The Sister Season

by Scott, Jennifer

  “Dear God,” she moaned, puffs of steam circling her face with each ragged breath. “Dear God, he’s really gone.” And this time her knees did buckle, as the image of his face filled her mind. The cute boy with the dimples; the red-faced, hard man who called her useless and berated her and never once remembered a Mother’s Day; the betrayed man, dead in his recliner at age sixty-seven. It seemed as if they could not possibly all be the same person. Who had he really been? And how did she not know?

  She slumped back onto her bottom in the cold grass and gulped as much air as she could squeeze into her lungs. Still, it felt like only teaspoonfuls. The sky swam, gray and burdened with coming snow, and she was sure she saw a birdhouse nailed to a tree just about ten feet in front of her, but damned if she could take a single step toward it . . . or even push herself back up onto her feet.

  Maybe it would be better to just freeze here. Maybe that would be easier. After all these years of stoically withstanding that which was so hard, maybe she could just, for once, go with the path of least resistance. Die in the fields, as her own daddy had done.

  “Mom?” she heard distantly, but she was still too busy trying to steady her breathing to process exactly where it was coming from. She thought there were maybe some footsteps approaching along with the voice, but in her mind she wasn’t sure if they were human footsteps or maybe the footsteps of Lucifer, Uncle Ed’s nasty old bull that had scared her so as a child. Wait, no. It couldn’t be Lucifer. They’d butchered him decades ago. They’d eaten him, Elise feeling halfway afraid to ingest his meat, for fear it would make her mean, too. Think, Elise, think. You’re really losing it now.

  Then she heard the voice again. “Mom?” And this time it made sense to her—the voice of her middle child, Maya.

  With great effort, Elise pushed herself back up to standing. Still the world spun, but at least she could give the impression of having things under control.

  Maya caught up to her, running clunkily through the pasture in her high-heeled boots.

  “Mom! You okay? Did you fall?”

  Elise nodded wearily. “Fine. I was just . . .” She trailed off, unsure how to finish the sentence. Distantly, she felt cold, and she wasn’t sure if the words would form even if she willed them to. She took a deep breath, squeezed her eyes shut. “Just feeding the birds,” she finally managed.

  Maya squinted at the seed bucket at Elise’s feet. “At night? On the ground?”

  And the question was so ridiculous that things began to snap back into place for Elise. Come back to reality. The sky slowed and then stopped tilting, her lungs opened, her thoughts cleared. She waved her hand dismissively toward the ground. “Old hoof divot,” she said. “I thought maybe I’d rolled my ankle in it, but I’m fine.” She held one foot up and rotated it for proof.

  Maya eyed her, unconvinced. Elise tried a tight laugh.

  “Goodness, you girls are all watching me way too closely. It’s your father who died, not me.” Instantly, she felt guilty for saying it, but Maya looked unfazed. Elise picked up the bucket and tromped toward the tree line, Maya tripping after her in those ridiculous boots and a creamy white ski jacket. “Go back to the house. You’re going to get that jacket dirty.”

  “It’s last year’s anyway,” Maya responded, her breathing labored as she tried to keep up with her mother’s stride. “It’s the boots that are a problem. Why did I wear heels to the farm?”

  “I was wondering the same thing. Really, you can go back now. I’m just going to see if any of your old feeders are still here. Give the birds some seed.”

  Maya’s hand grazed Elise’s arm lightly. “No, I want to spend time with you, Mom. Make sure you’re okay. You are okay, right? You didn’t look okay back there.”

  Elise stopped, put down the bucket again. “Well, of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Maya rolled her eyes. “You found him. After. He couldn’t have looked good.”

  Elise’s heart threatened to skip a beat again. If only Maya knew the truth. But she pushed the thought away. What was done was done and there was no need to upset everyone. “He looked like himself,” she said. “It wasn’t gruesome, if that’s what you’re worried about. He might as well have been watching one of those silly college football games on TV. In fact, he had been, so that’s exactly what it looked like.” She picked up the bucket again and strode to the first feeder, filling it with fistfuls of seed.

