What Happened to My Sister: A Novel (10 page)

I check all the drawers for anything left behind and sure enough in the table between the two beds I hit pay dirt.

“Hey, Momma, look! Someone left a book in here.”

She doesn’t look.

“Leave it be,” she says, taking full measure of the room. “That’s no book—that’s a Gideon Bible. Put it back. No soul’s ever been saved in this family as far as I can tell. Besides, if the devil wants to find you he will—no Bible’s going to keep him from doing his job.”

It’s brand spanking new with a man’s name in fancy gold lettering on front. Wouldn’t you think if Mr. Gideon went to all the trouble to get his name in gold letters on his own Bible he’d remember to take it with him when he left? That’s a mystery I’ll have to solve or it’ll drive me crazy. I get out my black-and-white notebook and write
ask Mr. Burdock if there’s anyone come by asking for the Bible he left behind
. If no one has I aim to ask if I can hold on to it. Finders keepers.

“This’ll be great, Momma,” I say as she sets herself down on the very edge of the end of the bed, hugging her purse up tight to her chest like a robber’s trying to pry it from her. I watch in the cracked mirror over the sink. She slumps a little then goes hunting through her pocketbook. She’s been real good about waiting till we got here to have her whiskey.

“Momma?”

“Hmmm?” She’s fingering the bedspread, tracing the stitching. She takes a second pull from the bottle.

“You want me to go fetch some ice from that machine we passed on the way up, Momma?”

I know it doesn’t suit her, drinking from the bottle like she is. The sound of clinking ice cubes might make us both feel more at home.

“That’d be fine,” she says, coming as close to
yes please
as she ever does.

I want so bad to run over and hug her. Not that I would. I want to, though.

“It’s really and truly gonna be great,” I say on my way out the door.

And for the first time, I believe my own self. This’ll be great. I got a feeling it really will be.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Carrie

Momma’s reaching over her shoulders holding the two sides of her dress together at the back.

“Get over here and pull up this zipper,” she says. “I can’t get it to save my life.”

Momma’s said more lately than she ever said to me. Ever.

I inch the zipper up slow because the middle part of her back’s got an angry scar from Richard’s beer bottle and even though it healed a while back I always think it must hurt her still. She’d never say, though, and I’d never ask.

“Momma, please can I come? I’ll stay real quiet,” I tell her. “You won’t even know I’m there, hand to God.”

“No you most certainly cannot. Last thing I need is them seeing a kid waiting on me,” she says under her breath while she’s fussing with her hair again in the cracked mirror.

I love watching her get ready for job interviews. Zipping up. Fixing her hair. Lipstick. Most of all her talking. I never heard her say so many sentences at one time in my life as when she gets
ready to look for work. I know it’s on account of her being nervous but sometimes I pretend she and me are getting fixed up for a dance we’re gonna go to with Daddy.

“What’re they gonna think?” she’s saying. “They’ll think I’ll be wanting time off to care for my kid. They don’t want to think their people have anything more important than work to worry about. And right about now there is nothing more important than work if we want to eat. Where’s my lipstick?”

She puts it on and starts talking again, to her own face in the mirror. I try to keep from smiling at her using the word
we
. She never says
we
.

“When I was your age my momma told me I’d never amount to anything more than a waste of oxygen.” She squinches her eyes while she sprays a halo of White Rain. The mist will turn the counter sticky and I know I’ll wipe it off after she leaves. I’m real good about keeping the room
spick-and-span
.

“Even though they called me Miss America back in school,” she says, eyeing herself from different angles. “Bet you didn’t know that. I was voted best-looking in the whole school. My momma never knew that and I didn’t tell her because she would have thought I was uppity. But I was pretty. I was pretty and I didn’t give it a second thought, that’s how stupid I was. I figured I’d always be pretty. Damnation will you look at that—I got makeup on my dress. Well, don’t just stand there—get over here and help for Christ’s sake!”

