The Good Sister (7 page)

“Oh, Carley! Oh, I’m so proud of you! See? I told you! I told you!”

Her joyful tears were contagious and Carley found herself crying, too. Crying and trembling and laughing in her mother’s embrace as they stood there in the front hall on a glorious winter afternoon when the sky was a deep, perfect blue and the sun was shining . . .

Or maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe Carley just remembers it that way.

In any case, that day was drastically different from today.

Drastically different, too, from the day not long after when Carley found out the truth: that it had all been a cruel prank.

The social worker, Sister Linda, called Mom and told her.

“Sweetie . . . are you okay?” Mom asked when Carley came home from school that afternoon.

That time, Carley didn’t say she was fine.

She said, simply, “No.”

There were tears in Mom’s eyes, and this time, too, they threatened to be contagious.

“You don’t have to go back there,” Mom said. “Not ever again. I’ll arrange for you to switch to Woodsbridge right away.”

Woodsbridge—with Nicki.

Carley longed to say yes; longed to leave Sacred Sisters behind without a backward glance.

But . . .

At Woodsbridge, she’d have to see Nicki every day. Plus . . .

What are you going to do, Carley? Leave school? Let them win?

She forced herself to tell Mom that she wanted to stay at Sisters. Then she went straight upstairs and shut herself into her room, where no one could see her as she wept toxic tears laced not just with grief, but with shame.

Ever since that day, Mom has behaved differently toward Carley. Either she’s bending over backward to be nice, trying to engage her in awkward conversations, or she’s looking at her sadly, maybe critically, as if she wishes she could make Carley over into the perfect daughter.

As if she’d been hoping I’d turned out differently, more like her. As if I let her down.

Dad gives off pretty much the same vibe, when he’s around—which isn’t very often now that it’s tax season. He’s always busy at work, worried about losing his job like a lot of other people at his company.

Only Emma treats her the same as always—which is, basically, like crap. But she almost welcomes her kid sister’s bad attitude these days, because it makes her feel like her old self.

Carley tears the gold foil wrapper from another candy bar and crams the whole thing into her mouth. Chewing hard, she feels a twinge in one of her molars as the chocolatey caramel coats what is probably the beginning of another cavity.

Great. She had perfect teeth until she turned thirteen.

“You’re the lucky one,” Mom used to tell her. “You won’t even need braces like Emma.”

No, but she needed two fillings and a root canal.

There are worse things, even, than needles in your gums and drills in your teeth and braces.

Worse things . . . like having everyone you know turn against you—including your ex-best friend.

That, more than anything else, is what hurts. She could probably have handled everything the girls at school have dished out—the taunting, the snickering behind her back, even the Spring Fling nightmare.

But what Nicki did? She can’t bear to even think about it.

So don’t. It’s over. It happened months ago. Who cares about her?

Carley moves her stuffed animals off her bed, carefully rearranging the collection on the built-in window seat, where they seem to watch her like an audience of supportive friends. Some of these guys, like a fluffy flamingo named Bubblegum, have been sleeping with her since she was a little girl and afraid of the dark.

Maybe she’d still be afraid of the dark if it weren’t for them.

Imagine how the girls at school would react if they knew she still sleeps with stuffed animals and sometimes even talks to them in her head.

Nicki knew that—well, not about the talking-to-them-in-her-head part. But she’s slept over in Carley’s room a million times and she knows Carley sleeps with the stuffed animals carefully arranged around her pillows. She’s the one who gave Carley many of her fake-furry friends, including Bubblegum, as gifts over the years.

Nicki knows, too, that Carley sometimes still reads
Charlotte’s Web
and the other books from her childhood, and that she even takes out her Barbies once in a while to change their clothes and brush their hair.

Nicki knows all her deepest, darkest secrets.

That never bothered Carley until now.

Lying on her stomach on her bed, she opens her laptop and pops a third Twix into her mouth before typing in the first few letters of the Web site she visited late last night.

B . . . U . . . L . . .

The rest of the link pops up. She clicks it and is transported to a virtual world populated by people who are exactly like her.

Well, not exactly: Many are female but a few are male; most are kids, though some are adults. They all have one thing in common with Carley, though: They are—or were—victims of bullies.

They post their stories here in a public forum; stories that tend to begin with lines like:
It all started in sixth grade
, or
I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but . . .

