The Good Sister

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  I should talk to Mom about this, she thinks—before remembering that she doesn’t really want to talk to Mom about anything. Not right now, while she’s suspended and being punished and trapped in the house—without Internet, without Angel, even—for another whole week.

  Anyway, chances are her mother knows all about Emma’s older boyfriend. That’s probably why they were fighting yesterday, much more heatedly than usual.

  I’m staying out of it, Carley decides, plugging in the hair dryer, wondering why she’s even bothering to make herself presentable. No one downstairs is going to want to discuss piano lessons after this bombshell—Carley included.

  And that’s really too bad, because while she was in the shower, she found herself thinking that it might actually be kind of nice to get back into music. Unlike Emma, she used to enjoy practicing and would often sit at the keyboard long after she’d finished her scales and assigned sheet music, playing songs from the old 1970s songbooks she found inside the bench or picking out by ear the melodies of favorite tunes from her iPod playlists.

  Yeah. Maybe Mom is right. Maybe she will want to take piano lessons again, after all of this blows over and things get back to normal.

  Normal . . . what is normal like? She can barely remember.

  Brows knit, she thinks again of the argument she just had with her sister. Of all the things Emma’s jerk of an older boyfriend could possibly say about her, that was just mean. Sick and twisted, too, since he obviously must know what happened to her best friend.

  Ex–best friend, she starts to correct herself, then stops.

  Best friend, period.

  All those years together . . .

  Feelings don’t just vanish overnight when someone hurts you, drops you. You can pretend you don’t care, and you can try not to care, but . . .

  You still care. You always will.

  No. Don’t cry. Aren’t you tired of crying?

  Carley wipes her eyes and furiously begins brushing the knots out of her wet hair, yanking the bristles hard through the tangles so that the hair pulls and her scalp hurts.

  She stares into the mirror, brushing, aching, thinking of Nicki, thinking of Taylor . . . and of Taylor’s dad.

  My mom said they had a super bad breakup, Nicki had told Carley, and made her swear she wouldn’t tell her mother that Mrs. Olivera was still friends with him. Good friends, Nicki had said.

  Did Nicki and Taylor know each other as well? Were they friends, too? Did they . . .

  What if they made some kind of suicide pact or something?

  Carley is so startled by the idea that she fumbles the hairbrush, dropping it into the sink.

  As she reaches for it, there’s another knock at the door.

  “Go away, Emma! I don’t want to—”

  “Carley? It’s me. I wasn’t sure if anyone was in here.”

  “Oh . . . sorry.” She opens the door to see Aunt Frankie standing there, barefoot in the same clothes she had on last night, toothbrush in hand and looking kind of ashen. Maybe she’s sick, too, like Dad.

  Maybe there’s a bug going around, Carley thinks hopefully, out of habit, and I can catch it and I won’t have to go to school on Monday.

  Then she remembers—she doesn’t have to go to school on Monday.

  Which is worse: having to go to school and being ostracized by everyone in every class, or having to stay home because you’re not allowed at school?

  “I’ll come back,” Aunt Frankie tells her.

  “It’s okay. I was just going to dry my hair, but I can do that in my room.” Carley grabs the brush and blow dryer. “By the way, Grandma and Grandpa are here.”

  “Oh no, really? Not that I don’t love them, but I’m just a little under the weather, so . . .”

  “They came over to tell Mom something about her old boyfriend—do you know him? His name was Mike.”

  An expression of distaste crosses Aunt Frankie’s face. “I did know him, a long time ago, when he went out with your mom.”

  “And you didn’t like him?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Want the short list?” Aunt Frankie begins ticking off on her fingers. “He was bossy, he was sneaky, he thought he was God’s gift to the world, and he was not a nice person. And I probably shouldn’t be talking about him like this after all these years, but it’s early, and—wait, is it early?” She looks at her watch, which she appears to have slept in, along with her clothes. “It’s not that early, but I haven’t had my coffee yet so I can’t be blamed for anything, right?”

