The Second Sister Page 15

  I flipped back the corner and took a closer look. The writing was small, black, and wobbly and definitely belonged to Alice. It said, “To Maeve” and the year, 2011. Nothing more.

  Pushing the pine-tree quilt aside, I took hold of one of the smallest quilts, with bright, cheerful blocks in hourglass shapes on a background of white with hot-pink polka dots, and checked the back.

  “To Maeve.” This time the year was 2001.

  I examined the back of every quilt, even those I’d already folded and put away in the hope chest. Every single one of them, eighteen in all, was labeled “To Maeve”; the words were all written in that same cramped hand, painstakingly penned by my sister, exactly the same except for the year. The years were all different, never two in the same year, from 1999 until 2016.

  To Maeve.

  In my entire life, I’d never known anyone by that name. But Alice had.

  Alice had known her well enough to make eighteen beautiful quilts that she had never been willing, or ready, or able to give to her . . . Maeve.

  Chapter 22

  When I went downtown later that afternoon, I ran into Peter Swenson. He smiled when he saw me lugging The Definitive Biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “Was it any good?” he asked doubtfully.

  I nodded. Of course it was good. Six people with advanced degrees had given cover quotes testifying to this. The fact that I found it unreadable wasn’t worth mentioning.

  Peter fell into step next to me, shortening his long stride to match mine.

  “Hey, I’m glad I ran into you. I was in Milwaukee all week on a case, but I was going to call to firm up the Thanksgiving plans. You’re coming, right? Mom’s planning to serve dinner at three, but she said to tell you and Barney to come at noon so you can watch the game. Fair warning—take it easy on Mom’s cheese spread and pigs in a blanket. She always puts out way too many snacks and then gets all miffed if people don’t take second helpings at dinner. If you’ve got some pants that are a little too big in the waist, wear ’em. Otherwise, you could end up in some serious pain by the time she brings out the pies. Pecan, pumpkin, and apple. If you don’t try some of each she’ll be devastated.”

  I smiled. All the talk of Mrs. Swenson overfeeding him aside, his eyes sparkled with an almost boyish enthusiasm, and it was really pretty cute. I’d always pegged the Swensons as being that kind of family, very close, with specific traditions, rituals, and recipes for different holidays. It must have been nice to grow up surrounded by that kind of stability.

  “Peter, you’re very nice, but your family really doesn’t want Barney and me horning in on your holiday.”

  “Are you kidding? They’re thrilled. Mom’s so excited that she’s talking about re-carpeting the dining room in honor of the occasion. Uncle Hugh can’t wait to talk to you. Or at least chew you out a little. He voted for the other guy. Seriously, Lucy. You’re kind of a big deal around here.”

  “Stop it.”

  “You are!” he protested. “Nobody from Nilson’s Bay has ever been interviewed on CNN. And you’re going to work in the White House. Everybody in town is talking about it.”

  I stopped at the bottom of the stone stairs in front of the library and turned toward him. “How do they know that? What have you been saying to people?”

  Peter stopped, too, frowning at me as if he didn’t understand the question.

  “Nothing. You worked for the campaign. Everybody assumes you’ll work for the administration as well. Of course they’re talking about it. You know how people are in Nilson’s Bay, Lucy. Everybody talks about everybody.”

  I took my eyes from Peter’s, looked over his shoulder and across the street. Two old men in feed caps stood talking to each other. A mother with a set jaw was dragging her screaming toddler out of the drugstore and toward her car. One of the old men looked in my direction and then said something to his buddy, who turned his head to stare.

  “Yeah, I remember,” I mumbled. “That’s part of why I left.”

  Peter’s lips went flat. “So people don’t gossip in DC?”

  There was no need to respond. We both knew the answer. But the gossip was different in Washington. It wasn’t about me.

  “Don’t be so sensitive. They’re talking about you because they’re proud of you. You’re an inspiration. In fact,” he said, sounding a little sheepish, “Mom’s going to ask if you’d be willing to speak to the kids at the high school.”

