The Other Sister

by Dianne Dixon

  Ali eventually left Levi. All the blood—the blood spilled in the parking lot, and in the miscarriage—had been too much.

  Now the memory of that blood was frightening her, and she said, “You need to go. I’ll always care about you, always…but don’t come back.”

  The look on Levi’s face was a mask of resentment and stubbornness, a violent refusal to let go.

  Finally, he said, “I’ll try to stay away. I’ll do my best.” The blank way he said it made it sound like a threat.

  Ali held Sofie tight and stared him down. After a while, Levi walked away and disappeared around the side of the house.

  Ali was thinking that she was afraid of him, that she hoped he would stay gone—and that she should change the locks.

  In that same fleeting splinter of time, she was thinking about the blood in the high-school parking lot. And the gum-wrapper ring on her finger. And the baby that never was.

  • • •

  The anxiety caused by Levi’s visit was still with Ali later that afternoon. When Jessica stopped by to pick up some toys and baby clothes that Sofie had outgrown—Ali’s donations to the community center where Jessica was a volunteer.

  As Ali, Sofie, and Jessica climbed the stairs leading to Ali’s attic, Jessica was saying, “I feel like a total fraud when I counsel the women at the center about parenting. I’m a shitty mother. Where do I come off telling anybody how to raise their kids?”

  “What makes you think you’re a bad mother?” Ali was a few steps ahead of Jessica, giving Sofie a boost up the stairs.

  “For a lot of women, motherhood is the most fabulous thing that ever happened to them. They swim in it, like champagne.” Jessica shot Ali an unhappy glance. “All I feel is scared. My guys are so little. They’re looking at me for everything. What if years from now, all the stuff I’m doing…the food, the vaccinations, the discipline…turns out to be wrong? Hell, what about the fact I’m staying home instead of providing them with a mother who has a career, who’s got more going on than stroller rides in the park and kissing their boo-boos? What if it all turns out to be wrong? I’m scared shitless.”

  Jessica made a frustrated, snorting sound. “I get flashes when all I want is to slap on a really short skirt and go out and have a good time. There’re days I’d give a kidney not to have to listen to crying while I’m walking around with cereal in my hair.”

  Ali stopped halfway up the stairs, looking back at Jessica. “So. You don’t like Ed. Or Joe. Even a little bit?”

  “That’s the nutty thing. I’d kill for those two. My hand to God. I would.”

  “I’m no expert, Jess. But I think that’s pretty much the definition of a good mother.”

  Jessica grinned. “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

  “I love you, too.”

  Then Ali continued up the stairs and went into the attic.

  The last time the attic had been cleaned was when Ali and Matt moved into the house. The floor was covered in dust, littered with fallen flies and dead moths. The small, round windows at either end of the room were shrouded with cobwebs.

  Ali was anxious to get this job done and get out. She’d never liked being in attics; the mustiness and the shadows made her uncomfortable.

  Sofie, on the other hand, was charmed. Happily running through mazes of empty moving boxes.

  The baby things were in heavy-duty plastic bags that were scattered everywhere. Ali quickly began moving the bags to a spot near the doorway. “I hope we find all of it. Matt’s really the one who knows where stuff is. He’s the only person who’s ever brought anything up here.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Jessica was wiping cobwebs away from one of the windows. “I refuse to set foot on Logan’s boat because it makes me seasick, and I hate that fucking marina smell. But not going into your own attic? What’s that about?”

  “I just never wanted to come in here. Attics give me the creeps.”

  Sofie was busy climbing onto a wobbling stack of moving boxes. Ali quickly lifted her down, and then grabbed a dust-covered plastic bag. “Jackpot, Jess. This one looks like it has tons of cool baby things in it.” But as she lifted the bag, it broke, scattering toys all over the floor—and Ali muttered, “I’ll go downstairs and find something else to put this stuff in.”

  “Wait.” Jessica pointed out an empty basket wedged between two stacks of moving boxes “Maybe you could use that.”

