Chapter 1

I was the cowardly sister. But that day in June of 1998, I somehow fooled myself into bravery. I waited outside for hours, wandering through the public library stacks and small streets and parks of my neighbourhood as the sky turned deep blue and settled to darkness, a few feeble star points surfacing above the city’s pollution. It was my first real attempt at defiance.

I wanted my older sister Diana to get in trouble.

How could you let your little sister stay outside, alone in the dark? I imagined my father reprimanding her. You’re fifteen. You’re supposed to take care of her!

But as I made my way back home, the pleasure of getting my sister into trouble sieved away and I was skewered by doubt. Why didn’t you stay with Diana like you promised, Alisha? You’re hardly thirteen. She’s in charge of you. I could never be sure my parents would choose me over her.

My chest was tight; my heartbeat ricocheted to my throat. The sidewalks were emptied of bikes and strollers and pattering children, and even the few passing cars seemed quieter than usual. It was just me and my wheezing breath, my stinging legs, hurrying past buildings and townhouses that were dark rectangles, past bushes and trees that were billows of black.

Stoplights and orange-yellow street lamps and empty backlit bus shelters glowed. As I turned onto my street and approached my apartment building, I passed some teenage boys. They were crouched at the curb, passing a smouldering blunt between them, their ball cap visors pulled low. The smells of spicy food that always wafted out of the apartment windows at dinnertime had already blown away from the block: the curry and jerk and cardamom and masala.

I jogged over the patch of grass and up the front steps of my building. I shoved through the broken outer door, jammed my key into the inner door, and dashed into the lobby to stab at the chipped elevator button. All I could picture was my mother and her queenly gesticulations. Off with her head!

From inside the elevator shaft came distant pings, hollow clangings, humming. An elevator had roused itself from the floors above and was making its way down to the lobby like a metal sloth.

Hurry up, hurry up, I thought as the beat-up doors parted lazily in front of me.

I reached the twenty-third floor and bounded down the brown-carpeted hallway. Light leaked out of the slit between our apartment door and its frame. My mother never left it cracked open like that and would get upset when me and my sister forgot to close the door ourselves. You want these people to stroll in here? she would say, flicking a hand to implicate the whole neighbourhood, as if everyone wanted to step on our parquet floors and admire our furniture and our squat television set.

If I’d had the presence of mind I would have been gentler in my entrance. Instead I tumbled into the apartment, battering the door like I was the leader of a police raid. My mother sat on the couch in front of me, her narrow frame curved in on itself and her face contorted. The lamp on the side table glossed her skin. My father stood in the kitchen to my left, braced over the counter with his fingertips on his forehead and the phone to his ear. The stove’s blue digits read 10:23 p.m. and the night beyond the living room window was lit up by the high-rises and the headlights and the street lamps that stretched into the distance.

The apartment depressurized and bloated again in a second. My mother rushed to me and wrapped her arms around me, crying and trembling. I felt tugging at my elbows and hands as my father tried to claim me as well.

They talked over each other. Where were you? We waited and you didn’t come…. Your mother, she nearly had a heart attack…. And your father called the police…. It’s dark out there, how could you come home so late, how could you do this to us? Mommy waited and Daddy drove around the whole place, up and down the streets…. We thought you died, we thought both of our children had died…. Alisha, baby, oh my baby…where’s your sister? Where’s your sister?

I was so astonished by my parents’ reactions, so pleased at their concern for me, that I hardly heard their question.

My father stepped back to look out of the apartment doorway. “Why isn’t she with you?”

“Where did Diana go?” my mother asked, gripping me at my shoulders.

Relief had hardly had the opportunity to set in before dread was already mounting, threatening to crash over them again.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

My father clutched my elbow. “What do you mean?”

His brown skin was pale and his neck had developed a sheen. By that point in my life I had already witnessed every emotion my mother possessed. I knew her pretty face better than anyone else’s because I had spent my whole childhood adoring it and tracing its lines in my mind. But my father’s face had always contained unknowns. I had never been privy to this look of shock and desperation, and his wide frightened eyes struck me.

