. . . but there is joy also! My child has survived. Christina is beautiful, though small for an infant her age and frail, having suffered such trauma in the womb. But the air here by the sea is good for her. She grows stronger each day.
Even Papa dotes on her. She has become the joy of his old age in these recent months, and if he in any way resents the circumstances of her entering this world, he does not show it. Eventually the past must be buried and all must be forgiven if life is to go on. While the circumstances of my returning home, the loss of my dear Andrew, sadden me, I count it gain that there has been the opportunity for rebuilding bonds with my father before it is too late. Andrew’s death and my long hours in the iron lung have taught me that not one day of our lives is a given, Iola Anne. There comes a moment when time stops, and to each of us that moment is a mystery. It so often slips around a blind corner.
I do not speak of this idly, Iola Anne. It is with a dire purpose that I have gone through the effort of using Papa’s considerable contacts with the War Department to find you and send this letter. I must tell you of your Maman. The doctors say that she is not much longer for this world. Her fondest wish is that she would see you again. I do not know your financial circumstances, so I have taken the liberty of including train tickets in this envelope. I hope that you and your husband will use them to come to us. Please know also that I love you and have missed you dearly these years since you left.
Please come home to us. . . .
I realized I was reading the letter out loud to Paul. I hadn’t meant to, but I was.
“Wow,” he breathed. “What a decision, huh?”
“Yes,” I said and silently returned to the box. “I’m afraid to even look at the next one.”
Paul rubbed his eyes and blinked hard, yawning. It was after eleven already. “Well, surely when she told her husband the truth, he stuck by her.” Hooking a hand over the back of the chair, he rested his chin on it and watched me as I unfolded the next letter and then another, skimmed the words, shook my head.
“She came home alone. And she came home for good.”
“So he left her when he found out . . . ,” Paul whispered.
“He did.” I turned back to the letters as Paul went downstairs to check on the kids.
The trail of Iola’s words led me on a train ride across the country and finally a ferry back to Hatteras on a stormy March day, where Isabelle was waiting, her legs in braces, her infant daughter nearby in Old Rupert’s arms.
Tears blurred the page as Iola recounted Isabelle’s words at their reunion.
“Oh, Iola Anne, Old Rupert told me what he supposes to be the reason for your leaving. Don’t you know that sisters are created not by blood but by love? In my heart, you have not been my niece, but you have always been my sister. . . .”
Closing my eyes, I brought the letter to my lips, breathed in the scents of ink and aging paper and truth. Sisters are created not by blood but by love. All my life, I’d let the ties of blood control me, limit me, define me, yet I’d ignored the ties of love. I’d shielded myself from the people who tried to slip inside the armor, who told me that I was worthy.
Paul came into the room again, giving me an uncertain look as he passed by. “Everything okay?” he asked tentatively.
“Yes. It’s more than okay.”
A new sense of joy filled me as I returned to the letters, the late-night hours slowly giving way to the early hours of morning. J.T. fell asleep on a fainting couch downstairs. Zoey made coffee and continued digging through newspapers, refusing to quit the task and go to bed. Paul and I worked closer to the center of the boxes, narrowing the open window on Iola’s life.
She’d lived on the island the rest of her years, moving back to Benoit House, first to nurse her maman, then caring for Isabelle and little Christina and for the grandfather who refused to claim her as his own.
Isabelle, eventually weakened by a bout of influenza that claimed the life of Christina, became bound to a wheelchair, her frame thin and frail, but her spirit undimmed. She discovered a love of photography and became an advocate for the wild Banker ponies living on the islands. With Iola’s help, she took countless photographs of the horses in their natural habitat, wrote articles for magazines, petitioned the park service for care of the horses, and argued against the wholesale roundup and removal of the horses that had survived on the islands for hundreds of years since swimming ashore from shipwrecked Spanish galleons. Even as Isabelle’s body began to fail, she and Iola fought to preserve the unspoiled beauty of the place that they loved.