  “But he wasn’t watching football, Mom. He was dead. Dead is dead. He couldn’t have looked good.”

  “He looked . . .” shocked, angry, “peaceful.”

  Maya huffed impatiently, as if she was displeased at Elise’s lack of proper grief. “You were married to the man for forty-seven years. You found him dead in his recliner. That can’t have been the most peaceful experience of your life.”

  Elise whirled around, doing her best to look steady. In her mind she begged her daughter to stop talking about this. To stop making her see Robert’s dead face behind her closed eyelids. To stop reminding her of that night, of what really happened. She pasted on a smile. “Maya. He’s gone. It’s okay. We were prepared to one day say good-bye. Nothing lasts forever. You grew up on a farm. You know this. Things die.”

  Maya’s shoulders slumped. “He wasn’t a sick goose, for God’s sake.”

  “I know that. You think I don’t know that?” Elise ducked under a low-lying branch and found the second feeder. It was missing the pegs for the birds to stand on, so she just scattered some seed on the ground underneath instead, the seed rattling as it hit the layer of dead leaves below the tree. “I know you and your sisters are worried. But I’m fine. Really, I am. You make a life with someone, you prepare for this day. You’ll see. Someday you and Bradley will be old and you’ll start to prepare yourself for the possibility of his death.” She tapped her finger on her temple. “Mentally.”

  Maya made a short snorting sound. “If we make it that long,” she mumbled. “Which is doubtful.”

  Together, they wandered along the tree line, Elise peering into the thicket for the third feeder, which seemed to be gone. She felt better, almost as if she’d talked herself into feeling better by assuring Maya that she was much finer than she really was. The shaking in her knees was gone, and her lungs seemed to have opened up. She let her body go on outdoor autopilot, the tip of her nose numb from the wind, her hands red and chapped and gritty from running them through the seed, the crow’s-feet at her temples collecting water from her eyes. This was what she knew best. As long as she could still do this, still work the farm as best she could, maybe she would be okay after all.

  “Are there still problems?” she finally asked, glad for the change of subject.

  Maya shrugged. Her pace was uneven; they were too near the creek and the heels of her boots kept sinking into the softer ground. Ruining them, surely. “I honestly just . . . I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

  “I was surprised to see him here.”

  “He refused to stay home alone with the kids. That’s his new thing. There it is.” Maya pointed to an old oak set a few trees back into the woods. Stuck to the side of it was the third feeder, looking as good as new. They walked over and began filling it, both of them taking turns with the fistfuls of seed. “I made this one,” Maya said. “Dad yelled at me for wasting nails.” She gave another of those sardonic snort-laughs, and Elise wondered if this, too, was part of Maya’s Chicago Perfection Persona—the guttural, dysthymic chuckle. “He could be such an asshole. Is it a sin to say that?”

  Elise blinked. “Your father? Or Bradley?”

  And this time Maya really did laugh out loud, the laugh Elise remembered from her childhood—not that snorty laugh that sounded as if she were poking fun at a servant. “Both, I suppose.”

  There were just a few handfuls of seed left in the bucket now. They took turns sprinkling it along the ground, until finally the buc
ket was empty.

  “Anyway, he refuses to stay home alone with the kids,” Maya continued as they headed back toward the house. “Says he ‘didn’t go to graduate school to be a goddamn babysitter.’” She made air quotes with her fingers while she talked, her voice going low and taking on a buffoonish quality. “As if they aren’t even his kids. I keep telling him it’s not babysitting if they’re your own children, but he doesn’t listen. He’s too self-absorbed to listen to anyone but himself. So he wouldn’t stay with them, and I’ve been . . . under the weather, I guess . . . so I didn’t want to travel all the way here with them by myself.”

  “You’ve been sick?”

