The Silent Sister

  “What big box?” I interrupted her, setting down my taco.

  “The one in his bedroom closet. Don’t you know it? There’s pictures of you when you were little. Pictures of your brother and sister and mother.”

  “Oh, yes.” I remembered no such box, but didn’t want to tell her there was yet one more thing I didn’t know about my father.

  “And I’d show him pictures of your mother from when she and I were kids, back in our teen years. I met Deb when we were in the eighth grade in Arlington, Virginia, and we became inseparable.”

  “What was she like?” I asked. Suddenly, I felt terribly sad that I’d never asked my mother about her childhood. I’d never thought to ask either of my parents. Jeannie was right about the “me, me, me” part. And now I’d lost the chance.

  “She was always the life of the party.” Jeannie smiled broadly.

  “My mother?”

  “Absolutely! She was always getting us into trouble. We’d hide other kids in our trunk to sneak them into the drive-in movie. We weren’t allowed to be there with our boyfriends in the first place, because you know what went on in those cars.” She laughed. “No one watched the movie, that’s for sure. And she was always talking me into cutting school with her.”

  My mouth hung open. “This doesn’t sound like my mother at all,” I said.

  “No? How do you remember her?”

  “Super-Catholic and really … I don’t know. Law-abiding. And depressed.” And distant, I thought. You could be in the same room with my mother and barely feel her presence. “Antidepressants barely seemed to touch her sadness,” I added.

  Jeannie nodded. “She changed after Lisa passed away,” she admitted. “That’s very true.” She looked at her watch. “So, Riley,” she said abruptly, “why did you want to see me today?”

  I would have liked to hear more about my mother but guessed Jeannie was pressed for time. “I saw Daddy’s lawyer a couple of days ago,” I said. “My father left you ten thousand dollars and his piano.”

  She sat back a bit from the table. “Oh,” she said, and I couldn’t read the emotion behind the word. “Well, that’s very sweet.” Her voice was strangely flat. “And I do love that piano. I have an upright, but I guess I can sell that and squeeze the baby grand into my living room.”

  “You don’t have to take it,” I said, trying to interpret her reaction. She was clearly not thrilled and that bothered me. He didn’t have to leave her anything. “I’ll be selling his things and I could sell the piano, too, and give you the money.”

  “No, no,” she said quickly. “I’d love the piano. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.” Then she smiled a sad, sad smile. “It’s just hard to say good-bye, you know? The piano will be a good way for me to remember him. I know some piano movers, and I’ll arrange to have them pick it up whenever’s convenient for you.”

  “Perfect.” I pulled one of my business cards from my purse, crossed out the number for the school where I worked, and wrote my cell number in its place. I handed it to her across the table.

  “So, I assume you’ll be selling the house and RV park and all his collections?” she asked, glancing down at the card.

  I nodded. “Well, I’ll sell the house and park, at least, but he did leave one of his collections to someone. The pipes will go to Tom Kyle. Do you know him?”

  “Really?” She wrinkled her nose. “How odd.”

  “I thought so, too, at first,” I said. “But I think the Kyles were closer to him than I realized. They’ve lived at the park for as long as I can remember and I guess my father probably thought he should leave them something. I think they can use a little extra cash.”

  She looked at my business card like it was the most interesting thing in the restaurant. “That was very generous of him,” she said.

  Everything out of her mouth sounded as though it had a double meaning. I set down my taco, feeling impatient. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “No, no.” She smiled. “Not at all. When did your father write that will?”

  “Three years ago.”

  She nodded absently. Sipped her soup. “Don’t you wish you could talk to him?” she asked. “I mean, we have to guess why he did what he did. Why the pipes to the Kyles? That collection has to be worth at least ten thousand.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Your father knew what he was doing as a collector. I’m not sure he knew what he was doing when he wrote that will, though.” She pursed her lips. “He was not all that friendly with the Kyles. I always had the sense he disliked Tom Kyle, actually.”

  And I’d gotten the sense from Tom Kyle that the feeling may have been mutual. I looked down at my barely touched tacos. “Yes, to answer your question. I’d love to be able to talk to my father. I suddenly feel like I didn’t know him as well as I thought.”

  “Have you been going through his things?” Her head was lowered toward her bowl, but her eyes were raised, watching me from beneath thickly mascaraed lashes. I wasn’t sure what was behind her question, but it made me feel guilty. Again.

  “Not really,” I said. “I haven’t known where to begin.”

  “Would you like help?” She looked excited all of a sudden, as though she’d been waiting for the opportunity to ask. “I’d be happy to do that.” She set down her spoon and used her hands to help her talk. “I can track down resources for you,” she said. “Appraisers for the collections. Then perhaps buyers. You really need to hold an estate sale and it so happens that my daughter, Christine, recently started an estate sale business, so she can help you set that up. She’s very good.”

  “That would be awesome,” I said sincerely, although I found myself leaning away from the table as though blown back by her sudden burst of energy. “I forgot you had a daughter.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever known.

  “She’s considerably older than you, so you never really knew her. She’s forty-two now, a couple of years older than Lisa would have been. They played together sometimes when they were little, before Christine and I moved to Asheville.” She rolled her eyes. “When Lisa wasn’t practicing the violin, that is. Your sister was a driven—and very talented—little girl.”

