The Sisters (22 page)

Right away, Daddy called somebody from church who gave him the name of a lawyer, Mr. Prather, and Rainey took an afternoon off work to go see him, but he told her there was nothing he could do. Even if they could manage to get Carl’s parental rights rescinded—“And there’s not much hope of that,” Mr. Prather said—it would take time. Months at the very least, possibly years. And so Rainey had made herself tell him about Carl and the other man—everything she had seen in the bedroom. When she began to cry, the lawyer came around his desk to sit beside her and offered her his handkerchief.

“I’m so awfully sorry,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “A nice young woman like you, churchgoing family.” While Rainey wept out her fears, Mr. Prather agreed that it would be a terrible thing indeed to let her child be exposed to that perversion. “But,” he said, “I can’t build a case on what you’ve told me—only one incident, so long ago. It would be your word against his.” It wasn’t enough, he said. She had to let Lynn go.

What agony it was, that first day Carl came for Lynn. Having neither seen him nor even heard of him for nearly five years, Lynn squalled in terror, begged not to be made to go, and tried to pull away from him as he led her to the car. For the next thirty hours, Rainey paced the house and smoked, praying to whoever might be listening that Carl would realize that Lynn hated him—that she would always hate him—and he would give up this farce of being a father. Lynn was still in hysterics when Carl brought her home, and Rainey believed her prayer had been answered. But two weeks later, Carl came again, and though Lynn fought him, she did so with less intensity. After a while, there were no tears at all, and not so long after that, Lynn began to smile, even laugh, as the time to go with her father approached. In the last couple of months, beginning days before Carl was due, Lynn would chatter excitedly about the places he had promised to take her, snapping “
No!
” at Grace when she asked if she might go too, and the moment Lynn saw his car pull in the drive, she’d be out the door, squealing, “Daddy!”

Carl kept Lynn charmed with movie tickets and new toys and days at the fair—things Rainey could rarely afford. He was buying her baby, plain and simple, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

“Is she staying quiet?” Mother came in with the big mixing bowl, which she set on the floor by Lynn’s bed. “This water’s good and cool.” She wrung out the washcloth that had been soaking in the bottom of the bowl and handed it to Rainey.

Lightly, so as not to wake Lynn, Rainey wiped the shining sweat from the girl’s face. “Where’s Grace?” she asked, handing the washcloth back to her mother.

“With Hans. On the porch.” She passed the freshly wrung cloth back to Rainey. “Poor little thing was so tired, she dropped off first thing. They’re stretched out together in the lounge chair—but your daddy’s awake.” After another two or three passes of the washcloth, Mother drew in a long, whistling breath. More than any other, that sound pricked Rainey’s nerves to attention.

“Just tell me—once and for all,” her mother began.

“Oh, please, Mother. Not this. Not tonight.” She couldn’t bear another of her mother’s determined explorations—not now—testing every little opening that might trip Rainey into blurting out the name of Grace’s father.

“It’s not that,” her mother said. “I just want to know—I think you owe it to me and your daddy to tell us—if one of these days some other buzzard’s going to turn up wanting to take Grace from us.”

Rainey pressed the damp cloth to her own throat, then turned it to the cool side and held it at the back of her neck. “No, Mother,” she said. “No. Never.”

“How can you be sure? That’s what you said about the first one—he’d never come back.”

“It’s not the same, Mother. You just have to believe me.”

Almost from the moment Rainey had met Marshall, she had resolved not to tell her mother about him. She just couldn’t face all those hours on the telephone, with Mother wanting to know if she had learned anything at all, lecturing her on what a poor judge of men she was, reminding her that she was a divorced woman with a child and that she had to be careful not to give people anything to talk about and twist against her. So nobody knew about Marshall, not really. At four, Lynn had loved his attention, and though she had cried a little when Rainey explained that Marshall had to go away, her memories of him faded quickly. Sally, sworn to secrecy, knew about Marshall, of course, knew that he was Grace’s father, but the sweet recollection of their time together was Rainey’s alone.

