I found her in a tree, once.
She was sittin' stuck in the uppermost branches, serene and unsurprised as an angel on Christmas morning. Dappled light inked her pretty with the shadows of leaves, and her fingers faintly tapped the rhythm of a bright hymn on the burdened limb.
"Hello!" she called, miraculously. The sun made a silhouette of her waving arm, and I breathed for the first time in hours. Her face looked so sweet, smilin' and brilliant. Though she was only a few dozen feet up, she looked down at me as though she was ages and miles away.
"Susan, get down from there," I yelled. "Momma's worried," I added in a mutter, my gaze scurrying down to my feet. I was lyin'. Our mother was no more worried for Susan's safety than she was concerned about her future prospects, certain of the prophetic glory that her elder child was gonna bring to the world, the sweet justification. I was the concerned party, sure my sister was gonna wander herself into traffic or a running crick one of these days. My Susan was going out of her mind, that was for certain. My mother, witch-like, possessed-seeming, remained unconvinced. She believed Susan was touched by an angel- "doin' God's Will." My mother also believed girls who wore braids in their hair were fated to be filthy whores and that President Carter was sent by the devil to destroy us all.
Susan beamed like I had just given her eternal salvation. "I cain't," and she laughed so fine I forgot how to be angry.
I got Mr. Petersen whose magnolia it was to call the volunteer fire department, and half an hour later, Mr. Davis my math teacher plucked her out of the branches like a ripe cherry. Her pearl face was scratched from nose to ear, and sugar blood fell precious into her round mouth. It took an hour that evening for me to draw all of the twigs and thorns from her copper red hair, and I brushed it sweet, 100 times till it shone. Meantime she babbled to our raptured mother about the birds in the treetops, the church steeple seen from 30 feet up, the feather-red fire engine. My mother drank in every word like gospel, looking ablaze like a fallen angel.
Susan'd gone missin' earlier that morning while I tended to the sink full of dishes she'd left when distracted by some lush bud on the bushes in the front yard. She put it behind her ear then returned to the house to pour music out of her soul at the piano- all them bright marching hymns, lots of Jesus and Alleluia, Allelu. Her voice ran clear as daylight, and I didn't mind takin' her work on for her. I was habituated anyway; our mother didn't never assign anything to her, and she'd start a chore and not get even halfway done before something called her away. Then she'd return on a chance, hours later, and the wet laundry'd be pegged neatly on the line 'stead a bunched in the baskets, or the living room swept, or the counters washed. And that open grin'd spread so wide and she'd say, "Why Hattie, you blessed angel!"  and throw her slender arms about me like I was the special one. So I'd throw my frustration out with the bathwater and hold her back. Sometimes she did feel like a messiah, a plain miracle.
Other times, though, she terrified me. Like when I noticed she wasn't singing anymore. Silence, poison gas, filled the house. Hands soaked in foam, I turned my head around the doorway into the living room where the baby grand stood an ineffectual sentinel. Nothing. Nowhere. Her bedroom was barren, the halls empty. Outside was pretty as a picture and horrible vacant. Not in the yard. Not in the street. Panic. Anger. Nausea. Houses blended together as I ran in all directions, certain that this time she was killed for sure. The sky was already winning over the falling sun when I stumbled through Mr. Petersen's backyard and I saw her shoe danglin' from a low branch. I thanked the Lord it wasn't her neck.
That night she slept early, and emboldened with memories of fear and the anger I wasn't gonna- couldn't- burden upon my beautiful sister, I confronted my mother as she consulted St. Peter as to what cereal to buy. She sat at the dining room table, hunched and sharp, skin too thin for the bones protruding outward.
My mother was a small woman, but even so, I always perceived her in parts. Sometimes I saw her as a pair of hard black eyes, and other times I only knew her as a long, dark brown mane. I was approaching her height, but she always seemed to tower above me like a statue of Lucifer. Most terrifying was when she appeared as a skeleton, with her bones seeming to yearn for freedom.
