The Sisters (26 page)

Such joyous upheavals—a new son-in-law, Daisy expecting, and Nick beginning to trust love at last—but at times Mabel still felt like her house had been picked up, shaken, and set back down again, nothing really broken this time but a few things fractured, everything out of order.

Perhaps this was one of the reasons, one of so many, why she wanted to fill as much of her time as she could with her soldiers. In this work, there was order and purpose—and it was important work, she believed, even if she couldn’t say just how. When Daisy had held her hands and said, “Why? Why do you want to do this?” Mabel could only think of something her mother had said long ago, about Jim Butcher’s time in France: “Terrible things he saw over there. Things nobody should ever see. Having to do things nobody should ever have to do.”

She showed Daisy some photographs she’d clipped from newspapers and magazines—some of villages turned to ash; some of weak, blindfolded prisoners, of skeletally thin Vietnamese lying dead; others of American soldiers wet, muddy, exhausted, bleeding—and she tried to explain the question she was struggling to answer for herself: Were such terrible things—terrible things like killing, like having no choice but to kill—carved like ghostly scars into the face, perhaps only to be seen in those fleeting instants between the expressions one prepared for the world? In those instants only the camera could catch, Mabel wanted to find the truth about who those boys were before Vietnam—and after, the truth of who they had become.

Mabel sat down at the table and opened the magazine again. No devastated villages this time, but plenty of broken young men, overcome by shelling and rifle fire, doing their best to carry their wounded brethren to safety, patch them up, and keep them alive until help dropped from the sky.

Long ago, a month, maybe two, after Daisy had somehow gotten her home from Juniper, Mabel surfaced from a tranquilizer haze to remember Wallace’s grave and to gasp at the pain of her exploded heart. Nick was there, and he rose from the chair where he’d been reading to kneel by the bed and stroke her hair. She cried for a long time—it was spring and the sun was still up when she woke, but it was dark before she could hear anything her friend said to her.

“I’ll take you back, Belle—to Juniper—if you want to go.” And then Nick told her that he’d gone there himself, on his own. Daisy had told him everything she knew, and so, armed with names and dates, he’d borrowed a car and gone in search of Bertie.

What he found was a dead village. Though a few people still picked through the rubble, no one lived in Juniper anymore, and no one, Nick was told, ever planned to live there again. The young families had left first, dispersing to neighboring towns where the parents could get their children back into school. Soon, the older ones followed, and people who had lived for generations in Juniper put down new roots in Wilton, Paint Rock, and Tucker’s Creek. So Nick had gone to these places, too, asking everyone he could find if they remembered a couple of girls named Fischer or a boy called Wallace Hansford.

“There is something—” Nick said, and Mabel held her breath while he told her he’d spoken to an old friend of Wallace’s—Henry Layman. “He said Wallace asked him to give Bertie a letter, and so he went to look for her at the church. He said she seemed upset, and she wouldn’t wait for him when he called to her—just ran out the door. He saw her a few days later, at the funeral—he said your stepfather hanged himself. By then, he told me, it was all over town about how you and Wallace had run off together. He said he figured all that was in the letter was some kind of good-bye or explanation and that giving it to Bertie after all she’d been through would be like rubbing salt in a sore, so he threw it away. He never saw her again after that.”

Mabel shook violently and she clenched Nick’s hands until her knuckles were white.

“It’s possible,” Nick said, “really—I think it’s possible that there’s somebody around there who knows where she is, or at least where she was headed when she left. When you’re stronger, I can take you back there—me and Daisy—and we’ll keep looking, together.”

“No.” The small word croaked from Mabel’s throat. “No. No.” Tears burned like acid on her cheeks. “It wouldn’t be right.”

She told Nick about the letters she and Wallace had sent, about the letters she had sent for years after Wallace had gone, and about the one that had come back to her in Chicago—
Deceased.
“I think,” Mabel said, “I think—but I don’t know—that Bertie wrote that herself.” She knew then, finally knew it as a truth she still wanted to deny: After what she had done, she had no right to tread whatever new ground Bertie might have cleared for herself, no right to cause her to grieve Wallace anew, and no right to stand before her sister and torture her with a plea to forgive.