She wets one of the thin rough washcloths and I hold my hand under the fabric of her dress while she presses against it trying to dab the smudge away. Luckily it’s her flowered Sunday dress so you cain’t see the thumb-size smear of pink but it makes her mad all the same. Her neck bruise’s nearly faded away and what’s still there is covered by the makeup she got at the dollar store. But when she gets angry the mark does too. No makeup can hide that.
We don’t talk about her bruises or marks, though. We never have. Not hers or mine. It’s probably better that way anyhow.

The smudge comes out pretty good and I can see that eases her mind so I figure I can ask her something that’s been weighing on me, since she’s so talkative and all. Momma’s usually not so good with
thoughts
and
feelings
and all that.

“Momma, you ever get pictures flashing into your head like from a movie?”

She’s standing on the chair out at the spot in the middle of the room where you can see your whole self in the mirror.

“What do you mean, pictures flashing into your head?” she asks me while she turns to get a look at the backside of her dress.

“Pictures of things that make no sense but you sorta feel like they should. Like when something’s on the tip of your tongue but you cain’t quite recall it?”

She steps off the chair and next thing I know she’s pinching my jaw between her finger and thumb.

“You mark my words right here and now,” she hisses at me, “if you get crazy again—don’t you dare try to pull away from me when I’m talking to you, I’m serious as a heart attack—if you get all crazy, loony tunes again I will dump you by the side of the road and never look back, you hear me? Hell, I’d love an excuse to do just that so don’t go giving me one if you know what’s good for you.”

Through pinched fish lips I say, “Yes, ma’am.”

“I will not put up with it again,” she says. “You understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She lets go of my face and turns back to getting herself ready to go.

“It’s bad enough they all treat me like I’m a damn hillbilly. Like I never worn shoes before. Like I don’t know their language”—she’s back to muttering to the mirror—“them talking real slow
and loud like I’m a foreigner. These people here thinking they’re better than me when I probably got more Carolina blood in my veins than the whole lot of them put together. It’s like I’ve got the word
stranger
stamped on my forehead. Like
I’m
the one with the accent. They see I’ve got a loony tunes girl clinging to my skirt that’ll be the final nail in the coffin, I’ll tell you what.”

She closes her lipsticked lips around a tissue.
Blotting
them, she calls it. I got to remember to fish that tissue out of the trash bin. I’d love to have Momma’s lips in my notebook. I finally got enough hairs from her brush to make up a lock of hair that I taped into the book yesterday.

“Well,” she says, stepping back to get a better view of herself in the mirror, “this is about as good as it gets, though I don’t know why I bother. I ain’t—I’m
not
qualified to do much of anything anyone’d see fit to pay money for. But I’m no charity case so that puts me square between a rock and a hard place.”

With the makeup covering the scar on her cheek and with her hair long enough to pouf up over the spots where it never grew back after Richard’s fists took clumps of it, she’s pretty for the first time since Richard came into our lives. What’s left of that neck mark of hers is the last hold Richard’s got on her. When it disappears—even though he’s been six foot under awhile now—Richard will disappear from our life. Forever. That’s why I keep track of how it’s healing in my notebook.

“I get a good enough job I can get the hell out of Dodge and get back on track to where I should have been long time ago,” she says.

“Where should you have been a long time ago, Momma?”

She don’t answer. She probably didn’t hear me.

“Now remember: you stay put. Don’t be giving them any reason to kick us out, y’hear me?”

“But Momma …”

I don’t tell her I hate being alone in this room with the walls so
thin I can hear everything on all sides of us. The whole place shakes every time someone slams their door which happens every five seconds and once a man with a deep voice banged on our door over and over calling out for someone named Melanie and I almost wet myself I was so scared but then he must’ve realized he had the wrong room and he went away. I don’t tell her I’ve already hunted through all her stuff, looking for that travel case she guarded with her life on the drive out of Hendersonville. I don’t tell her I been sneaking out after she leaves and no one’s caught me yet.

