The Good Sister (4 page)

Entry from the marble notebook

Monday, October 7, 1985

Today is my birthday. Sweet sixteen—what a joke. There is nothing sweet about it. Nothing sweet about my life.

Father came to my room after midnight saying he had a special present for me. He was laughing. I hate him. If I could figure out a way to get away with killing him, I would. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail, and I don’t want to go to hell for committing a mortal sin.

Before he left my room, he said I have to go down to Motor Vehicles to get my driving permit tomorrow, because he and Mother need me to start doing my share around here. As if I’m not already their slave. They want me to take over the grocery shopping and running errands. Usually I’m glad to get out of the house for any reason but I don’t want to drive if he’s the one who’s going to teach me. I begged him to wait until spring, at least, when the other sophomores will start turning sixteen and I can take driver’s ed through school, but he won’t let me.

I hate being older than the rest of my class—it’s because they held me back a year in school when we moved here from California. It’s just one more thing to set me apart from everyone else.

We don’t do birthday cakes in our house, but on Adrian’s fifth birthday last winter, I got him a Hostess cupcake, put a candle in it, sang to him, and told him to make a wish when he blew out the candle. That night when I tucked him in, he told me he had wished that I was his mom instead of her. I reminded him that you’re not supposed to tell what your wish is, or it won’t come true.

Today, Adrian was crying because he couldn’t figure out how to get me a cupcake and a candle so that he could sing to me and give me a wish. I told him we would make believe. When I blew out the pretend candle, he told me I had to make a wish.

I wished that my father were dead. That’s not the same thing as killing him. It’s not a sin. You can wish anything you want.

Adrian warned me not to tell him what I wished because it wouldn’t come true. I didn’t tell him, of course. But it doesn’t matter. It was a fake cupcake and a fake candle and anyway, none of my wishes have ever come true.

Chapter 4

“H
ow was school?” Jen Archer asks Carley as she blows in the door on a damp March gust.

Seeing the look on her daughter’s face, she immediately regrets the question that had impulsively escaped her mouth, as words so often seem to do.

Way to go there, Mom.

How was school?

How do you
think
it was?

Sometimes, it seems that Jen has spent the better part of her life reminding herself to think before she speaks—or trying to undo the inevitable fallout when she forgets.

Growing up the youngest of the five Bonafacio sisters, each more outgoing than the next, she was known by the childhood nickname “the Yapster.” She never quite outgrew her loquaciousness; in fact, it served her well in her postcollege career as a sales rep for a packaged goods corporation.

Not so well, though, as a stay-at-home mom to two daughters whose moods go awry based on the slightest inflection—real, or imagined—in Jen’s tone.

“Carley, I—”

“Mom, school was
fine
.” The last word lands as heavily as the backpack she drops on the polished hardwood floor, fiercely walloping Jen with maternal protective instinct.

For Carley, school wasn’t
fine
today. It hasn’t been fine for weeks now, as far as Jen knows. Probably a lot longer.

But it’s been two weeks, exactly, since the Friday morning when she got the phone call from Sister Linda, the school’s part-time social worker. Two weeks since Jen and her husband, Thad, found out that their fifteen-year-old freshman has become the target of vicious bullying.

Jen bends to pick up the backpack and move it to a cushioned bench. “This weighs a ton, sweetie. Doesn’t it make your back hurt?”

“Yes, but what am I supposed to do? Not worry about homework at all, like Emma?”

Conscientious Carley dutifully hauls around a stack of thick textbooks every day, unlike her slapdash eighteen-months-younger sister, Emma, whose eighth-grade assignments—if she remembers them at all—are usually crumpled in her school uniform pocket with a litter of Juicy Fruit wrappers.

Not that Emma’s even allowed to chew gum with her braces on.

Not that she cares.

That her daughters are extreme opposites used to give Jen pleasure. “They balance each other out,” she’d say when they were younger, “and opposites attract, right?”

Right. That was back in the good old days when Carley and Emma were so close that they walked around holding hands, completely of their own accord. Strangers would smile and say, “Awww . . .”

Now that the girls are both teenagers, opposites most certainly don’t attract; they repel. When they’re actually speaking to each other, they’re arguing.

Jen can’t help but think this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. She and her four older sisters didn’t always get along perfectly, but at least they all had similar personalities and temperaments and grew up to be good friends. Whenever they actually see each other—which isn’t as often as anyone would like since Jen is the only one still living in western New York—conversations are laced with laughs and the camaraderie of women who view the world from similar perspectives.

She can’t imagine that ever happening with Carley and Emma, given their extreme personalities. If they could just find a happy medium once in a while, life would be so much . . . well, happier.

