The Song Reader (29 page)

Not that the girls liked children especially, but they liked money and they needed money for their college fund. Amy had planned it out perfectly, and the amount they required was pretty staggering, even for the state school where they planned to go: University of Missouri, Kansas City, where their mother had spent three years studying botany before she got pregnant. Amy remembered their mother talking about UMKC, and how happy she was then. Kyra didn’t care where they went, as long as it was away from here.

Of all the dreaming teenagers in their little town, few would make it out and even fewer would stay out. Years later, Kyra would admit that she probably would have been one of those failed dreamers herself, if it hadn’t been for her sister. Already a prodigious planner at fourteen, by seventeen, Amy had all the skills of a personal accountant. Everything they purchased went in the green ledger she’d bought from the office supply store: every T-shirt, every soda, even the twenty-five-cent gumballs Kyra liked to buy on her way home from the new McDonald’s, where she worked after school. The babysitting company had been abandoned as soon as the girls could make real money at real jobs. Amy worked, too, doing data entry at the aluminum plant that was the biggest employer in town. She was the only teenager they’d ever hired, since those jobs were normally saved for the adults who needed them. But no surprise, Amy had somehow managed to convince them, so there she was, sitting at a reception desk rather than standing on her feet, wearing her normal clothes rather than an ugly uniform, coming home without the smell of hamburgers in her hair. And she made three times more than Kyra did, but she put all her money in their joint account and wrote the amounts in the deposit column and shrugged off their stepmother’s question about why Amy insisted on sharing everything with her sister. Back in their room, Amy played the “We are family” song, though neither girl liked it anymore. “Just to bother her,” Amy said. “Because it’s none of her business.”

Kyra’s response to this was to make a joke under her breath, a dumb joke most likely, as her comic abilities had taken a nosedive once she hit high school. By sixteen, when she still hadn’t been kissed by any of the boys Amy had tried to foist her off on, nothing seemed very funny to her. She wished she could ask someone what she was doing wrong, but the only person who wouldn’t laugh at the question was Amy, and Kyra already knew what her sister would say. “It’s just the guys in this town who can’t appreciate you. You’ll see when we get to college. It will all work out.”

Obviously, Amy was as nice as ever, and Kyra, just as confused. Why
was
her sister sharing all her money? She’d never asked Amy to do that. In a way, it was insulting, as if Amy thought Kyra was too incompetent to make it on her own.

Kyra still went to confession; only the sophistication of her laments had changed. There was one Catholic church in town, and all three priests there had heard some version of Kyra’s problems with her sister. But one of them, Father Tom, thought the girl needed something beyond more time on her knees reciting Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Father Tom was young, twenty-eight or twenty-nine; he’d majored in psychology and he recognized all the signs of sibling rivalry in Kyra, but he was also deeply spiritual. In fact, some of his beliefs were decidedly radical. His fellow priests might have been a bit shocked if they’d heard him interrupt Kyra in the middle of one of her tortured rants to ask if she’d considered the possibility that her sister was an angel.

“Are you joking?” Kyra sputtered. “Angels aren’t real.” “Not in the ordinary sense, no,” Father Tom said quietly. “But there are people in our lives that act as angels for us. They guide us and serve to demonstrate what God’s love might look like.”

“No way. I’ve seen her barf hot dogs out of her nose. She’s nothing like God. Her sneakers smell.”

Father Tom sounded like he was holding back a laugh. “I’m not saying she’s physically an angel.” Though Kyra knew he was probably thinking Amy looked like an angel. People always said that about her. She had white-blond hair, blue-gray eyes, and a lithe, dancer’s body. But her expression was the main thing.
What a beautiful smile she has. She always looks so perfectly happy!

“She’s not an angel,” Kyra insisted. “She talks about wanting to have sex way too much to be an angel.”

Kyra threw this in hoping to shock the priest, but it didn’t work. He asked her to just think about what he’d said. “You don’t have a mother,” he said, sounding more confident. “You may never have experienced truly unconditional love before. If your sister is offering this to you, you don’t want to refuse God’s gift.”

As Kyra walked over to her evening shift at McDonald’s, her thoughts were as dark as the winter night. If Amy was God’s gift to her, what, then, was she? God’s burden on Amy? It just wasn’t fair.