I felt weak. Why did I talk to that man at the mall? Why did I lead him to Diana?

I couldn’t tell my parents about the man without revealing my own guilt. I was afraid I’d lose the sliver of a foothold I had achieved with them over the last year by pretending I wanted to study hard like my sister did. Diana will be a doctor and Alisha will be our little lawyer. Our wonderful girls! Every sacrifice we’ve made has been for our girls!

I would preserve myself the only way I knew how. I would lie.

“I waited outside the mall,” I said, words assembling in my brain at breakneck speed. “Diana told me I had to stay there so I waited and waited for her to come back but she didn’t come and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

My mother’s fingers went to her mouth. She looked to my father and then back to me. “I told you to stay together!”

“I didn’t see you,” my father said, shaking my elbow so my hand flicked limp like a rag doll’s. “I drove everywhere and I didn’t see you or Diana.”

“But I searched for her, Daddy. I went around the cars and the park and everywhere I could, I promise I did. I kept looking and looking and I didn’t see her so I decided to come home….”

As rapidly as these words slipped over my tongue, my mind swallowed and digested them. How easy it was for me to believe my own lies, to accept them as the true facts of what had happened that afternoon. How easy it was to convince myself that I had really waited and watched and searched for my sister—when she was really the one who had to run after me.

“Mommy, I tried to find Diana but I couldn’t….” My voice crumbled and the tears began to well. Dee’s our special and ambitious girl and ’Lisha’s growing up to be just like her and the two of them are the very best of friends! My stomach felt like dough being folded in a mixer.

“Oh, ‘Lisha,” my mother whimpered, hugging me close and propping her chin on top of my head, “why didn’t you girls just stay together and come home?”

Her scent, a potent floral perfume mixed with baby powder, consumed my nose and mouth. I had banked on the compassion of a mother for her child and knew it would obscure my culpability. “I didn’t want to be late,” I said. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to be out so late but I didn’t know what to do.”

My father hadn’t let go of my arm. He pulled my elbow toward him as if I was one of those candy machines at the front of the grocery store where we shopped: persist on the crank and bits of information will rattle down.

“I stayed outside the mall….”

Clank, clank.

“…and Diana didn’t come back out to get me….”

Click, roll.

“…and I searched for her all afternoon, this whole time….”

My father launched back to the telephone, punching numbers and stretching the cord taut so he could stand outside the kitchen and listen to me as he spoke with the police. My mother nodded and nodded at me like a dipping bird toy, encouraging me to recall every detail.

Before long, my truths had been determined and replicated and we were all choking on them. I was a good girl obeying Mommy and Daddy. I had stood waiting and watching in the mall parking lot for my big sister’s return, dutifully searching for her when she didn’t come back out. Finally I had had no choice but to find my own way home in the dark without her.

We stayed up all night in the living room in front of a black television screen, staring at the half-open apartment door and studying its locks and chains and dents. We prayed to it, hating and loving it. Hating it because it was closed when we longed for it to open with her arrival; loving it because it was the only portal through which that arrival could come.

Each time one of the elevators dinged down the hall we rushed out with cries on the ledges of our tongues, only to return to our posts with our beating hearts in our hands. My father perched on the armrest of the couch until he could no longer stand waiting for the police to come. He left the apartment with his car keys in his hand to search the streets again. My mother sat against a cushion and brushed her clammy hand over my hair as I lay my head on her lap. I battled sleep and the sickening shame of what I had done.

Six years back, on Christmas Day of 1992, I was seven years old. My parents gave me a stuffed baby seal, all fuzzy and white. Diana was nine and in grade four. They gave her a boxed set of medical books, each volume stamped with gold lettering. Digestive System. Human Skeleton. Male and Female Reproduction. They were thick, glossy-paged, and small-printed. She kept them in a special place above her other books, on the top shelf of her bedroom closet.

