When We Were Sisters (36 page)

45

Robin

Yesterday, after Cecilia and I went through the house and before I drove back to the campground, I called Kris.

“I need you,” I said with no introduction. “When can you get here?”

He didn't sound surprised. “I decided not to wait until you asked. I've already talked to Elena. She'll stay with the kids until Lucie can get a flight. I'll be in late tomorrow morning. You'll be okay until then?”

“This is so much worse than I thought it would be.”

And it is.

Fourteen is a funny age. We're not children, barely teenagers and certainly not adults. Facts and fantasy aren't far apart. At fourteen we don't have the experience or brain development to make decisions, or even to commit reality to memory. What's real and what's not? At fourteen we can hide from ourselves and not remember that we did.

But sometimes hiding
and
forgetting are impossible.

“I'm worried about you,” I told Cecilia as I took photos of her after breakfast. We were in her camper, and Wendy was doing her makeup and hair. She had already painted her nails a soft coral, and Cecilia was waving them in the air to dry faster. “Doesn't Mick have enough footage already? Can't we pack up and get you out of here?”

She looked exhausted and drawn, but I had noticed at breakfast that she and Donny were nestled side by side, and at one point he leaned over and kissed her cheek. I wondered if that was the reason she was so pale, or maybe it was the reason she wasn't huddled in a corner banging her head against the wall.

She waved a little faster. “You know we're filming around the barn this afternoon.”

“CeCe, it's a barn and a barnyard. I'm not sure why it matters.”

She nodded to Wendy, thanked her and made it clear her assistant needed to leave. Wendy exited quickly and gratefully. The camper was air-conditioned, but with three of us crowded inside, breathing took energy.

“I know that's where you mostly worked with Jud,” I said.

Cecilia was sorting through jewelry and didn't look at me. She chose simple pearl studs and leaned toward the mirror as she fastened them in her earlobes. “The vegetable garden wasn't far away.”

I changed the subject. “Kris is coming this morning. He should be here anytime.”

“I know. He called yesterday and we talked.”

Suddenly the fact that Kris had already asked Elena to do child care made more sense. “You talked him into it?”

“Ask yourself if I could talk Kris into anything. Would he have called for my opinion unless he was already well on his way? He wanted to make plans, but he wanted to be doubly sure his timing was good. He was afraid you might wait too long to ask.”

Now I was relieved I'd called him. “Why did you tell him to come?”

“I want both of us in the barn this afternoon talking about the past. Mick's in favor. It makes sense visually. The two of us talking on film about everything that happened instead of me doing a voice-over. You've been on camera already. But if you do this, I think Kris ought to be here.” She faced me so she could read my expression. “I'll understand if you don't want to, Robin. It's up to you.”

“Why talk to me on camera in the barn and not in the house yesterday?”

“We lived on a ranch. We were outside most of the time, or at least I was. Mick has some of the old snapshots you took of me on the ranch horses and feeding the hogs. You know the way he combines elements to make his point. He'll intersperse them with whatever he gets today. Some of the photos are of you. I took those.”

“And you kept them all these years?”

“It's the only past we have.”

“You wanted to keep
those
memories alive?”

She didn't answer directly. “Did
you
?”

“No.” My heart was racing. “Will this film really help you put the past behind you? Or is it making things worse?”

“I honestly don't know. But I think it's too late to stop.”

“What if I say no?”

“I'll have to do it without you.”

“Do what?”

She hesitated, as if she was forming the best answer. “Today I want to make it absolutely clear how bad things were for both of us. And maybe that will change something somewhere for somebody. Maybe if people know how often children are at the mercy of the strangers who are paid to protect them, they'll make sure they have the best possible systems in place.”

“How long do you think their outrage will last? Ten minutes after they see the documentary? Then they'll move on to the next good cause.”

“The film will stay around. And you know what? I'll always be a reminder. As long as people still want to hear me sing, they'll remember at least some of the things I've said.”

“And that's how you want your fans to think of you? As a poorly treated foster kid?”

“It's just one of the ways they'll think of me, but if it's the only way?” She turned up her palm as if to say “so what?”

“What does Donny say?”

Suddenly she looked younger and vulnerable. “A lot, as always. And for the record, I won't be replacing him anytime soon.”

“I'm glad.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“I have to think about this.”

“You have a little time. This morning we're filming behind the house where Cold Creek used to flow. Mick wants some footage with me, but I don't see why you need to be there.”

