The Geometry of Sisters (12 page)

So Travis and I hugged the banks, paddling west. I kept looking at the magic lighthouse, wondering how far away it was, imagining that
this
year Carrie and I would go out there. She was sixteen, old enough to take me on our own. My brother and I could smell the bacon frying on shore, Mom cooking breakfast for everyone. But paddling along, Travis and I got distracted by this cool thing: a stream heading into the woods just around the bend, a beaver dam across the stream, and a big fallen tree that made a bridge we could walk on.

We missed breakfast.

We beached the canoe around that bend, crossed the tree bridge, watched the beavers nibble logs into pencil points. It was so cool, we just couldn't stop watching. Finally, when we got home, we ran to tell everyone what we'd seen.

But something was wrong. Carrie was quiet, and our parents weren't speaking. The bacon and eggs were just sitting there on the picnic table, flies landing, as gross as you can imagine. Mom and Dad fighting had gotten to be kind of common, and each time it felt like a knife in my heart.

What bothered me most this time was Carrie. She looked pale.

She was clutching her stomach, as if she'd eaten something that was making her sick. And tears were rolling down her cheeks—not in a sobbing, gulping way, but in a scary, silent way. I almost cried just to see her face.

“What's wrong?” I asked, scared.

“They fight because of me,” she said. “I just figured it out.”

“No way,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, gesturing toward the cabin. “Dad looks as if he can't stand me.”

“He loves you. And they
don't
fight because of you,” I insisted, positive. Kids always think it's their fault when parents argue. And maybe it sometimes is—if you fail a test, or punch your brother, or stuff your face with the last piece of chocolate cake. But Carrie was perfect. That was the truth, and we all knew it and loved her for it. “It's not because of you. You're the most wonderful girl in the world, and they know it. We all do.”

“What if I'm not?” she asked.

The question sort of shocked me. It was like being asked “What if two wasn't a prime number?” She looked so disturbed, for a minute I thought she was going to throw up.

I stood beside her, waited to see if she was okay. I wanted to put my hand on the back of her head, the way our mother always did when we got sick, and I wanted her to reassure me, tell me she was exaggerating everything. She gave me a look, letting me know she was all right.

“Come on, Beck. Let's go out on the lake,” she said.

“In the canoe? Do you feel well enough?”

“Yes. Let's go to the lighthouse!”

We ran down to the lake's bank, grabbed the canoe from under the bushes, and started to push it out. Overhead the sky was gauzy blue, covering us like a summer-weight blanket.

Our father walked over. He passed me as if I weren't there.

“Carrie?” he said.

Instantly tears filled her eyes.

“Sweetheart, let's go out on the lake,” he said. Then, looking at me, he smiled, gave me a big hug. “Be a sport, Beck? Let me take your sister for a spin in the canoe?”

I shrugged, disappointed.

“Carrie, okay?” he asked.

She nodded, a little hesitantly. Why would she be reluctant about going in the canoe with our father?

“I love you, honey,” he said to her, as if he'd never meant anything more. He said that to all of us, all the time. But something in his voice and eyes, and the way he said it right then, and in the way Carrie whispered back to him “I heard you fighting,” scared me.

Sitting on the bank, I watched them paddle out. And I watched until they were just tiny specks getting smaller and smaller. They headed toward the lighthouse. Then the air grew still, and I heard low rumbling in the west. And I heard their voices rising, my father's and Carrie's—were they arguing? No, they never fought; that was thunder, it had to be. I couldn't let myself think otherwise, but now, honestly, I doubt myself. Still, clouds came in all of a sudden. The lighthouse was gone. It disappeared, and so did they.

Mom and Travis called me to the cabin, made me take shelter. We stood by the window, the three of us, waiting. I was stiff, frozen. I wanted to ask my mother if she'd heard them, had that been them yelling?

The storm blew up so fast—driving rain, leaves flipping over so their silvery undersides showed. A flock of geese flew in a V, right out of the clouds from the far side of the lake, over the water, landed right in front of us, and the waves were so big, the birds were hidden by their crests. The sky turned muddy, a terrible brown. The wind roared, blowing rain sideways.

Suddenly the rain tapered off; the wind died down, and as the
last breeze pushed the clouds away, the sky turned bright blue. Now it was the clearest day you've ever seen. No yelling, no fighting, no voices drifting across the water. The only sounds were rain dripping from the leaves, birds singing in the trees, the gentle lap, lap, lap of small rippling lake waves.

We waited for them to come back, but they didn't. Cops came by in a patrol boat, to make sure we were okay, and my mother told them about my father and Carrie. They went straight out.

They found the canoe floating overturned, in the middle of the lake, on the other side of the island from where the lighthouse stood, out of sight from where we were waiting and watching. Carrie had made it to the island, crawled up toward the lighthouse, half-frozen, in such shock she couldn't talk. My father wasn't with her.

Things happened fast after that. They wrapped Carrie in blankets, radioed for the ambulance. My mother went nuts. She was crying for my father, all over Carrie the minute she hit dry land, hugging her, asking her about Dad, trying to figure out what happened. Carrie couldn't speak. The ambulance guy said she was in shock, and my mother climbed in to take her to the hospital. Carrie's skin was blue. I'm not even kidding.