  While Jessica was talking, a giggling Sofie scampered past, heading for the open door. And Jessica dashed out of the attic, instinctively chasing after her.

  Knowing that Sofie was in good hands, Ali ducked between the stacked moving boxes and reached for the basket. As soon as she moved the basket, she saw there was something behind it, wedged against the wall.

  Ali was surprised. When she lifted the thing off the dusty floor, it left an immaculate outline of itself. It had obviously been put in place when Ali and Matt first moved into the house, when the attic floor was clean.

  Ali instantly had a flash of memory: The cab, gaining speed…carrying her toward the airport, toward California. The little brown suitcase at her feet. The sensation of stepping off the edge of a cliff.

  What Ali had just found was that brown suitcase. The wedding present from her stepmother. The ugly item Ali had tossed onto a pile of Salvation Army discards a long time ago.

  The thing had been thrown away before she and Matt left the apartment. How could it possibly be here now?

  Bewildered, Ali pulled the suitcase closer—and opened it.

  What she saw knocked the breath out of her.

  She was looking at a pair of jeans, and a satin cowboy shirt with black edges around its pocket and cuffs. Beneath the jeans and shirt, she found a wide leather belt with a heavy buckle shaped like a horseshoe. Under the belt, a pair of ostrich-skin cowboy boots, dark purple, the color of an eggplant.

  Someone had packed her rapist’s clothes in this suitcase and deliberately hidden it here, right above her bedroom, right above her bed.

  As fast as she could, Ali shut the suitcase.

  It wasn’t until she reached the bottom of the stairs and caught her breath that she started to scream.

  • • •

  After a scalding shower, where she scrubbed herself raw, Ali was in her bedroom, as dazed as if she’d just taken a beating.

  The chaos that happened after she opened the suitcase was coming at her in jagged bits and pieces. Ali saw herself running out of the attic. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, and screaming. Then there was Jessica, with Sofie in her arms, asking, “What happened? What’s wrong?” And Ali, frantically grabbing Sofie and begging Jessica, “Go up there and lock the door. Lock it. Please!”

  Then somehow Ali was in a chair in the family room, rocking back and forth and moaning, holding Sofie. The next thing Ali knew, she was struggling to answer Jessica’s questions, too terrified to talk about finding the suitcase, only able to say, “The night before Matt and I moved into this house…I was attacked.”

  Now Ali was overhearing the sounds coming from downstairs. The front door opening and a rush of footsteps—the clatter of her mother coming back into the house and Jessica running to meet her, saying, “Oh my God, I had no idea Ali’d been raped.”

  Instantly there was noise, things breaking, as if her mother had lost her grip on a bag of groceries—eggs and cartons of milk and jugs of orange juice smashing onto the floor.

  Listening to the mayhem, Ali was thinking how surprised she always was by the clarity of the sounds that traveled up the stairwell.

  Downstairs, her mother was frantically asking, “Where’s Ali?”

  And Jessica was saying, “She’s in her room, lying down. She’s—”

  Ali could hear her mother rapidly climbing the stairs. “Is Sofie all right?”

  “Sofie’s fine,” Jessica sa
id. “We’ve been in the family room all afternoon, watching cartoons.”

  There was an abrupt silence. Ali’s mother had stopped in midstride. “Ali was raped? And you’re watching cartoons?”

  “Oh, no. That isn’t what happened.” Jessica sounded panicked. “We were in the attic… Ali said she hated being there. It gave her the creeps. I left her alone up there for a minute. It must have frightened her. And all of a sudden she was running down the attic stairs and screaming. Then when she calmed down a little, she told me she’d been attacked…a while ago. You know, right before she and Matt moved into this house. I guess she must still have flashbacks…”

  Ali could only imagine the look of horror on her mother’s face.

  “Oh my God,” Jessica whispered. “You didn’t know about it?”

  “No,” Ali’s mother said. “I didn’t.”

  It was several minutes before Ali heard her mother start back up the stairs.