  “I know.”

  “Let me come over and go through the house to see what’s there,” Jeannie said. “When would be a good time? How long do you plan to be here?”

  “I was hoping to be done in a couple of weeks, but I can see that’s not going to happen. I have the summer off so—”

  “Can your brother help?”

  I shook my head, and it was clear I didn’t need to explain.

  “It’s always a bigger job than you imagine,” she said. “And with that particular house … I can certainly help you get it ready to go on the market, if you like, but I don’t want you to feel pressured to use me just because—”

  “Please. I’m sure my father would have wanted you to be the one to sell it, and I don’t know the first thing about how to do it.”

  “You can let me take care of everything!” Her cheeks were flushed. “Christine and I will make it easy for you.” She pushed her bowl to the side of the table, clearly more interested in talking now than eating. “Now, because of how your father has everything set up in that house—all the built-in cabinets and the way he transformed the living room into an office and everything—I think we’ll have to do some renovations to make it look like a comfortable family home,” she said. “Nothing huge. No tearing down walls or anything like that, but the cabinets need to go and his furniture is quite old and the kitchen and bathrooms are beyond dated. We should have the estate sale first to get everything we can out of there and then evaluate the need to do the kitchen and baths, because that would be an expense, though perhaps worth it in the long run.” She was off and running and I sank lower in my chair, drowning under the deluge of her ideas. “The house has great bones,” she continued, “but he let the outside get a bit rundown and with old houses like that, they can look haunted, don’t you thi
nk?”

  “Well, he spent so much time working on the RV park.” I felt defensive, although seriously, the RV park looked like it took care of itself. Trees. Creek. Concrete pads. What was there to do?

  “How about I get someone over to the house to do the lawn and trim the shrubbery?” Jeannie asked. “Maybe plant something colorful in the front for a little curb appeal?”

  “That would be awesome,” I said again. I didn’t like her—she was pushy and hard to read and I felt resentful of all she knew about me and my family. But I was relieved to have someone to help me.

  We settled up with the waitress—Jeannie paid for my barely touched tacos—and we walked out to the sidewalk. Standing in front of the entrance, I turned to face her.

  “I’ll call you in a day or two and figure out a time for you to come over,” I said.

  “Don’t wait too long,” she warned.

  “No, I won’t,” I said.

  She lifted my hand and held it tightly as she stared hard into my eyes. I felt gooseflesh rise on the back of my neck.

  “I’m so glad to see you again, Riley,” she said, finally freeing my hand.

  I gave her a weak smile. “I’ll call you,” I said, and turned to head home, thinking all the way, What the hell is wrong with that woman?

  7.

  There was a big box of photographs on the top shelf of my father’s bedroom closet. I carried it to his bed, which I’d stripped when I was in town the last time, washing the sheets and pulling the quilt up. I’d noticed then that the quilt had initials in the corner: “JL to FM.” At the time, I hadn’t thought much about it, too caught up in the sorrow over losing my father. Now I realized Jeannie had most likely made the blue and yellow patchwork quilt for him. A personal thing. Something for his bed.

  I wasn’t sure why that woman made me so uncomfortable. The fact that she seemed to have been closer to my father than I’d been, I guessed. The suspicion that she’d been happy to get my mother out of the way so she could take her place? That was unfair. My mother’d been her oldest friend—I knew that for a fact—and surely Jeannie was telling the truth when she said that her grief and my father’s grief had drawn them together. It was the way she spoke to me. The way she stared at me, especially there on the street after lunch. I was trained, though, to look beyond behavior to motivation. Maybe she was simply uncomfortable with me. She didn’t know how to behave with the daughter of her lover.

  Whatever.

  I sat cross-legged on the bed in front of the box and pulled out photographs by the fistful. For a man who fastidiously displayed his collections, my father was sloppy about the family photos. I spread them around me on the bed. Many of them were from the years before I was born. Baby pictures of Lisa, but not too many of Danny as an infant and even fewer of me. I knew that younger children were neglected when it came to photographs and the recording of every developmental milestone. My parents were probably tired by the time Danny and I came along. Lisa had been eleven years old when Danny was born, and I was sure he and I were surprises. Mom had been a devout Catholic and I doubted she’d used birth control.

  As babies, Lisa and Danny looked very much alike. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, long faces. I was the odd one with a little mop of dark hair and dark eyes, a round face and a button nose I was glad I’d outgrown.

  There were pictures of Lisa as a child of about five or six. She wore a ruffled pink dress and held a diminutive violin. Her smile was wide, and she still had every one of her small, perfect baby teeth. What had happened? I wondered. How did that happy-looking little girl turn into a teenager sad enough to kill herself?

  In the middle of the box were two old VHS tapes. One was labeled “Lisa, April 1980” and the other “Rome Music Festival, June 1987.” My heart sped up. I could see and hear my sister! The only problem was, I hadn’t seen a VHS player anywhere in the house. I hadn’t seen one anywhere in years.

