Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

“The new one is nervous,” I tell Charlotte in the kitchen.

“She’ll be fine,” Charlotte says. We are both older than God by now, or so Mrs. Keyes would tell us. We cling to the stair rails. Our stomachs are not so kind. Charlotte uses a cane, though she’s the stronger between us, as she always was. The rest is a question of being content with the hour at hand. Charlotte and I sit together in the kitchen late at night. We sleep in the same bed to keep warm. But we sleep there even in the summer when it’s hot enough for fans. On Sundays, we go to the market to fill our carts for the walk home. The rest of the day we stay at the stove, holding out our tongues for a taste from a spoon. This is how we fill ourselves.

Charlotte stirs a large pot of soup. A Kuchen bakes in the oven, after Mother’s recipe, or what I could remember of it. Die Heimat, Die Liebe , I sing to myself. I never learned what the words meant. “Like a lullaby,” Charlotte says. “Before I met you I thought all German sayings had something to do with pigs.” At the table, the girls wait for their meal with tired eyes, but they never hurry us.

“Mrs. Byrne!” Charlotte and I turn our heads. It’s our oldest girl, Gisel. Twenty-five with a scar on her cheek. I’ve never asked how she got it. A boyfriend , Charlotte thinks. The girl pushes the door open with her fingertips.

“Yes dear?”

“Arlene’s sick. Can I take up a bowl for her?”

Charlotte’s spoon bangs the pot.

“Of course,” I say. “I’ll bring it up myself.” The door swings closed between us.

“That girl is sick every other week,” Charlotte says.

“I was sick every other week.”

“Well,” Charlotte says. “Here’s hoping this is different.”

After supper, the girls carry in their dishes and line up at the sink to give them a good rinse. At the end of the day, their feet hurt and they lean against the wall. They aren’t so terribly talkative now. I take up the soup for Arlene, leave it outside her room on a tray. The new girl’s door is closed, but her music trails out loud enough. I’m not one for knocking to bother her. At the top of the stairs, I catch my breath. There’s a flutter under my fingers when I touch my throat, the hard bone above my breast — it goes away as quickly as it came.

Down in the kitchen, I wash the table and hang the rag on its hook. Charlotte stays at the sink and sends me off with a wave. After so many years, she knows my habits as well as I know hers.

I step outside. In the alley, the light lists like a ship. It’s the time of day I like best. In the summer, the sun lingers for a good hour after the dishes are done and the air is precious.

The lake is ten blocks. I make my way through the alley, past the iron works. On the other side of the river, some of the factories are closed. Some aren’t even factories now but condominiums, though I’d never wish to live in one. “Not good enough for a dog,” Charlotte says. But when I was young, the factories were everything. Work to keep a girl busy. Money of her own. Mother had once said the same of New York. There are other places. So many people . She took my hand and placed it to her heart. The streets, the buildings, every week when I walked a mile to the market with my earnings, I could feel them beating .

Later, I told Esther what Mother had told me. It was the first time Esther looked at me as something more than a sister. We can go anywhere , she said. I’ll take you myself .

The years after Esther left did us some good. The beds were full. The factory gave Charlotte a raise, and Mrs. Keyes had meat enough for the table. Soon, Mrs. Keyes stayed in her chair in the kitchen and Charlotte and I ran the house. Late at night, the three of us sat to talk numbers and recipes. The work was something we chose. It was my word or Charlotte’s that sent the girls to bed, the shopping lists written in my own hand, the three of us with keys no matter the hour. I thought of home only when the days grew quiet, one winter passing into the next. Wait for me , Esther had said, but I couldn’t do much else. A train ticket, it was more than three months at Charlotte’s wages. For the two of us, it was almost twice. I had no money for myself, save the few dollars Esther sent. Half a room and meals, that was more than Mrs. Keyes could afford no matter how many girls we had. After a while, Esther’s letters went empty of dollars. The bank wants Father’s acres by the river , she wrote . Nan says we’ll lose more if the weather doesn’t turn. Ray and Lee will make themselves sick with the work, she says. But they do it together, I tell Nan. Not a word about why she didn’t come back. Worse yet, those letters never said if anyone at home asked about me.

I wrote dozens of letters myself. Her name is Greta. She’s fair like me, but sometimes she roars. I hope to be good at mothering, and you a good aunt. How much longer will you be gone? I never sent the letter, not that one or the next. When I tried so much as write the address, my face grew hot. Though I believed my sister would keep the contents of my letters close, still I imagined Tom capable of any kind of knowing. And what if he learned of Greta? Would he try to take her for himself?

I shut the paper away in my desk. Still Esther wrote every few weeks. Nan’s got a daughter. She married Carl McNulty not long after we left. They’ve got that house of his, but they’re always with us. And now Agnes is married too. He’s tall as Lee and can carry her under his arm. Over the years, Nan had another child, a boy named Lee, and Agnes had three girls of her own. As quick as rabbits , Esther wrote. That’s what Ray says. He eyes Patricia and her empty skirts when he does. But the way Patricia frets over them, you’d think they were hers. Three, I thought. Now another girl wouldn’t be so precious. Another wouldn’t be welcome at all. I imagined Nan or Patricia discovering any letter I sent and cutting it open with a knife to read aloud at the dinner table. Then they all would know — that their sister had gotten herself in trouble. She’d only be a burden to them.

But if I didn’t send word about myself, I could be anything they wanted. I could be better — the one who got away, living a grand life in such a grand place, no longer willing to play youngest. And Greta would be safe, no matter what. Before she left, that’s what Esther had always said about us.

It was three years before Esther sent the letter about Father. She’d written it on a single sheet of paper, the print too small to read without a looking glass.

Ray was the one who found him in the dugout. We don’t know when he snuck out. Nan says it doesn’t matter a wink that no one went to the funeral except us, but Patricia was all done out about it. Lee didn’t say a word to the preacher. Neither did I.

I shut myself away in our closet. When I closed my eyes, I heard only the blood in my ears and the river rushing above my head. I didn’t breathe. I couldn’t feel the cold or wet. When I opened my mouth, I could taste the snowmelt from the hills, and it tasted like home. Riding the current, I passed our yard as it had always been — the house, the dugout, the barn. The yard was there with its florid green, the patch of grass, always burning, and Father on the bank, striking at the water with his cane. When the sun came out, Greta floated at my side. Are we fish now? she asked, her eyes clear and bright. Are we dead? I said, Yes .

Father, if I told you what’s become of me, would you understand? You locked us in that house, as if you worried we’d leave without a look back — the way you and Mother did. But locks don’t stop a girl from thinking. And nails do even less. From the beginning, we believed that river would swallow us. More and more, Julius , I heard Mother say. When is the land we have enough? To lay your stake, you convinced Mother to follow you to the farthest place trains could run. Father, I have never had so much as a room of my own, in Chicago not even a bed — but Charlotte is the difference. Sometimes the person who never knew you or where you came from is the best kind.