The Night Sister

Now Lucy gave the little girl’s hand a lick with her enormous tongue. The girl laughed.

“She was born the same day as my sister, September 16, 1943,” Rose said. “Sylvie and that cow are as good as twins.” Rose leaned in to rub Lucy’s lucky spot, her hand covering the whole state of Vermont. “Daddy says when Lucy was born he had a vision. He saw the motel, the tower, the pen for Lucy. He knew people would come. And he was right. Because here you are.”

“Did your daddy build that big tower?” the girl asked, turning from the cow to look down the driveway. The tower was thirty feet tall, twelve feet across, built of stone and cement.

“He built it the year I was born,” Rose said. “He did everything himself: mixing the concrete, batch after batch, in a wheelbarrow, hauling rocks down from the hillside.”

“It was a gift for our mama,” Sylvie explained. “She’s English, and he wanted to give her her own Tower of London so she wouldn’t be homesick.”

The boy smiled at this. “This place is amazing. I can’t believe you get to live here. You’ve got the tower, the pool, the whole motel.”

“And Lucy,” Rose added.

“She’s soft,” the girl said, rubbing her hand over the cow’s fur.

“If I lived here, I’d never want to leave,” the boy said.

“I know,” Rose said. “We’re real lucky.”

“I’m going to leave one day,” Sylvie said, bending to set Petunia down. The chicken began to peck at the dusty ground. “I’m going to go to Hollywood when I grow up.”

“Hollywood?” Rose snorted. “You’re going to Hollywood?”

“What for?” the boy asked.

“To be in the movies,” Sylvie said.

The boy smiled. “I’ll bet you’ll be a big star,” he told her.

Above them, a monarch butterfly fluttered through the air. No one seemed to notice it but Rose. She stepped away from the fenced cow pen and toward the butterfly. It hovered over Sylvie, then landed lightly on her shoulder.

The boy smiled. Sylvie caught sight of it and laughed. “Isn’t it lovely?” she said.

“Yes,” the boy answered, not looking at the monarch.

Rose reached out her finger, willing the monarch to her. Choose me, she thought with all her might.

When the butterfly didn’t come, Rose made an impatient grab for it, tearing one of its paper-thin wings.

“Rose!” Sylvie hissed. “Look what you’ve done! How could you be so careless?”

Sylvie ran off toward the house, cradling the wounded butterfly, calling for Mama. But Rose knew that, for all Mama’s healing powers, there was nothing she could do for the ruined wing.

The boy from New Jersey turned away in disgust, his chance with Sylvie lost, probably forever. He took his little sister by the hand and dragged her off toward Room 12, ignoring her protests that she wasn’t done petting the cow. Now Rose was alone with Lucy. She stroked the cow, her fingers making circles in her familiar, dusty fur.

“She’s wrong,” Rose told Lucy, glancing over her shoulder to watch her sister bang through the front door of the house. Rose wasn’t careless. She cared too much, that was all. She cared so much that sometimes she was sure her heart might explode from the pressing ache of it.





Rose


The next evening, the motel was nearly full. Only one room was still vacant: Room 28, all the way at the end of the new building.

Rose was sitting with Mama in the office. Daddy had run out to do an errand after dinner and wasn’t back yet. When Rose asked Mama where Daddy had gone, Mama’s lips tightened and she said, “He’s just out, Rose. He’ll be back when he gets back.”