The Silent Sister

  “Yes, yes, of course!”

  “Give me a minute.” She started toward the back room. As she neared the door, she heard the man say to Grady, “She’s a wonder,” and Grady said, “She knows more than I do.”

  The boxes from the estate sale were stacked in one corner of the back room, and she was happy to see the one she wanted was on top. She opened it and pulled out album after album, finally finding the prize. The black cover with its two porcelain statues was a little faded from being tucked between other albums for a few decades, but she pulled the record from the sleeve and held it up for a better look. Pristine. Probably worth a hundred bucks. She carried the album back to the man, who’d found three others that he wanted. He took it from her with tears in his eyes and tried to press a twenty-dollar bill into her hand, but she shook her head.

  “I’m just excited we had it for you,” she said. She really was. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so happy.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  She almost slipped. In the eight and a half months she’d lived in Ocean Beach, she hadn’t slipped once, but he’d touched that part of her that was still so connected to Lisa. “Jade,” she said.

  “Oh, what a beautiful name. Beautiful name for a beautiful girl. I can’t thank you enough. I’m Charlie, by the way.”

  “Glad to meet you, Charlie.”

  She stepped behind the counter to slip a note to Grady. Worth $100, it read, though she hoped he wouldn’t charge that much. Grady looked at her note, then at Charlie’s glistening eyes. “Ten for this one,” he said, touching the album. “Five for each of the others.”

  Charlie paid, thanked her again, and left. When she returned to the rock albums, still smiling to herself, she felt Grady’s gaze on her.

  “You’re spooky,” he said after a minute.

  “Spooky?”

  “Just … that was amazing.”

  She shrugged like it had been nothing, and moved Neil Young out of the Bs and into the Ys.

  “How come you’re not in school?” Grady asked.

  “What?” She looked up quickly, panicked by his question. What was he asking? “I graduated in ’89,” she said. Another one of her many lies. She’d barely started her senior year when everything fell apart.

  “I mean college,” he said. “You’re smart. You’re not a stoner. You don’t seem broke. Why aren’t you in school?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I wanted some time off after high school.”

  “You planning to go?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Do you know you can have in-state tuition at San Diego State after you’ve lived here a year? It’s superaffordable.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, running her fingers thoughtfully over the tops of the albums. She hadn’t thought about being able to go to college since her escape. Her life had been all about surviving. Pretending. Lying. She hadn’t thought about actually living the rest of it. But a state school? After coming a hairsbreadth away from Juilliard? She felt like a snob for thinking that way. She’d been cut down to size pretty quickly.

  She knew Grady’d graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in business and then opened the record store. “Are you glad you went?” she asked. “I mean, you’re not exactly using your degree here.”

  He laughed. “Oh, I use it and it’s good to have. And college was a blast. You need to have some fun, Jade. You’re very serious, you know?”

  She could hardly disagree. “I know,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you went through with your family and everything that you needed to get away from, but I can tell it took a toll,” he said. It was the first time he’d talked to her about anything personal and he must have seen her discomfort. “Sorry to get in your business,” he said, “but I like you. I don’t want to lose you as an employee, but I think you need to go to school and cut loose. You could still work here part-time.”

  “I’ve only lived in California eight months,” she said. “But I’ll think about it.”

  “What would you major in?” He was looking down at the CDs on the counter, marking them with pricing stickers and acting like her answer didn’t matter, which made her wonder if it was a trick question. If she said music, would he somehow guess who she was? And of course, she couldn’t major in music, but she’d never considered anything else. “I have no idea,” she said.

  “You’d make a great teacher, I think.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said again, wondering how you went about taking the GED test, since she had no high school diploma. She’d need to retake her SATs, a thought which made her groan to herself. But then she pictured herself in the front of a classroom of little kids. Kids like Danny and Riley. She might like that, she thought, and for the first time since leaving home, she thought that maybe, just maybe, she could have a future.

  24.

  Riley

  “Good morning!” Jeannie said as she and Christine walked into the kitchen, accompanied by their usual explosion of energy. I’d hoped to be out of the house by the time they arrived, but no such luck. Instead, I was standing next to the counter eating a bowl of granola, and I nodded to them, my mouth full.

  “I finally have some comps for the RV park to show you.” Jeannie held her laptop in the air, then seemed to notice I was eating. “Come in the living room when you finish and we’ll go over them,” she said.

  “All right.” I turned around and I rinsed my bowl in the sink, letting half the cereal slide down the garbage disposal. My appetite was shot these days.

  “You know, Riley,” Christine said as she opened the dishwasher for me, taking the bowl from my hand and putting it inside as though I wasn’t doing it quickly enough to suit her. “You haven’t put anything in your father’s office yet. There must be something that you want to keep.”

  I was sure there were things I wanted to keep, but the truth was, all I seemed able to do for the past two days was sleep in the daytime and lie awake all night, thinking about Lisa. Torturing myself with the thought that she might still be alive. The last thing I felt like doing was going through my family’s belongings. I didn’t want to look at a vase or a shirt or a pen or a lamp and be flooded with memories. I’d rather have Christine take everything away than face more of my sad and confused feelings.

