The Good Sister

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “What? Oh. Yeah.”

  “You were texting me?”

  “Yeah. So . . . maybe we can hang out tomorrow or something. I’ve really got to—”

  “Can you wait a couple of minutes? I need to see something.”

  “What?”

  Wow. He’s not being romantic at all today.

  It was obviously a mistake for her to have come over. But Emma couldn’t stand not seeing him after everything they shared.

  Anyway, she has a legitimate purpose for being here. She made sure of that.

  “Remember when you said you saw something on my sister’s Peeps page?” she asks him briskly, as if that’s the only reason she came. “Can you show it to me?”

  “Now?” Gabe glances over his shoulder and she follows his gaze.

  The kitchen behind him is a mess. Not just a pots-and-pans-in-the-sink, cereal-boxes-on-the-counter kind of mess, but truly cluttered and dirty. Even from here, Emma can smell an unpleasant aroma of sour milk and garbage. Every inch of counter space is covered in stuff, cabinets are open, dry food spills out of a pet bowl on the floor.

  Hoping it doesn’t belong to a cat, Emma looks again at Gabe. “Please? The Internet’s down at our house and . . . something terrible happened this morning and I’m, like, super scared.”

  “What happened?”

  “Another one of my sister’s friends committed suicide,” she tells him—a bit of an exaggeration, since Carley said she didn’t actually know Taylor Morino. But the situation is a lot more compelling this way.

  Gabe smirks a little. “Dude, what is your sister, the Terminator?”

  “Gabe, I’m seriously terrified that she’s going to be next.”

  Okay, she’s not exactly terrified. Not really even particularly worried. More like . . . curious.

  Either Carley’s lying about what she wrote on her Peeps page, or Gabe is. If it’s him, he won’t want her to see it.

  And if it’s Carley . . . why would she write that? To get attention?

  The ironic thing about that: Carley isn’t the one who usually likes attention.

  I am.

  And right now, she definitely has Gabe’s.

  “Come on in,” he says, sounding resigned, but opening the door wider.

  “Thanks,” Emma says, and sneezes as she steps over the threshold. Definitely a cat.

  “But you can’t stay long. I’ve got to go.”

  She nods, wondering, suddenly, if he’s lying about that, too. Maybe he saw her coming through the window and put on his jacket so that he could pretend he was leaving.

  Maybe he doesn’t love her after all. Maybe he doesn’t even like her. He sure isn’t acting as if he does.

  “Come on,” Gabe says brusquely. “The computer’s in my room.”

  Entry from the marble notebook

  Friday, February 28, 1986

  My hand is shaking so badly I can barely write this.

  Today after school, I was practicing parallel parking over by Cardinal Ruffini again. My guy—I think of him as my guy, I can’t help it—came outside with his friends.

  This time, there was a girl with them, though. I know her—Debbie Quattrone, one of the cheerleaders. She’s stuck up and when I saw her with the guys, I got a sinking feeling because I bet she’s going out with one of them. I was hoping it’s not with my guy.

  Just like before, they all came over to the car to say hi. Even Debbie was nice, smiling and calling me by name as if we’re friends at school, which we’re not.

  I saw Father checking her out and it made me sick.

  Then something UNBELIEVABLE happened!

  The cute guy—my guy—slipped me a folded up piece of paper, and he winked at me. No one saw. I shoved the paper into my pocket until we got back home.

  Here it is.

  Separate sheet of paper taped into the marble notebook

  Dear Ruthie,

  I hope you got the flowers I sent you for Valentine’s Day and that they were a nice surprise. I was wondering if you want to go to Spring Fling with me? If the answer is yes, then be wearing a pink ribbon in your hair when I see you next Friday.

  Love,

  Mike

  Chapter 15

  Driving over to her mother’s house, Jen belatedly wishes she’d taken the long way around. This route takes her right past Cicero and Son.

  As she passes the funeral home, she spots Mike Morino walking up the front steps wearing a long dark overcoat and carrying an umbrella. He walks slowly, head bent, a large shopping bag in his hand.

  His daughter’s clothing, Jen guesses, and her heart goes out to him.

  For a moment, she contemplates pulling over to the curb and calling out to him. But this isn’t the time or place to offer condolences.

  Maybe she should go to the wake after all.

  The fact that she doesn’t think much of him as a person doesn’t change the fact that he’s a grief-stricken man who needs all the support he can get right now. A flawed man whose daughter blamed him for her suicide.

  She drives on, thinking of Mike and of Debbie, wondering how they’re going to get through another day of torturous guilt, let alone the rest of their lives.

  I couldn’t bear it, she thinks. I’m strong, but not that strong, and—

  Oh no.

  She just remembered that she was planning to stop at church before she left Woodsbridge, to offer the second day’s devotion in her novena to Saint Ann. If she waits until later, she might not have a chance. They’re already getting a late start on the cooking.

  She might as well make a detour over to Our Lady, the neighborhood parish where her parents attend daily Mass.

  She turns the corner, crosses the tracks, and turns again onto Wayside Avenue. Sacred Sisters is right up ahead. Jen can see a male figure wearing a hooded raincoat standing beside the signboard, and the glass-fronted cover is standing open on its hinges. He’s arranging new letter blocks immediately following today’s date and “42ND ANNUAL SPRING FLING.”

