Sisters One, Two, Three Read online

  Glory joined them in the kitchen. “Why so glum?”

  “Who’s glum?” Solly asked. “I just don’t know why I have to have dinner with the whole neighborhood.”

  “It’s just Ivan and the Clarkes and Mr. Diggans. Who I think is darling. Today he volunteered to join the theater group. You know what a hard time we have finding men, Solly.”

  “See? That’s what I mean.” Solly tugged off his prescription shoes. “Who comes for a visit and right away joins a group? I don’t trust him. I don’t trust him for a minute.”

  “For the love of god.” Glory headed toward the stairs, stepping around the children who’d gathered there to eavesdrop. “I need a vacation from this asylum.”

  “What’s wrong with Mr. Diggans?” Mimi asked. “Is he a kidnapper?” They’d recently watched a public service announcement about kidnappers. “Does he drive a black car?” In the commercial a black car slowly cruised down a street while a voice cautioned all children watching to stay alert.

  Callie moved closer to Charlie. “Is a kidnapper coming to dinner?”

  “Nice going, Solly. Now you’ve got them scared of the neighbors.” Glory continued up the stairs to her bedroom to put on her face.

  “Don’t worry.” Solly gave Callie a pat on her head. “Mr. Diggans is not a kidnapper. It’s nothing like that. Nothing to be scared of. Sometimes I meet someone, he rubs me the wrong way. Your mother meets the same person, she thinks he’s peachy keen.” He let out a sigh and disappeared into the den to see what Walter Cronkite had to say, leaving Ginger and her siblings alone with the scent of onions.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Being organized gave Ginger peace of mind. At work, the Band-Aids on the first aid shelf progressed logically from small circle to knuckle to knee-sized. At home, the mudroom cubby, which held suntan lotion and bug spray in the summer, was restocked on the first day of winter with Yaktrax boot grippers and Vaseline Intensive Care. With each thing in its place, Ginger could focus on what mattered: her mission to keep everyone safe.

  First thing every school morning, Ginger would tape a flyer to her office door, every day a different safety tip. It might be “You Are the Boss of Your Body!” on Monday, and on Tuesday, “Sneezes Go in Your Elbow, Please!” At home, she turned a whiteboard affixed to the refrigerator into the family communications hub, with a daily post about the weather, “Sun is out. Lotion up!” and a question of the day, “Did you remember to brush your tongue?”

  As a young child, Julia used to add pictograms, a crudely drawn hat or snowman next to the weather, a checkmark or heart next to the question of the day. As she got older, her annotations changed, first to “Yes,” then “Okay,” and one day, “Duh.”

  This past summer, Richard had suggested twice—first in a jokey voice, then in a more serious tone—that it was probably time to stop with the whiteboard. He reminded her that at seventeen, Julia found out about the weather the same way everyone else did, by checking her phone. Ginger disagreed. Not only did she believe Julia still liked waking up to her little notes, she was convinced her daughter would miss them if they suddenly stopped. At least that’s what she thought before their Mount Washington trip. Now, a week after their return, Ginger woke up every day to find her messages had been erased.

  “It’s rude,” she complained. “Ignoring it is one thing, but erasing it?”

  “It was me,” Richard confessed. He gave her a goofy grin, the kind he knew always made her smile.

  Except now it didn’t. “You erased it? You realize you erased our family meeting.”

  “Maybe it’s time we gave up those too.”

  The suggestion startled her. Richard loved their family meetings. They were Ginger’s idea—she organized the agendas—but Richard ran them, going through the topics in an orderly fashion, making sure everyone got a chance to voice their concerns, creating at least the feeling that decisions were reached by consensus.

  “We can’t give up the meetings now,” Ginger said. “We need a meeting so we can apologize. So I can apologize. It’s on me. I should have told her about Charlie and Callie. But how can I apologize if I can’t get her alone in a room without Nick?”

  “Just take her aside for a minute. And if Nick’s there, so what?” He offered another smile. “And maybe ease up on the punishment. Maybe let her use the car again.”

  How was that a good idea? It was the first week of school and already Julia had missed curfew three nights in a row. “You’re suggesting—what? We’re supposed to just let her do—”

  Julia walked into the kitchen and stopped. Her expression made it clear she knew they’d been talking about her.

  “Morning,” Ginger said, trying for a believable amount of cheer.

  “Morning,” Julia mumbled. She filled up a travel cup with coffee. “I’m getting a ride to school.” She started out of the kitchen.

  “Aren’t you going to eat something?” Ginger got up and opened the refrigerator. “What about a clementine?”

  “I’ll pick up a bagel on the way.”

  Not a great choice, but Ginger let it go. “Jules,” she said to her daughter’s back. “We’re having a family meeting tonight. Eight o’clock. Jules? Did you hear me?”

  Julia left the room and the front door slammed.

  “She heard you,” Richard said. “She nodded. I saw it. She’ll be here.”

  Ginger shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Being right was not always fun—that’s what Ginger was thinking right before Julia finally came home at eleven o’clock. Nick was right behind her.

  Ginger stood up. “Sorry,” she told the boy. “You have to go home. We’re having a family meeting.”

