Then I see her, surrounded. Della. Her brown hair is lighter than it used to be and now she has curls that she never had before. She is ten years old and surrounded by laughing friends. She is taller than she was. I always was skinnier. Her books pressed into her chest, she shouts at some boys climbing a fence. Della is pretty, she was always prettier than me and followed the rules. They said I could learn from her, watch her. Still I wasn't a bad example when I was here and then I was gone. Now I am back and she can learn from me.
She talks to her friends next to the yellow school bus. When they get on she does not get on. Instead she watches the bus drive away with her friends waving in the windows and then she crosses the street and begins to walk.
A whole flock of little black birds keeps rising from the branches of one bare tree to settle in another for a moment before something startles them and they rise up and return to the first tree again. I am thirty feet from my sister, though she is walking away. I follow. I am not afraid, I am only trying to time it right. I want her to hear me and not be frightened. I want to tell her my new, real name. Little sister, I want to say, I know so much more now and I've come back to take you with me to be my friend. I can teach you. This where you are is not a bad place and these are not bad people but it's not where you're supposed to be. It is not who you're supposed to be with.
I follow on one side and she's on the other side of the street. I want to see her better but I can't seem to cross over and there are parked cars so I can only see her head sliding along. Her face never did look like mine, her earlobes attach differently. I used to wonder and ask Father if maybe our foster parents had gotten us separately and he says, "Oh, Caroline, you two are sisters. Don't be jealous like that. You'll always be my first girl now."
Now I can see Della's whole body, walking, and we are the only two people walking on this block with just the width of the slushy street between us. She doesn't look over at me. It's like she doesn't want to or doesn't recognize me or is afraid. I take off my stocking cap so my long two-colored hair is down but she doesn't know who I am. I almost wave and I almost call out her name but I do not. It's not since I'm afraid, afraid she won't remember. It's more that I don't want to wave, that I don't want her to remember. I see that now. I wanted to see her without being seen even if the plan has always been to come back for her with Father, the three of us. Now without him I don't know. I do know that I am not the same sister she had.
This girl across the street, her name is still Della. She smiles and laughs to herself as she walks like she's remembering something that happened at school or thinking ahead to where she is going. Her black shiny shoes slip a little on the icy sidewalk. She's not even in the same day as I am even if once we were sisters and shared a room. There's a way that I think she should know it's me if she's really my sister. To just feel that I am near, or to tell by how I walk or move that it's me. She even glances over across at me and then glances away. Nothing. I know I am not that same girl and now I really feel that and know that Father knew better than I did when we left her here, behind.
The pioneer cemetery is down Warm Springs from the elementary school and is surrounded by a black metal fence but the gate is not locked and swings open. I walk along the spaces between the headstones and not on the paths. I used to get in trouble for playing here during recess. Some of the stone crosses and angels and even the names are familiar. Some have settled into the ground and stand up crooked. That's a sad thing to see. Some have sunken down so far the grass is growing over.
There's footprints all around some graves but most of the graves are surrounded only by the white snow, smooth since no one has visited. Do dead people need their family to visit them or is it sometimes the other way around? Who gets lonelier?
There is a place here that I remember, that is under some tall trees where the parents of my foster parents are buried and where we sometimes took flowers. There's spaces there waiting for my foster parents and for Della and also for me even if that's a place I'll never be.
As I walk closer to this place I see that there are new stones. Maybe my foster parents have died while I was gone and then I think that maybe they gave up on me after I disappeared and they could not find me. I am thinking that maybe they even put up a stone for me with the ground beneath it empty and not dug up at all. I want to stand there by my stone with no body beneath my feet since the name carved into the stone would be the same name I wrote once on a slip of paper and put into the hole of Randy's stomach, to remind me of a name I will never forget but that I will never use again.
Under the trees though I cannot find the names I expected at all or the stones that I know. I brush off snow, I kick it off the names that are flat along the ground. This is not the right place or the graves have been moved around. No one's here. My feet are wet and cold again. The sky is getting darker. I walk to every cluster of trees and do the same thing but never find the names I thought I would find. It really doesn't matter, I hardly know why I'm searching. Finally I cross out the other side of the cemetery, past the little black birds that hop along the snow's crust without making any mark.