Voices Carry (17 page)

“How did it happen?” Genna asked.

“Car accident. They were run off the road, so the witness says. But who knows? All we know for sure is that the car went down an embankment and flipped over once or twice.”

“Why’d you wait so long to let me know?”

“For one thing, I wasn’t sure you’d care. And for another, I’ve been. . .
away
. . . for a while.” Her voice dropped.

“Away?”

“I had a breakdown a few years ago—that’s what they called it, a breakdown. It’s taken me a good while to get back on my feet, though God knows I still feel a little broken. Anyway, after I got out, I was in a group home, a halfway house of sorts. Then I found out about them and went back for a time.” The touch of the old South crept steadily back into Crystal’s speech. “I was cleaning out the house. . . they spent the last few years in that little house out back of Grandma Petersen’s, remember? That little three-room place that sat out by the apple orchard?”

“I remember,” Genna whispered.

“Well, I was cleaning it out—hoping I’d find something of enough value to sell, to be honest with you. It’s
been a while since I’ve worked.” A nervous hand found its way to her neck. “Anyway, I was pulling stuff out of there and Dwight—you remember cousin Dwight—he was bringing his truck out to take the furniture down to the secondhand store. He was helping me take the mattress off the bed. I found these, tucked under the mattress.” She took something from her pocket, and held them out to Genna. “You can probably put the gun away. I swear I’m not armed.”

Surprised to realize she was still holding the Glock, Genna opened the top flap of her bag and, after making sure the safety was on, slipped the gun back in.

“What is it?”

“Take a look.”

Genna reached for the envelope, and taking it, walked toward the light that illuminated the very front of the building. One by one, she studied the photographs.

Pictures of Genna and her mother.

Pictures of Genna and Crystal. Of Genna and Crystal and their mother.

Pictures from Easter Sundays, the Snow girls dressed in their best dresses, their hair in tight braids. Chasing the ducks on the pond behind Grandma’s house. Sitting with her mother on the porch swing at Aunt Mary Claire’s house that summer she and Crystal had gotten poison ivy so badly they could barely open their eyes. Their mother had sung to them, read to them. Rocked them in her arms when the itching had gotten so bad they couldn’t sleep.

Genna couldn’t bear the memories. They hurt and confused
her and took her breath away. She’d never been able to reconcile the mother who had been so caring with the woman who had walked away from her without a backward glance.

It was too much to deal with at one time. Genna put the photos back into the envelope with shaking hands.

“I could offer you some coffee or something,” she said weakly.

“Only if you want to, Genna. I’d understand if you didn’t.”

“I think I want to.” Genna walked back to where she’d dropped her gym bag and fished the keys out of the pocket. “I think there’s still some iced tea left from yesterday, if you’d rather have that. . .”

“Whatever is the least trouble for you, Gen. I know you weren’t expecting me, and I don’t want to put you out.”

Crystal followed her up the steps and into the lobby, across the dark green and navy plaid carpet to the elevator. Genna hit the
up
button and stood aside when the doors opened and Crystal stepped in. She hesitated slightly, prompting Crystal to quip, “It’s okay, Genna. I won’t hurt you. I promise. Besides, you’re still the one who has the gun, remember?”

“I’m sorry,” Genna told her. “I’m just so stunned. I never thought I’d see you again. I don’t know how to react.”

She reached out and hit the button for the fourth floor. They rode in silence until the doors slid open and Genna stepped out.

“It’s the door at the end.” Genna said.

They walked the length of the hallway, and it wasn’t until they had stepped into the cool of Genna’s apartment and she’d turned on the lights
that Genna took a good look at her sister for the first time in eighteen years.

Crystal was shorter than Genna, and her dark hair bore traces of a strand of gray here and there. The lines in her face made her seem older than her thirty years, but all in all, Genna thought she’d probably have recognized her anywhere.

“Are you glad to see me?” Crystal asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there’s something that hasn’t changed over the years. You’re still painfully honest.” Crystal tried to smile. “Honest to the core, our Genna. At whatever the cost.”