  “I’ll try to get to it today or tomorrow,” I promised.

  “Well, it would be good if you could,” she said, shutting the dishwasher, “because we’re going to start slapping prices on everything soon. And it’d be a drag to do all the work of figuring out the value of things and then have you decide you don’t want us to include them in the sale.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  “And what’s happening with your father’s computer?” Christine nudged.

  “I’m getting ready to clean the drive,” I lied. I hadn’t even thought about the computer since copying everything to the hard drive.

  “And…” Jeannie reappeared in the doorway between the kitchen and living room. She motioned to the long row of built-in cabinets beneath the living room windows. “You were really cooking with your father’s paperwork for a while,” she said. “How’s that going?”

  It wasn’t. “I have a lot more to do, but there’s no rush for that, is there? I mean it’s not like his paperwork will be included in the estate sale.”

  They both looked at me with the exact same expression: concern tempered by impatience.

  “Well, it has to be done,” Christine said, walking past her mother into the living room. “I’ll be in Danny’s room if you need me.”

  “Fine,” I said, with a bit too much annoyance in my voice, and Jeannie didn’t miss it. She put a motherly arm around me and walked me into the living room in the direction of the couch. I let her lead me, too tired to resist.

  “I know this is hard, Riley,” she said. “I know you’re feeling overwhelmed. You just need to rely on Christine and me a little
bit more and not worry about anything. All you need to do—your only task—is to get through your dad’s paperwork by July twentieth when we have the estate sale. And—”

  “July twentieth?” I asked. “That’s only a couple of weeks away! You were supposed to check with me before setting a date.”

  She looked surprised. “I thought Christine talked to you about it,” she said.

  I folded my arms across my chest. “No, she didn’t,” I said, “and you have to change it.”

  “We can’t change it, honey. The advertising is already in place, but don’t worry. We’ll have everything ready by then. I promise. Please stop stressing about this, okay?”

  I gave in, dropping my arms to my sides. Somehow, I would have to make this work. “Fine,” I said, though I knew my voice made it clear it was not fine at all. I wished they’d picked a date a month away. Or even two months.

  “Good.” Jeannie put her arm around me again. “Now, sit down and let me grab my laptop and I’ll show you the comps.”

  She didn’t let go of my shoulder completely until I was sitting on the couch. She got her laptop from the table by the door and sat next to me, opening the lid. Hitting a few buttons on the keyboard, she pointed to some listings for land as they popped up on the screen.

  “I won’t bore you with all of this because I can tell you’re not in the mood, but by looking at the comps for undeveloped land along the creeks and backing up to the forest, as well as looking at other RV parks and campgrounds, I think we can safely say the land your dad’s park is on, with the improvements, is worth about ten thousand dollars an acre.”

  I hadn’t expected it to be that high. “How many acres is it?” I asked.

  “Just under twenty. Twenty-five if you include the land Danny’s trailer is on, but I know we can’t touch that.”

  “That many?” I pictured the park and its small RV sites. Each one of those sites stretched down to the creek and back to the woods, though, so I guessed twenty acres made sense. “I didn’t realize it was that valuable.”

  “Yes, it is. Isn’t that lovely? So I propose we—”

  “Jeannie,” I interrupted her. “Do you know anything about my father promising the park to the Kyles?” I was quite sure she didn’t, given her reaction to Tom Kyle being left the pipe collection.

  She stared at me. “Where on earth did you hear that?” she asked.

  “They told me. The Kyles. They’re upset because he said he would give them the park in a couple of years and they’ve been counting on it. I guess they don’t have much money.”

  Jeannie’s blue eyes were even bigger and rounder than usual. “Oh, my God, Riley,” she said. “They’re trying to pull a fast one on you.”

  I remembered Danny saying that Tom Kyle was yanking my chain.

  “Well, even Verniece said it, and she’s—”

  “She’s a sweet old bat, I know,” Jeannie said. “But she’s the one feeding you the load of crap about you being adopted, too, right? Stay away from them, Riley. They don’t care about you, and you really need people around you who’ll support you, not mess with your head.” She tapped her fingertip on my temple.

  “But could Daddy have said it?” I asked. “Promised the park to them?”

  “No!” She frowned at me. “He didn’t like the Kyles. I admit I’m lost about the checks he was giving Tom Kyle and why he’d leave him the pipes when he knew I could use a bit of that cash.” She let out an aggravated breath. “Although three years ago, which is when he wrote that will, I was in better shape, so it probably never occurred to him I’d be in need. But the idea of him leaving them a valuable piece of property is preposterous.”

  My phone rang before she finished her last sentence and I pulled it from my shorts pocket. The number was unfamiliar and it took me a moment to realize it was Danny’s cell phone. I jumped to my feet, amazed he would call. “I have to take this,” I said to Jeannie as I headed for the front door and privacy. Once on the porch, I lifted the phone to my ear.