  “Um—”

  “Never mind, sweetie. So Mom and Dad—Grandma and Grandpa—came over here to talk about Mike Morino? Why? What’s going on with him?”

  “His daughter killed herself. She went to my school, and—” She breaks off, mortified to feel a lump rising in her throat. Why? She didn’t even know Taylor.

  “Come here.” Aunt Frankie’s arms wrap around her, good and tight.

  She can’t help it. She finds herself crying again.

  “Oh, Carley . . . I’m so sorry.”

  “No, I’m okay. It’s not like . . .” Carley reaches for a Kleenex from the box on top of the toilet tank. “I mean, she wasn’t my friend, or anything. I knew who she was, but I didn’t . . . it’s not like Nicki. Not like that. I’m just . . . I’m just kind of shocked.”

  “Of course you are. This is just . . . unbelievably tragic.” Aunt Frankie pulls back and shakes her head, looking at Carley, brushing her damp hair away from her wet cheeks.

  “I’m a mess,” Carley comments dully, not sure whether she’s referring to her physical state, or her emotional one. Both, really.

  “Anyone would have a difficult time with this. You’ve been through a lot. Just take a deep breath . . . There, good. Better?”

  Carley shrugs, feeling faint, swaddled in moist, overheated air.

  “Keep breathing. Where’s your mom?”

  “Downstairs. She doesn’t know I know. Emma told me.”

  “Is Emma upset, too?”

  “Emma never gets upset.”

  “Some people are better at not showing it.”

  Carley shrugs, not wanting to tell her aunt that it isn’t like that. With Emma . . . it’s almost as if she likes this kind of thing, in some weird way. Likes the drama of it. She probably can’t wait to talk about it with her ghoulish boyfriend, the way she must have talked about Nicki. Why else would he have made up that stuff about Carley talking about suicide on her Peeps page?

  She shudders.

  “Are you cold?” Aunt Frankie asks.

  Not in the least, but she nods anyway, deciding to go with it. That’s better than trying to explain what her sister told her just now. It would just be one more stressful thing she’d ultimately end up having to discuss with her parents. If they hear that some idiot creep is spreading rumors about her Peeps page, she’ll never be allowed to get back online. She’ll lose Angel forever.

  “Go dry your hair and get dressed, Carley, and I’ll see you downstairs, okay? Just remember to breathe. Deep breaths. You okay?”

  Okay? She’s never been farther from okay in her life.

  But she nods again and slips gratefully away, into the cool, welcoming air of the hallway.

  Sitting down on the dining room window seat at last with a plate of freshly made eggs—the burned batch having been scraped into the trash—Angel sighs. It isn’t a contented sigh, exactly; rather, an exhausted one. The long night that turned into a long early morning has now given way to what now promises to be a long, sleepless day ahead.

  “No rest for the weary, right?” Angel asks around a spoonful of eggs—as opposed to a forkful, because a fork never did turn up in the kitchen drawer. But it doesn’t matter now.

  Nothing matters now but having found Ruthie.<
br />
  The last time Angel ever saw her alive was in this very room. They were seated across from each other at the long dining room table, the one that could seat twelve with the extra leaves inserted. Of course they were never inserted; there were never more than four people at that table . . .

  Until there were only three.

  But on that last night with Ruthie, there were still four.

  A harsh March wind howled off the lakes, rattling the dining room window panes. Sleet had been falling when they left for Sunday morning services, and it changed over to snow when the temperature dropped sharply. The pastor warned exiting churchgoers to be careful on the drive home.

  “The roads are covered in a sheet of ice,” he cautioned, “and this storm is only going to get worse.”

  The warning would come back to haunt Angel in the wee hours of the morning following the accident, and forever afterward. Surely they haunted Mother and Father as well. But at the time the words were spoken, they went in one ear and out the other, just like the pastor’s fiery sermons.

