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countryside, staffed by a couple with their own disabled child. They called it a group home, and home it was, with dogs and a real kitchen, living room, and bedrooms for the kids though they were some odd-looking kids, moaning and scraping around the basketball court.
    Years went by. I left for college, graduate school, and soon after began a family with a good man and two healthy daughters of my own. No one faulted me for keeping my distance. My sisters and I have always been war-veteran close. To blow off steam, we allowed ourselves politically incorrect jokes about the retarded. We ran the other direction when spotting a group of them on field trips. We stewed, we mourned, or none of the above. There was unspoken forgiveness for whatever tack we chose in dealing with Boo. Outsiders were the ones who misunderstood, who saw my inattention as uncaring. Most likely theirexperience was confined to the mildly retarded, those with greater awareness and independence. There was the question of whether Boo even
knew
us.
    When I was nearly forty, my eldest asked to meet her aunt, the only aunt she’d never seen. She was curious, so we drove out to Beckie’s school, where we were escorted down a long hallway to a shoebox in the back, with windows all around. We found her strapped into a chair, coated in chocolate and saliva, bellowing with clear satisfaction. I could feel Laura back away, full of concerns I would need to address. But for a few minutes, I spoke to my sister, clucked and murmured in that lilting soprano you would use to address an infant. I touched her corkscrew hair. She leaned her head against my shoulder, scanning my face with those wayward eyes. Seeing her raised a river of tenderness and murk. Were the nurses treating her well? Did they know she drank from a plastic cup, never glass, and adored highly processed smoked turkey?
    Because she chewed imperfectly and frequently inhaled her food, Beckie was prone to pneumonia. She bounced back from one terrible case after another, beating the odds in spite of scarring, weakness, and dire prognosis. Once in the ICU, we made the tormented decision to remove her from the respirator, and we gathered at her bedside to say good-bye. As if on cue, she immediately resumed breathing on her own. But we knew these farewells were practice, and indeed, when she turned forty-one, a particularly ferocious infection finally took her life.
    I’ve heard that while we are in utero, we may be accompanied by the undeveloped cells of a ghost twin. Grieving for Beckie has felt like this. She is a shadow-life tucked under my bodyeaves.There she sways with her lopsided limbs, rickrack teeth, and gentle infant demeanor. She ties me to the earth, my little instructor, reminding me never to feel completely safe or too full of pride. She is my discomfiting, my never-never-land little sister.

On Lying
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    I’ll come clean, right now. I excused my daughter’s absence from school with a lie. We wanted to get a jump on our vacation, so I told Sister Paulette that Bonnie would be attending her great-uncle Max’s funeral on Friday. Indeed, he had passed away last winter, the touch of truth that made the lie easier. It takes some chutzpah to lie to a nun, though people of all ages have been doing it for years.
    What did I feel? About twelve years old, like one of the girls roaming around me in their hiked-up blue skirts.
    But I was determined, with a specific purpose in mind: we would leave early for the long drive to Door County, avoiding late-afternoon traffic. Bonnie’s commitment to her classes and Sister Paulette were the only obstacles. My lie, like most lies, was a method of achieving my goal. Our goal, my family’s goal, that of expediency or safety or however I justified it at the time.
    I was also careful, perhaps more so than the uniformed teenagers around me. After all, I was replacing the truth with a falsehood and it had to be believable, with characters,