Portrait of a Sister

by Laura Bradford

  So Hannah told her about Jack and the umbrella stand he knocked over learning to do a cartwheel in gymnastics class. That story morphed into one about the gym Hannah and Travis had just joined and how everyone’s umbrellas tended to slicken the floor in the entry foyer. Soon, she was quietly laughing along as Travis pretended to fall backward, his arms spinning wildly in the air above Mary’s bed.

  “There it is.”

  She pulled her attention off Hannah and Travis and fixed it, instead, on the English man looking up at her with the dimples she’d almost forgotten on full display. “There what is?”

  “Your smile just now. It’s as beautiful as I remember it being.”

  “That’s the smile Mamm wanted you to find again, Katie.” Hannah interjected. “Because when you smile like that, it means you are truly happy. Like when you saw those paintings in the window of Mr. Rothman’s gallery that first time, and when you walked into my apartment after your picnic with Eric.”

  Katie’s gaze flew to the open doorway and the hallway beyond before settling, once again, on Hannah. “Shhhh . . . Please.”

  “Sorry. I forgot. But you know I’m right.”

  Keenly aware of three sets of eyes bearing witness to her reddening face, she stood, held her ear to within inches of Sadie’s lips, and then lowered herself to the section of the bed most conducive to hand-holding.

  “I took Sadie over to Miss Lottie’s the day before she got sick.” She reached under the blanket and closed her hand over Sadie’s. “She and Digger chased bubbles together for close to an hour. She laughed and ran just like we did when we were little, Hannah.”

  “Who’s Digger?” Travis asked.

  “That’s Miss Lottie’s dog.” Hannah pushed off Mary’s bed and came to stand beside Katie. “He’s got to be pretty old by now, doesn’t he?”

  Katie moved her thumb back and forth across Sadie’s skin while watching for any sign of awareness on the little girl’s part. “He is. But that day, Sadie had him barking and jumping just like a little puppy.

  “And the next day, when we went back, he was out in the middle of Miss Lottie’s yard, waiting for another round of bubble play before Sadie even stepped off the porch, isn’t that right, sweet girl?”

  She waited through Sadie’s imaginary response and then transitioned her thumb rub to a whole hand pat. “You’ll be running and jumping with Digger again in no time, Sadie. And next time, I want you to blow some of them for me, too. That way I can try to jump as high as you and Digger can.”

  A silence, unlike any other over the past five days, met her ramblings and forced her line of vision up and onto Hannah, her twin’s elevated eyebrow catching her by surprise. “Do you not remember blowing bubbles with Digger when we were a few years older than Sadie? He was just a puppy back then, but you got him so worked up he jumped over your biggest jump to catch one of the bubbles I made . . .”

  “Of course I remember. How could I not? I also remember you getting excited every time I made one bubble land on another bubble without either of them popping.”

  Katie dropped her gaze back to Sadie. “Oooh, I will try to show you how to make a double bubble, too, sweet girl . . . just as soon as you’re up and about and feeling better again.”

  * * *

  She lowered Sadie’s sleepy head back down to the pillow, set the glass of water on the floor beside the bed, and tried her best to stifle a yawn. “I would have understood if you’d wanted to stay at Miss Lottie’s with Travis and Eric, you know.”

  “I know. But I wanted to stay here. With you.” Hannah patted the other side of Mary’s bed. “So we can talk.”

  “We’ve chatted—with Travis and Eric, remember?”

  “We talked about Sadie and the bubbles, but I want to hear the rest.”

  She looked up from the wisps of hair she was pushing off Sadie’s face and gave permission to the smile she felt building in the corner of her mouth. “If you are wondering if there were cookies to go with the bubbles, there were. Chocolate chip.”

  “While that’s a fun detail, I’m talking about the reason behind the whole bubble visit in the first place.”

  Casting her eyes back to Sadie, Katie busied herself with a few necessary blanket adjustments. “I thought it would be good. For Sadie.”