Happy. When was the last time Carley was happy?

Yesterday
, Jen reminds herself.
Yesterday she almost smiled, for a moment there . . .

Yes, because when Carley came home yesterday, Jen greeted her not with questions about school, but with a funny account of the fat, persistent squirrel who’d invaded the backyard birdfeeder, only to be repeatedly chased off by a tiny, bossy bird. Jen embellished the story into a Disney-esque romp—anything to see her daughter’s face light up the way it used to.

Carley’s always been passionate about anything having to do with nature, particularly animals. Jen will never forget the pure pleasure—or resulting heartache—of surprising her on a long-ago birthday with a tiny white kitten. When she and Thad decided on the gift, they had no idea yet that Emma was asthmatic with a fierce allergy to cat fur. All fur, actually, and feathers, too.

The kitten—whom Carley had named Cutie Pie—had to go.

“Why can’t
she
go?” Carley had sobbed, cradling the purring ball of fluff and glaring at Emma, whose eyes were equally swollen and teary, courtesy of said fluff.

In the end, Cutie Pie went to live a few miles away with Jen’s sister Bennie and her family. Carley took solace in being able to visit any time she wanted—until Bennie’s husband was transferred to California. She didn’t return the cat—Emma was still allergic—but she did give the Archers her piano.

“Consolation prize?” Jen asked wryly.

“Maybe your girls can learn to play it. My kids were never interested and I didn’t want to force lessons on them the way Mom did on us.”

“But we actually liked piano lessons, remember?”

“Not really. We just liked Marie Bush,” Bennie pointed out, and Jen smiled, recalling the vivacious teacher who would come to the Bonafacio house on Wednesdays and teach one sister after another to play scales and eventually Beethoven.

Jen accepted the cast-off upright from her sister, and Cutie Pie moved to the West Coast. Following an extended mourning period, Carley survived the loss and started piano lessons. She hasn’t mentioned the cat in a long time now, though she remains affectionate toward furry creatures.

Predictably, Jen’s rogue squirrel story yesterday was rewarded with—well, not a smile, exactly. But at least there was a fleeting spark of interest in her daughter’s big brown eyes.

Bent on seeing an actual grin today, or maybe even getting a laugh, Jen was hoping to find a new anecdote to share. But woodland creatures were nowhere to be found in the backyard, thanks to the monsoonlike weather so typical of early springtime in western New York.

As the uneventful day wore on without yielding a shred of amusing material—nature-related, or otherwise—Jen resorted to scouring the Web for a good joke or a comedic video clip suitable for her fifteen-year-old.

She’s never spent much time on the Internet. Not compared to the rest of the world, anyway. Maybe she’d be more tech-savvy if she were still in the workforce, or a teenager, but she prefers to do most of her communicating and shopping and reading the old-fashioned way.

Aghast at what popped up via the search engine today, she’s more worried than ever about what her girls are being exposed to online.

“Whatever happened to good old-fashioned
clean
comedy?” she asked Thad during his regular lunchtime phone call, after she’d explained Mission: Cheer Up Carley.

“You mean like Charlie Chaplin?”

“Not
that
old-fashioned.”

“The Three Stooges? Abbott and Costello?”

“You know what I mean. Everything is so raunchy, and I—I don’t know. I just want her to laugh again.”

“She will, eventually. But it’s going to take a lot more than a laugh to get her past this thing. You can’t just fix everything.”

Sure I can
, Jen thought.
I’m her mom. That’s what moms do.
We fix things for our kids and we worry about them and we ask about their day when they walk in the door . . .

Dammit. Why, just when Jen felt like she was starting to get the hang of this motherhood thing, sisterly squabbles and all, did the rules have to go and change?

To make matters worse, the local bus Carley takes to and from school, so often running late, had to go and show up five minutes early today, catching her off guard. And so, rather than greeting Carley with an amusing anecdote or even a raunchy YouTube clip to take her mind off her troubles, Jen simply blurted the first thing that came to mind.

How was your day?

Carley was never forthcoming with details about her life even
before
the whole school nightmare started.

But Jen wouldn’t hesitate to ask Emma that same question on any given afternoon. She’s not necessarily less prickly than her older sister—if anything, she’s far pricklier—but she’s not nearly as private.

Never in a million years would Emma merely tell Jen that school was “fine.” She’d pronounce it “horrifying” or “amazing,” then launch into a superlative-heavy account of something that had happened during recess or lunch. The spectacular incident typically would feature at least half a dozen of the gaggle of girls Emma refers to as her BFFs—a term that used to amuse, but now only aggravates, her big sister.

