The Sisters by Nancy Jensen Page B

decently without scraping, but Mabel was glad, too, that he hadn’t lived to see the new war. His gas-scalded lungs had filled with fluid and carried him off two months before Pearl Harbor.
    Paul had told her once it was his five months in France that had turned him into a photographer. Not that he had wanted to record the agony in the Marne. “No,” he’d said, “I decided then and there I wanted to be in control of what I saw.” She had liked that idea of control, but when she’d started taking photos herself, she saw quickly that the most beautiful pictures—the most beautiful because they were the truest—came of spontaneity, not posing. She had gladly traded in hope of control when she realized the camera had given her something she’d craved even more: invisibility. Behind that black box, she disappeared, becoming the observer who could not be observed. She wanted no photos of herself and had never allowed Paul to take another after the first, the one she exchanged for a job.
    Crazy how he’d taken her in like that, right off the street—more than fifteen years now—a thin girl in a dirty coat who’d never even touched a camera. She’d spent most of the three days after Wallace disappeared wandering around Union Station, answering every boarding call to search for him in the crowd. Finally, after she’d taken to sleeping on a bench beneath the arching skylight in the Great Hall, the manager came with a couple of guards and told her vagrants weren’t allowed and that she’d have to leave. “I’m just looking for my family,” she said. “I have a room.” The manager didn’t believe her, just humored her by saying, “Then you’d best go back there and get some sleep.”
    She’d been telling the truth about the room, but by the time she was forced out of the terminal, it was as good as lost because she wouldn’t be able to pay the week’s rent. There was no point in even showing her face at the grocery, since Mrs. Winniver had reminded her every day she’d worked there that plenty of others would like to have her job. Working for Mrs. Winniver had been like stepping round a bobcat for twelve hours a day, and Mabel would have quit except that the bruised apples, scuffed carrots, limp greens, and sprouting potatoes she got to take home with her pay on Mondays were mostly what she and Wallace lived on, saving everything they could trying to bring Bertie to them.
    But Bertie hadn’t come.
    That first day in Chicago, Mabel had survived the long hours of waiting for Bertie’s train by imagining their embrace—how she would notice the strong breadth of Bertie’s back, how she would breathe in the sweet smell of her sweat and marvel at the softness of her hair, as if at once she were holding her sister in her arms for the first and the last time.
    Wallace had returned just before the train was due. He carried apples in his pockets—three lovely apples to celebrate his having found a large room for them, clean and cheap, rented by a landlady willing to believe his story that they were all siblings, doing their best to stay together now that their father had died.
    They stood for a long time after the train had departed, looking up and down the platform and all through the station, trying to persuade themselves that Bertie had gotten off and was waiting for them on a bench in a dark corner somewhere. “She probably missed the connection in Louisville,” Wallace said at last. “You know how that train’s always late getting into Juniper.”
    “Is it?” Mabel had never known it to be—for years she had used the faint whistle of the 10:45 coming into the station as her signal to mark her page, lay her book aside, put out her light, and kiss her sister’s dreaming cheek—but she wanted to believe Wallace. “Yes,” she said. “That must be it.”
    Wallace shrugged. “Let’s go find out the schedule from Louisville.”
    They’d gone back to their room to sleep, but they hadn’t slept at