"Momma." Her shoulder blades stabbed angrily out of her back like the wings of a demon. She didn't appear to hear me. I began recklessly, incautiously, revealing the scant experience of my twelve years that was usually belied by a facade of cynical maturity and obsessive book-learning. "Susan needs help. She needs a doctor." I knew this'd pierce her emotion; "doctor," like "medicine," "Democrat," and "Episcopalian" was a dirty word under my mother's roof. We hadn't never been to a real doctor our entire lives. Lucky we was hearty children, not subject to frequent colds or clumsy injuries. The few times we needed any looking to we got taken to a faith healer named Primrose, a madwoman and good friend to my mother.
My mother's head snapped up, and her quick dark eyes fixed on mine, hard as dying bone. Those coals could put the fear of God in me.
"Hattie, what on earth'd Susan need somethin' like that for?" She tore at the word with her tongue and teeth. Her eyes bowed back down to the New Testament, muttering and penitent. I impetuously pulled the Bible from under her sharp nose and tossed it across the room with a mournful clatter. "She's gettin' worse," I breathed fiery. "She's goin' even further from home. Sometimes she don't remember her own name when I find her. Sometimes she don't even remember who I am!" Here I paused, briefly disintegrated. "And she don't even know how she got where she did, or why. She's sick. All's we know she's got head cancer or something, and gonna drop dead afore we even know what's wrong!" I looked monolithic at my mother's black eyes while my breathing came in seizing spasms.
"How dare you throw the word o' God about like it weren't nothing!" she screeched fiercely. "The Lord god Almighty should oughta strike you dead standing!" She pushed around me to collect her gospel, weeping and scraped on the floor. "And don't even think to say there's something wrong with Susan. You are jealous that she is doing God's Will! She is guided by the angel Gabriel and you have the hand of Satan on your shoulder. And I ain't gonna hear you sayin' another word about it!" She appended this sermon with a smart smack across my face, which I took numbly. She hurricaned out of the room, spinning my world as I stood by the table, alone and petrified.

Susan knew nothing of my worries. She was four years older than I, but still a child. The people at school wanted to put her in a special class for the kids who didn't learn so quick, but I knew better. Susan wasn't retarded or nothing; she was just given to fits of distraction even when she wasn't running away from home for no reason. She liked pretty things, music and flowers and all that, and figures and letters and dates and suchlike were spinier than she liked. It'd always been like that. Even when we was little she always seemed like she just weren't quite there. Like she was looking at the world through a window a million miles away.
Eventually Momma took her out of public schooling with an eye to teaching her at home, but it ended up just being a reading out the Bible and some hymns and then nothing else, and they even gave up on that real quick. So I'd go to school, and Susan'd start a painting, or climb trees, or sing all day long. She didn't start forgetting things until just before she left school, and her spells of running away started afterwards. The fits varied little time after time: she'd be in the middle of doing something, when all of a sudden she'd drop everything and start walking nowhere, looking dazed and blank like an idiot, gaze even farther from me than usual. And sometimes she'd go far, and sometimes she'd only go a little ways. She never remembered how she got where she ended up, and sometimes she didn't know nothin' at all. I mean, she knew the capital of Nebraska and what's two plus two; but she didn't know her name, or mine, or where she lived, or who she was. Momma said that was cause of the Holy Spirit taking her over, but didn't God know everything about everyone? I was always told that God works in mysterious ways, but it often felt like He wasn't working at all.

The first time she run off she was just fourteen and I spent hours combing backwoods and pastures when I shoulda just looked into our neighbor's backyard. Momma tried to scold her after we got her home, but Susan just looked so sweet, so- angelic. And she claimed not to remember nothing, so Momma let it go with a breath and a prayer. By the third or fourth time, she'd already fleshed out her notion that Susan was divinely inspired. Momma had a revelation, and led the two of them in violent, shaking prayer; I excluded myself from this untoward display.
Later that night I crept into bed next to my sister and let her stroke my hair as she stared peacefully at the ceiling. "Susan?" I breathed, almost unwilling to disrupt the night's serenity.