“I’m going to read every one,” she declared, standing in her pyjamas and looking up at their spines.

I pressed my fingertips to my temple. “But they have so many words. That’ll take you forever!”

She forbade me to put my sticky hands on them, but she did let me sit beside her on her bed as she read the books aloud before bedtime.

“The duodenum is the beginning of the small intestine,” she said, astounding me with her pronunciation of biological terms, “designed to absorb nutrients from partially digested food exiting the stomach.”

I rested my chin on her forearm to examine the watercolour diagrams on her lap, the pink spleens and butter-yellow fat with tiny-lettered labels, more delicate than any illustrations in my picture books.

Do your organs get itchy? I wanted to ask. If you jump around, can they get scrambled out of place? But I didn’t voice my questions, afraid to interrupt the lesson.

She plucked a different volume from the box, flicking through the pages. “I’m going to show you something you’re too little to learn about in school,” she said. “It’s my duty as your doctor to make sure you know. Don’t tell Mommy and Daddy.” She found a picture of what looked like a school of swarming tadpoles. “Sperms are the essence of a man—everything rolled into a tiny animal. Men make sperms in their balls and women make eggs in their bellies, millions of them, everything so small you’d never be able to see it. That’s how babies are born.”

I looked at the sperms, propelled to the top of the page by their waggling tails. I was dismayed that anyone harboured such nasty creepy crawlies inside of them. I wasn’t sure I knew where a man’s balls were. “Ew!”

“I’m not allowed to get grossed out by anything, you know,” said Diana. “Doctors have to be professional.”

“Can I be your nurse?”

“Yeah. You’ll help me with my procedures.”

I pictured wearing a white dress and a white hat like I had seen on television. I would walk down hospital corridors beside my sister in her lab coat and stethoscope. Yes doctor, no doctor, this man is dying, doctor!

When grade two was over and school paused for summer, the asphalt and heat of the city gave way to colossal, run-on thunderstorms. None of the neighbourhood kids played outside when it rained, so Diana and I played doctor on our balcony. I would take on the role of elderly Guyanese patient by lying on our fold-out recliner, its frayed plastic lattice tickling the undersides of my knee joints, and cry, “Doctor-man, this belly a-bust me! Paining, ow, mercy! I need an x-tray!”

She would rush out with my father’s old Polaroid camera, her bare feet slapping the concrete, and snap pictures around my torso as fast as the churning machine would allow. My father had gotten it years back and didn’t wanted us touching it, so he hid it on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. All Diana had to do was steady herself with one hand on the clothes rod and stretch up her long arm. I would be behind, poised to catch the camera when she knocked it down, along with one of the bulk film boxes, which we would re-seal and put back in place when we were done. We had no reason to be concerned about our mother as we smuggled the camera out of our parents’ room. She would be preoccupied on the couch, reading a recipe, folding laundry, or painting her fingernails. She had little interest in protecting that camera.

“Let’s see what’s going on in your organs internally,” my sister would say, retrieving one of the spit-out photos scattered over the balcony. She would peel and toss away the waxy paper covering, letting it get snatched up by the breeze.

I would sit up and follow its wild path beyond our band of apartments at Jane Street and Finch Avenue. It flew over the road and the park and then disappeared entirely.

I would yank at her shirt. “What’s wrong with me, doctor-man? I gon’ live or die?”

She’d squint and ponder, turn the photo and squint, and ponder some more.

“Ow, tell me, nah?”

And it would finally come, the grand diagnosis. Cream-of-Cornosis, the result of ingesting too much canned corn. Watery Uteronious, a plague of sweat suffered by women who wear too much makeup. Overblown Spleenocitus, a common affliction of those who pretend to have more friends than they do.

“Terminal Gutsotitis,” she once told me. “Sorry to inform you but it’s my responsibility as your physician and your sibling. Queen Bea has it too.” That was the first time she uttered the nickname she had created for our mother.

“Eh-eh, what is that?”

