The Accidentals Read online

  “It had a deformity,” my father said. “Its face. Its mouth.”

  “It’s a she, not an it.”

  I said the obvious: that we—he and I—should have taken her if nobody else would. That baby girl was our own flesh and blood and he had turned his back on her. That I was ashamed of him and my aunt too.

  He looked at me a good long while, not answering. Then he proceeded to tell me there were things I didn’t understand. The baby would have ruined my sister’s life and possibly mine too. He might have lost his job. We might have all been run out on a rail. Then where would we be? Plus, if the baby were compromised in one way—compromised was his exact word—there were probably other things wrong with it. It might not have lived anyway.

  “Don’t tell your sister, she’s been through enough,” he said. “It’ll just make her feel worse.”

  “Doesn’t she deserve to know?”

  He looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure she would want to. Would you?”

  THAT NIGHT I tossed and turned and watched the moon cross the sky. I’d taken up talking to the moon, by now having given up for good on Jesus. I’d found over time that the more you talked to Jesus the less he said. Plus, you couldn’t see him except in pictures or hanging gruesomely on a cross. Although the moon didn’t talk back either, it was something real, it came up and went down, you could count on it to put in an appearance most nights. It seemed to have a face, pocked but kindly; some nights it even looked a bit sympathetic.

  The next morning I woke to Dad talking on the phone, a mumble from his bedroom. Grace wasn’t up when I got ready for school. I put on a cute pair of navy blue pedal pushers and a nicely ironed (by yours truly, who else?) yellow top with a Peter Pan collar stitched in blue to match. I wanted my sister to know I’d become a snazzy dresser in her absence. For breakfast I ate a good-size piece of the virgin apple cobbler, somebody had to eat it. I made myself a meatloaf sandwich from the meatloaf I’d made two days back and grabbed an apple (against all odds, I try to eat a balanced diet) and headed out the door. Dad was waiting in the Rambler and motioned for me to get in.

  “How is she?” I asked as he backed the car out of the driveway.

  “She’s all right.”

  “Why isn’t she going to school?” Having not been filled in on my sister’s educational status, I wondered whether she might have seen fit to finish high school in her time away.

  “She’s tired. I told her she could start fresh on Monday. If the Cuba thing doesn’t blow up on us.”

  “I don’t see why I have to go to school if she doesn’t.”

  Dad slammed on the brakes and the gravel in the driveway flew up under the tires. “June, your sister has been working as a hotel maid for the past eight months. She’s worn out. Give her a break, for crying out loud.”

  The iciness in my father’s voice and the way he called me by name, something he never did unless he was correcting me, stopped me cold. I looked out the car window. When I did, I saw the curtains at Grace’s bedroom window move.

  Dad had begun to back the car up again. I opened the car door on my side and swung my legs out. I could be a bad girl too.

  He threw on the brakes again. Before I could jump out, he grabbed my wrist and pulled me back. “For Christ’s sake, June. Today of all days you need to do as you’re told.”

  We sat there frozen, Dad holding on to my wrist, me with one foot on the pavement. Grace had opened her curtains several inches wider. I could see the outline of her face behind the pane. Smaller than I remembered and pale for someone so dark-complected. She looked like she hadn’t seen the sun in a year.

  I raised my foot from the pavement and put it back in the car and shut the door. Dad loosened his grip on my wrist, and I pulled it away. It felt scorched, which in itself was shocking. My father had never hurt me. I rubbed it and glared at him. He started backing up the car again. Then he stopped the car a third time. He put his forehead down on the steering wheel.

  I said, “Did you see the baby? Did you look at her?”

  “No.” He turned off the ignition and looked at me.

  “Will we have a funeral? Like we did with Mama?”

  “No, the orphanage said everything would be taken care of.” He looked down at his hands on the wheel. “You understand you can’t tell Grace.”

  “Why not? Give me one good reason.”

  “It’ll bring nothing but hurt, nothing but heartbreak. Is that good enough?”

