The Sisters Chase

by Sarah Healy

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Bunny

  1977

  1981

  1981

  1981

  1981

  1981

  1982

  1982

  1982

  1982

  1982

  1976

  1983

  1976

  1983

  1983

  1983

  1983

  1983

  1983

  1983

  1977

  1989

  1976

  1989

  1989

  1976

  1989

  1989

  1977

  1989

  1989

  1989

  1990

  1990

  1990

  Bunny

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Healy

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Healy, Sarah, date, author.

  Title: The sisters chase / Sarah Healy.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016045736 (print) | LCCN 2016054727 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544960077 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544960121 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Sisters—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Coming of age. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.E2495 S57 2017 (print) | LCC PS3608.E2495 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045736

  Cover design by Michaela Sullivan

  Cover photograph Stephen Carroll/Arcangel Images

  For my sons,

  Noah, Max, and Ollie

  One

  Bunny

  I was in the grocery store the other night waiting to be checked out, and in the line next to me were these two girls. They were nineteen, maybe twenty years old. And as they stood there leaning on their cart, they let their heels slide out of the backs of their clogs and picked at their chipping nail polish. One flipped through a gossip magazine while the other looked on. When they straightened up, you could see the indentation of their belly buttons through their T-shirts. They were just girls, Mare. And I wondered if you ever got to be a girl like that.

  Then a song came on. It’s big right now; you would know it. And as soon as they heard it, these two girls look at each other, and without a word, they let their heads drop back and they opened their mouths and you should have heard the voices that came out. You should have heard how beautifully these girls sang. Now everyone was looking at them, not just me. And for a second, I could have sworn you were there. That you had come up quietly behind me. Listen to them, Bunny, you’d say. I’d turn and you’d be smiling, your lips apple red, the hood of your sweatshirt pulled up like a cloak.

  It happens like that. I’ll be in the grocery store or waiting for the train or out on a run. And suddenly you come into my mind and it’s like I’m underwater. Like the rest of the world is above me and I’m watching it through the ripples and shimmers of the surface. And I’ll remember how on those days when the ocean was calm, you’d take me into the water and we’d sink down to the bottom and stay there for as long as we could. My need for breath always sent me bursting to the surface, but it seemed like you could stay down there forever, your black hair swirling around like smoke.

  I don’t tell many people about you, Mare. Or at least I don’t tell them much. But I framed some of your drawings and put them up around the house. And sometimes Daniel and I will have friends over, and I’ll see someone staring at one. Who did this? they’ll ask, not looking away, their nose near the glass.

  My sister, Mary, I’ll say.

  Two

  1977

  It had been a day and a half since the baby was born, and still she did not have a name. Diane stared down at her, a dim yellow light illuminating the hospital room. A tiny fist escaped the swaddling blankets, and Diane gently spread it open with her thumb as if she were unfurling the frond of a fern. Looking at the wrinkled palm, at the translucent crescents of fingernails, she brought the little hand to her face and inhaled the child in, inhaled her newness, her purity. She was worth it, of course; she was worth everything that had been and would be sacrificed. “Sweet girl,” Diane whispered.

  The maternity ward was without sound that night, and Diane felt as though they were sheltered in the belly of a boat as it drifted across a still black sea. Mary stood at the hospital room’s single window, her forehead resting against the cool glass, her eyebrows tensed as she peered into the night. Even at fourteen, Mary’s beauty had a ferocity to it, an elegant savagery. Diane let her head loll against the blue vinyl chair as she stared at her daughter’s back, at her reflection in the window.

  “How ya doin’, Mary, honey?” she asked.

  But Mary was silent.

  Diane looked back down at the baby, feeling the warmth of her in her arms. She hadn’t wanted her, had mourned her coming birth. When she learned with certainty that there was, in fact, a baby, she cried for two days, pacing around the motel and muttering about how stupid she was. How she, of all people, should have known better. How this was going to ruin their lives. But that was all incomprehensible now. Their family was now three: she, Mary, and the baby.

  She and Mary had left Sandy Bank, New Jersey, and their home at the Water’s Edge Motel in September. It was usually only the summer people who left then. Even though the motel closed soon after Labor Day, Mary and her mother always stayed through those months of churning gray seas and empty streets with the rest of the locals. Mary hadn’t wanted to go. There was a boy, of course. Someone Mary would have to leave, though she wouldn’t say who. And so she subjected Diane to terrifying acts of rebellion intermixed with frigid weeks of silence before their departure, but Diane insisted that this baby had to be born elsewhere. That she had to be born in a place without winters. So Diane pulled Mary out of school and they drove south, migrating slowly through small towns where people spoke with languid words until they reached their destination.

