She lit a cigarette, and when she sucked on it, dozens of tiny lines creased around her lips. “What’re you staring at?” she said to me.
“I’m not staring. I’m just looking.”
“Well, you sure are looking hard.”
She squinted and peered at me the way I must have been eyeing her. I don’t suppose she much liked what she saw either.
“Why don’t you make us some iced tea, Liz?” Mom said. “Your sister must be parched after that drive.” She turned to the girl she called Nina. “Unless you want to see your daddy right away.”
“No,” the girl said, “plenty of time for that. I’m dry from my throat to my knees. That damn Indian didn’t stop once. Thought I’d make a run for it. Might have too, but here I am.”
When I returned with the three glasses of iced tea on a tray, the girl was gone. I was relieved. This was all some middle-of-the-day dream brought on by the heat. Mom was going to wonder why I had three teas instead of two. But she didn’t wonder. She said, “Nina went to freshen up.” Then she whispered, “What’s wrong with you, anyway? You’ve barely said a word to your sister.”
“She doesn’t look right to me.”
“Maybe we’re not just what she remembers either. People change.”
I looked at my mother, at the gray strands twisting through her pretty dark hair in the places where a red sheen used to glow; I looked at her lined hands, but not too long, at her ankles swollen from the heat. “But we didn’t go anywhere,” I said.
I ran inside, past the girl, and pounded up the stairs. Locked in my room, I could hear their mumblings on the porch, Mom explaining my bad behavior, no doubt, and the girl chuckling, a gurgle that erupted with a rush and thrill like birds’ wings, a flock in sudden flight.
But there were silences too, long and heavy, falling between them like blinding sheets of rain.
Later someone knocked, Mom wanting to comfort and scold me, I thought, so I unlocked the door. The girl stood there holding my glass of tea. “Thought you might be thirsty,” she said.
I stared at the tea as if she’d offered me a cup of piss. “Ice is melted,” I said, flopping back on the bed and pulling the pillow up on my lap.
She set the tea on my dresser. “Look,” she said, “I don’t blame you for not being altogether delighted to see me. Red Elk told me Daddy was dying. That’s the only reason I came. Now Mama says he exaggerated the case, but I’m here all the same.” She slouched from the hips and didn’t use her hands to talk. I remembered Nina’s hands were always flying, drawing pictures I could see in the air. “Anyway, I won’t be staying long if that’s what’s eating you.”
Fine, I thought, go back where you came from. But that didn’t make me feel any better. She left without bothering to close my door and headed down the hall toward Daddy’s room. For a skinny girl, she had a heavy walk. I followed. If my father fell out of his chair at the sight of a dead girl, I wanted to be there to pick him up. If he didn’t recognize her, I wanted him to be able to look at me, his familiar daughter.
Not even a second passed when he didn’t know her. He saw beyond her lined mouth, beyond her brassy hair and lightless eyes to a place where she was still shining, a place that made him shine just to look at her.
“Nina,” he said, “my Nina.”
Father didn’t need me to catch him. And he wouldn’t need me to read the Rovato Daily News or bring his supper on a tray. Nina was there, right in front of him. She was not lost or drowned. “Daddy,” she said, “you look like a miserable old geezer sitting there with a blanket on your lap. I am about to melt, I swear, and there you are, bundled up like an old lady.” Nina, the only one who could talk to Father that way. “Mama says you been laying up here for days with some nonsense in your head, and Dr. Ben says there’s no reason for it — unless you’re just plain lazy. I don’t remember you being lazy, Daddy. You haven’t gone soft on me, have you?”
He looked like a man about to choke.
“Speak up, old man,” she said.
He swallowed hard several times and stroked his neck as if he wanted to rub the words out of himself. “Sit down,” he said at last, “let your father look at you.” His voice was hoarse and tender, one he never used with me because I had no power over him, and he did not need my pardon.
I slunk downstairs and sat in the kitchen with Mom. She didn’t scold me, but she didn’t comfort me, either.
Nina stayed with Daddy till it was almost dark. I couldn’t imagine their talk. In my whole life, I’d never exchanged more than four sentences in a row with my father, except for those nights I’d read to him from the Rovato paper.
When Nina stood at last in the kitchen doorway, she wore a yellow dress, short and loose with tiny white buds. Her hair was damp and pulled into a tight ponytail. She looked almost pretty but not like my sister.
“What’ve you got to eat?” she said. Mom didn’t seem to hear her, and Nina sat down and began rocking back in her chair. “Something wrong?” she said.
“Well?” said Mom.
“Well, what?”
“How were things with your father?”
“Fine.”
“Fine? Just fine?”
“Yeah. Fine. What’d you expect? A frigging miracle? We made up, okay? I can’t hang round here forever, you know. I’ve got a job.”
“Just a few more days,” Mom said, “please.”
“What’s to eat?”
“Cold chicken. Salad. Potatoes. What do you want?”
“Everything. Some of everything.”
She meant it too. She ate four pieces of chicken, tearing the meat off the bone with her sharp little teeth. She licked her fingers and reached for another piece before the one on her plate was half gone. I fried two leftover potatoes and Nina smothered them with ketchup, then scooped them up with a spoon. Maybe she really was a devil masquerading as my sister, maybe this was how I had to pay for the bad deal I made. Devils were probably hungry all the time, I thought, and gluttonous besides.
She patted her stomach and I could see it was tight and hard, distended under her dress. “I’m gonna burst,” she said. “I’m not used to eating so much. You can fry up the rest of those potatoes for breakfast, Lizzie. You do them just right.” I nodded. We’d have to go to the store twice a day if she kept this up.
Nina lit a cigarette, and Mom said, “I wish you wouldn’t smoke in here.”
“Christ, I’m home half a day and you’re already bitching.”
“I’m not bitching. I’m just saying.”
“Fine,” Nina said.
“Never mind,” said Mom.
“I said fine, didn’t I? Don’t use your long-suffering voice on me, Mama. I’m too old to fall for it.” She grabbed her cigarettes and kicked the back door open, letting the screen door slap behind her.
“Her father’s daughter,” Mom said, “every inch.”
Whose daughter am I, I thought, and almost said it, just to be cruel.
I left Mother in the kitchen under the glare of the fluorescent lights. I was in no mood to keep her company. I blamed her for asking the Indian to bring this stranger home. When Nina went away again, I’d make it up to my mother, but not tonight.
I sat alone on the front porch. Crickets called from the grass, and I let them pull me toward them. I followed their voices across the yard and down the street, one block and then another, until I came to the vacant lot next to Myron Evans’s house. A solitary light burned in an upstairs room where Myron’s mother must have sat, alone forever to blame herself, to play that morning backward a thousand times, back from the jail cell where her son was hanging, the shirt unknotted and buttoned back over his thin white chest, a chest too delicate for human eyes, the ribs too frail for the arms of Caleb Wolfe as he cut Myron down. Myron’s mother would unravel that day, returning the chair to its place against the wall, the safe and harmless chair, unkicked. And in her mind, Myron’s mother would see her own endless walk, head held high, a hat with a veil to hide her eyes from the judgment of her neighbors, those neighbors squinting through blinds, peering behind curtains, and Mrs. Evans still walking, clutching her little blue purse. What does she care what they think? And now she is paying Myron’s bail, bringing him home. Home. Make me some tea before you go to bed, Myron dear, make some tea for your mother; that’s a good boy. Myron darling.