The Second Sister

by Marie Bostwick

  His discomfort was understandable. We hadn’t parted on very good terms, but I was ready to overlook that. I’d been thinking about him and . . . well, I’d been thinking about a lot of things since I’d seen him at the festival. I figured that his sudden appearance meant he’d been doing the same thing.

  There was so much I wanted to say to him, speeches I’d been mentally rehearsing for the last day or two, but he was the one who had taken the initiative, so I thought it would be better—and yes, less embarrassing for me—to let him speak first. Then, as soon as he broached the subject, I’d jump in and let him off the hook, and we could move on from there as if nothing had happened and make a fresh start. But he certainly was taking his time working up to it.

  Waiting for the coffee to drip, we made small talk about the weather and how we couldn’t believe that it was only a few days until Christmas. He was nice enough to ask how things had gone at the meeting and said he was happy it had gone well, which, in light of our last conversation, was big of him.

  I filled two mugs with coffee and set them on the table along with a plate of leftover bars in case he was feeling hungry.

  “So,” I said with what I hoped was an encouraging smile, “is this just a social call? Or is there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

  He took a big gulp of coffee, as if he were trying to fortify himself for what was to come next.

  “Yes, there is. But first, I want you to know that I . . .”

  He stopped for a second and looked up at the ceiling, clearly at a loss as to how to begin. It was really kind of sweet.

  He cleared his throat and tried again. “Lucy, before I say what I’ve come to say, I want to tell you that I’m sorry.”

  I smiled. “You don’t have to apologize. I think we both said some things we wish we hadn’t, so let’s just call it a wash and move forward. Okay? I’m pretty sure I already know what you’re here to say anyway.”

  Peter tilted his head to the side, giving me a quizzical frown.

  “No, I don’t think you do.” He took a breath. “What I wanted to say is that I’m sorry I couldn’t be more forthright with you about this before, but, professionally, I really couldn’t talk to you about it. But something has happened to change that.”

  “Professionally? So, this has something to do with Alice?”

  “Yes.” He took an even bigger gulp of coffee. “As you know, Alice hired me to create a will for her. But that wasn’t the only thing she asked me to do for her. When she first came to see me, right after I moved home to Nilson’s Bay and started my practice, it was because she wanted me to help her find someone.”

  He looked at me for a moment, as if hoping that I’d take it from there, but I honestly had no idea what he was talking about.

  “She wanted me to find Maeve,” he said.

  It took a second for his meaning to fully sink in.

  “But . . . but I asked you if she’d ever mentioned anyone named Maeve and you said she hadn’t.”

  “No,” Peter said, his eyes solemn and his voice even, “I said that I couldn’t say that I had. And it was true; I couldn’t. Alice told me about Maeve in confidence, as her attorney, and because of that—”

  “You knew? And you didn’t tell me? Not even when I came right out and asked?” Peter started to answer, but I didn’t give him the chance. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to any more lawyer-speak. “What right do you have to keep secrets about my sister?”

  “Because they were Alice’s secrets, not yours!”

  His raised voice and the sudden flash of his eyes startled me into silence. He took a couple of breaths and went on, his voice low and deliberate.

  “Even after her death, unless there was some compelling reason to do otherwise, I had a duty to keep her confidence.”

  “And now there’s a compelling reason?”

  “Maeve is Alice’s daughter.”

  My mouth dropped open. For a moment, I forgot to breathe.

  “Her daughter? Is this some kind of joke? Alice was never pregnant. She never even had a boyfriend! Not after the accident.”

  “Yes, she did,” he said. “Well, I assume there was a boyfriend. Honestly, it could have just been some guy who took advantage of her. Alice never wanted to talk about it. You know how she was.”

  I started to nod, but then realized that maybe I really didn’t know how Alice was.