More often than not, the entries end with variations of:
I wish I were dead
.

Yeah. Carley knows the feeling.

Not that she’s brave enough to actually do anything about it.

There’s a lot of talk of suicide on the forum, but that, Carley knows, is a sin. If you kill yourself, you don’t go to heaven.

But sometimes, when she climbs into bed after a cruel day, knowing that tomorrow will bring more of the same, she wishes that she could just go to sleep and never wake up.

Who cares about heaven when your life is pure hell?

Q
T-Pi is online
.

The message flashes in a corner of the screen like a beacon.

“Ah, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”

QT-Pi—whose real name, of course, is Carley Archer—will have just gotten home from school.

The dismissal time at Sacred Sisters is 3:12, and the metro bus ride home to the South Towns should take anywhere from thirty to forty minutes, with stops. Carley—concealed, or so she believes, behind the QT-Pi screen name and the little portrait of a kitten—usually pops up on the Internet after four o’clock.

But here she is, and it’s only 3:55 right now. Either the bus was early, or she was in a particular hurry to get online today.

Probably the latter. Misery loves company.

“Aw, what’s the matter, Carley, did you have another bad day at school? Is that why you’re here?”

Here
, as in an online forum populated by fellow victims of bullies.

Safely concealed behind the screen name Angel 770—a meaningful screen name created just for this Web site—it’s tempting to engage QT-Pi in a private chat or at least bait her for comments on the message board.

But maybe that’s not a good idea.

No, given Angel’s plan for tonight, it’s probably wise to keep a low profile right now. And in the days ahead, for that matter.

No one would ever in a million years think Angel might be responsible for what’s going to happen tonight—or, for that matter, to the others, including Carley Archer, when it’s her turn.

Still . . . you never can be too careful.

Angel was careful when it came to Sandra Lutz.

The Realtor’s death, widely covered in the local papers and on
Eyewitness News
, was ruled accidental. Her body was found just inside the front door of the fire-gutted house, which was locked from the inside. The key to the double-cylinder dead bolt turned up nearby in the rubble.

The fire investigators reported that the fire had started in the living room, where a burning candle had ignited draperies.

Sandra must have been frantically trying to get out, couldn’t locate the key, and was too overcome by panic and smoke to escape through a window. Those closest to the door, facing the street, were all closed and locked. And the smoke detectors on both floors were useless without batteries.

The fire chief used Sandra’s sad demise to teach the viewing public a fire safety lesson.

“This woman’s death could have been prevented,” he grimly told a television news reporter, “if she had taken a few simple steps. Smoke detectors should be in working order. Lit candles should not be left unattended. Keys should be left in locks that open from the inside, in case an emergency makes it necessary to get out quickly.”

Sandra, he made it clear, had done everything wrong.

Ah, but she hadn’t—other than talking too much, asking too many questions, snooping and finding that notebook . . .

It was Angel who removed the batteries from the smoke detectors. Angel who closed and locked the front windows. Angel who hid the key to the front door lock before Sandra even came home.

It was Angel who held the lavender candle to the curtain panel until it caught fire, then set it on a table beneath the window as flames hungrily licked the wall.

And it was Angel who hastily climbed back out the mudroom window, replaced the old-fashioned screen, and scurried away as flames engulfed the house.

Sandra Lutz’s body was burned beyond recognition, according to ghoulishly graphic reporters. That meant the investigators wouldn’t have realized—or suspected—that the woman had been lying unconscious by the locked door long before the fire started.

Smiling faintly, Angel remembers the satisfaction of knocking her out by shocking her carotid artery and jugular vein with a well-practiced, well-placed sharp blow to the side of her neck.

It had been so easy.

All of it.

No problem finding the house, the broken window screen, even the key above the door  . . .

Angel has Sandra herself to thank for that.

You just didn’t know when to shut up, did you?

You got what you deserved.

And now, so will the others.

Angel leans away from the keyboard with arms folded and hands clenched around fingers that are twitching, eager to type, eager to reach out to QT-Pi . . .

No. Not yet.

For the moment, all Angel can do is watch her.

And wait.

But it won’t be long now.

Entry from the marble notebook

Saturday, November 30, 1985

When I heard someone unlocking my bedroom door late last night I thought it might be Mother, having a change of heart about locking me in here as punishment or at least bringing me water. But it wasn’t.

It was him.

