The Sisters (30 page)

Rainey began to shake. She clutched at the bedspread, trying to compose herself. “The judge ordered…”

“Lynn’s over twenty-one, Mother.”

“She wasn’t twenty-one when all this started.” Rainey could feel her argument, so carefully imagined, slipping out of her grasp.

“Yes, she was,” Grace said.

“So you
do
know when she went the first time!” Rainey stood up and turned her back on Grace. She couldn’t look at her, not right now. “What does age have to do with it anyway? Is that a license to lie?” She tried to trace the pattern of a chained collar pinned on the wall before her, but it eluded her, breaking its rhythm every time she thought she’d unlocked its secret. Then she saw it: the wire twined like overgrown rose vines, but there were no blossoms—only a tangle of thorns. “He’s hypnotized her, hasn’t he? Making big promises about sending her to law school?” That was all over Lynn’s journal, too. Pages of it. Rainey could feel Grace, behind her, measuring her words.

“I really don’t think this is any of my business, Mother. Or yours.”

Rainey wheeled around, arms crossed, the collar forgotten. “Anything your sister does that affects this family is my business. Like sneaking.”

“And what would you have done if she had told you?”

“I would have stopped her!” How dare her own child question her like this? She should walk out of the room, come back when she had regained her calm, but she plunged on. “I’d have pulled her out of school if I had to. Kept her here until she swore never to go again. I would have protected her.”

“From what?” Grace picked up the link she’d just made and turned it in her fingers. “You would have made her a prisoner? For how long?”

“No! Stop twisting my words.” Rainey could feel the tears pushing at her eyes. “You learned that from your sister.” She pressed her fingertips against her closed lids. “He’s just going to build her up, make her think he’s going to pay all the bills, and then he’ll pull it all out from under her. It’s a trick. Don’t you see?”

“And why would he do that, Mother? What would he get out of it?”

“He wants to hurt her again! He wants to get at me.” She reached for Grace’s hand. “Please, help me.
Help me
. Help me make her understand what a liar he is—he’s a
snake,
Grace.”

Turning her chair back to the desk, Grace said quietly, “You think she’ll listen? You’ve already given it a lifetime—two lifetimes. Three, if you count yours.”

Rainey grabbed Grace’s shoulders, trying to pull her around again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Grace twisted from Rainey’s grasp, propped her elbows on the desk, and let her head drop wearily into her waiting hands. “For as long as I can remember—for as long as Lynn can remember—you’ve run him down. Looking for every chance to insult him, telling us how horrible he is.”

“He was.
He is
.”

Grace laid her head on the desk and closed her eyes. How sweet she looked that way. Innocent. Until now, Rainey hadn’t realized how cruel her younger daughter could be—how secretive she was, how stealthily she could cut, like the thorns of a rose.

Eyes still closed, Grace said, “So why not tell us what it was that made him so awful? So we could decide for ourselves.”

“Grace—have you been going down there, too? Don’t lie to me. Have you? What’s he been promising you?”

Grace sat up, shaking her head. “Why would I go, Mother?”

Rainey backed away and sat down on the bed again. “All I ever wanted was to keep you girls safe.” She was losing her battle against her tears. “Safe from all the bad things in life, from knowing.…” She dug a wadded Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose.

“Safe from what?” Grace turned to stare out the window. “What exactly?” The sun had gone behind the clouds and the bare branches waved in the rising wind, as if struggling to touch. “Don’t you think it hurts to be without a father?”

Rainey found another Kleenex and blew her nose again. “Your grandpa is the best father anyone could want.”

Grace glared at her. “You don’t get it, do you? Of course we love Grandpa. But he’s your father, not ours.” She picked up the spiral link and flung it at the window. “Why do you expect us not to want one?”

Rainey held her head erect. “I expect you to trust me. To show me some respect.” She dabbed a remaining tear from her cheek. “There were a lot of things I wanted,” she said. “Things I never got. Things I gave up for the two of you. I think that deserves something.”

“You can’t make somebody else pay for what you lost,” Grace said. “Or you shouldn’t, anyway. Lynn just wants to find out for herself. If the man’s the mess you say he is, she’ll figure it out soon enough.”

