She told Wade that they hadn’t just been Accomack poor growing up, but cripplingly poor. There was no money in the house. Not for toys, not for clothes, sometimes not even for food. After holidays, they would dread going back to school, because the other kids would all be talking about their presents and would want to know what they got. Anjee learned to tell stories, inventing dollhouses and other presents that she would say were too big to be carried into school. Occasionally, their mother would be able to secret away a quarter from the grocery money so they could each buy an ice cream at school. She would quietly slip it in their hands as they were leaving for school in the mornings. This was the happiest memory that Anjee could conjure when she thought of her childhood, and it was tinted with sadness because she also remembered her mother saying, “Don’t tell your father.”
She told Wade that their father had been more than mean. He wasn’t an ornery coot, like some of the other townspeople thought. He was scary, she said. Beatings were daily, sometimes with his hands, more often with the buckle end of a belt when the girls failed to follow an arbitrary order, like picking up a piece of lint from the floor. Anjee would look and look for the piece of lint but not be able to find anything. Their mother’s best advice was to try not to make their father mad, but she didn’t know how to stop it; he hit her, too. Tonya wasn’t targeted as much, partly because Anjee set to taking the blame for some of the things her father perceived as infractions. “Who did this?” he would ask about something he’d decided was unacceptable that day, and Anjee would say, “I did,” even though she knew it had been Tonya. She thought it was her duty; Tonya was so much tinier than she was.
They weren’t allowed to sit at the table during dinner; they had to eat in their room. Sometimes they weren’t allowed to eat at all, and Anjee never knew whether it was because there was no money for food that night or if it was because she and Tonya were being punished for something else they had done wrong. He would eat. They could hear their father eating at the table.
People didn’t know that when Tonya was fighting with bullies on the bus, half of the time they weren’t her bullies. They were Anjee’s. Anjee got picked on for her clothes and shoes, too, but she was too meek to defend herself. Tonya, who was three years younger and half Anjee’s size, would do it for her, not hesitating for a moment before flying on them and yelling, “Leave my sister alone.” Maybe it was repayment for how Anjee covered for Tonya at home.
As an adult, Anjee realized their father must have been troubled himself. He had gone through the family albums at one point and cut his own face out of the family pictures, leaving photo after photo of a man whose head was replaced with jagged little holes. He must have carried a lot of self-hatred to do something like that. As an adult, she realized that her father must have been a miserable person.
Anjee had run away from home before she was eighteen and didn’t keep in contact with the family. She had made a life on her own, away from the Eastern Shore. She had children she was devoted to, and started a business refinishing antiques. She’d sent letters to her mother for a while but they came back marked “Addressee no longer lives here,” even though Anjee knew they hadn’t moved and the return-to-sender message was in her mother’s handwriting. She was sure her father had made her mother write those messages. It’s how he’d always dealt with any mail from people he didn’t want to talk to.
After running away, the first time that she came back home was because she heard that their father had died and—she knew it sounded crazy—she wanted to know if he really was dead. On the way down the Delmarva peninsula for the funeral, she stopped and picked up Tonya, who at that time was living in Pocomoke City, Maryland. At the funeral home, she learned that her father had had cancer of the liver and lungs and that it spread to his brain. She was sure it was the chemicals in all the fields that the farmers of Accomack County inhaled so they could eke out livings and bring food to the rest of the world. She hadn’t seen Tonya in more than four years, and her sister had become so beautiful.
The two of them tried, after that. Sporadic contact, introducing the cousins, and trying to learn sisterly behavior. Tonya and Anjee had two properties promised to them—the one they had grown up in, which belonged to their mother, and the one that belonged to their grandmother, which their father had been raised in. After Tonya found their mother dead in the backyard of her home, Anjee came down to help her deal with the estate.
When they were done cleaning out the house, they came up with the agreement that deeded that property to Tonya, with the idea that their grandmother’s house would go to Anjee. And their grandmother did die, and Anjee did move back to Accomack, at least for a little while. She came down with her boyfriend at the time, a guy she retroactively realized was no prize. One night at Tonya’s house, the boyfriend hit on Tonya, leaning in to kiss her when he didn’t know Anjee was in eyesight. She didn’t know if Tonya had encouraged it, but it didn’t look to her like Tonya had discouraged it, either. Shortly after, it happened again, and they got in a big fight. Anjee said things. About how she thought Tonya disgraced herself looking like she did when she left the house. About how Tonya thought people were jealous, but really they were just horrified that a mother would be wearing the kinds of clothes that she did. “You’re not in a photo shoot, you’re in a bar!” she remembered shouting, or something like that. And Tonya shouted back. And one of the things she shouted was that their deal was off. Anjee couldn’t have their grandmother’s house. “I’ll burn it down before I sign over those papers,” she remembered Tonya saying.
A year or so later it burned down.
But all of their history, all of their past—maybe that’s why Tonya dressed the way that she did. Because after a childhood of never having anything pretty, she longed for people to notice her as something beyond ugly and poor. And maybe that’s why Tonya loved her boys so furiously, because she had never felt that kind of protective love at home.
And maybe that’s why it had been so hard for the two sisters to have a relationship, for all those years. Because they had both been through something scary and sad, the kind of thing that could bring two people closer together, or it could make it impossible for them to be in the same room with each other because of their shared memories. Anjee had gotten out, and after therapy, had gotten better. Maybe some people were affected more than others, in ways nobody ever could have predicted.
When Anjee considered Tonya and their strained relationship, she thought about the oddest things. Like about how, when they were younger, Anjee didn’t like chicken and only wanted to eat her vegetables. But food was scarce, and she was hungry, and she knew she would be punished if she left food on her plate. So Tonya would offer to trade. She would tell Anjee she could have all the vegetables, saying she wanted more chicken for herself. It was only after a while that Anjee realized Tonya didn’t like the chicken, either. Sometimes Tonya wouldn’t eat it, instead hiding it under the bed and throwing it away at school the next day. Which meant sometimes Tonya didn’t have dinner at all.
Anjee would think about those small, delicate acts of kindness from her sister, and she would cry.
She didn’t know whether Tonya had lit those fires. But either way, she was afraid the county would see her as a monster, and she wanted Wade to know her sister wasn’t that.