Sisters (35 page)

“Yes, that’s
right.” Anna May looked at her in puzzlement, not understanding
her intensity. “What is it, Sophie?”

With a force which shook
her to her heels, everything Sophie knew about the past lurched over
in her mind and came to rest at a new angle. It all fit together now.
Yes, she understood.

She spun away from Anna May
and began to run. Without thinking what she was doing, she headed
down the road toward town. She was crying, the tears coming in a
flood, and they mixed with rain on her face until she had difficulty
seeing. Puddles were already forming on the hard surface of the road,
and she plunged into them, through them, hardly aware how wet she was
getting.

She heard voices far behind
her, but there were more immediate sounds: the noise her wet shoes
made, the sound of her feet hitting the earth. And there was a harsh,
rasping noise which she finally realized was her own breathless
sobbing.

A carriage drew alongside
her, and she knew it was James. “Leave me alone!” she
screamed at him through the rain.

“You’re getting
soaked! You’ll make yourself sick!” he shouted back.

“Just leave me
alone!” She veered off the road and ran across the grounds of
the county hospital, then across open land, then alongside city back
toward Ferguson Street.

She was wet now, wet
through. She could feel tendrils of hair pasted to her face; her
lashes were heavy with rain and tears, but still she continued to
run. And to weep. Sometimes they were her own tears she was crying,
sometimes her mother’s, sometimes her grandmother’s. And
once when she looked down at the hands clutching her skirts, she felt
puzzled about whose hands they were.

When she reached the
Stevenson house, Mrs. Syms was in the hallway. “Mrs. Dymond,
why, you’ll catch your death!”

Sophie brushed past her and
ran up the stairs. She stopped on the landing, stopped dead still,
her hand on the newel post. Then she approached the chair with the
buffalo robe folded over it, reaching out slowly, slowly, until her
hand rested on it, caressing the soft leather. A dark spot appeared
on the robe, and then another and another, and she realized she was
dripping rain. She pulled her hand away and looked at the floor. Rain
from her clothes had beaded in puddles on its waxed surface.

She went on up the stairs
to her room and took off her dripping clothes. Connie came in as she
started undressing. “Go away, Connie, leave me alone.”
She took off her dress, her petticoat, her corset, her stockings.
Even her lacy undershift and drawers were wet, clinging to her body
before she stripped them off. Standing naked, she opened the volume
on the bedside table and took out the letter she had put there
earlier. Clutching it with one hand, she pulled back the bedclothes
with the other and got into bed, burying her face in the pillow.

The first time Connie
knocked, she ignored it. And the second. When the third knock came
several hours later, Sophie bid the girl enter.

“It’s Mr.
Stevenson, ma’am. He’s awfully concerned about you.”

“What time is it,
Connie?”

“Two-thirty, ma’am.”

“Give him a message
for me, Connie, then come back and help me dress. Tell Mr. Stevenson
I’d like to see him at four o’clock. And tell him I’d
like Mr. Bellavance to be there too.”

They were waiting for her
in the drawing room. Both stood as she entered.

She looked directly at
Paul. “Emile Bellavance was more than a grandfather to me,
wasn’t he, Paul?” She paused. “He was my only
grandfather.”

Paul reached back,
clutching at the arm of the chair. He found it and sat down heavily.

“Julia wasn’t
Joe’s child, she was Emile’s. And you were Emile’s
child too. That’s why you couldn’t marry. You were
half-brother and half-sister. That’s why you couldn’t
marry. You were half-brother and half-sister, you and my mother.”

“We… we didn’t
know,” Paul said, his voice so low she could barely hear him.
“Even they didn’t know…”

“How could that be?
How could they not know?”

“Not for years and
years, they didn’t.” He furrowed his brow and rubbed at
his forehead. “It… it started one winter when the three
of them lived together, Joe and Deer Woman and Emile. It seemed all
right in the beginning. Emile told me that years later, when he had
to talk about it. But then Deer Woman was pregnant, and they didn’t
know whose child it was, Joe’s or Emile’s, and it didn’t
seem right any longer. After that winter camp, they were still close,
but they were never… together again, the three of them.”

