I took some comfort in that. I wasn’t the only one in the household living a secret life.
But now Laura and Mother were off somewhere together, probably in
Charleston
shopping for party dresses and Christmas presents. Ellen was away at college, and Cathy, the eldest sister, was living at the ski school in
Canaan
Valley
, teaching Senate aides and lobbyists how to slalom.
And I was left alone, sitting in a church by myself.
The organist struck up some dirge of a postlude, and the priest hustled out the side door, and I hunched up against the cold and walked out into the night. Around me families were sliding along the icy sidewalk to their cars, little knots of relatives bickering genially about dinner and homework.
I dug my hand into my pocket and came up with a quarter. Down the street, near the Shell station, I found a pay phone, pulled the accordion door shut, and opened the phonebook.
There was only one Price listed. Louis. I didn’t recognize the name, but I figured he must be related somehow. As the phone rang, I invented my cover story, and sent up a silent prayer as I told the man who answered that I was Mrs. Joan Price’s cousin’s daughter, and my father was dying, and he wanted me to contact her before it was too late.
Louis didn’t question this. But he had no answer for me either. “I don’t know that family well. We’re not related, at least not that I know of. But I worked out at the mine, and people were always confusing me with Pete. Because of the name. But I don’t know what happened to him. They moved. Years ago.”
“You don’t know where they were going?”
He sighed. I heard the wheeze in his voice. “I figured he went south. To get out of the cold. The black lung, you know.”
“They all left? The whole family?”
Now he sounded impatient. “I told you, I don’t really know them. I just remember he quit and they moved out of town. Tell you what. Give me your name and number, and if I hear from them, I’ll have them call you.”
I mumbled something, and he pretended to take it down, and as I hung up I realized that I was all alone, forever. I would never find them, and they would never look for me.
Mother came home the
next day, alone. Laura, she told me, was staying in
Morgantown
with Aunt Jane for a little while. She didn’t tell me why, but I decided, piously, that I should pray for Laura, because she must have gotten into trouble. Mother was trying to separate her from that biker boy, probably.
Laura’s transgression, whatever it was, gave me courage. She had defied Mother and survived. So the next Sunday, when she came to wake me for church, I sat up in bed, geared up my courage, and said, more positively this time, “I don’t want to be confirmed. I don’t feel right about it.”
Mother stopped with one earring on and one still in her hand. She studied me for a long moment, and I closed my eyes and prayed hard, inarticulately, that someone, either Jesus or Mother, would forgive me whatever sin I ended up committing.
Jesus could send me to hell. Mother could send me back.
Only there was no “back.” My old family was gone.
“Mother?” I said, and opened my eyes.
She fastened on the other earring and stepped back from my bed. When she got to the doorway, she turned to me. “You do what you think is right, dear. I know—I know that your early training was in another faith, and I understand that this might all be confusing to you.”
Weak with relief, I sank back onto the pillow. “I thought you might be angry at me. Send me away.”
“Send you away?” Her eyes blazed fierce, and though she never moved closer to me, that fierceness was very like an embrace. “You don’t need to worry about that. Ever. I don’t give up my daughters.”
I let that fierceness comfort me, and only when she was gone did the errant thought come into my mind—but what about Laura? You sent her away.
Just as, I supposed, my own mother—my first mother—had sent me away.
But she had to, I whispered inside my head. She must have had to.
And Mother must have had to send Laura away.
A few weeks later, I learned the truth about Laura, or part of it. Laura called, and I answered. I said only that I would go get Mother.
“No!” she said.
In the silence that followed, I heard the crackle of long-distance.
“Look, Theresa, all I want is for you to tell her that I’m okay. And she’s not supposed to look for me. I’m fine and I don’t need—” here her voice went rich with irony—“to be rescued. Got that?”
I was a quick child, sensitive to nuance. And I’d been watching Laura for months, wondering. “You ran away, didn’t you? With that boy.”
“Yeah. And I’m not coming back. So just tell her not to worry about me.” From somewhere came a deeper voice, and Laura’s answering laugh, and then she said, quickly, “I’m fine. I’m not just fine, I’m happy. Okay?”
“But—” I was overcome with something—envy? Admiration? Here was someone who was sinning and not suffering for it. I wanted to keep her on the phone. I glanced around the front hall, into the living room, up the big staircase. There was no sign of Mother. “But what if something happens? What if—what if Mother gets sick? How do we find you?”
I could sense her hesitation, and remembered that she’d already lost one parent. So what. I’d lost two. “She’s getting old, you know,” I added. “She could get sick.”
“All right. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a phone number you can call. But you have to hide it and not show it to Mother, all right? Unless there’s an emergency, like someone getting sick.”
“All right,” I replied carefully.
She still hesitated. “You have to promise. Really promise. A sister’s promise, okay?”
A sister’s promise. That was rich. She didn’t even introduce me to her friends as her sister. It was always
oh, yeah, and this is Theresa
.
