The Sister Who Drove Me to Bangor

Thirty-two years, written out

I have told this story to myself so many times that I know every word, and I have only just learned that I had half of it wrong.

Our people are Soucys, from outside Van Buren, right on the Saint John River with Canada on the other bank. Our father, Alphonse, grew ninety acres of potatoes. Our mother, Lucienne, worked the packing shed in the fall and kept the books all year.

Ginette is five years older than I am. When I was small she was more a second mother than a sister, and I mean that as a fact, not a compliment.

Mama went to the shed at five every school morning in the fall, and Ginette got me up. She stood me on a kitchen chair and braided my hair, two tight French braids, pulled so hard my eyebrows went up.

I left at eighteen for a secretarial course in Portland. I married Raymond, a lineman with a loud laugh and a van full of tools, and I stayed away. I called on Sundays. I told myself the farm was something I had outgrown.

Ginette stayed. She married Armand, who drove a fuel oil truck, and had two boys, Marcel and Gilles, and she carried that farm and our parents on her back.

In the winter of 1993, Mama’s emphysema went to her heart. Ginette moved her into the front bedroom and started the long watch. I know now it was eleven weeks. At the time I thought it was a few.

I was in Portland, twenty-nine years old and seven months pregnant with Colette. A month before Mama died, my doctor found trouble and put me flat on my back, up only for the bathroom.

I called the farmhouse every Sunday from the sofa. Ginette always picked up and said, “She’s resting, she’s all right, she’s all right, Odile,” and I believed her because I wanted to.

That is my first fault, and I have carried it a long time. I never asked the one question that mattered. I never said, how bad is it, Gin, really.

Mama died on a Friday in May, and Ginette called me at ten past ten at night.

“Mama’s gone,” she said. “You can come now.”

You can come now.

I heard those four words as a slap, and I went on hearing them for thirty-two years. Raymond drove, five hours in the dark, with his jaw set and my hands pressed under my belly, and we got to the farmhouse an hour after she had gone.

Ginette was sitting in the kitchen in her slip and her coat, with her hands flat on the table. I did not say I was sorry for her loss. I did not take her hand.

After the burial, when the neighbors had gone home and left the dishes, the two of us stood drying casserole dishes in a kitchen that smelled of ham and baked beans.

I said, “You should have called me when she went down.”

“I called you when she died,” said Ginette.

“You kept me away on purpose.” My voice was shaking. I had been holding that sentence in my chest for five hours of road. “You wanted her all to yourself. You always did. You liked being the only one who loved her.”

I knew it was cruel when I said it. A person always knows. I said it anyway, because I wanted her to hurt as much as I did.

Ginette set down the dish she was holding and looked at me for a long moment.

“You were never here,” she said. “You don’t get to count.”

Then she dried her hands, folded the towel in thirds, and laid it on the table.

“Don’t come to the house again, Odile.”

“I won’t,” I said.

And I didn’t. For thirty-two years, I didn’t.