  “How about if I take Sofie home with me and bring her back tomorrow?” Jessica asked.

  And Ali’s mother replied, “That would be nice. I need some time with my little girl.”

  • • •

  The bedroom was in semidarkness, the curtains closed, when her mother came in. Ali was curled in the center of the bed. What she saw in her mother’s eyes was the love-filled bond between parent and child.

  Their conversation was short.

  “You were raped?”

  “Yes, Mom, I was raped.”

  “Honey, why didn’t you tell me?”

  There was a silence. Then Ali said, “Because I was ashamed.”

  “Do you want to talk to me about it?”

  “Mom. I can’t. The one time I talked about the details was the night it happened. I told everything to a female detective who wrote it down in a notepad. The only reason Matt knows exactly what happened is because he was in the room when I talked to the detective. To lay it all out again would mean having people poking at me, probing…asking questions. I don’t have any answers. And I’m in too much pain to be poked and probed.”

  Her mother had come only a step or two into the room. She seemed to be letting Ali decide where she should go next.

  Ali sat up in bed, began to cry, and reached for her mother.

  Her mother held her. Cradling Ali and telling her she was loved and safe.

  Hours later, when her mother asked, “What do you need now, my darling?”

  Ali said, “Morgan.”

  Morgan

  Morgan came through the front door of Ali’s house to find her mother crouched on the floor, cleaning up spilled milk and shattered eggs. She looked old and broken; Morgan almost didn’t recognize her.

  Apprehensive, Morgan said, “I got here as soon as I could. What’s wrong?”

  After a long beat, her mother told her, “Ali was raped.”

  Morgan staggered a little.

  “It happened some time ago…on Ali and Matt’s moving day.”

  For a split second, it was as if everything had gone black.

  Moving day. The day Morgan had stormed into Ali’s guest room with that pizza receipt.

  Moving day. When something terrible was going on with Ali, and Morgan had screamed, “I hope it’s something awful. You deserve it.”

  Moving day. The day Ali was raped.

  The impact sent Morgan sprinting for the stairs.

  • • •

  As soon as Morgan went into Ali’s bedroom, she took off her shoes. And got into bed. And lay down beside her sister.

  The only thing Morgan said was, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too” was Ali’s answer.

  “You don’t have to tell me about it,” Morgan said. “You never have to say a word.”

  Morgan didn’t need to hear the specifics. Morgan was Ali’s twin. The wounds inflicted on Ali—the violation and the fear—were as real to Morgan as if she’d been the one slammed to the floor in that rented apartment.

  Morgan was sobbing, grieving for what happened to Ali. Ali. Who had always been Morgan’s strength.

  Ali. Firmly holding Morgan’s hand as they walked toward their first day of kindergarten.

  Ali. Her voice steady and sure at their sixth-grade dance recital—her breath sweet and warm as she whispered, “Don’t worry, Morgan. If you fall down at the hard part, I’ll just fall down, too…and it’ll look like that’s the way we meant it, like a joke we made up together.”

  Ali. In high school, when she was the homecoming queen, circling the football field in the back of an antique convertible—her smile at its brightest when she saw Morgan waving to her from the bleachers.

  Ali. In the guest room of this house, brutalized and mute, while Morgan screamed at her and called her a bitch.

  “I’m sorry for what I said to you that day, the day you moved in here,” Morgan murmured. “I let you down. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  Ali slipped her hand into Morgan’s and intertwined their fingers.

  And Morgan knew she’d been forgiven. For what she’d said on that terrible moving-in day. And for what she had done in all the years when she’d been jealous of Ali’s life and blind to Ali’s pain.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Ali said.

  “I’ll always be here” was Morgan’s hushed reply.

  Ali

  Her mother sat on the side of the bed, gently rubbing Ali’s back. “You’ve been in here for almost a week.”

  “I know. I’m hiding.”