“You can’t have twenty people you call best friends forever,” she often tells Emma. “If there are twenty of them, then they aren’t BFFs. They’re just friends. A person can only have
one
BFF.”

“Maybe
you
only have one,” Emma shoots back, “but I have twenty. Actually, twenty-three.”

Yes, and poor Carley no longer has even one. Not since Nicki Olivera switched to public school after their eighth-grade graduation from Saint Paul’s Parochial.

Inseparable from Nicki since preschool, Carley had asked if she, too, could go to Woodsbridge High, rather than commute to Sacred Sisters, the all-girls Catholic high school in the working-class Buffalo neighborhood where Jen had grown up.

“Try Sisters first,” Jen told her. “If you don’t like it, you can change to Woodsbridge sophomore year.”

Once Carley got to Sisters, she wouldn’t want to leave, Jen was certain. After all, she herself had gone there, along with all four of her siblings, and her mother and aunts a generation before them.

So had Debbie Quattrone Olivera, Nicki’s mother and one of Jen’s closest friends back at Sisters. They drifted apart when they went off to college, but rekindled the friendship about a decade ago as married young moms living in adjacent developments here in Buffalo’s South Towns suburbs.

“If I ever have a daughter,” Debbie used to say back when they were teenagers, “I’ll
never
send her to Sisters.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want her to have freedom to choose where she goes, not be forced into it like we were just because our moms went here.”

Yes, Sacred Sisters was a tradition among Catholic families in the old neighborhood, but Jen didn’t consider herself forced into attending. On the contrary, having wistfully watched her older sisters enroll one by one, she couldn’t wait to go.

The Bonafacio girls thrived there, academically and socially. Firstborn Maddie was class president all four years. Brainy Jessie graduated a year later as valedictorian. Bennie and Frankie were standouts—and eventually captains—on almost every athletic team.

Night after night, year after year, they sat at the supper table brimming with tales of high school life.

When at last it was Jen’s turn to walk into that three-story yellow brick building as a student, she found her niche on the yearbook and newspaper staffs. She loved every minute of those four fleeting years, with the exception of her on-again, off-again high romance with Mike Morino.

Genuinely taken aback when the ever-irreverent teenage Debbie declared that she’d sell her future daughter into slavery before she’d send her to their alma mater, Jen had asked, “But what if she
wants
to come here?”

“Why would she?”

“Why
wouldn’t
she?”

Famous last words.

Last spring, when Carley started asking about public high school, Thad wasn’t opposed to the idea of forgoing high school tuition payments for the next four years. He’s always worried about money, thanks to the dismal economy, bills piling up, taxes and college costs on the rise, and regular rounds of layoffs at the accounting firm where he’s a principal CPA.

“Just think—we could save more in the girls’ college accounts if we send them to public high school, Jen, and they’d still get a great education.”

“You and I both went to private high schools, though . . . so how would we know?”

“I don’t know . . . but I’m guessing my experience wasn’t as warm and fuzzy as yours.”

Having grown up in a wealthy suburb of Rochester, Thad had gone to a four-year prep school. He isn’t Catholic—or religious, for that matter. While his parents had been Presbyterian, they weren’t practicing, and the first time he set foot in any church was when he married Jen. He never considered converting, but he occasionally attends Sunday Mass at Saint Paul’s with her and the girls. He likes to refer to himself as a lapsed agnostic.

“Look, I know Sacred Sisters is a tradition in your family, Jen,” he said. “But if Carley feels that strongly about it—”

“She doesn’t,” Jen cut in. “She’s always planned on going there. She’s just worried about being separated from Nicki after all these years. I told her they can still be friends.”

“You and I both know it won’t be the same.”

“Well, it’s not really good for the two of them to be joined at the hip anymore. Nicki’s the type who might be tempted to walk on the wild side when she gets a little older.” Lord knew her mother certainly had. “Carley’s not like that. She’s a good girl, and anyway, it’s time for her to branch out and make new friends, don’t you think?”

“Sure, but you’ve said yourself that Sisters is too small—”

“I never said
too
. I just said small.”

“Okay, you’ve said that it’s small, and insular—”

“
Insulated
. That’s not a negative quality. Crazy, terrible things are going on out there in the world, Thad.”

“Crazy, terrible things can happen anywhere. Isn’t high school a time for Carley to broaden horizons instead of narrow them?”

“That’s what I just said. I want her to branch out and—”

“And you want her to be insulated. I feel like you’re talking in circles, Jen.”

To be honest, so did she—and it wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation. But whenever she feels passionately about something, she fights for it.

Not about to let her daughter miss out on a wonderful high school experience, she told Thad firmly, “I have a feeling she’ll love Sisters if she just gives it a chance.”