The Second Sister Read online

  Realizing my alarm was genuine, Peter put me down and let me go. Then Clint called and Peter swam over to see what he wanted, so I got out of the water and went back to sit on my towel.

  Denise was grinning when I sat down. “Oh, geez! Oh, geez!” she hissed in a delighted stage whisper. “He picked you up and practically held you over his head like you didn’t weigh anything!”

  “Oh, stop it. He only lifted me halfway out of the water.”

  “He couldn’t keep his hands off you, Lucy! He likes you! He really does!”

  I stretched out full length on my towel.

  “No, he doesn’t,” I said with a smile.

  “Yes, he does,” she insisted. “I took a look at the front of his swimsuit when he jumped out of the water, and his . . .”

  “Denise!” I cringed and slapped her shoulder. “Quit it! That is so gross!”

  Denise rolled her eyes, a smug smile on her face. “Oh, please. Spoken like a virgin. But I bet you won’t be one for long, lucky duck. He is so cute.”

  Denise sighed and I closed my eyes, enjoying the sun on my wet skin and the sensation of having someone, at last, feel jealous of me.

  “You know,” she said, “if you play your cards right, you might even get it over with today. There’s a bunch of trees and bushes over there on the far side of the cove. After lunch, you could ask Peter if he wants to go on a walk. I’d cover for you.”

  “Eeww,” I said again, opening my eyes.

  “What?” Denise blinked, looking genuinely confused by my revulsion. “I think doing it outside would be romantic. Way better than in the backseat of Buddy’s car; that’s for sure.” Denise rolled onto her left hip so she could see me better. “We went to the drive-in last weekend and it was so cramped and hot. The upholstery kept sticking to me.”

  I made a face. “Oh, ick! Denise!”

  She shrugged. “You’ve got to do it somewhere.”

  “Well, I’m not doing it in the back of a car! Ever. And I’m not asking Peter to go for a walk and then trying to jump him. That’s so forward.”

  “Forward?” Denise rolled her eyes again. “Geez, you sound like my mother. Yesterday, just because I phoned Clint to ask if he was coming to the picnic, she called me a chaser.”

  She was my friend so I didn’t say anything, but Denise was a chaser. Just a few months older than me and she’d already slept with three guys. Her current boyfriend, Buddy, was a college kid who’d come up for the summer to wait tables at the White Gull Inn. Now that summer was coming to a close, she was obviously on the hunt for a replacement.

  Denise sat up on her towel and tossed her head so her hair flipped over her shoulder. Clint noticed her, smiled a little. Denise smiled back and wiggled her fingers in a little wave. Clint elbowed Peter, who looked toward us and grinned that cocky, self-satisfied grin of his.

  I turned my head away, lay back down on my towel, and closed my eyes again.

  “The boy who wants me is going to be the one to do the chasing, not the other way around. Even if I have to wait.”

  “With an attitude like that,” Denise said, “you could end up waiting a loooong time. Like until college. Or even till you’re married! Like my folks did. By then you’ll be too old to enjoy it.”

  Mr. Tielens called us for lunch when the brats were ready. It was so oppressively hot when we finished eating that even the girls abandoned their towels and got into the water. Somebody had the idea to organize some races. That’s when it happened.

  Alice was racing from the Tielens’ dock, on the east side of the lake, to the west side. I don’t know exactly what happened. Maybe it was too soon after she ate and she got a cramp? They say that’s just an old wives’ tale, but I can’t think why else it would have happened; Alice was always such a strong swimmer. All I know is that she was there and then she wasn’t. That’s how it seemed. But I didn’t actually see it happen. I was on the other side of the lake.

  I heard a commotion, looked up, and saw a crowd of kids standing on the shore, yelling and pointing to a spot far from the shore. Alice wasn’t among them.

  By the time I realized that, five of the older boys, including Peter, were swimming to the middle of the lake as fast as they could. Mr. Tielens was pulling a canoe off the grass and into the water. He climbed in and started paddling after the boys and yelled at his wife to dial 911.

