The Second Sister Page 11

  He spun around, looking startled.

  “Yeah?”

  “I . . . I just. Never mind,” I said, realizing how panicked I had sounded. I waved my hand and let out a nervous laugh. “It’s stupid.”

  “No. What is it?” Peter took a step toward me.

  “I’m going to be here until New Year’s. Seven weeks.”

  Still frowning, he nodded. “Uh-huh. So?”

  “So . . .” I spread out my hands. “What am I supposed to do while I’m here?”

  Peter took another step toward me, looking bemused, and kissed me on the forehead.

  “Live,” he said with a grin. “Just live.”

  Chapter 16

  Lakeview Trail, the aptly named road leading to a cluster of homes on the shores of Lake Michigan, about a mile and a half north of downtown Nilson’s Bay, hadn’t changed a bit. It was still narrow, unpaved, and studded with deep potholes that rendered the fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit sign unnecessary.

  The houses on Lakeview Trail had been summer cottages back in the twenties and thirties. They were small and rustic and sat on tiny lots. The original buyers were working-class folk who couldn’t afford more and were satisfied with simple accommodations in glorious surroundings.

  The only reason our cottage sat on such a large plot of prime land, jutting out from the shore with an unparalleled view, was because my family, some of the earliest inhabitants of Nilson’s Bay, had once owned more than fifty acres on the lakeshore. At some point, they realized they could make more money by selling the land than cultivating it, and so they did, one parcel at a time, as financial necessity required, until there were only two acres—the best two acres—left.

  That was the land on which my ancestors had built their cottage. It had been passed down through the generations, eventually to my mother, then my sister, and now, assuming I could stick out the ridiculous required residency, to me.

  By the time Alice and I were born, the neighborhood was settled. People were always upgrading, of course, adding a carport, a deck, vinyl siding, extra insulation, or improved plumbing, whatever was required to turn summer cottages into year-round residences; about half of the houses were now occupied full-time. But that was as far as it went. People fixed up what they had or bought, but nobody built new.

  Until now.

  It wasn’t yet common—far from virulent—and perhaps only one plot in ten had succumbed, but here and there among the little cottages, I could see brand-new homes built on land laid bare when the old houses had been razed and the ground scraped clean, until no trace or memory of the former dwelling remained. These new homes were far from rustic. They were expansive. And expensive.

  They gobbled up every available inch of ground, creating maximum square footage for their owners, people who lived here four or six or eight weeks a year but who had decided they couldn’t do so without replicating their luxurious urban lifestyle amid this cluster of cabins on a remote piece of land in rural Wisconsin. The houses they built on those teeny cottage-sized lots had double garages and double entry doors, paved driveways and palladium windows. One had a wrought-iron gate across the driveway with an electronic keypad to keep away intruders.

  “What intruders?” I said aloud as I drove past. “What are they so afraid of?”

  It was crazy. And depressing.

  I rounded the curve and took a left into the driveway, pulling up behind a blue 2001 Subaru, Alice’s car, which had once been Dad’s car. I twisted the key to turn off the ignition and sat there looking at the blue bumper, the not-too-clean rear window with a pink stuffed teddy bear suction-cupped on the inside.

  It was strange to see it sitting there in the carport, right where Alice had left it, strange to think that both of its former owners were gone. I sat there for a while trying to get my head around it, but finally got out of the car and circled around the house to take a look at the lake, walking across the long expanse of lawn to stand at the water’s edge, the spot where, if you keep your face fixed forward, you don’t see a single object made by man and can imagine yourself in splendid isolation, the first human to draw breath here. Or perhaps the last.

  It was breathtaking, especially on such a crisply cold but bright and sunny day in an autumn that was lingering long. Every breath of wind raised sparkling ripples on the endless blue-gray surface of the water and rattled the leaves of the trees, releasing showers of still brilliant yellow, gold, orange, and red foliage that floated to the ground like little flags of welcome.

