Sisters (32 page)

"Thank you."

Miss Travers stood silently
for a moment, then suddenly began to speak. "Since yesterday,
I've felt such a need to talk to Helen." Her high, flat voice
had a quaver in it. "Last night was worse for me than almost any
time since she died. I think what I feel is almost a need to
confess."

What was she saying? Sophie
deliberately kept her voice calm. "Confess what, Miss Travers?"

"The way I've always
felt about Baby. That's what's been bothering me most. I was never
able to love her like Helen did. Whenever I'd look at her, I'd see
her with men..." She broke off and gave a quick, convulsive
shudder. "It was so grotesque, so horrible to me that she'd let
men do that to her, again and again, as though she were merely a
vessel of flesh, an animal, and nothing more. I couldn't get beyond
that."

Sophie thought back to her
first reaction to Baby, the way she had thought her eyes look like a
clever animal's, her face like a monkey's face. She hadn't been as
repulsed by that aspect of Baby as Miss Travers had, but neither
could she say her response had been absolutely different.

"Well, I don't mean to
burden you with this," Amy Travers said. "It isn't why I
came. I wanted to tell you about the children. Lydia said you'd want
to know. I'm going to keep them, raise them for Baby." She
looked directly at Sophie as she spoke, as if to challenge her
objections. "That's what Helen would have done."

At that moment, Esther
burst into the room. "Have you seen my father?" she
demanded. "I want to show him what Sally's learned."

"I haven't seen him
this morning," Sophie said.

"Sally can ride the
bicycle by herself now."

"Does it work? The
front wheel--"

"Father had the
carriage maker fix it. It's fine, and you should see Sally!"

They all went outside to
watch Sally make a short, wobbly ride. She fell and the end of it,
scooping up some dirt with her face, but by unspoken consent, her
three watchers clapped instead of hurrying to her. "Oh, Sally,
that was good!" Amy Travers exclaimed. "Can you do it
again?" Sally, who had clearly considered calling it a day on
account of injury, got up out of the dust and got on the bike again.

When Miss Travers left,
Sophie decided to go see Joe. She still had the book Amy had given
her, so she slipped it into her pocket as she started toward the
Bellavance house. As she walked along, she thought how she had
misjudged Amy by thinking her Helen's murderer. Indeed, she was about
to conclude she had entirely misjudged Helen's death. She had learned
something about herself last night when she had become aware she was
beating the unconscious Rodman. There was violence in her nature,
violence she hadn't been aware of before. Could she be projecting it
onto what had happened to Helen, seeing violence where there was
none?

And her conviction that it
wasn't an accident--couldn't that be a product of her unwillingness
to believe that one's fate was a matter of blind chance? She had
always needed to feel that she was in control of what happened, that
life was, in fact, controllable. Perhaps that made her fight too hard
against the idea that death could have simply happened to Helen,
just... happened one day.

She remembered Philip
dying, and the way she had sat at his bedside willing him to be well,
thinking she could dominate the cancer, make it go away if she just
tried hard enough. And she had focused her mind on ridding him of it,
focused all her energy, but still it grew, a dumb, unfeeling
destroyer, oblivious to human wish. Surely that ought to have
convinced her that the essence of life is a roll of the dice, a spin
of the wheel, not a plan or plot. But perhaps she hadn't learned,
hadn't wanted to. It was easier to think someone had killed Helen
thank to think she had just fallen, simply stumbled and been unable
to catch herself. If there was a killer, then one could rant at the
evil of his act, seek him out, seek revenge. But if Helen were the
victim of pure happenstance, what then was one to do? Nothing, of
course. Nothing at all.

The maid who answered the
door at the Bellavance house told her Mr. Stevenson and Mr.
Bellavance were in the front parlor. Would she like to join them?

“No, I don’t
think so. I’ll go on upstairs.” She walked slowly up the
stairway, still deep in her thoughts. She had such inner certainty
that Helen had been killed. The feeling was so strong, it was hard to
believe it was nothing more than the product of self-delusion, but
perhaps that’s all it was.