"Mm?" Back and forth on my scalp went her fingers. Her breath made her chest rise and fall with a steadying regularity.
"D'you really think that you're touched by an angel, like Momma says?" I felt too awkward to look at her.
I felt her shrug. "I dunno, Hattie. Sometimes God don't do things real obvious-like. Maybe I am."
Back and forth, rise and fall. "But she says you're doing God's Will. What is His Will, Susan? It don't seem to me like you're doing anything particular special."
She thought about this for a moment. "I got no earthly idea, Hattie." She paused, seeming to realize that this response gave me no comfort. "But it ain't like it's anything bad." Back and forth. "That's not His way," she added in a pensive murmur.
At the time, it was enough for me that she wasn't worried, so I fell asleep beside her, confident that God wouldn't never guide my sister into harm.

It felt like someone upstairs must have been listening to me that night I told Momma I thought Susan was sick, because for a very long time she didn't have any of her spells. She stopped forgetting things so much, and even began to talk about maybe going back to school. These conversations got limited to our late-night communication in her room; our mother wouldn't hear none of her returning to public education or otherwise abandoning her holy destiny. Every day it seemed like she was coming closer to me, wandering forward through the mist that had kept me from her for so long. Finally, beautifully, it seemed like it was all, all over.

Going on a year after the day I found her in a tree, we had one of the hottest, wettest summers we'd seen in lifetimes. The temperature hovered around 100 degrees every day, and walking through the streets was like parting' the Red Sea with every step. Over the last school year, I'd made friends with a girl, Carrie, who had air conditionin' in her house, and spent most of my summer days with her. Initially I felt bad about leaving Susan behind, but she insisted that I have no guilt. If I had been around more, though, maybe I woulda seen something.
One day dawned particular hot and damp, but around ten o'clock, heavy black clouds could be seen to the side of the sky. "Gonna be a mighty storm," my mother said. "You keep inside, you hear?" This last order was given as I was galloping out the door. Susan called a good-bye that sounds plaintive in memory, and I yelled a hasty response before runnin' off down the street. I didn't look back, but I can just picture her in my mind, standing in the doorway, looking after me, gaze receding back into the infinity of her mind.
Carrie and I watched television most of the morning until the storm broke around twelve o'clock. We watched it rage outside of her living room window, squealing and awed at the ferocity of the tempest. Most big storms only last a little bit, but this one wouldn't quit. Carrie's mother decided to take me home during a brief pause in the violence, and I skipped up the steps of my house, full of the electric energy of the weather. I called for Susan, wanting her to watch the rain with me, but received no response. Peeking my head into the dining room, I saw my mother reading the Bible. "Momma, where's Susan at?"
"She's in her room, prayin'," she muttered, distracted. I bounded down the hall and knocked on her door. No response. "Susan?" I called. Perhaps she was napping, as I often did when sent to my room to pray. When I opened the door, her bed was made up neatly and the room was empty. I began to feel a familiar sickening fear. I returned to the kitchen. "Momma, she ain't there. Where is she?" My mother looked up, baffled. I knew well enough what her thoughts were. She had run off again.
Within seconds I was out the door, sprinting. Thunder roared above me, and the rain began pelting down again. I was soaked through in minutes, but I kept on goin'. She was not in our yard, nor anyone else's. Not on our street, not in our neighborhood, not in Mr. Petersen's tree. The rain was coming down more, not less, and my panic became all-encompassing. Where had she gone? I began to look in ridiculous places-under cars, inside mailboxes, behind flower pots. She was nowhere.
After several hours, the rain slowed to a drizzle, the sun hid ashamed below the horizon, and I trudged back home, face more wet with tears than with rain. I went inside under the vain hope that she had come home all on her own, but my mother's pinched face told me everything I needed to know. This was the first time I had ever seen her worried for Susan, and seeing her in such a new state, I consented to appeal to God with for our Susan's safe return. The prayers only ended when the police called to say that they had found her, my beautiful sister, face down in a river, weeds in her hair and her arms spread like the Crucified Lord.

