The Night Sister Read online

  “We’re on, girl,” Rose whispered to the hen, giving her a good-luck stroke. She grabbed a handful of raisins from the Sun-Maid box and went to work, leading Petunia across the stage as the skate’s metal wheels rattled.

  Uncle Fenton whistled appreciatively. He was not actually their uncle, but a distant cousin of Daddy’s and much younger: he’d just turned nineteen. He was wearing his usual outfit—a stained white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve, blue work pants and heavy black boots. In his back pocket he always kept a thin paperback book, something he’d picked up at the five-and-dime: science fiction or crime, sometimes a Western. Uncle Fenton was Daddy’s helper, the fix-it man at the motel, and he lived in a trailer behind the house that Daddy helped him pay for. When Fenton wasn’t reading, repairing something, or cutting the grass, he was building himself a motorcycle out of parts he’d been collecting. Sometimes the girls would go help him, and he’d promise that once he got it running he’d take them for a ride—maybe even add on a sidecar, so they could all three go.

  Now they got Sunshine, a big, glossy black hen, from the cage behind the back curtain, and all three birds were dancing, moving back and forth, spinning in carefully choreographed circles, banging into each other clumsily, while the girls led them on with raisins; all the chickens wore hats and silk scarves.

  “And now for the grand finale,” Sylvie announced. “I will use the power of hypnosis to put all three chickens to sleep. I need absolute quiet from the audience. Watch, and you will be amazed.”

  Rose held Matilda and Petunia firmly in place next to one another. Sylvie held Sunshine down with her left hand; with her right, she used a white stick (she called it her “magic chicken wand”) to twirl circles in the air in front of them, then drew lines on the ground, a straight line drawn again and again in front of each hen. The birds watched the white stick, eyes focused on the line it made in the dirt, and gradually relaxed, holding perfectly still. One by one, Sylvie picked the birds up and flipped them onto their backs, where they lay with their eyes closed, feet in the air. The crowd oohed and aahed. Sylvie gave a proud smile, then snapped her fingers and said in a loud voice, “Awaken!” All three birds jumped up, righted themselves, and ran wild.

  “Tah-dah,” she said, taking a long, deep bow, chicken wand still clutched in her right hand.

  Mama looked down and picked at the hem of her dress, pulling a thread loose. But Daddy banged his hands together and gave the girls an enthusiastic grin. Uncle Fenton laughed out loud, slapping his knees. The young newlyweds applauded politely, then headed back down to their room. The housewife from New Jersey reached over and took her husband’s hand, and he looked at her and smiled a can-you-believe-this smile. Their wedding rings glinted in the sun. The little girl turned to her brother and said, “We need to get some chickens when we get home.” The parents laughed.

  “Good show, girls,” Daddy said. He pulled the little notebook from his pocket and jotted down something. Daddy was always getting wonderful ideas—ideas that would make money, make the motel bigger and better and more efficient; ideas that could change the world.

  “I’ll go start dinner,” said Mama, her wary eye on the hen in Sylvie’s arms. Mama was not a big fan of the chickens. She thought they were dirty and not all that bright, and sometimes worried out loud about the diseases the girls might catch from them, like salmonella. Secretly, Rose wondered how you could get a sickness from a chicken that would turn you into a fish, and what exactly would happen—would you grow gills? Scales? Not be able to breathe on land?

  “It’s my paper night,” Mama reminded them. Every Thursday, after dinner, the girls had to clean up the kitchen and get their own selves off to bed, so Daddy could watch the office while Mama had her newspaper meeting. She and some of the members of the Ladies Club of London put out a weekly paper—The London Town Crier—full of news, recipes, and advertisements. Mama was the editor, and each Thursday night they planned the next week’s issue.

  Sylvie wandered over to Lucy the cow’s pen, and let the guest kids pet Petunia while Daddy talked to their father, the two men huddled close, smoking. They were talking about the highways being built all over, how soon there would be one running right by London, going from White River Junction all the way up to the Canadian border. Daddy shook his head, said in a low voice, “It’s no good for this town. No one will come through on Route 6 anymore.”