  “It’s nothing. I’m taking care of it.” Maya flicked her hand, then tucked it into her armpit. To Elise, she looked as if she were hugging herself, protecting herself, her dismissal flat and not believable. But before Elise could follow up, Maya continued. “And . . . so . . . Bradley is here. With . . .”

  “With his family, where he belongs. It is Christmas.”

  “No, I was going to say ‘with Claire.’”

  Elise stopped walking. Of course she’d known this was going to come up, sooner rather than later. “Have you talked to her?”

  Maya shook her head, her iron-straightened hair whipping around her face like filament. Elise noticed that despite the long day her daughter still had makeup in place. My God, how exhausting that must be, she thought. “She was still in her room. Though . . . you never know. Maybe he’s seen her. Maybe he’s in there with her right now.”

  “Oh, Maya,” Elise said softly. “You don’t still think . . .”

  “Of course I do. I’ve never had any reason not to.”

  Elise grabbed her daughter’s hand and began walking toward the house again. “She said it never happened. She swore to you. She’s your sister. That’s a reason not to, don’t you think?”

  “But he never denied it. And Claire has sworn a lot of lies over the years.”

  Elise nodded patiently. “Always little lies. Nothing this big. Besides, even if she did, it’s been so many years.” She stepped over a large limb that had fallen off the plum tree during the last snow. It would make good firewood, but that had always been Robert’s job. Elise wasn’t even sure she’d be able to lift it by herself. But fortunately that was not something she needed to worry about right now. “You forgave Bradley.”

  This time Maya stopped abruptly, her hand leaving Elise’s. Her cheeks were pink, whether with fury or cold Elise couldn’t be sure. “Mom, I will never forgive her. You don’t sleep with your sister’s husband and just . . . expect forgiveness.” She raised a manicured nail, pointed it at the house as if she were pointing to her sister. “Now, I will make nice for the next few days until we get Dad buried, but then she’s back to not even existing in my world. Please don’t ask me to accept her. Please. Queenie understands and you need to, too. Claire is not my sister. She lost that right eight years ago. She will never get it back.”

  “Maya, it’s Christmas,” Elise said, standing there, clutching the empty bucket in front of her.

  “I know. I’m sorry. But it’s not like we’ve ever had a happy little family Christmas anyway,” Maya answered. “I need to check on the kids.” She turned on her heel and strutted off toward the house in those ridiculous boots, both arms crossed over her chest, her cocoa-colored hair fluttering beautifully against her jacket. Such perfection. Such torment. Elise could not see how you could separate the two when it came to that woman.

  Elise considered calling after her, but decided against it. What would she say? Just as Maya had no proof that Claire had been lying, neither did Elise have any that Claire had been telling the truth. Would she like to say she absolutely disbelieved that her younger daughter would do anything so terrible to her older sister? Yes, of course. But eight years ago was such a tumultuous time for Claire. Especially that particular day eight years ago. That day was the worst. The last day Claire ever spoke to her father or her sisters, as far as Elise knew.

  The day Maya found . . . Oh, poor Maya.

  Elise had thought she would never live through the weeping and the screaming and the threats and the beseeching to take a side, any side, but she found that if she simply stuck with her usual silent poise, eventually everything would calm down. She was hardly a pillar of strength at the time herself. She knew nothing about healthy marriages. And she felt like an utter failure over raising a daughter who would steal another daughter’s new husband. It just didn’t even seem possible. Surely there was a lesson she hadn’t imparted, a moral she hadn’t spoken.

  Maya and Claire were at war. They vowed never to speak to each other again—Maya out of betrayal and Claire out of disbelief that her sister would distrust her so—and poor Julia, not sure whose side to take, vowed silence as well, just to stay out of it. She had marriage problems of her own to deal with, and a six-year-old little boy caught between two fighting parents like a pasture fence trembling with the effort to stay dug in during a tornado.

  As far as Elise knew, that silence had mostly stuck. Claire packed a garbage bag full of clothes and slipped off to California. Bradley took a job in Chicago, where, cut off from family and everything familiar, Maya had no choice but to forgive him. And Julia lived her own separate hell up in Kansas City, leaving Elise to contend with Robert and all that achingly empty space in the house by herself.