  “She never shared more than the basic facts,” Peter said. “All I know is that she got pregnant while she was away at school, working on her veterinary tech certification. Your parents convinced her that she couldn’t keep it, that she wasn’t capable of taking care of a baby, and made arrangements for her to go away to have the baby and then give it up for adoption. They told her that she could never tell anyone about it, not even you. They said if people knew it would make the family look bad and hurt your dad’s practice.”

  I let out an incredulous huff. They didn’t need Alice’s help with that. Dad had been perfectly capable of hurting his practice all on his own.

  “Alice was always sad about giving her baby up for adoption,” Peter continued. “She thought about her all the time. After a couple of years, she became so depressed that she tried to kill herself.”

  I’d always known about that part. Mom had found her lying on the floor, unconscious. She called me from the emergency room, completely hysterical. I told her everything was going to be okay, even though I didn’t know if it was, but somebody had to calm her down. I packed a bag and went to the airport, but before I could board the plane, Mom called again and said that Alice was awake and would be all right, but they were transferring her to a psychiatric hospital and that she wouldn’t be allowed visitors, so I shouldn’t come after all. Alice was in the hospital for three weeks and I sent postcards almost every day, most with pictures of animals, but she never answered. After she was released, she didn’t want to talk about it. Neither did my parents, even when I asked my mother directly.

  “That was the first time she’d ever told anyone about the baby,” Peter said, “during that time in the hospital. Alice said it made her feel better just to be able to talk to someone about it. The doctor said that even though Alice wasn’t in contact with Maeve, she might want to make something for her—”

  “The quilts,” I whispered.

  And the drawings too. Though she hadn’t inscribed them, I knew without being told that the dozens upon dozens of drawings were of Alice’s daughter, the way she had imagined her for all those years as a baby, a toddler, a girl, a teen, and the life they might have had together.

  “So she made a quilt for every year of Maeve’s life,” I said, “hoping that someday she would find her and be able to give them to her in person.”

  “That’s right,” Peter said. “After I moved back to Nilson’s Bay, she came to my office and asked if I could help her get in contact with Maeve. I tried,” Peter said earnestly, “but it was a closed adoption, so I couldn’t track her down. I did help Alice register with several reunion registries. It was a long shot, but I hoped that once Maeve turned eighteen, assuming she even knew she was adopted, she might go searching for her birth mother. Now she has. Maeve—her name is Jennifer now—called my office yesterday.”

  I started to cry. How could I not?

  Everything about Alice’s life and death, her unfulfilled promise and longing, and the secrets she’d felt she had to keep, even from me, was not as tragic as knowing that the child she had carried and borne but never known and, yet, who was never far from her heart, not even for a day, had finally come looking for her. But come too late.

  I pressed my hand hard against my mouth, barricading the sobs that threatened to escape. My shoulders shuddered with silent convulsions as the tears trailed down my cheeks. Peter moved his chair back, as if he might come to comfort me, but I raised my arm to warn him away. I didn’t want to be comforted. I didn’t want him.

  “Why?” I choked when I was finally able to speak. “Dear God, why now
? Why let her die before she had a chance to meet her daughter? What was the point?”

  When God shared no answer, I posed the question to Peter. He offered no explanation either, just sat there helplessly.

  “I thought . . .” he said hesitantly, casting his eyes over his shoulder as if embarrassed by my tears, or perhaps by his inability to stop them. “I thought you’d want to meet her, to give her the quilts. She’s coming up the day after tomorrow. I made a lunch reservation for you at the Harbor Fish Market in Bailey’s Harbor. It’s quiet there and I thought you’d prefer that to—”

  “You should have told me about her before,” I said, as the tears of my grief grew hotter and harder, turning to anger.

  He turned his head toward me, his gaze steady and final. “I couldn’t.”

  “You should have gotten Alice to tell me. If she’d just have told me, then—”

  “I tried to, but she wouldn’t . . .” He stopped himself. His lips became a line. “She wouldn’t do it.”

  “You should have made her!”

