The Best of All Possible Worlds

When they were young they used to hide in the corn. They knew Daddy was drunk by the way he came into the house. When he was sober he would just slide the house key right into the lock, turn it and walk in. When he was drunk they could hear him walking up the porch steps, his footfalls sounding like those of some brute giant, and he would try to slide the key into the lock, but it usually took him a few tries to hit home. He always dropped the keys at least once, and they could hear the jingle jangle of the keys hitting the porch. This is when they would rush into Jessy’s room together, the two of them clad in pajamas. Jessy would open the window and lower her little sister down to the ground. Maddie would hesitate sometimes; that side of the house rested at the top of a slope, and the six foot drop to the ground must have seemed like a drop into the abyss to a scared little girl. Jessy was always able to reassure her sister, though, and then she would lower her down. By this time Daddy would be in the house, calling out to them, calling his little girls to come to Daddy. Jessy would follow after her sister, crawling out the window and holding on to the ledge, then letting go and dropping down. Then they would run into the corn. They didn’t talk much while they were out in the corn; they just sat quietly, holding on to each other against the chill of the night.

They would stay out there until the early hours of the morning, when Daddy would finally have gone to sleep, when he would no longer be waiting for them to come back from wherever they had run off to. Jessy would get the ladder out of the shed behind the house, and they used it to climb back up through the window. On those nights Maddie wouldn’t sleep in her own room; she would share Jessy’s bed for the night. It was safer that way, just in case Daddy woke up before morning. As they lay in bed under covers Jessy would tell her sister stories from before--before Mama died, before Daddy started drinking, before he started doing the other things, the bad things that he always said he was sorry for. When she saw that Maddie had drifted off to sleep Jessy would close her own eyes, and soon she would also be asleep. She dreamt often of Mama.

Time moved on, as it does. They got older and Daddy got drunker. He had stopped doing the bad things when Jessy told him she would tell her Aunt Frannie, and she didn’t care how much trouble he got in for it. So the bad things stopped, but sometimes they still went out into the corn. Whether they were erring on the side of caution, or it had just become a comforting habit, neither could say for sure. Maybe it was both.

They left behind first grade school and then middle school. There were slumber parties (always at other girls’ houses), first kisses stolen in the shadows, first heartbreaks. When Jessy was a junior in high school Maddie was a freshman, and they both had their own circle of friends. At school they were like two old acquaintances; when they saw each other in the halls they would smile at each other, and maybe there would be a small wave, but the closeness they had once shared was no longer as tight as before. They were sisters, but not friends.

When Jessy left during her senior year she didn’t think much on how it would be for Maddie to be left behind. It wasn’t until later, during late-night phone calls home from one corner payphone or another, when she heard a certain sadness in her sister’s voice and strange silences filled with things unspoken, that she started to think about the bad things. Daddy had stopped when Jessy had threatened to tell, but that was because he knew she had meant it. Jessy had always been the strong one. Would Maddie have been able to tell about the bad things? Jessy didn’t think so. Maybe Daddy didn’t think so, either. It was during these calls when Jessy would want to tell her sister that it was okay, that she was on the way, that she would save her. But she wouldn’t say these things. There was a part of her that didn’t want to go back no matter what. It was this part of herself that would speak through her, not letting on that she noticed anything amiss in her sister’s voice, saying it’s nice to talk to you, I’ll see you soon, just not right now, I met this guy and things are kind of heavy at the moment. And Maddie would say how nice it was that Jessy had met that guy, and how good it would be to see her when she finally had a chance to come home.

And Jessy really did mean to come home soon, if only for a short visit. But after that guy there was another guy, and then there was a job, and then there was a baby. (Viola is such a nice name, isn’t it? Yes, it is.) Late-night phone calls made from phone booths on dimly-lit street corners bathed in the soft fluorescent glow of gas stations and 24-hour convenience stores were followed by phone calls made from a home phone that clung to the kitchen wall of a house which a young family had made its home. By then Maddie no longer lived in the house where they had grown up together. Daddy had died in a car accident on Highway 53 after a long night of drinking, and had been laid to rest in Ford Hill Cemetery next to Mama. Jessy attended neither the funeral nor the burial, and Maddie hadn’t expected her to.

Maddie had then moved into an apartment closer to town with a couple of friends. Maddie told Jessy that she had to visit soon, had to see her new place, and Jessy said that she would. But time slipped by, and Maddie moved on from the apartment she shared with her friends without Jessy ever having seen it, and it made both of them sad in their own private ways.