“The woman is so uptight that intestinal gasses can’t escape her butt. Like many of the Guyanese, she caught it on the way to this country.”

Diana pushed me flat on my back and compressed my stomach with her hands. I would have laughed at the tickling but I was hardly able to breathe as her fingertips dug into my diaphragm.

“Gracious rice and peas,” I coughed at her, “is it contagious, doctor-man?”

“Yes. And there’s no cure. Our mother is completely fartless.”

My parents received invitations to summer weekend get-togethers at the homes of cousins and neighbours they had grown up with in Guyana. We would pick up my mother’s sister, Auntie Julie, and drive over to the hosts’ house in the afternoon. My sister and I would run around and play games with the other kids in the backyard.

“My sister’s going to be a doctor!” I blurted to Celia, a girl who was about my age. She wore a pink T-shirt and pink shorts and her hair was tied into two frizzy braids. Guyana-gold jewelry dangled at her neck and ears. We were in the middle of a big game of tag. Everyone screamed amongst the smell of barbeque chicken grilling on the deck where the adults sat together.

“Which one is she?” she asked, panting and flushed.

I pointed to Diana. She was cackling and chasing one of the boys, on a collision course with the fence, one sandal on and the other kicked off onto the lawn somewhere.

Celia twisted her face. “She’s smart?”

Annoyance bubbled up in me. “She’s the smartest kid here!”

“She don’t look it.”

Something overtook my limbs, a defensive loyalty I didn’t even know I had. I shoved her and she tripped and thumped onto her bottom, braids flicking up on impact.

“Ow!” she cried when she realized what had happened.

I reached out to her but she shrank away from me and began to howl.

“Shhh,” I said, “stop it! I’m sorry!”

Diana ran up to us, still missing her shoe. “What’d you do, ’Lisha?” Her hair was all tossed up from the game.

“She just fell.”

“She pushed me!” Celia screeched.

“She called you dumb!”

Celia’s mother rushed over to her and crouched low, gathering her up to her breasts to hush her and caress her head. “What in the world happened?” she asked me. Her hair was a curly brown bob and she wore pink pants and gold jewelry herself.

“We don’t know,” Diana responded for me, “she just fell.” My sister yanked at my arm and leaned close to my ear. “Let’s go.”

She hauled me away, hiding us in the clump of other kids.

It was Labour Day. Diana was to start grade five and I was to start grade three at our elementary school that week. She ate fried saltfish and bakes with my parents at the living room table while I sat on the couch watching Power Rangers with a soup bowl full of Froot Loops nestled between my folded legs.

I heard Diana tell them something but I didn’t pay attention. I took notice only when my father laid his newspaper on the table and removed his glasses. “This child,” he said to my mother, “she liked the books we gave her, after all. She’s something else, huh?”

My mother went into the kitchen. “Julie,” she said into the phone without a greeting, “do you know what Dee just told us? She wants to be a doctor.”

My parents perked up and the whole apartment seemed to have freshened itself, alight with gauzy sunshine. Diana pretended to be blasé, chewing her fish and sipping her tea.

“There’s a museum of anatomical oddities in France,” Diana told me a week later as she sat on her bed next to me with a medical book open on her lap. “My teacher told me about it. They have cut-off heads and diseased eyeballs and lumps they had to dig out of peoples’ skin. Everything’s in jars for you to look at.” She set her fist against the side of her neck as if it were a growth and spit out the tip of her tongue.

“Gross!” I said.

“I want to see it.”

“I’ll throw up.”

“I’ll explain everything to you. It’s so cool.”

I continued to fuss and wretch but I was exhilarated by the thought of flying in a plane with my sister, soaring over the Eiffel Tower I had learned about in French class.

“Dee!” my father called from the couch. “Come watch this with me, come quick!”

I skidded down the hallway in my socks after my sister. She launched onto the cushion beside him in her blue-checkered pyjamas and I hovered at the entrance of the living room.

