Clara nearly dropped her watering can when the moving truck pulled into the driveway next door.
At 76, Clara lived a quiet, solitary life. But the woman directing the movers across the lawn looked exactly like Clara’s older sister, Eleanor. It was impossible. Eleanor had died in a tragic boating accident fifty years ago, leaving Clara with a lifetime of unresolved grief and a family broken by sorrow.
For three days, Clara watched the woman through her kitchen window, terrified of her own failing memory. The stranger had the same slight limp, the same sharp profile, and the same habit of tucking her hair behind her left ear.
On Sunday morning, Clara finally gathered the courage to knock on the neighbor’s door.
Before she could cross the wet grass, her front doorbell rang.
Clara opened the door. The woman from next door stood on the porch, her eyes filled with tears. She didn’t introduce herself. She reached into her canvas tote bag and pulled out a heavy, leather-bound Bible with a broken brass clasp.
Clara gasped. It was her family’s heirloom Bible, the one that had supposedly gone down with Eleanor’s boat in 1974.
“My name is Sarah,” the woman whispered, holding the heavy book out with trembling hands. “My mother told me to find you after she passed, and to beg for your forgiveness.”
What the Lake Didn’t Take
Clara didn’t take the Bible.
She looked at it. The clasp was broken the same way it had always been broken, bent outward at the hinge, because their father had once slammed it shut on Eleanor’s thumb during a Wednesday-night argument and something in the brass gave. Nobody ever fixed it. Their mother said a Bible didn’t need a lock anyway.
“Your mother,” Clara said.
“Eleanor,” Sarah said. “Eleanor Ann. She went by Ellen. After.”
After.
Clara’s hand found the door frame. The paint there was flaking; she’d been meaning to call somebody about it since April. She held on to the flaking part and felt it come off under her fingers like dry skin.
“She drowned,” Clara said. “In Lake Whitcomb. June the twenty-second. They found the boat upside down by the north cove and they dragged for her for nine days.”
“I know,” Sarah said. “I know they did. She told me about the nine days.”
Behind Sarah, one of the movers was carrying a floor lamp across the lawn with the shade still on, and it bobbed above the hedge like a head. Clara watched it go. She didn’t know why she watched it.
“Can I come in?” Sarah asked. “Please. I’ve been sitting over there since Thursday trying to work up to this, and I saw you in the window, and I thought, she knows. She already knows. She’s been looking at me like she’s seen a ghost.”
“I have,” Clara said.
She stepped back from the door.
Coffee, Which Nobody Drank
Clara made coffee because her hands needed something. She measured out the grounds by the old method, one scoop per cup and one for the pot, and then she lost count and had to dump it and start over. Sarah sat at the kitchen table with the Bible in front of her. She didn’t open it. She kept one palm flat on the cover as if it might slide off the table.
“You have her hip,” Clara said, with her back turned.
“Dysplasia. They didn’t have a word for it when she was a girl. They just said she walked funny.”
“Our father said she walked like she was mad at the ground.”
Sarah laughed, a wet little sound. “She said that. She said Grandpa said that.”
Grandpa. Clara set two mugs down harder than she meant to and coffee jumped over one rim and ran under the sugar bowl. Neither of them wiped it up.
“Where,” Clara said. “Where did she go.”
“Fort Wayne, first. Then Muncie. She worked the counter at a dry cleaner’s for about twenty years and then she did bookkeeping for a Lutheran church, which she thought was very funny, considering.” Sarah turned her mug a quarter turn without drinking from it. “She died in March. Pancreatic. It was fast, which she said was the only fair thing that ever happened to her.”
March. Clara had spent March fighting with the county about a drainage ditch. She’d written two letters. She had, she remembered, been very pleased with the second one.
“Fifty years,” Clara said. “She was in Indiana.”
“Yes.”
“Three hours.”
“Yes.”
“Our mother died in 1989 still setting a place for her at Christmas. Did she know that? Did you tell her that? Did somebody tell her that?”
Sarah’s face did the thing faces do right before they come apart, and then it didn’t come apart. She held it.
“She knew,” Sarah said. “That’s sort of the thing I have to show you.”
The Front Pages
Families like theirs wrote things in the front of the Bible. Births, marriages, deaths. Clara remembered the pages: thick, cream-colored, printed with curling borders and the words FAMILY RECORD across the top in red. Their great-grandmother’s handwriting was up there, all loops. Their father’s was below that, small and pressed hard.
Sarah opened the cover and turned to the record and slid the book across the table.
Clara saw her own name first. Clara Jean, born October 3, 1948. Her father’s hand.
Above it: Eleanor Ann, born May 19, 1946.
And then, on the DEATHS page, the line Clara had stared at a hundred times before the book disappeared. Except it wasn’t there. Because the book had disappeared before anybody could write it. Their father never got to put June 22, 1974 in that column. He’d said so, drunk, once. Said it was the one thing he couldn’t do for her.