“I'm not sure I understand why he's filming a creek that isn't there. It started to dry up when we lived here.”

She didn't answer directly. “A metaphor? Anyway, part of the problem is the way the creek was managed. Jud dammed it for a livestock pond at the edge of the ranch. The creek is low up to that point, but it trickles to a stop after that. Measures could be taken to get it flowing through this property again.”

“Too bad nobody did that in time for filming.”

“He may go farther west to see if he can get some shots of the creek the way it used to. But a creek with no water will make its own kind of statement.”

Knowing Mick, I could guess he'd get both shots and put them together as a disembodied voice—most likely Cecilia's—narrates local history.

I left her to finish preparing for the morning.

I didn't want to go with Cecilia to the creek. A dry creek bed so overgrown with weeds it blends into the surrounding landscape is a poor subject for photographs, and I already had a million of my sister in more interesting places. I knew where I did want to go instead, and I headed there now.

Twenty-five minutes later Kris found me standing in what had once been Betty's vegetable garden. While sad little citrus-tree skeletons now took up much of it, I could still picture it the way it had been.

Kris didn't say anything. He came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. I'd heard him pull up, and I'd glanced behind me to watch him get out, but I hadn't gone to greet him because I was struggling not to cry.

“I can't imagine you here,” he said, before I could get the words out. “It feels haunted. Every inch of it. And you lived in this place, what, two years?”

“Just about.” I covered his hands, but I didn't turn. “Thank you for coming.”

“Nobody could keep me away.”

I held his arms tightly around me. “We grew some of everything in this plot. It used to be more than an acre, no trees, and Jud sold our surplus at a neighbor's vegetable stand. In Virginia winter's a time to rest. Here winter was prime time, and even though workers came in to help during high season, mostly it was Betty and me. Whatever was left burned up in the hottest part of summer, but by the end of August we were back out here, cultivating the soil, and planting beans and cantaloupe, squash and pumpkins. There was always something to plant or pick, weed or spray. Never ending.”

“What surprises me is that you still like gardening.”

“When I lived here I liked being out of the house, and I learned to like watching things grow. I got home before Cecilia did because my school let out earlier. I would come out here to work and wait for her bus, and I always had a reason. Something needed to be done, and in the evening I had to work in the kitchen, so nobody really questioned me working outside in the afternoons.”

“They expected you to do all that?”

“If our caseworkers questioned them they probably claimed it was good for us to work hard. They were ‘building character.' I'm sure they had an entire repertoire of excuses. Too many kids don't feel needed. We knew how important we were to the ranch, and we got so much from it. Fresh, delicious food, a warm, happy place to live. Foster parents who only had our best interests in mind.” The tears came suddenly, despite everything I'd done to prevent them.

Kris turned me to rest against him, and I cried against his chest. “That's what they told the authorities?” His voice sounded strained, as if he was afraid to let it out.

“They looked okay on paper,” I said, when I could speak again. “Jud was the quintessential good old boy. Polite, funny, able to talk his way into—” I took a deep breath “—or out of anything. The house was run-down but sparkling. Betty didn't say much, but she always agreed with whatever Jud said. United front and all. They never fussed about having to go to meetings or training, never complained about the kids they took on. They talked about adding on to the house so they could take more, but that was just talk. Because they knew—” another deep breath “—they were lucky. They knew Cecilia and I weren't going to complain about the way we were treated. Because if we were removed, we would almost surely never see each other again.”

“You've never really talked much about this before.”

“What was there to say?”

“Plenty, I think.”

“I just wanted to forget it.” I stepped back so I could see his face.

Kris reached out and gently brushed my tears away. “It's part of who you are.”

I took his hand and turned. “I'll show you the garden.”

We did a quick tour, even though I knew he didn't really care about where the string beans and tomatoes had been planted. But explaining what we had grown and where gave me time to recover. We stopped at what had been the boundary farthest from the house.

“We had compost bins over here.” I pointed to the corner where the rusted remains of posts that had held the fencing were still visible above ground. “One of my jobs was to fork it from one bin to the other so it would decompose faster. I took out what was decomposed and spread it as I went. If I waited too long, the pile got so tall I couldn't reach the top. So I did that two or three times a week. Sometimes Cecilia would help when she got home. If she wasn't too busy.”

“What did she do the rest of the time?”

