The Sister Who Drove Me to Bangor

What was in the bag

There were two things in it.

The first was a rosary. Blue glass beads, one of them chipped, with a tarnished silver cross. The one Mama carried to Mass for fifty years and kept in her apron pocket.

I had not seen it since she died. I had not once thought to ask where it went.

The second was a piece of paper folded in four, gone soft and brown at the creases. It was a sheet from the pad where Ginette had kept Mama’s medicine schedule, with the name of a Van Buren pharmacy printed across the top.

On it, in a hand I knew better than my own, shaky, the pencil pushed hard into the paper, was Mama’s writing.

Gin,

You are not to call Odile until I am gone. She is carrying that baby and the doctor says she must lie still, and I will not have it said I cost a child one hour of her life for the sake of one more goodbye. I have said all I need to say to her on Sundays.

You tell her I am not afraid. You give her my rosary, the blue one. She will want to be angry at somebody. Let it be you for a while. You are the strong one. You can stand it.

And you two be good to each other. I mean it.

Maman

It was dated nine days before she died.

Mama had known, nine days before the end, exactly how far gone she was. And every Sunday she had taken the telephone and talked about the garden, and the neighbors, and asked about the baby, and never let me hear it in her voice. She had chosen that. And Ginette had held my mother’s last order in her pocket for thirty-two years.

“You could have shown me this,” I said. “You could have shown me at the kitchen table.”

“I know.”

“You let me stand there and say you wanted her to yourself. You had this the entire time.”

“It was in my coat pocket,” said Ginette. “Right there. I had my hand on it when you said it.”

She was quiet, and then she said the rest, very low, looking at the carpet.

“Odile, I had slept eleven weeks on the floor of that room. I had washed her, and fed her, and held her up to breathe. I watched her go by myself, at ten at night, with nobody in the house but the dog. I was thirty-four years old.”

“And then you told me I liked being the only one who loved her. What was I going to do, hand you a note?”

“Yes,” I said. “You were.”

“I know.” She laughed, a thin, ruined laugh. “I know that now. I was so angry I could not see. And Mama had said, let it be you for a while. So I let it be me. I thought, a month, until the baby comes and you are rested. Then it was a year. Then you had your life, and I was the woman who kept you from our mother. And then it was too long to say.”

“I’m stubborn,” said my sister. “You know that. So are you.”

I had to put the paper down.