Missing Sisters

by Gregory Maguire

  “Alice?” said Garth.

  “No. A new baby.”

  “You don’t mean Mommy’s pregnant?” said Miami. “Aren’t you too old? That’s gross!”

  Mrs. Shaw said, “I’m not too old according to my doctors. Nor my body, apparently. We were going to wait another month to tell you, to make sure we pass the first set of hurdles. But it seems you should know earlier. Sweethearts, it’s going to be a real stretch to handle a family of five kids. We didn’t think I could get pregnant. That’s why we took all of you on. We wanted a family.”

  “So does one of us have to go back?” said Miami. “Why not Garth?”

  “No sir, not me,” said Garth. “I ain’t moving.”

  “Well, Garth is the only really different one,” said Miami. “We could trade him for Alice. Then we’d all match at least.”

  “Miami,” said Mrs. Shaw. “If you’re going to get on our nerves, you can go inside. You know what we think of talk like that. We’re not going to give up any of you. However could we? We don’t want to. We’re a family. But we’re a big family—we’re going to be five kids.”

  “So what’s one more? Alice is skinny. She won’t eat a lot. She can have half of mine,” said Miami. “She’s my sister.”

  “She is your sister,” said Mr. Shaw. “And that means she has a special place in our family, like a very extra-special cousin. But it doesn’t mean she can live here. For one thing, darlings, the people who make those decisions probably just wouldn’t allow it. You have to earn a certain amount per child, and while we qualified for each of you, having a new baby in the family is going to put us out of the running for any other adoptions, I’m afraid.”

  “How much does it cost?” said Miami. “I have forty bucks in the bank from my birthday.”

  “More than that.” Mrs. Shaw raked up clipped grass. “Besides, Alice is going to need some pretty fancy speech therapy, maybe an operation on her tongue when she’s a little older. It’s a burden we can’t accept; we couldn’t honor it. But we’ll clearly have to get to know her. She can come visit sometimes, maybe, if we all agree it’s a good idea.”

  “You know,” said Miami, “you people are real hypocrites.”

  “Hypocrites. What a word!” said Mr. Shaw. “Your vocabulary is improving, Miami.”

  “I mean it,” said Miami. “What’s the difference between me and Alice? I thought we were Catholics and had to love everybody. How can you make sandwiches on my plate and not make some for her too?”

  “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Mrs. Shaw. “I don’t expect you to understand, sweetie. I expect you to be furious with us. But it just can’t be helped. And Alice might not want to come into a family where there are three babies and a girl who looks just like her but doesn’t have her ailments. It might make her feel inferior.”

  “I could help her learn to talk better, I know I could!” cried Miami. “You’re just mean!”

  “Me too,” said Garth bravely. “But I ain’t going to anybody else’s family for anything.”

  Miami ran inside and banged the screen door behind her. Garth ran after her, but she turned in the hall and shouted, “Get lost and stop following me, you creep!” So he changed his mind.

  She stormed upstairs. But not all the way to the tower. She went into the bathroom on the second floor and stood by the window with the light turned out, so they wouldn’t know she was there. The Shaws kept clipping their hedge and trimming their lawn as if there were no terrible crisis at hand. She hated them. It wasn’t fair.

  In her parents’ bedroom she flopped on the chenille bedspread, and absentmindedly pulled out some of the tufts and dropped little clumps of blue cotton on the floor. What an awful week this was! She wished Patty would come back; she wished things would get back to normal. She wished lightning would come down and strike all five members of her family at once. Then she could go find Alice and they could live by themselves in Washington Park or someplace.

  Are you thinking about me, Alice? she wondered. You don’t even know me. But there you were all along, growing up someplace not so far away. How come I got to be the one who got hit by the Dillons and then lucked out with the Shaws, and you only got dumb nuns like a thousand live-in baby-sitters? Maybe if we’d been together all along…like we should’ve been! We should’ve been!

  Call me up, she thought. Call me. Call me. She rolled on her stomach and stared at the phone on the bedside table. It was a trimline Princess phone. I don’t know your number. I don’t know where you live. You know where I am. Call me up. Call me.

