The Shadow Sister, page 10
“She doesn’t hate you,” I concede. “She probably likes you better than me, honestly. She just doesn’t like the church.”
Ruth nods with her lips closed around her spoon. “Oh,” she says, drawing out the word. “Sounds like her. Makes sense. I bet we’d even agree on some of her complaints.”
I nod. Ruth is definitely more devout than either Sutton or me, but she’s less of a stereotypical pastor’s daughter in private. She has faith, but several of her social beliefs would not be met well by her father if she voiced them to his face. It’s not like Ruth and I spend most of our time hanging out at Heights Above out of choice. It’s usually a choice between the church or her house. Her dad has a parental control app on her phone that tracks her location, so she doesn’t exactly have the freedom to leave whenever she wants. At least at church, other people can keep an eye on her siblings so we don’t have to babysit.
“She could have come,” Ruth says. “You said she did okay at the pet shop.”
“My mom was there too,” I remind her. “They’re not going to let her go anywhere unchaperoned for who knows how long.”
Besides, I’m having more fun without her. After the past few days, it’s nice to have some space from all the family drama.
“You can have my loyalty card,” I tell Ruth. I slide it across the table. “Mom and Dad aren’t likely to let me out of the house much this summer either.”
“I’ll keep it safe for you,” Ruth says, picking it up and twirling it between her fingers. “Oh, he punched the whole thing!”
“That’s strange,” I say. “You should use it.”
Ruth doesn’t say anything. I look up from my Froyo, and her lips are pursed like she’s trying to hold in a laugh. “I think he wants you to use it.”
She pushes the card back toward me. There’s a number written on the back.
“What?” I look to the register. The boy winks at me. His blue eyes match his teal uniform.
I stumble over every syllable trying to exit my mouth. “I don’t—I, um… You can keep it.”
“I will take the free yogurt,” Ruth agrees, “but I won’t be calling him.”
“Why not?”
“Casey,” Ruth says, looking like she’s about to laugh at me again. “He likes you. And I’m a lesbian.”
“Right,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m not my best today.” I stick another spoonful of yogurt in my mouth, but my cheeks still burn at the attention.
“No apology necessary. I’m very happy to file this in my Casey collection of embarrassing memories.”
“Come on,” I groan. “I have a legitimate reason to be distracted.”
Ruth nods. “This time,” she concedes and doesn’t press it any further. We eat in a pop-soundtracked silence. I try to commit this moment to memory, the contentment of escaping responsibility and being in the company of the sister I chose instead of the one forced upon me.
“See?” A voice breaks in, ringing as melodically as the door chime announcing a new customer. And another new customer, and another, and another.
Six girls of varying shades but identical moods file in. It disrupts the ecosystem of the place, distracting kids at other tables. An employee steps out of the way, the white cleaning cloth in his hand fluttering like a flag of surrender.
“I told you I wasn’t making shit up,” the first girl says. A father nearby frowns at her language, looking at his toddler. “I couldn’t make this place up if I tried.”
Four of the girls head straight to the soft-serve machines, but the leader—a white brunette with expensive highlights—stays behind with the final member of the group. The straggler watches her friends with the same wariness I had for Fro-Yo-Yo, but she has a more justifiable reason to avoid the chaotic group arguing over flavors.
Her arm is in a sling. Her manicured fingertips tap the cast encasing her wrist, colored the same hot pink as her nails. She uses her free hand to tighten her strawberry-blond ponytail, which complements the blush tones of her coloring. “It’s a lot,” she says. I feel a kinship with Cast Girl.
At least I do until the leader speaks again.
“You can wait with Coach if that’s easier,” she says. “Tell me what you want, and I’ll get it for you.” They both turn their heads toward the front window, and I follow their gaze. My appetite leaves the building.
I recognize the man sitting in the front seat of the forest-green van in the parking lot. He’s clearly browsing his phone from his bent head and slight glow on his face. I can hardly see his face, but I don’t need to.