I drive the car close to the dunes, as far as we dare go, so as to avoid becoming trapped in the sand. Isabelle recounts the last time we mired our vehicle, and we laugh together about our escapades, our life a grand adventure. We’ve traveled up to see the Banker ponies again today, to take photographs.
“Remember our rides on the old horse?” she asks. “And the day we discovered the shipwreck? It was a magnificent day.”
“Yes, it was,” I say, and for a moment I see the light of that young girl with dream-filled eyes. I find her inside the body that grows thin and rebels and refuses.
“I had the life I wanted,” she says. “I had my adventure. It was shorter than I’d planned.”
“I wonder if it is ever what we plan.” I squeeze her hand, then slip out my door and circle the car to hers.
“I hope we’ve done some good . . . for the horses and the people . . . and the islands.” For a moment, her gaze is far away. “There was no other place I loved so well as this one.”
“Me as well,” I say, and I know it is true. For all the places I’ve loved, there have been none like this. This place is a deeper love, a sisterhood of water and sand and soul. A place where you fill me through my eyes and my ears, Father.
I lift Isabelle onto my back to carry her over the dunes. She is as light as a child. The camera swings from her hand as I walk.
Isabelle chatters. This wasting of the body has done nothing to dull her mind. “I read that in five years, there will be a bridge connecting Hatteras from Pea Island to Nags Head. There will be a paved highway from one end of the Banks to the other. No need for the ferry, except perhaps for Ocracoke.”
“Well, I don’t know. They say anything in those newspapers.” I heave and groan as we pass through the dunes.
“You sound like the old horse,” Isabelle teases.
I laugh and snort and toss my mane. “Be careful, or I’ll dump you in the sand. Remember when you let the picnic blanket dangle against the old horse’s flanks, and he threw us both?”
“I think that was you who let the picnic blanket dangle.”
I snort again. We, both of us, know who insisted on the blanket with the fancy silk fringe that day so long ago. Isabelle was always the one with the grand ideas.
“They could save themselves the trouble of a bridge, you know,” I tell her. “In five years, it will be 1960, and we’ll be living in Futurama.” I think of that tiny city at the World’s Fair, almost twenty years past now. That miniature, perfect life with its plastic people. “And we’ll be coming here by dirigible and autogyro, remember?”
When we reach the shore, Isabelle tosses the blanket off her shoulder, and it lands in the sand. I spread it with my foot, lower her onto it, and sit beside her. The Banker ponies are nowhere in sight, but they’ll be along in their own time.
For now, we watch the sea, my sister and I, and the sea is always enough.
“They say we’ll put a man on the moon in not so many years,” she tells me. Isabelle is taken with Life magazine and National Geographic.
“I don’t believe it,” I answer. “Men are always trying to solve the mysteries of God, but they never will.”
She plucks a whelk shell from the sand, contemplates it, turning it over with her bone-thin fingers. “There will always be another mystery. God is infinite.”
She hands the shell to me, and I hold it up, letting the sun shine through it. I think of the creature that once lived here. Perhaps he has outgrown his old home. “You tie my mind like knitting thread. In very small knots,” I complain to Isabelle. “You always have.” I wonder what I will do when she is gone, when the thread runs out and its end drifts beyond my reach.
“You’ve always been the wiser one.” She lays her tired head on my shoulder and looks through the shell with me, into the great mystery. I think again that heaven must be like this place, and I say that to Isabelle. I wonder, When she is in heaven and I am not, how far away will she be?
“It’s just another journey,” she whispers, the long, strawberry-gold strands of her hair teasing my skin. “Heaven. It’s one more beautiful adventure. I’m not afraid. Don’t worry about me. Christina waits for me there. My little girl. And Andrew.”
“And Maman and Mama Tee and Old Rupert,” I remind her.
“Yes, and all of them.” She laughs softly. “I think the first thing I’ll hear is Mama Tee singing and Christina’s laughter.”
“I think so too.”