“And Deer Woman had
no more children.”

He nodded. “That made
them suspect that Julia was Emile’s child, though they never
said anything much about it, even to one another. And they didn’t
do anything—what was there to do? Julia called Joe her father,
and he raised her, and, as I say, they didn’t talk about it,
not even among themselves.

“Then Emile brought
my mother, my brother, and me to Fort Martin. Julia wasn’t
there in the beginning. She’d gone away for schooling. But she
came back a year or so later, and oh, she was lovely, Sophie. Your
mother was so lovely. And she loved me. And then she was pregnant
with my child, with you.

“We wanted to marry.
Both Joe and Emile were violently opposed, but they wouldn’t
tell me why, any more than we would tell them why it was important
that we marry soon. But when they finally saw there was no other way
to stop us, Emile and Joe told Julia and me about the winter camp,
about the likelihood Emile was her father as well as mine.”

“And how did Julia
react to the news?”

“Calmly,” Paul
said, seeming not to notice the sarcastic edge to the question. “Or
at least that’s how she appeared. She sat very still when I
told them she was pregnant, and then she went off by herself and was
quiet. She didn’t want to see me, didn’t want to talk to
me. Lieutenant Talbot had just come to the fort. He was in the Corps
of Engineers and had come to see about making Fort Martin into an
Army post. I was never certain what happened between them, but within
a month, he and your mother were married. And then you were born.”

“Didn’t Talbot
think it odd I was born so soon? I must have been born earlier than—“

“As far as I know, it
never bothered him. I think he loved your mother, truly and deeply
loved her. And, oh, she was a lovely thing. She had fine large eyes,
doe eyes I called them…” His voice trailed off, and it
was a moment before he began to speak again. “About a year
later, Helen was born.”

“And then Talbot
died.”

Paul nodded. “Joe and
my father had sold to the Army by then, and there was an explosion in
the powder magazine. It was an awful thing. Two men were killed.
Talbot was one.”

“Is that why she left
us? Because he was dead?”

“She did depend on
him, lean on him. He gave her strength and support against the
knowledge of the terrible thing that had happened between her and me.
Or at least that’s how it appeared. After the day Joe and Emile
talked to us, I never spent any time with your mother again, never
knew for sure how things were with her. But there was something
besides Talbot’s death that caused her to leave. I could sense
that. It was you, Sophie. It was the way you looked. Every day you
grew to look more and more like Emile. You made it almost impossible
for her to forget what had happened.”

Sophie’s head fell
forward. James came to her and put his arm around her. “Was it
something everyone noticed?” she asked finally.

“No, it wasn’t
like that. But if you knew, you couldn’t help but see it.”

“And that’s why
she left.”

“It wasn’t you
yourself that sent her away, but the memory you called up. She simply
couldn’t function when she thought about it all the time.”

“When did your mother
find out? When did the widow know?”

“I wasn’t aware
she did. Not until I heard her threatening you.”

“But I can remember
her looking at me when I was a child, looking at me and hating me.”

“We thought she was
just generally bitter after Emile’s death.”

“She could see the
same evidence everyone else did and reach the same conclusion. Emile
with Joe and Deer Woman all those years. Joe and Deer Woman with no
other children. And I’ll wager she didn’t know you were
my father, did she? I’ll wager no one bothered to tell her.”

“No.”

“It’s too bad
you kept it from her. That would have justified my resemblance to
Emile, you see. And so it was, she had to conclude that my mother was
Emile’s child. You forced her to see the part of the secret you
most wanted to keep. I’m astounded you didn’t realize she
knew, especially after she hid Emile’s picture.”

“I suppose we didn’t
want to know that she knew.”

