picture of you—even if it’s nothing special—it’ll still be sweet to look at, and I get some of the credit for what God made.”

She liked him in spite of herself, but she didn’t let on to him, not then. “No,” she said. “You can get somebody else.” She took a step away, right into the path of a woman loaded down with Christmas shopping. When she had mumbled her apologies and the woman had pushed on, Mabel looked back over her shoulder at Paul. “Besides, I don’t have the money to pay you.”

“Free. Free,” he said. “You’d be doing me a favor.” The whole time he talked, he hadn’t taken a single step toward her, as if he knew she might bolt if he did. He’d even calmed his vibrant hands by clasping them behind his back. “Just come in and have a look,” he said. “See what I do.”

He was obviously proud of the photographs he showed her, some framed on the walls, some in big albums, but they looked a little stiff to her, as if the subjects were enduring the process, even the ones who were smiling. The studio itself was a mess—spent flashbulbs rolling around on the floor, prints scattered across every flat surface, cloths dropped here and there, two or three plates with bits of dried cheese and bread crumbs. A photograph of her wasn’t what he needed.

What she needed was a place to anchor her while she kept searching, kept trying to gather her little family back in. “I’ll trade you,” she said. “I let you take my picture to put up and you give me a job keeping this place clean. I’m good with hair, too, so I can help you get people ready for their pictures.”

“Done!” He flung out his hand for a shake. She was startled by her own boldness, stunned and suspicious that he had so easily agreed to her silly bargain. He even gave her a few dollars, an advance on her first week’s pay, so she could make the rent on her room. Walking back there against the bitter wind, she had begun to wonder if, seeing her need, Paul had somehow set the whole thing up, tossing about a quick mess, just so he could give her a job. To this day, she still wondered. Far-fetched, maybe, but not impossible; indeed, the longer she knew him, the more likely it seemed.

Paul had the power to see even the subtlest signs of a person in trouble, and he had the gift of being able to give without appearing to. The woman who ran the bakery next door would sometimes find that the heavy bags of flour had been lifted onto her storeroom shelves while she was out front paying for the delivery. A messenger boy who’d half-ridden, half-carried his bicycle into town to get his punctured tire repaired might come out of the shop and find a dollar woven into a wheel spoke. Their own customers, always the ones who had long saved for the luxury of a special photograph, would often come back after paying to mention some miscalculation on their bill, and Paul would jovially tap his head and say, “My mistake!” and when they would promise to pay him the rest when they could, he would wave them off and say, “No! No! Paul Connolly pays for his own mistakes!”

At one time or another, nearly everyone in the neighborhood had told Paul their greatest sadness—because he let them tell their stories in their own time and way. It was nearly two years before Mabel told him about Wallace, calling him her brother, and several months more before she told him about Bertie and how she and Wallace had written and written—how she had written since—and never gotten an answer. To tell him about Bertie, she had to identify Wallace rightly, not as her brother, but as Bertie’s beau. When she did, she didn’t confess to having lied before, just went on as though she were mentioning Wallace for the first time. Paul’s eyebrows didn’t even flicker in question. He never asked why she’d left Juniper, why she couldn’t simply go back and talk to Bertie, and for that, she loved him.

While Mabel became an expert at eluding Paul’s sneaky efforts to photograph her, she was pleased at how she’d managed to catch him unawares perhaps a dozen times in as many years, a quick snap of the shutter as she pretended to test the light or rewind a roll. She’d saved all those negatives in secret, concealing them in the cabinet under the name M. Brownlow, recalling Oliver Twist’s rescuer. When Paul died, she printed every one of the negatives, unwilling to give up a single view of her friend, and hung all but one in the darkroom, where, in the dim light, it would seem that he was still there, watching over her shoulder, guiding her. Her favorite, she hung in the studio, behind the counter. Paul would have scoffed and snatched it from the wall, saying no one wanted to look at such an ugly bloated old man, but she defied his memory on this and kept the portrait up because his laughing face—with his mounded cheeks, bad teeth and squinting eyes—was glorious.

One by one, as she finished them, she clipped the prints of Daisy, ten in all, to the line to dry, then shut off the red light, stepped out of the darkroom, and pulled up the shades on the front windows to let in the late-morning light. Sitting backwards on the bus stop bench in front of the shop, staring in at her, was Daisy Harker.

Mabel turned the lock on the door and stepped out to the sidewalk. “Hi,” she said. “Have you come for your photos? They won’t be ready for a couple of days. I was planning to bring them with me on Saturday.”

Daisy said nothing, just stood up, walked nearer to Mabel, and studied the yellow words
Photographic Studio
on the window, tracing the letters with her finger. “Can I come in?”