The Sisters

by Rosalind Noonan

  “Glory Noland. That’s her legal name, not a nickname for ‘Gloria,’” Ellen said, always a stickler for detail. “And the children are Ruby and Aurora.”

  Glory nodded. “We’re just heading out for some fresh air.”

  “Not so fast,” Ellen said dramatically.

  “I’m Juana Lopez, from Portland Child Services.” The woman extended a hand, making Glory scramble to switch Huggy Bear to her left hand so she could shake. “I’m wondering if you have a few minutes to chat?”

  This woman was a social worker? Trying to process the situation faster, Glory pressed Huggy Bear to her chest, then tucked it in beside Aurora. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I called DHS to investigate the fire. I was worried about you burning the house down,” Ellen said peevishly. “Of course, that was weeks ago. It took them that long to get someone out here. It’s a wonder we’re not all burned to a crisp by now.”

  “Ms. Carlucci, we’re overworked and underfunded. It takes a while to process nonemergency complaints.”

  “What are you talking about?” Glory asked indignantly. “I would never set the house on fire.”

  “But you almost did with that stove fire.” Ellen frowned at the social worker. “Smoke was everywhere—the toxic kind, I think. The smoke detectors went off, thank God, but this one almost slept through it. Might be postpartum depression, or worse. All I know is, I worry about the safety of my house and these little girls.”

  Glory’s fingers tightened on the bar of the stroller as she pulled it back toward her. Ruby stared up at her, blue eyes lit with fear. “We’re all fine here,” Glory insisted. “It was an accident, a pot left on the stove when I dozed off.”

  “I think she would have slept through the smoke alarms if I didn’t come downstairs and wake her up,” Ellen insisted in a sour tone. “We’d all be dead.”

  “Let’s not exaggerate.” Glory appealed to the social worker. “Ms. Lopez, she’s blowing this out of proportion.”

  “Please, call me Juana.”

  “We’re all fine, Juana,” Glory continued, “and this was a onetime accident.”

  “Still, I need to file an incident report, and I’d like to discuss this more in private. How about if we step inside your apartment and talk about this off the street?”

  Glory looked back toward the house, wanting to clear this all up. She was happy to talk with the woman, but what would Juana Lopez think of their home, with cereal and crackers spilled here and there, stains on the carpets and sofa—the perpetual mess of being alone all day with babies? Sometimes it was a marvel that Glory found time to shower, let alone clean the apartment. But she doubted that any social worker would understand that.

  “We’ve got to get going. We have an appointment.” Glory hoped they weren’t able to see through the lie.

  “It will only take a few minutes,” Juana insisted.

  “Sorry. Gotta go.”

  “Some other time, then.” Juana handed Glory a business card and peeled a sheet of paper from her clipboard. “Here’s a copy of the complaint. My name and contact info are on both of these. You need to call me and make an appointment for a formal interview.”

  Glory swallowed, her dry throat starting to feel sore. The social worker made it sound like she was in trouble, which was the last thing she needed. At the back of her mind she thought of stories she’d heard about children being removed from homes that were deemed unsafe. “Okay, then. We have to go.”

  As she wheeled her girls away, she was conscious of the two women watching her, judging her, thinking that they could do better.

  I have a husband! she wanted to shout at them. A man who loves me. A man who would help take care of his children.

  If only he were here.

  CHAPTER 13

  Determined to escape the social worker, Glory made her way to the mall under a sky that was rapidly turning from clear blue to pewter. By the time she reached the outer ring of the parking lot, raindrops skittered over the pavement, pelting her head and shoulders. She pushed the stroller in through the mall doors just in time to avoid a soaking.

  Today she longed to tell her friends about the social worker, the accusation of her landlady, and the crazy fear that these women might try to take her girls away. Glory was dying to get the words out, but these women at the mall wouldn’t understand. They weren’t mothers and none seemed to have an aggressive bone in her body to strategize a counter-strike. What was that expression they loved to say? “Leave the bad; focus on the good.”