“She shoveled manure and brought some for the compost piles when she could. She fed the animals, cleaned their pens, gathered the eggs, groomed the horses.” I realized I was standing stock-still, gazing into space. “Jud called her his ‘little gal pal' because she worked with him most of the time. He used to brag about teaching her to be the perfect rancher's wife.”

“This wasn't just about hard work, was it? The reason you were both so unhappy here?”

“He was a drunk and a bully. He used to laugh when he made Cecilia do chores she hated. He liked to say he was toughening her up, that by the time she was eighteen, nothing would get to her. If she complained he told her he'd get me to do it instead.”

And then Kris said one of the nicest things he's ever said about my sister. “So she probably stopped complaining.”

“I was terrified of the big animals. Especially Jud's boar and the bull. They were meaner than God intended because Jud made them that way. He liked to shock them with the cattle prod, just for fun.”

“He's dead now?”

I hesitated a heartbeat or two. “Why, are you going to find him and finish him off?”

“I can't wrap my head around how this happened.”

“Sometimes children die in foster care. It's more common than you think. And sometimes children thrive and bloom and get the new start they need. That's more common than people think, too. It's not a perfect system, and it's certainly an underfunded one. We got caught in the undertow.”

“I'm not sure why you're here. Why can't Mick Bollard make that point some other way? Why put you through this?”

“Cecilia thinks it's necessary.”

“She's not always right, Robin. You know that?”

If he'd said that last with any heat, I would have reacted. But he said it gently, and I knew he was worried, not angry.

“No, she's not always right.” I thought about the way she had manipulated our caseworker to bring us here in the first place. Had Ichabod known what we would be in for with the Osburns? After she made her threat, had this been his own form of revenge?

And would I trade having her in my life then and now for a better place to live all those years ago?

“We're here now,” I said. “
You're
here now. I'll get through this.”

“Will she?”

I didn't know. But the next hours would be the test.

46

Robin

When I went into labor with Nik, I remember wishing I could turn back the clock and forget the whole thing. But it was too late by then to redo the past nine months and the night of enthusiastic sex that eventually propelled me to a hospital delivery room.

And now, somehow, it was too late to tell Cecilia I didn't want to explore the working section of the ranch, that I had finished facing our past together.

The problem? I love her too much to ask her to face it alone.

“We can do this once,” Cecilia told Mick. “Just once.” She looked pale, with a sickly greenish undertone. Even Wendy's best efforts with mineral powders and foundation hadn't made much of a difference. Cecilia also looked vulnerable, more like the teenager she'd been and, at the same time, somehow more like the old woman she would become.

“You can stop us anytime,” Mick reminded her.

Mick wasn't pale. He was alert and wary, fidgeting, as if he was anxious to say something, but he wasn't sure what. I could tell he suspected that whatever he got today might be important.

He turned to me. “You're still willing to be on camera?”

I had dressed for it, although I was only wearing jeans and a fuchsia shirt I've always loved. Wendy had done
my
hair and makeup, too, but with restraint. I still looked like me.

He waited for my nod. “Then I thought we might start with a long shot of the two of you walking toward the barn from the front of the house. There won't be sound, so you can chat about anything. Just remember whatever you say won't be in the film. No big revelations, okay?”

I had learned so much from being part of the crew. I knew so much more about master shots, both moving and locked-off, medium and close shots, and the use of a servo zoom lens to bring subjects closer without the use of dollies and track. Our new camera operator had been placed right in our path in the bed of a pickup, which gave her stability and a great angle. Mick would use this footage to establish the scene and prepare the viewer for what was to come.

Cecilia and I glanced at each other, nothing more, but he seemed to take that as confirmation. He explained that Jerry would be waiting at the once-sturdy fence that surrounded the former corral. When we got there, whatever we decided to recount would begin.

Now Mick was checking notes as he spoke, more, I thought, to look unconcerned than for information. “I'm hoping you'll start or at least move toward what brought you both here. Before you move on to what it was like with this family.”

Cecilia scuffed her boot in the dirt, back and forth until a ditch had formed. “And then?”

“We'll film in the barn.”

She gave a short nod.

“It's safe?” I hadn't yet been inside.

“Siding's missing—that's obvious—but the structure is safe enough. It seems to have been repaired more often than the house.”

“Of course. The
animals
were valuable.” Cecilia inclined her head, and she and I started our walk. The distance wasn't short, but we walked in silence. Halfway to the house we turned, as we had been instructed, and waited until we were signaled to start back. A viewer would think we had just come down the front steps, but actually doing so wasn't necessary.