On the BIRTHS page, under Clara’s name, in blue ballpoint that had gone a little purple with age, in a hand Clara knew the way you know your own sister’s handwriting on a birthday card:
Sarah Ellen, born February 11, 1975. Ball Memorial Hospital, Muncie. 6 lbs 2 oz. Mother: Eleanor Ann. Father: G.
“G,” Clara said.
“Gene Pruitt,” Sarah said.
Clara sat back.
Pruitt’s Hardware, on Second Street, across from the Rexall. Gene Pruitt cut keys. He wore a green apron and a wedding ring and he sang bass in the choir at First Methodist three rows behind where the Wilkes family sat every Sunday. Their father had shaken his hand on the church steps every week for ten years. Gene’s wife, Bev, brought a ham to the house after the drowning. A whole ham, with the cloves in it.
“She was twenty-eight,” Clara said. “She wasn’t some girl.”
“She was twenty-eight and pregnant by a married deacon in a town of four thousand people and her father was Harold Wilkes,” Sarah said. “She said you’d understand that part. She said of everybody, you’d understand that part.”
Clara did. That was the worst of it. She understood immediately and completely. She could see the whole thing, her father’s face, the church, Bev Pruitt in the produce aisle. She could see exactly why a person might rather be dead.
“So she tipped a boat over,” Clara said.
“She didn’t tip it.”
Sarah reached into the tote bag again. She pulled out a bundle of envelopes held together with a brown rubber band that had gone brittle and stuck to the paper. She didn’t hand them over yet.
“Mrs. Doyle,” she said. “You were married to Ray Doyle.”
Thirty-Four Envelopes
Clara had been married to Ray Doyle for thirty-three years. He’d died in 2009 of a heart attack in the Kroger parking lot with a bag of birdseed in the cart. She’d buried him at Riverside next to an empty plot that was hers. He fixed outboard motors for a living, and on June 22, 1974, he’d been the one who called the sheriff. He’d been the one who’d found the boat, overturned off the north cove, while he was out testing a rebuilt Evinrude.
He’d sat with Clara on the dock that night. He’d brought her a Coke from the bait shop and held it while she shook. She married him two years later, partly because he was kind and partly, she knew even then, because he’d been there. Because he was the last person who had been near Eleanor.
“Ray,” Clara said.
Sarah slid the bundle across the wet table. The bottom envelope soaked up a little of the spilled coffee.
The rubber band broke when Clara touched it.
The envelopes were addressed to Ellen Wilkerson at four different addresses in Indiana. No return address on any of them. The postmarks went from 1975 to 2008. Thirty-four of them. Clara counted, because she couldn’t do anything else yet.
She knew the handwriting before she opened one. All capitals, leaning backward, the *E*s made like little combs. Ray wrote every grocery list that way. He wrote the labels on the freezer bags that way. MEATLOAF 11/94. He wrote her anniversary cards that way.
The first one, 1975, was short.
E. – Here is $200. I can do this every month I think. Hal is still dragging the cove on Saturdays by himself. I go out with him. I don’t know what else to do. C is not doing good. Burn this. – R.
Clara put it down. She picked up another from the middle of the pile. 1983.
E. – Your mother asked me again if I thought you suffered. I said no. I said it would of been fast, the water was cold. She liked that. I am going to hell for a lot of things but maybe not that one. C got first prize at the county fair for her tomatoes, the Brandywines. She cried. She said you would of hated that she beat you. Money’s in here. Tell the kid happy birthday from nobody. – R.
“He knew,” Clara said. Her voice came out normal. That surprised her. “He drove her. Didn’t he. He tipped the boat and he drove her.”
“She swam to the south shore,” Sarah said. “He picked her up behind the Pruitts’ cabin, actually, which she thought was… she had a word for it. Poetic. She had a bag packed in his truck. He drove her to the bus station in Lima and gave her his cash and the Bible, because she’d hidden it in his truck that morning. She said she needed something with the family’s name on it. She said she wanted me written down somewhere real.”
“Why would he do that.” Clara wasn’t asking Sarah. “Why would Ray do that.”
“She asked him to. She said he was the only person in that town who never once looked at her like she was a problem. She said he’d do anything for anybody and that was the trouble with him.”
That was true. That was exactly Ray. He’d once driven a stranger’s dog to Toledo.
“And then he married me,” Clara said. “And then he lay down next to me for thirty-three years.”
Sarah didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say to that, and she was smart enough not to try.
Clara picked up the last envelope. 2008. Seven months before the parking lot.
What Ray Couldn’t Write Down
The last letter was longer than the others. It went onto the back of the page. Clara read it at the kitchen table with her reading glasses that she’d had to go get from the bathroom, and Sarah waited, and outside the movers slammed the truck’s rear door and someone yelled That’s it, that’s the last of it.
E. – My doctor says the heart is not good. I won’t go into it. I’m writing because I want to ask you one more time to let me tell her.
