Free A Ticket to Ride by Paula McLain Page A

questions about his homework, if he wanted, simply, to be touched, he went to Berna. Suzette, on the other hand, was magnetized by what Raymond thought of as Earl’s perimeter—that space around his father that seemed cordoned off by invisible fencing. As Earl sat in the parlor, Suzette, even at two, three, four, would hover around him, either in spite of or because of his seeming not to notice she was there.
    After Earl died, Suzette became even more fixated on him as a figure, a symbol, an idea. She wanted to talk about him all the time, wanted a larger picture of him put up on the mantel, though clearly these reminders upset their mother. Suzettealso became inordinately interested in death, what it meant to be dead. What was the soul, exactly? When you were buried, could your soul wake up in the casket and wonder where it was or how it could get out? And could you suffocate that way? Like dying again? When she went to Raymond with these questions, he didn’t know how to begin to answer them. He would have asked Berna for help, but she was in a kind of grief trance and would be for months, sliding past her children in the kitchen or the yard, not seeming to see them or remember they needed supper or baths. She seemed to be sleepwalking.
    In the mornings, as Raymond made oatmeal for Suzette, Berna would stare out the window that faced the road. There was nothing out there, just the mailbox, the patch of switchgrass on the slope Earl had been too busy to keep mowed, and the one old Macintosh tree that bore sour fruit every other year. There was nothing to see, but that didn’t keep Berna from standing at the window for hours every day as if her feet were strapped to sandbags. At other times, she boiled water down to nothing on the stove, singed the toast, let milk sour on the table. She lit cigarettes and forgot them on the edge of the sink, where they burned themselves down.
    Raymond missed his mother terribly, but there was so much to do in the way of caring for Suzette that he soon found himself drawn into an even tighter orbit around his sister. If he had worried about her before, that anxiety doubled, tripled after Earl’s death, as she began staging mock funerals for the animals on the farm—undead cats and chickens and Earl’s dog Milton who, with heroic patience, let her drape him with a white sheet and tuck weeds around his deaf old head.
    “She just has an overactive imagination,” Berna said tiredly when Raymond finally did consult her about how to handle it. “She needs more exercise.”
    So Raymond cajoled her out in the yard to play several times aday. Once there, however, Suzette would begin the long process of embalming Milton, or sketch a clown face in the dirt with her finger, adding fangs and exploded stars for eyes. At school, they both had friends and lives apart from each other. Both got good grades and were well liked, but none of this seemed to apply once they climbed off the school bus. As they went up the dirt driveway, the front porch steps, the creaky stairs to their rooms, the world shrank and closed off, and it was just the two of them again, with Berna busy but distant in the parlor, dusting the already spotless mantel.
    At night, when Berna was tucked behind her bedroom door, reading Ladies’ Home Journal or sleeping, Suzette would come into Raymond’s room, asking for bedtime stories, by which she meant ghost stories. She was a funny little kid that way, liking to be scared, the palpitations and breathlessness, the moments when she’d have to pinch her eyes shut or cover her head with a pillow. Against his better judgment, Raymond would give in and tell her the one about the escaped mental patient with a hook for an arm, the one about the big horned owl swooping off with the baby—and she would listen transfixed until she was too scared to sleep. Later, he’d hear her whimpering through the wall, or she’d knock on his door in the middle of the night, asking if she might sleep