She knocked quietly at the
door to Joe’s room, turned the knob, and pushed it open. As
usual, the nurse was knitting her black wool. And the Widow
Bellavance was there too, standing on the other side of the room,
holding a large rectangular object. It was the Landseer Stag, Sophie
realized. The old woman must have taken the engraving off the wall to
look at it more closely.

“Emile!” the
old woman gasped, looking up at Sophie.

Sophie looked at her in
puzzlement. What was she talking about? She’d said exactly the
same thing yesterday when Sophie had been hurrying to the Wilsons’
and come across her downstairs.

“Emile,” the
old woman said again, and then the surprised expression in her face
turned to a hatred so intense, Sophie was stunned by its savagery.
“Tu mens, Emile. You are a liar. You think I will not see how
it is as Fort Martin, and so you never tell the truth, never, never.
And I am your wife. Always you try to hide things from me, and you
think you have success, but you are wrong, Emile. I see what is
happening, I see with my own eyes, just as I see you now, hiding in
the clothes of a woman.”

Suddenly the old woman
raised the picture she was holding high over her head, and she
brought it down on the edge of the oak washstand. The frame broke
apart, and the glass broke, falling to the floor in pieces. The old
woman bent over, picked up a foot-long shard and advanced toward
Sophie, the sharp point of the fragment pointed at her. The end of
the shard was squared off, but the edges of it cut into the old
woman’s hand, and Sophie could see blood. It began to drip on
the floor, but the widow seemed unaware of it.

“Madame Bellavance,
please,” Sophie said. “You must put down the glass.”

“The old woman made a
thrusting gesture with the shard. It was inches from Sophie’s
breast. The nurse at Joe’s bedside began to weep. Sophie could
hear her, and she could sense there was someone behind her in the
hallway now, probably James and Paul. They must have heard the noise.
But how could they help her? Sophie looked into the old woman’s
eyes, and what she saw there told her the old woman would not
hesitate to plunge the glass into her heart. She was maddened with
age and hatred, walled up inside some fantasy of the past.

“Madame Bellavance, I
am not Emile. I am Sophie Dymond, here visiting.”

“Menteur! You to lie
to me.”

“I’m Joe
Martin’s granddaughter. You know Joe.” Sophie glanced
over at the bed and what she saw made her forget the Widow
Bellavance. Joe’s eyes were open, looking at them. And then he
was struggling to sit up, light fighting cloudiness in his eyes, his
lips moving as if he were struggling to speak. Then suddenly he fell
sideways. The nurse barely caught him, and his body hung over the
edge of the bed. “Oh, my God!” Sophie cried out.

Her exclamation caused the
widow to glance at the bed, and when she did, a hand closed around
her wrist. Paul’s hand. He and James had come from behind
Sophie, and Paul gently took the glass shard away from his mother.
“You’ll hurt yourself,” she said softly.

“Yes, Jean-Paul.”
As she gave up her weapon, all the fire went out of her. She seemed
uninterested in her wounds, uninterested in Sophie or in anything as
Paul led her from the room.

Sophie moved to Joe’s
bedside. The nurse had got him back onto the bed, and she had her ear
close to his mouth, listening for breath. “Is he alive? Is he
breathing?” Sophie asked.

The nurse straightened,
nodded. She was still weeping. “But it’s not strong.
Someone better get the doctor.” She began to cry harder,
whether from fright or sorrow wasn’t clear.

“I’ll go,”
James said. He left the room, and only Sophie and the nurse remained
with Joe.

There was a sound from the
bed, a noise so faint Sophie barely heard it, like a very small
animal choking. The nurse, who’d been drying her eyes, quickly
moved Joe’s head, then put her ear next to his mouth again. She
looked frightened. “I hope the doctor’s not gone out
somewhere.” Tears started down her cheeks again.

“Please stop crying,”
Sophie said.

“I’m sorry,
ma’am. It was just seein’ that old woman come after you
scared me so. I can’t make myself stop crying.”

“Of course you can.
Stop, please.”