“I promise.”
I found a pen and pad in the drawer and dutifully took down the number. Then I said, politely, “Goodbye,” and we hung up.
I prayed about it for several weeks, but got no answer. I hid the phone number in my old math textbook, and for another few weeks, every time I glanced at the bookcase, I felt the phone number’s heat burning through the pages and binding.
Finally, I retrieved the paper and took it with me on my next trip to the library. Back in the corner, there was an IBM typewriter for the use of patrons who wanted to type a letter or a resume. In all caps, I typed LAURA, and the phone number. Then I put it in an envelope and typed our address and mailed it to my mother.
Mother never said a word to me about it. I think she suspected the note came from one of Laura’s friends in the drama club. She was distracted for several days, constantly whispering on the phone, and then Merilee stayed overnight for three nights. Then Mother came home, this time with Laura.
I’d done the right thing. Laura was ill, so ill that she was home only a few hours before Mother took her to the hospital. I knew better than to visit her. She came home three weeks later, so terribly thin that when fits of coughing seized her, I was afraid her ribs would break. She didn’t speak to me about what I’d done, and I didn’t try to defend myself. We seldom talked at all. We’d never really been sisters, so it was no loss to me.
It was a wet, cold mountain winter, two hundred inches of snow altogether, and after only a week at home, it was clear that Laura’s lungs weren’t improving. So she went away again, this time to somewhere in
Georgia
, a convalescent hospital, I guessed. That summer she came home, still pale but no longer coughing. She was home only a week when Mother interrupted dinner to announce, “I’ve enrolled you for the summer session at a boarding school. You can catch up the semester you missed while you were ill.” She looked as if she anticipated a protest, but Laura only stirred the food on her plate. Mother tried again. “It’s in
Louisville
. They have a stable. You can ride horses whenever you like.”
Laura looked up. “
Louisville
? There’s a theatre festival there, isn’t there?” And she smiled and pushed her plate aside and said, “I’ll go pack.”
The next morning, as I returned from swim practice, she emerged from the house followed by a cab driver carrying two suitcases. She looked very grown up and stylish in a silk cardigan, her dark hair tied back with a Hermes scarf. I stood at the bottom of the front steps, waiting for her to do something. While the driver packed the luggage in his trunk, she watched from the porch. Then, gracefully, she descended.
As she approached me, she said, very softly, “How nice for you, Theresa.” She trailed a hand along the banister. “Now you’ll have Mother all to yourself.”
And then she smiled, a smile full of the irony I’d learned to expect from her, and got into the cab and left me behind.
I didn’t see her again for six years, when Ellen and her husband Tom and their little daughter had us all over to their house in
Brussels
for Christmas. It was the second Christmas after Cathy died, and no one had much cheer, but Laura glittered. She was already a minor success in
Hollywood
from her role in a soap opera, and she had plenty of names to drop and enough money to buy us lovely little crystal flagons of perfume. She politely ignored me, and why not—I was nothing but a reclusive teenager, still in braces, quietly set not on college but the convent, and I kept out of her glamorous way then, and for the next decade or so.
And now we were both home again, and nothing had changed. Laura was still glamorous in an understated expensively casual way, and I was still the one who didn’t belong.
That first night home, as I sat there at the restaurant, picking at the first steak I’d seen in two years, the college president fawned on her. To her credit, Laura didn’t seem to like it. She was much nicer to the waitress who asked for an autograph than to President Urich when he suggested an honorary degree.
And she stiffened when he touched her hand. It was just a little touch, nothing more than the insinuating friendliness of a salesman. But she didn’t like it.
I found this interesting. Of course, she didn’t like
him
, that was easy enough to see. But she also didn’t like it when the restaurant manager came around and dropped his hand on her shoulder—and he was some old friend of hers from high school. She hid her reaction from him, smiling warmly up at him and speaking lightly of old times.
But I noticed. And I understood. I didn’t like being touched either . . . for, I was sure, a completely different reason. People probably touched her all the time, just to see if she was real, because it must be hard to believe in what you see on TV and the movie screen. I didn’t like being touched because . . . well, no one ever touched me anymore. In the cloister, we never touched. It was a way of reminding ourselves that we weren’t really creatures of the body anymore.
As the convent nurse, of course, I touched the other nuns, took their pulses, checked their blood pressures, palpated their abdomens— and felt them shrinking away under my professional hands. I would be the same, I supposed, if someone touched me so intimately— fingers on my wrist, my arm, my stomach.
But Laura . . . I was struck yet again, watching her, with the odd notion that inside we were somehow similar. She might smile brightly and speak lightly and pretend to be a social animal, but I remembered her as a girl, playing her parts, putting on her costumes, speaking her lines. She did that to hide herself. I didn’t have her ability— I couldn’t disguise who I was. But I knew that quiet need to withdraw, to hide, to stay safe within.