  His eyes flashed and he slammed his hands hard against the table, shoved his chair back, and sprang to his feet, his body unfolding sharp and fast like a jackknife ready to slice.

  For a moment I thought he would shout back and I was glad. I wanted him to be as angry as I was, to feel what I was feeling, to know his own failure the way I knew mine. But he didn’t shout. Instead his voice became low, hard, and cutting.

  “I couldn’t make Alice do, or feel, or see anything. Not any more than I can you. I don’t know what more you expect of me, Lucy. I don’t know what you want.”

  I shook my head, turned my face to the wall. When I turned back, he was gone.

  Chapter 40

  It came back that night, the dream.

  It had been at least three weeks since I’d walked across the white plain and the earth had opened up, swallowing me whole, plunging me into the icy, suffocating depths, but Celia’s harangue summoned it back into being, in the extended version that came to me shortly before Alice’s death, the dream where she saves me, but then, the tables turning, I am unable to save her. And this time, there was something more.

  Unable to grab hold and haul Alice back to the surface, I put my head into the hole and then slipped through to follow her, my arms stretched out and pointed purposely toward the abyss. I couldn’t see Alice, but I knew she was just ahead of me, somewhere, hidden in the black. I was frozen with cold and nearly out of air, and frightened, knowing that, in a moment, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from opening my mouth and trying to breathe, that I could not override eons of instinct, and that doing so would mark the end. And I was right.

  With my lungs about to burst, my mouth opened in a desperate gasp. I was flooded by water and fear and relief. Terrible relief. And a single thought that shone quicksilver bright in my brain.

  Just let it be over.

  I woke with a start, the way I had on that night when Alice’s final phone call splintered my dream, but this time there was no rude ringing phone and no patient and persistent sister, begging me to come home and remember rightly.

  And still, it wasn’t over. It never would be. Not unless I figured out a way to finish it.

  Chapter 41

  Though I had never in my life needed wise counsel more than I did that day, there wasn’t anyone to talk to. Celia and the rest of the FOA were obviously not speaking to me, and I wasn’t speaking to Peter. Barney was away at his conference, and Joe Feeney was on a flight to Los Angeles, probably to meet with his deep-pocket developer client.

  I even tried getting hold of Jenna, not that I thought she’d have much to offer or add, but I was desperate to talk to someone—anyone. My own thoughts and uncertainties were circling in a continuous loop, as pointless as a dog chasing its own tail.

  Finally, I got into the car and started driving with no particular destination in mind, just wanting to get out of the house and outrun the tangle of emotions that clung to me like spiderwebs. I drove out to the lighthouse, now closed for the winter, then turned around and drove back, went past the turn for the house and back through town, passing the town hall, the market, the bookshop, the library, and The Library. I nearly passed St. Agnes’s too. But then, suddenly, without really knowing why, I took a sharp, hard right, turning so quickly that the rear tires fishtailed and almost hit the curb.

  The big oak doors to the church were unlocked, but heavy. I had to pull with both hands to open them.

  I went inside, hearing my footsteps echo against the stone floor, breathing in the church scent of my childhood, a perfume mixed from dust and candle wax and damp wool. The dim winter sun coming through the banks of stained glass windows bathed the walls and floors in dull red, gold, and blue. The doors swung closed behind me with a soft but solid thump. I walked up the center aisle and, four pews from the front, crossed myself and sat down on the right-hand side.

  It was incredibly quiet and still. I had a sudden feeling of—I don’t quite know how to describe it—of expectation, I guess. As though I’d been summoned for an audience with some ancient and august monarch.

  I sat there, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

  After a few minutes I glanced down to my right and saw a book lying on the pew next to me, a copy of Augustine’s Confessions —a book my mother had pored over constantly. It was still there, sitting in the bookcase at the cottage. I’d never opened it, but now I did and began to read....