The crying ceased, and they
waited, watching the man in the bed. Sophie willed him to breathe,
willed his lungs to fill with air. Breathe, Joe, breathe. And the
chest rose. It was barely perceptible, but it rose and fell, and
then, after what seemed a very long time, it rose and fell again, so
little, but it was life.

“Should you sit down,
ma’am?” Sophie saw the nurse was looking at her worriedly
now, and she realized she was doing with Joe what she had done with
Philip, willing him to live, demanding with all her force that he not
die. And she did it even though she knew it would not work, had had
it proved to her it would have no effect.

She forced herself to sit
down, tried to relax, let her glance go around the room. There was
blood on the floor near the doorway, the widow’s blood,
darkening now as it dried. A piece of broken picture frame lay near
the washstand amid pieces of scattered glass which reflected the
late-morning light. The engraving of the stag was leaning against the
washstand, about half the frame still intact. On one of the sides
where the frame had broken away, something was sticking out from
behind the engraving, a yellowed corner of heavy paper with a drawing
on it. It was a face, Sophie saw, and thought only a portion of it
was visible, there was something hauntingly familiar about it. She
knew that person, she thought, getting up and crossing the room. Just
from the little she could see of the drawing, she was certain she
did.

She reached down and pulled
it out from behind the engraving. It was a man, a handsome man with
wide cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and a full, sensuous mouth. And all
at once Sophie understood so much and yet so little. Because even
though the face in the picture was a man’s, it was also,
somehow, hers. The softness was gone, and most of the delicacy, but
it was she in the picture, herself she was looking at, a male version
of herself.

Even before she looked at
the back of the picture, she knew who it was, and when she turned the
drawing over, it was only for confirmation. On the back was written,
“Emile Bellavance, 1849.” It was a picture of Paul’s
father.

She also knew why she
looked like him. So instinctively certain was she of it, she didn’t
even pursue the thought immediately, but instead let her mind go off
on a tangent. Esther will be pleased to know about this picture, she
thought, remembering how the girl had asked for one, how Paul had so
abruptly denied he had one.

And then she considered
herself, how she had always believed she looked like her grandmother,
believed the high cheekbone were the Shoshone in her, but here were
her bones in this man’s face, his wide-set eyes looking out
from this picture, her full lips caught in a grim expression. Emile’s
hair didn’t look as heavy as her own, perhaps that she owed her
grandmother.

James came through the
doorway with the doctor, a young man, tall, thin, with cadaverous
hollows in his cheeks. He nodded curtly to Sophie, then looked in
disgust at the nurse, who had started to cry again. “Get the
women out of here,” the doctor said to James. “Let me
have a few minutes with the patient alone.”

The nurse fled the room.
Sophie saw James look at her, saw him understand she would be angry,
and she was, but she wouldn’t do anything about it now. As she
left the room with James, she wondered if this were the same doctor
who had tended Helen when she came to childbed, the doctor who’d
been so protective of her modesty, so embarrassed by her pain and her
blood.

She didn’t ask. She
descended the stairs with James in silence, Emile Bellavance’s
portrait in her hand. Paul was in the front parlor when they entered.
A liquor bottle was open on the table, and he had a glass of
amber-colored liquid in his hand. “What’d the doc have to
say, James? Here, I’ll get you a drink.”

“I’ll get it.
He didn’t say much of anything yet. Wanted a few minutes to
examine Joe.”

James had his back turned
when Paul’s eyes met Sophie’s. Slowly she raised her arm
toward him, holding the picture. “I understand now, Paul, why
your mother thought I was Emile.”

He kept his eyes on hers,
reached out for the thick, yellowed paper. He glanced down at it
quickly then laid it aside as though it were unimportant. “Yes,
this old picture…” He broke off when he saw the way she
looked at him.

“The likeness is
quite close, isn’t it?” Sophie asked. “Your mother
saw that right away. Or saw something in my face that made her
uncomfortable. She’s been troubled since I arrived, though I’m
not certain she pinpointed what bothered her until she saw me in
man’s clothes yesterday. She knew then. Saw how much I look
like Emile, thought I was Emile, in fact. But how could I resemble
him so much? We’re not supposed to be related, Emile and I? How
could it be?”