Even if I couldn’t place him by appearance alone, the logo emblazoned on the van would make it a dead giveaway. Gwen Light Academy’s crest shines in the summer sun. WILD WILLOW CHEER SQUAD reads the custom paint job.
“We should go.” I’m already halfway out of my seat. I can’t deal with this today.
Ruth frowns, brows furrowing. “What?”
They’re Sutton’s teammates.
I should have recognized them from the search party or the halls at school, but they look less like clones when they aren’t color coordinating every part of their outfits. I didn’t even notice one of them had an injury when I saw them at the park. The pink of her cast must have blended in with the neon of their FIND SUTTON T-shirts.
“We have plenty of time before the nanny comes back,” Ruth argues, oblivious.
I consider rushing out the door to avoid them, but that’s more likely to cause a scene than staying put. Then Ruth utters the killing blow to my attempt to stay unnoticed.
“Casey,” she asks, as the music lulls between songs. “What’s wrong?”
The whole shop hears.
“Casey?” repeats Cast Girl.
“Oh my God,” echoes the leader, likely the captain. “It’s Sutton’s sister.” The rest of the pack turns from the soft-serve machines.
And just like that, our paradise is gone.
The girls at the machines start hurrying through their orders to come over, but one shouts across the shop, “How’s Sutton?”
“I’m so glad she’s home and okay,” the captain chimes in. She moves forward as she speaks, and I instinctively step back, my abandoned seat pressing against my spine. I catch Ruth’s eyes and see the apology forming in them, but nothing can be done now.
Cast Girl doesn’t crowd me like her friend, but she asks, “She is okay, right?”
The entire shop is listening to the conversation now. The cheer girls, the families—they all wait for my response. Sutton was on prime-time news for a whole week. They know her name. They know her face. They practically know more about what happened to her than she does.
And now they can see her in me.
“She’s—” I swallow the bile rising in my throat. “She’s good.” I can tell by their faces that it’s not enough of a response, but I don’t know what else to say. “She doesn’t remember anything.”
“Is she going to get better?” Cast Girl asks.
“Yeah,” comes a voice from the toppings bar. “Cheer camp is in August. Will she be better by then?”
I open my mouth to respond, but I don’t get the chance.
“Screw cheer camp, Amelia,” the captain says with an eye roll. “I’m pretty sure Sutton and her family have more important things to worry about.”
“She’s one of our best tumblers, that’s all.”
“Amelia!”
“I’m not saying she needs to be on her A game. It would be nice—”
“Is she even gonna do cheer in the fall?”
“She may not come back to school at all.”
“You shouldn’t say that, she—”
Their voices and questions overlap. I try to answer what I can, but there aren’t really answers to give. I have no idea what happened—or what’s going to happen. I have no idea when or if Sutton will return to normal. I don’t know why we’re going through this. That’s why Ruth and I came here. This was supposed to be an escape.
Ruth gathers our half-eaten bowls and walks toward the trash. The team takes the hint to lay off the questions, though they’re still focused on me.
“Can we come see her?” Cast Girl asks.
The others fall silent to hear my answer. I feel like an awards-show announcer presenting a deeply competitive prize. No matter what I say, someone will end up disappointed. But their affection for my sister is evident, even if she won’t remember them.
“That’s not really up to me,” I say honestly. “You’d have to ask my mom. She’s in charge of who’s allowed to see Sutton.”
“I have her number from carpool!” Amelia says. “I can text her!”
“No!” chorus all the other girls.
“Until you learn how to pull your foot out of your mouth,” the leader says, “there’s no way in hell you’re gonna be the one to talk to Sutton’s mom.”
I can’t help but agree.
“Could you be our go-between?” Cast Girl asks. She’s already pulling out her phone before I have a chance to respond. “Your number?” I rattle it off, and a few seconds later, my phone pings.
