The Silent Sister

  The very next morning, Mom was gone. Daddy and I ate a lonely, tasteless dinner that night. I told him how unfair I thought it was, that out of a family of five only three of us were left. “It’s just you, me, and Danny now, Daddy,” I’d said, and he’d turned his head away from me.

  Back then, I thought he’d turned away because my words were too painful to hear, and I regretted them. Now I realized he’d turned away because he knew they were not the truth.

  October 2, 2004

  Mr. M (I’m not sure what to call you),

  I wanted to let you know J’s in the hospital. She lost the baby yesterday morning. It was another boy and we are both brokenhearted. The doctor has no idea why this happened, but I’m sure I know—she’s so worried about Danny and it’s taken a toll on her. She hasn’t been the same since you let her know how badly he was hurt in the attack. She’s so afraid he won’t make it. The night after she got your note, she carried her fiddle out on our patio and played “Danny Boy.” It was so beautiful. Some neighbors who heard her play it told me they cried. Of course they didn’t know about Danny, but they knew something terrible must have happened for her to play so mournfully.

  She thinks it’s her fault. She knows that’s irrational, but that doesn’t make any difference. She’s never been sure there’s a God, but now she suddenly is and she thinks He’s punishing her. First, her mother’s cancer diagnosis. Now Danny’s injuries. She’s paranoid that something bad will happen to R next. I wish you could actually talk to her. She really worships you and is so grateful for how you helped her. My family loves her so much, but all our love can’t make up for everything she’s lost—and of course, my family doesn’t actually know how much she’s lost.

  She talks about R a lot now. I know you don’t want her to have a picture of her, but she could use it right now. She feels so lost. It doesn’t matter how many children we have, there will always be a place in her heart reserved for R. The other night, she put on that pendant that reminds her of R and said she’s never taking it off again.

  If you think it would be safe, you could talk to her on my cell phone instead of hers. Or maybe you have another idea?

  Love, Celia

  That was the last e-mail from Celia. Or I guess it had really been the first. I was sorry to hear that Lisa had lost a baby, but I knew that one line from the e-mail would be swirling around in my head for days: “It doesn’t matter how many children we have, there will always be a place in her heart reserved for R.” Was there still a place for me in Lisa’s heart? Was there room? I needed to find out.

  48.

  Between searching the Internet for Lisa and reading Celia’s e-mails, I’d been up the entire night. I went to bed at seven in the morning, exhausted and excited. I lay there unable to sleep, knowing that I could no longer keep what I’d learned to myself. I had to share it with the one other person who’d understand how I felt. The one other person who had loved Lisa … and who—unlike my brother—I was certain would never cause her harm.

  I waited until eight o’clock before dialing Jeannie’s number. I paced the living room floor, cell phone to my ear. “Please tell me I didn’t wake you,” I said when she answered.

  “I’m up.” She sounded worried. “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you home? Can I come over? I need to talk to you.” I hadn’t been to Jeannie’s house, but I knew exactly where it was.

  “I’ll come there,” she said. “I’m dressed.”

  “Could you?” I was glad for the offer. I didn’t trust myself to drive.

  “I’ll be there in a few,” she said.

  I brewed a pot of coffee and sat on the couch, so tired I felt as though I might be dreaming. I must have drifted off, because I didn’t hear Jeannie’s car pull into the driveway and I jumped at the sound of the doorbell. Morning light poured into the living room when I opened the front door.

  “My God, honey, you look like hell.” Jeannie ran her hand down my arm as she came inside. Her touch was warm and concerned, and it made me want to trust her.

  I shut the door, then stood with my back to it. “Lisa’s alive,” I said, nearly whispering as though I was afraid someone might be able to hear me.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn’t seem to find the words. I could tell she’d had no idea. My father’d kept her in the dark as well.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s a shock.”

  “It’s impossible,” she said finally.

  “She faked her suicide.”

  Her hands flew to her cheeks. “Oh, my God!”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but I was afraid. I didn’t know who to trust.”

  Jeannie sank onto my couch as though her legs had turned to liquid. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “Your poor parents! Your poor father! All these years, he grieved and—”

  “He knew,” I said. “He helped her.”

  She stared at me and I saw the hurt work its way into her face. I knew how she felt. We’d both been duped. “How do you know?” she asked finally. “How was he involved?”

  I started at the beginning, holding nothing back as I told her how my father and Tom Kyle had helped Lisa escape. How she’d changed her name to Jade and lived in San Diego and met Celia. I told her what I’d learned about her current life from Celia’s e-mails and about their two children.

  “This is…” She kept shaking her head. “It’s just so crazy.”

  I sat next to her with my laptop and pulled up the Jasha Trace Web site. When the photograph of the band appeared on the screen, Jeannie gently touched the pendant at Lisa’s throat.

  “Unbelievable.” She shook her head. “Just … extraordinary.”

  “Check this out, Jeannie,” I said, clicking on the link to their tour schedule. I handed the computer to her, resting it on her lap. “They’re coming to New Bern Saturday night.”

  Her eyes were huge blue marbles in the light from the computer screen. She looked at the schedule, then at me. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “Isn’t it risky?”

