The Sisters (41 page)

Rainey nodded. One summer of her girlhood, she hunted the ground for bottle caps which she dropped into a mason jar. At night, she rattled their music in her ear before she slept.

“After I found the fossil, I wanted more. I put the shoe box in a garage and forgot about it.” Marshall took the sunset stone from Rainey and slid it back into its pouch before speaking again. “A long time later—two, maybe three years—I came home from school, and there was my mother, sitting at her worktable, that old shoe box open beside her. Did I tell you she’s an artist?”

Rainey shook her head. “What then?”

Marshall laughed. “Stupid kid I was, I said, ‘Hey! Those are mine!’ My mother just kept on working, setting the sherds one by one into plaster. ‘They’re not yours,’ she said. ‘They belong to the people who made the pots, painted them and used them. And to the people who respect them.’ I just sat and watched her for the longest time, not saying a word—I’d never done that before—and after a while I started to see what she was doing. She was making something beautiful, something new and whole, out of what had been lost and broken.”

A few weeks later, when Marshall, off to graduate school, said good-bye to her, he gave her a small box, asking her not to open it until he was gone. Inside, wrapped in a soft cloth, was one of the potsherds he had shown her the night they met—a jagged triangle, not quite two inches long from its apex, half that wide at the base. Most of the other sherds in Marshall’s collection were in shades of brown and red, the colors of mud and clay, but this was a lovely aged white, like old ivory. Dropping diagonally across its broken shape was a pattern of faded black lines, each like two sides of incomplete triangles, or like two paths diverging from the same point, keeping each other in sight—three repetitions of the pattern and part of a fourth, traveling across the sherd like time.

Somewhere, deep in a drawer or maybe a forgotten box in the attic, the sherd waited for her to find it again.

Rainey made up her mind. She would go to hear Marshall’s talk. And afterwards, perhaps, she would speak to him only long enough to thank him. She wouldn’t be able to tell him she had always been confident of her own strength, but at least she could thank him for telling her he had seen that strength in her. No one else, not even Daddy, ever had.

*   *   *

The campus was much larger than Rainey had imagined, sprawling across an area she remembered as a collection of small farms. So much had changed that, on the way in, she’d missed the main entrance and had to drive a little further on to a subdivision where she could turn around and come back. The parking area was a confusion of signs, most of them saying either
RESERVED
or
PERMIT ONLY
. Finally, on her second go-round, she saw a sign that said
VISITOR PARKING
, and she was able to get a spot someone else was just pulling out of.

She was no less confused when she got out of the car. Five or six buildings arced around the parking areas. Still others stood beyond those. There were people everywhere—not all of them young—with arms full of books or bags slung over their shoulders, walking from one building to another, sitting hunched in their winter coats on benches, huddling in entryways to smoke. She tucked the newspaper under her arm and headed for the nearest building, where she stopped a woman about Grace’s age, showed her the article about Marshall’s talk, and asked for directions. The woman pointed her to the center building, a flat-roofed structure that seemed to be made of nothing but windows.

Once inside, Rainey took a moment to catch her breath. She looked around and unbuttoned her coat. There was a handmade poster advertising Marshall’s visit, with a sign-up sheet at the bottom. A stout woman with frowzy blond hair was writing on it. Rainey put a hand up to her own hair before stepping up beside the woman. “Is this for the archaeology lecture?” She noticed there was a line not just for name but for address, phone number, and e-mail, as well. “I didn’t realize it was reservation only.”

The woman shook down the ink in her pen and finished writing her address. “It’s not,” she said. “This is for anyone who wants to go on a dig.” She turned to Rainey, offering her the pen. “Interested?”

“A dig?”

“In Arizona, in March. Spring break, I guess.”

“And you’re going?” The woman was over sixty, with splotchy pink skin that would blister in the desert.