  We rode to school in a thicket of silence. While I was getting out, he said, “Remember, if anything happens, I’ll be right back to pick you up, so be ready.”

  I grabbed my lunch and books and slammed the car door. I was fighting mad, at my father for not wanting Grace’s baby girl, at Kennedy and Khrushchev and Castro for the Bomb, at Grace for not eating my cobbler. I climbed the concrete steps up to the door of the school, which was shadowed by overgrown crepe myrtles, now covered in brown seed balls. Just before I went inside, I looked back. Dad was sitting with his hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead, his jaw set hard. He looked like an old man. I went on in. It only dawned on me later that, given the sad fact that the fate of us all lay in the hands of two stubborn men with fire in their eyes and fingers on red buttons, this might have been the last I ever saw of my father.

  In homeroom, half the seats were empty, and our teacher, Miss Whiteside (a particularly egregious example of the Lady Schoolteacher Smell issue; beside her, Frances smelled like a gardenia), didn’t say good morning or kiss my foot. She didn’t take the roll, which I found thoroughly unfair since I had perfect attendance thus far in the school year. When the bell rang and we settled in our desks, she said we needed to practice our Duck (down to the floor) and Cover (under our desks or a handy table) technique. Just In Case. Having the father I did, I knew all about radiation, what filters it and what doesn’t, so I knew this was a patently ridiculous enterprise. I raised my hand and said so. I spoke eloquently on the relative ratio of radiation one might expect from the H-bomb and the A-bomb.

  After pronouncing that wooden desks would be of no help whatsoever when the Bomb, A or H, descended upon us, but especially if it was the H, that we were going to be fried oysters despite everyone’s good and decent efforts and ought to be at home with our loved ones given the horrendous state of things, I looked around. My classmates looked back at me, slack-jawed. Some of the girls had begun to cry. Miss Whiteside dabbed her handkerchief to her nose and told me to remove myself to the office; perhaps Mr. Spight the principal could arrange for me to return home, given the fact that I seemed a bit anxious. I said fine, hunky-dory, but I wanted to be counted present for the day. I’d come to school, I’d done my part.

  I gathered my books from the floor (we’d been told not to put our books below our desks since we needed to be ready to skedaddle under them) and headed for the door.

  “Be sure to check out, June,” Miss Whiteside said as I walked past her desk. Her voice had a quaver to it as if somebody were shaking her as she spoke. As I left, I heard her tell the class about dog tags, how they were being prepared and would arrive later that afternoon, our full names and addresses and parents’ names engraved on them. They would be worn during school hours. She didn’t say why we were being bestowed with such martial jewelry, but given my powers of discernment, I figured they were designed to make the identification of our incinerated bodies quick and easy by whatever powers-that-be remained on Planet Earth.

  Outside, the morning was sunny and brisk. The sugar maples had turned orange and red and the leaves on the sidewalk made a satisfying crunch as I dodged the bucks and cracks in the sidewalk where the roots of the giant elms had pushed through. The light cut through the leaves and multiplied their colors and shapes. Leftover elm pods rattled down the street.

  I welcomed the opportunity to skip school, something I’d never done in an effort to maintain my status as the one decent daughter. Not for lack of wanting to. Since my sister had become one of those girls who went aw
ay, the bare handful of friends I had left after Mama’s death had peeled off. Hil was keeping herself busy kissing boys as opposed to me. As for the others, nobody was openly cruel, but it was like there was a glass cage around me. People, especially parents, looked at me like I was an exotic creature in a zoo, interesting enough but potentially deadly. There was one older boy who wanted to walk me home from school, but there was something sinister about the way he’d ask that set my teeth on edge. At lunch I sat at the edge of the cafeteria and gobbled my sandwich, then went to the library and pretended to do homework, which of course I’d already done, having nothing but time on my hands. Now that Grace was back, I figured things were just going to go downhill.