  “I know there is more, Katie.”

  “You know no such thing.”

  “I know Miss Lottie called me and that she was upset about what I sent you in my letter. So I know you were talking about me, and New York, and”—Hannah scooted forward across the bed until her head was hanging off—“your sketch pad that you have wrapped in that quilt over there.”

  “That is not . . .” She let the rest of the denial go and, instead, sank onto her chair.

  Hannah sat up, grabbing her hairbrush from beside the pillow. “Don’t worry, Katie. I only knew that’s what it was because I know you. To anyone else, it’s just a blanket you stuck under there in the event you need another one.”

  “Unless they have seen that picture you sent from that paper. The one that could get me shunned if it is seen.”

  “Who is going to see it, Katie?”

  “I don’t know, Hannah . . . Maybe someone Amish, maybe someone who knows Amish . . . It could happen.” She clamped her mouth over the because of you that would serve no purpose. What was done, was done.

  “The caption under the picture says only your name and that you are Amish. It doesn’t say where you’re from or your age or anything.” Gathering her hair into a single handful, Hannah pulled it across her left shoulder and began to brush. “Just so you know, there are hundreds of Katie Beilers in America. Even if someone from right here in Blue Ball were to see that picture, it doesn’t mean it was you who drew it.”

  “But the picture is of Mary!” she whispered.

  “Who is now six years older.”

  She wanted to believe Hannah was right but really, the only thing she knew at that moment was that her head was starting to hurt and her eyes were getting very heavy—

  “Katie, why don’t you come to bed. You need to sleep.”

  “I sleep when Annie naps. That way, with Mary right here”—she pointed to her chair—“I know I’ll be called right away if Sadie wakes up.”

  “But that’s only what? An hour of sleep if you’re lucky?”

  “Yah.”

  “Katie, if you don’t get more sleep than that you’re going to get sick, too.”

  “She is very weak, Hannah. I have to be able to hear her.”

  “And you will.” Hannah patted the bed again, mid-yawn. “We . . . are . . . just a few feet away. If she moves, one of us will hear her.”

  “I can’t. I—”

  “You need to be strong. For when Sadie is well.”

  Katie looked from her sleeping sister to Mary’s bed and knew Hannah was right. If Sadie stirred, one of them would know . . .

  “I will try.” She made one last check of Sadie, assured the sleeping child she was still there in the room, and then climbed into bed beside Hannah, her eyes heavy with the promise of sleep.

  “Katie?”

  “Yah?”

  “How come you only wrote about the picnic in your journal?”

  She stared at Hannah. “What are you talking about?”

  “The book the little ones gave you. I found it in your drawer when I was helping Mary put away the wash earlier. You told me when you came to visit that you were to use it to write about your adventures in the city. But all you wrote about was the picnic and—”

  “How much did you read?” Katie whispered.

  “I don’t know, maybe a paragraph or two. I wanted to read more, but I heard the buggy out on the driveway, and I went downstairs to see who was here, instead.”

  She closed her eyes against the memory of her written ramblings and willed herself to breathe, to sound unaffected. “Hannah, you said yourself, I need to sleep.”

  “But we did so much those five days. You met Jack, we went to the
gallery, we—”

  “I don’t know, Hannah, I guess I’m just better with pictures than words.”

  “I guess, but—”

  “Please, Hannah, let’s get some sleep.”

  “Okay, but one more question first?”

  More than anything, she wanted to close her eyes on the day just as surely as she did her sister’s questions, but she knew sleep would come faster if she simply gave in this one last time. “Yah.”

  “With you talking to Miss Lottie and all, I have to know . . . Have you made your choice?”

  “My choice?” she murmured.

  “Are you going to stay because you have to or leave because you want to?”

  Katie rolled onto her side, her back to Hannah.

  “Katie? Did you hear me?”

