The Sisters (15 page)

Even after such a long time gone, Mabel had thought she would be able to find her way around pretty easily, but the fire had changed everything. In some places it was even hard to tell whether she was driving down one of the remaining dirt roads or just a path cut by fire. One moment, she chided herself for not having come back sooner—at least to find out anything she could about what had become of Bertie, or whether anyone had ever heard again from Wallace. Then the next, she told herself that her questions could only raise others—questions that, even if she answered them, wouldn’t change a thing for anybody. There wasn’t any reason but hope to make her imagine she could find a trace of Bertie, especially now. In spite of the one letter that had come back to her, the one out of the dozens she had sent since 1927, she didn’t believe Bertie was dead. She would feel that in her heart, wouldn’t she? And after all, it was remarkably easy to disappear. No one knew that better than she did.

“That’s the church,” Mabel said, stopping the Chevy and pointing at a gray mound of tumbled stone. “The Emmanuel Baptist Church. I recognize the cross.” The cross had stood out front, beside the footpath. When Mabel was eleven or twelve, there had been a ceremony to erect it, and she remembered how odd it had looked to her, this black iron cross not quite six feet high, seeming like a scrawny man holding out his arms, guarding the property. She hadn’t ever been able to stop thinking of it that way, and now she felt a tightening in her throat, seeing the sad, skinny man, his left arm painfully twisted, leaning against the pile of river rocks that had once been the church’s front wall.

Mabel got out of the car, and Daisy followed. Together they stood before the ruined church. “Mama and Daddy were married there,” Mabel said. “And Bertie and I were baptized by Reverend Small. Not here. In the river.” She clasped her hands against her chest and smiled faintly. “Well, I was baptized twice. When it was Bertie’s turn, she was scared of the preacher dunking her under, so I went with her.”

“You mean you went first to show her not to be afraid?”

“No, I mean I really went with her. I got behind her, wrapped my arms around her, folded her hands in mine and hugged them against her chest, so when the preacher got hold of us, he held my back and our four hands. Everybody was cheering when we came back up.”

It was her last happy memory of church. Not long after that, Mama had married Jim Butcher and stopped going to services. Mabel and Bertie had gone for a time, and the church women had done their duty when Mama died, but Mabel had felt their stares after that, stares that burned her naked, making her feel ashamed that they might know what was going on in Jim Butcher’s house, making her feel not only that they knew but that they blamed her for it.

“So you know where you are now,” said Daisy.

Mabel pointed to her left. “The school was over there,” she said, seeing now what the man in the soot-streaked flannel shirt had told her earlier—nothing left. “And down that way,” she said, pointing toward the right, “was the main corner. Turn left and go down a block and you’d get to town, all the stores. Turn right to pass the rich people’s houses. After a few blocks, the sidewalks turned to paving stones, then gravel, then dirt. We lived on the dirt.”

“No difference now,” said Daisy. She continued to look toward the corner for a moment, then turned back to the car.

Mabel took her hand. “Let’s walk for a while. Do you mind?” She opened the rear door of the car and leaned in over the seat, emerging with her camera hanging from a strap around her neck, her pockets bulging with rolls of film. Officially, Mabel was in Juniper as a photographer for the
Indianapolis Star,
though it had taken some persuading to get her editor to give her the time to come down. She’d barged into Jonas’s office while he was setting out his lunch.

“What do our readers care about a fire in some little town in Kentucky nobody ever heard of?” He held a fat corned beef sandwich in one hand while he tried to flatten the waxed paper wrapping into a makeshift tray on his desk. “So?” He looked at Mabel over the tops of his glasses. “Make your case.”

While Jonas dismantled his sandwich and painted the top slice of bread with mustard, Mabel argued that the
Star
’s circulation reached out toward the areas in Indiana surrounded by forest. “The pictures can go with a story reminding people how fast a forest fire can move,” she said, seeing her editor wasn’t biting. “I can interview some expert,” Mabel sputtered. “In prevention. Or get the fire chief to talk about planning an escape route.” A child could have punctured her ridiculous argument.