When Rainey opened her mouth to answer, a wail rose from deep inside her, turning her inside out, robbing her of her bearings. Children thought it was so easy, so easy to lay out simple reasons, like lines on a highway—not the way it really was, like trying to untangle one of Grace’s golden chains. No—worse—as if someone had plucked all those webs from their velvet boards, thrown them inside a wheel, and turned that wheel for ten years, twenty, until they had become a single mass, knotted and crushed. Where could she begin any telling? With the baseball field? With the house in Siler—opening the bedroom door, the Vaseline jar on the pillow, the skewed pictures, and those …
monsters
? Or would it be better to leap forward to a hospital where a doctor told her there was no other choice but to tie her child to the bed, to fill her thready veins with drugs enough to bring down a giant? What if she started in between—with the drowning, the lies, the nightmares that told the truth? Or maybe she would begin just a few years ago, when Lynn’s fits suddenly vanished and she sealed up like a marble wall. Rainey sank to the floor, her back against the bed. She hugged herself against the pain, rocking. “You don’t know. You don’t know. You just don’t
know.
”

Grace picked up a new piece of gold wire and started twisting it, but it broke in her hands. “That’s just it. We don’t know.” She tossed the wire onto the desk. “At least Lynn had a name to start with.”

Shock stopped Rainey’s tears. “What are you talking about?”

Grace wouldn’t look at her.

“Grace? What do you mean—a name? You know his name. Grace?”

Her daughter picked up the wire again and began turning a new shape with the pliers. “I know,” Grace said bitterly. “I know he’s not my father. Lynn told me. Years ago.” She gripped the tool so tightly her knuckles were white. “Maybe you’d like to tell me about that.”

Rainey put a hand to her throat to steady her trembling voice. “No, Grace. Oh no. No.” She pulled herself up and grabbed her daughter’s arm—too hard—trying to make her turn. “You
mustn’t.
” She let go and said more quietly, “You mustn’t,
do you hear me
? You mustn’t ever try to find your father.”

“How can I?” Grace’s voice was as concentrated as her skilled hands. “You won’t even tell me who he is.” She turned and stared at Rainey. “Are you going to tell me now that you’re keeping me safe? I guess he must be the biggest bastard that ever lived.”

Rainey’s open hand, out of her control, slashed across Grace’s face.

She stared, uncomprehending, at her stinging hand, and the angry mark on her daughter’s soft cheek.

“I’m sorry! Oh, sweetheart,” Rainey cried, wrapping Grace tightly in her arms, kissing her hair. Grace sat stiff, unyielding. “I’m so sorry, Grace.
Please
. I’m sorry, baby.”

When Rainey released her, Grace returned to her tiny, elaborate turnings of the wire.

“Oh, Grace. My Grace. Your father,” Rainey said. “He was—lovely…” But even as the words still hung in the air, the sentence waiting to be finished, she knew there was no untangling Marshall, either. How could she explain that even before she had felt the first flutter of Grace in her womb, she had decided for all of them, decided to keep silent—decided to let everyone around them believe a lie—so that Marshall could stay on his path? And even if somehow she could explain, even if Grace in time could recognize the sacrifices Rainey had made—how? How could Grace not believe that she herself had been forced to pay the greatest part of the price?

“He never knew about you,” Rainey said. “It was for the best. You have to believe me. Please, baby.” She rubbed Grace’s shoulders, but the girl wouldn’t have it. “He was good and kind, your father. And very smart. Isn’t that enough?”

“No, Mother,” said Grace. “It’s not enough.”

S
EVENTEEN

The New Man

Summer’s End 1981

Newman, Indiana

GRACE

H
E HAD A GOOD SEAT,
the new man, even better than Hiram, though she’d never say so out loud—not if she wanted to keep her job anyway. She did. Grace thought she’d heard Hiram call the man Ken when he first came to the stable a couple of weeks ago. They seemed to know each other—the way Hiram slapped his hand into the other man’s, pulling him in for a half hug; the way they laughed really loud and then put their heads close together, like men did when they shared a secret or a dirty joke—and though Grace had been listening as closely as she could without seeming to, she hadn’t heard Hi call his friend, except that once, anything besides Crab.