  So far, they spell out C-A-N-C-E.

  Jen drives on past as he pulls an L from his alphabet box and reaches toward the sign. She wonders whether the dance will be rescheduled later this spring.

  Selfishly, she hopes not. It was difficult enough for Carley to endure a month’s worth of buildup to the dance. Stretching it out even longer will make it harder for her to close this chapter and move on.

  Remembering what Frankie told her about how the other girls coerced Carley into cheating in math class, Jen allows her fury—diluted earlier by a wave of shock and worry—to fully sink in. Most of it is directed at the other girls, though a good deal of it is aimed at herself, and she can’t deny a bit of anger toward her own daughter as well.

  From the time Carley was a tiny girl, Jen had tried to teach her to be a good person and get along with others when clearly, she should have spent more time teaching her to stand up for herself, and not let others push her around . . . not to mention never to cheat in school.

  I’m the one who drummed into her how important it is to do well and get good grades . . .

  When it comes to academics, though, Carley is much harder on herself than Jen ever has been.

  I told her to stay home that day and take the math test later. She didn’t want to do that. She was worried about breaking the rules . . .

  Ironic, since she then went and broke one of the biggest rules of all.

  But everyone has a breaking point, Jen reminds herself. Especially when her emotions have been endlessly beaten down, manipulated, and abused.

  Besides, Carley insisted on sticking it out at Sacred Sisters when she could have switched schools. That took strength.

  I should point that out to her, Jen decides. She’s stronger than I thought. Stronger than she herself even realizes.

 
; She parallel parks on the street and leaves her phone in the car, plugged into the charger. After feeding the parking meter, she heads toward the old stone church with its stained glass windows and towering steeple. Memories bombard her as she picks her way around puddles in the cracked sidewalk, just as she used to do when she was a little girl trying to keep her shiny white Sunday shoes from getting muddy.

  So many milestones unfolded here at Our Lady. She and all four of her sisters and countless cousins were christened in the church, and every spring for many years, it seemed, someone was making a First Communion or Confirmation here.

  As she climbs the wide stone steps, she remembers lining up with her classmates for pictures, shivering in her thin white Communion dress as May flurries fell. Years later, she and Thad were showered with birdseed as they held hands and ran down those same steps toward a “Just Married” car. And they posed here with infant Carley in her christening gown, not long before they moved to the suburbs and joined Saint Paul’s.

  That picture sits framed on Jen’s dresser back at home. Frankie was godmother, flanked by Jen and Thad, proudly cradling the white-bonneted bundle in her arms.

  “I’ll always be there for her,” she tearfully promised Jen that day. “I’ll never let anything happen to her, ever. I’ll love her as if she were my own child.”

  Remembering that peaceful, joyous morning, Jen is comforted.

  Maybe it’s no accident that I forgot to stop at church in Woodsbridge, she thinks as she tugs open one of the massive arched double doors. Maybe this is where I was supposed to be.

  She crosses herself at the holy water fount and slips into the incense-scented sanctuary. The altar is draped in Lenten purple, and the pews are deserted.

  She sinks into one, pulls her prayer booklet from her coat pocket, and finds the devotion for the second day of the novena, to be followed by the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be to the Father.

  Today, the ancient verses seem to have new and urgent meaning.

  Lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil . . .

  When she’s finished, Jen adds a final, silent prayer for the souls of Taylor Morino and Nicki Olivera.

  Emma’s eyes tear up as she stares at the laptop screen, open to a Peopleportal profile page for her sister, the big fat liar.

  “Do you have a tissue?” she asks Gabe, doubting it. Never in her life has she seen such a pigsty. His room is worse than the kitchen, with crap piled everywhere and a layer of cat fur over it all.

  Sounding put out, he says, “Hang on,” and leaves the room.

  Fighting the urge to rub her itchy eyes, not wanting to smear the carefully applied mascara, Emma thinks about Carley, endlessly lecturing about the dangers of putting too much information out there on the Internet, and how she should just put her first name on her Peeps profile, and blah, blah, blah . . .

  Meanwhile, that Carley Theresa page was obviously just a dummy page set up in case their parents looked at it.

  “Here,” Gabe says, back with a handful of . . . toilet paper.

  Nice.

  The visit isn’t going the way she’d imagined, by any stretch.

  Emma blots her eyes, sniffles, and looks at the Peeps page again.

  This one has her sister’s full name, and a bunch of pictures, and it shows a side of Carley that Emma has never seen. It’s not that there are particularly provocative pictures on there, or that her sister is up to anything particularly scandalous. No, it’s more that . . .

  “Your sister’s a real bitch,” Gabe observes, reading over Emma’s shoulder, and he’s right.

  Here on Peeps, Carley has nothing nice to say about anyone—especially the girls at Sacred Sisters. Scrolling up the page, Emma can see that she’s been making rude comments about them for months now. She accuses them of slutty behavior, and spreads rumors about them, and when it comes to their looks, she’s merciless. In the comments section on one slightly overweight girl’s picture, she wrote simply, “Moo.”