  Bardavista, Florida, was a small city on the Gulf of Mexico whose business was shrimp and the United States Navy. And during that winter, Diane and Mary stayed on the barrier island of Bardavista Beach, which then had only a smattering of motels and beach cottages. Together they walked in silence over sugar-white sand from their cottage up to Ft. Rillieux. The fort was an enormous structure occupying one end of the narrow semibarren island. When they first visited, Diane found Mary reading a placard about Geronimo, who had been held there for a year of his life.

  Diane read over her daughter’s shoulder. “Geronimo,” she said. “Isn’t that something?”

  Mary was quiet for a moment. “One of his wives died here.”

  “In Bardavista?”

  “She’s buried in the big cemetery. Over the bridge.”

  Diane and Mary kept to themselves in Bardavista and people let them. At thirty-four, Diane was still young. She liked to think that people assumed she and Mary were sisters. Maybe even two young naval wives walking together on the sand while their husbands donned uniforms and defended the nation.

  Diane worried about Mary during those months. Worried that she was supplanting the need
s of one child for another. Worried that something essential was being drained from her wild, lovely daughter. Mary used to sit alone on that beach that winter, a sheet of paper resting atop the phone book in her lap. She’d draw creatures rising up out of the sea, pelagic dragons, their massive bellies turned skyward as they breached the white crests of waves. Mary had always been an exceptional artist.

  Diane had been twenty when Mary was born. It was she and her father at the Water’s Edge then. Vietnam was about to become the event horizon for a generation of young men, and so, perhaps sensing the inevitability of that conflict, boys began crisscrossing the country like creatures at once pursued and in pursuit. They would show up every so often at the Water’s Edge with an undirected hunger in their eyes, searching for something for which to long. And one day a boy with thick dark hair and a tall broad body parked his motorcycle in the lot of the motel and came in, addressing Mr. Chase as “sir” and asking for a room.

  Mr. Chase looked down through his glasses as he took the boy’s name and where he was from.

  “Vincent Drake,” he said. “From Bardavista, Florida.”

  Mr. Chase gave a murmur of recognition. “I hear it’s beautiful down there.”

  And as Mr. Chase filled out the paperwork in his slow, careful script, Vincent Drake looked out the window behind the front desk at the pretty girl who was shooing away seagulls from the Dumpster as she heaved in another overstuffed trash bag.

  After shutting the lid, Diane came back into the office, eyes and mind elsewhere as she started to say, “Daddy, the . . .” Then she noticed Vincent Drake and her words slowed a bit. “Dumpster is full.” And the boy found something for which to long.

  Diane didn’t have the opportunity to tell Vincent Drake that she was pregnant. Her father spent months calling town clerks’ offices, but they never did find a young man with that name near Bardavista. And though mother and daughter walked those beaches together for weeks, Diane never told Mary why she had chosen there, of all places, to wait out the arrival of another child. Diane wasn’t even sure if she herself knew.

  Sometimes during that winter, Diane would look at her daughter as if remembering the man who said his name was Vincent. Mary resembled him physically, but where his presence was most apparent was in Mary’s boldness. In her opportunistic charm. In the way she could tell wild, outrageous lies with a steady-eyed calm.

  Mary had a similar expression on her face now as she stared out of the window of the hospital room. Diane shifted, feeling the fatigue in her body reach down to her bones.

  “Mary, honey,” Diane said. “Can you hold the baby for a minute?”

  Mary didn’t move. Diane shifted slightly in her seat, suddenly feeling the enormity of raising another child on her own. She was going to need Mary, she knew. She was going to need her girl.

  “Mary,” she said, her tone sapped of patience, her words lingering and long. “I need you to hold your sister.”

  Mary’s eyes found her mother’s in the window’s black glass, all that was unspoken passing in a look.

  “Why?” asked Mary.

  Diane held her daughter’s gaze. “Because I have to go to the bathroom, Mary.”

  Mary turned slowly and looked at the baby, her arms at her sides. Diane struggled up, cradling the infant in one arm while pushing herself up with the other. “Mare . . . ,” she said, keeping her awkward hold. “Can you?” She felt herself slip slightly, fall back against the chair, and the baby let out a mewling cry.

  And to Diane it looked like reflex, like some primal need to protect the being with whom she shared blood—a tribal sense of duty. But Mary darted forward, sliding her arms beneath the baby and pulling her into her chest. Diane watched them for a moment, watched as Mary started to sway, calming the child.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, but Mary was still looking at the baby, some internal battle silently being waged.

  In the bathroom, Diane turned on the water and sat on the toilet, letting it run and run, letting it drown out everything else. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed in there. It could have been five minutes. It could have been twenty. And when she opened the door, Mary was sitting in the blue vinyl chair, the baby still in her arms. Diane watched them for a moment.

  “So,” Diane said. And Mary started slightly, as if she hadn’t heard her leave the bathroom. “What are we going to name her?”

  “Name her whatever you want,” Mary replied, though she couldn’t quite look away from the baby’s small face.

  “She’s going to need you, Mary,” said Diane. It was something Diane knew without understanding how. “Do you know that?”