I know what you said. I know you said she’d never forgive you and she’d never forgive me and you’d rather she have a dead sister than a sister who left. I’ve let you decide that for 34 years because it was your life. But it’s hers too. Every June she goes down to the north cove and stands there. She doesn’t think I know. I follow her in the truck and park by the bait shop and watch her stand there an hour. 34 years of that, E.
I don’t think I’m going to make it to tell her myself. I’m not brave enough anyhow, I’ve tried a hundred times. I get as far as the kitchen and she asks me if I want the meatloaf or the pork chops and I say the meatloaf.
So I’m asking you. When it’s your time, send the kid. Send the Bible back with her. Let C put it right in the book. That’s the one thing Hal couldn’t do and I know it ate him. Maybe she can.
She’s a better person than either one of us. She’ll be mad as hell. Then she’ll make coffee.
Her Brandywines came in good this year.
– R.
Clara took her glasses off. She folded them and set them on the letter.
She looked at the coffee, still sitting where she’d put it, with a skin forming on top.
“He knew I went down there,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Every year. I told him I was going to the cemetery.”
“She said he told her that, too.”
Clara laughed. It came out of her like a cough, ugly, and it kept going for longer than it should have, and then it turned into something else and she put the heels of her hands against her eyes and pressed until she saw orange. Sarah reached across the table. She didn’t touch her. Her hand just stayed there on the wood, an inch from Clara’s elbow, with chipped pink polish on the nails.
When Clara could see again, Sarah was crying too, without any noise, the way some women learn to.
“Did she ever,” Clara said. “Did she ever just. Pick up a phone.”
“She called your house once,” Sarah said. “In 1997. You answered. She said you said Doyles’ and she hung up and threw up in the sink at the dry cleaner’s. That’s the only time she ever told me she was sorry about any of it. Before the end, I mean. At the end she was sorry about everything.”
1997. Clara tried to remember a hang-up. There had been hundreds. There’d been a whole summer of them once, some boy who liked to call houses and breathe.
“What did she say,” Clara said. “At the end. You said she told you to beg.”
Sarah wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
“She said, ‘Tell Clary I was a coward and I knew it every day. Tell her I named you Sarah because it was the name she picked for her doll and I stole it like I stole everything else of hers.’ And then she said, ‘Tell her to put me in the book.'”
The Book
Clara had forgotten the doll.
She remembered it now, in the way you remember a smell. A rubber-faced doll from the Sears catalog, Christmas 1953. Clara named it Sarah. Eleanor said it was a stupid name and bit its thumb off.
“She bit the thumb off,” Clara said.
Sarah blinked. “What?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” Clara stood up. Her knees cracked, both of them. “Where’s a pen.”
“I’ve got…” Sarah dug in the tote.
“No. Not a ballpoint.” Clara went to the drawer by the phone, the one full of rubber bands and twist ties and three keys nobody could identify, and pushed things around until she found Ray’s fountain pen. A black Sheaffer he’d gotten for twenty-five years at Marine Supply. He’d never used it once. He said it was too nice for a grease monkey.
She came back to the table and sat. She pulled the Bible toward her and turned to DEATHS.
Her father’s name was there, in her mother’s hand. 1981. Her mother’s name was there, in Clara’s. 1989. Clara had driven to Muncie, Indiana, more than once in her life. There was a garden show there in the nineties. She’d bought seed potatoes.
She uncapped the pen. It had been in the drawer fifteen years and it didn’t want to write; she scratched at the margin of a paper napkin until the ink came.
“What day in March,” she said.
“The ninth.”
Clara wrote it in. Slowly, because her hand wasn’t steady anymore and hadn’t been for a few years, and because she wanted the letters to be right.
Eleanor Ann Wilkes. Born May 19, 1946. Died March 9 of this year, Muncie, Indiana. Not drowned.
She looked at it. Then she turned back to BIRTHS, to the blue-purple ink, Father: G., and below it, in the empty space, she wrote one more line.
Sarah Ellen. Niece of Clara Jean.
She capped the pen. She pushed the Bible back across the table, past the cold coffee, past Ray’s thirty-four envelopes, until it was in front of Sarah.
“You moved in next door to me,” Clara said.
“I bought the house in April. I didn’t know how else to do it. I thought if I lived here I couldn’t chicken out.”
“That’s a lot of money not to chicken out.”
“It was a lot of house for what they wanted.” Sarah almost smiled. “The basement leaks.”
“It does. It always has. The Kesslers had a sump pump that sounded like a car crash.”
They sat there.
Out front, the moving truck started up and backed into the street, beeping, and drove off.
Clara got up and dumped both mugs in the sink and rinsed them and set them upside down on the rack. She took the can down off the shelf.
“I’ll make a fresh pot,” she said. “Then you can tell me what she was like. The whole fifty years. And don’t you dare make her sound nice.”
—
Could you have forgiven Ray? I’ve gone back and forth on it all day.
For more unexpected showdowns, see the farmer who stood up to a developer and the fire chief who uncovered the truth about a house everyone hated. And for another story of trust between neighbors, read the church’s troubling letter to Martha.
