“what your mother left for both of us.” I climbed the stairs slowly, one step at a time, gripping the rail, with Mrs. Ostrander close behind me whispering that the woman had never once frightened her. The bedroom door stood open. A woman in the red dress of my mother sat on the edge of my bed with a battered hatbox on her lap. She was past seventy, with the chin of my mother and the gray eyes of my mother. I was afraid for exactly one second more. Then she said, “Hello, Lorraine. My name is Ruth. I am your sister.”
I had never had a sister, or so I believed. Ruth explained it gently. In 1955 our mother, Annette, was seventeen and unmarried in Larkspur Bend, Wisconsin. Her family sent the baby to live with Aunt Hattie in Iowa, and Ruth grew up believing the lady who visited four times a year, always on a Thursday, always in a red dress, was only “Aunt Annie.” Ruth learned the truth four years ago, when the estate papers of Aunt Hattie were opened. By then our mother had been gone twenty three years. Ruth drove north anyway and stood in front of my house on Cedar Hollow Lane.
My husband Frank answered that first knock, Ruth told me. He studied her face for a long moment, and then he invited her in for coffee. They talked for three hours. Frank had a weak heart and he knew it. He gave her a spare key and said, “Come when you like. Lorraine will need time, and I will find the right words.” He took the red dress from my closet and gave it to Ruth, because it belonged with the daughter our mother visited. Then Frank passed away last spring, before he found the words.
The woman in the red dress is a long lost older sister who came to sit in her mother house, and the sisters finally meet.
“I did not know how to knock on the door of a widow,” Ruth said. “So I kept coming on Thursday nights while you were at choir practice, to sit in the front room where our mother grew old, and to stand at the window where she used to wait for the mail.” My eyes filled. Behind me, Mrs. Ostrander cleared her throat. She had known Annette for fifty years and had recognized Ruth the very first Thursday. “It was not my secret to tell,” she said. “So I brought lilies. They were the wedding flowers of your mother, and I thought you would ask.”
I sat down on the bed beside my sister. Honestly, I did not know what to say, so I said what was true. I told her I had been frightened, and now I was ashamed that I had been frightened of a woman who only wanted to sit in the house of our mother. Ruth laughed through tears and said she would have been frightened too. She apologized for the camera, the photograph, the mystery. I told her the only thing I wanted an apology for was the seventy years that nobody had thought to bring us together.
Ruth opened the hatbox. Inside lay forty three birthday cards, one for every year until our mother passed away, each signed “Aunt Annie.” Beneath them was a letter in a hand I would have known anywhere, folded and refolded until the creases were soft as cloth. Our mother had left it with Hattie in 1997 to be opened when Hattie passed. Ruth read it to me in a trembling voice. “My first daughter, my second daughter. I was not brave in 1955. I hope you are braver than I was. Look after each other.”
There was one more thing, Ruth said, and she lifted a small envelope from the bottom of the hatbox. It held a key to the cedar chest in my attic, the one I had never been able to open. Inside, wrapped in tissue, were the baby blanket of Ruth, a lock of dark hair and a hospital bracelet from 1955. Our mother had kept them hidden for forty three years. I held the tiny bracelet and understood, at last, why she used to sit at that window every Thursday, looking toward the road as though someone might come walking up it.
We sat on that bed until the sky outside went dark. Ruth showed me photographs of her three sons, my nephews, whom I had never met, and of a granddaughter who had the same stubborn cowlick as me. I showed her pictures of our mother laughing on the lake pier in 1982, with the same chin, the same crooked smile Ruth wore. Mrs. Ostrander brought up tea and sugar cookies from her purse, as if she had expected a party all along. We talked about recipes, church picnics, the way our mother hummed while ironing, and all the small ordinary things sisters are supposed to know about each other after a lifetime together. Somewhere in the second hour I noticed that I had stopped being afraid and had started being a little sister.
Before she left that night, I asked Ruth to keep the key and the dress. She tried to refuse, and I told her it was only fair and that our mother would have wanted it so; Frank had chosen well, and I would not undo his last kindness. Then I asked her to come through the front door next Thursday, not to stand at the window alone. “Bring your sons,” I said. “I will make mother meatloaf from the old card.” She held on to me on the porch for so long that the porch light clicked off by itself, and we both started laughing again.
Every Thursday since then, there has been a light on in my living room window and a woman standing behind the curtain, and now there are two of us. The lilies still come on Fridays, though Mrs. Ostrander brings them to the table instead of the porch, where everyone can see them. I used to think my house was empty. It was only waiting, just like my mother, for the one who had been missing to finally ask the right question and come inside.