Sisters, Long Ago Read online

  Dr. Rogers had never said anything more to Willow about giving Sarah “false hopes for a cure.” Willow wondered if Dr. Rogers thought it was a coincidence that Sarah came out of the coma after Willow talked to her. Would she have awakened at that time, regardless of what Willow said or did?

  There was no way to prove that Willow’s thoughts and love and healing energy had helped Sarah.

  And there was no way to prove they didn’t.

  She decided to try it again. Right then. Maybe she could help Sarah be ready for the transplant. Willow thought of the white light and immediately, a glowing light encircled her. Although it was invisible, she felt its warmth and its power.

  She thought of Sarah, lying in her hospital bed. She knew Sarah was in a special room that night, breathing sterile filtered air. In her mind, Willow imagined the room. “I give you the white light, Sarah,” Willow whispered. “I send the light of love to heal you and keep you safe.”

  The light radiated from her and floated out the window, into the sky toward Sarah. In her mind, she saw the white light enter the hospital and creep under the plastic shields which hung like shower curtains around Sarah’s bed.

  Strangely, even though Willow sent the light to Sarah, this did not diminish the amount of light she felt around herself. She could give the healing love away without losing any of it.

  She didn’t understand how that could happen but she knew it was true. The white light was infinite; she could draw on it forever and there would still be more.

  She breathed deeply. Having done what she could for Sarah, she felt relaxed and sleepy.

  As Willow slipped over the edge from waking to sleeping, the dream returned.

  Tired from the excitement of the party, Kalos slipped outside and walked quietly through the garden.

  She thought of the new child who would soon join her family. She knew she would love this new baby, as she had always loved Tiy, and she hoped the baby would grow to love her, too. Even more, she hoped that perhaps this new child would understand her, as Tiy and her parents did not.

  Tiy loved her, there was no doubt of that, but Tiy was often baffled when Kalos shared her thoughts and feelings.

  Despite her friends and loving family, Kalos knew she was different from the others. She had inner strength; she had the ability to be happy regardless of circumstances.

  When the others prayed, they asked favors or gave thanks. When Kalos prayed, she opened her heart and mind and felt Amun-Ra’s light and energy flow into her.

  Even at night, when all was dark and Amun-Ra traveled through the chambers of the underworld, Kalos could feel his light around her. It kept her safe; it gave her courage; it brought her joy.

  Because of this, she knew she was special. She was glad that Amun-Ra had chosen her to receive his gift of light. She wondered if somewhere, perhaps in a land faraway, others shared her special gift. One day she hoped to speak to one of those others, to let that person know how she felt.

  Kalos sat under a palm tree, leaned her head against the trunk, and closed her eyes. She wondered what she would say to another like herself, if she had the chance to speak.

  High above her in the cloudless sky, Amun-Ra watched. Kalos looked up and smiled. She felt his power surround her, enter her, and reflect back to the sky.

  Nuk ua em ennu en Xu ammu Xu.

  That, she decided, is my message.

  Nuk ua em ennu en Xu ammu Xu.

  Willow stirred as the words came through once more. Nuk ua em ennu en Xu ammu Xu.

  This time, she recognized the voice that spoke them. It was the voice of her dreams. It was herself in another lifetime. It was Kalos.

  And then she knew.

  Even in her half-waking, half-sleeping state, she realized it was not a nonsense phrase.

  Nuk ua em ennu en Xu ammu Xu was a message from Kalos.

  18

  “HEY, QUEENIE.”

  Willow heard the words and knew Jeff was behind her. She decided to ignore him.

  “What’s the matter, Queenie? You too good to talk to your subjects?”

  Willow walked faster. She was only two blocks from school. Once she got there, she thought Jeff would leave her alone.

  He followed at her heels as she crossed the schoolyard. “Do you wear your royal jewels when you sleep?” he asked.

  Willow turned to face him. “You aren’t funny,” she said. “All I did was ask a question about your speech; I don’t see why you’re making such a big deal out of it.”