“Something I’ve always wanted to do,” the woman said. “My husband’s not too keen on the idea, but I just said to him, ‘Nobody’s asking you to come.’” She smiled at Rainey conspiratorially. “Kids are all grown. What’s to stop us, eh?”

“I never really liked the sun,” Rainey said. “My daughter does—but her work keeps her too busy to do anything like that.” The woman was looking at her so intently, Rainey felt she had to explain her presence. “I just saw the article in the paper and it sounded like it might be interesting—the talk. Maybe some pretty slides. I had the day off work, so…”

The woman looked at her watch and then bent down to pick up a large tote. “We’d better get going, then.” The tote was open at the top and Rainey could see a couple of thick books and a fat green binder.

“Do you take classes here?” Rainey asked.

“Oh, sure,” the woman said. “Three or four a year. I always think I’ve taken about all there are, but then I get the schedule and I see something else that looks interesting. How about you?”

“Me? No,” Rainey said. “I started here years ago, just after high school, when it was still the junior college. But I had to quit.” She felt a surge of tears behind her eyes and struggled to think of something else to say without revealing too much.

The blond woman nodded at her words. “I know what you mean. Life happens.”

The room wasn’t an auditorium, as Rainey had expected, but more of a meeting room, with long tables pushed together to form an open rectangle. A wooden lectern sat on the end of one table. A white screen had been pulled down behind it. There was no crowd to get lost in. Only one other person was seated—a boy of perhaps twenty who looked like he hiked for a living. Rainey looked for the least conspicuous seat. If she sat at the furthest end of the room, she would still be no more than twelve feet from Marshall.

“How about these two?” The blond woman was already scooting sideways behind the chairs to the seats with a center view of the podium.

Rainey followed. The woman set her tote on the table, pulled out a chair and started wrestling out of her coat.

“You know,” Rainey said. “I think I’d better find a restroom before this starts.”

“Oh, yes.” The woman winked at her and whispered, “I miss those good old days of bladder control, too.” She lifted her tote into the chair next to hers and nodded toward the door. “Go left. It’s five or six doors down. I’ll save your seat.”

In the restroom, several very young women—Rainey supposed they were only eighteen or nineteen—giggled and talked as they leaned in toward the mirror, checking their hair and makeup. Rainey pushed into a stall and locked the door. She dug in her purse for her cigarettes and lighter and then dropped them with irritation back into her bag. She’d seen at least four
NO SMOKING
signs since she’d come into the building. It would be humiliating to be caught sneaking a smoke in the bathroom like a teenager. She tried to remember a calming exercise she’d seen once on television. She had never tried it, but now she hooked her purse on the stall door, stood as straight as she could, relaxed her shoulders, and tried to breathe very slowly from below her belly button, counting to twenty. She took one breath, then another. On the third, she realized it was working: she’d stopped trembling and her mind was no longer spinning around like a carnival ride.

She waited until she heard the girls leave, then came out of the stall and set her purse on the counter over the sink. She washed her hands, reached into her purse for her comb, dampened it with water, and flicked it lightly through her hair. Putting the comb back, she worked her fingers along the bottom of the purse to find the potsherd, still wrapped in its soft cloth. After hours of looking, she’d found it in a box of old photographs taken during the two years she’d lived happily in Indianapolis—first with Sally and Lynn, and then, briefly, on her own, with Lynn and baby Grace. She slipped the sherd in her pocket, in easy reach if Marshall needed a reminder. With another deep breath, she picked up her purse and stepped back out into the hallway.

Two men wearing jackets and ties passed her. They were talking, focused on their conversation about how a design on a pottery fragment could identify its place of origin, even if it had somehow been carried hundreds of miles away. Marshall’s hair was streaked with gray, but his body still danced with boyish energy. He and his companion turned into the room where Rainey’s pink-cheeked friend with the flyaway hair waited in happy anticipation.

Every doubt, fear, question, and silly dream Rainey had had about coming instantly dropped away and burned like a launch engine from a rocket. Just like that.