  Opening her eyes to the window, she made her breath rise and fall with a sleep that was no longer hers for the taking.

  Chapter 30

  She didn’t need Mary or Annie to announce Eric’s pending arrival. His footsteps on the staircase were just different. Where Hannah clacked with a seemingly unending supply of fancy shoes, Eric’s simple pair of sneakers never changed. Where Travis’s steps were heavy with an almost oblivion, Eric’s were quiet and respectful, as if Sadie’s plight was uppermost in his mind at all times.

  So she wasn’t really surprised when, glancing over her shoulder toward the open doorway, she saw Eric standing there, studying her with the same concern he’d worn since arriving nearly forty-eight hours earlier.

  “Knock, knock,” he said, his voice hushed. “Is it okay if I come in?”

  “Yah.”

  Quietly, he stepped into the room, his eyes traveling across a still-sleeping Sadie before landing on Katie and her temporary spot at the window. “No change?”

  “No.” She turned back to the window and leaned her forehead against the glass pane. “I don’t know if I am doing the right thing any longer.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I am doing everything the doctor said. I am giving her sips of water and that special food drink Miss Lottie brought. I am making sure she gets her medicine. I am holding her hand and talking to her about the things we will do when she gets well. But still, she sleeps.”

  Eric stepped in beside her, his gaze soaking up the same fields she’d stopped seeing days earlier. “Sleep is the body’s way of healing, Katie.”

  Oh, how she wanted to believe he was right. To believe that Sadie was getting stronger somehow. But the hope and conviction that had made her fight to keep the four-year-old at home was starting to wane. “She needs to be outside, Eric. Running with Annie, chasing the barn cats, picking me wildflowers on the edge of the woods.”

  “In other words, she needs to just be.”

  Parting company with the window, she made her way back to Sadie’s bed, his words and the memories they stirred only adding to her restlessness. “I can’t lose her, Eric. I just can’t.”

  “I know.”

  She sank down onto the edge of the bed and turned the uppermost part of the blanket down along Sadie’s chest. “I don’t know what to do anymore. I really don’t.”

  The same footsteps that had alerted her to his presence in the doorway let her know he’d left the window and was closing the gap between them. “Come for a walk with me, Katie. The fresh air will do you some good and maybe it’ll help clear your head a little.”

  “I can’t leave her,” she whispered, looking up. “She might need a sip of water or—”

  “Mary can do all of those things. When I was downstairs, she was talking about getting Annie ready for a nap and then coming in here to relieve you so you can nap.”

  “But a walk would mean not being in the house,” she protested. “At least if I nap, I’m just at the other end of the hall.”

  “True. But Hannah said you slept last night and—”

  The bed squeaked as she pulled her hands into her lap. “I only pretended to sleep. So she would stop asking me things I do not want to talk about.”

  “Katie, you can’t keep doing this. You’re going to get sick!”

  “I-I promised Sadie I would stay with her.”

  “And you have. But you need sleep and you need a change of scenery, too. You’ve been in this room for six days.”

  “I told you, I nap with Annie in my own room sometimes.”

  Shaking his head, he squatted down beside Katie, the concern in his eyes making hers mist. “Katie, you need to get out for a little while. It’ll be good for you and for Sadie. Besides, I’d love for you to show me some of the places you told me about.”

  “Places?” she asked.

  “Yeah like Miller’s Pond, and the place where you stashed your sketch pad when you first started drawing, and the spot where you sat with your mother while Hannah was swinging from trees like a lunatic. You know, those places.”

  Sadie’s bed shook with Katie’s answering giggle. “Hannah did not swing from trees. She just climbed them. And sometimes hung upside down from them.”

  “There we go. There’s that smile.” He stilled her restless hand with his own and squeezed. “Come on. Let’s go for that walk.”

  She glanced down at Sadie and then back up at Eric. “But what happens if she wakes up and I’m not here?”

  “Someone will come and find us.”

