The Sisters (29 page)

“Tell me what he said. About the job.”

“Probably the same exaggerated nonsense you’ve heard at home.” Derek cut his eyes at her, so like the way her family did when they were afraid to tell her something. “It’s just talk, Lynn. Even if I told you, you wouldn’t mind about it—you’re too open-minded for that.”

“Derek—”

“All right,” he said. “The guy called him ‘an old fag’—your dad.”

“Oh!” Lynn choked on a hot burst of tears.

“Lynn, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have used that word,” Derek said. “But it doesn’t bother you, does it? You don’t care if he’s gay. Do you?”

Lynn noticed a quaver in Derek’s voice. Did it matter to him? And if it did, should that matter to her?

“Lynn? Are you okay?”

“Yes!” she snapped. “Of course I am.” She pressed furiously at her eyes. “I don’t know.” Derek was asking her how she felt, but what did it matter what she felt? She knew what she believed: Nothing was important but thought—reason. Just look at all the times she had stood up against classmates, and even professors, attacking them for their absurd prejudices. And last year, even though she’d never been to California, she made signs and sat for a whole day with five others in front of the student union in support of Harvey Milk’s campaign. So why was she upset? It was nonsense.

When Derek had said the word—
fag
—she remembered not her father, but that other man—the big one. Had she heard him say that word, or heard someone say it about him? Bear, she used to call him—but not to his face. He had a goofy sense of humor, and he’d always been friendly to her, bringing her into his jokes, but she’d never liked him. Whenever she visited, it seemed he was there, too. Always—when she wanted to have Daddy to herself.

Lynn saw the sign for Hanging Rock Road. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I want to go back.”

Derek made the turn, then slowed the car almost to a stop, keeping his eyes anxiously on the rearview mirror. “I’ve put almost three hundred miles on my car,” he said. “My chemistry reports are going to be late. You’re doing this.”

Lynn let her tears go.

“
Christ,”
Derek said, almost too quietly for her to hear. Almost.

She was fond of Derek, and there were times—mostly when they were in the backseat of his car or squashed together in her bunk—when she thought she might like to marry him, and he was a sweetheart to bring her all this way, but right now, when she really needed him, he was like a mole on concrete—blundering and helpless.

Up ahead on the right, there was a gravel turnaround. Derek drove there, stopped the car, and turned off the ignition. He reached over to Lynn and laid his arm awkwardly across her shoulders. He tried to pull her to him, but the steering wheel and the gearshift were in the way.

Lynn sat back in her seat and dug a package of tissues from her purse. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose and hoped at least Derek would not say
Pull yourself together
.

Derek laid his head back and stretched his long body as far as the seat would allow. He rolled down the window and tapped an irregular rhythm on the steering wheel. “Look,” he said, “let’s just go on like we planned. I’ll go with you to the door. I’ll explain why we’re here if you want me to. Okay?”

Derek turned Lynn’s face toward him. So gently, as if he were touching a day-old kitten, he stroked her cheek. “Okay?” He smiled, his eyes raised in hope.

Lynn took his hand in hers and kissed it. “Okay,” she said, and Derek started the car.

Just as the directions indicated, the farm appeared on the left as they came out of a sharp S-curve. Grandpa Dieter’s farm—or what was left of it. On the ridge behind were new houses, cheap, close together, and all alike. But the old house was the same, except for now being a soft dull blue instead of white. And there was a chicken house she didn’t remember, surrounded by a high rail fence with chicken wire filling in the gaps between the rails. At the sound of the car, two chickens that had been perched on the little tin roof flew clucking down into the yard, stirring the other chickens into a flurry of flapping wings.

The commotion among the chickens set the dogs to barking. They were big red dogs, skinny but strong—three of them. Lynn was grateful to see they were in a chain-link pen, a padlock on the gate. When she and Derek got out of the car, the dogs lined up side by side, dropped their heads level with their backs, and growled low—a deep, steady, terrifying sound.

Lynn laid her hand in Derek’s waiting palm—it was solid and dry, strong—and let him lead her up the front walk and onto the porch. There was no doorbell, so he opened the screen door, knocked hard, waited, knocked again, and let the screen close.

The door swung open. Standing on the other side of the dark screen was a blocky man in his mid-forties, a head taller than Lynn, with a square face and reddish hair.

“You two lost?” He sounded irritable, even angry, as if they’d interrupted something. He stepped out onto the porch so suddenly Lynn and Derek had to jump back out of the way. The man went to the corner of the porch nearest the pen where the dogs were still growling, more loudly now. He pounded on the side of the house and barked, “Quiet!” The dogs fell silent and dropped to the ground, heads between their front paws but eyes wide and alert.

The man turned back to them, arms crossed. “What is it?”

Lynn felt herself go pale. Her throat was so tight she involuntarily lifted her hand to it as if to tear away whatever was choking her. “I…”

“Mr. Brandt?” Derek said. “Are you Carl Brandt?”

The man acknowledged with a slight nod, eying them with suspicion.

Derek quickly introduced himself, then put his arm around Lynn. “This is Lynn,” he said. “Your daughter. She’s been wanting to find you for a long time, but her mother wouldn’t allow it.”

“Rainey,” the man said bitterly.

“That’s right,” Derek said. “Rainey Brandt. This is Lynn.”

Lynn could think only of how grateful she was for Derek’s arm around her, keeping her steady, keeping her from running. How good he was. She would marry him today if he asked her.

When the man before her stepped into the sunlight pooling at the center of the porch, Lynn recognized his frost blue eyes. “Daddy,” she said.

The man came closer, testing each step, as if the floor might dissolve under his feet.

“Daddy. It’s
me.
”

“Lynney?”

There it was, right before her, so close she could see a multitude of tiny lines—the sad, loving face of her dreams.