  She was so ready to pick up the phone that when it did ring, she grabbed it before a full loud jangle could be heard out in the backyard. “Hello, Alice,” she whispered furiously.

  “You have to shout,” said Alice. “I can’t hear over these things.”

  They made a plan. Alice still had five bucks left from the talent show prize money. She would come back and ask Mr. and Mrs. Shaw to adopt her. How could they refuse her? Saturday would be a good time. Mr. Shaw would be home from work, and everybody’d be relaxed and in a good mood. “Have you got that?” said Miami, trying to shout softly. “I think come at ten. Then we can talk a bit at the bottom of the steps and plan it better. I knew you’d call.”

  “Sister John Boss isn’t going to like this very much,” said Alice. “But who cares?”

  “See you then,” said Miami. “Sis.”

  “So long,” said Alice. “Bye.” She didn’t hang up. She wasn’t very good at the phone, Miami realized.

  “Hang up now, someone’s coming,” said Miami, and did so herself.

  “Who’re you shouting at?” asked Garth.

  “None of your beeswax, nosy.”

  “You got grass stains all over the bedspread.”

  “I’ll get grass stains all over your face if you don’t watch it.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Garth considered. “Oh. Boy, we didn’t get very far with our plan, did we.”

  “Not yet,” said Miami, “but just wait.”

  On Saturday morning Miami finished her chores early and said, “I’m going outside.”

  “Don’t go far,” said Mr. Shaw, turning the pages of the Times Union. He lost himself in the columns usually, chuckling out loud at the funny ones. Miami was surprised he had even heard her. “We have a family outing planned as soon as your mom gets up and has her breakfast.”

  “Oh, no!” said Miami. “Why doesn’t anybody tell me these things? What’re we doing? I don’t want to go.”

  “We’re taking a drive over to Troy,” said Mr. Shaw. “We’re going to go see Alice and have a chat with Father Kevin and Sister John Bosco.”

  “What time?”

  “About midmorning. When we’re ready.”

  This was awful! This was a disaster. Alice might be sneaking away just as they were driving over to where she lived. But Miami couldn’t really say she didn’t want to go. Maybe they were going to make an offer to adopt Alice. Maybe they’d listened to Miami. Taken her seriously. For once.

  If Alice showed up in a taxicab before they left, well, they could just drive her back. Miami went out to wait at the foot of the steps.

  Mrs. Jenkins was there scrubbing her sidewalk with a brush and disinfectant. She was so weird. “Miami Shaw,” she said in her raw voice. “Where in the world were those clergy taking you the other day?”

  “It wasn’t me,” said Miami. “It was my sister, Alice.”

  Mrs. Jenkins had to know everything. And Miami was so nervous, waiting for Alice, that she told her the whole story. “Well, that’s one for the papers, that is!” said Mrs. Jenkins. “Your folks going to call a press conference?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Where you call the newspapers and radio and TV channels and tell them all to come at a special time. Then they hear you make a speech and tell the world your unusual story. And yours is a doozy, it is. A lalapalooza.”

  “Well,” said Miami,
“I don’t know about things like that.”

  “It’d be front page of the papers, I bet,” said Mrs. Jenkins. “Did you ever hear the like?”

  “I better go in now,” said Miami. “Garth needs help tying his shoes.”

  “Such a nice sister to Garth, you are,” said Mrs. Jenkins. “I know. I see what I see. Well, you’ll get over it.”

  Oooh, the witch. Miami ran up to the house.

  Then adult forces took over, pushing the kids this way and that, the way they always did. The babies howled. Garth was goody-goody, eager to see this Alice again. Miami kept running to the tower to stare down into the street, looking for a taxi. But none stopped, and before too long the family had bundled into the Rust Queen, Mr. Shaw’s name for the ’61 Chevy deathtrap they risked life and limb in, or so Miami thought. Alice was not in any taxi they passed so far as Miami could see. She dreaded the scene when they got to Troy.

  But despite herself, she grew interested in seeing where Alice lived. She hadn’t been to Troy before, or not that she could remember. In school they called Troy the armpit of America. It didn’t look so bad to Miami. And with Mrs. Shaw craning for landmarks and Mr. Shaw cursing (or as near as he came to cursing) at the one-way signs, Miami had ample opportunity to imagine that she lived in Troy, and Alice was her sister in Albany somewhere.