  Sometimes their talk reminded her of the girls’ lunch table at high school, where the smallest stories burst into huge moments of delight. Today Annabelle was the storyteller. Glory was lost in the weary trance of breastfeeding when Leo joined the group, taking the empty seat directly across from her. Annabelle was telling them how she spit her pickled beets into a napkin and tucked it into a crevice under the table to make her foster parents think she’d eaten her vegetables. Eyes closed, Glory imagined the little trick and smiled. She opened her eyes to see Leo sitting tall, his broad shoulders braced against the back of the seat. Although he said nothing, he commanded the table, the kind caretaker of the women gathered there. In that moment, Glory wished he were her protector, too.

  She turned her head away, not wanting him to see the longing in her eyes as she tried to conjure an image of her husband, the lines of his body, the curve of muscle and bone. His flat, smooth stomach, the ridges of his abs. It was all there in her head—Winston in totality—but the memory grew fainter with each day that he was away.

  When she lifted her chin she discovered Leo staring at her, though he wasn’t making eye contact. Maybe she should have been offended, but instead her blood heated as she felt his gaze on her bare breast. A tug of sweet sensation rippled deep down inside her, a visceral desire. She wanted him, and she wanted to think that he wanted her, too, just for this crazy moment.

  Of course, it was not meant to be.

  Glory stroked back Aurora’s curly hair as people chuckled over how Annabelle had tricked her foster parents.

  “Were they horrible people, your foster parents?” asked Laura.

  “Not really. But I thought they were so bossy after living with my mom, who had no rules. Really, the worst parent of them all was my mother, with her bouts of paranoia and violence. She’s addicted to crack, but I didn’t understand that until I was a teenager.”

  “So foster care saved your life,” Natalie said. “We have to be grateful for the kindness of good people like that.”

  “I see that now,” Annabelle admitted. “But all those years, I would have gone back to my mother in a heartbeat. I think I would have been better off if she’d just given me up for adoption, but she refused to let go. So I went from one home to another, waiting for the day that Mom would come rescue me. A day that never happened.”

  “And there’s the lesson.” Natalie sat back in her wheelchair as if it were a throne. “When a parent gives up their child, they need to let go completely. Not that any of us will ever need that bit of advice,” she said, looking around the group. “Oh, maybe you, Glory.”

  “Not me,” Glory said defensively. It was as if they knew about the accusations of the social worker in Glory’s front yard.

  An image of Juana Lopez, her silver hair and stoic eyes, loomed in Glory’s mind as a giant of a woman blocking the walkway to their little apartment. Maybe the woman wasn’t that evil, but Glory didn’t trust her. She couldn’t take a chance of getting tangled up with the department of child welfare or anyone who might try to take her girls from her. Eventually, Ms. Lopez would give up and just close out the report.

  Go away, Glory thought. Leave us alone.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Maybe we should buy a little house here and leave the pressure cooker behind,” Pete said, imagining beach walks like this every day with the glimmering blue Pacific a backdrop to his beautiful wife. This afternoon she’d forgotten her baseball cap and the waterfront
breeze lifted her dark hair behind her. Between the wind effect and her classic black sunglasses, Tamarind looked like a model at a shoot in the islands.

  “Run away to Neverland?” Tamarind cocked one eyebrow. “Will we live on love and fairy dust?”

  “Fairy dust might get a little dry. But I could telecommute, and you could find something out here.” He turned and started walking backwards so that he could face her. “Actually, with my promotion, you wouldn’t need to find work right away. You could take that ceramics class you’ve always wanted to try.”

  “I doubt there’s much work for paralegals out here. And the coast is no place to raise a kid, dilnashi. Half of the year it’s gray and rainy here. It just about shuts down in the winter, and when the big quake comes, everything from here to I-Five is supposed to be decimated.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  She shrugged. “I’m becoming more of a realist.”

