The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For
“Maybe she doesn’t,” I said. “Maybe she’s gone.”
Neither of us said the other thing. I got up and finished the peas.
That is my answer to anyone who asks why I did not just look her up. I looked for forty years. Every door I leaned on was held shut by somebody who had given their word. So I did the only thing left. I got on my knees, and I stayed there.
The back door of the Mercury opened.
A foot came out first, in a navy sensible shoe, and then a hand on the door frame, and then the rest of a woman I had never seen in my life and knew at once.
She was small. She stood an inch or two shorter than I do, and I am a short woman. She wore a cardigan the color of oatmeal, and her hair was soft brown going gray at the part, cut in a no-nonsense bob. Her face was round. She had my mother’s chin, Velma Tackett’s chin, with the little cleft like a thumbprint, that I had seen every day of my life in my own mirror and in my daughter’s. It looked strange and wonderful on a stranger.
She stood with her fist pressed to her breastbone. I was looking at a sixty-one-year-old woman in a church parking lot and I saw a two-year-old holding something against her chest.
“Hello,” she said. It came out a whisper. “I don’t know what to call a person like you.”
I could not think of one thing to say.
“I don’t know what to do with my hands,” she said, and laughed, a wet shaky laugh, and it went through me like a dipper of cold well water on a hot day. It was Mama’s laugh. It was the screen door.
“Marcella?” I said.
“It’s Janet now,” she said. “Janet Rumsey. I was Janet Pruitt. Nobody told me Marcella until this summer.” She took a breath. “But I think, if you don’t mind, I’d like to hear it.”
“Marcella,” I said.
She nodded. Tears ran straight down her face and she did not wipe them.
“I have something of yours,” she said.
She put a hand into the pocket of her cardigan. It took her three tries. What she brought out was a flat tin with a hinged lid, the kind that once held throat lozenges, with the paint rubbed to bare metal at the corners. She thumbed it open. There was a bed of yellowed cotton inside, and on the cotton lay one black wool-covered button the size of a nickel, with a few strands of brown thread still caught in its holes.
Something in my chest gave way and I made a sound. I do not remember what kind.
“My mother kept it,” Janet said. “Pauline. She told me when I was six that I’d come to them holding a button, and that somebody had put it in my fist, and she never had the heart to pry it out. She put it in that tin the year I started school.” She was crying hard enough that her words had begun to break in half. “I’ve carried it in my coat pocket every winter since. I never knew whose it was. I only knew that somebody had pulled it off her own coat and told me to hold it, and so I did.”
“Until I come,” I said.
She looked up.
“I said hold this until I come,” I told her. “I said it to you. You were two. You stopped crying.”