“Where did you find this beast?” Sophie said warmly as she scratched the dog’s head. When she glanced up and saw Isabel, she stopped talking.
“Are you calling me a beast?” Isabel joked, but the joke fell flat.
“She’s come to help,” Violet explained.
“She would never come and help,” Sophie said.
“Well, I wrote to her,” Violet said. “And now she’s here.”
“You should never have done that,” Sophie told her daughter. “You know we don’t speak.”
They were talking about Isabel as if she weren’t even in the room, and Isabel supposed she deserved that. She’d been something of a ghost all these years, so she couldn’t quite expect to be treated like a person.
Sophie was still beautiful, but she was wearing a gray nightgown Isabel thought she recognized from their youth, and she seemed twenty pounds lighter, so thin her eyes appeared even larger and darker than usual. “I hate to tell you this,” Sophie said to her daughter, “but you can’t make things that have gone wrong right again.”
“Actually, that’s not true,” Violet contradicted. “If you couldn’t, then nobody would go to a doctor or have surgery, and you’ve done so, and you’ll be right again in six weeks.” Violet looked back and forth at the way the sisters were staring at each other, as if they were strangers. “I see,” Violet said, now understanding her mother’s meaning. “You mean Isabel can’t be made right again.”
It was bad enough to be judged by one person, and somewhat overwhelming to be judged by two, especially when one wasn’t much more than eleven.
“I guess you were a lousy sister,” Violet said. “I’m a lousy person, but I’m a great daughter.”
Sophie grinned, and anyone could see who the light of her life was. “You are not lousy at anything.”
“Isabel is staying,” Violet said. “Lousy or not, we need her.”
“I’ll sleep in my old room,” Isabel suggested. She had the rising desire to prove her niece wrong.
“That’s Violet’s room now,” Sophie said.
“Then I’ll sleep in the attic.”
“We have bats,” Sophie said stiffly. “Quite a lot of them.”
“Dad’s room,” Isabel said.
“It was also Mom’s room, no matter how much you want to pretend she never existed.”
“I never pretended that,” Isabel said.
“You wouldn’t even walk into the room during her last week.”
Isabel remembered now. That was when she had begun plotting out her getaway. Back when every day seemed dark as night and even books couldn’t help. All she wanted was to get to a place where every road and lane wouldn’t remind her of her mother and all she had lost.
“I went into her room when I was with you,” she said to Sophie, suddenly remembering their mother’s last day and how they’d stood there together, holding hands.
“I remember,” Sophie said. “I just didn’t think you did.”
Isabel was restless up in her parents’ old room. Knowing she’d never sleep, she went downstairs to the bookstore. It was indeed a mess, and she did her best to begin cleaning up. The front room merely needed to be vacuumed, but the back room was a disaster, with piles of dusty books everywhere, the paper suffering from the damp. It looked as if what they called the Fairy-Tale Room had sat undisturbed for years. Isabel began to divide the piles into fiction and nonfiction, fairy tales and cookbooks. While rummaging around she found something unexpected in a drawer in a bureau. There, behind the unpaid bills and the check stubs, was the cardboard box of index cards that her mother called her baking library.