  I had always loved this view. Even as a little girl, running along on this same stretch of grass, playing tag or hide-and-seek or capture the flag, I would sometimes stop in my tracks, chest heaving for breath, just to look at the water, to watch the gulls soaring and calling overhead or the sun dipping toward the horizon. As a child, I hadn’t yet heard the phrase “million-dollar view” and didn’t understand that not everyone was lucky enough to have this kind of natural beauty right outside the door. And even this morning, when Peter had informed me that the lowball sales price of these two isolated acres would top four hundred thousand, I balked at such a figure.

  But now, standing at the water’s edge and gazing out on that truly magnificent vista, I understood completely.

  I could have stood there for an hour staring at the lake, but it was chilly and I didn’t have a proper coat, so after a few minutes I went back to the car, got my suitcase out of the trunk, and unlocked the cottage door.

  I felt so odd, taking that first step through the door, like an intruder. The house was so incredibly quiet and still. It had never been like that when I was growing up.

  When I’d come through that door as a girl, the first assault upon my ears was the barking of several dogs. We never had fewer than three in residence. Dad was a vet and tended to get on with animals better than with people. The next layers of the Toomey noise collage might include a roaring vacuum cleaner, feet walking on the poorly insulated floors of the upstairs bedrooms, a toilet flushing or a running shower in the bathroom, also upstairs, a banging of screen doors as kids and dogs ran in and out of the house, or Alice practicing an etude on our upright piano. There was always noise, always somebody around, always the sense of the house being too small and too crowded. But now . . .

  I stood in the foyer—really just a four-foot square of beige linoleum, a place for people to take off their snow boots or wipe their feet before walking onto the beige carpeting—and breathed in that strangely familiar aroma.

  The house smelled like pine and vanilla and wool and mothballs and cooked meat and twenty other things I couldn’t pinpoint but knew so well. It was the scent I’d never thought of as a scent because, growing up, it was all just air to me, the thing I inhaled and exhaled every day of my life. I had to go away and come back to recognize it as something unique to our house, but there it was. And all these years later, it still hung in the air unaltered, the smell of us.

  I left my suitcase and briefcase on the floor, slipped off my shoes, the way Mom had taught me to, and walked across the carpeting and into the kitchen.

  It was perfectly tidy, not a dish in the sink or a crumb on the countertop. Aside from the door shelves of condiments and such, the refrigerator was empty and perfectly clean. The floor was clean, too, and the dishwasher empty. A fresh kitchen towel hung over the handle of the oven door. I wondered if someone had come in to clean. Barney had said that one of the neighbors was taking care of the cats. Maybe whoever had done that had also taken it upon themselves to tidy the house as well.

  The piano stood against the dining room wall opposite the china cabinet, where it always had. I found middle C and played a scale, pressing firmly against the ivory keys to bring forth the sound. It was tinny and a little out of tune. Maybe that was because of the humidity and being so close to the lake. Or maybe it just wasn’t a very good piano.

  When I was little, the house had been full of voices: my mother talking on the phone, planning the next neighborhood party or parish fu
nd-raiser, Dad telling a patient how to get a Labrador to swallow a pill, Alice and me arguing over possession of the remote, yelling for Mom to referee, my parents’ voices, sharp and shrill, overlapping in argument.

  Back then, I used to play my music as loud as I could so I couldn’t hear them fight. Now I’d have given anything to hear their voices, even raised in anger, anything to banish the silence. Had Alice wished the same thing? How had she endured the silence all these years? No wonder she kept trying so hard to get me to come home.

  I circled back through the kitchen to the living room, past the stairway and hallway, and into the family room, looking at the pictures on the walls, the arrangements of objects on shelves, observing them from a distance the way you look at displays in a museum of history, artifacts that raised as many questions as they answered and had but little to do with me—except for the book, the papers and pencils. These were the only things in the house that hadn’t been tidied up.

  They sat on a little table in the family room next to a chintz-covered lounge chair, angled toward the window, facing the black walnut tree we used to climb when we were little.

