The Silent Sister(16)

Whatever.

I sat cross-legged on the bed in front of the box and pulled out photographs by the fistful. For a man who fastidiously displayed his collections, my father was sloppy about the family photos. I spread them around me on the bed. Many of them were from the years before I was born. Baby pictures of Lisa, but not too many of Danny as an infant and even fewer of me. I knew that younger children were neglected when it came to photographs and the recording of every developmental milestone. My parents were probably tired by the time Danny and I came along. Lisa had been eleven years old when Danny was born, and I was sure he and I were surprises. Mom had been a devout Catholic and I doubted she’d used birth control.

As babies, Lisa and Danny looked very much alike. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, long faces. I was the odd one with a little mop of dark hair and dark eyes, a round face and a button nose I was glad I’d outgrown.

There were pictures of Lisa as a child of about five or six. She wore a ruffled pink dress and held a diminutive violin. Her smile was wide, and she still had every one of her small, perfect baby teeth. What had happened? I wondered. How did that happy-looking little girl turn into a teenager sad enough to kill herself?

In the middle of the box were two old VHS tapes. One was labeled “Lisa, April 1980” and the other “Rome Music Festival, June 1987.” My heart sped up. I could see and hear my sister! The only problem was, I hadn’t seen a VHS player anywhere in the house. I hadn’t seen one anywhere in years.

I set the tapes on my father’s night table and continued digging through the box. There was a picture of Lisa as a very young teen standing with a boy about her own age, both of them holding violins to their chins but smiling for the camera. On the back of the picture, someone had written “Lisa and Matty, ’85.” She would have been around thirteen. I had no idea who Matty was, other than a cute kid with a mass of dark curls and chocolate-brown eyes. I found another picture of the two of them at sixteen, standing back-to-back, a strand of Lisa’s pale hair tangled in one of Matty’s dark curls. Lisa wore a white oval-shaped pendant around her neck. Matty’s smile looked genuine, but I thought Lisa’d had to work at hers. Or maybe I was reading too much into a photograph, one tiny fraction of a second, frozen in time.

I recognized Jeannie in one of the pictures. Her dark hair was long and she had her arm around my mother. Lisa, about eight years old in the picture, leaned against my mother’s side and a black-haired girl a couple of years older and several inches taller leaned against Jeannie’s. That had to be her daughter, Christine, the one who could help me with an estate sale. Everyone looked happy in this picture, my mother included. Her smile was wide, the tilt of her head playful. It was a jolt, seeing that relaxed and lighthearted side of her. But in this happy photograph, she hadn’t yet lost her daughter.

As I looked at the picture of my mother, I remembered the weeks before her death from cancer. She’d wanted to be at home, and the hospice nurses taught Daddy and me how to care for her here in this bedroom. I’d nearly lived at her bedside night and day during those last weeks. I felt like I grew up that summer. I bathed my mother, managed her medications, held her hand. I told her every day that I loved her, and sometimes when Daddy wanted to take over from me, I resisted. I wanted every extra minute with her that I could have. My usually reserved mother was softer, more open, in those last weeks, and although our conversations were never deep or profound, we probably talked more than we did during my whole life. Her focus was on our future—mine and Daddy’s and Danny’s. Danny was still in the hospital in Maryland then and unable to travel. “You all need to stay in touch with each other,” my mother had said. “You need to take care of each other.” I hadn’t done such a great job of that with Danny. He made it hard. I thought I’d stayed in good touch with my father, but now, knowing he’d been unable to be open with me about his life, I worried that I’d failed not just Danny, but everybody.

I set the picture aside, wondering if I should give it to Jeannie, but then I thought about the hundreds of photographs Jeannie most likely had of herself and her daughter over the years, and the few I had of my mother and sister, and I set the picture with the others that I would keep. I wanted to remember my mother this way, happy and content with her life.

The next picture I pulled from the box was of Danny in his uniform. The expression in his eyes was empty, as though he was surrendering to his fate. Or maybe I was once again reading too much into a picture with the benefit of hindsight.

There was another picture of Matty, the boy with the curly dark hair. He sat on a bench at a baby grand piano—ours?—between Danny and myself. I couldn’t have been more than two and Matty had his hand on mine above the piano keys, as if he was trying to teach me to play. Good luck with that, I thought. Funny to see myself in that picture when I didn’t remember Matty at all.

Beneath those pictures was a large framed photograph that made me gasp with recognition. I knew this picture. It was a professional shot of Lisa, Danny, and myself. Lisa and Danny sat side by side on a white upholstered love seat and I sat on Lisa’s lap. I couldn’t have been more than a year and a half. That would have made Danny about five and Lisa sixteen. All three of us were dressed in white. My hair was the only dark thing in the whole photograph and I wondered if it had irritated the photographer. Had I messed up an otherwise ethereal composition? Danny grinned at the camera, a gap where one of his front teeth should have been. My head was turned to the side and I was reaching up, toward his chin. I felt a twist in my chest, looking at the picture. I’d loved him so much, my big brother. He’d looked out for me. I was always mystified when other kids said they hated their siblings or tried to get them in trouble. There was never any of that between Danny and me. I treasured this picture. I was glad my parents selected this one over their other choices—surely there had been one where I was looking directly at the camera? But this photograph, with my hand reaching out for my brother, said so much more. Was there any way, I wondered, to get that connection back?