The Secret Sister by M. DeLuca (leveled readers txt) 📗

of ice fog roll across the lake. Above it a watery sun rose, an opal disc in a colorless sky.

I ate breakfast in a little diner by the harbor. Warm and cozy, it smelled of toast and browning sausages. Huddled on a blue vinyl bench seat, I finished off a plate of bacon, eggs and all the fixings in record time. I’d never felt that kind of nervous hunger before but then I’d never traveled so far away from the city, and in this unfamiliar place I felt a thrill of adventure and hope. Now I understood why all my college friends set off on summer-long backpacking trips to Europe or Thailand. To recreate themselves as someone carefree, open, even joyful. A person who embraced change, not dreaded it. I came to that understanding while I chewed on rye toast and watched the sunlight finally bleed through the mist.

After an hour of scoping out the docks and getting more familiar with my bearings, I summoned up the courage to approach dock workers moving crates, and laborers leaning over the rails of freight ships. All morning I traipsed up and down, talking to as many as I could. Nobody had seen her. In the afternoon I switched to the bars, chain restaurants, family diners, beer parlors until I narrowed my search down to a couple of places – seedy hangouts where hookers drifted through like tired ghosts and wild-eyed guys searched for cheap sex.

I pulled up my hood to cover my hair, shrank into a corner seat, ordered a beer and waited. I repeated the routine in all three places, but by late afternoon I was checking my watch. It’d soon be dusk and the last bus was in less than two hours. I’d just drained the final dregs of beer when a bartender sidled up to my table. He had a thick beard and a shaggy ponytail and kept checking out the front door as he talked.

“You Anna?” he murmured. I could barely see his lips move underneath that beard.

I nodded. “Who wants to know?”

“Some woman outside. Says she wants to talk to you.”

My heart leapt. This was classic Birdie. She wouldn’t approach me directly. Always left a note or sent a message. Gave you options. As if she wanted to be sure you were actually interested in talking to her. I stuffed a couple of dollar bills into the guy’s hand and raced outside.

A woman stood in the street, her back to me, shivering, hands stuffed into her pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold in a thin denim jacket. An icy wind blew off the lake, whipping her hair into a shaggy halo. She turned. Through the ice fog I saw her nose was running. As long as I could remember, Birdie’s nose was always streaming. My heart hurt so bad it knocked the breath from me. I offered her a Kleenex. Looked closer and knew it wasn’t her.

“Heard you’re looking for Birdie.”

“Who are you and how do you know her?” I tried to stop my voice from cracking. This girl’s nose was different to Birdie’s. Instead of a slim, delicate nose, hers was a flattened-out bulb, the bridge crooked and knobbly, like it’d been broken and healed wrong. Her top lip was scarred and swollen.

“Name’s Tara. Birdie was – I mean is – my friend.”

“Where is she?”

“She was here,” she said, her voice rough and scratchy – a smoker’s voice. She reached into her pocket and took out a pack. Her hand shook so bad when she tried to light the cigarette, she dropped her lighter. I swooped down and picked it up, held it to her trembling hands and cradled them while I lit her cigarette. She took a long drag then sighed and released a cloud of smoke into the frigid air. “But we ain’t seen her around for maybe a year or more.”

My voice was strangled in my throat. I’d wanted so badly for it to be Birdie, but Tara looked twenty years older. Skinny, sallow-faced, dull-eyed. A middle-aged face on a scrawny kid’s body. All the light and life gone from her.

I pulled up the hood of my parka. The wind cut through the opening.

“You’ll freeze,” I said as she dug her hands into her pockets. She shrugged.

“Don’t matter. I’m a tough old whore,” she said, cackling then doubling over into a wet, hacking cough that caved her cheeks in.

I waited until she wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. Her face appeared almost ghostly in the light. “So how d’you know my sister Birdie?”

She bent her head down against the wind and started to walk. I followed her along the waterfront away from the ships until we came to a pier. The lake water shimmered through the gaps netween the planks, its black surface pocked with ice floes. Beautiful but deadly.

“How many times I walked along here with Birdie and she talked about jumping right in,” she said, gazing downwards. “Ending it all.”

I looked into the frigid water. “Why – why did she talk that way?”

“Our life here is worth nothing. It’s like hell on the boats.” She grasped the handrail, her breath blowing out in icy plumes as if her life was sapping away into the night. “You’re nobody. Not even a person. They punch you, cut you, do stuff I can’t even talk about. And Birdie was too young. Not like the rest of us. She was a good kid. Always acting crazy, trying to make us laugh.”

That sounded exactly like my sister. My heart was sore thinking about where she could be. “How d’you know about me?”

She flicked the live butt into the water. Coughed and spat over the rail. “She always talked about her sister Anna. Her bodyguard, she called you. Said you were the only person that loved her. Said she planned to make enough money to get away from here and find you.”

I cursed myself. Why hadn’t I come to look for her earlier? “You think she