AGNES
IT WAS JUST PAST FOUR A.M. WHEN I WENT TO THE CLOSET AND DUG out my treasure box. In the light of my room, the elephant was more a drab green than the vibrant jade I imagined in the fluorescent lighting at social services. More than anything, I wished I had never gone there that day, wished I’d never seen the collection on Julie’s desk or the feather on her wall.
Sometimes all we can do is forget.
For so long, I couldn’t remember who had told me that, but now I saw Ma’s face hovering over me after I woke from another dream about my sister back when I first came.
It’s the move, she said to Dad when he padded into the room. A lot of times, it brings it all back. But don’t worry. She’ll settle down when she’s been here awhile, won’t you, Agnes? Were those the exact words she said? I can’t be sure, but the touch of her hand on my cheek, the tenderness she held back in the daytime, that was indelible.
BY THE TIME I went to see Julie, I’d already forgotten almost everything. I’d held tight to who my sister was for me—Mau Mau—and lost Maud-Marie. But after the case worker read from my records, I could no longer keep it back. Now, if I dreamed about her, I didn’t see the girl in the waves at the beach or the one beside me in the car, our four legs striped by the same sun; I saw Maud-Marie thrashing wildly, shrieking, and in the background someone else—me—crying like I’d never done before or since. Crying because there was nothing I could do to help her. Nothing we could do to help each other. Was that when I had become the kid they described in the files, the one who moved from house to house, misery to misery, as if nothing could touch her?
I put on my clothes, determined to walk to Buskit’s River and chuck Julie Rocher’s elephant as far as I could the way Zaidie had done with Henry’s tie tack after Jon left.
Zaidie rubbed at her eyes when I climbed into bed beside her. “What—Agnes? Don’t you think you’re a little old for . . .” But then she scooted over toward the wall. Though she had pulled the shades tight to keep out the early-morning light, I could sense her folding her hands behind her head, staring upward, the way she did when she was pondering something.
“Boy trouble?”
“I wish. That would be a lot easier.” I found her hand in the dark and placed the elephant inside her palm. She fingered it like it was braille.
“Okay, I give. What is it?”
“Just hold on to it.”
As she turned the elephant over and over in her hand, I told her about my meeting with Julie Rocher. About the file and the shifting labels they’d given Maud-Marie.
Before they settled on mentally retarded, they’d called her bipolar. Possibly schizophrenic. When Zaidie reached for my hand, the tiny elephant cut into my skin.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Zaidie? All those years ago, when you read the file, why didn’t you—”
It was a long time before she spoke into the dark. “Tell me something you remember about her,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be anything she did or even a specific memory. Just the first thing that comes to mind.”
I stood up and switched on the light so she could see the truth of the river on my face before I spoke. “This is what I remember. No matter who she was or what they said was wrong with her, I loved her like she was . . . my own self, Zaidie. Does that make any sense?”
“More sense than anything you’ll read in the file. If you want to know why I didn’t tell you, that’s why. You already knew the only thing that mattered.”
After that, we cried for a while. At first about Mau Mau and then about all the other people we’d lost. When we washed our faces and turned out the light, it was as if they were all streaming past us in the dark. I held Zaidie’s hand like I used to, the jade elephant between us like all our unanswerable questions, and we slept until the morning could no longer be kept back. A new day that demanded we get up and live it.
TWO DAYS LATER, at breakfast, Zaidie waited till Ma left the room, and then—real nonchalant, as if this was an everyday occurrence, she asked Dad if she could borrow the car. I wasn’t sure who was more shocked—Dad or me.
Eyes wide, he set down his coffee cup. “My car? Today?”
“Yup. Agnes and I have to go somewhere.”
“We do?” I said. “But Coach Lois . . .”
“You spend your life at the pool, Agnes. You can afford to miss one practice.”
Dad mumbled a few words about talking to your mother before he moved on to absolutely not. And how the hell would he get to work? But then he looked across the table at the daughter who had never made such a request before and glanced up at the clock. He clambered to his feet. “Well, no dawdlin’ then. You need to get me to the garage by eight sharp, and no hot-roddin’ around, either.”