  When I got home, I dropped my books on the table. Grace had taken her own good share of cobbler, which gave me a spark of hope. The TV was blaring. Down the hall, the door to her room was open, the bed made neatly, no suitcase in sight, no Grace either. I casually strolled through the house, looking here and there. I wanted to call her name like it was a normal morning and we were normal sisters, one of whom had cut school, one of whom had gotten sent home. I opened my mouth twice but nothing came out. It was as though I’d been struck dumb.

  I went out into the backyard, expecting her to be out getting some fresh air, but she wasn’t there either.

  When I came back in, I turned off the TV. Enough is enough, I thought. I was sick to death of doom and gloom. Here I was, dismissed from school, nobody to answer to, a pretty October day, maybe my last. My sister clearly on the lam again, wandering off who knew where, same old story. I sat down in Mama’s chair at the kitchen table, looked out the window and pondered how to make the most of my limited time on earth. A flock of finches landed in the mimosa tree out back, and I took up the binoculars.

  Then I heard a commotion in the basement. From down below Grace yelled, “Damn it the hell,” which had been our mother’s favorite curse when someone was listening (she said much worse when she thought no one was around).

  I opened the basement door and peered down the steps, expecting to see the one lightbulb shining from the fixture. Instead there was only dark. “Grace?” I called out.

  “What?” Her voice came from below and behind me.

  I took a couple of steps down the stairs, feeling for the string to the light. “What are you doing down here?”

  “Waiting for the Bomb.”

  I found the string and pulled it. I was so blinded by the single bulb that I didn’t see her at first. Then I heard her move directly beneath where I was standing and looked down between the open steps. She was crouched in the dark space under the stairs, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her hair in a tangle. Her eyes shone like twin moons, reflecting the light of the bulb. It was as though I’d come upon a wildcat, crouched and ready to spring.

  I leaned out over the steps. She looked so wild and strange crouched down there that I wondered if she’d lost her mind in the ordeal of that past year and a half. I couldn’t think what to say to her. Finally I opted for the mundane. “How’d you like the cobbler?”

  “It was okay.”

  “Did you have some ice cream on it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, you know what?” I said. “We’ve got the whole house to ourselves. I think we ought to raise some hell.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

  “All they’re doing is making us practice stupid Duck and Cover.”

  “Like that’s going to stop the Bomb.”

  “Yeah, like that’s going to stop anything. Do you remember Miss Whiteside?”

  “No.”

  I wondered if Grace had lost her memory along with everything else. “She’s got the Lady Schoolteacher Smell bad.”

  “Gross,” my sister said, and a wave of relief washed over me. I knew I had her now.

  “Worse than Frances,” I said.

  There was a sigh. “I just couldn’t deal with Frances. I just had to get out of there.”

  When she said that, the reality of what she’d been through washed over me like a tidal wave. Here we were, spinning on a planet that was about to become hot as fire, then cold as ice; that was the situation, plain and simple. This is the way Grace must have felt when her life got off track and there was no shelter.

  I squatted down and said as much, whispering the words through the openings between steps in the stairs. I told my sister I was sorry she’d had such a devil of a time. I suggested we eat more cobbler and pour on the ice cream and then walk around town. Then I held out my hand, through the opening between two steps. To my surprise, she took it and I hoisted her up. Then she walked around and came up the stairs toward me and took my hand a second time. I backed up, step by step, not letting go.

  At one point I teetered and almost lost my balance and tipped forward. I pictured Dad coming home to find us in a heap at the dark bottom of the stairs. Sometimes now, I feel I’m still backing up those stairs, avoiding the spaces between, where the darkness dwells and beckons. Sometimes still, I picture myself pulling my sister up step by step, the precarious world holding its breath, always in danger of tipping.

  I’d like to leave us on those stairs, in that one long moment that has stretched out over the years. I would end things right there, with that touch of our girlish hands, my sister’s rough and callused from the work she’d done, mine still soft as a baby’s.