  The Sacred Heart Home for Girls loomed like a redbrick office or factory. The area around it seemed slummy. Miami had been expecting a private house with a picket fence and gaily painted shutters, a garden with big floppy flowers. But the home shot up three solid floors into the air like a fortress, like a massive land formation. It was flat-topped, with iron grille in the lower windows and bars on the top ones. Were they to keep girls from falling or from jumping? Miami wondered. “Creepy,” said Garth. That just about summed it up.

  Sister John Bosco opened the front door. Father Laverty was in a sitting room off to one side, looking hot and peevish in his black clothes. He bulged inside them as if quilted there. He was fanning himself with an issue of Catholic Digest. A statue of Our Lady, with a chip in her foot, presided from a side table. A plate of homemade cookies and glasses of lemonade waited on a tray. The chairs were a thousand years old, straight and flat and dark and horrible; they made you repent just to look at them. “Won’t you have a seat,” ordered Sister John Bosco. “I’ll get Alice.” Father Laverty, Miami noticed, had taken the only upholstered chair for himself. She couldn’t blame him.

  Then it was “Father Kevin” and “Joe” and “Joan” and “the little ones,” chummy as a cocktail party. Miami blanked out for a while, imagining that Sister John Bosco would return on the run with news that Alice was nowhere to be found.

  “But what a name, Miami,” Father Laverty was saying to her. “There’s no Saint Miami in the community of saints, as you well know.”

  “Yeah, where did my name come from?” Miami had never asked before.

  “She was Carol before,” said Mrs. Shaw. “We had a lot of advice on how to adjust her ideas of family life when she came to us. She was in a bad way. Doesn’t remember much of it, do you, dolly?” She smiled. “So we gave her a new first name and shifted Carol to a middle position, and since we weren’t sure, we invented a new birthday to mark a new beginning for Miami Carol Shaw.”

  “But Miami?” pressed Father Laverty, sneaking a glance at his watch.

  “That was my mother’s maiden name,” said Mrs. Shaw. “I was adopted, too. We wanted to build the sense of family history. My mother died a few years ago, but while she was alive she loved Miami very much, and the name is now passed on.”

  “I sound like a football team or an airport,” said Miami.

  Then Sister John Bosco returned, calmly, quietly, steering Alice Colossus by the shoulder.

  Alice shrugged at Miami. “Couldn’t slip away. Too many nuns around,” she said, or that was what Miami guessed she had said.

  Sister John Bosco passed around the cookies and lemonade. Fanny and Rachelle were set on the floor to gnaw at the legs of the beastly chairs or whatever else they could get into. “Now we’re all together again,” said Sister John Bosco. “The second of many such meetings, I’m sure. Will you start, Father Laverty?”

  The priest stared at his cookie as if asking it for guidance. Then he looked around at each of them, a nice uncomplicated look into all their eyes, and said, “We’re here for two reasons. We’re here to understand why Alice Colossus is not Alice Shaw, and why she can’t be, won’t be. It’ll take a long time to understand this, and today is just a beginning. We also need to invent some ways Alice Colossus and Miami Shaw can come to know each other as sisters. As twins, in fact. They will be in each other’s lives from now on, for as long as they live, and nobody is going to stand in the way of that. So this day’s work is partly hard, and may involve some tears, and partly joyful, because the hand of God and the surprising initiative of Alice have pulled the cloak of mystery away from our eyes.”

  Miami almost murmured, “Amen,” but controlled herself.

  Father Laverty went on with such delicacy, such gentleness, that at times Miami couldn’t follow. But the gist of it seemed to be that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance on a pancake griddle anyone was going to let Alice get adopted by the Shaws. First, there was money. Then there were the laws of the state of New York. There were Miami’s needs as a preteen recovering from nasty early years she could hardly remember. There were Alice’s special needs. There was Garth to think of, and Fanny, and Rachelle. It turned out Alice had had a chance for adoption already this year, first time ever, and she’d turned it down.

