The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For
“I know,” Janet said. “I don’t remember the words. But I remember I was told it would be all right.”
I do not know who moved first. I believe we moved together, the way two people step toward a dropped thing at the same moment. She was in my arms, and she fit. That is the only way I have of saying it. After sixty years she fit exactly where she had been. Her head came to my chin. She smelled of lavender soap and clean wool and, under it, very faintly, Vicks, and I thought my legs would quit.
“I’m here,” I said into her hair. I said it over and over. “I’m here, I’m here. I came.”
“You’re late,” she said, laughing and sobbing both.
“I know it,” I said. “I know.”
Nobody rushed us. When I finally lifted my head over my sister’s shoulder, I saw that the Hendersons had shut off their minivan and gone on their way, and that most of the lot had cleared out the way a church lot does when people understand what they are looking at. Wanda Bartlett stood about thirty feet off with her cane and her pocketbook, not saying one word, which for Wanda is a feat.
Arlis came last. He walked across the gravel slowly, wiping his hands on a handkerchief, and stopped a few steps away and looked at Janet and then at me. He is a big man, seventy, with a face like a plowed field.
“Well,” he said. “Hello, Janet.”
She looked at him, bewildered.
“I’m Arlis,” he said. “I’ve been married to your sister fifty years. If I’d known where to look I’d have come looking.” He cleared his throat. “She’s prayed for you every night since before we had our girl.”
Janet put her hand over his big weathered one and held it there, and that was all it took for me to love her.
Wanda is eighty-one and has never been accused of subtlety. She came across the gravel and pressed a packet of tissues into my hand and a second into Janet’s.
“Come on in the hall, the lot of you,” she said. “There’s a whole ham in there and half a pan of lemon bars nobody’s touched. Sit down. Eat something.”
So that is how my sister and I spent our first hour together, at a folding table in the basement of the church, with a plate of ham and scalloped potatoes between us that neither of us touched. Wanda took herself to the far end of the room with a dish towel and pretended to dry one coffeepot for forty minutes.
I asked Fern to tell it, because Janet could not, and I could not, and she was the one who had carried it.
“It’s my mother’s doing,” Fern said, “and you’ll have to forgive her for that. She never forgave herself.”
She had taken off her good wool coat and her face had settled. She was seventy, and she had Hilda Kasper’s long jaw. Once I saw it, I could not unsee it.
“Mother’s alive,” Fern said. “She’s ninety-six. She’s been in a care home in Harrison since 2001, when Daddy died and she came to live near me, and the last two years her mind has gone out like a tide. Most days she calls me by her sister’s name.”
I had pictured Mrs. Kasper in the ground for so long that I had to hold the edge of the table.