  “And what about the other harsh reality?” He hadn’t wanted to bring this up on their weekend at the beach, tucked into the cozy inn at Manzanita with a hillside suite overlooking a beach dotted with evergreens. But they’d made progress here. Each time the orange sun slid into the silvery blue line of the ocean was a measure of recovery from the pain, a day closer to getting back to normal. They were ready to discuss the elephant in the room. “The doctor was pretty straightforward.” They were not going to have kids, at least by the usual methods, and even if they tried in vitro again, it was unlikely that Tamarind would carry to full term.

  “I feel so inadequate.”

  He pulled her hand to his lips and kissed it. “You are more than adequate in my book.”

  “Just this once could we not joke about it?”

  The steely look in her dark eyes took him by surprise. “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Seriously, my body has failed the one thing it’s supposed to do to propagate the species.” She sidestepped around a mound of seaweed. “You know, when I think back to all those years of birth control pills. All that awkward fumbling for a condom, so freaked out about getting pregnant. What a waste of time and effort. A big cosmic joke.”

  “Yeah, but we had some fun trying. At least until the IVF. I’m glad that part’s over. From now on, no more pain. No more shots and hormones.”

  “I’m still getting over the disappointment. I’m still angry with myself, but I’ll get over it. What matters is that we will have a family, not how we get it.”

  “We could be a family of two.” That morning when they were in bed, his lips pressed to Tamarind’s neck and his palm on the taut skin of her abdomen, he’d wondered if they were teasing fate. “Maybe it’s enough that we have each other,” he said. “It seems that’s meant to be.”

  “We are meant to be, dilnashi, but we’re destined to have children. I saw it in my tea leaves.”

  “You read your tea leaves?” It was a thing for Tamarind and her mother, sitting together and chatting as they tried to see the future by looking at the dregs in a teacup. Intriguing, yes. Interesting, definitely. Reliable, no way. But the idea of decoding brown shit in a cup seemed hinky to him. Besides that, the methodology was flawed. A dagger meant a warning against using sharp words and a door meant opportunities were coming, but to his eye a rectangular dagger could look a hell of a lot like a door. Pete preferred the guarantees of hard science. One plus two was always going to equal three, whether you saw a dagger or a door in your cup. And if he was looking for help to navigate his life, he wasn’t going to rely on some soggy tea leaves. “So when did you do this reading?” he asked.

  “This morning, while you were taking a shower. You saw the teapot they brought to the room. I saw a fish, which means good news, and a crescent. That can mean rebirth or something feminine. Maybe we’ll have a daughter. Or maybe it’s about the rebirth of motherhood for me. I’ve been feeling so wounded. You know that.”

  “I know.” He swallowed back his skepticism. Tamarind knew he wasn’t into the tea leaves, but it was one of those things about which they had agreed to disagree.

  “But the best part was, in the bottom of the cup, the more distant future, there was a basket. For me, that means only one thing: a new baby.”

  Staring ahead at the whitecaps breaking in layers parallel to the shoreline, Pete worried that she’d lost her mind. He trod carefully. “Are we talking about adoption now?”

  “I know, I said I’d never do it. But I’ve been humbled by life. If I can’t bear children, we’ll find a child who needs us.”

  “So you changed your mind? Really?” It threw him off, especially since Tamarind was not one to back off her convictions. Adoption. Her sudden change of heart gave him pause; it seemed kind of forced. “We don’t have to rush into anything.”

  “You could hardly call it a rush. We’re already in our late thirties. If we don’t get started soon we are going to be geriatric parents. You’ll be tossing our son a ball from your wheelchair.”

  “Easy now. I’m only two months older than you.”

  She pressed up to his side, walking in tandem as she slid her arms around his waist. “And you wear your age well, old man.”

  He lifted her and swung her around, a maneuver that used to make her laugh. Nothing much had amused her since the miscarriage, though he now detected a spark of hope in her eyes.