  Mrs. Tielens ran into the house and I dove into the water, swimming faster than I’d ever swum before, but the boys got there first. They flipped their bodies forward and kicked their feet up behind them like a school of playful porpoises, disappearing beneath the water for as long as their breath held out, then resurfacing to take another huge breath before diving down again.

  As soon as I reached them I started diving, too, keeping my eyes open wide in the murky water, searching for my sister, the sensation of panic growing exponentially with each passing second. I went under two, three, four times, searching desperately and finding nothing. I broke through the surface again and heard more screaming from the shore, but this time it was different. There was a note of exultation in the cries of the girls on the shoreline.

  Treading water and gasping for breath, I looked to my left and saw nothing, then paddled in a half circle to my right. Peter and Jeremy Tielens were swimming in tandem, each with one arm hooked under one of Alice’s arms as they dragged her on her back toward the canoe. When they were close enough, Mr. Tielens grabbed Alice by the arm and pulled her lifeless, unresponsive body aboard. The hopeful cries from the shore became weaker and more tentative, then faded into silence.

  I don’t remember the swim back to shore, only that I was exhausted when I arrived. Someone, Mrs. Tielens, I think, wrapped a towel around my shoulders. I stood with the others circled around my sister, her skin slightly blue against the red spandex of her one-piece suit, and watched silently as Mr. Tielens performed CPR. I think I prayed, but I’m not sure now.

  Mr. Tielens worked on her so long that the circle of onlookers began to diminish, as some of the girls gave up hope and drifted away, weeping.

  At about the same time I heard the distant whine of sirens, Alice’s inert body suddenly convulsed. Mr. Tielens shouted to his sons, Jeremy and Michael, who helped him turn Alice onto her side. Her body jerked again and she coughed, spewing out a murky mixture of lake water and phlegm. Alice’s eyes were still closed, but she began to breathe on her own, her skin turning from blue to pink, like a chameleon adjusting to a new environment.

  That was when I started to cry, to sob. She was going to be all right. The relief that washed over me was so overpowering that for a moment, I thought I might faint.

  She wasn’t all right. But we didn’t know that for a couple of weeks.

  The neurologist sat us down in the conference room in the hospital to explain the extent of the damage to Alice’s brain and that we shouldn’t expect her recovery to go much further.

  “We can continue with rehabilitation therapies, but at this point,” he said, “what you see is pretty much what you’ve got.”

  It wasn’t a good meeting. Mom started to sob and Dad let completely loose on the doctor, who stayed surprisingly calm in the face of my father’s attack. I guess he’d seen that kind of thing before.

  After he left, Dad spun around and fixed me with eyes of ice. “Where were you, Lucy? Can you explain that to me? When your sister was drowning, where were you?”

  It was the longest single utterance my father would make to me for the rest of his life.

  But as it turned out, the neurologist’s predictions were too dire. Alice’s condition did improve.

  Within a few months she was able to walk, but with a slight shuffle, able to speak and read and write, but laboriously, and to draw with surprising skill that only increased as the months passed. In fact, with the exception of her handwriting, all Alice’s small motor skills remained intact and even improved with time. The collection of quilts she eventually left behind testifies to that.

  It was
really kind of miraculous; even the doctors admitted as much. My mother attributed Alice’s remarkable improvement to the hours she’d spent in prayer, petitioning God and St. Agnes for healing. My father said that was a load of bull and pointed instead to the many hours he devoted to helping Alice with her physical and occupational therapy and to the fact that, unlike the doctors, he refused to give up on her or accept anything less than a complete recovery.

  At some level, I suspect they were both right. Without their intervention and their ceaseless and utter devotion, Alice wouldn’t have come back as far as she did; I have no doubts about that. For the first time since I could remember, they were on the same page. I’m not saying that Alice’s accident suddenly united them in love; it didn’t. But it certainly united them in purpose. They had only one concern and focus, and that was Alice’s recovery.

