The Silent Sister (10 page)

I moved to the floor in front of the TV, trying to get even closer to my sister, my throat so tight it ached. What incredible courage she had had to be able to stand on that huge stage in front of … I couldn't see the audience, but I imagined there were hundreds of people seated in the auditorium. Danny would not have been born yet, and I wondered if it would temper his envy of her to see her at such a tender age and realize the pressure she must have been under during her entire short life.

The tape was a little more than an hour long, and I watched every second of it, mesmerized. It contained bits and pieces of different recitals and concerts. In a couple of segments, Lisa performed with other children, although it was obvious she was the youngest, the tiniest of them all. In one piece, she was the only child in a sea of adult violinists. That segment hurt me the most to watch. Although she played with confidence and skill, I thought I could see the vulnerability in her. The tender innocence that any child of seven would have. How hard had she been pushed? I wondered if she was truly doing what she'd wanted to be doing. She'd never been allowed to have a real childhood.

“I'm so sorry,” I whispered, reaching forward to touch the screen with my fingertips.

When the tape ended, I sat still for a moment before ejecting it and inserting the second. “Rome Music Festival, June 1987” the label read. Lisa would have been fourteen in 1987. This tape was much clearer, with a professional quality to it. It opened in what looked like the gate of an airport. A group of energetic teens appeared to have taken over the seating area, some of them standing, others sitting, all of them laughing and talking. I searched the faces for my sister. A few frowning adults sat in nearby seats, clearly not amused at finding themselves surrounded by a bunch of rowdy teenagers, probably Lisa's fellow music students. They were all about the age of the kids I counseled, thirty or forty of them, loud and goofing around while crammed into the waiting area. The scene, full of adolescent hormones and blossoming egos, would have been comical if I hadn't been so intent on finding Lisa in the crowd.

A brown-haired man appeared on the screen. He held his right arm in the air, and as if he'd cast a spell over them, the kids stopped what they were doing and looked in his direction. He was tall and slender, with a thin angular face that was just shy of handsome. He gave a slight nod, and the kids pulled their instruments from cases I'd barely noticed till that moment. They began to play. Violins. Violas. Cellos. As usual, I had no idea what music they were playing but it was a happy, bouncy melody that quickly had the sour-faced spectators not only smiling, but clapping.

I finally spotted Lisa. She stood to the side, nearly out of the camera's view. I recognized the boy next to her from the photographs in my father's box. Matty, with the curly dark hair. When that piece was over, the conductor or teacher, or whatever he was, motioned to Lisa and she moved forward. He lifted his baton, and she began to play a solo. She looked very much like a feminine version of Danny. She was so pretty. There was a fragility to her features, but it was clear that when it came to her violin, there was nothing fragile about her. She was in complete command. I knew she'd been good—I knew she'd been a prodigy—but I found her incredible talent heartbreaking. Somehow it had cost her. It had cost her everything.

I fast-forwarded through the tape and saw the same group of kids behaving like idiots at the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps and in front of the Colosseum. My sister and Matty were always a little off to the side, talking together. Sometimes laughing. Not quite part of the crowd. Then the group performed with hundreds of other young musicians in front of an audience in an enormous, ancient-looking building with ceilings so high they weren't on the TV screen, and pillars as big around as the living room I was sitting in. At one point, Lisa stepped forward from the rest of the group as she had in the airport. Dressed in white, she looked like an ethereal angel as she raised her violin and began to play. To the far right of the screen, I saw the tall conductor again, and even though there was quite a distance between him and Lisa, it was as though a fine thread ran from his white baton to her violin, coaxing every note from the instrument. This music I knew: Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor. My father listened to it all the time. The familiar piece used to drift through the rooms of our house until I was numbed by it, but I was anything but numb now, hearing Lisa play it. I swallowed hard, wanting both to turn off the tape and to play it over and over again.

When the camera closed in tight on Lisa's face, I leaned forward and saw the long fair lashes above her closed eyes, the delicate crease between her eyebrows, as if the music pained her. I wished so much that Danny was watching the tape with me. That I had someone to share the emotions with.

I made it through the first movement of the concerto before I needed to turn off the tape. I sat in front of the TV, crying until I could cry no more, overwhelmed with grief for the sister I'd never gotten to know. It had only been a couple of hours since I'd started watching the tapes, but it may as well have been a month for how changed I felt. Even though I'd never had the chance to know her, she'd been such an influence on my life and I was full of love for her. Yet I realized now that I'd made her up. I'd had to imagine what she'd been like because I had no way of knowing. Now suddenly, I'd seen her face. I saw how hard she worked. She'd been just a kid. Practically a baby in that first tape and a young and hopeful teenager in the second. All anyone would be able to see as they watched her perform was the skill and perfection; no one could see the toll her career was taking on her heart and soul.

What was it that caused her to break apart? That conductor—had he demanded perfection of her? Had my parents? Had the fame been too much for her? I ran my fingers through my hair, my tears falling all over again. I wished I could hug her! Hold her tight. I wished I could tell her she didn't need to be perfect; she only needed to be Lisa. I wanted to reach inside those tapes and tell that delicate young angel to hold on.
Someday,
I would promise her,
it will be all right
.

 

11.

“You'll be shocked what people will buy at an estate sale,” Jeannie said as we poked through the items in my mother's china cabinet in the dining room. In my hand, I held an old green bowl that had clearly been broken in two and glued back together “Christine will want you to leave everything just as it is.”