“Yes, Daddy.”

She held out her arms as in the dream and closed her eyes, struggling to trap the image of him, like a saint’s portrait inside a knight’s shield.

“Lynney Lou?”

Suddenly his arms were around her, squeezing her so tightly her sobs clogged inside her ribs. She pressed her arms against his back, imagining herself small again, so small she nearly disappeared against his broad chest, imagining all that had happened going backward, undoing itself—her nightmare cries, gone, for there was no nightmare. The weeks in the hospital, gone. The courtroom, gone. Everyone except the two of them, gone. Everything gone—until she was back with him on the lake, hiding under the giant Christmas tree, popping out, laughing as he chased her, him scooping her up and swinging her, laughing. Swinging her, laughing with her. And this time—
this time
—he wouldn’t let go.

S
IXTEEN

Turnings

March 1979

Newman, Indiana

RAINEY

R
AINEY OPENED THE DOOR TO
the bedroom without knocking. In spite of the midday sun that poured through the window and flooded the desk, Grace was bent under the blazing lamp, curling long strips of gold wire into tiny, tedious spirals with a pair of needle-nose pliers. Rainey couldn’t see the point of it—Grace would ruin her eyes and her small, pretty hands—but she had to admit that when Grace linked several dozen variously sized spirals to make a bracelet or necklace, the creation was lovely. There was a word for it, a word that sounded like the tinkling of high notes on a piano—
filigree
.

Instead of putting up posters of rock stars or photographs of friends like other girls, Grace had covered the walls on her side of the room with panels of velvet-covered corkboard—glistening emerald, ruby, amethyst—on which she displayed an ever-changing arrangement of elaborate jewelry. Grace sold enough pieces at school to buy more supplies, but her grades this term—except for her art class—weren’t very good. Rainey had been meaning to talk with her about that—the grades. Grace needed to bring them up if she was going to get into college. That was another thing they needed to talk about—Grace’s frivolous plan to study art instead of something sensible like computers—but it would have to wait. Rainey had other things on her mind.

“Grace,” Rainey said, standing behind her daughter’s chair.

“Mmm?” Grace didn’t look up from her work. She was completing a very delicate link, more complicated than what she’d done before, or at least it seemed so to Rainey. Grace had curled the wire on both ends, toward the middle, creating two large spirals in the center, each doubling back and looping out toward the ends into smaller spirals—like two treble clefs on their backs, touching toes.

Grace showed no sign of stopping, so Rainey said, “Put that down, please. I want to talk to you.”

Grace set her tools on top of the sketch she’d made of the finished piece and folded her hands on the desk. Rainey leaned in to look at the sketch—grand enough for royalty, very impractical for any modern young woman. She wouldn’t be able to sell that one, not even for prom.

“Grace!” With two rigid fingers, Rainey tapped smartly on her daughter’s shoulder, and at last the girl switched off the lamp and scooted her chair in a half turn toward the center of the room.

Preambles made Rainey impatient, especially when she had something serious to say, so she sat down on the edge of the bed and faced Grace with a hard stare. “I want you to tell me everything you know about your sister.”

A flicker of a satiric smile nudged the corners of Grace’s lips. Rainey wasn’t going to take that nonsense. “You know what I’m talking about,” she said sharply.

Grace opened her mouth, then closed it and rubbed at the depressions the wire had made in the pads of her fingers.

“It’s no good trying to lie for her,” Rainey said. It was this point that made her especially angry. Grace and Lynn had never been close, Lynn lording it over Grace all her life, trying to make her feel stupid, just as she did with everyone else, so Grace’s loyalty ought not to be with her sister, but with her mother.

Rainey pressed. “I know she’s been sneaking away from college to see—” She couldn’t bring herself to say
her father
. She started to say
that asshole,
but she’d noticed the word made Grace fold inward. Rainey went on: “—to see that
thing
known as my ex-husband.” Her shudder of disgust was partly real, partly exaggerated to show Grace how upset she was at Lynn’s betrayal.

“Did Lynn tell you that?”

“You know perfectly well she did not.”

“How could I know?” Grace shrugged and looked at Rainey as if to ask another question—one Rainey didn’t want to answer. Grace would ask,
What makes you so sure Lynn even knows where he is?
and Rainey didn’t want to say that one day last week, when Lynn was home on spring break, she had read Lynn’s journal straight through while Lynn was out with friends.

She had learned a great many things about her elder daughter—for one, just how much time Lynn spent running around to scream about rights: rights for women, rights for the Haitian boat people, rights for trees and for the ozone layer, rights to be safe from nuclear power. Rainey had learned, too, that Lynn was sleeping with her boyfriend—that Derek, who sneered when he said, “Yes, Mrs. Brandt,” or “No, Mrs. Brandt,” so full of his own importance. And she had learned that somehow, some way, Alma—her own sister—had had a hand in Lynn’s sneaking. Everyone, it seemed, had turned against her.

“Lynn didn’t tell me,” Rainey said, proud of how calmly she spoke but still wanting Grace to know she was angry. “Of course you didn’t, either. Never mind how I know. I do, and you’re going to tell me what you know about it.”

Grace tucked a stray, stringy brown lock back up into the headband that held her hair out of her eyes while she worked. She said nothing.

“Grace. Tell me. How long has she been sneaking around? How does she get down there?”

Grace stalled, rubbing at the back of her neck, looking up to the ceiling, down, to the side. When at last she leveled her gaze at Rainey, there was a flash of defiance. “I don’t know if it counts as sneaking.”

“Well, what else would you call it, I’d like to know?” Rainey’s voice grew shrill. “She’s gotten down there somehow, time after time. Without a word to me—lying to me outright. Making up stories about where she’s been.”

Grace’s clear stare chilled Rainey. “You think she needs your permission? To see her father?”