For a while there were no phone calls, because Jessy didn’t have a number to call. After three months she was concerned. After six months she was worried. After eight months she was frightened. Out of the blue, on a cold November night, Jessy got a call from her sister. Maddie apologized for not getting in touch sooner, but things had been a little crazy. She had gone to Vegas (yeah, Vegas), but she didn’t want to talk about her time there. Why not? Just because, maybe another time they would talk about it, but not now. She was just glad to be getting out, away from whatever bullshit she had stepped into in that city in the desert. Where was she going now? She didn’t know; maybe L.A., maybe San Francisco. She would call when she got there, wherever “there” was.

She had been true to her word. She did call when she got there; “there” was Seattle, 1,100 miles from L.A. and 800 miles from San Francisco. The story of how she had ended up in the Pacific Northwest had been a long one, but it really came down to a job and a guy named Carl. It was almost Christmas, and both Jessy and Maddie agreed that they just had to find a way to get together for the holidays. One of them would fly out to the other, but they never decided who would do the flying, and in the end neither of them did, though they made a pact to see each other no later than summer. In the summer they agreed to meet by Thanksgiving, but then things got bad between Maddie and Carl, and she didn’t like her job, and she was thinking about going back to Las Vegas. And what had happened the last time she was in Vegas? Another time, not now, she didn’t want to talk about it now, but she would be in touch.
Two years went by, and there was a second child for Jessy, a boy named Richard, just like his father. Viola was happy to be a big sister, and Jessy was happy to have so much--her children, and her husband, and her home. But late at night, lying awake in bed, she thought about Maddie and felt a feeling that had progressed from uncertainty to worry, then to fright, and had finally settled into something that could be called nervous resignation at the lack of a phone call, the absence of an old familiar voice. Had Maddie made it back to Vegas? Was she there now? Was she alone? Happy? Jessy would fall asleep with these thought in her head, and sometimes she would dream about her sister, about holding on to each other in the corn, holding on like a person hanging on to an outcropping of rock to keep from being washed down a rapid river.

Another year passed, and little Ricky had learned to walk on his own--awkwardly, but on his own. Viola was excited to be starting the first grade. She looked beautiful in her first-day-of-school dress. Things were going well for Richard, Sr. at work, and there was talk of a promotion. They might even be able to move into a bigger house, and wouldn’t that be great? Jessy thought that it would be.
It was shortly after Viola’s first day in the first grade, with still no final decision made about the promotion (or the bigger house) when the letter came. Jessy read it twice. Maddie was in New York (can you believe it, Jess?). She was sorry for not getting in touch, but she was sure Jessy understood how life could get a little crazy. (Echoes of a long-ago phone conversation.) There had been some bad times over the last three years, but things were better now. The letter assured Jessy that she was happy. They had to get together soon, they really did. Jessy would love Mark, who was a great guy, and nothing at all like Carl (remember Carl?).

When the phone call came it seemed just like any other phone call. There was nothing about the ring to let Jessy know that this call would be different. She didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line; the man told her that his name was Mark, and that he had been dating her sister Maddie. She told him that yes, Maddie had mentioned him in a letter. He said that he was sorry, but he had some bad news and maybe she should sit down. She didn’t want to sit down, she wanted him to say what he had called to say, so he said it and then she did want to sit down, only there was no chair handy so she sat down on the floor. She set the phone on the floor beside her, and eventually, after a minute of hello, are you still there Jessy?, the line went dead.

Richard found her still sitting on the floor when he came home with the kids from a trip to his sister’s house. He told Viola to play with her little brother in her room, and then he came back out and hung the handset back up on the wall. He helped Jessy to stand and asked her what was wrong. She repeated what Mark had said, getting it out in little pieces: Maddie had been depressed and sleeping a lot, but she had seemed genuinely happy the last few weeks. He had gone to work and she had kissed him goodbye, telling him that she loved him. When he came home he found the bathroom door locked. He had knocked on the door, and then banged on it, and then had kicked it in. She was already gone when he found her.

The funeral was held at the same church where Daddy’s had been held, and Maddie was buried in Ford Hill near her parents. Jessy was told that the plots on either side of Mama and Daddy were occupied (a strange choice of words, she thought), so Maddie was buried one row over. After the burial Jessy considered driving by the old house, but she decided against it. There were only ghosts there now.
Back home she read Maddie’s last letter one more time, this time focusing on the post-script, which hadn’t really caught her attention when she had first read the letter. She read the words several times over as warm tears streamed down her cheeks:
I’ve been thinking about the corn a lot lately. Do you remember?

Of course she remembered. How could she not? When her tears had dried she searched in her closet for a box where she had stored the few keepsakes she had from her childhood--a few pictures, a hair brush that had belonged to Mama, a poem that had been written for her by her first boyfriend. She put Maddie’s letter in the box and closed it, and put the box back in her closet. What followed after was life, and just that.