The Sisters (24 page)

Lynn tried again to pull herself up. “Do I have shrapnel in my back?”

Her mother straightened up and looked over to where Grandma Bertie was sitting. “Shrapnel? Where’d you get an idea like that? You don’t even know what that is.”

It was making her tired to talk, so Lynn didn’t try to correct her mother. “Will I have a wheelchair?”

Grandma was beside the bed now, squeezing Lynn’s foot through the covers. “You’ll ride in one when you go for your tests.”

“Will I have to have it forever?”

Mother tucked the covers around her tighter. Too tight. “Why are you being so silly? Of course not.”

“Why can’t I get up?”

“I’ve told you all about that, baby,” Mother said, her voice sharp around the edges. Lynn knew she mustn’t ask anymore. “The doctor has said you have to rest.” Mother leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead. Lynn could feel the smear of lipstick and wanted to wipe it away, but even though it didn’t seem so much now that something was pressing on top of her—she couldn’t
see
anything—she still couldn’t move her arms.

“Grandma’s going to stay with you,” Mother said. “I’ll be here in the morning—probably way before you’re even awake. Then I’m going to take Grandma home so she can get ready for church, and I’ll come right back and stay with you all day. You start thinking about any of your books or your games you want, and Grandma will call to tell me.”

Mother’s heels clicked away like gunfire.

“There now,” Grandma said, patting at Lynn’s heavy arm. “You want to see what’s going on with Festus? He’ll be on in a little bit. I might could raise the bed up some, so you can see the television.”

“I’m hot,” Lynn said.

“You have to keep warm, now.”

“I’m hot.”

Grandma looked at her for a moment and shook her head, but then she pulled back the top blanket. There were still too many covers, too much weight. “More,” Lynn said.

“Let’s see how this does.” Grandma smoothed the blanket over the end of the bed. “It’ll take a minute or two for you to cool down.”

“Where’s Grandpa?”

“He’s home with Grace. They’ll come in to see you after church tomorrow.”

Lynn wanted to ask if Grandpa would come on his own just to see her special, without Grace tagging along to hog up everybody’s laughs and proud smiles, but she couldn’t work out how to say it without making her grandmother wag her finger and tell her not to be so selfish.

“Now,” Grandma said, “if the doctor says it’s okay for you to have it, I’ll send your grandpa out to get you some chicken from Colonel Sanders. You and your sister can eat it here on the bed, like a picnic. Wouldn’t you like that?”

Lynn closed her eyes and swallowed hard. Her throat was dry and her nose still itched. It was hard making Grandma understand. “Where am I?”

Grandma’s eyes and mouth opened wide. “Well, you know where you are. We’ve been here since yesterday.”

Lynn couldn’t remember yesterday.

“It’s the hospital, sugar.”

“Is Bob here?” Lynn asked.

“Bob?”

In her head, Lynn could see Bob’s dark hair and the way he always smiled with his mouth closed, but then his picture swam away and she saw, only for a second, a bald man in black robes sitting behind a shining wooden wall that was taller than she was. Bob had another name. What was it? “Dr. Hughes,” Lynn said, suddenly remembering Bob wasn’t a real person. Her cheeks burned. Grandma would think she was stupid.

Grandma laughed. “That’s a television hospital,” she said. “This is a real hospital. Remember how we came to see Mrs. Davis here one time?”

She remembered Mrs. Davis—the tiny lady from church who had a bunch of violets on her hat. Mrs. Davis carried butterscotch in her purse and every Sunday she gave Lynn two pieces—one for her and one for Grace—but Grace didn’t know about that, since Lynn always ate them both. When Mrs. Davis got sick, Grandma had made Lynn and Grace come to the hospital with her. Then one Sunday, the preacher said Mrs. Davis had passed away.

“Am I going to pass away?” Lynn asked. She knew that meant
die,
but Grandma always said it the other way.