  She’s always whining to Mom about how everyone hates her. Is it any wonder?

  For that matter, she has nothing nice to say about Mom here, either. She complains about her constantly, calling her names and mocking her. If Mom ever saw this, she would be devastated.

  In the profile questionnaire for this page, Carley lists her literary heroes and heroines not as E. B. White or Laura Ingalls Wilder, as she does on her Carley Theresa page, but as “Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway, because they were smart enough to check themselves out of the B.S. Hotel.” Meanwhile, her daily posts have grown increasingly dark, sprinkled with quotes and stanzas of poetry.

  The most recent posts went up a few days ago:

  My ex-BFF killed herself. Good riddance. I just wish I had the guts to do the same thing . . . and Suspended from school. I’d rather be dead than spend days on end stuck at home with my mother. God, I hate her almost as much as I hate myself. I wish I really were dead.

  “See? I told you,” Gabe says, pointing at that post.

  “I . . .” Emma hesitates, sneezes, “I never saw any of this.”

  Neglecting to bless her, Gabe asks, “How come? I mean, I noticed you’re not connected to her on here, but neither am I, and I can see it, so it must be set to public visibility.”

  “Yeah, but you can still block people.” Emma sneezes again and wipes her nose on the toilet tissue before reaching for the mouse, which is sticky and spattered with something that looks like coffee or Pepsi. “She obviously has me blocked in her settings. Here, look . . .”

  Emma clicks out of Gabe’s screen name and signs into her own. Then she types the name “Carley Archer” into the Peoplefinder search window.

  There are no results, other than a Carla Archer—an older woman from Michigan—and some Mexican guy named Carlos Archevarios.

  When she types in “Carley Theresa,” though, the dummy page pops up.

  “See?”

  “Pretty smart of her,” Gabe says admiringly.

  “I’m sure she has my parents blocked, too. They’d be super pissed-off if they knew.”

  Not to mention super worried.

  Maybe Emma should tell them.

  I will, she decides, feeling Gabe’s hands suddenly resting on her shoulders, just . . . later.

  Now that she’s here she plans to put aside thoughts of her sister—not to mention her cat allergy and the household squalor—and make the most of her time alone with Gabe, who seems to have forgotten all about having someone to meet.

  Walking back to her car after leaving the church, Jen sees the telltale paper rectangle stuck beneath the windshield wiper and realizes that she was in the church much longer than she’d intended.

  Oh well. A measure of inner peace is well worth the cost of a parking ticket. She shoves it into the back pocket of her jeans and climbs into the car.

  It takes only a few minutes to cover the distance to her parents’ house on a block lined with foursquare, vinyl-sided houses set so close together that when the windows are open in summertime, you can carry on conversations with the neighbors without setting foot out the door or picking up the phone. Jen knows, having done so plenty of times when she was growing up here.

  Not seeing Frankie’s car behind her parents’ white Buick on their half of the shared driveway, she wonders if Emma decided, at the last minute, to join them after all. That would explain why they’re running late. Her younger daughter tends to take forever to get ready to walk out the door, regardless of whether she’s going to a party or just out to the mailbox.

  Jen grabs the plastic bag from the supermarket, closes the car door, and starts for the house—only to see her parents throwing open the front door.

  “Genevieve!” her mother calls. “Where are they?”

  “Frankie and the girls? They must be—”

  She stops short, seeing the l
ook of concern on her father’s face. “What do you mean? Where are who?”

  “Where are the girls? Frankie has been calling. She was trying to reach you because she thought maybe they were with you but you didn’t pick—”

  “No, they’re with her!” Even as she says the words, Jen realizes they aren’t true. She registers the panic in her mother’s eyes, and she hears her father say they’d better call the police, and she knows that despite her fears and her promises and her precautions and yes, even her prayers . . .

  Something has happened to her daughters.

  On weekday mornings, it takes about half an hour to get to Sacred Sisters on the metro bus. But today, Carley waited at least that long before a bus even pulled up, and this one is making local stops.

  Slumped in a window seat with her knees pressed against the seat back in front of her, she stares at the rain and wishes the kid a few rows ahead would turn down the music on his iPod. He’s wearing earphones, yet every lyric, guitar solo, and percussion blast is loud and clear.

  If Carley had her cell phone, at least, she could get in touch with Angel to let her know she’s running late.

  She could also call her mother to say she’ll meet her over at Grandma’s house later. That seems like the logical plan, since she’ll be right in the neighborhood.

  By now, Aunt Frankie must have found the note. Carley plans on telling her—and Mom, too—that she’d hopped the bus because she thought Emma might be heading into the city.

  She hasn’t yet figured out why she’d have possibly come to that conclusion, but she can probably make the story work.

  Or not.

  Guiltily, she reminds herself that covering one lie with another is never a good idea.

  But Mom would never understand how desperate she is to meet Angel in person—or how touched she is that she’s flown all this way from California just to make sure Carley is okay.

  She’s my only friend in the entire world, Carley thinks as the bus turns, at long last, onto Wayside Avenue. I’m going to see her, and then they can punish me all they want after she leaves tonight.