  And now they were all back. They were under the same roof. They would be here for days.

  And most important . . . their silence would be forced to be broken.

  Attempts—I

  The clock in his bedroom had the loudest tick he’d ever heard. Even if he’d wanted to sleep, there was no way he ever could. It was so quiet in the country—every little bump and noise and creak sounded like a bomb dropping.

  Not that he really wanted to sleep here at all. He didn’t even want to be here. He didn’t have any great Christmas plans or anything, but just sitting at home watching old reruns of that Charlie Brown Christmas show alone would be better than this. This house was hot. And crowded. And he didn’t know anyone, and they were all crammed around the kitchen table all the time and were all mad at each other. Stupid. Seriously, everyone tried to tell you that when you grew up, things got better, but as far as he could see, adults were no less likely to get dumb in an argument than kids were.

  He turned over, his cot squeaking loudly against the silent midnight, and stared out the window, the moon spotted by the filmy polka-dot curtain. He was pretty sure everyone else was asleep by now, but his eyes felt pried open by an unseen force. His mind felt electric, like it would never turn off. He could hear his mom’s soft breathing over in her bed. She was turned away from him. The dotted moonlight fell across her like a second blanket.

  After a while, he turned over again, and then again. And then, with a sigh, sat up and slipped out of his cot and padded down the hallway in his socks.

  The hallway spilled into the front room, the room where his grandfather had died. Right there in the recliner. He reached out and slid his hand along the arm of the chair, touching the rough upholstery with his fingers. A death chair. The very thought excited him.

  Slowly, carefully, without making any sound, he slid into the chair, easing back into it luxuriously. Every nerve in his body felt every bump of the fabric. It was like being on a drug—a death drug. It was the best thing he’d felt in a long time. Maybe for as long as he could remember.

  He started to consider all the things he could do in this chair. All the things he could do, period. All the ways he could accomplish exactly what he wanted to accomplish. He pulled a pocketknife he’d found in the top drawer of the bedroom bureau, small but sharp, out of the waistband of his pajamas and unfolded it, taking in the gleam of the blade in the moonlit room.

  But no sooner had he held the knife up than he heard a noise. He stiffened, every muscle tensing, ears straining to hea
r if it was just another pop of the house settling, or something more.

  Creak, creak, creak.

  Footsteps. It was definitely footsteps. Treading carefully down the hallway. Quickly, he closed the knife and stashed it back in his waistband. His heart pounded as he listened for more, sitting straight as a spike in the chair, hands clamped on the arms as if they would protect him.

  Creak, creak, creak.

  The steps moved closer and then turned toward the kitchen. He let out a shaky breath, as slowly as possible, and listened as the steps turned to the rustling of a coat and the whine of the back door opening onto the sunporch. And then a light click as it shut.

  Gulping, trembling, he bolted out of the chair and, taking as much care as he could, raced back toward his room, plunging the knife under the cot mattress where he’d hidden it earlier in the afternoon.

  His mom stirred and rolled over when he dove back onto his cot, but he simply flung the blanket over himself and closed his eyes, feigning sleep, feeling certain that his heartbeat could be heard across the room.

  But the clock kept ticking. The night settled back around him. He calmed and even began to doze a little, the adrenaline rush subsiding and soothing his system. He began wondering who he’d heard. Who was wandering around outside this late at night? And why?

  He tumbled into sleep. He didn’t hear the second set of footsteps pass his bedroom and slip out the back door.

  December

  23

  “You can’t take every little threat seriously.”

  Four

  Julia’s hands shook as she fumbled in her coat pocket. She supposed she could blame the shakiness on the cold—it felt absolutely subarctic out here, especially when the wind zipped tiny pellets of ice around the garage corner and up against her face—but she knew her jitters had far more to do with the phone conversation she’d just had with her ex-husband.