Unknown Number: This is Natalie. Sutton’s friend. Let us know what we can do to help.
I save the contact as Ruth makes her way toward the door. She opens it for me. I don’t waste a second following her out, but I pause and look back. They’re still watching me.
“Thanks,” I tell Natalie, though I’m not sure what for.
As we pass the green cheer van on our way through the parking lot, the man in the van looks up from his phone and does a double take at the sight of me. It’s the assistant coach, once again filling in for Coach McCoy. I hold his gaze long enough to see the exact moment he realizes I’m not my sister.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he looked relieved.
ELEVEN
Ma Remy was kinda hot, once upon a time.
I’m beginning to seriously doubt Dad’s claim that I resemble a younger version of my grandma because I’m looking at several photos of her. I’ve never had such effortless elegance, and there is no way I could pull off bell-bottom jeans, even if they managed to somehow come back in style.
Her hair is wild and sun-kissed like the rest of her, glowing through the time-faded print. Her smile is immortal. I can see it in this snapshot of youth the same as through the memories of my childhood. The same as the last time she smiled at me, tired and sedated but still mine.
“I miss her,” I say.
Dad smiles softly at me and nods, but I only hear laughter. The sliding door is closed, but the sound of Sutton’s teammates in the pool is inescapable. Romeo sits anxiously on our side of the glass, his tiny huffs fogging up the foot of the door with his disapproval.
“You can go hang out with them if you want,” Dad says. He lifts the lid off another box of Grandma’s photo albums and memorabilia. He’s still working at the dining table instead of his office, though Sutton isn’t even in the house. She’s in the backyard with Mom.
I can see her from where I’m standing. She’s perched at the far edge of the pool, her legs dangling in the water while the rest of her is completely dry. Her bikini shows off her athletic figure. She looks perfect. Entirely normal. Exactly like her frolicking friends. Except she’s not interacting with them at all. She simply watches them.
“I’m supposed to help you,” I say. “I’m fine here.”
“You can skip one afternoon,” Dad offers. “I’m not tallying your hours for payroll, Casey. One day off isn’t going to make you miss your concert. You go have fun.”
I tear my gaze from the yard, returning to the family history laid out before me. “I’m having more fun here,” I say honestly.
I don’t even know the girls on the cheer team. I should recognize my sister’s friends. I’ve seen them all dozens of times when my parents dragged me to support Sutton at competitions.
I won’t pretend I always paid attention. Those bleachers were where my Ivy James fandom took root as I browsed and befriended other fan blogs on my phone as the hours dragged on and on. I’d listen to music while the rival teams performed, only taking out my headphones when Sutton’s group finally took the stage. But while Sutton showcased her assimilation and teamwork, my community thrived in her shadow.
We both preferred it that way. She never formally introduced me to her friends, and she never asked about mine. It shouldn’t be so unsettling that I can barely name a fraction of the girls in our yard today, but it is.
Mainly because the person who feels like the biggest stranger is Sutton herself.
“Well, I’m happy to have you with me,” Dad says. He ducks his head to hide his smile, like this acknowledgment of affection could hurt him somehow. I return my focus to our task too.
I haven’t seen many of these pictures before. Ma Remy liked to display photos of family at her house, but it was mostly pictures of us as children with her. She also displayed some very old frames of her and her two brothers, along with snapshots of their children and grandchildren back in the Carolinas.
I’ve seen pictures of younger Ma Remy before, of course. Mom always loved pointing out the prints of Dad as a little kid. Those are the ones Mom is most excited to redisplay now that we’ve inherited my grandma’s scrapbooks. But Dad is more interested in Ma Remy’s memorabilia from before he was born.
“Who is this?” I ask him, pointing to a picture of a tall man with his hands wrapped around young Ma Remy’s waist at a park. She’s laughing. Her hair is pressed slick from the top of her head down to just below her ears, where big roller curls hem her head, like a petticoat peeking out from the bottom of a skirt. They’re both wearing warm-weather clothes, but with them being from the South, that doesn’t mean it was summertime when the photo was taken.