“I thought you might be lonely,” he said. Bastard. I’d rather be locked in here alone for a year—for the rest of my life, even—than spend one minute with him.

Before he left, I begged him to sneak me some food or even just water and let me out to go to the bathroom, but he wouldn’t.

“You heard what your mother said,” he told me. “You have to stay in here until it’s time for church Sunday morning. You have to make atonement.”

My sin this time: sneaking up to the third-floor bathroom to wash my hair while she was at work at the drugstore. She found hair and shampoo residue in the drain. She must inspect it every day like she inspects everything else around here.

She won’t let me take a bath more than once a week because she says it’s sinful to be vain and wasteful of hot water. I think she wants to make me ugly because of him. As if he cares what I look like.

I wish no one else did. I’m the only girl at school with dirty, greasy hair and it makes everyone hate me even more. But not as much as I hate myself, or as much as Mother hates me. She knows what he does to me and she doesn’t stop him. And worse yet, she blames me for it, I know it.

At church tomorrow morning, I’m going to pray that something terrible happens to him. That’s not a sin, is it? It’s the same thing as just wishing someone dead when you blow out your birthday candles. You can’t go to hell for that.

Chapter 5

A
fter wiping her eyes again on the soggy cuff of her flannel pajama top, Jen fumbles in her pocket for the wad of damp Kleenex she’s been carrying around the house with her for the past hour, ever since the first wave of grief washed over her with the grim news that arrived when the phone rang at six, much too early for a Saturday morning.

“I just don’t understand,” she tells Thad, pressing the useless clump of tissue against her streaming nose, “how a sweet, beautiful girl who had everything to live for could . . . take her own life.”

Take her own life . . .

They might mean the same thing, but the words sound less jarring than the phrase that was on the tip of her tongue:
kill herself.

For once, she’d caught herself. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that as having been unable to say the ugly word.

Kill . . .

Kill . . .

Kill . . .

Dear God, it’s so violent, so utterly out of place in this safe suburban world.

Crazy, terrible things can happen anywhere.

That’s what Thad told her last spring, when she said she wanted to keep Carley insulated at Sacred Sisters.

“I feel sick.” Trembling, she sinks down beside him on the couch. “This is so . . . it’s so  . . .”

“It’s tragic.” He shakes his head, putting an arm around her. “That’s what it is. Tragic. What a waste.”

They fall silent, sitting side by side in the formal living room they so rarely use.

Hearing footsteps and creaking floorboards overhead, Jen looks at Thad. “That’s Carley.”

He nods, well aware that Carley has the steadier, heavier footfall, while Emma tends to bounce and prance, even at this hour.

“What are we supposed to tell her, Thad? Kids aren’t supposed to die. Not this way. Not at all.”

“No. But they do.”

She nods mutely and they listen as the footsteps go down the hall, away from the stairs. After a brief lull, the toilet in the hall bathroom flushes, the footsteps retreat, and Carley’s bedroom door closes again.

She’s gone back to sleep—for now, anyway.

Relieved by the momentary reprieve, Jen tells Thad, “She’s going to be devastated. How is she possibly going to deal with something like this?”

“She’ll have to.”

“But how?”

“She’ll face it and eventually she’ll get past it. It’s a part of life. It happens to everyone, growing up. You lose people.”

She nods bleakly, remembering how her beloved Pop-Pop, who lived two houses away, had a heart attack and dropped dead in his backyard one morning while he was pruning his fig tree.

“My grandfather died when I was in high school,” she tells Thad. “But that was different. He was old. When you lose someone your own age . . .”

“Kids die suddenly, too. When I was a junior, a friend of mine, Chase Rivington— Did I ever tell you about him?”

“No. Yes. I think so.”

Her brain is shrouded in a fog of grief right now. Still, she remembers, long ago, commenting about the name: Chase Rivington.

“He sounds like such a prep school kid,” she told Thad at the time. “Even more than Thaddeus Leland Archer the third.”

“What’s wrong with prep school?” he asked.

“Nothing. I just forget sometimes that we grew up worlds apart. If we’d met back then, we wouldn’t have given each other the time of day.”

“If we’d met back then, you would have told me you were going to marry Mike what’s-his-name.”

Morino was his name. Mike Morino.