  The boy who was petting Petunia moved closer, so that the toes of his Keds were practically touching Sylvie’s sandals. His hand brushed hers, and she smiled.

  “How do you do it?” he asked. “Hypnotize the chickens?”

  “It takes a lot of practice,” Sylvie told him.

  “Can you hypnotize people?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I do it to my sister all the time.”

  “Will you do me?” His eyes glistened, his whole body thrumming with excitement at the possibility.

  “I don’t know,” Sylvie said. “Maybe.”

  The boy’s little sister was reaching through the cedar fence rails to pet Lucy. Nailed to the fence was a sign Daddy had painted:

  LUCY, THE STATE COW, WAS BORN IN THE FALL OF 1943. IF YOU LOOK ON HER LEFT SIDE, YOU WILL SEE SHE HAS A SPOT IN THE SHAPE OF THE GREAT STATE OF VERMONT.

  Now Lucy gave the little girl’s hand a lick with her enormous tongue. The girl laughed.

  “She was born the same day as my sister, September 16, 1943,” Rose said. “Sylvie and that cow are as good as twins.” Rose leaned in to rub Lucy’s lucky spot, her hand covering the whole state of Vermont. “Daddy says when Lucy was born he had a vision. He saw the motel, the tower, the pen for Lucy. He knew people would come. And he was right. Because here you are.”

  “Did your daddy build that big tower?” the girl asked, turning from the cow to look down the driveway. The tower was thirty feet tall, twelve feet across, built of stone and cement.

  “He built it the year I was born,” Rose said. “He did everything himself: mixing the concrete, batch after batch, in a wheelbarrow, hauling rocks down from the hillside.”

  “It was a gift for our mama,” Sylvie explained. “She’s English, and he wanted to give her her own Tower of London so she wouldn’t be homesick.”

  The boy smiled at this. “This place is amazing. I can’t believe you get to live here. You’ve got the tower, the pool, the whole motel.”

  “And Lucy,” Rose added.

  “She’s soft,” the girl said, rubbing her hand over the cow’s fur.

  “If I lived here, I’d never want to leave,” the boy said.

  “I know,” Rose said. “We’re real lucky.”

  “I’m going to leave one day,” Sylvie said, bending to set Petunia down. The chicken began to peck at the dusty ground. “I’m going to go to Hollywood when I grow up.”

  “Hollywood?” Rose snorted. “You’re going to Hollywood?”

  “What for?” the boy asked.

  “To be in the movies,” Sylvie said.

  The boy smiled. “I’ll bet you’ll be a big star,” he told her.

  Above them, a monarch butterfly fluttered through the air. No one seemed to notice it but Rose. She stepped away from the fenced cow pen and toward the butterfly. It hovered over Sylvie, then landed lightly on her shoulder.

  The boy smiled. Sylvie caught sight of it and laughed. “Isn’t it lovely?” she said.

  “Yes,” the boy answered, not looking at the monarch.

  Rose reached out her finger, willing the monarch to her. Choose me, she thought with all her might.

  When the butterfly didn’t come, Rose made an impatient grab for it, tearing one of its paper-thin wings.

  “Rose!” Sylvie hissed. “Look what you’ve done! How could you be so careless?”

  Sylvie ran off toward the house, cradling the wounded butterfly, calling for Mama. But Rose knew that, for all Mama’s healing powers, there was nothing she could do for the ruined wing.

  The boy from
New Jersey turned away in disgust, his chance with Sylvie lost, probably forever. He took his little sister by the hand and dragged her off toward Room 12, ignoring her protests that she wasn’t done petting the cow. Now Rose was alone with Lucy. She stroked the cow, her fingers making circles in her familiar, dusty fur.

  “She’s wrong,” Rose told Lucy, glancing over her shoulder to watch her sister bang through the front door of the house. Rose wasn’t careless. She cared too much, that was all. She cared so much that sometimes she was sure her heart might explode from the pressing ache of it.

  Rose

  The next evening, the motel was nearly full. Only one room was still vacant: Room 28, all the way at the end of the new building.

  Rose was sitting with Mama in the office. Daddy had run out to do an errand after dinner and wasn’t back yet. When Rose asked Mama where Daddy had gone, Mama’s lips tightened and she said, “He’s just out, Rose. He’ll be back when he gets back.”

