On Easter morning at the old house, everyone would leave for Mass at the Sacred Heart Church in town, the whole family in two pews. Sarah and Leanne would skip their own church services and come with their husbands, and with the baby. Of course Del’s pregnancy might alter this tradition a bit. I couldn’t be sure about my mother’s reaction—if she’d wonder aloud about the possibility of getting rid of it, or if she’d call our father to consult.
Most of my predictions were proven correct when Del called me a week later and recounted everything, nearly exactly as I’d imagined it, except for one startling revelation: she would stay in Connecticut with our mother. They’d had a long talk Easter evening, she said, sitting on our mother’s bed. Our mother thought it would be easier to have the baby there. She had offered the support I had not, and while I had to admit that staying in Connecticut was a more practical option—the availability of our sister’s gently used baby furniture, our mother as experienced babysitter—I was suspicious. Why would our mother with her newfound freedom from child rearing, and the drudgery she so hated when we were young, agree to help Del? Del said that they went out shopping at Nordstrom and A Pea in the Pod, and I pictured Del laying out each outfit on the twin beds in our old bedroom. I was reminded of the days when we’d choose our clothes for the first day of school. The whole scene was so redolent of the past, I felt a wave of sadness. How leery I was of any attempt to recapture lost happiness. I’d learned that it was impossible, an endeavor pit-holed with disappointment, and I steered clear.
“Who will break the news to Randy?” I asked her. “I hear he’s got the trailer all set up with a crib.”
Del closed a door and the hush, as if she’d shut herself in a closet, dampened her voice. “I wish you’d leave there,” she said.
She told me she’d sent me something, and the next day I received a small package that contained Sister’s missal. As a child I had often slept with the missal; it had been a comfort. I’d held the small book in my hands or tucked it under my pillow. During the day I knew I would have to hide it from Del, who sought out anything I valued. I’d slipped the missal beneath the bottom shelf of the built-ins against the wall, a white-painted shelf that lifted like the lid of a box. Like Mary Rae’s hiding spot for her journals. Del must have realized how I’d know where Mary Rae’s journals had been and explored my hiding place once she got home.
I took the little volume out of the envelope. Its cover was mildewed, and as I thumbed the gilt pages, so thin and fragile, most of them stuck together. I turned on the desk lamp and sat down at the table and looked again at the illustrations with a sense of having merged with the past, the younger version of myself somewhere, living out her days. On the inside cover, my great-aunt had placed her signature, and the date, 1943. She’d died at twenty-nine, in 1962; she’d been about ten years old. She’d written in the book with pencil, but underneath I noted there’d been another name, one erased, presumably by Martha Mary. I pulled the light closer and saw the etched-in name: Rose. The missal had been Rose’s, but Martha had claimed it as her own. I understood that. Someone had given Rose the missal, and Martha had wanted it, coveted it, and taken it, as I had.
In her phone call Del had reminded me of the pink inflatable rabbit she received one Easter as a child. It had been nearly as big as she was, and she’d taken to sleeping with it each night. It sprang leaks, and by morning it was out of air. We had to keep blowing it up, and our mother patched it with black electrical tape. “How sad for me,” Del said.
Would Del start another life with our mother and Leanne and Sarah, a life of babies and tending and birthdays and occasions for celebrating? During the years she’d been at the Institute, and then at Ashley Manor, the old house had been as much mine as my mother’s. We’d had our routine—tea in the Brown Betty pot, toast with orange marmalade in the afternoons. Like two spinsters, we’d spent our evenings reading under throw blankets. Would Del heat the water for the tea, open the back door and feed the gray cat? Would she move back into our old room, sleep in her long-empty bed, hang her new clothes in the closet where I’d left my summer dresses? My mother and I were often at odds, but we’d slipped easily into a pattern of life together. Would Del now step into my place and reestablish my and my mother’s old routine? And if she did, what was left for me? I felt a strange sadness, much as Del must have felt remembering her dependence on the pink plastic bunny, bandaged again and again with the shiny black tape.
Through the small window the sky is gray with burden, and out of that brushed charcoal shade the snow tumbles, delicate and dizzying. The flakes make a sound like pinging on the metal roof, and I try to imagine each cluster of crystals—hexagonal plate, crystal with broad branches, stellar crystal, ordinary dendritic, fernlike—like the images classified in the book we found on Grandfather’s shelves. Dark boards, a gilt snowflake on the cover, and inside thousands of photographs, the images so beautiful we spent hours turning the pages.