When Susan was buried in the churchyard, my mother consented, incredibly, to see a real doctor. This doctor gave her some pills to take that kept her from sobbing and screaming all day long; really, kept her from doing anything at all. After the funeral, I felt a strange sense of amputation, as though I had lost one of my arms or legs. I kept checking the mirror to see that all my extremities were still there, and felt constant surprise when they were.
After that, I stayed out a lot. I got the feeling that seeing me just made my mother more sad. At first, I tried to be angry with her for doing nothing about Susan's illness, but I found it impossible to hold it against her any more than she was holding it against herself. She was never up when I left for school, and sometimes didn't leave her bed the whole day. I'd check on her and watch her sleeping fitfully, seeing her grow smaller and bonier.
Susan's birthday came on a late summer Sunday, golden and shining. The season was dying in a blaze of heavenly glory. My mother didn't leave her room, and I didn't go nowhere near it all morning long. I had a vague sense that if I did, I was gonna find my mother stone dead between the sheets, gone off to chase her favorite child.
I made as little noise as I could all day, skulking around the house like making a peep would cause the hand of God Himself to reach down from the sky and strike me down. But just when the light of the late afternoon was making everything as gilded as Midas's palace, my mother called to me.
I rushed towards her room, dreading what I was going to find. Perhaps she was dying in a fit, coughing up blood and spewing divine fire. What I found, though nothing of the sort, still managed to surprise me.
She was sitting up in bed, still in her nightgown, with the sunlight pouring all over her. Her dark hair seemed to shine red from the inside, giving her head a sheen like a bottle of Coca Cola. She was holding something in her hand and looking at it, sad and trembling. This sight gave me a great shock. Not because there was anything particular wrong, or unusual, or Satanic; but because this woman, this sad, broken, ordinary woman, was my mother. Someone had replaced her black heart with one of blood and tissue. They didn't get it quite right, though; they gave it to her broken.
I hovered just inside the doorway, wary and uncertain of myself. She kept stroking the paper that was in her hands; squinting, I could see it was a photograph, one of the few family photos in our possession in which we all looked more or less happy. Without looking up, she said in a fragile, cracking voice, "Come here, Hattie."
Nervous, I stepped lightly over to the bed and sat down on the edge beside her. She kept on a-stroking that picture, and didn't seem to know I was even there. After several minutes, she breathed heavily, and began to speak. I almost didn't catch what she was saying, her tone was so new. "Eighteen," she breathed. "She woulda been eighteen years old today. Look, Hattie. Don't she look so pretty?" Here she turned the picture to my eyes, and I nodded.
"She's beautiful," I murmured.
"Eighteen. Oh, Lord Jesus, smite me for sayin' it ain't fair." I heard tears in her voice before they began to prick at her eyes. "Strike me down for knowin' that I- I needed her more. Oh, God, what am I goin' to do?" Rivers sprang up down her face, and she kept repeating those words like a mantra: "What am I goin' to do, what am I goin' to do, Lord Jesus Christ Almighty, why did You have to take her from me, why?" She sniffled and gulped air, turning her weak and watery eyes on me. "Why did they do it, Hattie? Why did they take my baby angel away from me? What'd they go and do that for? What was the reason for it?"
The sunlight warmed the back of my hands, and I turned them over to see the lines on my palm. I traced what I had been told was the lifeline, and wondered if Susan's had just run a little too short. There was a bird singing outside, and the shouting of children in the street. My mother was still shakin' all over, and making soft little gasping noises as she cried. I closed my eyes, and saw Susan's face swim indistinct before me. I saw her eyes, so pretty and yet so wrong, looking at me from a million miles away; looking, but never really seeing.
I looked out the window towards the setting sun, straightened my back. My mother was still waitin' for an answer, her small, lined face leaning expectantly up to me. I looked at her hand, and took it in mine. "God's Will," I said.