  THAT DAY IN October, as the world held its breath, Grace and I sat down together and ate the rest of the cobbler and ice cream. After that, she wanted to go over to the Bakers’ house, she wanted to ask about Daniel. I had to tell her how Daniel and George had vanished into thin air and how the Bakers had moved one Thursday afternoon last fall; a moving van had come and that was that, they’d gone somewhere in Michigan, where I didn’t know. As I told it all, Grace began to cry, saying Dad had told her that Frances hadn’t taken the baby. It was a slow, quiet kind of crying, as if she was expecting to cry for a good long time and needed to conserve her tears.

  “Everybody’s gone,” she said. “George and Daniel, and my baby too. Disappeared into thin air.”

  “I’m here,” I said. I went and got some sweaters from my room. We needed to get outside, it was a nice day and might be our last. I pulled Grace to her feet and put my sweater around her shoulders. I grabbed a handful of Kleenexes and divided them between us—you can never tell when you might want to have a good cry yourself—and we set off. We walked through Opelika kicking up fall leaves. She blew her nose, then began to talk about cleaning elevator mirrors, the ghastly fog in Darcy, a friend named Elsa. She didn’t talk any more about her little child, and I didn’t either, my silence being the one comfort I could give her.

  It was years later, after I’d had my boy Noel, that I saw what I’d done. I was only fourteen, please give me that, but still: I’d fed my sister scraps from a dirty table, written her life’s story as disaster and shame.

  GRACE LEFT ME without a word. One afternoon that December, she came in from school drenched to the skin and shaking like a leaf. One cheek was skinned and her lips were one big bruise. I ran up to her and took her by the shoulders and asked what had happened. She said she’d taken a shortcut and slipped into a creek.

  In the months to come, I would cook and she would clean. Our father would smile as we went about our housekeeping. Only I knew that my sister now lived elsewhere, on a strangely threatening island, distant even from herself.

  Grace, I would call out across the water, and there would be no answer. In the end, as the years drifted by, I would choose the familiar shore. I would pull myself out of that murky water and make my way inland.

  19

  Grace

  AFTER I CAME HOME FROM GOING AWAY AND THE RUSSIANS decided not to bomb us to smithereens, Dad said it was time for me to go back to school. I didn’t need urging. My old life, BC, Before Child, my humdrum, what-are-we-going-to-have-for-supper life, had begun to seem like a pair of serviceable shoes that had been stolen by a thief in the
night. Now that they had magically reappeared, I was eager to step back into them, not because I was preparing to have a good life, a normal life; I’d long ago lost any hope of that when my mother went and did what she did. But now that I was home and had to stare at what had been Daniel’s house across the street every day, I felt even worse than I had when I was cleaning elevators. In Darcy, I’d been lost in a fog, everything gray and indistinct; at home, the sun came out and I saw what I had lost. I needed to get busy, I needed to get moving.

  The first day I dressed up. It was early November by then, cold and drizzling, an exquisitely miserable day. I had a bit of a crush on John Kennedy, thinking him very brave for standing up to Khrushchev and saving us from the Bomb, so I decided to wear red, white, and blue to display my patriotism: a blue skirt and white blouse, topped with a red sweater, all a bit tight on me now. I put my hair up in a ponytail and tied it with a red ribbon. I added some blue eye shadow and Electric Red lipstick. June said I looked absolutely smashing. I barely glanced at her. Some days I found my sister hard to look at. I wanted to forgive her for ratting me out to Dad, truly I wanted to let bygones be bygones, but her open, girlish face revolted me in some unfathomable way. Sometimes her grin just seemed to get bigger and bigger, her mouth reaching out to swallow me whole.

  We got to school early. I wanted to get settled in my new homeroom before the other students arrived. I wanted my homeroom teacher, Miss Holcomb, to assign me a seat and give me my schedule. I wanted everything to go smoothly. I was confident that Frances’s tutoring had kept me up on my studies, that I could take my place with the other seniors. Dad had talked to the principal and arranged everything.