  “Lo! The Queen speaketh!” Jeff said loudly. Several kids came to see what was happening. “Bow down!” Jeff said. “Bow down before the mighty Queen Willow.” More kids gathered.

  Willow clenched her teeth, determined not to be drawn into a scene with Jeff. I don’t need this, she thought. Not today.

  “What are your wishes, mighty Queen?” Jeff said.

  The sun came out from behind a cloud and Jeff squinted as he looked at her.

  Willow felt the sun on her back. Amun-Ra. Willow took a deep breath, turned and started to walk away.

  Jeff’s hand clamped down on her shoulder. “You can’t leave,” he said. His fingers dug into her shoulder. “We’re going to crown you. Queen Willow. Queen of the . . .”

  “Knock it off, Jeff!”

  Willow spun around. Gretchen stood with her hands on her hips, her eyes flashing angrily. “You slime!” she said. “Don’t you think Willow has enough problems?”

  “Queens don’t have problems.”

  “No? Cancer isn’t a problem? Willow’s sister is getting a bone marrow transplant today.”

  Jeff scowled. “I didn’t know anything about any sister,” he said.

  “You act like you’re still in kindergarten,” Gretchen said. “Come on, Willow. Let’s go to class.”

  The other kids dispersed as Willow and Gretchen walked away.

  “Thanks,” Willow said.

  “My pleasure. I can’t believe what a jerk Jeff is. And speaking of jerks, I got an answer to my letter.”

  “What letter?”

  “The ad I answered. You know, the 16-year-old male.”

  “You actually sent him a letter?” Willow asked.

  Gretchen nodded. “Fortunately, I had the sense not to use my real name. I decided once I found out who it is, I could always tell him my real name. Well, I found out, all right.”

  “Who is it?”

  “You won’t believe this.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Pete.”

  “Pete Wellington?”

  “The one and only.”

  Willow started to giggle.

  “It isn’t funny,” Gretchen said, but she was laughing, too. “No more Personals ads for me,” she said. “I’ll have to find the love of my life some other way. Any news on Mrs. Clauson?”

  “None. After you left last night, I watched her house until midnight, when my folks got home. She didn’t leave again.”

  “I was hoping that officer would arrest her as soon as she took the reward money from Andrea Wilson.”

  “Me, too, but I suppose if Mrs. Clauson claims she found Bonnie, no one can prove otherwise.”

  “My pastor called this morning to ask if we wanted to keep Sarah’s name on the prayer chain. I told him yes.”

  Willow smiled at Gretchen. It was comforting to know that all over the city today, people would be thinking of Sarah, praying for her, sending good thoughts to her.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d be at school today,” Gretchen said.

  “It doesn’t do any good for me to sit at the hospital. The time will go faster for me if I’m thinking of something else.”

  “You may have plenty to think about,” Gretchen said. “I heard that this is going to be Mr. Barclay’s Hell Week.”

  Willow moaned. Not that, too, on top of everything else. Once each year, Mr. Barclay, their history teacher, assigned a major project to each student and gave them only one week to do the work.

  Each year, older s
tudents warned the seventh graders about the project, referring to it in menacing tones as, “Barclay’s Hell Week.” They declared that the only way to get a passing grade on a Hell Week project was to work so hard you nearly died from the effort.

  Each year, the projects were different so that students whose older brothers and sisters had previously survived Hell Week weren’t able to help. Each year, according to the older kids, the projects were harder.

  Willow and Gretchen found their seats in history class and waited.

  “Good morning, class,” Mr. Barclay said. “I understand there’s a rumor going around that this is the day you get your special project assignment, sometimes referred to as Hell Week.”

  Willow looked at Gretchen.

  “I prefer to think of these assignments as heavenly opportunities for learning,” Mr. Barclay said.

  Everyone groaned.

  “Here it comes,” Gretchen whispered.

  “This year,” Mr. Barclay said, “our projects will be written reports. Each will be different.”