  I don’t blame them for that—if I were a parent in that situation, I’d do the same thing. Alice needed them, but I could make my own way. I’d been doing it for years.

  If I’m honest with myself, the thing that truly drove me to shake the Door County dust from my feet wasn’t my parents’ emotional abandonment of me. It was the things people around town said to me in the aftermath of the accident.

  It was kind of like what had happened after Alice rescued me. No matter where I was or what I was doing, they’d ask me the same questions about how Alice’s recovery was going, how my folks were holding up, how miraculous it was that she’d survived, and, of course, that unspoken question that they asked only with their eyes....

  Where were you?

  As I stood at the water’s edge and the biting wind of a fast-moving storm turned the skies to gray, I could see it all: the Tielens’ house on the far side of the lake, the slate-gray boards of their neighbor’s dock on the opposite shore, maybe a hundred feet from the place I now stood, and the spot in between, where my sister had almost drowned, the patch of brown earth where she had lain unconscious and blue before taking her first breath as a different being. I could see it all, every inch of it, and I knew exactly where I’d been on that day. What I can’t explain is why, not even to myself.

  And when I finally got back into the car, my fingers numb with cold even though I was wearing gloves, and drove back home, arriving just after dark, I understood that this dust I can never shake off, the day I can’t change or atone for, the question will follow me wherever I go.

  Chapter 24

  Mrs. Lieshout had suggested that I consider taking a quilting class or at least connecting with some of the local quilters, but I decided to tackle it on my own.

  Lacking the IQ points Alice had—or had before the accident—I always had to work harder. There was no other option, and in time, I came to enjoy leaning in and figuring out how to do difficult things on my own. In time, that became my instinct, outworking everybody else to make up for my deficits. That’s not all bad. At this point in my life, I feel confident I can understand and master anything printed between the covers of a book. Absolutely anything.

  I didn’t sleep very well after my visit to the library. The dream was back, but when I woke up the next day I decided it was time to quit brooding and get busy. As soon as I finished my breakfast, I grabbed a cup of coffee and went up to the sewing room and read both Quilts for Beginners and The Novice Quilter’s Handbook from cover to cover twice, with a pad of paper nearby so I could jot down notes to myself.

  After a while, Freckles came padding into the room, jumped onto the window seat, and curled up to watch me. Soon Dave showed up as well, standing at the threshold of the room to see what was going on. I was so happy to see him out from under the sofa at last, but resisted the urge to pet him, afraid that I might scare him off. After a few minutes, he joined Freckles on the window seat and started to purr.

  Smiling at this small victory, I sat down at the Singer with the manual I’d finally located by lifting up the seat of the sewing stool and familiarized myself with the basic operation of the machine. Winding the bobbin was tougher than it looked. I was able to make it work on the second try, but not before untangling and unwinding about five miles of blue thread. Dave seemed fascinated with the thread, so I took the blue snarl and set it on the edge of the window seat. He batted it around while I threaded the machine and inserted the bobbin into the case according to the instructions.

  Everything seemed fine, but when I tried sewing two scraps together, I ended up with a whole line of loose, messy loops of thread. Frustrated but determined, I completely unthreaded and rethreaded the machine. Four times. After the fifth attempt, my test stitches were perfectly straight and evenly spaced. I had no idea why, but decided not to question it.

  The idea of tackling a big quilt was intimidating, so I flipped through the projects in the handbook and picked out a baby quilt made from four-patch checkerboard blocks alternated with big squares that looked cute and fairly simple. The fun part was picking out fabrics. I needed only three, but it took me close to an hour to settle on the right three—one with big, mostly green polka dots and just a touch of turquoise and a calmer turquoise floral that went perfectly with the polka dots. Those were for the checkerboard blocks. The big squares would be a simple white on white with a kind of starburst pattern.

  Finally satisfied with my fabric choices, I got out Alice’s green cutting mat, a rotary cutter—it looked like it was meant to slice pizzas—and a long, clear, plastic ruler.