  So it was going to be adoption. He lowered Tamarind’s feet to the ground, then stared off at Neahkahnie Mountain. All along Pete had pushed for adoption to save his wife the discomfort of IVF. Now that she had come around, a new set of worries occurred to him at the prospect of an adoption really happening. What if he didn’t bond with the kid? Although he usually liked messing around with his nieces and nephews, he didn’t have to take those kids home and shower them with love. What if he wasn’t able to be a good father to this kid? It was his own fault, and now his big idea was threatening to bite him in the ass.

  “You’re scared,” she said.

  “Just trying to change gears. You were so dead-set against it; I thought it was off the table.”

  “I have a new angle on adoption. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and there are kids out there who don’t have families. Kids who need love. Adoption’s not for everyone. Actually, parenting isn’t for everyone. Many adults don’t possess our mad communication skills and amazing talents.”

  “And modesty.”

  “My point being that it takes a special couple to parent children. And you and I, my husband, we are it.” She tipped her chin up to him, one dark brow cocked in a smile.

  “Look at you, all confident and proud.”

  “You love that about me.” It was true. Her iron resolve and faith in people kept him in the game, grounded and hopeful. Before he’d met her, Pete had been quick to make people laugh, but his humor had been based on a stoic sense that anything that could go wrong would go wrong. She had changed that.

  “I love everything about you,” he said, breathing in her dark, soulful eyes, her glossy black hair, her rich cinnamon-colored skin. “And I’m glad you’ve got enough confidence for the two of us.”

  “Don’t worry. There’s plenty of that.”

  “Have you talked to my sister?”

  “About that . . . You know I love Kaysandra. I do. But she’s always ramming her agenda onto the table. Always pushing her business around.”

  “She means well, baby, and this time, I think she can help us.”

  “There’s no doubting her passion and connections. But I worry about our privacy. If we go through Kaysandra, our personal and financial business is going to be out there in your family.”

  “She would never expose us. Kaysandra’s got a big mouth, but she’ll take care of us. She’ll be professional about it.”

  “All right, then. We’ll keep it in the family.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday . . . three days without word from Winston.

  The knot of worry grew inside Glory’s chest like a ball of yarn growing larger as doubt
s and suspicions were twined around the core of fear. Had Winston been binge drinking? Had he had an accident working on the pipeline—a fall or a piece of heavy equipment knocking him out? Or maybe it was something worse. Maybe he’d met someone. She knew he’d been struggling with loneliness and isolation. Maybe the dark, cold nights alone in that wilderness had become too much for him to bear.

  On Friday morning while Ruby was at school, Glory tracked down the phone numbers for the two main hospitals in Fairbanks, Alaska, and called their emergency rooms. It took a while to get to the right person, but she was finally able to confirm that Winston had not been brought into either hospital’s ER.

  She was grateful and pissed that he would put her through this silence. And it wasn’t even the first time. Did he think she was just chillin’ down here, taking care of the kids 24/7 and dodging the landlady?

  Miss Mandy seemed especially warm when Glory arrived for the Friday pickup. “I want you to see Ruby’s art project—a jack-o’-lantern face. I thought she did an especially good job.” She pointed to a goofy-faced pumpkin pinned to the bulletin board amid a sea of orange construction paper. “See how the facial features are in the right proportion? That shows a level of development that’s more advanced than most of my students.”

  “That’s great.” Glory had to rein in her reaction for fear that she might burst into tears of relief. At least something was going right in her life.

  “Keep up the good work, Mom, and have a nice weekend,” the teacher said as Glory and her girls headed out the door.

  Just as Glory rolled the stroller down the ramp beside the steps, black dots of rain began to appear on the pavement. “Put your hood up, Ruby,” she said, pausing to arrange the waterproof blanket over Aurora’s legs. The rain was a steady patter on Glory’s hood for the next block. And then her phone buzzed.

  Annoyed, she paused under the cover of some trees that still had their leaves and checked it. A number from Yukon, Alaska.