  “You can’t stay in your bedroom, hiding from this thing forever. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Ali nodded, letting her mother think it was the trauma of revealing she’d been attacked that had knocked her into bed and kept her there. But what Ali was really keeping her distance from was the suitcase in the attic.

  She didn’t know how to talk about her rapist’s clothes. Or how they’d gotten into that suitcase. Or who could have hidden the suitcase. She wouldn’t know how to talk about any of it, with anyone, until she found a way to deal with the terror she was experiencing.

  “I left today’s messages from the restaurant staff on your nightstand,” her mother said. “Let me know if you need me to return any calls.”

  “I will.” Ali rolled over and closed her eyes. All she wanted to do was lie safely in her bed—taking comfort in her mother’s love, and Morgan’s, and the sense of peace that came from singing Sofie to sleep every night. She didn’t want to think about anything else.

  There was worry in her mother’s voice. “Matt called this morning…just like he does every day. He asked me to tell you he was glad you finally told us about what happened to you…the rape. He said he knew how difficult it must’ve been, and he understands why it would make you want to escape from phones and emails for a while. But, honey, it would mean the world to him to hear your voice, even if all you said was hello. Matt’s very concerned about you. Don’t you think you should call him? At least send him an email?”

  Hearing Matt’s name made Ali queasy. The house had been empty when they moved in; Matt was the only one who had ever taken anything into the attic. The implications were grotesque. Ali couldn’t begin to get her head around it.

  She waited for the queasiness to fade. Then she changed the subject, asking, “Who won?”

  “Me,” Sofie said.

  Sofie and Morgan were stretched out at the foot of Ali’s bed. Locked in a contest to see who would be the first to finish a page from Sofie’s coloring book. Sofie was holding up her page—a jungle scene scribbled in parrot green, canary yellow, and hibiscus red.

  “Look at all the brilliant colors,” Morgan said.

  Sofie crawled in next to Ali, pillowing her head on Ali’s shoulder.

  “Those colors make me think of Ava,” Ali murmured.

  As she stroked Sofie
’s hair, Ali made a silent promise to this little girl she loved so dearly. I’ll protect you. And celebrate you. I will try, always, to lead you toward the light, to places where you’ll find strength and beauty.

  “I think I need to teach Sofie about God,” Ali said.

  “Why?” Morgan asked.

  “Because Ava believed in God, and I want Sofie to have the same things in her heart that Ava had.”

  Morgan’s response was fast and frightened. “God let Ava die, and he let you get raped. Maybe he isn’t somebody Sofie’ll want to meet.”

  The lights in the room were low. Ali’s mother had moved to a chair near the window—and she appeared to be dozing. It caught Ali off guard when her mother said, “Tell Sofie the truth. God isn’t Santa Claus. He isn’t an all-powerful granter of human wishes. But he is…continually and constantly…all loving.”

  “That makes no sense,” Morgan said.

  “Yes, it does,” her mother insisted. “Remember when the two of you were little, and you kept going out to the curb with your dolls?”

  The memory made Ali smile. “Feeling that whoosh when a car went by used to get us just stupid happy.”

  “And every time I found you and brought you back into the yard, you’d be so upset.” Her mother’s sigh was good-natured. “You didn’t understand that I knew things you didn’t know.”

  That comment sparked an angry confusion in Ali. “What could God possibly know that would make what happened to me all right?”

  “I have no idea.” Her mother’s tone was gentle.

  Morgan looked baffled. “Ava said her prayers every night, and I’m betting she never prayed to die young.”

  Ali’s mother took a blanket from the end of the bed and tucked it around Ali’s feet. “Just tell Sofie that no matter how difficult life gets, God will be there walking beside her, and loving her, as she goes through it.”

  “That doesn’t seem like much,” Ali said.

  “Honey, it’s the most powerful thing imaginable. Look around this room…at Morgan, and Sofie, and me. We’re not God. We’re just human beings. Think about the strength that comes from simply having us near. Think what it would be like for you right now if you had to go through this alone, if you weren’t surrounded by love.”