After a few days, she decided that she wasn’t sure about UMKC anymore. Maybe MU would be more fun. Columbia was a college town, after all. Maybe she wouldn’t even go to college but would instead join the navy or the air force.

When she told Amy what she was thinking, her perfect sister finally got mad. It was the only big fight Kyra remembered them having—until the summer after her junior year in college, when everything went to hell.

“After all this?” Amy said, or more precisely, shouted. She grabbed the green ledger from the top of her dresser and threw it on Kyra’s twin bed, missing Kyra’s elbow by only an inch or two.

“It was your plan,” Kyra said. “Not mine.” She drew up her knees, wrapping her arms around them. She wasn’t an angel, but she was thin and flexible, too. In her case, the thin was called skinny. No boobs, no butt, nothing to set off her stick figure but her size 10½ feet and her too-pronounced chin. She had brown hair that she wore long and close to her face, hoping to hide that chin. Her smile, on the rare occasions that she smiled, was nothing like beatific. She couldn’t ever remember feeling perfectly happy.

“So you were just pretending to go along?” Amy said, flopping down so fiercely on her own bed that the metal box springs rattled. “You were
humoring
me?”

Amy looked shocked, and no wonder. Their father humored them. It was one of their first realizations, after their mother left when Amy was eight and Kyra was seven. They didn’t use that word, but they knew he was just pretending to listen. Pretending to care when they cried for Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.

“I wasn’t humoring you,” Kyra said. “It’s just, I’ve never had this certainty that you do. About the future. And about . . . whether we have to go to the same school.”

She looked away from Amy, but everything in their room condemned her. The money jar on the windowsill. The stack of UMKC brochures on Amy’s white dresser. The dresser itself, as they’d discussed whether they would take it with them when they went to college. Amy was planning to work full-time for a year and wait for Kyra to finish high school, so they could be freshmen together and live in their own apartment. It would be right up Rockhill Road, in the area where their mother’s college apartment had been. They’d seen the area only once, on a trip to Kansas City when they were so small Kyra was still in a booster seat. She didn’t remember the trip, but Amy had the address. She had all the papers their mother had left behind in a box under her bed.

Amy was leaning back against the wall. She had her pillow grasped in her hands and she was twisting it hard—as if, her sister thought, it was a useful substitute for Kyra’s neck. Kyra was waiting for her to say something, anything, but the only sound was the ticking of the old-fashioned clock that they’d found at the thrift store. They’d intended to give it to their stepmother for Christmas, but then she’d yelled at Kyra for leaving a spoon in the sink, so they gave her the usual boring black socks instead.

“Why do you care?” Kyra finally said. “You’ll have like a zillion friends and a boyfriend and teachers who’ll think you’re God’s gift.” Not to mention priests, Kyra thought. She paused for a moment and looked at her hands. They were getting raw, both from the very cold winter and from all the hand washing at stupid McDonald’s. She took a breath. “You don’t need me.”

“I can’t go without you,” Amy said. “I just can’t.” All of the anger had left her voice. Was she choking up?

“Yes, you can,” Kyra said. “You’ll do great. You don’t need—” Amy held her hand up. The tears were coming now, soft, Amy-style tears. No sign of the red, scrunched-up face that made Kyra herself so ugly when she cried. (She’d watched herself cry in the mirror, and actually cried more when she realized how hideous she looked.) But even so, Kyra felt sorry for her sister. Amy almost never cried.

“Don’t you love me?” Amy’s voice was breaking. Her long lashes were glistening with tears. “How can you not love me, sis? I love you more than anybody in the world.”

Kyra felt so horrible that she went to Amy and put her arms around her and said she didn’t mean any of it. She said she must have PMS, and hoped Amy wouldn’t remember that her period had just ended last week. “Of course I love you,” she insisted. “You are the biggest part of everything to me. I can’t even imagine the future without you in it.” Amy looked up, and Kyra nodded. “God, Amy, everyone loves you. You are the kindest, smartest, person in—”

“I’m not that great,” Amy said. “I’m just trying really, really hard. And all those people don’t love me. They don’t even know me.” Her tears were wetting Kyra’s shoulder; her snot was dripping onto Kyra’s purple shirt. She cried silently for a while. Kyra could feel her sister’s chest shaking when she added, “Only you really know me.”