Rainey had to clap her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. She was glad she’d seen Marshall one last time. Seeing him without being seen—it was enough. Nothing of what she had expected, but all she needed.

Leaning against the wall, she took the sherd from her pocket and held it in her palm. Someday, perhaps, she would press it into Grace’s hand and tell her, “This is from your father.” And Grace, her lovely Grace, would see what it was, see that it was something beautiful but broken, waiting to be born anew.

Rainey buttoned her coat and started back down the hallway, her step light, almost buoyant. How would she ever explain all this to Sally? “I followed my instincts,” she would say, and leave it at that.

Outside, she pulled her purse strap high on her arm and put out her hand to stop a young woman who was just going into the building, possibly to hear Marshall’s lecture. “Could you tell me where the admissions office is?” Rainey asked.

“Right next door,” the young woman said. “First floor. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you,” Rainey said, not quite realizing she was speaking to the air, having already stepped away from the young woman toward her destination. “Thank you so much.”

T
WENTY-THREE

Family Court

October 2005

Indianapolis, Indiana

LYNN

T
HE PIECE ON
GOOD MORNING
AMERICA
wasn’t kind to her, but Lynn supposed it could have been worse. She had expected worse. The producers made no attempt, so far as she could see, to conceal their prejudice in favor of the adoptive parents, to whom they had devoted two full segments, with the leggy blond reporter leaning in towards the trembling mother and saying in her rich, warm, Dixie-tinged voice, “Tell us, Lila, if you can, what it’s like knowing that in less than twenty-four hours, Judge Brandt may order you to return little Julianne to her natural father.”

It was a question designed to make the woman collapse, sobbing, against her husband’s chest, choking out, “She’s our daughter … our daughter,” so the reporter waited for what seemed a compassionate five or ten seconds, the camera catching her look of shared sorrow, before she addressed the man: “Keith, how have you prepared your daughter for this? How do you explain to a four-year-old that she may have to go and live with someone she’s never met?”

Keith Howard repeated much of what he’d said in court yesterday afternoon in his final appeal, though now allowing himself greater emotion for television. He claimed he bore no ill will toward the birth father, Julio Ortiz, that he respected Mr. Ortiz for fighting in Afghanistan, that he believed Mr. Ortiz loved Julianne and would have been a good father to her had he known about her from the beginning. And he said he was sorry Mr. Ortiz had been lied to by the birth mother, Casey Lockwood, but that her lie to a former lover did not reflect on the Howards’ right to Julianne, who had lived with them since she was five weeks old.

At home, in private, Lynn railed to Sam about the court of public opinion whipped to frenzy by television news, but when she passed the crews, she knew to keep a pleasant, professional poker face for the camera, acknowledging them with a nod as she entered and left the courthouse. An intern from
Good Morning America
had called her for comment, which of course she couldn’t offer, as even an intern ought to know, but Lynn knew how the people on these programs liked to foment controversy while implying their own fairness by being able to say, truthfully, “Judge Brandt declined our request for comment.”

Sam appeared beside her, holding out a cup of coffee. “Are they making you out to be the Merry Monster of Meridian again?” A few days ago, when the media began implying that Lynn was showing considerable sympathy toward the birth father’s case, some cheeky reporter from a TV tabloid claimed that picketers in support of the Howards had labeled Lynn “the Merry Monster.” An image of Meridian’s street sign, with the courthouse in plain view, flashed on the screen beside a video of Lynn striding into the building. Since then, the nickname had been flying all over the Internet. Though Lynn hadn’t looked at it—and wouldn’t—her daughter, Taylor, had told her there was already a spoof on YouTube, showing Lynn’s transformation from a smiling middle-aged family court judge to a leering, snaggletoothed monster in battle fatigues who, along with a man in a cheap black Halloween wig, broke down the door of a suburban home, trained their assault weapons on the Ozzie and Harriet parents, and dragged a screaming little girl into the darkness.