Jonas rubbed at the back of his neck, pretending to consider the idea, even tossing out a name or two, but now Mabel knew he had made up his mind to let her go. She had noticed him listening from his doorway a little while earlier when Lannie picked up the story about Juniper off the wire and used it as a chance to mock again what he called Mabel’s “Bourbon drawl.” They all knew she was from Kentucky, but none of them, not even Jonas, knew her connection to Juniper—not until now, anyway. “Three days,” Jonas said. “No more.”

She thanked him and pulled the door shut behind her, avoiding the eyes of her fellow journalists as she hurried through the clutter of desks and out the door. Though it shamed her even more to think of it, Mabel had been prepared, if Jonas had refused her, to remind him that in the nearly ten years she’d worked for the paper she hadn’t ever made a request for a particular assignment. She was ready to point out, too, that she’d had more of her photographs picked up by the AP than anyone else on the staff, that she had won three awards, the first of them for shooting the baking contest at the state fair—an assignment everyone had laughed at—given for her photo of Mrs. Jefferson Twichell cradling her blue ribbon like a child, a moment the awards committee had praised as evidence of Mabel’s “instinct for the intimacy of human joy.”

From the café on the corner, Mabel called Daisy at the bank and said, “I need you to go with me. I can’t do it alone.”

Daisy agreed without hesitating, and, so far, Mabel hadn’t asked her what little lies she’d had to tell to get the time off, whether she would have a job when they returned to Indianapolis on Thursday. Had she asked, Daisy would have said, “What does it matter what I told them? If they fire me, I’ll find something else.”

Mabel marveled at Daisy’s ease in herself, the way she seemed sure of what mattered and what didn’t. Daisy had had half a dozen jobs since high school, leaving them one after the other when the work collided with rehearsal schedules for the playhouse. Some of Mabel’s acquaintances had let her know they thought Mabel was too indulgent, that Daisy was too old to be allowed to quit a job over something as frivolous as saying lines on a stage, but even if the role was a tiny one, Daisy gave her whole self to it. Only a petty person wouldn’t admire that.

Early this morning, Daisy had been up and dressed long before Mabel, her small suitcase by the door, ready to follow wherever her mother led her. Not until they had crossed the border into Kentucky did Daisy ask, “What do you hope to find, Mama-bel?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Mabel said, and that was the truth. But at the same time, she was conscious of an entirely different truth. She wanted to find some sign of Bertie and Wallace, yes, but there was something more she couldn’t quite name. What was it? Peace? Certainty? Absolution?

There had been times—not frequent, but intense—when Mabel wanted to tell Daisy everything. But she knew she never would. From the beginning, they were fused by pain that would remain unspoken, experience they would never describe for each other. Both of them had lost the people they’d loved most in the world. Both of them had been used by men they’d had to call “father.”

Though Daisy had never said so, Mabel knew from the way her daughter couldn’t stand anything binding her waist or wrists—how she had to have even the sheets left untucked at the foot of the bed—that at times Harker had tied her. And through the wailing nightmares, when Daisy fought off her blankets, pleading to her familiar incubus not to force her mouth open, not to choke her with his vile flesh, Mabel learned some of the details of what her darling girl had endured.

In the early years, Mabel had feared what she herself might dream, what Daisy might learn from the words replayed in a nightmare, but once, when talking over Daisy’s terrors, Daisy had said, “You never talk, Mama. You cry. Only tears. No sound.”

They both carried with them their private hells, doing their best, as Paul had taught her, to think on freedom and kindness. Long before there was Daisy, one day when Mabel and Paul had been sitting quietly at a table, going over the monthly accounts, she had put her hand over his and said, “If you ever want to talk about the war, I’ll do my best to understand.” Gently he’d lifted her hand from his and drawn his own away. He sat there for a long time, staring into lonely air. In time, he turned his wet eyes to meet hers. “You can’t understand. Only someone else who was there. And then, when you meet him, what connects you, what makes you trust each other, is knowing the same thing. You don’t talk. There’s no reason to talk. He knows what you know. And that’s enough. Because it has to be.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. She knew now why she had never told Paul about Jim Butcher, knew why she hadn’t even been able to tell Paul the reason she wouldn’t let him photograph her. She, too, had a battlefield in her past, different from Paul’s. A place and time that had brought her to do things she could never have done, and couldn’t have answered for, in ordinary life.