By now we were, as he'd promised, out of earshot. Cecilia shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “How many times did we make this walk to the barn together?” She tossed a long curl over her shoulder. Florida humidity was taking its toll on her hair.

It wasn't a question that needed an answer.

Mick still hadn't signaled. He appeared to be consulting with the camera operator. She was proving to be talented and easy to work with, and Jerry was now free to set up more complex scenes.

“How honest are you going to be?” I asked when the silence stretched too long.

“About how we ended up here?”

“About that, about how cruel Jud was, about his drinking, about his threats...”

“Does it seem like a long time ago, or does it seem like yesterday?”

“I thought I'd shoved it so far away it would never see the light of day. But right now? Yesterday.”

Mick made a spiraling motion with his finger, then he pointed. We turned and walked back toward the house, stopping every few yards and glancing back to see if he was happy. He finally gave a quick salute, to show we had reached the sweet spot. We waited again.

Cecilia smoothed the hem of her shirt into place. “I've asked myself so many times why I let you become the center of my world. Haven't you? You needed me, but why did I need you?”

“Because until you met me, your world didn't have a center.”

“I guess I could have saved myself a lot of time and asked you first.”

“Did you come to a different conclusion?”

“Not really. I couldn't save Maribeth, but I thought maybe, if I tried really hard, I could save you.”

“How'd that work out?”

“I don't know. Maybe I caused more problems than I fixed.”

“Don't say that again.”

Mick motioned us toward the pickup, and we began to walk, talking as we did.

“Mick asked me to refer to Jud as my foster father, not to mention his or Betty's names. You, too?”

“Legal issues. In case they want to crawl out of the woodwork and sue us or him.”

“Anybody who cares enough can find out their names.”

“Wouldn't that be just like Jud to reappear if he thought there was money in it?” I kept my voice light, but my stomach clenched. I glanced at Cecilia.

She wasn't smiling. “After we finish filming today I don't think even Jud would be willing to come out of hiding.”

My stomach could clench no further. I wanted to find Kris among the bystanders, but even more, I didn't want to make this walk again because I had screwed up the first one by looking for him.

We got a thumbs-up as that shot ended. As instructed we continued to the corral. Once, the expanse had been surrounded by a sturdy three-rail fence that was perfectly capable of keeping larger livestock in place. Now there was no animal who couldn't plow through it with a nudge. Jud might have been lazy and mean, but he had realized the value of fences. He had been a master at keeping animals and humans in captivity.

We waited until Jerry finished his setup and gave us the go-ahead before we began to recount our past. Cecilia began. “You were only twelve when our caseworker left us here. Do you remember much about that day?”

“I remember being frightened. The only good part was that you were with me.”

“I'm not ashamed to admit I made threats to keep us in the same home, and somebody took me seriously and pulled the right strings so we could stay together. After that our caseworker backed off and we rarely saw him, or the two who followed. Supervision was so minimal it was laughable. But I wasn't about to let anybody separate us. You were the only family I had.”

I was impressed at the way she'd spun that, as if making threats meant very little. In fact, under the circumstances, threats sounded admirable. Cecilia was a pro.

I added my part. “I was a lot older before I finally realized how unusual it was that we'd been kept together. By then you were out of care and we
were
separated. You were in New York, but you took the bus all the way to my group home whenever you could, just to be sure I was okay.”

“I wanted to see for myself.”

“And every single time you told me if I needed to leave, I had a place to go.”

Cecilia flashed a sad smile. “You made a good choice by not taking me up on it. It wouldn't have been fun. I was living with three other girls in a one-room Manhattan walk-up with junkies for neighbors. On the plus side, our mice were hospitable.”

“I was lucky to have a safety net. It's not something most foster kids can say.”

“Big sister.” She wasn't smiling now. “It was my job to protect you.”

“You protected me
here
, too.”

“Yeah, but you know, if anything had happened to you, I wouldn't have been able to live with myself. I was protecting me, too.”

“And there was a lot to protect me from.”

She was looking straight ahead now, because I had just given her the perfect opening to talk about the ranch. “This was an awful place. Two years of hell, starting with the day we walked through the door.”