“Rainey, we’re none of us strong enough to go through this again,” said Mother. “I’m asking you—what makes you sure?”

“Because he doesn’t know about her. I wasn’t with him long. He never knew I was pregnant.” Now that she’d said it, Rainey was relieved. Her mother would no doubt think her the worst of tramps, but what did it matter? She went on: “And I didn’t try to find him to tell him because I knew he wouldn’t answer to it if he did know”—this was a lie, but a lie that would surely put an end to her mother’s questions—“so he won’t ever come. Grace is mine.
Ours,
” she added to appease her mother, all the while thinking, But Marshall is mine. Only mine.

No other time in her life was so free of regret—three lovely months, if she counted from the Saturday night when she’d tripped over Marshall while he knelt in front of the row of mailboxes, trying to open a package with a nail clipper. She’d been carrying a paper grocery sack filled with garbage, looking side to side, watching her step as she came down the stairs from her apartment, never expecting someone might be on the floor right in front of her. She’d managed to catch herself when her shins banged into him, but the bag had catapulted from her arms, scattering coffee grounds, carrot ends, cereal boxes, and cigarette butts across the black-and-white linoleum on its way to the umbrella stand, where it burst on impact.

Silently, the young man—she’d never seen him before—had put down the nail clipper, pushed his package against the wall, and started sweeping coffee grounds with the edge of his hand onto an open
National Geographic.
Rainey watched, amazed at how much he was able to get up without a cloth. And she would never have thought, as he did, to take an empty cornflakes box and tap the grounds off the magazine into it. He had torn off the edge of another box and was starting to use it to sweep up the cigarette butts when Rainey finally said, “Oh, please. Don’t do that. I’ll get a broom and another bag,” and hurried up the stairs.

When she got back, he was standing waiting for her, and she was startled to see how short he was. Kneeling, he’d given the impression of height somehow, in spite of his narrow shoulders and small head—not at all the kind of man she had dreamed would rescue her.

He held out the remains of the bag, folded together like a wonton, into which he had gathered and compacted all the trash, and he placed this carefully inside the fresh bag Rainey held open. Taking the bag from her and nodding to the entry door, he said, “If you’ll open that…” and then he lifted the lid on one of the cans just outside and dropped the bag in.

“Thank you so much,” Rainey said. “Sorry about your magazine. Did I hurt you when I ran into you?”

“Fine, fine,” he said—in answer to what, she didn’t know. He seemed confused, looking back and forth between the package on the floor and his dirty hands, which he kept trying not to put in his pockets.

“Let me get that for you,” Rainey said.

“No, that’s fine,” he said. “I’ll get it later.”

How strange he seemed, skittery. She wondered if he was nervous about the box, which was a thought that made her suddenly nervous. “Well, then,” she said, turning back to the steps, reminding herself to walk slowly, casually, and then to bolt the apartment door the moment she closed it. “Really, thanks for your help,” she said, looking over her shoulder toward him but avoiding his eyes.

“It’s just—” he said. “It’s just—well, you see my hands are filthy and my keys are in my pocket, and…”

Rainey stared at him, breathing hard. Was he suggesting she reach into his pocket, fish out the keys? She thought of Lynn asleep and alone upstairs. Sally wouldn’t be back from her date for hours.

The man reddened a little. “I’m sorry. I’ve only just had these pants dry-cleaned and I need them Tuesday.” He held his hands out like a child might. “Could I come in just for a moment and wash my hands?”

“Sure,” Rainey said, though she was not at all sure, her voice cracking in proof. “We’re just to the right of the landing.” Inside the apartment, she pointed to the bathroom and he went in. She leaned against the door frame, watching him carefully, trying to pretend she wasn’t. “So what’s in the package?” She congratulated herself on how conversational the question sounded.

“Potsherds.”

“Potsherds,” she repeated.

