My little girl. I have failed her.

The deputy waits until I look up at him.

“It is just you and me in this room,” he says. “Mrs. Fielding is not here. This is your one and only chance to convince me to let you go and be done here. Tell me the truth.”

31

The few memories I have of my little sister are as delicate and thin as tissue. I was only four and a half when the sickness took Sophie from us. I remember her being a happy child, mischievous sometimes, and afraid of the dark—she would cuddle close to me in the bed we shared at night. I remember her sitting on my grandmother’s lap and my being jealous because I wanted Gram’s lap to be only mine. I remember her taking one of my shoes once and throwing it into the well just to hear it splash. I remember her golden brown curls and the yellow hair ribbons she liked to wear that at one time had been mine. I remember her lying in our bed burning with fever and how I had to sleep at Gram’s cottage while she was sick and I liked it. I remember Gram telling me between sobs that the angels had come for her and I remember the tiny coffin. I remember the sound of my mother’s wailing and my father carrying the coffin up the hill to the cemetery with other men from the village.

After Sophie’s death my parents seemed unable or unwilling to talk about her, and so her presence lifted and she became like a vapor to me, a dream. A dream of a sister whom I might have had but never did. As the years went on, my parents learned to laugh and smile again, and I know they loved again because I would hear them in their room next to mine. But there were never any more babies and I don’t think they grieved that. Losing Sophie had changed them, made them fearful of having more children who could also be taken from them.

My father brought out his word book again when I was eight or nine; I didn’t even know he had it, because he had put it away when Sophie died. But he was ready, I suppose, to continue to learn all that the world had to teach. I was the only one of the children interested in Da’s word book. My brothers weren’t curious and didn’t value schooling like my father did. None of them wanted to be learned men who taught at university or performed important work in an important office building dressed in an important-looking suit.

So it was me with whom Da shared his word book. The book kept us close even as I became a young woman and started to be more and more interested in Mason’s friends. My two older brothers, Niall and Ross, both married at age twenty, and since they were eight and ten years older than me, they were out of the house and creating families of their own well before I knew where babies even came from. Mason, only three years older than me, didn’t mind my company, especially after the older brothers moved out, and he let me follow him and his friends almost anywhere they went. He had a group of chums and most of them were unremarkable fellows.