  Rose didn’t mind. She loved these times, when it was just her and Mama, alone. Sometimes Mama would read to her from the paper, or tell her stories about when she was growing up back in England. Rose tried to picture Mama as a little girl; she imagined a neat, stern-faced child who ran the neighborhood doll hospital and never once broke any rules.

  Rose was tired. Her eyelids kept drifting closed as she stared at the bright office light. The screen door was closed, June bugs and moths thumping into it. The sign said Vacancy, they seemed to say. Can we come in?

  It was well past bedtime now, but Mama said Rose could stay up a little while longer, just in case another guest showed up. Rose wanted to be the one to run down to the road and flip the sign to No Vacancy.

  She loved to be there when people checked in, road-weary, blurry-eyed. She’d slide the little manila registration card across the desk to them, watch as they wrote down their names, addresses, number of people in their party, car make and model, license number. Rose loved to see where they were from: Staten Island, New York; Portage, Pennsylvania; once, they had an older couple from Christmas, Florida. Imagine, a town called Christmas!

  Sometimes they’d mention where they were traveling to: New Hampshire, Maine, all the way up into Canada. There were even people going to see the ocean, which Rose had seen only once, when Mama and Daddy took the girls to Hampton Beach a few years ago. They’d gone in the winter, because when you’re motel people you can’t go anywhere during the busy season. Sylvie had run up and down the shore, collecting rocks, shells, and bits of driftwood, oohing and aahing about how beautiful it was, how lovely it was to lick your lips and taste the salt of the ocean. Rose stood shivering on the beach, thinking only that the ocean looked cold and dark and seemed to go on forever. She tried to imagine the beach crowded with swimmers and sunbathers stretched out on towels, the smell of hot dogs and candy apples in the air, but it was no good. It was like standing on the empty stage long after the school play was over and all the costumes and sets had been packed away.

  Rose loved the names of the cars people arrived at the motel in—Dodge Coronet, Hudson Hornet, Studebaker Starliner—the heavy steel bodies, the sparkling chrome grilles, the tires spinning through the gravel of their driveway, tires that had been turning for hundreds of miles, been to places Rose could only imagine.

  The cars, Daddy said, got bigger and faster each year. Rose imagined one day cars would be more like rocket ships, like in one of Uncle Fenton’s science-fiction books. You’d be able to blast off and go from London, Vermont, to Christmas, Florida, in less than an hour. Maybe even all the way across the ocean, to London, England, where Mama was from.

  Down at the road now, a car went by. Rose could see the taillights fading away. They turned the corner and were gone, moving toward downtown London. Soon they’d be passing the Texaco, Woolworth’s, London Town Library, Congregational church—everything shut down, locked up tight this time of night.

  There was talk, lots of talk, about how the interstate highways were coming. Her teacher, Miss Marshall, said that President Eisenhower was promising bigger, better roads that would connect the whole country. Rose liked the sound of this (though she would never tell her father, who got red in the face whenever the word “highway” was mentioned), of being able to follow a highway from here all the way to the other side of the country. A highway built for all those beautiful cars to rumble along, engines purring, tires spinning so fast they were just a blur. Not quite like rocket ships, but a step closer.

  Sometimes she dreamed of machines. Of cars and rockets. Of the big machines that would build highways: of bulldozers and graders, mechanical shovels and steamrollers. She dreamed they were coming this way, tearing up the land, dynamiting rocks, making a smooth blacktop surface for cars to race along. Coming closer. Closer. Rumbling, chugging.

  “Where’s your sister?” Mama asked, and Rose looked up and rubbed her eyes.

  “Up in our room. She’s got a headache.”

  “Poor thing,” Mama said, and Rose nodded sympathetically.

  “Maybe this butterfly isn’t just a butterfly,” Sylvie had said to Rose just after dinner, when they were alone in their room, looking at the broken-winged butterfly on Sylvie’s nightstand.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you remember Oma’s stories?” Sylvie had asked, her eyes growing wide.

  Rose nodded. She did remember. She remembered that Sylvie had been frightened to death by Oma’s stories, so Oma had stopped telling them to her and shared them only with Rose.