Mabel slid her hand across the open page of
Life
and looked at the broken men lying prostrate in a watery field of cane. Some damage could never be undone. One could only try to stand, take another’s arm, and stagger on.

“Mama! Mama, come quick!”

She leapt up at Daisy’s cry and ran toward the front room. “What is it? Honey! Are you hurt?”

Daisy was leaning on Barry, her arms wrapped around his neck, and she was dragging him around in a clumsy little dance. Barry looked over Daisy’s shoulder at Mabel, his face overspread with jubilation.

“Mama!” Daisy broke from the dance and held her hand out for Mabel. “Give me your hand! Give me your hand!” She pressed Mabel’s palm into her small round belly. “It moved. The baby moved! Press here. Harder. Can you feel it?”

Mabel pressed, trying to hold still while Daisy laughed and kissed her, while Barry laughed and kissed her, trying in spite of her own laughter to hold her palm firm and steady, waiting for the next tremor.

F
OURTEEN

Prisoner

March 1973

Newman, Indiana

GRACE

I
N THE ATTIC, ON A
windy day, Grace always imagined the house might fall. The cold air sliced through the vents, sucking at the roof, and the windowpanes jiggled in their frames. Particular as he was about keeping up with repairs, Grandpa never seemed to notice that only specks of paint remained on the strips of wood dividing the glass. Even last spring when he had laid blankets of pink fiberglass between the rafters and pounded in planks for a floor to give them more room to stack boxes of cast-off toys and clothes, he’d left the windows alone. Grace was glad. Except for in summer, when it was too hot to breathe, the attic was her favorite place, and the windows, hazy with years of grime, made it seem abandoned, more hers for the claiming.

In spite of the grime and frost, the windows gave her a good view of the snow, pushed by the wind into powdery hills. Hour by hour since early morning, whenever Grandma said into the telephone how in all her born days she’d never seen a March snow like this, her estimate of how much had fallen had grown by an inch or two, despite the snowfall’s having ended before dawn. It was hard to tell how deep the snow would have been if it had lain flat and still, but from the attic, Grace could see what she could not see: the washtub Grandma kept turned over beside the grape arbor, just in case she had to get the clothes off the line in a hurry—gone; the maple tree, twenty-nine inches high when Grandpa planted it for her tenth birthday last May—buried; the green-painted swing set—the crosspiece of each A-frame seeming to sit on the snow, like a frozen snake.

She would like to put on her warmest clothes and go outside to play, maybe tunnel out a little cave where she could sit for a while all alone in the quiet, but Grandma would say, “You’ll catch your death and the ambulance won’t be able to get to us through this mess.” Grandma would tell Grace she might fall, that the snow might collapse on top of her. “And how would I ever get you out—saying I could even find you?”

When it was warned the snow might fall for days, Grandpa had packed up the car and driven to Crother’s Mill to stay with other men at Bill Junior’s. When he called to say he’d made it, he said the road was so slick it had taken him almost two hours to drive the eight miles. Mother’s boss, Patrick, had picked her up yesterday morning in his jeep, having arranged to give her a room at the Galloway Inn so the two of them could trade off in twelve-hour shifts at the reception desk. Grace had thought about calling Mother at the motel to ask if she could go outside, but she knew Mother would snap that she was busy, and Grandma would be mad that Grace had gone behind her. The first thing Lynn did when she heard about the snow was to get on the phone and talk her friend Elsie Myers into getting her parents to let Lynn stay with them while school was canceled. That had made Grandma mad, too, when she found out about it, but before anybody in the house knew the plan, Lynn had called Patrick to ask him to drop her off at Elsie’s on the way to the motel. When Patrick got there, he picked up Mother’s suitcase and said to Lynn, “All set, Lynn-dee-Lou?” Mother’s face turned red and her mouth went tight, and so did Grandma’s—but neither of them would speak out in front of company, which Lynn well knew.

Except for not being allowed to enjoy the snow, Grace didn’t mind being at home just with Grandma. She liked the peace of having the bedroom to herself, instead of having to share with Mother and Lynn, and if she asked nicely, like she had this afternoon, she could probably get Grandma’s permission to come up to the attic every day or two.

“I want to look for some old coloring books and crayons,” she’d said, “in case the TV goes out. Maybe some puzzles.”