  For it is thou, O Lord, who judgest me. For although no man “knows the things of a man, save the spirit of the man which is in him,” yet there is something of man which “the spirit of the man which is in him” does not know itself. But thou, O Lord, who madest him, knowest him completely. . . . Therefore, as long as I journey away from thee, I am more present with myself than with thee.... I would therefore confess what I know about myself; I will also confess what I do not know about myself. What I do know of myself, I know from thy enlightening of me; and what I do not know of myself, I will continue not to know until the time when my “darkness is as the noonday” in thy sight.

  The things I knew about myself, the things I had journeyed so long and hard to escape, had pursued me just the same. The actions I’d refused to acknowledge and memories I’d tried to expunge are written with indelible ink. I could not erase them. God knows I tried.

  God knows. So who am I running from?

  The answer was suddenly clear. Only myself.

  There was a click-click-click and the overhead lights illuminated in three groups—back, center, and front. Father Damon’s voice echoed off the high ceiling and limestone walls.

  “Lucy? Is that you?”

  He walked up the aisle and I quickly swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand.

  “I was just coming to hear confessions. I don’t get many takers in winter; maybe it’s too cold to sin,” he said. “But just the same, I’m here every Wednesday from noon to one. Just in case someone needs me.”

  He stopped at the end of the pew and turned to face me.

  “Is there something I can help you with, Lucy?”

  I told him everything. Not just about Peter and Celia and Maeve, but everything, the things I had never told anyone. We didn’t go into the confessional; it was too late to hide behind a screen. Instead, we sat turned toward each other in the pew, face-to-face, talking. Actually, I did most of the talking. Father Damon responded now and then or urged me to go on, but mostly he just listened. There was a lot to listen to.

  On that day, the day of the picnic, I’d had this plan—this stupid, childish plan—to get Peter’s attention. I took the tip money I’d made at the restaurant, everything I’d earned for a month, and bought a bikini from one of those expensive boutiques in Fish Creek where the tourists go. It cost me a fortune and it was tiny and my mother would have had a fit if she saw it. I knew that so I hid it in the bottom drawer of my dresser, underneath a bunch of winter sweaters, because I didn’t think she’d go looking in th
ere.

  She didn’t. But Alice did.

  She was looking for a pair of pink shorts she thought I’d borrowed, found the bikini, and showed it to Mom. Mom was furious and she yelled at me. And Alice? Alice just stood there, right behind Mom’s right shoulder where she knew I could see, smirking.

  I was angry. I was so, so angry. Not so much because she’d ratted me out, but because she enjoyed doing it. And also because, after Mom went off to church and Alice and I drove to the Tielens’ house for the picnic, she kept teasing me about it, needling me about trying to flaunt myself and saying that, just because I’d finally grown a pair, did I really think that the boys were going to take any notice of me? And that even if they did, it would only be because they’d be hoping to cop a feel and that I’d be making a fool of myself, parading around in that outfit.

  I’m not sure I could have put it into words back then, but I think I’d been anticipating the picnic as the day of my transformation. Not just the day when I’d capture Peter’s attention—though I wanted that, too—but the day when I would become someone . . . different. Someone that other people wouldn’t be able to overlook anymore. But Alice spoiled it for me, made me doubt myself, made me afraid that everything she’d said was true. That’s why I was so angry. At that moment, I honestly think I hated her.

  Of course, it was silly to think that a new bathing suit was going to change the course of my life, but I was sixteen. At sixteen you still believe in transformation. And I wasn’t really wrong. In a sense, that bikini did change my life. Alice’s too.

  I wish I’d never laid eyes on it.

  I was starting to feel that way even before we arrived at the picnic, but it was too late by then. The bikini was the only thing I had on under my shorts and top, and it was so incredibly hot. I told Denise I wanted to sit down on the far side, away from the crowd, but mostly away from Alice and her friends, who were already sitting there like a flock of fat hens, looking at me and snickering in a way that would make it clear that I was the one they were laughing at.