The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain

there was quite a distance between him and Lisa, it was as though a fine thread ran from his white baton to her violin, coaxing every note from the instrument. This music I knew: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor. My father listened to it all the time. The familiar piece used to drift through the rooms of our house until I was numbed by it, but I was anything but numb now, hearing Lisa play it. I swallowed hard, wanting both to turn off the tape and to play it over and over again.
    When the camera closed in tight on Lisa’s face, I leaned forward and saw the long fair lashes above her closed eyes, the delicate crease between her eyebrows, as if the music pained her. I wished so much that Danny was watching the tape with me. That I had someone to share the emotions with.
    I made it through the first movement of the concerto before I needed to turn off the tape. I sat in front of the TV, crying until I could cry no more, overwhelmed with grief for the sister I’d never gotten to know. It had only been a couple of hours since I’d started watching the tapes, but it may as well have been a month for how changed I felt. Even though I’d never had the chance to know her, she’d been such an influence on my life and I was full of love for her. Yet I realized now that I’d made her up. I’d had to imagine what she’d been like because I had no way of knowing. Now suddenly, I’d seen her face. I saw how hard she worked. She’d been just a kid. Practically a baby in that first tape and a young and hopeful teenager in the second. All anyone would be able to see as they watched her perform was the skill and perfection; no one could see the toll her career was taking on her heart and soul.
    What was it that caused her to break apart? That conductor—had he demanded perfection of her? Had my parents? Had the fame been too much for her? I ran my fingers through my hair, my tears falling all over again. I wished I could hug her! Hold her tight. I wished I could tell her she didn’t need to be perfect; she only needed to be Lisa. I wanted to reach inside those tapes and tell that delicate young angel to hold on. Someday, I would promise her, it will be all right .

 
    11.
    â€œYou’ll be shocked what people will buy at an estate sale,” Jeannie said as we poked through the items in my mother’s china cabinet in the dining room. In my hand, I held an old green bowl that had clearly been broken in two and glued back together “Christine will want you to leave everything just as it is.”
    â€œEven broken dishes?” I asked, holding the bowl so she could see the crack.
    â€œAbsolutely,” she said. “Artists use them to make jewelry and all sorts of things you can’t imagine. So we want to leave everything in place. You don’t need those boxes.” She pointed to the three empty boxes I’d found in the basement. My plan had been to fill them with things to donate, but Jeannie had a different idea. “I do want to get a closer look at the collections and figure out what sort of appraisers we need to call,” she said. “If there are any things you want to keep—items with sentimental value, for example—just set them aside. We can make a place for them in your father’s upstairs office. For now, you can clean out those cabinets in the living room where he kept all his paperwork.” She took the green bowl from my hand and put it back in the china cabinet. “Let’s go take a look in there,” she said, and I followed her into the living room. She stood in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, and both of us faced the ten built-in cabinets that ran the entire length of the living room beneath the windows. “I know he would just stuff insurance forms and all sort of things in there that can probably just be shredded. That can be your job.”
    â€œAll right.” I dreaded even opening those