  “I’m sure they planned it so they could see Daddy,” I said. “Lisa may not know he’s dead.” I went to the Google Web site, holding my laptop so she could see all the links that popped up for Jasha Trace. “I guess they’re well-known in bluegrass circles.”

  “Wow.” Jeannie looked at the list of links. She pointed to one of them.

  “What’s this page?” she asked.

  “That’s a site where you can share photographs, I think,” I said, clicking on the link.

  A page of tiny images popped up, and when I clicked on the first photo, I knew right away where the pictures had been taken: Lisa and Celia’s December wedding.

  “Oh, my,” Jeannie said as we scrolled through the pictures. “I can’t get over the fact that she’s gay. I guess Matty was just an aberration. She looks so happy, doesn’t she?”

  She did. I wanted to be glad for Lisa as I scrolled through the pictures of her dancing with Celia, laughing with friends, hugging her son and daughter, but with every new photograph, I fought the gut-roiling sense of being forgotten.

  “Oh, my God!” Jeannie said suddenly as a new image appeared on the screen. “Look!”

  I saw what she was referring to even before she pointed to the top right-hand corner of the photograph: my father, sitting at a table, chatting with an elderly woman.

  “He was there?” I sounded as though I was asking a question, although there was no doubt about it. Daddy had been at the wedding.

  Jeannie scrolled through more images, leaning hungrily over my computer. My father was in a few of the photographs, usually off to the side talking with someone. In one picture, though, he laughed with Lisa. In another, he danced with a woman I was sure was Celia’s mother, and in yet another, he was on the keyboard with the band, a wide grin on his face. I shook my head in hurt wonder over my father’s secret life.

  “When did you say they got married?” Jeannie asked.

  “Dec
ember twenty-ninth.” I’d spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s with Bryan at his parents’ house in New Jersey, worrying the whole time that I’d deserted Danny and my father over the holidays. I usually divided my time in New Bern between the two of them, but I knew Danny didn’t really care about Christmas and Daddy had encouraged me to go with Bryan. I’d still felt guilty and called every day. Sometimes my father didn’t answer his phone and I pictured him napping to ward off depression over being alone for the holidays. Instead, he’d been in Seattle, dancing, chatting, and jamming with the band at his daughter’s wedding.

  “I suggested to him that we get away that week.” Jeannie sounded equally stunned. “But he said he had a funeral to go to in Seattle. One of his close collector friends.”

  “He lied to you,” I said. “There was no funeral.” I was surprised by the anger I felt. It was one thing to protect Lisa by keeping me in the dark about what had actually happened to her. It was another thing entirely to be an active part of her family while leaving me behind.

  Jeannie suddenly stood up, raising her arms in the air in a gesture of frustration.

  “Why didn’t he ever tell me, for heaven’s sake?” she asked. “He knew he could trust me!”

  I understood her pain completely. “I feel like”—I hunted for the words—“like Lisa and Daddy did everything they could to keep her existence—and their relationship—a secret from me.” My voice locked up, and Jeannie looked down at me.

  “I can’t imagine what this is like for you,” she said. “I feel so … betrayed myself. It’s got to be a thousand times worse for you.”

  It was a million times worse, and I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin. I set the laptop on the coffee table and stood up, needing to move. Needing to do something to erase the image of Daddy and Lisa laughing together, three thousand miles away from me. “I know this is irrational,” I said, “but I feel almost as though they were laughing at me in those pictures.”

  Jeannie walked over to me and put her arm around my shoulders. “No, honey, now you know that’s not true, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what’s true anymore,” I said.

  “You sit.” She gave me a little shove toward the couch. “I smell coffee. I’m going to get us both a cup. Then we’ll be able to think more clearly, all right?”

  I nodded, flopping onto the couch again. I tried to empty my mind while I listened to Jeannie rooting around in the kitchen, but the images of my father at the wedding were burned into my brain and I couldn’t get them out.

  I spotted an e-mail notification on my laptop and clicked on it, surprised—and fearful—when I saw it was from Danny. I opened the mail.

  Come over tonight. I have something to show you.

  I stared at his message. This couldn’t be good. Danny was much more sophisticated than I was when it came to using the Internet. If he believed Lisa was alive, who knew what he’d been able to find?

  Jeannie was back in the room and she nearly missed the coaster as she set my mug on the coffee table in front of me. “She was terrified of prison, Riley,” she said, lowering herself to the other end of the couch. “After the … you know, the shooting and everything, Deb would call me up, so worried. She’d say that Lisa couldn’t sleep and she cried all the time. She felt so guilty that she’d taken a life, and she was afraid of being in prison with … you know … hardened criminals. If your father offered her a way out, she must have jumped at the chance. It was foolish of him, but I guess he was desperate to protect her. We have to forgive them both.” She lifted her mug to her lips, but set it back on the table again without taking a sip. “Did Deb know, do you think?”