  Diane walked over and sat on the edge of the hospital bed facing her daughter. Diane waited, knowing that Mary was a girl whose loyalty was fierce and rare and absolute. Knowing that Mary was deciding, right at this moment, whether or not to love this child, whether or not to give herself to her entirely. The baby squirmed in Mary’s arms and the expression on Mary’s face slackened and at that moment Diane knew it was done. Raising her chin, Mary looked at her mother, and said simply, “Let’s call her Hannah.” And with those words, it was as if Mary had slashed the palm of her hand and offered her blood as oath.

  Soon the three of them would return to Sandy Bank, and the whispers and gossip would rise like a tide and then eventually recede. The father of Diane’s second baby, it was said, had swept in and out of her life in much the same way as the father of her first. Another Vincent Drake had come to the Water’s Edge, laid Diane down on a sand dune, and given her a child but nothing more.

  Three

  1981

  In the dark, Mary felt the presence of the small light-limbed body next to her. She and her little sister lay with their heads on the same pillow, Mary’s dark hair mingling with Hannah’s light. Hannah had inched in as close as she could and wrapped both of her arms around one of Mary’s as the story Mary was telling grew almost unbearably climactic for a four-year-old.

  “Princess Hannah and Princess Mary raced as fast as they could through the forest, the briars ripping the skirts of their gowns and scratching their hands and faces,” said Mary, skillfully riding the wave of her tale. “Because behind them . . . they heard the wolves.”

  Hannah gasped. “The evil queen’s wolves?” she asked, as she hugged Mary’s arm tighter.

  “The evil queen’s wolves,” confirmed Mary.

  Mary could spin masterful stories and often transformed the room she and Hannah shared at the Water’s Edge into a land of beauty and magic and danger. A land where they were princesses, always running, always pursued. A land where no one was to be trusted except each other.

  “And just as they reached the edge of the Black Woods”—Mary’s voice built as if she were giving a speech from a grandstand—“a wolf came leaping out of the dark, its mouth open, its fangs bared. But Princess Mary drew her sword and plunged it into the beast.”

  “Does that mean she killed it?” asked Hannah, the words coming out as an urgent breath.

  Mary smiled at her sister and nodded, relishing Hannah’s utter absorption, her lack of disbelief. “Then Princess Mary pulled Princess Hannah onto her back, and together they ran out of the Black Woods, falling out of the forest just as the rest of the pack reached its edge.”

  “So they were safe?” asked Hannah, desperate for confirmation. “The wolves didn’t get them?”

  “They were safe.” Mary leaned over to kiss her sister on the line where her hair met the skin of her forehead. “Don’t worry, Bunny. The wolves can’t leave the Black Woods.”

  DIANE DIDN’T LIKE THE STORIES that Mary told Hannah. “They’re too much for her,” she’d said one morning, piling a plate high with the powdered sugar donuts that they set out for the motel’s guests. “She doesn’t understand that they’re not real.”

  Mary looked at her mother, her gaze sharp. Mary bristled when her judgment regarding Hannah was called into question. “She likes them,” she answered, taking a donut fro
m the stack. It was past Labor Day, so only a handful of the rooms at the motel were occupied, but Diane was a believer in customs.

  “Yeah, well,” started Diane. She let her head drop back as she rubbed her eyes. “I like a lot of things that aren’t good for me, too.” Diane had grown heavier since Hannah was born, her stomach and thighs thickening until her figure, once so girlish, was now matronly. Everyone assumed it was baby weight, but Diane blamed her schedule and never having time to eat a proper meal or get a full night’s sleep. Since her father had died, she ran the Water’s Edge alone, taking a second job as a cocktail waitress at one of the casinos down in Atlantic City to make ends meet during the off-season. “So listen,” she said, letting her hand drop to the counter. “Mrs. Pool is going to make you girls some dinner tonight. I had to pick up Tina’s shift so I won’t be home.” Diane looked at her daughter. “Can you watch the front desk when you get home from school?”

  “Yeah,” said Mary, brushing her dark hair over her shoulder. “Sure.”

  Diane’s eyes remained wide as she looked at her daughter, as if to communicate both her distrust and concern. “Because someone needs to be here from three o’clock on. Mrs. Pool can cover until then.” Mrs. Pool lived next door to the Water’s Edge, which was, incidentally, not on the water’s edge but several blocks away. Having sympathy for the woman who was raising two children alone, Mrs. Pool often helped Diane with both the girls and the motel. “And when I say here,” Diane said, slapping her open palm on the laminate wood countertop for emphasis, “I mean right here.”

  “I got it, Mom.”

  Diane continued to stare for a moment, then looked away, grabbing the now empty donut bag and crumpling it against her chest. “Alright,” she said. “Okay.” Mary looked coolly at her mother until Diane changed the subject. “So school is starting off good this year?” she asked.