  “But that don’t count!” interrupted Alice, her first public pronouncement. “The Harrigans! It was right after Sister Vincent de Paul got burned up! I made a pact with God!”

  “Oh, you did,” said Father Laverty, more kindly than ever, so softly Alice couldn’t hear him and looked bewildered.

  “Oh you did,” intoned Sister John Bosco helpfully into her left ear.

  “Yeah, I did. I said when Sister Vincent de Paul comes back safe and sound, I’ll do whatever. I’ll pack up and go anywhere. But not till I know.” Alice had a fierce look, a look of a guttering candle, or of a bird banging against the insides of a window, not knowing why it can’t go through. “I said I won’t go to the Harrigans till after Sister Vincent de Paul shows up! And she never does!”

  “The point is,” said Father Laverty, “that Alice is making leaps and bounds this year. Her misbehavior has its positive side, and though Sister John Bosco loses sleep from time to time, I feel quite comfortable in Alice’s development.” Sister John Bosco was shooting him such an onslaught of disapproving looks that he amended his remarks quickly and said, “Of course I only get the most limited of pictures. Sister John Bosco, have you anything to add?”

  “Let us remember,” said Sister John Bosco, “that we’re not here to deprive anyone of anything, but to give our children the best chances they have at success. Some of the children start with considerable disadvantages. Alice is one. Learning to disobey—I feel compelled respectfully to correct Father Laverty—is not a sign of advancing maturity. On the other hand, look what Alice has achieved this year. Her taking part in the spring musicale by playing Eliza Doolittle was a triumph—not just of her willpower, but an aesthetic success as well. Alice is a gifted singer, even with her disabilities, and may be very proud of how she has marshaled her talents and her confidences.”

  Sister John Bosco then went on, “And it is not lost on anyone here that Alice’s pact with God implies a seriousness, a sobriety of moral purpose that is all too lacking in the young in this day and age. Her commitment to Sister Vincent de Paul is further proof of her accomplishments. Alice has come out of a private harbor, where once she verged on autism, to care deeply about herself and the world. Alice,” she turned, and a lovely smile blossomed within the frame of her wimple and cowl, “we will do all we can to turn you loose on the world with a vengeance, packing six-shooters if you must. Bu
t even if adoption by the Shaws were a possibility—which it is not—I could not recommend it for you. You need more exclusive attention still than the Shaws, however devoted to you, could provide. Do you understand what we’re saying?”

  “I can’t go,” said Alice in a thick voice.

  “You’re not even invited,” said Miami with bitterness. “This is a party to celebrate your being left out. Care for some more lemonade?”

  “I can see the family resemblance,” said Sister John Bosco tartly.

  “Let’s move on, shall we?” said Father Laverty. “I have to coach a CYO baseball game in Latham at twelve-thirty.”

  For a while then they talked about what could be done. Next summer Alice and Miami might go to Camp Saint Theresa during the same session. Maybe they could talk on the telephone once a week, on Saturdays? “For a predetermined length of time,” said Sister John Bosco. Maybe monthly visits? “How about Christmas?” said Miami. “There are some things the grown-ups should decide in private,” Sister John Bosco remarked. “But this is a healthy start. Would the Shaws like to see the home now before we all get on with our busy days?”

  “Yeah,” said Garth. “Come on, Alice, show us where you sleep.”

  “But just a minute,” said Mrs. Shaw, gathering up babies from the antiseptic floor. “Did I miss something, or is Alice still in the dark about this nun in the fire? This Sister Vincent de Paul?”

  Everyone looked just a bit uncertain.

  “Well, it’s clearly significant,” said Mrs. Shaw, apologetically but also boldly. “Sounds as if Alice wants to know, and she’s old enough to deserve the truth, I suppose. Did the nun die?” “Well, of course not,” said Sister John Bosco. “There would have been a requiem mass, and the girls all would have attended.”

  “She’s not dead?” said Alice.

  “Alice,” said Sister John Bosco slowly, “where in the world did you get the idea she might be dead?”

  “Well, where is she?” said Alice. “It don’t look like she’s around anymore, so where is she?”