  I set the tapes on my father’s night table and continued digging through the box. There was a picture of Lisa as a very young teen standing with a boy about her own age, both of them holding violins to their chins but smiling for the camera. On the back of the picture, someone had written “Lisa and Matty, ’85.” She would have been around thirteen. I had no idea who Matty was, other than a cute kid with a mass of dark curls and chocolate-brown eyes. I found another picture of the two of them at sixteen, standing back-to-back, a strand of Lisa’s pale hair tangled in one of Matty’s dark curls. Lisa wore a white oval-shaped pendant around her neck. Matty’s smile looked genuine, but I thought Lisa’d had to work at hers. Or maybe I was reading too much into a photograph, one tiny fraction of a second, frozen in time.

  I recognized Jeannie in one of the pictures. Her dark hair was long and she had her arm around my mother. Lisa, about eight years old in the picture, leaned against my mother’s side and a black-haired girl a couple of years older and several inches taller leaned against Jeannie’s. That had to be her daughter, Christine, the one who could help me with an estate sale. Everyone looked happy in this picture, my mother included. Her smile was wide, the tilt of her head playful. It was a jolt, seeing that relaxed and lighthearted side of her. But in this happy photograph, she hadn’t yet lost her daughter.

  As I looked at the picture of my mother, I remembered the weeks before her death from cancer. She’d wanted to be at home, and the hospice nurses taught Daddy and me how to care for her here in this bedroom. I’d nearly lived at her bedside night and day during those last weeks. I felt like I grew up that summer. I bathed my mother, managed her medications, held her hand. I told her every day that I loved her, and sometimes when Daddy wanted to take over from me, I resisted. I wanted every extra minute with her that I could have. My usually reserved mother was softer, more open, in those last weeks, and although our conversations were never deep or profound, we probably talked more than we did during my whole life. Her focus was on our future—mine and Daddy’s and Danny’s. Danny was still in the hospital in Maryland then and unable to travel. “You all need to stay in touch with each other,” my mother had said. “You need to take care of each other.” I hadn’t done such a great job of that with Danny. He made it hard. I thought I’d stayed in good touch with my father, but now, knowing he’d been unable to be open with me about his life, I worried that I’d failed not just Danny, but everybody.

  I set the picture aside, wondering if I should give it to Jeannie, but then I thought about the hundreds of photographs Jeannie most likely had of herself and her daughter over the years, and the few I had of my mother and sister, and I set the picture with the others that I would keep. I wanted to remember my mother this way, happy and content with her life.

  The next picture I pulled from the box was of Danny in his uniform. The expression in his eyes was empty, as though he was surrendering to his fate. Or maybe I was once again reading too much into a picture with the benefit of hindsight.

  There was another picture of Matty, the boy with the curly dark hair. He sat on a bench at a baby grand piano—ours?—between Danny and myself. I couldn’t have been more than two and Matty had his hand on mine above the piano keys, as if he was trying to teach me to play. Good luck with that, I thought. Funny to see myself in that picture when I didn’t remember Matty at all.

  Beneath those pictures was a large framed photograph that made me gasp with recognition. I knew this picture. It was a professional shot of Lisa, Danny, and myself. Lisa and Danny sat side by side on a white upholstered love seat and I sat on Lisa’s lap. I couldn’t have been more than a year and a half. That would have made Danny about five and Lisa sixteen. All three of us were dressed in white. My hair was the only dark thing in the whole photograph and I wondered if it had irritated the photographer. Had I messed up an otherwise ethereal composition? Danny grinned at the camera, a gap where one of his front teeth should have been. My head was turned to the side and I was reaching up, toward his chin. I felt a twist in my chest, looking at the picture. I’d loved him so much, my big broth
er. He’d looked out for me. I was always mystified when other kids said they hated their siblings or tried to get them in trouble. There was never any of that between Danny and me. I treasured this picture. I was glad my parents selected this one over their other choices—surely there had been one where I was looking directly at the camera? But this photograph, with my hand reaching out for my brother, said so much more. Was there any way, I wondered, to get that connection back?

  And what did the photograph say about Lisa? She was only months from her death, and I swore I could see the pain in her face. She smiled for the camera, of course, like a dutiful daughter, but when people say “her smile didn’t reach her eyes” … well, looking at this picture, I understood that phrase. Had she been thinking about her application to Juilliard when this picture was taken? Had the fact that she was talented enough to apply not been enough to validate her? What pressure she must have been under during her whole young life. Child prodigy. It couldn’t have been easy for her.

  I must have stared at the picture for half an hour, wishing I could change things for her, the sister I never got to know. “I’m changing things for other kids,” I whispered out loud to the room. I hoped that, somehow, she could hear me.

  I suddenly remembered the first time I’d seen this photograph. I’d found it tucked away, facedown, in the dresser drawer where my mother kept her scarves. I was seven. I’d recognized Danny and myself, of course, but I didn’t know who the older girl was, though she was a little bit familiar. I carried the photograph into the living room, where my father was playing the piano and my mother sat on the couch, helping Danny with his homework.

  “Who’s this girl?” I asked, holding up the picture in its carved wooden frame.

  All three of them looked at me, and then my parents looked at each other.