  I held the warm mug between my palms. “I don’t think she knew until just before she died,” I said. “Lisa came here to see her.” I told her about the brief e-mail from Celia telling my father that Lisa had made her plane, and then I began to cry. “I feel so alone, Jeannie,” I said. “Totally alone. Dealing with all of Daddy’s stuff.” I waved my hand through the air of the living room. “And I feel responsible for Danny now. I worry about him all the time and I’m totally alone with that, too. Meanwhile, Lisa’s surrounded by a happy, healthy, smiley family. Children and a partner and all those friends and Celia’s family and I have no one!”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” She moved closer to me, taking the mug from my hands and setting it on the table. “I wish you could remember Lisa from when you were little. She doted on you. She adored you.” She patted my hands where they rested limply on my lap. “You have to get in touch with her. You know that, right?”

  I nodded. “I just don’t know the best … the safest way to do it. And Danny can’t know. He already thinks something’s up, but if he knows for sure she’s alive, he’ll tell the police and that will be the end of her.”

  “He’d do that?”

  “He really hates her. He blames her for everything that went wrong in our family.”

  “You could e-mail her,” she said. “There’s that contact information on the Web site.”

  “Who knows where that goes?” I said. “I have to be really careful. That e-mail probably goes to their band manager or something. I do have Celia’s e-mail address from Daddy’s computer, but I—”

  “You need to tell Lisa you know she’s alive,” Jeannie said, “and that Frank passed away and that you’ll find a way to meet up with her when she comes to New Bern.”

  I shook my head. “It can’t be done by e-mail,” I said. “If she doesn’t reply, I’d never know if she got my e-mail or if she just wanted nothing to do with me.”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” she said quickly. “Somehow, you’ll have to talk to her in person at that concert, then. I want to be there, too,” she added. “I need to see her.”

  “Let me do this alone, all right?” I asked. “It’s going to be hard enough with only myself to worry about.”

  She sighed, nodding reluctantly. “All right,” she said. “I’ll settle for just being there in the crowd.” She broke into a wide smile. “I still can’t believe this! When you talk to her, please tell her I’m relieved she’s alive and well. That I’m glad she found the happiness she deserves and let her know that I love her.”

  I envied Jeannie for being able to see past the deception to feelings of warmth and love. The image of Lisa laughing and dancing, as though she didn’t have a care in the world, would be with me for a long, long time. I didn’t know what I would say when I was finally face-to-face with her. I was so afraid of seeing her. Of scaring her. She might turn away. Turn me away. But I remembered Celia’s e-mail to my father, how she’d written that there would always be a place in Lisa’s heart for me. She’d written those words years ago, but I’d hold on tight to them. I needed them to be the truth.

  49.

  At seven o’clock that evening, I drove through the dusky forest to Danny’s clearing, determined to reveal nothing of what I’d learned. I wouldn’t let him trip me up. I was only worried about what this thing was he wanted to show me … and I figured that out the moment he opened his trailer door to let me in.

  The music on his laptop wasn’t loud, but it was very familiar to me after listening to it nonstop for most of the day. Danny’s computer was on the counter, and the Web site photograph of Jasha Trace was on the screen. The picture of Lisa and the group stared me in the face as I walked inside.

  “Okay.” I surrendered, standing with my back against the door. “What’s going on?”

  He sat down at the kitchen table. “Good ol’ Verniece,” he said. “She really wants the RV park.”

  I swallowed. Damn it. “What are you talking about?” I asked, lowering myself to the bench across the table from him.

  “You can lose the innocent act,” he said. “They couldn’t talk you into turning over the park to them, so she tried to get it through me.” He ran his hand over his short blond beard. “I didn’t tell her that (a) I don’t care about the park and (b) I don’t have the le
gal authority to give it to her without your involvement … although I have to say I was surprised to learn that you had had no problem keeping me out of your dealings with her and Tom.”

  “Oh, Danny, I’m sorry.” I felt my whole body sag in defeat. “I was desperate to find out what they knew.”

  “And what you didn’t want me to know, right?”

  “Do you blame me?” I asked. “You and I have different ideas of what should happen to Lisa. And how did you figure out about—” I pointed to the laptop, where Lisa was in the middle of a fiddle solo. “Jasha Trace? How could you…?”

  “I took a look inside our father’s RV,” he said. “Do you believe our old man?” He laughed, but there was nothing funny in the sound. “I always knew he worshiped her, but I’d really underestimated just how much. Anyway, I had to break the lock to get into the trailer. And I think you beat me to it, right?” He waited for me to answer, but I kept my expression stony and blank. “I found a newspaper ad on his table about the concert coming up,” he said. “I saw there was a violinist in the group and she had on a necklace like the one Lisa used to wear. Daddy had all this bluegrass music there, but none of that band, which made me wonder…” He tilted his head, eyes on mine. “Did he have some of their CDs and you took them?”

  I hesitated a moment, then nodded.

  “I had to pay iTunes eight bucks for this CD.”

  “Danny…”

  “Once I had her name, it was easy to find out everything else.” He shook his head, and I recognized the hurt look on his face. It was the same expression I saw that morning in the mirror. “She’s made one hell of a life for herself, hasn’t she.”

  “Danny.” I folded my hands on the table and leaned toward him. “I’m pleading with you. Please leave her alone.”