  Oma had come to visit last year. They’d spent weeks getting ready: cleaning the house from top to bottom, setting up a cot in Mama’s sewing room, asking excited questions about what she was like, this grandmother they’d never met, coming all the way from England.

  “This is your grandmother,” Mama had announced as the old woman climbed out of the backseat of Daddy’s car, shouldering a large patent-leather pocketbook, wearing loose white gloves stained yellow at the fingertips.

  She took the girls in, studying them from head to toe, turning them, touching their faces and hair. Then, apparently finding them acceptable, she gave them each a kiss on both cheeks. “You call me Oma,” she said, her accent different from Mama’s. When Rose asked Mama about it later, she explained that her mother was German but she’d married a Londoner.

  “How come we’ve never met her before?” Rose had asked.

  “Because she’s a busy woman. And crossing the Atlantic is no small feat. Especially since Oma hates to fly. She came in a boat.”

  Oma sucked on horehound candy, wore sweaters she’d knitted herself, and taught the girls to make apple cake.

  One morning, Rose woke up with her hair in tangles. Oma clucked her tongue and went to work brushing it out.

  “Perhaps you’ve been visited by a mare,” she said.

  “A mare? Like a girl horse?” Rose asked.

  Oma shook her head. “Your mother hasn’t told you girls about mares?”

  Rose and Sylvie shook their heads.

  “Mares are human during the day, but at night, they change into all different creatures. One minute, they’re a person; the next, they can be a cat, a bird, or a butterfly.”

  Sylvie, listening from her own bed, said, “That’s made up. It’s another of your fairy tales.”

  “You think so?” Oma said, continuing to gently work the tangles out of Rose’s hair.

  “Are they good?” Rose asked.

  “Sometimes. But sometimes they turn into terrible monsters with teeth and claws. They come to you in the night, give you bad dreams, tie knots in your hair, suck your breath away. If you’re not careful, they’ll swallow you whole.”

  Later, Rose wished Oma hadn’t told them about mares. Not because she was scared, but because of Sylvie. Her sister had been so frightened that she started having nightmares.

  One morning, when Mama was comforting Sylvie after one of her bad dreams, Sylvie told her about Oma’s stories, about how, ever since, she couldn’t st
op thinking that every person she met, every animal she saw, might secretly be a mare.

  “Even though I know it can’t be true,” Sylvie said, sniffling. “It couldn’t be true, right, Mama?”

  Mama was furious with Oma.

  “I will not have you poisoning the minds of my children,” Mama had hissed at Oma. She said it had been a mistake to invite Oma at all. Rose tried to eavesdrop on the argument from the top of the stairs after she and Sylvie had been sent to bed early, but caught very little of it. Oma left the next day and went back to England.

  Rose was mad at her mother for sending Oma away, but mostly she blamed Sylvie—if Sylvie hadn’t been such a scaredy-cat tattletale, Mama would never even have known.

  Oma sent Rose a few cheerful letters from England, letters Mama always opened and read before giving them to Rose. Oma told Rose she was knitting her a sweater for Christmas and asked what color she would like. Rose wrote back, “Red, please,” and told her how much she missed her.

  But Rose never got the sweater. Just before Christmas, Mama got a call from a cousin in England. Oma had been killed in an accident.

  Rose was devastated. Oma was the only adult who had ever seemed to prefer her to Sylvie, who had ever thought she was the special one. It just wasn’t fair.

  She thought of Oma often—of the stories she told when they were alone together, the walks they had taken through the woods behind the motel. “Everything out here is alive, Rose,” she had said, her hand wrapped around Rose’s. “Can’t you feel it?”

  Rose thought about that still: how everything seemed to have a life of its own, not just the trees and mushrooms in the forest, but things like highways and buildings and cars. A car was coming up the driveway now, its headlights winking in the dark. At first, Rose thought it was Daddy in their Chevy Bel Air. But the shape of the car and the sound of the engine were all wrong.

  “Looks like we might have a full house after all,” Mama said as the car pulled up and parked outside the office. A man got out and stood up, stretching. (They almost always stretched.) A woman with a pale kerchief over her hair waited in the car.