“Aren’t you a little old for that?” Grandma pulled a saucepan from the cabinet beside the stove and set it on the counter.

“I’m tired of reading,” Grace said. “Lynn took all the good books with her.”

“All right, then.” Grandma spooned cocoa powder and sugar into the pan. “Reach me the milk, Grace,” she said. “Don’t stay too long and get yourself frozen. Look in the boxes alongside the chimney. And careful not to bang your head.”

She would get the coloring books and puzzles, but the real reason Grace had come to the attic was to find a safe place for her POW bracelet. For the last week, ever since she and Lynn had watched their POWs getting off the plane that had brought them from Hanoi, Lynn had been after her to send her bracelet back.

“I’m sending mine,” Lynn said, and a moment after the reporter identified the slim, straight figure coming down the roll-up stairs as Lt. Col. Conrad John Lewis, just promoted to colonel, Lynn had her bracelet off. “I’m getting an MIA next.”

A few minutes later, Capt. Mark P. Stevens, now Major Stevens, stepped off the plane, smiling and waving. The reporter said the major had gotten home just in time to celebrate his thirty-fourth birthday. Grace wished she could be there—wherever there would be for him—to hug him after he blew out the candles. She would have seen to it that his cake was simple and plain, no pastel scallops and icing roses.

“That’s it!” said Lynn, grabbing at Grace’s bracelet. “Hand it over and I’ll mail it.”

“No.”

“That’s the way it works.” Lynn rolled her eyes. “You can write a letter if you want, but the bracelets are supposed to go back to the men to let them know we remembered them.”

Grace pulled her wrist to her chest and cradled the bracelet with her other hand. For two years she had worn it, never taking it off—even facing up to her teachers, who wanted her to leave it in her desk at recess, explaining to them how she had to wear it always, like a wedding ring, at least until she knew her captain was safe. Well, now he was safe, and Grace felt the joy of that far down in her belly, but she had come to love Capt. Mark P. Stevens, USAF, 9-9-66, and wanted to keep him. Wasn’t that remembering?

So she had lied to Lynn, said she had written a letter and had taken it to church on Sunday to ask Reverend Mike, the youth minister, to check it for mistakes. “He’s going to mail it for me in a church envelope,” she told her sister. She wouldn’t put it past Lynn to ask Reverend Mike about it, but Grace would worry about that when it happened, after she’d hidden the captain somewhere Lynn would never find him.

But where would that be? Lynn didn’t come up to the attic much—at least Grace didn’t think she did—but Lynn was a big snoop, so the boxes marked
Grace
wouldn’t do. None of the boxes, really—or even the hand-sized space in the back corner of the old sofa, under the cushion—not inside anything that somebody could carry off. She poked around the chimney to see if there might be a loose brick, but even if there had been, she couldn’t count on Grandpa not to patch it up sometime and seal Capt. Mark P. Stevens inside, a prisoner again.

At last she thought of it. There was one plank in the new floor, along the front of the house, that didn’t quite butt up to the old floor. When Grandpa had cut the lumber last spring, he told her how he’d measured and measured so there wouldn’t be any waste. He knew he’d be short an inch and a half on the last plank—not worth buying more wood for, not for an attic—and so he’d planned to leave the gap in the spot where the roof was pitched steep, where no one was liable to walk, and where cold air from the window and corner wouldn’t seep through. He’d shown Grace where the space was, then pulled a heavy box on top of it, grinned and tapped his forehead with his finger: “Horse sense.”

So as not to make extra noise Grandma might wonder about, Grace crawled under the hanging clothes, around the crib, and then stood up to tiptoe past the dress form Grandma never used when she sewed. She walked the last few feet on her knees and then pushed her whole weight into the box that sat over the gap. When the space showed again, she sat for a moment with her back against the box, stroking the engraving on the bracelet, still on her wrist. If it weren’t for Lynn, she could keep her captain near, if not on her wrist, then in her jewelry box, but there was no way to do that without fighting, and if either Grandma or Mother heard Grace and Lynn arguing, they’d make up their minds on the spot about what was to be done, and Grace couldn’t risk their telling her she had to send the bracelet away like Lynn said. They might as easily tell Lynn to hush up and let Grace keep it if she wanted to, but there was no knowing for sure what they’d decide.