“Momma I just want to come with you please? I won’t be any bother. I’ll disappear when you go in places. You won’t even know I’m there. Please, Momma. Take me with you.”

She’s back hunched over at the mirror turning her head right and left but it’s hard to get a handle on how you look in a mirror with only the bottom half not spiderweb cracked.

“Get over here and open this cup for me. I’m so damn thirsty. My head’s about to split open with this damn headache.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Burdock gave us two new plastic cups wrapped tight in plastic and Momma doesn’t want to ruin her nails. Her fingertips look so good, you cain’t hardly tell it’s Magic Marker.

“And turn that goddamn TV down. I don’t understand why you set your sights on bugging me every goddamn minute. TV turned on night and day, day and night. Loud as hell, like in old folks’ homes.”

“It won’t go down. I tried. It’s broken or something. You have to unplug it to get it off and on and the sound buttons don’t work.”

Momma’s fixing her eyes on me and I back up just in case. Best to get out of her way when she’s going to find work. Or just in general.

“What do you mean it’s broken? When did
that
happen? We better not be getting charged for the damage, I’ll tell you that much.”

She slips her feet into her shoes like Cinderella with her glass slippers only Cinderella made it look easy and Momma winces on account of her feet being rubbed raw from wearing the same shoes ever-day. We used the black Magic Marker to draw in the parts that had faded from all the walking and they look like new, hand to God.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It just started happening.”

She limps over and fiddles with the knob on the front of the old TV then feels around the back of it.

“Perfect,” she says, sighing. Only I don’t see what makes a broken TV perfect.

“See I told you,” I say.

“You being smart with me?”

Now I’ve gone and done it. She ain’t mad at the TV any longer. It’s me she’s mad at and I’d feel a lot better if the bathroom door had a lock on it. The other night she pushed her way in and got me even though I had all my weight up against the door. But that wasn’t her fault. The liquor store man gave her the whiskey but didn’t give her the job, so it was his fault she was feeling blue. In this room there ain’t nowhere to go when it turns her mean at night.

“You’re lucky I’ve got to go,” she says, smoothing her dress then hitching her purse onto her shoulder. “Keep the door locked. We might have nothing to our name but what we’ve got we need to hold on to.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She squints at me hard and I know she’s trying to figure out if I’m sassing her but I’m not and in a second she gives up and leaves.

I say goodbye but I don’t think she heard me through the door.

I got to stop giving her reasons to get rid of me. I thought she’d gone and figured out a way to do it back before we left Hendersonville, after I shot Richard. That was a real close call.

The days right after Richard died are sort of blurry in my head but I remember Momma going to see if she could leave me with some lady who works for North Carolina. Now
that’s
a whole other mystery: How does someone work for a
state
? The state is her boss? They say I’m the one who’s crazy but
that’s
what’s crazy. The lady came and talked to me like I was a baby, asking me did I know my own name and what is it and without looking in the mirror what is my hair color (like I’d need a mirror for the answer). She asked me all kinds of stupid questions and went out to
have a word
with Momma, who was outside the house pacing back and forth and smoking one cigarette lit from the last. Finally the lady got in her shiny car and drove away and Momma came in looking like a storm was brewing behind her eyes. She didn’t say as much, but I could tell she was hoping the lady would take me off her hands. She told me I was going to stay with her after all but
things were going to change
. The deal was I had to go with the lady every day to an office the next town over. It had a little room with toys and small chairs and finger paintings taped to the walls. The lady and me sat cross-legged on a hard carpet that left bumpy marks on my legs for hours after I left. But it was great on account of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips. I got those free and the only thing I had to do was answer her questions and watch her scribble things down on a pad she held up against her chest like I was wanting to steal it. She told me I should think of her like a friend and that I could tell her anything at all but I don’t know any kid who’s best friends with a grown-up. Also, for all the time she talked to Momma you’d think she already knew the answers to the questions like:

“What was your daddy’s name?”

“Do you have a grandma? Where does she live, do you know?”