The Sister Who Drove Me to Bangor

What I said, which was the truth

“I knew,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Not about the note. About the rest. By the time Colette was a month old I knew in my gut that Mama would never have wanted me in that car. I knew I would have gone anyway if you had called, on that bed rest, and maybe lost the baby, and maybe lost us both. I knew you were right.”

“And I could not say it. Because I had already said what I said.”

“I wrote you four letters. The first one the winter she was born. I could not make myself mail a single one. I put them in the woodstove, one by one. The last was the winter Raymond died.”

“I went to Armand’s wake,” I said.

Ginette did not move.

“I never told anyone. I drove to the funeral home in Van Buren in my good coat and parked at the far end of the lot. I sat there with the engine off for forty minutes and watched you go in with your boys. I could not make myself open the door.”

My sister’s face broke in two.

“At Raymond’s funeral,” she said, in a voice I had never heard, “I sat in the lot at Holy Rosary. In the Buick, at the back, behind the hearse. I watched you carry the flowers in. I had my hand on the door handle the whole service. I could not open it.”

We looked at each other across the narrow space between two motel beds.

Both of us in parked cars with the engines off, for the better part of an hour, on the days we buried our husbands. Two years and twenty-five miles apart.

“Oh, Gin,” I said.

“Odile,” she said.

I do not remember crossing the room. I only remember her arms, which were strong, and the smell of the barn coat, fuel oil and cedar and old canvas, and Mama’s rosary against my neck where she had wrapped it.

We held each other in a motel in Houlton, Maine, in a snowstorm, in our stockings. I do not know for how long. The heater ticked.

At some point she said, into my hair, “I did like having her to myself at the end. Part of me did. That is true.”

“I was jealous of you, too,” I said. “You were the one who stayed.”

“What a pair,” said Ginette. “Two stubborn old women.”

“Two stupid old women,” I said.

“Speak for yourself,” said my sister, and wiped her nose on the sleeve of our father’s barn coat.

The rest of the winter

We did not sleep. We lay in the two beds with the lamp on and talked until the window went gray and the plows began going by on Route 1.

Two weeks later, driving to Bangor for the seventh treatment, we talked the whole three hours. I do not remember about what.

I remember she let me read the bulletin. She had been keeping notes in the margins for months. Dates, blood counts, what I had eaten and what I had not. And in the corner of the very first one, a line she had written to herself the Thursday we drove down.

She ate the ploye.

“That was the day I knew,” said Ginette, taking the bulletin back, looking out at the road. “That was when I thought, she might let me.”

Ringing the bell

The twelfth and last treatment was in late April, on a day of mud and rain, with the frost coming out of the ground.

They have a bell at the cancer center in Bangor, a brass one at the end of the infusion hall. When your last treatment is done, you ring it.

Sheila took out my needle. Colette had driven up the night before with Luc, and they were standing at the nurses’ desk with paper cups of coffee. I was wearing my braid, and Armand’s work gloves, because I could not bring myself to take them off.

Ginette was in the hall by the door in her good navy coat, not the barn coat, with her handbag held in front of her in both hands. Her eyes were red. She stood very straight.

“Come on,” I said.

She shook her head. “It’s yours.”

“Gin. Come here.”

She came. She put her hand on the rope over mine. And together, two old women from a potato farm on the Saint John River, we rang that bell.

I have never heard anything so loud. The whole hall turned around. A man in a recliner clapped, and then a woman by the window, and the nurses, and Colette crying with her hand over her mouth, and Luc yelling, “Gramma, you did it!”

My sister turned her face against my shoulder in the middle of that hall.

“I have not cried in front of anybody since Armand,” she said.

“You’re doing it now.”

“Don’t tell anybody.”

“I’ll tell everyone,” I said. “I’ll put it in the Aroostook Republican.”