  “You can stay if you want,” Julia told him.

  “That’s okay,” Nick said. “I’ll go.”

  Julia saw him out. Their good-bye took ten minutes. When she came back, she sank into the couch. “Let the lecture begin.”

  “We’re not here to lecture you,” Richard said.

  “I want to apologize,” Ginger took over. “I should have told you about my brother and the accident and my sister. I have no excuse. I was wrong.”

  As if she needed to underline how much she didn’t care, Julia let her neck go limp.

  Her daughter looked like a marionette on break. Ginger took a breath and reminded herself that there were scientific studies showing people in comas could hear what was being said around them. Surely if a coma victim could hear, so could an oppositional teenager.

  She continued the conversation, now directing her words to the top of her daughter’s head. “In my family, growing up, there were things we just didn’t talk about.” Julia snorted and Ginger pretended she didn’t hear it. “There are things that are still hard for me to talk about. But I’m here now. Happy to answer any questions you have. Everything is fair game.” She waited but got no response. Even a snort would have been better than this. Silence. “Hello?”

  Julia sat up and met her mother’s eyes. “You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to be living here much longer so I don’t care. Are we done? I have a chem test tomorrow. I need to study.”

  “Then why were you out till eleven?” Ginger looked over at Richard, hoping for help.

  “Go,” he said. “Go study.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” Julia ran upstairs and closed her door before her mother could veto the pardon.

  Ginger shook her head. “That was not helpful.” She whispered the next. “She’s changed. Something’s different. Could it be drugs? Behavior change is a big warning sign for drugs.”

  “I don’t think so.” Richard reached over and moved Ginger’s hair away from her eyes. “Can you take a vacation from worrying about her? For one week. Just try it. See what happens. Because”—he motioned to the space between Ginger and Julia upstairs—“this isn’t working.”

  Ginger might have taken offense at the implication—that Julia’s behavior was her fault—except that Richard looked so sad. So she
took the dare, a vacation from worrying for a week, meaning for one week she didn’t say a single worry out loud.

  At the end of the week, when Richard said, “Success! You didn’t worry and nothing bad happened!” she smiled back, relieved to see him look so happy.

  But Monday morning, first day at work after a week of not worrying, Ginger got a bad-news call from her friend Lydia, the nurse at the high school, about one of her favorite students—they weren’t supposed to have favorite students, but all the nurses did. The boy, a sixteen-year-old, had gone to the hospital over the weekend after accidentally swallowing his magnetic tongue ring. “They got the magnet out,” Lydia told her, “but they had to cut open his intestines. Poor kid almost died.”

  “No magnetic tongue rings!” Ginger wrote on the whiteboard that night before she went to bed. But in the morning her message was replaced by one written in Julia’s handwriting, “Sleeping at Angie’s. See you tomorrow.”

  “Did she leave yet?” Ginger asked as she sat down to her breakfast. “Did you see what she wrote?”

  Richard looked up from the paper. “She’s at zero period gym. And yes, I saw it.”

  “She thinks we’re going to fall for sleeping at Angie’s?” Ginger liked Angie, but she knew Angie had been dumped last summer for Nick, along with the rest of Julia’s friends.

  “Come on. What evidence do you have she’s not going to sleep there?”

  Ginger didn’t need evidence. She had a built-in danger detector and Richard knew it. The problem was that even when she knew something bad was coming, she couldn’t be sure of what the bad thing would be. What she was sure of was this: Julia was not planning on sleeping at Angie’s. “We have to do something. I don’t know how much more of this I can—”

  Richard’s phone interrupted her. He left the kitchen to take the call in private. Ginger hovered near the doorway but couldn’t make out what he was saying. When he returned, he looked grim.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Was it Angie’s mom?”

  “No. Work. New case.”

  “Oh. Boy or girl?”

  “Boy and girl. Twins. Five years old. I don’t want to talk about it. I have to go.” He left to gather his things.

  This was something new. Richard had used her as a sounding board for work for as long as they’d been together. His job was how they’d met. She was a new nurse—it was her second month at her school—when Orney, the gentle giant of a custodian who spent his spare time polishing doorknobs for no other reason than that the children noticed, walked into her office holding hands with a little girl named Ruby. The tears on Ruby’s five-year-old face had only made her bruised eye more apparent.

  “Go on,” Orney prompted. “Tell Nurse Tangle what happened.”

  “I fell,” Ruby said.

  “Tell her what really happened.”

  “My mommy hit me.”

  The custodian stayed with Ruby, sitting at her side, big hand next to little, both coloring, while Ginger called the Abuse and Neglect Hotline. The intake worker on the phone gave the case a status of Immediate, so they didn’t have long to wait.

  Orney was one of the few people who knew what happened next, that the investigator couldn’t locate Ruby’s father, who’d left the family long ago, or the grandmother who’d gone away, location unknown, so Ginger stepped up, applied for, and was given provisional license for foster care. Later that day, Ruby’s older brother told the law guardian assigned to them that Ruby had lied. His mother, the boy insisted, had never hit anyone. Because the children’s stories didn’t match up, Ruby was assigned her own law guardian. That was Richard.