That first day, Hi had put him on Ashes, the big gelding, which made everyone at the stable gather around the ring, asking in whispers if maybe Hi had something against the guy, whether he was pulling some practical joke. Unsaddled, Ashes could be led by a child, but saddled, nobody except Hiram could hold the horse’s head—he fought the bit, even with Hi’s brother Merle, who had so many show trophies he’d taken to using the tall ones as stakes for his tomatoes and pole beans. But Hiram put his old friend on Ashes, and from the moment he entered the ring, the man held the horse high and tight. In every way they looked a team, and in the sun, the gleam of the horse’s coat, freshly curried, matched the shining pewter color of the man’s thick hair.

This was the fourth time Crab had been to the stable, so he was old news to the men and women who spent their days there—he was a gifted rider, they’d give him that, but there wasn’t any need to act like he’d dropped from heaven to take a gallop on a unicorn. Still, Grace couldn’t resist watching him, and when he turned up, she would suddenly find work to do in one of the stalls that looked out on the ring. This morning, hoping the man would come, she’d left Delia’s stall for last. Hi had raised his eyebrows at her when he saw her skipping it to go on to the one next to it, but Grace said she figured since Delia had been taken off in a trailer at dawn to meet her stud, she had first better clean the stalls of horses who would be coming back by midmorning.

From Delia’s stall, the outside window gave a clear view of the ring. As soon as she saw Ashes and his rider pass, Grace let the pitchfork drop in the straw and pushed open the wooden shutter to watch them. After two walks around the ring, they moved into a trot, then a canter, back to a walk, another canter, and then the man shouted to Hi, and they came out of the ring at a gallop and breezed past the barn.

Never had Grace seen a back so straight, and she envied the way he and Ashes seemed a single nerve, the way they seemed to share a mind.

—No, not a mind. Nothing so rational. It was instinct. It didn’t take any special sight to notice that when he rode, this man wasn’t an ordinary man, but Grace liked to think she was the only one who could see that when mounted on Ashes, he wasn’t a man at all. He was—he just …
was.
Not like anything else.

She heard Ashes’s hooves pounding the dirt on the far side of the barn, slowing up as they rounded the back corner. By the time they passed the open window again, the man had Ashes in a cooling walk. When he looked straight in at her, Grace turned and grabbed the pitchfork to finish mucking out the stall.

The sweet odor of straw and manure wound around her and she breathed deeply. Mother complained that Grace carried the smell in with her, all through the house, but Grandma said she couldn’t smell it and that Rainey needed to leave the girl alone, so long as she left her boots outside. Neither of them had liked the idea of her working at the barn, but after Grace had brought them over to meet Hiram and Grandma realized he was a nephew of Bill Crother, Grandpa’s old boss, she accepted Hiram’s promise to look after Grace.

“I expect she’s safer there, Rainey, than she is closing up that store in the mall,” Grandma said.

Mother, though, still thought Grace was crazy, doing all the grunt work at a dirty old stable just for the sake of riding lessons with Hiram. “What do you want to ride for?” Mother would say. “You don’t have a horse, and I don’t see you being able to buy one.”

“That’s just the point,” Grace said. “If I work at the stable it’s almost like having my own horse—lots of horses.”

What she didn’t tell Mother, because it would have led to a real fight, was that Hiram had worked it out with the farrier to let Grace learn to shoe. She didn’t mind the shoeing, but what she really wanted from J.J. was to learn blacksmithing, and this was her way in. J.J. wasn’t keen on having a nineteen-year-old girl hanging around red-hot lengths of iron because, like most men, he had the foolish notion that girls burned more easily than guys did, but even he had to admit Grace had a way with the horses, that they lifted their feet more willingly for her than they did for him. Little by little she was breaking J.J. down, proving to him she was strong enough to do the heavy work and that she wasn’t afraid of sweat, calluses, or filth.