“Is this one okay?” he asked, pointing to a hand towel, and she nodded. “I’d left them—the potsherds—with my parents for safekeeping. I’m going for a teaching assistantship—for graduate school—and I need them for a presentation I have to give. At IU. They’re in Arizona,” he said. “My parents. That’s where I found the sherds—on some property they’d just bought near Flagstaff. I asked them to give me a year to dig before they started building. They’re good like that, my parents. My father just retired.”

Rainey hadn’t imagined he could talk so much—not that she really understood what he was talking about. “So you have an interview on Tuesday?”

“Yes. Tuesday.” He was relaxed and smiling now. “Would you like to see them? The sherds?”

“I would,” she said, forgetting all about her fear, now trying to conjure up a picture of what she was going to see. From the door of the apartment, she watched him retrieve his package, handing him a pair of scissors when he returned. “I thought maybe you were a Communist.” She laughed.

“No,” he said. “An archaeologist.”

Across her kitchen table, he spread the fragments of clay vessels—unimaginably old—some pieces so small, they might have been dust, others large enough to suggest the curve where a hand had once rested. He talked on and on, practicing his presentation, she supposed, and while he did, Rainey thought what an inadequate word
clay
was to embrace what lay before her—the reds, browns, grays, and ecrus. Each time she picked up a piece to hold it in the light, Marshall showed her how to see what she would never have noticed on her own—a faint residue of paint, or the eroded remainder of an etched design, now no more than a scratch, fine as a hair.
Earth,
she thought. Here was
earth,
in all its meanings.

A long while later, when Marshall had packed away the sherds again and got up to leave, she told him about Lynn, let him peek in at the child asleep in her bed, and asked him to come to dinner the next night. The night after that, when he invited Rainey out to celebrate his interview in advance, he’d made sure to choose a place they could all go, where Lynn would be as welcome as they were.

From the start, Marshall was more natural with Lynn than she was, able to keep the girl cheerful while Rainey cooked or got changed. He stocked his car with coloring books and inexpensive toys and taught Lynn how to play I Spy.

It was weeks before they kissed, but when at last it happened—Rainey had had to lean in close and lift her face to him to let him know it was all right—his lips touched hers so completely, so tenderly, she wept. He drew back then, his eyes full of concern, and she had smiled, shaken her head, and pulled him to her. Making love—those wonderful, wonderful weeks—he looked into her eyes, stroked her cheek, her hair, her neck, kissed her, said her name.

Mistakes, mistakes,
her mother would say. If Rainey dared to tell her about Marshall, Mother would say Rainey’s every choice had been bad: a mistake to speak to him, a mistake to go out with him, a mistake to go to bed with him, and a mistake to let him go. Strange, wasn’t it, and exasperating, how people could be so certain they were using exactly the right word to describe something, when really they were using exactly the wrong word. Grace herself—her beautiful, sweet-hearted Grace: If people knew the truth about her birth, they would whisper to each other that Grace was “a mistake.”

Rainey had no intention of letting that happen. Thankfully, it hadn’t been difficult to keep the secret. Within just a few weeks of returning to Newman with the girls, she realized that everyone outside the family simply assumed Grace was Carl’s child. Mother and Daddy had been too embarrassed to tell anyone about her divorce when it happened, and so now the neighbors and people at church were divided, when they gossiped about whether Rainey had left Carl or Carl had left her. Of course, she’d had to tell the lawyer, Mr. Prather, that Carl wasn’t Grace’s father, but on hearing this, Mr. Prather had once again shaken his head sadly, making clear he thought it was perfectly understandable that Rainey, after her terrible shock, would have been vulnerable to the charms of a normal man. He certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone.

So all Rainey had to do was stay quiet—she was good at that. And her silence would be a protective shield around Grace, who would grow up believing what it was natural for her to believe—that she and Lynn shared the same father: an absent father, but the same.

But Rainey hadn’t reckoned on Carl’s coming back. Though she hadn’t lied about Grace—he couldn’t charge her with that—she had let a lie be believed. What would he do if he found out? She couldn’t think about that—not now.