“Even broken dishes?” I asked, holding the bowl so she could see the crack.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Artists use them to make jewelry and all sorts of things you can't imagine. So we want to leave everything in place. You don't need those boxes.” She pointed to the three empty boxes I'd found in the basement. My plan had been to fill them with things to donate, but Jeannie had a different idea. “I do want to get a closer look at the collections and figure out what sort of appraisers we need to call,” she said. “If there are any things you want to keep—items with sentimental value, for example—just set them aside. We can make a place for them in your father's upstairs office. For now, you can clean out those cabinets in the living room where he kept all his paperwork.” She took the green bowl from my hand and put it back in the china cabinet. “Let's go take a look in there,” she said, and I followed her into the living room. She stood in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, and both of us faced the ten built-in cabinets that ran the entire length of the living room beneath the windows. “I know he would just stuff insurance forms and all sort of things in there that can probably just be shredded. That can be your job.”

“All right.” I dreaded even opening those cabinets. I'd seen how Daddy crammed papers into them with as little care as if he was tossing them in the trash.

“Look at those hydrangeas!” Jeannie took a step toward the windows that overlooked the side yard. “How your father loved them,” she said. “I wish he could have had one more summer. He was looking forward to it. His favorite season.”

I hadn't known that about my father and it irked me that she did. But I was determined to be nice to her today. I really needed her help.

“What the hell…?” She suddenly noticed that the sliding glass doors were missing from the pipe collection. “Where's the glass?”

I thought of making something up, but decided to tell her the truth. “Danny was over the other night and he got upset about something and threw a beer bottle at them,” I said.

“That's terrible!” she said. “Your father always insisted Danny wasn't violent.”

“He's not.” I remembered Danny saying he'd put on his PTSD act for Jeannie, whatever that meant. “He was just angry. He'd never hurt a person.”

“Are you very close to him?”

“I was when we were young. He was more withdrawn as he got older and we didn't talk as much. He became more like my father, I guess. Very introverted.” I missed the Danny I'd grown up with.

“I don't think of your father as all that introverted,” Jeannie said.

I worked hard to produce a smile. I was sick of her thinking she knew Daddy so much better than I did. “I guess we experienced him differently,” I said.

“Oh, well.” She smiled. “We both know he was a good man, and that's what counts.”

I nodded. I would let it go at that.

Jeannie walked over to the pipes and lifted one of them from its ledge in the display case. “I've always been drawn to this one,” she said. The barrel of the pipe was carved in the shape of a bird's head, complete with ruffled feathers and green beads for eyes. I noticed a serious tremor in her hands as she held the pipe. Was she nervous or ill? Whatever the cause, seeing that small weakness in her made me feel slightly sympathetic toward her. You never knew what demons people were dealing with.

“Would you like to have it?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “Oh, no,” she said. “I wouldn't know what to do with it. I have to say, though, that I still can't get over Frank leaving this collection to the Kyles.”

“Well, I guess they've helped him a lot with the park, and they—”

She made a sound of disgust. “I'll tell you something,” she said. “I don't like to gossip, but you should know why this makes no sense to me. Tom Kyle was beholden to your father, not the other way around.”

“What do you mean?”

Jeannie carefully replaced the pipe in the cabinet. “Your father was his supervisor back when they worked for the Marshals Service,” she said. “Tom had an affair with a client he was supposed to be protecting and Frank found out about it. He should have canned Tom, but he didn't. He even helped him cover it up. Tom owed him his job and probably his marriage. So why would your father—”

“He's been giving Tom checks for five hundred dollars every month, too,” I said.

Jeannie stared at me, and I saw a blaze starting in her eyes. “You're joking.”

I shook my head.

“He could have given that money to me, if he was so hot to part with it,” she said bitterly. “I'm underwater on my mortgage, and I thought that after a six-year relationship, he—” She shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “It is what it is.”

Now I understood her lukewarm reaction to my father leaving her only the piano and ten thousand dollars. And I thought of the hundred thousand that would soon be in my own bank account.

“I'm sorry, Jeannie,” I said. “How can I help? He left me more than I need right now, and—”

She bent over and put her hand on mine. “Don't even think about it, honey,” she said, her features softening. “I'm sorry to lose my composure like that, and I'm fine. Truly. I just wish I understood why Tom and Verniece rated so high in his opinion.”

“Do you know Verniece well?” I asked.

“Not all that well. They pretty much keep to themselves out there.”

“She told me I was adopted.”

Jeannie's blue eyes flew open even wider than usual.
“What?”
she said. “That's crazy.”

Had the color left her face or was I imagining it? “She says my mother told her I was.”

“She didn't even know your mother,” Jeannie scoffed as she set the pipe back on its ledge again, fingers shivering. “Not really.”

I hesitated before I spoke again. “Well, she admitted that,” I said, “but according to Verniece, she was upset over losing a baby and my mother suggested that she wasn't too old to adopt. She said she and Daddy adopted me, and that's what encouraged Verniece and Tom to adopt a little boy.”

“Ludicrous,” Jeannie said. “Just utterly ludicrous. Think about it,” she said. “Even if it were true, your mother wouldn't tell a near stranger, for heaven's sake. You know what a private person she was.”

“Actually, I don't know that,” I said. “I only know what she was like with me, not what she was—”

“Listen to me, Riley. I was her dearest, oldest friend and she still wouldn't tell me half the things that were going on with her. So the idea of her telling a woman she barely knew something that intimate is just plain silly.”

“I guess.” I felt only slightly relieved, especially with Jeannie admitting that my mother didn't tell her everything. Maybe my mother'd had a weak moment, touched by Verniece's pain, knowing she could say something to relieve it. Verniece was so sweet. I could understand how she might have inspired my mother to confide in her.

“Enough of that nonsense,” Jeannie said. She picked up a notepad from the piano bench where she'd set it when she first arrived at the house. “I'm going to walk through the house and make a list of what needs to be done, starting with the collections upstairs. I can't wait for you to meet Christine,” she added. “You're going to love her and vice versa. She really knows the value of things and ways to publicize a successful estate sale.”