“That’s my father,” Dad says. “Spring of 1975, about a year before I was born.” He doesn’t linger on the photo. He returns to unsealing two boxes of journals and prints. I know better than to ask him to elaborate, though he usually loves waxing poetic about family history.
I know he won’t talk about Grandpa Booker. This is the first picture I’ve seen of him. He died before Dad was born. Before Ma Remy even knew she was pregnant, a month before their wedding. He’d survived the Vietnam War only to die on American soil right before his life was set to begin. No one has ever told me how or why.
Everything I know about Grandpa Booker is what he never knew himself, what he was never able to experience. He never got to marry the love of his life. He never knew he was going to be a father. He never met Dad, let alone Mom or me or Sutton.
He never knew us, and we don’t know a lot about him. He was estranged from his family and didn’t talk about them much to Ma Remy before he passed. For someone as obsessed with heritage and legacy as Dad, the lack of knowledge we have about Grandpa Booker has always been a sore spot. It’s not that Dad is ashamed of his father; I think he has a hard time with all that he will never know about him or his family.
Daddy looks just like him. I start to sift through the pictures on my half of the table for ones featuring Booker. Dad pages through one of his mother’s old diaries. His eyes are misty behind his glasses. He’s too distracted to really pay attention to me.
Booker is always smiling. In almost every photograph, he’s grinning wide at the lens. I have to assume Ma Remy is behind the camera because the only ones where he’s not facing the camera are where his smile is directed at her instead. He always looks so happy. It’s like a flashback to Dad before Sutton’s disappearance.
The only print he’s not grinning in is the single one of him in uniform. Though Dad was never in the military, Grandpa’s serious—almost pained—expression reminds me of my father now, so I set that one aside.
I run out of photos that aren’t in scrapbooks, so I start to skim through one of the journals Dad isn’t reading. A navy-blue patterned one with an illustrated iris on the cover has several Polaroids tucked inside, so I slow my flipping to give a closer inspection to the content.
I’m distracted by the word ivy repeated several times on a single page. Ma Remy wasn’t writing about Ivy James twenty years before she was born. It looks like a list of ingredients.
Ivy—woven into marriage wreaths, for protecting homes and blessing luck on a person.
Cleavers—for binding?
Bay Leaf—purification? Needs more research.
Grandma listed several combinations of herbs and flowers, crossing out certain matches with various levels of frustrated scribbling. It seems like she was testing something.
She reasoned her experiment was failing because of the absence of a plant she couldn’t identify. She sketched out various small flowers and weeds around the potential lists.
“What’s this?” I ask.
Dad looks up at me from the journal he’s reading, then reaches out a hand for me to pass it over. He pushes his glasses up his nose, but he doesn’t spend more than a few seconds reading before he snaps the blue cover closed and puts it back in one of the boxes. “This is one your grandma’s diaries,” he says.
“It didn’t seem like a diary,” I say. “Or a field guide. But it had information and sketches about plants. It looked like she was trying to solve a puzzle.”
He glances down at the box. He doesn’t look like his father anymore. “It’s probably from when she was trying to remake the pendant on her bracelet.”
“Remake it? She told me it’d been in the family for generations,” I say. “Did it get lost?”
“For a time, yes.” Dad puts the journal he was reading on top of the one he took from me and then puts the lid back on the box. “She found it eventually, so it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to be reading about Ma Remy swooning over your grandfather. Trust me, she does not mince words in these journals.”
I giggle. “I think can handle it.”
“They don’t have anything we’d want to put in the display,” he insists. “Maybe when you’re older.”
I want to argue, but I know better. “Well, I want to put this in the display.” I hand him the picture of Ma Remy and Booker embracing at the park. “He looks like you. He belongs in our heirloom collection.”
