The Mystery of the Secret Sister

My father and his first wife, Betty.

When I was young, maybe 8 or 9  years old, I would spend parts of my summer staying with my grandma and my uncle who lived with her. My uncle’s first wife had left him some years earlier and he had moved back in with his mother in his 30s. 

I loved staying at my grandma’s house. She had cable, which we didn’t have, she fried bologna, and she had so many books and trinkets and pictures and pieces of paper tucked away everywhere for me to dig through. 

I had long ago finished all of the Nancy Drew mysteries and was on my way through the Agatha Christie cannon, so looking at these old photographs and newspaper cuttings made me feel like some sort of junior detective. I didn’t necessarily have a mystery to solve, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t find clues. 

When I wasn’t combing through my grandmother’s treasure or watching Fraggle Rock or reading, my uncle would often take me over to my friend Katie’s house. My friend Katie was really only my friend because my uncle introduced me to her one summer. Realizing, I suppose, that taking me to the pool in his business suit and reading the paper and smoking while I begged him to get in and play wasn’t the best use of his time, he found a girl who was about my age who happened to have similar age neighbors with a pool. Problem solved. 

Katie was a little bit older than me and therefore super cool. The pool we went to was also super cool, with a dragon fountain that spit water on you if you were brave enough to swim close to it. The other kids must have been OK and I remember hanging out in a basement rec room with them drinking fruit punch and talking about important kid things. 

My uncle would always drop me off at Katie’s house and I would change into my swimsuit there. I got to know that old house and its bathroom well. I also got to know Katie’s mother, Betty.  She was a nice woman and I felt the slight anxiety you feel as a child when you are around an adult you don’t know very well. She had black hair that I thought was dyed too dark, but she was kind and my anxiety eventually abated. 

Katie never came over to my grandma’s house and that was fine by me. I had plenty to keep me occupied in that three bedroom, one bath house. I loved to try on my grandmother’s Chanel No 5 that she kept on her dressing table, but never wore. I still sat in her lap and smelled her skin (Jergens rose lotion) and played with her moles. You have to love someone a lot to let them play with your moles, I think. 

And, of course, I went exploring. The dresser drawers were packed full of things and on one particular day I was concentrating on the small drawers of a dresser that were stuffed full of pictures and papers. It was here that I came across a 2 inch by 5 inch laminated newspaper clipping that became my own personal Nancy Drew Mystery.

The clipping was an obituary for a baby girl named Cindy Wall, which was a lot like my name, Suzy Wall, but not my name. Her parents were listed as Joe and Betty Wall, which were the names of my parents, except they had left the “e” off of my mother’s name. This was all very confusing, as I was not dead. I thought maybe someone had made a mistake at the newspaper. I didn’t understand and I stared and stared, trying to make these 6 or so sentences make sense to my young mind. 

I knew my mother had been married before she married my father, only because my half brother Tom had told me when I was five or so that I wasn’t his “real” sister. So I understood in a nebulous way that moms and dads could have other people they made other children with. What I did not understand was how my parents had made a child together who I didn’t know about. 

While I was pondering this mystery, my grandmother found me and I asked her who Cindy was. My normally soft, loving, rose lotion smelling grandmother became hard and scary. She told me that I must never, ever, under any circumstances talk about what I had found with my father. I explained to her that I didn’t understand what I had found and she softened back into her normal self, sighed, and tried to explain. Cindy had been my father’s daughter who died when he was married before. But, I said, it says Joe and Betty and Betty is my mom. No, she explained, not your mom, Bettye, Katie’s mom Betty. 

My brain worked hard trying to process what this meant. Katie’s mom Betty had been married to my dad Joe. My dad Joe was now married to my mom Bettye. Betty and Joe had had a baby,  Cindy, who would have been my sister.  Katie was not my sister, but Katie and I had had a sister. Her mom had been married to my dad, so maybe that made us secret sisters? Almost sisters?  And didn’t our shared dead sister make us even more like sisters than not? If nothing else we shared a secret that no one else shared and that was super cool, right?  

I had read all kinds of books about missing siblings and twins and even sisters who lived in parallel universes. I had three way older brothers and the thought of having a sister, especially a secret sister, was unbelievably exciting to me. My grandmother had told me I was never allowed to talk to my father about this and I understood that loud and clear. But she hadn’t said anything about talking to Katie. 

The next day my uncle dropped me off at Katie’s house as usual. I was nervous, but I tried to play it cool, changing into my swimsuit and heading out to the pool with the other kids. We swam and played for a long time, and I enjoyed my secret knowledge that Katie was kind of my secret sister. 

I waited until the other kids went home and it was just the two of us left in the pool. My memory of this moment is at dusk, but it must have been earlier and overcast, or maybe all memories are in sepia tone. Crouching in the shallow end with only my head above water like a crocodile, my body hidden safely underwater, I told Katie that our parents had been married. I told her that we had had a sister. I told her that we were almost sisters. 

I expected her to be as excited as I was and to want to help me find out more about our mutual mystery. What I didn’t expect was her actual reaction. 