  He went on to explain that they had three choices:

  1. Write a paper on one country’s history of agriculture.

  2. Write a paper on one country’s history of religion.

  3. Write a paper on the history of literature, art, and music in one country.

  “The papers must be a minimum of ten pages long,” Mr. Barclay said, “with a bibliography of at least five sources. And the country cannot be the United States.”

  The students grumbled some more. Hell Week was even worse than they expected.

  “Here is a list of the acceptable countries,” Mr. Barclay said. “Each country appears three times, followed by the word agriculture, religion, or art. As soon as you select the country and topic you want to study, write your name beside it and cross it off the list. Only one person will be allowed to do a paper on each topic.”

  He gave the list to a boy in the front row, who looked at it, shrugged helplessly, and passed it on without choosing his topic. By the time the list got to Willow, only three topics had been crossed off.

  Quickly she read the list of available countries: Argentina, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt . . . As soon as she got to Egypt, she knew what she would do. She crossed, Egypt, religion off the list, wrote her name, and passed the list to Gretchen.

  In her notebook, she wrote, “Hell Week Project: The history of religion in Egypt.” All around her, kids muttered about the unfairness of Barclay’s Hell Week.

  Even Gretchen, who usually didn’t complain about school, frowned at the list as she tried to decide. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I’ll never finish in only one week.”

  Willow didn’t answer. She would never have admitted it when everyone else was so upset, but secretly, she could hardly wait to start. She wanted to learn the history of religion in Egypt. She wanted to know if there was a god called Amun-Ra. And she wanted to be involved in a big project, even a hard one, to keep her mind occupied. If she was reading about the past religions of Egypt, she wouldn’t be able to worry about Sarah.

  19

  “THE TRANSPLANT went smoothly,” Dr. Rogers said, “with no complications.”

  Willow wanted to shout but shouting was frowned on in a hospital so she hugged her mother instead. Then she hugged her father. And then, in an outburst of glad relief, she hugged Dr. Rogers.

  “May I see her?” Willow asked.

  “We want you to see her,” Dr. Rogers said. “You’ll need to scrub down and wear a mask and gown, or stay outside the sterile room and talk to her through the plastic.”

  “I’ll scrub down.”

  “You understand, of course, that today’s transplant was only the first step,” Dr. Rogers said. “It will be several weeks before we can say with any certainty that the transplant is a success. There’s always the possibility of infection or liver failure and more than half the patients develop some degree of GVHD.”

  GVHD, Willow knew, meant Graft-Versus-Host Disease. The dangers of GVHD had been explained to them many times. Why couldn’t Dr. Rogers just let them be glad for this one success, instead of reminding them of all the potential problems?

  “She made it this far,” Mr. Paige said. “We’re thankful for that.”

  For the next three days, Willow used every free minute to work on her Hell Week project. When she visited Sarah, she talked through the plastic, rather than scrubbing down and donning the mask and gloves. It was faster and she needed every possible minute. Sarah understood. She had been through Mr. Barclay’s Hell Week herself, two years earlier.

  Willow spent her time at the public library, or at home reading the library books. She had stacks of 3 × 5 cards with notes about the religion of early Egypt.

  Gretchen called nightly to complain that Mr. Barclay was a slave driver. Willow just listened. Ever since she began her Hell Week project, she’d been fascinated by what she learned.

  That first day, in one of the library books, she read, “In the New Kingdom, Amun-Ra became the supreme state god, the King of the Gods.”

  Willow’s breath caught. There he was in print: Amun-Ra. King of the Gods, just as Kalos had said.

  Quickly, she turned to the chart of dates at the front of the book. The New Kingdom went from 1567 to 1085 BC. The New Kingdom ended more than 3,000 years ago. Was it possible that she could accurately recall details of a lifetime from over 3,000 years ago?