  Dinner that night was boiled beef with carrots and potatoes, same as it was every Sunday evening.

  Ruthie pushed hers around on her plate, the tines of her fork chinking the china amid the wet sounds of their father eating. He could never breathe through his nose—allergies, he said—so he always chewed with his mouth open. That disgusted Ruthie—everything about him disgusted Ruthie, though Angel wouldn’t grasp the deep-seated reasons for her distaste until the marble notebook surfaced.

  But on that final night, she didn’t even seem to notice the sounds. She stared off into space, not even catching Angel’s eye across the table as Father chewed and china chinked and Mother gave occasional terse directions—Put your napkin on your lap and Please pass the salt—and the large mantel clock ticked toward seven o’clock.

  After dinner, Ruthie silently helped Mother clear the dishes, and Angel bundled up in a warm coat, gloves, and hat to help Father carry wood from the woodpile.

  After Father’s heart attack a few months earlier, Mother had decided Angel should start helping with that particular chore.

  “He’s not old enough or strong enough to be hauling logs around,” Father said the first time.

  That was true. But Mother insisted; she blamed it on his bad heart but she probably didn’t want Father to continue to disappear outside for a good half hour every evening after dinner to smoke his forbidden pipe and, Angel and Ruthie suspected, stay as far away from Mother as he could, for as long as possible.

  Their distaste for each other was palpable. Angular with high cheekbones and slate blue eyes, Mother could conceivably have been a handsome woman if she’d ever smiled in her life—but Angel was convinced she had not. Father, with his bushy red sideburns, ruddy pock-marked skin, and overbite, was known to grin on occasion, revealing an uneven row of yellow teeth, but it was usually brought on by some kind of perverse pleasure, like purposely stepping on the tail of the stray cat who used to prowl the yard.

  Angel knew why they were married to each other: because no one else would have either of them. But why, Angel wondered for many years, bother to get married at all?

  The likely answer turned up in a highlighted passage in the dog-eared Bible Mother had used as a young literalist, and later used for theology lessons when homeschooling Angel: “But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.”

  Mother had found a husband because the Bible instructed her to.

  What, then, had been Father’s motivation?

  Did he believe marriage would allow him to obscure his pedophilia? Was he counting on a wife to eventually give him daughters?

  Oh, Ruthie . . .

  Angel caught a final glimpse of her on that last night before slipping out the back door into the hush of swirling white darkness. Ruthie stood alone in the dining room, head bent, lost in thought while clearing the table.

  Was her mind already made up, or was she still wrestling with her decision? Had she already written the final entry in the marble notebook, the one Angel would read years later in the turret room? Or was she composing it in her head even then, choosing the words that would become her last while scraping watery, greasy sludge and scraps of gristle from one plate onto another?

  Outside, the branches were glazed in ice and fringed with snow. Every so often, there would be a distant cracking sound and somewhere, a limb would fall to the ground. Father leaned against the woodpile, puffing gray tobacco smoke into the night as Angel threw snowballs against fat tree trunks to make faces.

  Eyes—wham, wham—nose—wham . . .

  The mouths were the tricky part. You had to line up several snowballs in an upward curve in order to get a smile. Angel’s aim left something to be desired. When it was time to take the wood and go inside, the yard was filled with sad, scowling trees that years later seemed an eerie harbinger of what the night would bring.

  The kitchen was clean and deserted now, lit only by the dim bulb in the stove hood. The rest of the first floor was still: Ruthie was already upstairs in her bedroom; Mother in hers. The air still smelled of boiled meat and onions, but there was another faint, lingering fragrance.

  The large bouquet of pink lilies had arrived a few days earlier, addressed to Ruthie. Angel didn’t know who sent them—not when they arrived, anyway. Ruthie had brushed away her little brother’s initial questions about the floral delivery wearing a happy, mysterious smile for the first and only time Angel could remember.