Genna turned from her and walked into the kitchen and snapped on the light. “Would you like something cold to drink? I have soda, iced tea. . .”

“Whatever. Anything is fine. Ice water is fine.” Crystal stood in the doorway. “I think that since I’m here we should get it out of the way early, Genna.”

“I don’t. . .”

“. . . want to talk about it? Any shrink will tell you that’s a very unhealthy attitude. There’s something that’s been standing between us for more than half our lives, Gen. I need to get it off my chest.”

“If you’re talking about the fact that I didn’t hear from you all that time, about the fact that you never made any attempt to contact me all these years. . .” Genna’s control was forced, the words shooting out of her mouth beyond her control.

“I was a kid too, remember.” Crystal’s hands shook as she accepted the glass of iced tea that Genna held out to her. “I didn’t have the means or the opportunity to come and find you. And I didn’t have the guts, either.”

Genna reached past Crystal to grab her own glass from the counter.

“I never had your sense of right, your sense of justice. I never had your strength, Gen.” Crystal sipped at her drink. “I wish I had. But I never did, even when I wanted to so badly. Even when I knew I should, knew how important it was for me to. . .”

Genna stepped past her and turned off the light, gesturing for Crystal to follow her into the living room. At that moment, she wasn’t sure of just how much she wanted to hear, and she moved like a cornered animal, wary and watchful and suspicious.

Crystal stood in the doorway, watching as Genna hit the message button on her answering machine. There were four messages. Crystal stood patiently waiting for them to end.

Genna sat back on the sofa and put her feet up on the coffee table.

“You can sit down,” she said, without her characteristic grace.

“This isn’t easy for me.” Crystal perched on the edge of the dark green hassock and studied her sister’s face.

“Well, it was your idea, Chrissie. You must have thought it out.”

“I thought out what I’d say to you. I couldn’t think out how I’d feel.”

“How do you feel?”

“Worse than I expected to. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all. Maybe I should leave.”

Genna withdrew the envelope holding the photos and tossed them on the table. Several escaped and fell onto the floor. “You can take those with you.”

“I just thought you’d like to see. . .”

“See what? The best moments of my early childhood? The smiling, loving face of my mother, who let that wacko, crazy, abusive man who fathered us, control her life, control her emotions, turn her against her own flesh and blood? That loving mother who abandoned her own child for the crime of telling the truth?” Genna grabbed one of the toss pillows that graced the corners of the sofa, and pressed it to her stomach as if to press away the pain that shot through her. “Do you really think I need photographs to remind me of what I lost, Crystal?”

“I’m sorry, Genna. I thought maybe you’d want them.” Crystal stood up. “I thought maybe it would be good for both of us. I was very wrong.”

Crystal picked up the pictures that had slipped onto the floor and tucked them back into her pocket, her face red with embarrassment.

“This was clearly a disaster,” Crystal said as she picked up her bag with trembling fingers. “Just another example of how bad my judgment is. I just wish. . .”

Genna looked up at her with eyes darkened with emotions she’d spent years denying, but did not trust herself to speak.

“Well, I just wish you could have been just a little happy to see me.” Crystal crossed the carpet toward the door.

“I’d have been a lot happier if you hadn’t waited all these years to show up,” Genna said curtly.

“That door swings both ways, Gen. Your resources are much more sophisticated than mine.” For the first time since she’d arrived, a touch of anger rose in Crystal’s voice and she stopped at the door,
her hand on the doorknob. “How much of an effort did you make to find me?”

“I was the chick who was pushed out of the nest, remember?”

“I wasn’t the one who was doing the pushing. And for the record, you just don’t know how lucky you were.” Crystal opened the door and let herself out, closing it quietly behind her.

For several long minutes, Genna sat on the sofa, trying to make sense out of what had just happened.

The last person in the world that she’d expected to show up on her doorstep, just had. The pain that initially had been dulled by shock began to spread through her chest, and she clutched the pillow tighter.

“Crystal. Crystal was here.” Genna said the words aloud as if to convince herself that it had really happened.