  The book, The Encyclopedia of Animals, was open, face-down, to an entry on meerkats. She’d been drawing meerkats, not copying the photographs but sketching them in completely different postures and groupings. The drawing pencils, in black, gray, tan, and brown, lay scattered haphazardly on the half-finished drawing, and a cream-colored afghan, another of my mother’s creations, lay in a careless heap on the floor right next to the chair. It was as if Alice had only just gotten up to answer the phone, or the door, or run outside to get the mail and might return any minute.

  I heard footsteps on the porch. My heart jumped and I spun around, startled. I heard children’s voices, little-girl voices, high and shrill, and the sound of the doorbell. When I opened the door I saw two gray plastic boxes sitting on the porch and two little girls running away across the yard.

  One was about eight, wearing jeans and a Packers sweatshirt two sizes too big. The other was four or five, wearing a red sweater, pink tutu over black spandex shorts, and bright pink rain boots.

  I called out to the girls and the older one turned around.

  “Mom told us to bring back the cats!” she shouted while jogging backward. “She said to feed Freckles separately because she’s too fat and will eat all of Dave’s food if you let her.”

  “Thanks!” I shouted. “What’s your name?”

  “Ophelia!” she cried and then turned and ran off, adding to the distance between herself and the younger girl, who was running as fast as her stubby, rainboot-clad legs could carry her, the pink tutu bouncing with every step.

  I called out again, asking their mother’s name, but Ophelia disappeared through a little patch of pines, leaving behind the younger one.

  “Felia!” the baby whined when her sister sprinted away. “That’s not fair! Wait for me!”

  Another person might have thought it was sweet and perhaps even smiled as they watched the ballerina in gum boots flounce off in pursuit of her older sister. But the sight of that little one chasing along behind the sister who so easily outpaced her made my throat feel suddenly tight.

  There’s no point in thinking about things you can’t change, and so I don’t. I try not to. But as I stood on the porch of our old family home and watched that little girl lumber off through the trees, crying for her sister to wait, the memories crowded too close.

  My rain boots had been pink too. I, too, had been the second sister, forever falling behind, running the unwinnable race.

  Chapter 17

  Alice was the smart sister. Unless you’d met her before the accident, you wouldn’t know that, but it’s true.

  Alice had twenty-four IQ points on me. The reason I know that is because my father told me. The first time he said it, I didn’t know what IQ meant, but I understood his tone.

  I was a disappointment to my dad. One of many.

  Raised on a not very prosperous farm north of Sacramento, Dad decided early on that education would be his ticket out of the hard, boring life in the country. But college and vet school tuition left him deeply in debt, and so when he graduated from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, he didn’t have money to start or buy into a practice in the city. That was the first disappointment.

  He was offered only two jobs, one in Kansas and the other in Wisconsin. Dr. Sutton, a sixty-three-year-old vet from Door County who was getting too old for the long hours and physicality of a large animal practice focused mostly on dairy cattle, promised to let Dad have the practice when he retired. Dad took the job, figuring that ownership of a lucrative practice would make up for having to live in the country and work with cows. Except it didn’t work out that way.

  By the time Dad took over the practice, farmers in the county were beginning to sell off their dairy herds. They couldn’t compete with the big corporate operations. Before long, Dad’s practice was struggling. He couldn’t afford to expand the family cottage that my grandparents had deeded to them when Mom married Dad, or to buy a new car, or to go on vacation. He opened a small animal clinic, but it never brought in much. People preferred to drive their animals to the clinic down in Sturgeon Bay rather than go to my dad.

  The truth is, people in the county never took to him. They felt that he thought he was better than them, and they were right about that. He was one of those people who deal with their insecurity by acting superior and end up coming off like egotistical jerks. It didn’t help that he was married to my mother, a nice woman from a nice family who had lived on the peninsula for decades, but didn’t treat her very well.

  Nilson’s Bay is the kind of place where you can dial a wrong number and end up having a twenty-minute conversation with whoever answers. Everybody knows everything about everybody, the good and the bad.