  “They must promise to come and get me right away or I will not go.”

  “You got it.” He reached for her hand again, this time holding on long enough to pull her up and onto her feet. “Come on. Let’s get Mary and be on our way.”

  * * *

  Closing her eyes, she lifted her face to the afternoon sun and breathed in through her nose.

  “I wish you could see yourself right now.”

  She stopped walking to check her kapp strings and then her dress. When she found nothing amiss, she looked up at Eric. “What is wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. You just look so . . . peaceful, I guess.”

  “But I’m not at peace. I am worried sick about Sadie.”

  “I know.” He gestured in the direction they’d been walking. When she began to move again, he fell into step beside her, his hands finding their usual spot inside the front pockets of his jeans. “Still drawing?”

  She listened to the crunch of the graveled road beneath her boots for a half dozen or so steps and then shrugged. “I drew one picture about three or four nights ago but that’s it.”

  “I imagine worry and sleep deprivation would make it hard to draw.” He slowed to check out a cow on the other side of the fence and then flashed her one of his dimpled grins. “Though, I suspect, even with all this stuff with Sadie, you’d still draw better than most.”

  “No, I’ve only drawn once since I’ve been back. In Blue Ball.”

  “I didn’t know you went somewhere else.”

  She motioned toward a path just beyond the fence to their right. “I didn’t.”

  “Whoa.” He veered off the edge of the road and onto the grass. “Are you telling me you’ve only drawn one picture since you left New York?”

  “Yah.”

  “But it’s been like five weeks since you left.”

  “Six.” She pointed again at the path and continued walking, looking back at him when he didn’t budge. “If you want to see the pond and the tree, we cannot keep standing in the middle of the road. I don’t want to be gone too long.”

  He jogged away the gap between them, reaching her just as she left the road in favor of the three-person-wide trail that would take them to Miller’s Pond. “Why only one in all that time?”

  “I have told you why. The Bible says, ‘you shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.’ That is what I have been doing. And because of me, Mary’s face—Mary’s graven image—now hangs in someone’s office.”

  “Actually, that was Hannah’s doing, not yours,” he reminded.

  “If I had not dra
wn Mary’s face, it could not hang somewhere.” She hurried her pace as they rounded the final corner, her hand sweeping outward as the pond came into view. “This is Miller’s Pond. The bench and that picnic table on the other side were added by Englishers as was that sign right there telling people to swim at their own risk. Other than those three things, nothing else has really changed since I was a little girl.”

  He broke ahead several feet and then turned around. “And the tree?”

  “It is right there.” She directed his attention back toward the pond and the stump not far from the edge. “It came down in a storm a few years ago.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “The stories I told you were from back when it was still standing. It was bigger than that tree right there”—she pointed to a different maple tree tucked farther back from the pond—“and it had one big long branch that spread out over the water.”

  “I’m surprised Hannah didn’t use it to swing her way into the pond,” Eric mused.

  “She did. Once. But that is when she cut her chin open.”

  “Ahhh.”

  Stepping around him, she headed toward the stump and the patch of dirt between it and the pond. “This is where I would sit with Mamm when Hannah would climb.”

  “Not always. You climbed sometimes, too, you said.”

  “Only when Hannah insisted and Mamm encouraged. I liked sitting right here with Mamm more.”

  “Why?”

  “It was safe for one thing.” She wandered over to the shoreline and toed at an odd-shaped rock. “I could not fall if I were already on the ground.”

  Eric’s laugh tickled her ears as she looked out over the same pond she’d visited nearly every day since she was a little girl. “Sounds like you’ve got yourself a meme right there.”

  “Meme?” she asked, looking back.

  “It’s like an expression or a thought that people share on social media that speaks to people on some level. Anyway, I’m babbling.” He sat on the stump and rested his forearms atop his thighs. “So go on, why else did you prefer sitting with your mom instead of chasing after Hannah?”