“You’re a liar!” she screamed, “I hate you, I hate you!” And she stumbled out of the pool and ran home, not stopping to listen to my attempts to calm her down, to explain to her that this was a really super cool thing. I couldn’t understand why she was so angry. 

I don’t know how long it took me to get out of the pool and go back to her house myself, but I do remember her mother, Betty, my almost mother, taking me by the hands and telling me that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I may have cried, but I also may have been too mortified to show any emotion. 

My uncle picked me up as usual and I never saw Katie again, not until we were adults. I never got to solve the Mystery of the Secret Sister with her. 

I told my mother what had happened and she also told me that I could never talk to my father about Cindy or what had happened with Katie. She said it would kill him and that he blamed himself for her death. I didn’t understand any of this, but I didn’t question her. I stayed silent. 

The next time I saw Katie was 20 years later at my father’s memorial service. My uncle, standing next to me to keep me upright and make sure I knew who all three hundred plus people were who were streaming into the funeral home said, “Suzy, you remember Katie.” And I did. It wouldn’t dawn on me until later to wonder why she was at my father’s funeral. I had not gone to her mother’s funeral, who had already died, nor would I go to her father’s, who would die ten years later. 

I knew that my father had gone to Katie’s mom’s funeral. My mother told me this and she also talked to me openly for the first time about Cindy, telling me that my father went to visit her grave after Betty’s service for the first time since Cindy was buried. She said he hadn’t been able to bear going before then. 

I never talked to my father about Cindy or Katie or his first wife Betty. He took all of those secrets to his grave. My husband asked me why I hadn’t, and I told him that my grandmother and mother had made me promise not to. It was that simple in my mind as a child and I never thought to question that reasoning as an adult.  I also never talked about any of it with my uncle, who is also now gone. I wonder what the conversation between him and Betty’s mom was like that day. I wonder whose decision it was for me to never play with Katie again. I wonder about a lot of things. 

So when, on the 18th anniversary of my father’s death this year, I started getting curious about Cindy for the first time since I was a child, I had no one to talk to about her. A quick Facebook search showed that Katie’s profile was locked down tight and she never responded to a message from me. Both of her parents were dead and my mother, while still alive, wouldn’t be much help. 

I realized I didn’t know when Cindy was born, how old she would be, how old she was when she died. I didn’t know anything really except that she existed. And for all of my Nancy Drew excitement about Katie being my secret sister, Cindy really had been my sister. My sister. A part of my father. And I didn’t know her at all. 

This is when it occurred to me that my friend and business partner, Jennifer, literally spends all of her time looking up her family genealogy online. Certainly she could help me find out when Cindy was born and when she died. 

She wound up finding a lot more than that. It turns out my father married his first wife halfway through her sophomore year at university, according to the wedding announcement, leading me to believe it was a shotgun wedding. Cindy was born not long after, on January 31, 1958. My father would have been 21 years old. Of note here is that my birthday is January 5th and my father’s is January 19th, which lines us all up nicely for the month of January and probably made the beginning of each year very emotionally difficult to my father, unbeknownst to me. 

I learned her date of birth from her death certificate, which was issued just a few months later on May 10. 1958. The cause of death was listed as “strangled to death.” After having a heart attack deciphering the spidery handwriting that stated this, I wound up not flat lining when I read the next line, “possibly due to milk.” This, I found out from Dr Google and breeder friends, is commonly called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome today, probably because “strangled to death” was fucking traumatic as hell, considering you had already lost a fucking child. 

The idea is that the baby isn’t burped properly or enough, or is sleeping in the “wrong” position or any number of things that a parent could blame themselves for for the rest of their lives, that caused the baby to choke on a tiny bit of milk. 

A tiny bit of milk. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I knew there was a reason I never wanted children. How could you bear that? I don’t know that my father did bear it very well. My mother had told me that he had sat by my crib when I was an infant to make sure that I was always still breathing. I didn’t understand that until I read her death certificate.

What really threw me for a loop, though, was a write up of Cindy’s funeral service in the local paper. It listed the mother as “Betty Katherine Wall.” This freaked me out for several reasons. The first reason is that my full maiden name was Susan Katherine Wall. It was my maternal grandmother’s middle name as well.  The second reason is that it never dawned on me in a million years that Katie’s real name was also Katherine. We not only shared a sister, we shared a name.  

Not only that, but both sets of parents apparently decided it was cool to let us play together as kids without telling us any of this crazy shit. I guess it didn’t matter if we didn’t know, and to be fair, how the hell could we have understood what it all meant?  In retrospect, I can’t imagine how hard it was for Katie’s mother to see me all those summers, as I have always been told I am the spitting image of my father. 

Maybe what’s craziest is that Katie and I actually got along, at least until my unfortunate announcement in the pool. Young girls can be vicious and they don’t always play well together. Katie and I did. 

It feels like there are so many connections that can’t quite touch each other because the connectors are all dead: my father, her mother, and Cindy. If Cindy were alive, Katie and I wouldn’t be sisters, but we would share a half sister. We would share something. I think in the end that’s all I want: someone to share all of this with. Someone who is a part of it. Someone who could help me fill in the missing pieces.