Kyra wondered what Amy meant, what Kyra knew about her sister that other people didn’t. It surely wasn’t the mundane details of the body: the barfed hot dog, the occasional stinky feet, the mole on Amy’s forearm that she had to keep shaving or face a long, curly hair growing out from its center that they both agreed was unfair and a little disgusting. It couldn’t be their stepmother’s random criticisms and punishments. She was hardly Cruella De Vil, and though Amy and Kyra complained about her constantly, part of Kyra knew she wasn’t that bad.

Their father’s indifference was more important, but Amy had told a few boyfriends about that. It wasn’t exactly a secret anyway. Every teacher had remarked on their father’s absence at the girls’ school functions and parent conferences. Even the priests could tell their father was not a true parent to the daughters in the pew next to him every Sunday at Mass.

What did Kyra know about Amy that no one else did? She snored. Big deal. She had to work very hard sometimes to get her perfect grades. Harder than Kyra herself, actually, but this was a recent development. Kyra had chalked it up to Amy working so much at the aluminum factory. She hadn’t let herself consider that she might be better than Amy at something.

Amy was crying harder when she stammered out the word
Mommy.
It wasn’t strange; even seventeen-year-old Amy still called for their mother on the rare occasions when she cried. But it reminded Kyra of what she should have known immediately, why Amy thought Kyra knew her better than any of her friends. And why, in fact, she did.

When their mother left, it was a Thursday in July and so hot and humid the gnats stuck to their eyelashes. She said she was going to Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City where their grandmother lived. Grandma was dying, and she had to go to take care of her.

Their father was at work. She was standing on the curb, holding a liquor store box, pressing its weight against her chest. She’d packed up nearly everything she owned: her clothes and her books and dozens of framed pictures of the girls. The rest of the boxes filled the back of her old Plymouth. In the passenger seat, she’d wrapped a blanket around two limp plants.

Amy had run after her, grabbed her arm, felt it slip in her sweaty hand. “Wait,” she panted. “Take me with you.”

“Granny is sick, kiddo. I don’t think you want—” “I can help!” Amy said. “I won’t do anything wrong!” Though Kyra barely remembered this, the child Amy was nothing like Amy now. The child Amy was always getting into trouble. Knocking over her milk glass. Melting crayons in the radiator. Breaking their mother’s favorite blue bowl. Almost setting the house on fire trying to light a candle for a Barbie tea party.

It was all innocent enough, and it certainly had nothing to do with why their mother didn’t come back. Though it was true that their grandmother was dying, it was also true that their mother and father had already filed for divorce. Irreconcilable differences. Full custody awarded to the father but only because the mother did not request custody or even visitation. She did request that she not be required to pay child support, but since she had no steady source of income, the father saw no point in fighting her on that.

Their mother said nothing about the divorce. Instead, she told Amy that if she was a good girl, Mommy would come back for her. It was either an incredibly cruel thing to say or at least very immature. Possibly both.

“Until I come back, though, I want you to stay with your sister.” She pointed at the walkway, where Kyra was standing. Kyra was afraid of death. She didn’t like to think of Grandma dying. She couldn’t imagine wanting to go with Mommy like Amy did. “You two take care of each other,” their mother said, as she put the last box in the car. The closing of the trunk smacked the air and Kyra jumped.

Amy had to be pried off their mother and deposited next to Kyra. Their mother instructed Kyra to “hold your sister’s hand.” Kyra tried, but Amy managed to shake loose and she followed the Plymouth down the block, running as fast as her short legs would carry her. When their mother gunned the engine at the corner, Amy lost sight of the car and wailed her way back.

Their mother really did go to Grandma’s, but when Grandma died, she traveled to all kinds of places, none of them even close to their small town. She sent postcards to Amy and Kyra; she wrote things like, “You should see the Pacific. It’s FANTASTIC.” “The Liberty Bell isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Ha, ha.” She never once asked how her daughters were. Kyra didn’t care that much, since they obviously couldn’t have answered her anyway. None of the postcards had a return address.