What The Dead Know

her mother’s real-estate office.

But that long-term possibility paled alongside the prospect of a Saturday at Security Square Mall, a place of great novelty to Heather. Over the past year, Sunny had fought for and won the right to be dropped off there on Saturday afternoons, once a month, to meet friends for matinees. Sunny also got to baby-sit, earning seventy-five cents an hour. Heather hoped to start doing that, too, once she was twelve, which was just next week. Sunny complained that she spent years trying to gain her privileges, only to see Heather awarded them at a younger age. So what? That was the price of progress. Heather couldn’t remember where she had heard that phrase, but she had adopted it for her own. You couldn’t argue with progress. Unless it was something like the highway through the park, and then you could. But that was because there were deer and other wildlife. That was the environment, which was more important than progress.

“You can go to the mall today if you take your sister,” their father repeated, “or you can stay home with her. Those are your choices.”

“If I have to stay at home with Heather, shouldn’t I be paid for babysitting?” Sunny asked.

“Family members don’t charge one another for doing things for the family,” their father said. “That’s why your allowance isn’t chore-based. You get spending money because your mother and I recognize that you need some discretionary income, even if we don’t always approve of the things you buy. The family is an entity, joined in a common good. So no, you don’t get money for taking care of your sister. But I will provide bus fare for both of you if you want to go to the mall.”

“Big whoop,” Sunny muttered, chopping up her pancakes but not really eating them.

“What did you say?” her father asked, his tone dangerous.

“Nothing. I’ll take Heather to the mall.”

Heather was elated. Bus fare. That was an extra thirty-five cents to spend as she wanted. Not that thirty-five cents could buy that much, but it was thirty-five cents of her own she didn’t have to spend and could therefore save. Heather was good at saving money. Hoarding, her father called it, and he was being critical, but Heather didn’t care. She had thirty-nine dollars in a metal box bound with a complicated system of elastic bands, so she could tell if anyone had tried to get inside it. But she wouldn’t take her money to the mall today, because then she couldn’t be tempted to spend it. No, she would compare prices and study sales, then return with her birthday money when she had made a careful decision about what she wanted. She wouldn’t waste her money on an impulse as Sunny often did. Last fall Sunny had bought a poor-boy knit sweater, off-white, with a red placket. The red trim had bled on the first washing, creating twin tracks on the sweater’s back. But it was the kind of sale that said no returns, and Sunny would have been out eleven dollars if their mother hadn’t gone to the store and berated the salesperson, embarrassing Sunny so much that she wouldn’t even say thank you.

Their father put the dishes on the drain board and left the kitchen, whistling. He had been fun this morning, much more fun than usual, making pancakes with Bisquick and even throwing in chocolate chips, real ones, not the carob ones he normally used in baking. He had let Heather pick the radio station, too, and although Sunny made fun of her choice, Heather knew it was the same station that Sunny used to listen to in her room, late at night. Heather knew lots of things about Sunny and what went on in her room. She considered it her business to spy on her older sister, and it was another reason she liked her hour alone on weekdays. That’s how she had come to find the bus schedule in Sunny’s desk drawer yesterday, the Saturday times for the Number 15 carefully highlighted.

Heather had been looking for her sister’s diary, a miniature book of Moroccan leather with a real lock. But anyone could figure out how to jiggle it open without the key. She had found Sunny’s diary only once, more than six months before, and it had been sadly boring. Reading her sister’s diary, she had almost felt sorry for her. Heather’s life was much more interesting. Maybe that was how it was: People with interesting lives didn’t have time to write about them in diaries. But then Sunny had tricked her, drawing Heather into a conversation about one of the entries, only to point out that Heather couldn’t know of the incident on the bus unless she’d read Sunny’s diary. Heather had gotten into quite a bit of trouble for that, although she didn’t understand why. If the family was supposed to share everything, then why was Sunny allowed to lock up her thoughts?

“Heather just admires her big sister so,” their mother had told Sunny. “She wants to be like you, do everything you do. That’s how little sisters grow up.”

Wrong , Heather wanted to say. Sunny was the last person to whom she would look for guidance. Almost in high school, Sunny didn’t even have a boyfriend, while Heather sort of did. Jamie Altman sat next to her on field trips and paired up with her whenever the teacher made them go boy-girl. He also had given her a Whitman sampler on Valentine’s Day. It was the small one, only four chocolates, and none of them with nuts, but Heather was the only girl in all of sixth grade to receive chocolates from a boy other than her father, so it made quite the stir. Heather didn’t need Sunny to show her how to do anything.

She picked up the Accent section and read her horoscope. In just five days, there would be a horoscope especially for her. Well, for her and the other people born on April 3. She couldn’t wait to see what it said. And next week there would be a party, bowling at Westview Lanes and a bakery cake-devil’s food with white icing and blue roses. Maybe she should buy something new to wear. No, not yet. But she would take her new purse to the mall, an early birthday gift from her father’s store. It was actually multiple purses that buttoned to the same wooden handles, so you could match it to your outfit. She had chosen denim with red rickrack, a madras plaid, and one with a print of large orange flowers. Her father hadn’t planned to stock the purses, but her mother had noticed how Heather studied the samples and pressed him to include it in the orders he made back in February. They were by far the most successful new item in his store this spring, but that just seemed to make her father grumpier.

“Faddish,” he said. “You won’t want to carry it a year from now.”

Of course , Heather thought. Next year there would be another purse or top that was the thing to have, and her father should be glad for that. Even at eleven she had figured out that you couldn’t run a successful store if people didn’t keep buying things, year in and year out.

SUNNY, FRUSTRATED ALMOST to the point of tears, watched silently as her father left the kitchen. He had been so odd this morning-making pancakes, letting Heather listen to WCBM, singing along and even commenting on the songs.

“I like that one,” he said of each song. “The girl-”

“Minnie Riperton,” Heather said.

“Her voice sounds like birdsong, don’t you think?” He attempted to imitate the cascading notes, and Heather laughed at how poorly he did it, but Sunny simply felt uncomfortable. A father wasn’t supposed to know songs like “Lovin’ You,” much less sing along with them. Besides, her father was the biggest liar. He didn’t like any of these songs. The very fact that a song was Top 40-the very fact of popularity in anything, whether it was music or movies or television or fashion-disqualified it from serious consideration in her father’s life. On his headphones, in his study, he played jazz, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead, which seemed as formless and pointless as jazz to Sunny. Listening to the radio with her father and sister made Sunny feel queer, as if they were reading her diary in front of her, as if they knew what she was thinking late at night when she went to bed with her transistor radio plugged into one ear. Her tastes were changing, but she still found certain love songs irresistible: “You Are So Beautiful.” “ Poetry Man. ” “My Eyes Adored You.” Twitching in her seat, cutting her pancakes into ever-smaller pieces, she had yearned to jump up and turn the radio off.

Then Ringo came on with the “No No Song” and her father did it for her, saying, “There’s only so much a man can take. When I think-”

“What, Daddy?” Heather asked, playing up to him.

“Nothing. What do my girls have planned today?”

And that’s when Heather said, “Sunny’s going to the mall.” She spoke with a lisping baby quality, a voice she had long outgrown, a voice she never really had to begin with. When Heather petitioned for a new freedom for herself-permission to ride her bike to the shopping district in Woodlawn, for example-she spoke in her regular voice. But when she was trying to show up Sunny, Heather used this little-girl tone. Even so, their mother was onto her. Sunny had heard her mother tell someone on the phone that Heather was eleven going on forty. Sunny had waited to hear what her relative age was, but it hadn’t come up.