  They met for the first time when Richard came to interview Ruby at her foster home, Ginger’s apartment. After Ruby was reunited with her grandmother, Richard made his next appointments with the girl in the office of her school nurse. One year later, when Ginger and Richard married, Ruby, by then in permanent custody of her grandmother, was their flower girl.

  They continued to be short-term foster parents in the early years of their marriage, but as the number of Richard’s cases grew, it got harder to decide which child to take. Often Ginger was made mute by the choices, weighing the needs of the daughter with the abusive alcoholic mother against the needs of the son with the schizophrenic dad. They were between foster kids when Ginger got pregnant, and after Julia was born they made the decision not to take in any more.

  Ginger would not deny that listening to the things that went wrong in a family sometimes took her breath away and that, on occasion, when Richard shared details of a case of neglect, she’d gotten physically sick. But she didn’t want this, for Richard to stop sharing altogether.

  She followed him into the small den where he was packing up his computer. “Tell me about the case,” she said. “I want to know.”

  “What’s the point? It’s just another horror story.”

  She recognized the tone. It was his courtroom voice, the one he used when the summation was over to signal that nothing more could be said.

  “But—”

  “No.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “You have enough on your mind. Try and have a good day. Try.”

  It was during her ten-minute lunch break that she called Angie’s mother, Shelley. Ginger and Shelley had been friends in that sort-of way mothers made friends, alliances formed when the girls were little, sharing information to prevent—well, no one really knew what they were trying to prevent. They just had a vague sense of dread about what was coming. The scary tweens followed by the scarier teens. Pooling what they knew was their first line of defense.

  As it turned out, by the time the girls reached high school, friendships had shifted and reshuffled more times than any mother could keep up with and soon the mother friendships faded too. It was still nice to catch up now and then when they bumped into each other in the supermarket or at the physical therapist. But it had been months—years—since Ginger had bumped into Shelley. If it was any other mother, she would have felt too awkward to call but Shelley was a worrier too. She’d understand.

  Except, she did not. “Are you kidding? Julia is the most together of all of them. I’m thrilled she’s sleeping over. I wish Angie brought home more friends like her.”

  Ginger wondered when Shelley had last spoken to Julia. “That’s sweet. Of course I think she’s great too. It’s just she’s got this boyfriend. And he’s kind of a creep. So I wanted to make sure she really is staying with you. And not with him.”

  “Julia would never do that,” Shelley told her, and then hurried off the phone.

  It was just before dinner the next night when Julia texted. Sleeping at Angie’s again. An emoji of a winking face followed. What that meant, Ginger had no idea. Against Richard’s advice, she picked up the phone and made another call to Angie’s mother. “Is it okay with you that she’s staying another night?”

  “Of course,” Shelley said. “Julia’s the best. And with her around, Angie’s an angel. Last night, the two of them were so quiet Dick and I forgot they were even here.”

  Ginger hung up. “So naïve. Shelley has no idea the girls snuck out.”

  “You don’t know that,” Richard said. “Can’t you give her the benefit of the doubt?”

  Ginger shook her head. “I have no doubt.”

  She texted Julia three times that night and got zero responses, but she didn’t report that to Richard. At breakfast she texted again. This time she admitted it. “I asked Julia if she wanted to come to my class tonight, but she didn’t answer.”

  This would be the first night of the semester for Nurse Tangle’s Danger Class. It was a popular offering at the Adult School. There were over a hundred classes in the fall session. Some, like Gluten-Free Cooking and Not Your Mother’s Mahjongg, had enrollment spikes and troughs from term to term. But Nurse Tangle’s Danger Class was always oversubscribed.

  Richard was baffled. “Why would Julia want to come to your class?”

  “I’m trying something new tonight. I�
�m going to start things off with a little talk about ‘The Danger of Secrets.’ I thought Julia might . . .”

  Suddenly, she wasn’t sure what she thought. That Julia might be interested? That she might be appreciative? She checked her phone. No text. She heard the front door close and looked up. Another first, Richard had left for work without a good-bye.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ginger was setting the table when Solly called from the kitchen, “Somebody’s bugs are here.”

  “The ants came?” Charlie ran to see them.

  He and Callie had been double-team begging for a pet for a year. Charlie did the asking while Callie pretended to be the pet. For their first attempt, a dog, Callie panted as she pawed her mother, staring up with adoring eyes.

  “How sweet,” Glory said. “Want a lift to the animal shelter? I’m sure they’ll be able to find a dog as cute as you a darling family in no time.”

  They tried a cat next, after Mimi told them cats were hardly any work. This time while Charlie asked, Callie purred and rubbed against her mother’s leg.

  Her mother shooed them both away. “Nice try but I’m allergic.”

  “Give it up,” Glory told them the day Callie trotted over to her and neighed. “Bad enough I have to take care of stuffed animals. Every day I put them on the shelf. Every night they’re back on the floor. We are not getting a pet.”

  But the edict had changed abruptly the night the family, gathered in the den, saw the commercial for Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm on TV. Solly, who had a low tolerance for other people’s pitches, waved the idea away with a laugh. “What kinda crazy idiot thinks people are going to pay money to bring bugs into the house?”