They grew up in the same neighborhood but attended different Catholic schools and never met until the summer after her freshman year, when their paths converged at a church lawn fete. She wore his class ring on and off through high school and beyond, enduring quite a few breakups and an unfounded pregnancy scare before he finally drifted out of her life for good—just as Thad walked into it.

Thank God for that. Thank God for Thad.

They were both twenty-two and recent college graduates when they met at a bar on the Elmwood Strip, though Jen assumed he was younger. He had a baby face, and a sweet, kind disposition that grabbed her attention immediately.

“He’s the type of guy,” she confided in her sister Frankie the morning after she met Thad, “who would never hurt someone.”

“Everyone in the world is capable of hurting someone, Jen.”

“But not on purpose. Not like . . . you know.”

“The jerk.”

Mike. Right.

Frankie didn’t even know the extent of what Mike had pulled. Jen had never confided the whole truth about him: how he’d pressured her to go farther than she wanted to, dumping her several times when she wouldn’t. And then, when she finally did sleep with him senior year, then thought she was pregnant, he told her she’d just have to have an abortion, and broke up with her again when she told him she wouldn’t.

Of course he came back. He always did. And she took him back every single time for years, until finally she grew up, came to her senses, and realized that Mike Morino was sorely lacking a heart.

It wasn’t just about how he treated her. It was how he treated other people, as well.

“This guy,” she told Frankie, after meeting Thad, “just wouldn’t deliberately hurt me or anyone else.”

“And you know this how?”

“I just know,” she said with a shrug.

Some deep-seated instinct told her that Thad, a virtual stranger, was obviously kindhearted. So different from Mike, whom she knew well enough to realize that he was capable of hurting others—not just Jen—for the perverse pleasure, it seemed, of inflicting pain.

The night they met, she and Thad danced to U2’s “The Sweetest Thing.” It became their song, the one they first danced to at their wedding a few years later. The lyrics seemed to have been written for them.

Blue-eyed boy meets a brown-eyed girl
 . . .

Those blue eyes, at the moment, are focused on the window opposite the couch. Jen knows that Thad isn’t gazing out at the sun-splashed morning beyond the panes. He’s remembering his lost friend.

“Chase was a year older,” he tells her, “but we were on the lacrosse team together . . .”

“What happened to him?”

“Car accident.”

“Isn’t it always?” she says, remembering names from tragedies in her own past.

Jimmy Fazzoleri . . .

She hadn’t known him; he was in her sister Maddie’s class.

Ruthie Bell.

Jen had known her, of course. They were sophomores together at Sacred Sisters when Ruthie was killed. Not friends, not by any means, because . . .

Because she was
Ruthie Bell.
Even the name itself is light years away from
Chase Rivington.
But it comes readily to Jen’s mind, ushered in by the memory of Mike Morino’s cruel streak.

Ruthie was the gawky, ginger-haired girl everyone made fun of; the girl Jen was thinking about just yesterday afternoon when she was wondering whether Carley’s appearance has anything to do with her being bullied.

But of course Carley is nothing like Ruthie.

Anyway, what happened to her daughter at school seems much more insignificant now. At least it wasn’t life and death. At least Carley is alive.

But somehow, they have to break the news to her that last night, Nicki Olivera took a chef’s knife from a kitchen drawer and slit her wrists.

M
orning sunlight streams across Carley’s bed, falling across the carefully arranged menagerie of stuffed animals at her side and the laptop propped against her pillow.

She tilts the screen to cut the glare, but it doesn’t help much.

Why does the sun have to shine today? It hardly ever does at this time of year.

It hardly ever shines around here, period.

Nicki is always complaining about the western New York weather.
Was
always complaining. Past tense. Nicki isn’t in Carley’s life anymore, because she apparently decided she no longer wanted to be best friends.

But when she was around—always around,
always
, for as long as Carley can remember—she’d sometimes say, “When I grow up, I’m getting out of here. I’m going to live someplace where it’s always warm and sunny, like Florida or Arizona or L.A.”

And then Carley, who never wants to move that far from home, would remind her of their plans to be college roommates and then get an apartment together and then, after they were married, live next door to each other. And their kids would play together and their husbands would play golf and they would be best friends, closer than sisters, forever.

Yeah. Not happening.

Stupid sun.

Carley can always go pull the shade down or move the laptop over to her desk, but she’s in the middle of instant messaging with a new friend and she doesn’t want to interrupt it even for a few seconds.

Finally, somebody gets it.

Gets
her
.