My father's body was recovered later that day, over by the beaver dam that Travis and I had found. His T-shirt got snagged on the fallen-tree bridge my brother and I had crossed. That's where the searchers found him. Travis and I stood on shore, watching them bring him back. We stayed, to be there when they brought him onto land. We did that for him.

We thought Carrie was being cared for at the hospital. It gave us some comfort, thinking that she would be okay. We would all be together later that night, mourning Dad. Carrie could tell us what happened. We could know his last moments, help Carrie deal with it. That's how our family did things.

Carrie ran away. My mother saw them take her into an exam room,
right there in the ER. How much safer can you get than an ER? My mother was showing the receptionist her insurance card, looking at paperwork, trying to get someone to call the cops and find out what was going on at the lake, and in those ten minutes, Carrie disappeared. Off the gurney, back into her wet clothes, out the door.

No one knows why. Of course I have my theories.

One, the most obvious, is that she was pregnant. All that holding her stomach, feeling sick, crying. Justin, that loser, had gotten her pregnant. And Carrie, our perfect girl (and what an idiot I feel like for actually saying it to her, that very day) couldn't take the shame.

Still, that doesn't completely ring true to me. Because how bad, in this day and age, is getting pregnant, even at sixteen? I'm not saying everyone does it, but it's not exactly unheard of. My mother would have been fine about it. And I know Travis and I would have too. So it must be something else.

That's why it's wrong to be here in Newport. Because once Carrie is on her own with her baby for a while, and gets tired of hiding, how will she find us? I know my mother left all these messages, and has the detective guy looking, but why hasn't any of it worked yet? I left a note at home. Not in the house, because the new owners would be there, and Carrie wouldn't be welcome. But out back, in the potting shed behind the garage, where we used to play. That was our place, and we'd put big flowerpots upside down and use them for seats.

I left Carrie a note there, under one of the flowerpots. She'd look, if ever she returned to our house in Columbus. And she will, I know.

We are sisters forever. Nothing can ever take that away. It's what we are, as certain as any prime number. We are each other's blood, we are each other's life.

Carrie is coming back to me. She has to.

Maura noticed the tension between Travis and Beck, and she instantly knew: Beck was stealing again. She felt it in the way Travis watched her, with cool, worried eyes. And she saw it now in Beck's defensiveness, the way her shoulders hunched up to her ears, the scowl on her face as she bent over her schoolbook at the kitchen table.

“Hi, honey,” she said, coming in one afternoon after classes.

“Hi,” Beck said without looking up.

“Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” Beck said.

“Where's your brother?”

“I don't know. Football practice.”

Good. Maura sat down across from Beck. Travis was attentive and involved, but Maura didn't want to bring this up in front of him.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?”

“Mom, I'm studying.”

“I know. But stop for a minute, okay?”

Beck lowered her pencil. She took her time looking up, the tops of her ears fiery red.

“Have you been having trouble?” Maura asked.

Beck shook her head. Then she twirled her hair. Then she bit her lip.

“I think it's time to call Dr. Mallory. She said you could have phone sessions if you want. Or she'd refer us to a therapist here in Newport.”

“No!” Beck said. “I'm doing fine here, making friends. I don't want anyone to know about me!”

“No one will know.”

“They found out back home. ‘She’s crazy, she steals, she goes to a shrink.' They'll see me going to the office, those little one-hour disappearing
acts I made all last year, and everyone wondered where I was, and then they found out, and it's not like I had something other kids have, like ADD or ADHD or whatever. It's bad enough being how I am, but I don't want to be known for it, and teased for it.”

“I love how you are,” Maura said.

“You love that I steal?”

“Are you doing that again?” Maura asked.

Beck's eyes flooded. “Behaviors,” they were called: stealing, lying, acting out. They stemmed from grief, depression, stubborn anger. Maura reached for her hand, and Beck grabbed it. They sat there together, not speaking.

Maura imagined a wise mother. Someone who would cock her head, smile sadly, say
I want to be able to trust you again; you have to earn people's trust
. Outside, the breeze blew, and golden leaves floated from the trees down to the ground. The wise mother would gesture, say something about seasons changing, the passage of time.
We don't steal. People die, people run away, but still we don't steal
.

“It sucks,” Beck said.

“It does,” Maura said.

They kept holding hands, even though there wasn't anything more to say.

Providence was made up of worlds. College Hill, home of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, campuses and gracious old houses; Federal Hill, the heart of Rhode Island's Little Italy; Fox Point, where the Portuguese fishermen lived.

Carrie lived on Fox Point, in a pink rooming house filled with Azoreans and Cape Verdeans. She'd moved there from Hawthorne House, a haven for girls like her. She had come east over a year ago, traveled far away from her family in Ohio; in a strange way, she'd traveled to Rhode Island to get closer to them.

Sometimes she thought of things she could have done differently. She could have swum stronger, tried harder to stay with her father. She could have lied when he'd asked her about being pregnant, avoided the fight. Or she could have not gotten pregnant in the first place. She'd loved Justin, but getting pregnant was an accident. And somehow she hadn't realized how that fact would destroy her family.

She loved Gracie, more than anything. She was overwhelmed with huge questions—if she hadn't gotten pregnant, hadn't had that fight with her father, maybe he would still be alive. But then she wouldn't have Gracie, right? Was everything in this world so confusing?