“It’s your sister.”
Vera frowns. The sun hits her face as she turns to look at me.
“Clarice?”
“Yes. I can’t stop thinking about her ever since Sandra died. I talked to Ryan about it and about how she didn’t leave a note, either, and that was when it struck me.”
“What did?”
I stop and look at her. I place a hand on her arm, then look around us. I know there’s no one there, no one is listening in, but I feel like I need to check.
“I remember you told me something at the funeral. Back then, I didn’t think anything of it, I just thought you were grieving, grasping for answers. But then, the other day, it struck me. You said she called from Afghanistan a couple of days before she died.”
Vera nods. She knows what I’m getting at.
“She did.”
“Didn’t she say something about being scared for her life?”
Vera looks at me, her nostrils flaring slightly. I hope I haven’t upset her by asking. I know she doesn’t like to talk much about it.
“Well, it wasn’t as dramatic as that, but she did say she had concerns about something she had witnessed over there.”
“But it was more than that, wasn’t it?” I ask.
Vera sighs. She looks at her feet quickly, and I know it hurts to talk about it. She was close to her sister. They joined the Air Force together. I have a feeling Vera did it mostly to keep an eye on her younger sister.
“She also said that if anything happened to her, then we should investigate it.”
“Yes, that’s it. That’s what I remembered,” I say.
Vera sighs. “But Laurie, it’s not something we…”
“But we need to investigate it,” I say. “At least in her honor. It was her last request.”
“We tried,” she says with a deep exhale. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get any information out of the Air Force?”
“You tried?”
“Well, my parents did. They’ve tried everything. But all they ran into were closed doors.”
Chapter 12
Somehow, I convince Vera to take me to see her parents. I don’t know how I did it because she is very reluctant about it, and as we drive there together, two days later, she keeps glancing at me nervously.
Her parents live in Orlando, in one of those cookie-cutter neighborhoods, which kind of reminds me of the housing on base, only more expensive with a small water fountain at the entrance. But just like on base, all the houses look alike, a little too much for my taste. I know that, once I leave base, I’ll want a unique house, preferably in a Spanish style. There’s one I keep looking at every time I drive to Publix. It’s located across the street from the beach and has beautiful arches around the windows and a cute red tile roof. I often dream that I live there and grow old there when I think about the future. I don’t know if Ryan and I will ever be able to afford one like that once he retires from the Air Force, but a girl has a right to dream, doesn’t she?
“Please, be gentle with them,” Vera says as she stops the car in front of their house. The lawn outside is well taken care of, the flowers blooming. An orange tree in the middle of the lawn has fruit that is ready to be harvested. We have one similar at our house that we harvest from every January, then squeeze into juice. One orange can give enough for a big glass full, that’s how juicy they are.
“They’re still very fragile, and talking about Clarice is tough,” she adds.
I nod. “Of course. I’m not here to upset them.”
“It’s not that they don’t want to talk about her, they do, but it’s just, well, my dad tends to get a little worked up about it, and he has a heart condition, you know? He takes pills for his high blood pressure. My mom tries to keep him calm.”
I smile and think about my own parents. My dad has high blood-pressure but is otherwise healthy. Yet my mom does tend to worry about him anyway. It’s like she doesn’t have anything else to do, now that her kids are grown, and she can’t worry about us constantly. I often think it’s like she got into a habit of just worrying, and now she can’t stop; she misses it if she tries. I also often wonder if I will be the same. Right now, I am always worried about Ryan, and of course, my kids, but for different reasons than my mom worries about. Completely different.
“I get it,” I say with a reassuring smile. “I’ll try not to agitate him.”
Vera’s mother serves us coffee in the living room, while her dad shows us pictures of Vera and Clarice from when they were younger.
“Those two were inseparable,” he says and points at a picture of them together. Vera is no more than four or five years old, her sister even younger. “They loved one another so much and always wanted to sleep together, often in the same bed. We tried to give them separate bedrooms, but they always ended up in the same bed the next morning. They were so close in age; they even had the same interests.”
“How far apart are they?”
“Only a year and a half. They’ve always acted like twins, doing everything together. Even sometimes dressing up to look alike so people couldn’t tell them apart. Vera doesn’t even remember that there was a time without her sister,” he says. “But they could also fight. No one could fight like those two, oh, dear Lord.”
“No one loves and hates each other out of a good heart like sisters,” I say, thinking about my own childhood. There are three years between my sister and me, so I can relate. My sister and I are very different, though, and look nothing alike. I’m a redhead, whereas she has the most gorgeous long brown hair and blue eyes. She’s also much taller than me, which has always annoyed me.
“We always told them that they had to remember that, once we were gone, they’d always have one another,” Vera’s mom, Hattie says. “That’s how special it is to have a sister…and…” she trails off and doesn’t say any more. Her eyes drift off, and she looks down into her lap at her hands, rubbing them lightly on her pants.
Seeing this brings a lump to my throat. I stare down at the table and my hands wrapped tightly around a mug.
“Anyone want a cookie with their coffee?” Hattie says, her face lighting up suddenly. She rises to her feet before we can answer, then disappears. Vera’s dad, Samuel, or Sammy, as he told me to call him when he met us at the door, takes over. He closes the photo album, then says:
“Anyway, you didn’t come here to hear all our silly stories. You wanted to know about the last call we had from her?”
I nod, swallowing the lump. I feel awful for coming, and I wonder if it is even necessary. Am I just ripping open old wounds for nothing? Because I’m curious? I don’t even know what my deal is, what I expect to get out of this meeting. I can’t tell them how I think it is connected to what happened to Sandra. It’s just a feeling, nothing else. Why am I ripping open their grief over a feeling?
“Well, Clarice called two days before we received the message that she had…that she wasn’t…” Sammy trails off, then exhales. He doesn’t seem to know I’m even there anymore. It’s like he’s talking to himself. “She sounded so different; I immediately knew that something was wrong. She was never happy over there. She didn’t like being there. She had told us this earlier, in other calls. It was nothing like she expected it to be, not at all.”