Finally, she has someone to talk to about what’s been going on at school.

Who would have thought she’d find more comfort in a total stranger she met on the Internet than in anyone she knows in real life?

QT-Pi: do u think i can evr trust her again?

Angel 770: y wd u want 2?

QT-Pi: cuz shes been my BFF 4ever its not like i nvr want 2 see her again

Angel 770: tru friends dont do what she did 2 u last fall who needs thatttt?

Carley finds herself nodding. Angel is right. Who needs Nicki?

QT-Pi:
i dont need it not anymore

Angel 770: good then stay away from her

QT-Pi: believe me i will

That isn’t very hard to do now that she and Nicki are in different schools. She just hopes the Olivera family doesn’t show up at ten-thirty Mass tomorrow. Some Sundays they don’t make it to church at all, because Nicki’s mom isn’t as much a stickler about it as Jen’s mom is. Unfortunately, though, they usually do go during Lent.

They were there last Sunday morning. Ordinarily, Carley and Nicki would have been rolling their eyes at each other in silent agreement that Father Peter’s long-winded sermon was ridiculous. But this time, Carley avoided making eye contact.

When it was time to go up to receive Communion, she whispered to her mother that she wasn’t feeling well and slipped out to wait for her parents and Emma in the car. Otherwise, she’d have had to come face to face with Nicki as their mothers chatted in the vestibule after Mass.

If the Oliveras are there tomorrow, she’ll have to do the same thing.

Or maybe she should just look Nicki right in the eye; stare her down. Make her feel super uncomfortable about how she treated Carley.

That would be good . . .

Except I could never pull that off.

Staring people down isn’t her style. Her style is . . . pretty pathetic. A typical Carley move would be to take one look at Nicki and burst into tears.

She needs to work on getting a thicker skin—or at least try acting like nothing bothers her.

Angel 770: u still there qp?

QP. Short for QT-Pi. It’s Angel’s little nickname for her.

Nicki has one, too. She’s always called Carley “Carls,” and Carley calls her “Nicks.”

Well, they did when they were speaking, anyway.

Okay, enough. Forget Nicki.

QT-Pi: sry im here just spacing

Angel 770: yeah its early rite?

QT-Pi: not as early as where u r!

Angel lives in California. That means it must be, like, four
A.M.
there.

QT-Pi: do u always get up so early?

Angel 770: u mean do i always stay up so late?

Carley smiles.

QT-Pi: night owl?

Angel 770: yeppppppp

Beyond her bedroom door, Carley can hear the phone ringing.

She glances at the computer clock. It’s pretty early for a phone call on a Saturday morning.

It’s probably Grandma Bonafacio. She and Grandpa are always up early, out and about before the sun comes up, even on weekends. They go to seven-thirty Mass at Our Lady every single day without fail, and then over to Tim Horton’s for coffee with a bunch of old people from church. When Carley was younger, they would often pick up a box of doughnuts and bring it over here afterward. They always remembered to get extra chocolate-frosted ones with sprinkles, Carley’s favorite, and extra powdered sugar with jelly, Emma’s favorite.

But then one Saturday morning a few years ago, they knocked on the sliding glass door in the kitchen and scared the heck out of Dad, who was standing there in just his boxer shorts pouring coffee. He splashed it and burned himself—plus, his in-laws saw him in his underwear. After that, he told Mom to tell her parents to please call first from now on.

Grandma and Grandpa weren’t thrilled about that, but they said they’d try. Most of the time, they remember.

Carley wonders if they’re on their way over with doughnuts. Ordinarily, she’d welcome that. But lately, she doesn’t feel like seeing anyone, not even her grandparents.

Glancing back at the computer screen, she thinks that might be different if Angel lived close by instead of on the opposite side of the country.

If she were around, I’d be into seeing her.

No one else.

Just Angel, because she understands. She’s been through this, too.

Angel 770: i wasnt always a night owl but when things started getting bad at school i had a hard time sleeping how about u?

QT-Pi: same here

Angel 770: do u take stuff to help u sleep?

QT-Pi: warm milk and honey doesnt help

Angel 770: not what i meant

What did she mean? Drugs? Like sleeping pills?

Before Carley can reply, another question pops up.

Angel 770: do u have nightmares 2?

QT-Pi: major nightmaresssssss the other night i—

She breaks off typing, hearing the phone ring again.