“Good Lord, what notions you children get!” Grandma looked up to the ceiling, clenching her fists, whispering, “Give me strength.” Grandma stood like that for a long time, sucking in breath and whooshing it out, sucking it in and whooshing it out. Finally, she leaned down close to Lynn and said, “Now, you don’t need to talk like this around your mother. She’s mighty upset already.” Grandma fiddled with the covers and pulled down another one over the foot of the bed. “You remember when we went to the courthouse—that was Thursday. Well, you took on awful bad when the judge talked to you—kicking and screaming so, we couldn’t get you settled down. Your grandpa had to help your mother get you outside.” Grandma shook her head. “What’s a big girl like you doing carrying on like that? You got so worked up, you made yourself sick, and we had to come on over here. So you can get some rest.”

While Grandma talked, Lynn closed her eyes. She saw the bald man again, leaning down toward her where she sat in a high, hard chair, crying, trying her best to stand up in the chair so she could make the judge hear what she was saying, but her black Sunday shoes were slick on the bottom and they kept sliding across the polished wood and catching in her skirt. “No,” she was saying to the judge, but he just kept on talking. “No,” she said louder, but he didn’t pay her any mind. “No!” she screamed, and then she was crying and slamming her fists. “
No! No! No!
” And then the judge was banging a hammer on the desk and Mother was grabbing her around the waist, pulling her out of the big chair, and somebody—it must have been Grandpa—tried to hold her feet.

Daddy was there. Daddy was there and his face was red and wet and he was reaching out his arms toward her. She was reaching out to him, too, but the harder she reached, the further away she got. She screamed for him, screamed and screamed, and then somebody smacked her hard and splashed water in her face and she thought for a second she was in the lake again. Hot sweaty hands held her wrists and ankles and Mother leaned down across her, crying, “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right. You’re safe now. You don’t ever have to go with him again.”

Now Grandma was stroking her hair and saying, “There, there, sugar.” The stroking felt nice, and Lynn could feel herself relaxing the way Daddy’s big yellow dog, Mr. Goldwater, did when she massaged his velvet ears.

Since she was being quiet and good, not screaming like before, maybe Grandma would let her talk some, let her ask about some things, like why she couldn’t get her arms loose to push herself up, but she wanted more to talk about Daddy.

“I want Daddy,” she said.

Grandma stopped stroking Lynn’s hair, leaned all the way over the bed, and took her hard by the shoulders. “Don’t you be saying things like that. Don’t you upset your mother talking like that. You need to get it through your head that man’s a good-for-nothing.”

Lynn started to cry. “I want Daddy. Where’s my daddy?”

“Listen to me, girl.” Grandma was so close, Lynn could smell her cinnamon gum. “The judge decided it’s not safe for you to go back there anymore. And—that man, he’s to stay away from our house. You won’t see him again. He’s lost his rights to you.”

Rights.
What did that mean? For days and days after she had gone into the lake, she lay in her bed, listening to Mother talking in the living room to Grandma and Grandpa, or to someone on the telephone, and she kept saying, “He nearly drowned my little girl. I have to get his rights stopped.” After that, the next time Daddy came to get her to take her to the farm, Mother held her tight in the kitchen while Grandpa went to the door to make Daddy go away. It happened like that three times in a row, and since then, whenever Daddy was due, Mother told Lynn he had gone away and wouldn’t be coming for her.

And then the other morning, Grandma came to get her up and helped her put on her Sunday dress instead of a school dress and told her they were going into town to the courthouse. “Grandpa’s already in the car, so you better scoot,” she said. Somebody knocked on the front door and Grandma said, “That’ll be Hazel.” Hazel was Mrs. Wyler, their next-door neighbor.

Lynn waited until she could hear Grandma opening the door for Mrs. Wyler, and then she took her shoes and sat in the hall beside the doorway so she could hear what they were saying. “I don’t know how long we’ll be. Grace oughtn’t to be any trouble, so long as she’s got her beads and things to play with. I’ll come after her soon as we get back.”

“We’re all praying for you,” said Mrs. Wyler.

“Well, then pray the judge sees that man’s not fit to be around any child.” Grandma said good-bye to Mrs. Wyler, closed the door, then called out, “Lynn, c’mon now!”