  When it came to my father, it seemed like the bad always outweighed the good—partly because he could rarely see the good.

  He was disappointed with his practice, prospects, and income, disappointed with his life and his wife, with a little house in a little town, with his failure to obtain all that he felt was due him. When my mother told him that she was expecting again and that the new baby would be born just seventeen months after their first child, whose arrival had further stretched their already tight finances, he was more than disappointed; he was resentful. His resentment toward my mother manifested itself in frequent arguments and constant criticism. He criticized me, too, but more often than not, he simply ignored me. In some ways, I think that was worse.

  My mother tried to make excuses to explain away my father’s indifference. But the older I got, the more hollow those explanations sounded. Though she’d originally converted to Catholicism just so she could marry my father, Mom was zealous in her faith and wouldn’t consider divorce. As the years went by, she immersed herself more and more deeply in the life and work of the church, organizing events and fund-raisers, chairing the annual Bishop’s Appeal, teaching catechism, and eventually becoming a lay minister. I don’t doubt that her faith was a solace, but I’m also sure she was happy for any opportunity to get away from my father. Seeing her tireless efforts on behalf of the parish and undoubtedly knowing how difficult her marriage was, people often said my mother was a saint. She was a good person, and I know her faith was absolutely real and sincere, but . . . a saint?

  I’ve sometimes wondered if, at some level, my mother didn’t enjoy the sympathy that came her way. There’s a fine line between religious devotion and martyrdom, and by the time I entered high school, I think Mom was starting to edge in that direction. After the accident, of course, the journey was complete. She became a martyr to her works of faith, to the brain-injured daughter whose spark of promise was forever doused, and to the misery of her marriage.

  I’ve always wondered why Dad didn’t seek a divorce. Though he was born and raised Catholic, he rarely attended mass. Every year my mother would write a check to the Bishop’s Appeal and every ye
ar they would have a big argument about it. So it wasn’t religious zeal that kept my father in the marriage. I think it was because he didn’t want to risk losing Alice. She was the only thing in life that didn’t disappoint him.

  Alice was smart, like Dad. She had his scientific mind and shared his interest in animals. She was a good athlete, too, and fearless. She loved to skate and swim. She could ride any horse, no matter how wild, and climb any tree, no matter how high. Really, Alice could do almost anything she set her mind to. Before the accident, she was a straight-A student who planned to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a vet, as well as a better-than-average pianist and a talented artist.

  Like I said, there was nothing Alice couldn’t do. Including charm my dad. Let me tell you, that took some doing. I tried and failed for sixteen years. The only times my father seemed to notice me was when he was pointing out how far short of the mark I fell in comparison to my sister.

  He was just a very critical, bitter, and deeply unhappy man. With time and distance—as well as a year of professional counseling—I can now look back logically and see that my father’s dislike of me stemmed more from his personality flaws than from mine. But it wasn’t as easy when I was five, ten, fifteen years old.

  During those months of counseling, my therapist refused to believe me when I said I didn’t resent my sister, but I truly didn’t. Of course we had arguments—all siblings do—and I can’t say I was never jealous of Alice, but I didn’t resent her. Alice was good to me. She helped me with my homework and stuck up for me if Dad got too abusive. One time, when he said something demeaning to me when my friend Denise had come to spend the night, Alice refused to speak to him for two days. He was nicer to me after that, for a while.

  And then, of course, Alice saved my life.

  I was ten years old when it happened; Alice was nearly twelve. It was a Saturday in mid-March. Mom was at some meeting at church and Dad was out on a call. Alice and I decided to go ice-skating. It was a little late in the season, but still cold, and the ice on the north end of the pond was still plenty thick. We weren’t being stupid or careless; we knew enough to check for things like that. Any kid raised on the peninsula would. But we didn’t count on me losing control while I was attempting a spin, falling and sliding toward the south end of the pond, where the ice was thinner even though the water was deeper, and falling through.