Lucy considered my face. “Mommy says people can be scared without being mean.”
“She is right.” I turned to Anna. “You have every reason not to forgive that slap. I don’t know what happened to my head.”
“I saw my little sister come back from the dead,” Anna said faintly. “I wasn’t thinking clearly either.”
I shook my head. “You thought I was alive. I thought you were buried somewhere I was never allowed to visit.” Tears ran down my cheeks, and Anna began crying again. We held hands across the blanket because neither of us knew how to cross the larger distance yet.
A nurse entered, checked Anna’s monitors, and asked if she was becoming tired. Anna nodded. The physician, Dr. Elena Shaw, later explained to Richard and me, with Anna’s permission, that a serious infection had worsened an underlying heart condition. The next forty-eight hours mattered. She was receiving intravenous antibiotics and careful monitoring, and the medical team was evaluating whether she would need a procedure once the infection was controlled.
I had chaired charity galas that raised money for hospitals. I knew how to speak at lecterns about compassion. Yet I had not known that my sister was lying in a room three miles from the mansion where we had grown up. The contrast hollowed me out.
Richard noticed my hands twisting together in the corridor. “What do you need?” he asked.
“To call my mother.”
He hesitated. “Are you sure you want to do it tonight?”
My mother, Eleanor Hale, was eighty-one and lived in the family house outside Charleston. My father had died eight years earlier. I still called her on Sundays, listened to her criticize caterers and flowers, and accepted her habit of changing the subject whenever my childhood came close to the surface. For all these years she had sat across from me knowing Anna was alive.
“I want to hear her say it,” I told him.
Mother answered on the third ring. In the background I heard a television program she always watched after dinner.
“Victoria, the reception should be finished by now. Was everything satisfactory?”
“I found Anna.”
The television sound disappeared. My mother did not ask who I meant.
“Where is she?” she asked.
“At the hospital. She’s sick.”
A chair creaked. After a long pause, Mother said, “I told you not to go looking into the past.”
“You told me she died.”
“Your father made the decisions that seemed best at the time.”
“You stood beside him and told me there had been an accident. You let me grieve at a grave that didn’t exist.”
She began speaking about the disgrace Anna had brought on the family, about Daniel Mercer, about how difficult things had been for my father. I looked through the corridor window at Lucy asleep against Richard’s shoulder. Her sneakers were muddy. She had been brave enough to enter a garden full of strangers for a woman she loved.
“Your granddaughter is here,” I said.
Mother made a small startled sound. “Anna has a daughter?”
“Yes. Her name is Lucy. You never bothered to know.”
I hung up before she could turn the child into another argument about the family name.
In the next day and night I learned that the distance between Anna and me had been constructed carefully, brick by brick. She had left home with Daniel after Father threatened to have him fired and barred from our neighborhood. They stayed first with a cousin, then moved for work. Anna tried to call me. Each time she reached the family house, Mother said I refused to come to the telephone.
Six months later Anna received a typed letter with my name at the bottom. It accused her of shaming the family and ordered her never to approach me. She kept it even though it broke her heart. I had received a different lie: an accident, no body to view, no funeral because grief was supposedly too dangerous for a seventeen-year-old girl.
“I thought you chose them,” Anna said when she could speak for longer stretches. “I thought they had taken you to their side.”
“I thought I had been too frightened to protect you,” I answered. “I spent half my life wondering if you’d be alive if I’d been older and braver.”