Always before, Lynn had liked the courthouse. Last spring, her class had taken a bus there, and while they stood on the stone steps, the teacher explained the columns were called Ionic. At school, when she’d first watched the filmstrip about Greek buildings, Lynn had decided she liked Corinthian columns best, but when she was able to stand right next to the courthouse columns with their scroll caps, she liked them better than the flowery Corinthians.

This time, when she walked into the courthouse between Grandma and Grandpa, she was too nervous to notice the columns. No matter how much she asked, nobody would tell her why they had come. On the school trip, her class had gone into an empty courtroom and pretended to have a trial. She was the judge. This time, when Grandpa opened the courtroom door, Lynn could see there were people inside, including Mother, but when she tried to follow Grandpa, her grandmother held her back and pulled her over to a hard bench. “We’ll wait,” she said.

They waited so long, Lynn’s bottom hurt, but Grandma wouldn’t let her take her book down on the floor so she could stretch out on her stomach. “You’ll muss your dress,” Grandma said. About the time Nancy Drew started worrying that something had happened to keep her father from joining her at the haunted mansion like they’d planned, Lynn heard her mother crying. Nobody else she knew cried like Mother, all stopped up and choking, holding her hand over her mouth like she was trying to stuff the sadness back in. Then Mother opened the door, her eyes puffy and her hands shaking, and said, “They’re ready for you now.”

Grandma pushed her forward and Lynn went in. All the way at the end of the room, there was a bald man in black robes sitting behind the judge’s high desk, just as she had done. He wasn’t smiling, but he seemed friendly. He was motioning for her to come toward him. Beside the tall desk was a heavy wooden chair, the witness chair, and a man in a gray uniform was patting the arm of the chair, showing her she was to get in it. She passed between the two tables where in their play court Joey Beasley and Tim Jackson had sat, pretending to be lawyers. When she climbed up in the chair, she first looked past the tables to the benches, lined up like pews in church, and saw there weren’t so many people after all. Grandma and Grandpa sat together on a bench way in the back, and then, further up, on the other side, she saw Grandpa Dieter, Daddy’s daddy. She smiled and waved because she hadn’t seen him since the day at the lake, and he gave a little wave back and then looked down at his lap. Next to Grandpa Dieter was Daddy’s friend Vernon—in her head she had named him “Bear” because of the black hair that covered his arms and legs, and even his chest and his back. Vernon didn’t look at her.

Daddy was sitting at the table on the right, beside a man she didn’t know. When Daddy looked up at her, his eyes were sad but his mouth was tight, like he was angry. Mother was sitting at the table on the left with another strange man, her eyes still puffy, her mouth a sharp slice of bloodred. Nobody smiled back at Lynn, and she felt her own smile slide away like candle wax.

“There now,” Grandma said, patting Lynn’s leg through the blankets. “That’s a good girl to stay quiet.”

Lynn was still too hot, but she didn’t say anything to Grandma. She was trying hard to remember, but all she could get were quick flashes—one picture she just barely had time to see, and then another, like slides clicking past in a dark classroom.

The bald judge leaning toward her and asking her name.

The bald judge asking her, “What were you doing before your father threw you in the lake?”

The bald judge smacking his gavel down so hard she had to cover her ears. Him saying, “Calm down, child. Tell me the truth, now.”

The bald judge, his face like a red balloon, smacking the gavel down over and over and yelling, “Order! Order! Sit down, girl! Sit down!” Not letting her tell the truth.

The bald, sweaty-faced judge standing, pointing at her mother, saying, “Take this child out now!”

After that, a swirl of voices and faces, hands on her and then not, like she was being sucked up in a tornado, like Dorothy Gale from Kansas. No one would believe her. No one would listen to her. That was like Dorothy, too, except no beautiful witch in a shimmery dress came to quiet everyone down so Lynn could tell her story.

“We were playing,” she tried to tell the judge. Grandpa Dieter was grilling hot dogs. Vernon was sitting at the end of the dock, fishing. He always came with them when they went fishing. She was playing hide-and-seek with Daddy, and when he found her curled in the soft needles under a giant Christmas tree, veiled, she thought, under the low branches, she scrambled out and ran from him, squealing, toward the dock.