  That night, as always, the house felt warm for the first few minutes after the bitter cold outdoors, but of course, that was mere perception. Even during the harsh winter months, the thermostat was always set just high enough to keep the pipes from freezing. The only relatively warm spot was on the sofa directly in front of the living room fireplace. That was where Angel settled with a book of Bible pictures and Father with the Sunday papers, just out of sightline to the stairs and the hall.

  When someone creaked down the flight a little while later, they both looked up.

  “Ruth?” Father called, recognizing her tread.

  She didn’t answer.

  There was a jangling sound: car keys being removed from the pocket of Father’s Sunday overcoat, hanging on a coat tree in the foyer. Then the front door opened and closed, and she was gone.

  With a curse, Father stood and strode to the hall. He opened the door, and Angel heard the sound of the family car driving off down the street.

  That was shocking for many reasons.

  Meek Ruthie was newly licensed and had never even driven alone yet. She certainly wasn’t allowed to take the car without permission, let alone at night, in a snowstorm.

  Angel wasn’t particularly worried, though—just impressed at Ruthie’s bold move.

  Father, it seemed, was neither worried nor impressed; he was furious. He muttered something, slammed the door, and strode up the stairs. Angel heard him up there talking to Mother.

  Angel tried to eavesdrop, but it was too hard to hear. Eventually, the boring book and all that snowball tossing and log carrying and the warmth of the crackling fire took effect and drowsiness set in . . .

  The next thing Angel knew, Mother was screaming that Ruthie was dead.

  “But I didn’t know why,” Angel ponders aloud. “Not then. I thought it was an accident. I didn’t know whose fault it really was. I didn’t know what really happened to you. If you hadn’t written it down in the notebook, I never would have known.”

  Of course Ruthie doesn’t answer. Not out loud. But Angel hears her voice, clear as day.

  Thank you, Angel.

  That was the nickname Ruthie had bestowed from the moment she became a big sister.

  “You’re my little Angel,” she used to say. “I’ll always take care of you.”

  But she didn’t. She left A
ngel all alone in that awful house with their parents. All those years, Angel believed that she hadn’t meant to leave. She never would have abandoned her little Angel.

  And now that you know the truth . . .

  “I’m still your Angel, Ruthie. Your guardian angel. I promise I’ll make them pay for what they did to you. Two of them already have, and the third will be soon.”

  Now, Angel. Don’t wait any longer. Please. It’s been long enough.

  Angel sets aside the breakfast plate, now empty, and turns to Ruthie, propped on the window seat.

  “Tonight.” Patting the rotted, blackened flesh clinging to her skeletal hand, Angel assures her, “I promise I’ll do it tonight.”

  Under any other circumstances, Jen knows, Carley and Marie Bush would have hit it off very well. But today, when at last her daughter shows up in the kitchen, she walks into a somber conversation about Taylor Morino’s shocking death.

  “Carley!” Jen’s mother is the first to spot her standing there in a bulky sweatshirt and jeans that look too snug. Her hair appears to be blown dry but not styled, pulled back in a barrette that’s parked crookedly at the nape of her neck. Her eyes, behind her glasses, betray too little sleep; too many tears.

  “Hi, Grandma. Hi, Grandpa.” Carley dutifully hugs one, then the other, and turns to Jen. “Dad said I needed to come downstairs.”

  Yes. That was before the world tilted even more crazily. Longing for ordinary Saturday mornings of not so long ago—when the worst imaginable disruption was her parents popping in with doughnuts—Jen introduces her daughter to a subdued Marie.

  “Ms. Bush is here to talk to you about piano lessons, but we just got some news that’s—”

  “I already know,” Carley cuts her off. “About Taylor Morino, right?”

  “How did you hear? Were your friends talking about it online already?” Jen asks, before remembering she’d changed the wifi password.

  “I’m not allowed to be online anymore,” her daughter says pointedly, “and I don’t have any friends.”