My father had long changed out of his work suit and was in checkered pyjamas himself. He pointed the remote at the screen and braced his thumb on the volume button, his free arm around Diana’s shoulders. “They’re going to do an operation on this man’s brain.”

“They keep them awake so they can poke around and see what moves,” she cheeped.

“What a thing!”

“I should be a brain surgeon.”

That dashing toothy grin of my father’s appeared. “Better than a foot doctor.”

My mother approached me from behind. “Donald, won’t they show blood?” she asked over my head. Her long hair was unravelled from its bun and she was in a nightgown, just as I was. My nightgown was made of flat cotton and hers was layered, flowing, and shiny, but both were white, hemmed under the knee, and frilled at their cap sleeves. “Dee, you can stand it?”

Neither my father nor Diana responded, already too absorbed in the surgeon’s step-by-step. We’re making a surface incision. Soon we’ll saw through the skull to get at the grey matter.

“Ouch,” said my father, “that must hurt.” He placed a palm on the highest part of Diana’s head, just for a moment.

“They don’t feel anything,” answered my sister. “They use local anesthetic.”

My mother’s eyes were fixed on Diana and she seemed puzzled, as if she needed to ask a question.

“I’m not afraid of blood,” I said, out of place.

My mother smiled at me, combed her fingers through the ends of my loosed tufts and fluffed them. I reached around her waist to play with the end of a lock of her long hair, but my ears were still tuned to the television. One slip and we’ll sentence this patient to an early death. I wondered if my sister would remember that she had told me we would go to France together.

“Let me brush your hair before you go to sleep,” my mother said to me. “I want it to keep growing.”

She took my hand, threading it into hers. She led the way to my bedroom and we left my father and my sister there together on the couch: Daddy and Dee, fascinated by brain surgery. It was my sister’s bedtime too, but I seemed to be the only one who remembered.

Chapter 2

1938

When she was seven Paula heard noises and thought her mother was making them. She got out of bed and felt about in the dark. She reached the front door of the house and opened it. The looming shape of a man in a long black coat stood in front of her. A car rumbled out on the road behind him—a hunk of black metal with headlights that looked like a pair of unblinking eyes. The air was icy. She shivered as the wind shot under her collar and down her nightgown.

Paula feared the man. White people never came by for good reasons. She felt tugs at the hem of her nightgown. Ave stood next to her in cloth diaper and bare chest. She had wobbled out of the bedroom behind Paula. She was two years old and following her big sister as she always did. Her legs were chubby and goosefleshed.

“Go back to bed!” Paula whispered.

Looking up at her sister with her marble eyes, Ave shoved a few fingers in her mouth, her thumb hooked out the side.

Paula heard steps and turned to see her mother coming toward her in her nightdress. Her brow was knitted in shadow as there were no lights, nothing beyond a leaking moon. Paula didn’t know why her mother had stopped a few paces behind her and Ave, why she wasn’t crouching down to pull them in with her slender, sturdy arms. Her heart began to thump.

“No,” her mother said with a cracked voice, “please.”

“I have to,” the man answered.

Foop. Paula’s bare feet left the floor as the man picked her and Ave up, one in each arm. He turned and carried them toward the car with its smoking tailpipe. Paula strained to look back over his shoulder.

Her mother stood frozen. She didn’t cry out, didn’t so much as whimper. Paula was confused and no words came.

Ave screamed and wriggled in his arm. “No, no, no!” she shrieked. “Mama, don’t wanna go, don’t wanna go!”

Her mother skidded forward to clutch at the doorframe, as if the wind might tear through and blow her away. Paula tried to make out her mother’s face, the most beautiful in the world, with her chestnut skin and pepper-black eyes. But her features were a blur.

Ave reached over the man’s chest. “Paw! Paw! Paw!” she wheezed in her baby voice, digging her tiny nails into Paula’s arm.

But Paula didn’t answer. She felt too far from solid ground in the man’s grip, too small and weak. She sealed her hands over her ears and clamped her teeth together as she did when it stormed, when the hulking sky thundered over their clapboard roof.