“Our foster father showed us to our rooms. I'm not sure mine had ever been painted. It was at the opposite end of the hallway from yours. There were so many strange noises, I don't think I slept for a week. I was glad when the weather changed and it was hot enough to use the air conditioner to drown out everything else.”

Cecilia was staring into the corral as if horses still galloped there. “He warned us we had to stay in our own rooms at night, no matter what. Something about needing to know where we were in case of fire.”

We had developed a rhythm. It was my turn. “I didn't have time to unpack. Our foster mother took me down to the kitchen and told me what I would be required to do every day.”

“And our foster father took me out to the barn and introduced me to the livestock. I got to know them well.”

Cecilia had clearly tired of standing here talking. She began to circle the barn, and I walked beside her. Mick didn't stop us, and Jerry followed. These shots wouldn't be smooth. If these moments made it into the final documentary, this section would look exactly like what it was, cinema vérité. No fancy camera work, just candid revelations and a stab at finding the truth.

I spoke, since she didn't. Jerry was close enough that his mic would catch us. “I'd done a little cooking in our last home. It was fun there. Not fun here. There was no end to it. We started cooking at five in the morning and finished washing dishes around nine at night. If I had the energy, I finally did my homework.”

“And you worked in the vegetable garden when you got home from school and on Saturdays. For hours.”

“There's nothing left of the garden now, but back then being outside was better than inside, because you were out here, too. And I knew my jobs were nothing compared to yours.”

We rounded the barn and walked along the north side, where the hog pen had been adjacent to the long wall.

Cecilia took up the conversation. “I was older and bigger, so...” She almost said Jud's name. I could hear it on the tip of her tongue, but she caught herself. “...our foster father made me the farm helper. All those people who think I've lived a pampered celebrity life? Get over it. I shoveled more sh—” she caught herself “—manure than they'll ever see.” She listed some of the other things she'd done. “I didn't hate the animals, but I learned pretty fast not to get attached. Because...our foster father picked up on that, and those were the first animals to be sold or eaten.”

“Which says all anyone needs to know about why you're a vegan.”

“I grew to hate going into the hog pens, the chicken coop. I knew if he was around, he would watch and cull my favorites.”

“You liked working with the horses.”

“Only because the bigger animals were safer from him. And I could pretend that at the end of the day I would jump on one and ride away and never have to see this place again.”

I was remembering more than I wanted to, and the knot in my stomach was now a boulder, the way it had been during our two long years here. “We weren't allowed to complain.”

Cecilia stopped and shook her head. “He made sure we didn't. His favorite way was telling me that he'd be glad to call our caseworker and ask to have us moved.”

I repeated what was probably already clear and would likely be cut. “And if they did move us, we knew we would be separated.”

She turned to me. “There were times when things got so bad, that seemed like a small enough price to pay, Robin. Didn't you think so more than once? Didn't you want to leave no matter what happened or where we went? But then he came up with a new twist. I could leave anytime I wanted, since I was the troublemaker, but of course there wouldn't be any reason for you to go.”

This was new information. “He told you that?”

“He said he and...his wife would make sure you stayed here without me, that he'd make sure everybody knew I was the problem, the bad influence, and once I was gone, you would thrive.”

“You never told me.”

“It was bad enough that
I
had to worry about it.”

We were quiet long enough that Mick stopped Jerry from filming and ambled over to put his arms around us both.

“How are you doing?”

I could feel the tension in Cecilia's body. She shifted away from him. “I want this over, Mick. Let's move inside.”

He was hesitant, which surprised me. “I'm not sure that's really necessary. You may have said all you need to. You were overworked, intimidated—”

“I
haven't
said all I need to.” She moved out from under his arm. “Let's go in. But get Jerry in place first. I'm only going to do this once.”

Without a doubt now, I knew what was coming, even if I didn't want to know, had never wanted to know for certain. At fourteen, when I left the Osburn ranch, I might have been too young to understand, too uneducated, too sheltered by my sister. But through the years, when I've thought back on our time here, I've wondered. And now I knew.

Tears filled my eyes, and I put my hand on Cecilia's arm. “Don't! You don't have to.”

She didn't answer. This once, I was not the one for whom speech was difficult.

Mick waved Jerry inside, and Cecilia started into the barn. Mick looked worried but also energized, as if he knew we were about to film something that would assure his backers there would be no reason to worry about ratings. Cecilia was going to make sure of it.

I followed her in, because where else would I go? I didn't look for Kris or Donny, although I hoped Donny would stay nearby.