  Where had her soul been in the meantime, during all the years between Kalos and Willow? Had she been a man with a dagger, riding a white horse? A woman in a green gown, admiring paintings and sculptures? She reminded herself that just because there once was a god named Amun-Ra, it didn’t prove that Willow had lived in ancient Egypt.

  She continued to read. And then, on the third day, she found it. Willow felt a chill go up the back of her neck as she read the words. “One of the great architectural wonders of the world was the Temple at Karnak which was designed so that, on the day of the winter solstice, the rising sun shone directly on the temple’s altar.”

  There was a picture of the Temple at Karnak. She recognized it immediately. As Willow looked at the picture she felt just like she did when she looked at a photograph of her old house, where the Paiges lived before Sarah got sick and they had to move closer to the hospital.

  Karnak. She looked at the map of Egypt. Karnak was on the east side of the Nile River, right in the middle of Egypt. Last year she would have called it a foreign country. Now she thought of it as her other home.

  She didn’t read only about religion. She also looked for details of the daily life of the people who lived then. She found descriptions of the kind of house Kalos had lived in: made of mudbrick, with three sections. The outer room was for greeting strangers; the central room was for entertaining friends and the last room was the family’s private quarters. Willow remembered how Kalos and Tiy got ready in their private room and then went to the middle room to play their instruments for their guests. Detail after detail in the books were just as she had remembered them in her dreams.

  In her report, Willow summarized the earlier religious beliefs and gave an in-depth report on Amun-Ra. She ended with a two-page description which, she said, might have been written by herself, if she had lived during that time.

  “My name is Kalos,” she began, “and my favorite god is Amun-Ra. Each year, on the day of the winter solstice, I go with my family to the Temple at Karnak.”

  The words flowed easily as she described what she wore and the offerings she carried. Most of all, she told about her feelings. It was easy to pretend she was Kalos as she wrote; she had only to remember her dreams.

  The Hell Week projects were due on Friday. On Thursday night, as Willow was copying hers over in ink, she heard loud voices outside. Looking out, she saw a police car in front of Mrs. Clauson’s house. The same officer who had come to meet Andrea Wilson stood on Mrs. Clauson’s porch. So did a fat woman with red hair.

  “That’s her,” th
e woman cried. “I’d know her anywhere.” The woman started to open Mrs. Clauson’s door but the officer restrained her. “Where’s Jojo?” the woman cried. “What have you done with Jojo?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mrs. Clauson said. The door was open less than six inches and she stood so that the woman couldn’t see in.

  “She took my dog!” the woman insisted. “I saw her. Jojo was in my car and I stopped at the grocery store to get a loaf of bread. I didn’t lock the car because I knew I’d only be gone a few minutes. When I came out of the store, I saw this woman drive away with Jojo. I called to her but she didn’t stop.”

  “You are mistaken,” Mrs. Clauson said.

  “I got your license number,” the woman said.

  “Then you deny that you have this woman’s dog?” the officer said.

  “Of course I deny it. I don’t know anything about her dog. And if you don’t quit harassing me, I’ll call the Chief of Police and complain.”

  A dog barked.

  “That’s him,” the red-haired woman said. “Jojo’s in there; I hear him.”

  “You hear my dog,” Mrs. Clauson said.

  Willow knew that wasn’t true. Mrs. Clauson didn’t have a dog.

  “We can’t go in without a search warrant,” the officer said.

  Willow left the window and looked quickly around the room. A bouquet of flowers for Sarah sat on the coffee table. One of Sarah’s friends had brought it that afternoon and asked Willow to see that Sarah got it. Willow grabbed the vase of flowers and ran out the front door. Sarah wouldn’t mind, not if the flowers did what Willow hoped they would do.

  As she hurried toward Mrs. Clauson’s yard, the red-haired woman began to shout. “Let me in!” she demanded.

  The dog barked again.

  Willow walked quickly up the porch steps. “Hello, Officer,” she said, and he nodded.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the red-haired woman. “I have a delivery for Mrs. Clauson.” The woman stepped aside.