The car revved on the road. Another man in a black coat sat behind the wheel and he leaned out of the open passenger window. “Two?” His breath billowed in the cold night air.

“Yeah.” The man carrying them grunted in a way Paula felt in her belly. “Mama should’ve kept her legs together.”

She turned to look for her mother’s reaction to their laughter.

The door of the house was closed.

The man thrust Paula into the back seat of the car and her bottom bounced on the upholstery. She recoiled at the door’s slam. He carried Ave to the front, yanked his door open, and struggled to hold her on his lap. Her limbs thrashed.

“Take me!” Paula screamed. “She’s just a baby!” She would put herself in Ave’s place, the older for the younger, because she had nothing else to offer. Just her arms and hands and legs and head, her whole body for her little sister. She stood on that scratchy car mat on her naked feet; she grabbed the man’s sleeve and yanked and hollered. “Leave her alone, take me!”

He twisted back and detached her hands, pushed her into the crook of the seat and grabbed her jaw. “Behave and be quiet,” he ordered. “This is for your own good.”

Paula and Ave were driven to a large brick house. A white woman in a white dress took them inside and drew musty cotton shifts that were too big over their heads. She led them into a room with many white women and children. Some lay on cots. Others crouched on the plank floor or sat braced against the walls. They were all swaddled in blankets—some clutched them to their necks and others drew them right over their heads. Everybody was unsmiling.

Paula sat with her knees up to her chin in a corner on the floor and gripped a woollen blanket around them both, bracing Ave against her side. Her feet were still bare and numb.

After hours of whimpering, Ave fell asleep. Once in a while, a noise escaped her chest. Paula thought she must have been dreaming about the two men.

Paula had screamed out everything. Her throat felt raw and her stomach ached. She couldn’t sleep and kept her eyes on the doorway. “Don’t worry,” she whispered to the top of her sister’s head. “Mommy will be here soon.”

Ave didn’t stir.

Paula would take care of her sister until their mother came. She had long come to understand Ave’s lexicon of cries and whines and squeaks, attuned as she was to her sister’s needs. At home, Paula would always wait until Ave fell asleep beside her before allowing herself to fade into a dream. She would insist on feeding her sister her porridge before her own, spooning the excess from the corners of Ave’s little mouth.

You’re a natural, Paula’s mother would tell her. You look after her so well.

What a frightening place they had been brought to—huge and infected with every manner of noise and smell! There wasn’t a familiar face in sight and strange people paced the room and hallway, cursing each other up and down, scuffing and scratching at the walls.

Ha, ha!

Paula was jolted from her daze by a man’s joyless laughter from the floor above her. But what was there to be amused about? Babies bawled and children whined to their mothers for food. Men’s voices called out for the Lord and for porridge and for rum like they were the holy trinity.

A young girl with stringy blonde hair and a purple spot on her jaw sat at the edge of the cot beside Paula and Ave. She held her palms under her blanket against a bulging belly, and glared at Paula with muddy eyes and tight lips. No words, no kindness. A drowsy boy who hardly seemed older than Paula sat cross-legged at the girl’s feet. He fisted the blanket at his chest with one hand, rocking back and forth and knocking a stick on the floor with his other hand in no particular rhythm.

Paula stared at the bruise on the girl’s face. A stretched oval with blue-green flecks.

Frigid hours passed. Yelps and cackles, scraping feet and things smashing echoed from upstairs. Light changed in the window and crossed the room, going from sharp to hazy and then slinking away entirely. Pockets of shadows emerged as the night crept in.

Paula watched a spider at the baseboard where the plank floor met the plaster wall. The spider was black and immobile as a pebble, suspended on a web. She wanted to reach over and nudge it to life with her finger, to give it a perch on her thumb, to cup and bring it under the blanket into the tent of warmth that sustained her and Ave. But the spider eventually roused itself and began a cautious survey—two legs stretching in front, four more venturing to follow, the last two pushing off. It recreated that movement again and again as it crept about in search of something.