  “Danny?”

  “Come over,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

  JULY 1992

  25.

  Jade

  She needed a car.

  After sailing through the GED, she’d been admitted to San Diego State for the fall semester on the strength of new SAT scores—not nearly as good as Lisa MacPherson’s scores had been—and an essay about growing up in Maryland with her fictional family. She planned to study hard and keep her head down, and she guessed that in a few years, she’d be a teacher. Not a career she’d ever imagined for herself, but she had to do something worthwhile with her life, and if she couldn’t play music, working with children was the best thing she could think of.

  San Diego State, though, was fifteen miles from Ocean Beach. She planned to continue living at Ingrid’s and working at Grady’s, the two places she felt safe, so a car was an absolute must. And that, she decided, constituted a dire emergency.

  She’d been so good about not getting in touch with her family! Yet she longed for them, and sometimes she felt so forgotten. She knew her father had created the ruse to save her from a far worse fate, but did he miss her? Did he even think about her anymore?

  She opened her own post office box under her new name, Ann Johnson. Then, sitting at the kitchen table in her little cottage, she wrote a long, heartfelt letter to her father, weeping through every sentence. She couldn’t send it. She didn’t dare. She dried her tears and started over.

  Dear Fred,

  I plan to attend school, majoring in education. The only problem is transportation. Although I’m working and will continue to do so, I don’t have enough money to buy a used car. I hope you can help.

  Sincerely,

  Ann

  She sat back from the table and read the note aloud, stumbling over the cold sound of the words. The formality, when what she really wanted to write was, I miss you so much! How is everyone? Tell me about Riley. Please tell me she’s still the happy little girl at four that she was at two. Is Danny all right? Has he forgotten that terrible day? Is there any way—ANY WAY—I can see all of you? Please!

  She folded the letter in thirds and put it in an envelope. There was a good chance he would be angry, but so was she.

  * * *

  She began checking her post office box three days after mailing the letter and of course it was empty. Her spirits sank each time she saw the hollow space behind the glass window in the small metal door. But on the nineteenth day, a shadow blocked the glass. She opened the door and pulled out a long fat envelope. There was no return address, but the postmark was from Pollocksville, North Carolina, and she let out a joyous yelp before she caught herself. Her address was written in block print she would never recognize as her father’s, but it could be from no one else. She trembled as she put the envelope in her purse, and she nearly ran all the way home.

  Sitting on the big couch in her living room, she carefully slit open the envelope. There were bills inside—twenty one-hundred-dollar bills—and tucked in the middle of the stack, this note: You are loved and missed. She held the note close to her heart. Of the twenty-one items in the envelope, this was the most precious.

  * * *

  She bought a rickety old white VW bug for four hundred dollars from an aging hippie in Ocean Beach and put the rest of the money in her bank account. She also got a California driver’s license. Even after living in San Diego for a couple of years, she’d felt nervous walking into the DMV, turning in the fake Maryland license, having her new picture taken. The process was easy, though. Facing her fear turned out to be the only hard part.

  Late in July, she made her first drive to the university to take a special placement test. The test took two hours to complete and struck her as easy. When she’d finished, she wandered around the campus. She would have denied even to herself that she was looking for the music building, but there it was—standing between the building where the test had been held and the parking lot—and becaus
e it was so hot out, she told herself it made sense to cut through the building to cool off.

  The sound of an oboe greeted her in the hallway. It was only playing scales, briskly, then slowly, then briskly again. She was due to work at Grady’s in an hour, but she slowed way down as the oboe began to play an étude, the haunting sound echoing through the deserted hallway.

  The air in the building began to smell like Violet. She walked even more slowly, filling her lungs with the woody, dusky scent, knowing it was only in her imagination but not caring. The oboe accompanied her down the hall until she went through the first set of double doors that led outside. In that small vestibule were two bulletin boards, both covered with posters. She stopped. Would it hurt to go to a concert? Nonmusicians went to concerts all the time. She moved from poster to poster to see who’d be in San Diego over the summer. There were so many performances she would love to see! Then one small poster made her stop and stare. THE STUDENT STRING ORCHESTRA OF THE PEABODY CONSERVATORY. Her heart pounded. Matty’d had early acceptance into the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins. Surely he went; it had been his first choice. He would have finished his sophomore year by now, and the chance that he might be touring with the string orchestra for the summer made amazing, wonderful, extraordinary sense.

  She studied the poster for the longest time, squinting at the dark photograph of the orchestra, but it was impossible to make out faces. She committed the date and time to memory, fantasizing about seeing Matty, and maybe if she was very brave—or very stupid—talking to him. She was going to that concert. There was no way she would miss it.

  She left the music building, her heart skittering in her chest. She nearly ran the rest of the way to her car, feeling so alive and excited that she couldn’t walk slowly. She doubted the concert would be a sellout, but she would get her ticket right away. She needed a good seat. She needed to sit close enough to be able to scrutinize every musician. She would die if Matty wasn’t one of them.

  But she would also die if he was.