  “What?” My head snapped toward Peter. “No! I’m not a good public speaker. I work behind the scenes. That CNN interview? I almost passed out after it was over. I am not speaking to a bunch of high school kids, Peter. No way.”

  “You don’t have to,” he assured me. “But Mom’s going to ask you about it, so I thought I’d better warn you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh, great.”

  “But you’re coming for Thanksgiving, aren’t you? C’mon, Lucy. You have to. Mom is counting on you.” He paused for a moment, and then, in a softer voice, he said, “So am I.”

  I looked at him and laughed.

  “Oh, man. You really know how to lay it on thick, don’t you? Does that really work?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Especially if I add the puppy dog eyes.” He pulled a pathetic-looking face. “But . . . uh, no. Not really. Could explain why I’m thirty-six and still single.”

  “That might have something to do with it.”

  I glanced over Peter’s shoulder again. The old guys were still staring. I considered sticking my tongue out at them, but decided to give them something worth talking about instead.

  I pushed up on my tiptoes and gave Peter a kiss on the cheek—a kiss, not a peck, leaving my lips pressed against his skin for just a nanosecond longer than propriety and friendship dictated. I looked back toward the old guys and arched my eyebrows into a “How’dja like that?” expression. They ducked their heads with embarrassment and quickly turned away.

  Pleased with myself, I returned my attention to Peter. “Thanksgiving with the Swensons sounds terrific. What can I bring?”

  The boyish sparkle came back into Peter’s eyes.

  “Not a thing,” he said. “Just show up.”

  As I came through the library door, a woman with three slightly scruffy, jabbering little girls in tow pushed past me.

  I recognized Daphne Olsen from the funeral. I thought about saying hello, but then, recalling my unpleasant encounter with Rinda, I decided against it. She didn’t look like she was in the mood to talk anyway. The little girls bickered and whined and tugged at her jacket, demanding a ruling on whose turn it was to ride shotgun. Daphne, who was digging into her purse in search of cigarettes and a lighter, cuffed them away with her free hand like a mother bear batting away a bunch of unruly cubs and wearily uttered a series of benign threats.

  Hardly anybody I know smokes anymore, especially if they have little kids. But on the other hand, if I had three yappy little girls dogging my every step, I might feel the need for a jolt of nicotine too.

  I went inside, my footsteps echoing across the small stretch of marble that led from the lobby to the checkout desk, and plunked down The Definitive Biography. A big white cat with patches of black sauntered out from behind the desk, rubbed up against my ankles for a moment, then jumped up onto the counter and started sniffing at the spine of the volume as if it were a fish that might have gone deliciously bad. I scratched him on the head.

  “You must be Mr. Carnegie. You’re awfully friendly,” I said. “Why don’t you come over to the cottage and give Dave some lessons?”

  Mrs. Lieshout, who had been alerted to my presence by the ponderous thump of The Definitive Biography, approached the counter.

  “How did you like it?” she asked brightly.

  “I couldn’t get through it,” I admitted. “I kept dozing off.”

  Mrs. Lieshout leaned toward me. “So did I,” she whispered, then opened the book cover and swept a scanning wand across a bar code inside the book.

  �
��We’ve got another biography of Mrs. Roosevelt, you know. It’s not as detailed as this one, but is far more readable. Would you like to check it out?”

  “Not today. I was wondering if you had any books about quilting.”

  “What kind? Quilting history? Quilting as art? Quilting novels? Quilting instruction?”

  “Instruction,” I said, before adding, “They have novels about quilting?”

  “Oh, yes. Very popular with our patrons, even the ones who don’t sew.”

  She picked up the unreadable book, lifting with both hands, and dumped it into a wheeled bin with other books waiting to be re-shelved.

  “Are you thinking of following in Alice’s footsteps? She was a very talented quilter. Did you know she made a quilt for my granddaughter, Ashley, when she was born?” I shook my head. “So sweet of her,” Mrs. Lieshout said and blinked a few times.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it,” I said quickly, moving the conversation into a less emotional direction. If Mrs. Lieshout started crying here in the middle of the library, I probably would too.