“Don’t be scared,” Paula said to Ave, whose eyes were still closed. “We’ll go home soon.”

Paula hoped the spider would know how much she cared about it. She had failed Ave so badly by letting the men bring them to this place. By morning, she hoped she and Ave would wake to find themselves under a dome of webbing, strung thick as a basket and stiff as straw.

A woman with grey hair entered the room, followed by a short girl who carried a tray with bread and metal cups and bowls. Both of them wore white dresses and white handkerchiefs on their heads. Everyone gathered, resuscitated back to life. There’s been no food, Miss, please, said the women, nothing to eat all day, and my children are hungry, my milk has already dried up and I think my baby is starving, Miss….

Paula looked to her sister in the crook of her arm. Ave’s eyes were open, bright as ever, watching as women and children, hooded in their blankets, closed in around the woman and girl in white dresses.

“All right, we’re here now,” the old woman said over the protests, swatting away the women’s hands. “Patience, ladies, you’ll get your due. Good Lord!”

The girl went around the room passing out the bread, bowls, and cups. Please, Miss, women said, there’s been no food all day and my children are still so little, they’re losing strength….

The old woman busied her wrinkled hands, lighting lamps that hung from iron hooks in the walls. “Better now, isn’t it?” she said, chipper. “Don’t be content in the dark like bats in a cave, ladies, the Lord gives light.”

Each lamp glowed violent yellow.

When the girl came to Paula and Ave, she squatted down and set a single bowl, cup, and slice of bread at their feet. “Here you go, little ones.” She tried to get Paula to smile back at her. “Eat up or it’ll disappear.” She smelled of sweat and cooked food. Soft wisps of blonde hair grew above her top lip.

Paula’s belly felt like a cavern but she couldn’t move. Her limbs were leaden and her head slumped to the shoulder, close to her sister’s.

Paula could see Ave under her cheek, looking up at her. Ave waited on her sister to show her what to do, unwilling to attempt anything Paula didn’t do first. Remember, their mother had said to them, the older always goes before the younger.

The girl pinched off a hunk of bread and fed it to Paula, holding the cup to her lips to wash the solid down with liquid. She did the same for Ave, who was not nearly as languid. Ave slid close to Paula’s hip and pushed her head across her sister’s chest, opening her mouth to consent to the food and water.

Paula struggled to chew, even to moisten the morsel enough to swallow it. Ave pressed her ear into the hollow of her sister’s neck, chewing noisily.

“You’re weak,” the girl said to Paula.

Paula’s eyelids crept to a close, reopening at the coolness of a spoon holding sweet, lumpy porridge at her mouth. The girl fed her and Ave in turn, one after the other, ignoring the fussing and begging of the women around them.

Oh, Miss, please come here. My babies need your charity too.

“Mommy,” Paula finally spoke in a rasp that barely made it out of her throat.

“No, silly,” the girl answered, sweeping her index finger over Paula’s cheek. “Look at you, black as tar. I couldn’t be your mommy.”

But Paula was asking a question.

The girl pushed close to Paula. Her lips were dry, a patchy pink. “You won’t have to be in the poorhouse much longer,” she whispered. “They’ll take you where they take the other negro children.” She used the edge of her sleeve to wipe away porridge that had dribbled onto Paula’s chin. “You’ll be with your own kind. You’re lucky girls.”

Ave breathed, open-mouthed, anticipating the next spoon of porridge.

Paula didn’t feel lucky. The girl was telling her that they would not be taken back to their mother. Paula surveyed the floorboards to find her beloved spider, but all she could see was its abandoned webs.

Advance praise for
The Lost Sister

Praise for The Sudden
Disappearance of Seetha

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

1938

Advance praise forThe Lost Sister

Praise for The SuddenDisappearance of Seetha

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

1938

Advance praise for
The Lost Sister

Praise for The Sudden
Disappearance of Seetha