Sophie went to stand by the
window. She looked out, trying to slow her whirling thoughts. Joe
hadn’t been her grandfather at all. Not at all. Because had and
Emile and Deer Woman in winter camp… She shut her eyes, unable
to keep from thinking what it had been like. A cabin, or perhaps a
tepee, with hard-packed floors and willow-frame beds. Deer Woman had
cooked and sewed (had she quilled the buffalo robe then?) and told
her stories… stories… just as she, Sophie, had written
her stories, only it had been an elegant row house in Capitol Hill
instead of a cabin, and Sophie and Albert and Philip instead of Deer
Woman and Joe and Emile. She put her hands on the windowsill and
leaned her forehead against the cool glass. Was it coincidence? Could
it be no more than that? Or somewhere in her, deep within her, had
there been a story written long ago which she’d had no choice
but to live? Or perhaps there was only one story with variations so
slight that if one cared to look, she would always find herself in
others. She and her grandmother, from whom she’d thought
herself so different; she and her mother; she and her sister—for
a moment she felt as thought she were sinking into the quicksand of
other lives, and the sensation was not unpleasant. To sink was so
much easier than facing what lay ahead.

Abruptly she turned from
the window. “Did Helen fall in a struggle over the letter from
Julia, Paul? Or did you push her?”

“Sophie!” It
was James. “What are you saying? We’ve been through
this.”

“Paul knows what I’m
talking about, don’t you, Paul?”

Paul remained motionless.
He was sitting in the overstuffed chair with an elbow on his knee,
his forehead resting in his cupped hand.

“Things have never
bothered you very much, have they, Paul?” Finding out you’d
fathered a child upon your half-sister, her fleeing in despair to
who-knows-where—most men would have been destroyed, but you
went right on with your life. And it was the same after Helen…
was killed, wasn’t it?”

Still he remained silent.

“It had to be the
children heard! It must have been!” She was shouting, and she
stopped and closed her eyes to calm herself before she continued. “I
didn’t force the issue when I first found out you were my
father. I let you sidetrack me with your talk of how you loved me. I
let you mislead me with truths that were real lies. What was it you
said? ‘I couldn’t harm Helen just to keep you from
knowing I was your father.’ And I believed you. I could feel
you were telling me the truth. What you didn’t say was that
there was another, darker secret you’d do anything to hide.”

“I didn’t lie
about loving you, Sophie!” Paul burst out. “All I ever
wanted is what’s best for you.” He leaned back in his
chair and spoke more quietly. “She first called me over to talk
about the letter from Julia in June, just a little over a year ago
now. She was happy and excited, so certain she was going to find
Julia. She only told me, she said, because Julia mentioned me in the
letter. She wasn’t going to tell anyone else, not even Amy
Travers, not until she had located Julia.

“I tried not to be
too concerned. I didn’t want her to find Julia, of course,
because I didn’t know what might come of a reunion between the
two of them, but I told myself there wasn’t much to worry
about, that the chances of her finding Julia weren’t nearly as
good as Helen thought they were.

“Over the next month,
I sensed she was gradually becoming discouraged. And then she called
me over on August 12.”

“The day she died.”

Paul nodded, his eyes down.
“She had told me she was convinced that Pinkerton’s
wasn’t paying as much attention to the matter as they should.
But she didn’t like any other agency, didn’t think any of
the others was as good. She wanted to know what I thought she should
do.

“Well, I told her
just to keep trying and to keep her spirits up. I got up to leave.
She was in front of me, showing me out, just about to go down the
stairs, when she whirled around all of a sudden.

“ ‘I’ll
go to Denver, Paul!’ she announced. ‘If I go down there,
Pinkerton’s will have to keep working on it. They can’t
just set it aside if I’m checking on their progress every day.’

“ ‘You can’t
go,’ I told her. ‘You can’t.’ Because I
feared she was right. With her down there pushing the matter, Julia’s
trail might be found.

“ ‘I am going,
Paul,’ she said.

“ ‘No!’ I
shouted, and then… I don’t know for certain how it
happened. She was standing with her back to the stairs, and I stepped
forward with my hand raised. I didn’t intend to strike her, I
never intended that. I was just… overwrought. But she jerked
backward and fell. I rushed down the stairs after her, but as soon as
I saw the way her heard lay, I knew she was dead.”

“And you ran away.”

“I went out the back
door.”

“Why didn’t you
take the letter from Julia?”