  “But I’ve got some time on my hands, so it’s worth a try. I’ve got everything I need as far as fabric and tools, but I couldn’t find any books of patterns or instructions, and I looked everywhere. I thought maybe Alice got her instruction books here.”

  “No,” Mrs. Lieshout said. “Alice mostly checked out movies, music, and books with animal photographs. She wasn’t much of a reader. As far as I know, she didn’t use any patterns for her quilts, or instructions. I think it was almost instinctual to her, the same way her drawing was. You know how much value I place on education, but I do think that some people possess a kind of wisdom that can’t be found between the covers of a book. Alice was one of them.”

  A minute before, I had been the one focused on trying to keep Mrs. Lieshout’s emotions in check, but the tables had turned. Her eyes were dry and her tone almost philosophical, but my eyes were full and my throat so tight that I knew I was only inches away from launching into the full-blown ugly cry.

  Mrs. Lieshout whipped two tissues out of a pink plastic dispenser standing next to the stapler and handed them to me. Then, without missing a beat, she scooped Mr. Carnegie up off the desk and carried him next to her chest like an infant waiting to be burped.

  “Craft instruction books are all on the second floor,” she said briskly. “If I’m not mistaken, quilting arts should be found in section 746.46. Follow me.”

  I did as I was told and trailed up the stairs after her, dabbing at my eyes with the tissues. Mr. Carnegie, his front paws resting daintily on her right shoulder like two white kid gloves, stared at me and flicked his tail.

  Chapter 23

  There’s a phrase somewhere in the Bible about shaking the dust off your feet when leaving a town that has made you unwelcome or unhappy. I’m not religious enough to be able to explain the original purpose of that act, but in my mind, it means you leave that place behind and never think of it or its inhabitants again.

  When I left Nilson’s Bay, just one day after my high school graduation, that was my intention. I wanted to shake the Door County dust from my feet and never think of or return to this place again. But now I’m back and I’m not sure I want to forget anymore. The longer I am here, the more I feel like I have to make sense of it, to see if Alice and Barney were right when they said I was remembering wrong.

  Maybe that’s why, as I was driving home from the library, I suddenly took a hard right onto a road that leads to Kangaroo Lake, where the accident happened.

  Mentally, those two words are always capitalized for me, as if they are the title to a book: The Accident.

  Well, maybe not a book. Maybe a chapter heading, or the second act in a three-act play, the scene that separates the beginning of the story from the end, the pivot point that changes everything. That’s what the accident was, the thing that changed everything.

  When my sister’s unresponsive body was pulled from the water on that hot day in August of 1996 and laid on the ground while a man performed CPR for what seemed like hours until she finally, finally, finally coughed up a lungful of lake water and began to breathe, everybody, including the doctors at the hospital, said it was a miracle that she’d survived.

  I suppose that was true. But in some sense, Alice didn’t survive the accident. Yes, she could breathe and talk and care for animals and draw beautiful pictures, but she wasn’t the same person after that. Neither was I.

  It was a Saturday in late August and time for the end-of-summer picnic for the high school kids. The Tielens family had nine kids in the school system, and so the picnic was always held at their house on Kangaroo Lake. Jeremy Tielens, seventh in the line of nine, was a year ahead of me in school.

  The yearly gathering was something we all looked forward to. Even though Door County is surrounded by water on three sides, the waters of Lake Michigan are generally too cold for swimming even in summer, so getting an invitation to go swimming in one of the warm, private inland lakes was a treat, but swimming wasn’t the only thing we were excited about.

  For Door County kids, summer vacation was something of a misnomer. Most people who live on the peninsula full-time are self-employed. Summer, with its good weather and accompanying onslaught of tourists, was the time when they made most of their money for the year, and so it was all hands on deck.