  The instructions said to lay the fabric on the mat, place the ruler on the edge of the fabric and measure in two and a half inches, use the rotary cutter to cut a long strip of fabric, then cut the strip into two-and-a-half-inch squares. It seemed simple enough.

  But the thing about rotary cutters, I would soon learn, is that they are sharp. Really, really sharp. When you’re using one, you should be very careful to keep your fingers, especially your thumb, planted securely on the ruler, well out of the way of the blade.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t careful.

  The blade sliced into the fleshy part of my hand, right below the thumb joint and across the top of my index finger too. I screamed and both cats bolted from the room in a panic. Freckles got tangled in my feet and almost tripped me. My hand hurt so bad that I thought I might pass out from the pain. There was blood everywhere—I mean everywhere. I couldn’t see how deep the cut was, but I knew I needed stitches. The doctors’ offices were closed by then, so I’d have to go to the hospital in Sturgeon Bay.

  I grabbed the white starburst fabric and wrapped it around my hand to keep blood from dripping onto the carpet and hurried downstairs. Dave, his eyes wide with fright, was standing at the bottom of the staircase, but ran back under the sofa when he saw me coming. I went into the kitchen to get my purse and car keys, but quickly realized there was no way I could drive myself to the hospital. The wound was painful and bloody, but not life threatening, so I didn’t want to call 911. I decided to see if one of the neighbors would be willing to drive me.

  There were no signs of life at the three houses closest to me, but a white Subaru with a rusted fender was parked in front of the fourth house and the porch light was on.

  The little girl who opened the door was my pint-sized neighbor with the pink boots. She looked at my face and then at my hand and started to scream at the top of her lungs. I didn’t blame her. By that time the blood had soaked all the way through the white fabric, so I must have looked pretty gruesome, especially to the eyes of a five-year-old. A moment later, her older sister, Ophelia, the one who had sprinted past her just to prove she could, ran in to see what the commotion was about, and she started screaming too.

  Maybe I should have just called for the ambulance.

  A third girl, who had reddish hair, freckles, and a scowl on her face, appeared from a hallway, shushing the other two and pushing past them. Seeing me, her eyes went round and her face went white. For a second, I thought she might scream too.

  Instead she opened her mouth and yelled, “Mom!” When no answer came she yelled again
and louder, “Mom!”

  An irritated adolescent voice from the back of the house yelled back. “She’s having happy hour with the girls!”

  “Go get her! Now!”

  “You go get her! I’m trying to make dinner!”

  “Juliet! Really! Go get Mom!”

  “Viola, I told you, I’m busy! What’s going on out there?”

  The girl from the consignment shop, the same girl I’d seen sitting on our glider and staring out at the water, walked into the room, wiping her hands on a frayed kitchen towel.

  “Ophelia! Portia! Will you two shut up and . . .” As soon as she saw me, Juliet dropped the towel. The two little girls ran to her and grabbed her around the waist.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m really sorry to bother you, but I had . . .”

  She ran out of the room before I could finish. The little ones ran after her, and one of them, the youngest, I think, started shrieking again. A door slammed and the cries of the little girl faded into the distance. The red-haired sister, Viola, stayed where she was and stared at me with a kind of horrified fascination.

  After a moment she said, “I think Juliet went to find my mom. Do you want to come inside?”

  I shook my head. “Probably not a good idea. I might drip blood on the carpet.”

  “Oh. Right.” Another stretch of silent fascination and then a frown. “How did you do it?”

  “Sewing.”

  Her eyes went wide again. “Does it hurt?”

  “A lot.”

  The screen door slammed again. A confused, panicked gaggle of girl voices with one lower, calmer, gravelly, grown-up voice, like the pulse of a patient bassoon in an orchestra of piccolos, came from the back of the house.

  “All right, all right. Calm down. If she was able to walk over here on her own steam, it can’t be that bad.”