Even so, though she shared a kind of old soldier’s past with Daisy, Mabel feared what her daughter would think of her if she ever learned the whole story. There wasn’t a way to tell about it directly, not in a way that would encompass the truth. Talking could only unlock what Mabel knew she had to keep caged.

When Daisy was still in high school, she had brought home a copy of
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
For her required essay on the book, Daisy decided to discuss the damage Hollywood had done to Stevenson’s tale, pointing out the foolishness of an added love story just so Spencer Tracy could make love to Ingrid Bergman. It had been a couple of years since Mabel and Daisy had seen the picture together one winter matinee, and, as ever, Mabel had delighted at Daisy’s precise recall of film scenes—clearly the actress in her—so Mabel had borrowed the book. How it had haunted her, revealing why she, why Paul and so many of his fellow soldiers, buried the darkness within. In the story, the hale and hearty Dr. Lanyon, after witnessing Hyde’s retransformation into Jekyll, dissolves to a wraith. Once a great lover of life, once a believer in knowledge as a good in itself, the dying doctor says to a visiting friend, “I sometimes think if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away.”

Paul had told her once that he’d thought of suicide, going so far as to walk out onto the Michigan Avenue Bridge one April day, wearing his heavy wool coat. “That and boots,” he said. “I worried it wasn’t enough of a drop. I thought the extra weight would pull me under pretty fast.”

“What stopped you?” she had asked.

Paul finished putting away the equipment he’d been cleaning and walked to the street window of the studio. The late-morning sun had settled on the bench in front, and a couple of women sat together, packages between them, their faces turned to the warmth. Some people glanced at Paul as they passed, a few with smiles, but most didn’t notice him, lost in their own business.

“They’d just finished the esplanade,” he said at last, continuing to look at the passersby. “Not the friezes.” He looked now at Mabel. “But you know that.”

She nodded and took a few steps toward her friend. They had gone together to the unveiling. It was the first day he’d trusted her to roam with one of the cameras, free of his advice, and, later, when they studied the drying negatives, he’d put an arm around her and said, “You have an eye.”

Mabel touched Paul’s shoulder and asked again, “What stopped you?”

“I don’t know exactly.” He turned from the window and sat down at the worktable, his head in his hands. “I remember thinking about all the people out on the esplanade, like it was a holiday. I knew I’d have to wait until it was dark. I didn’t want any kids to see me jump. So I waited, just watching. After a while I took off my coat, bundled it up, and sat down on it. I watched some more. Around sunset, when I looked at my watch, I saw I’d already waited six or seven hours, and I thought, Okay, I’ve lived six hours more than I thought I would. I could see myself living another ten or twelve, to get through the night. Next morning, I thought about going to the bridge again, early, before everybody turned out for work, but I figured I’d give it a try to live through the afternoon. Just to see. After that, I kept on deciding, five or six hours at a time, then a day, a day and a night, until I realized I wasn’t having to decide anymore. I was just living.”

So many times, in the years between losing Bertie and gaining Daisy, Mabel had repeated Paul’s words in her mind. Just a few hours more. A half a day. Only one more day. And in that way, she had decided to live.

Without Mabel’s realizing it, she and Daisy had passed the main corner and were now turning down one of the streets in what had once been Juniper’s three-block downtown. What few buildings there had been of brick now remained as charred shells, while the smaller wooden buildings had vanished. Mabel stopped, raised her camera, and started shooting. Suddenly, a stout woman emerged from behind one of the blackened brick walls, waving her arms, shouting, “Just what do you think you’re doing? Who are you? Stop that right now!”