  Some kids worked on the family farms—planting or herding or weeding or picking or packing—and the children of entrepreneurs helped out at the family business. For example, Denise’s parents owned a motel in Jacksonport, so she spent her summer cleaning rooms. Alice worked at the animal hospital, cleaning cages and assisting Dad in the clinic. He never asked me to help at the hospital, said I made the animals nervous, so I worked at Al Johnson’s restaurant, serving and clearing thousands of plates of Swedish pancakes and meatballs for tourists.

  After such a long and labor-intensive summer, we were almost looking forward to going back to school and to seeing one another at the Tielens’ picnic. It gave us a chance to renew old friendships, catch up on the news, and, like the normal, healthy, hormone-driven adolescents that we were, show off for members of the opposite sex.

  The girls always put a lot of thought into what they should wear to the annual picnic. I’m less sure about the boys. No matter the occasion, they always showed up in the same jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps, but that didn’t matter. From eighth grade on, I’d noticed that the summer months wrought an astounding transformation on the male members of our class.

  They’d show up at the August picnic looking taller, tanner, and more muscular, mature, and desirable than they had when we parted ways in May. It really was kind of miraculous. I suppose the same thing must have been happening to the girls, but I didn’t take much notice. Maybe the other girls got better looking over the summer months, but I was sure it wasn’t happening to me, not at all.

  I was small for my age, slow to develop, wore glasses, and had a bad overbite that required me to wear braces from the sixth grade on. The other day, I found some of my old school pictures while going through a box of photo albums. Sure enough, I looked just as geeky as I’d always felt.

  But that summer, my sixteenth, it was finally my turn for transformation. My braces came off in June, and my long-awaited bust arrived not long after. In mid-August, I took a good chunk of the money I’d earned busing dirty pancake and meatball plates and bought a pair of contact lenses and a swimsuit just like one I’d seen on a Sports Illustrated model: bright yellow bikini bottom, belted and with a gold-tone buckle, and a matching bandeau top with another buckle in the middle that gathered the fabric and made the bust look bigger.

  The contacts were one thing, but when my mother found out how much that swimsuit cost, she was furious.

  “Ninety-five dollars! For that! Did they charge by the inch? If you think that I’m going to let you go down to the lake and parade around in that skimpy little . . .”

  You get the idea. It’s
the same fight mothers and their teenage daughters have been having since the beginning of time. In the end, she did let me wear it. Well . . . it wasn’t so much that she let me as that she hurried off to work at the church rummage sale and couldn’t stop me.

  It was an incredibly hot and humid day. When we arrived, Mr. Tielens was firing up the grill so he could cook some brats, and Mrs. Tielens was handing out glasses of lemonade. The girls squealed and hugged when they saw one another and the boys gave each other high fives and playful elbows in the ribs. Somebody brought a boom box—remember, it was the nineties—and started playing Green Day.

  Carrying red Solo cups full of lemonade, we headed down to the lake to lay our towels out on the grass. Alice and her group, all rising seniors, set up camp next to a small cluster of birches. I headed in the opposite direction, far from them and closer to the water, to sit with Denise. I stretched out on the towel and, noticing Peter standing nearby with Clint and a couple of other guys, started applying sunscreen to my legs, belly, and breasts, taking my time and keeping my eyes down, pretending not to notice that he was watching me.

  After a couple of minutes, the guys stripped off their shirts and jumped into the water. We girls sat on our towels to talk, tan, and steal glances at the half-dressed boys who were swimming and horsing around. Peter came swimming over toward our group with that cocky grin of his, then swept his whole arm across the surface of the lake, splashing water on me and my friends. I screamed, pretended to be mad, and jumped up from my towel and into the water. A five-minute water fight ensued.

  Of course my feigned anger turned quickly to laughter. I was thrilled that Peter was paying attention to me. He grabbed one of my arms and I squealed and tried to wriggle away, but my heart rate about doubled. However, when he came up from behind, looped his arms around my waist, and lifted me halfway out of the water, saying he was going to get even by dunking me under, I screamed for real. A little splashing was one thing, but I’d spent an hour and a half doing my hair that morning.