I saw something pass over her face. Sadness, but something more that left me with a hunch about where this was going. Like the Entwistles, the Saninos must have reached out to my parents for help. There seemed so much to say, but neither of us spoke for a long moment, and then without any prompting from me, she simply began.
“We wanted more children, an entire brood, but my husband and I, well, we started late. So we were just grateful for the blessing of her. She got all the attention. She had better clothes than we did. She got sent away to summer camp. There were endless sleepovers and birthday parties.”
“It seems like a good way to grow up,” I told her.
“It was. But raising a child holds no guarantees. You can follow all the right steps, do all the right things, and still something can go wrong— Actually, no. That’s a word my husband would use. I won’t say wrong anymore, I’ll say differently than planned. That’s what happened to my daughter when she reached her teens.”
I remembered Albert Lynch, standing at the end of our lane, warning us that Abigail could seem perfectly normal until suddenly everything changed. I remembered the girls I’d read about in that “history” book years before too.
“As a mother, you think you know your child. You brought her into the world, after all. You changed her diapers and picked her up when she cried. You read her stories each night before bed and slipped coins under her pillow so she believed in the Tooth Fairy. But then, despite all that love and effort, years go by and one day she turns sullen. She keeps secrets. She doesn’t want to be near you. I used to ask her what was wrong, but she always told me the same thing: I wouldn’t understand.
“Then her grades dropped. She began skipping school. She didn’t want to be with her old friends anymore. Despite all that, she managed to graduate. We sent her off to a good Christian college in Massachusetts. We thought the freedom of being away from home would help. But after a month, we received a call from the dean informing us that she had stopped attending classes. Worse still, her behavior had become erratic. She was caught breaking into someone’s dorm. When the R.A. reported her, she threatened the girl with a knife.” Emily stopped and looked toward the window, listening. When there was no sound, she smoothed her hands over her dress and told me, “I don’t think she would have done the things she did if my husband had not been so hard on her.”
“Is that when you turned to my mother and father?” I asked.
Mrs. Sanino tilted her head, her mouth dropping open into an oval shape that made me think of a Christmas caroler. “Your parents?” she said after a moment. “We never took her to them. Although I read all about your mother and father, and saw them interviewed on TV, we did not meet.”
“But if you didn’t seek them out, then how—”
“My daughter came to know your sister when we sent her away to Saint Julia’s.”
This was not the story I’d been expecting after all. I needed a moment to adjust things in my mind, but Emily Sanino didn’t allow for that.
“As you no doubt have learned about me,” she pushed on, “I’m not afraid to take a road trip while my husband is away from the house. Nick is an officer three towns over, so he doesn’t get home certain days when he’s doing a double on patrol duty. I’d tell him I was going to see my sister over in Dover. Really, I snuck away to visit our daughter. During those trips, that’s when I met Rose. Did you ever go to see her there, Sylvie?”
“No. My father promised that we would, but he kept putting it off. He told us the staff prohibited visits, because it created setbacks in the behavior of the girls there.”
Emily scoffed. “Well, he wasn’t lying. That was their policy. No visitors. For the first thirty days anyway.”
“Ninety,” I said, remembering how endless that summer seemed without her.
“No,” she told me. “I’d remember if it was that long. But either way, they didn’t welcome the influence of the outside world at that place. Still, I didn’t care. I never wanted to send her there in the first place. Even if I couldn’t bring her home for good, I found a way to sneak her out for the day. And those times, well, they were the first in a great while that my daughter actually seemed happy to see me. Rose usually managed to sneak out too and join us.”
“Where did you go?”
“No place special. Hiking. Walking in the park. But it felt special. Those girls were like prisoners set free. Every little thing made them laugh. We’d stop for ice cream before heading back to Saint Julia’s, and it was as though I was giving them the treat of their lives. They were that grateful, that happy.”
I tried to place my sister in the scenario she described, laughing, eating ice cream. Instead, what I conjured was the memory of trips to the ice cream parlor with my parents during the months Rose was gone, the strange guilty peace I felt during that time. Those memories led me to say, “My sister didn’t last there more than that summer.”
“Neither did my daughter.”