She rose and carefully replaced the pillow on the sofa, then bent to pick up one of the fallen photos, missed, apparently, when Crystal gathered up the others. Genna, her brown hair in tight, neat pigtails, dressed in a hand-me-down dress of ugly green and gray plaid that someone in the church had given them, posing for her school picture. Crystal had worn it the year before. Genna studied the face of the child she had been. This must have been in second or third grade, she recalled. The side of her jaw bore the faintest tinge of purple, where her father’s fist had taken its toll for some infraction the weekend before. Genna searched her memory for what her transgression had been that time. . .

It occurred to Genna then that her mother must have taken great pains to hide the photographs that
Crystal had brought with her. Her father had forbidden them to have their pictures taken.

Looking at yourself promotes vanity.

Even in the silence of her apartment, so far from that small house in Kentucky where they’d lived the year the class photo had been taken, Genna could hear his voice. The backwoods church had been without a preacher and when her father had been offered the position, he’d jumped at it. For a while, Genna and Crystal had been almost happy. The house backed up to a woods where they could sneak off and play on those afternoons when their father had been busy counseling members of his congregation. And the busier he was, the less time he had to worry about the many ways in which they were leading themselves into the arms of the devil.

There in the woods, Genna’s imagination could run wild, unrestricted by constant quotes of Scripture that reminded her that this world was not her home. The two girls would gather sticks and lay the outline of the grand mansion they pretended to live in. A mansion that had lots of windows that were always open to let in those gentle breezes that would push out the stifling air of their father’s dominance that hung over them all.

It was there, in Kentucky, where her father had first come to the attention of Clarence Homer, a wealthy man from the small town of Lindenwood in the southwesternmost point of Pennsylvania, just over the West Virginia border. Homer had been visiting the Blue Grass members of his family when he’d first heard Reverend Snow’s fiery rhetoric, and his own fundamentalist leanings had been incited. Returning to Lindenwood, which at the time had a
church but no resident preacher, he convinced his brother elders that Reverend Snow was just the man they needed to bring around the wayward in their community. Reverend Snow had a definite gift for reminding transgressors of what awaited them in the hereafter.

The move to Pennsylvania had proven, for a while, to be their salvation. Back in Kentucky, school had been an endless series of religious lectures presented by dour teachers in a small clapboard building over which their father ultimately presided, for the school was run by the church. Mr. Homer, however, had felt Preacher Snow’s time far too valuable to be spent in the classroom, and had effectively removed him from the educational process. The children in Lindenwood attended the local public schools, as had Mr. and Mrs. Homer and each of their six children, and
they’d
all turned out just fine.

And so Genna and Crystal had their first exposure to public education, with books to read that told stories that weren’t just from the Bible. It had taken the Snow girls a good two weeks to adjust to the changes—none of which, they agreed, they should discuss with their parents—but before the first month had passed, they’d become acclimated to their new school. Happier than they’d ever been, they knew instinctively to keep that joy under wraps at home, lest their father find a way to take it from them in the guise of saving their souls. It seemed the more they enjoyed their life and their new surroundings, the wider their horizons became, the more their father’s vision narrowed.

And then came that first summer, and Mr. Homer’s pronouncement that the Snow girls should
spend the months of July and August at the camp that was owned by his family and run by his brother, Michael, in the woods upstate. Before their father could object, Genna and Crystal had been shuttled off to the Way of the Shepherd where, besides endless hours memorizing yet more Scripture—much of which they interpreted during arts and crafts—they learned to swim and play soccer and baseball. Rarely, if ever, had Genna seen Brother Michael, who roamed the camp like a wayward monk, his white robes flowing around his ankles, its loosely fashioned hood folded around his head and hiding his face. Genna’s only contact with him had been at morning and evening prayers, and so he had not been a factor in her life. Not until that second summer, anyway. . . and even then, she’d never seen his face.

Only his dark eyes.

Genna went to the window that overlooked the parking lot, searching for Crystal in the dim light, but there was no movement to be seen. Perhaps she had parked along the street side. She pushed aside the living room drapes and peered out toward the main road. There, halfway to the corner, a woman walked slowly in the shadow of the street lamps.