Hot-rodding? Zaidie? The two of us tittered, and even Dad almost laughed.
After we dropped him off, we stopped at the N. P. to pick up a couple of colas. It was already so hot that the profusion of pink petunias Joe Jr. had planted out front wilted five minutes after he watered them.
Mr. O’Connor cocked his head in the direction of the Buick parked askew outside the window. “Since when did Louie let you kids use the car?”
Zaidie counted out the change from her purse. “His way of saying he’s going to miss me, I guess. I’m leaving for California in two weeks, you know.”
Joe Jr. seemed to appear from nowhere. “Eleven days,” he said, consulting his watch, as if he was expecting it to tell him the exact number of hours. “Eleven days till Zaida gets on a plane for college, six till Agnes flies off to swim in the nationals. Mrs. Moscatelli told me yesterday. Imagine.”
He even had Ma’s inflection down.
“So you going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked once we were back in the car.
Zaidie put on her sunglasses and smiled. “Nope.”
She kept driving until we reached the edge of town, out past the Egg Auction where she’d been traumatized for life by a row of chickens on a conveyer belt headed for decapitation. She came to a jolting stop in front of the iron gates of a cemetery.
“Sorry. It came up on me faster than I expected.”
“A graveyard? The first time in history Dad lets one of us use the car and this is where you take me?”
She was already on the sidewalk, opening the gate. Driven by something I couldn’t see, she moved purposefully through the field of stones while I trailed behind, reading the markers. I recognized the family names of several classmates.
Despite the drought, it was lush and green, and tucked beneath a canopy of pines, noticeably cooler. “Nicest spot in town on a day like this. Too bad the, um, residents can’t appreciate it,” I said. When she stopped before a small flat stone in the back corner, however, we were reduced to hushed silence.
SYLVIE MENDELSON FINN
October 2, 1926–March 14, 1957
Now it was my turn to take her hand. “Oh, Zaidie . . .” And then a moment later, “How did you find her?”
“There’s only one Jewish cemetery in town. And once I walked through the gate, I remembered so much—like you when you heard about Maud-Marie.”
“But when? And why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was after Jon left. That terrible time when—what did you say about watching your sister scream? You realized there was nothing you could do to help her anymore. Nothing you could do to help each other. I suppose it was true for all of us.”
I stared down at the stone. “So you came here and told her.”
“Sometimes, yeah, I did. And you know, there were days—ordinary afternoons like this one—when it really seemed like she heard me. But mostly, I just sat here and wrote to Jon. I tried different spots, but my best letters, my truest ones, always came from here. It was almost as if they were from both of us—our mother and me.”
“Wait a minute. You’ve been writing—to Jon? My God, Zaidie, how long?”
She looked up from her mother’s name. “Every day since he left. Never missed a one.”
“And did he—”
A long moment passed before she answered my unfinished question with a quick shake of the head. “No, he never wrote back. For all I know, he burns the letters soon as they arrive. Or Michael Finn just throws them away. But I keep writing—day after day and year after year. At this point, it isn’t only for him. It’s for me, too.”
Wordlessly, we began to clean off the stone, to pull the dead leaves from a limp geranium that had been left there.
“You know, sometimes I try to imagine him at thirteen,” I finally said. “But I keep picturing the little kid—that crooked run he had.”
Though I was talking about Jon, I was also thinking of Maud-Marie.
“Someday you’ll find her again,” Zaidie said, responding like she often did, to words I hadn’t said. “Then you’ll learn the truth about what really happened to her.”
“You really think so?”
She nodded. “And you know what else? Someday, when we’re done with growing up, we’ll get on a plane or a bus—or hell, we’ll just walk to Colorado if that’s what it takes. But we will be with Jon again.”
She stood up and brushed the dirt from her clothes. Then, staring down at the finality of the dates on the stone, she said, “There’s only one thing that could stop us.”