I was sitting on the back steps outside the kitchen door when Mrs. Hoch, our neighbor in the apartment across the court from us, came screaming in through the front door "Maureen, where's your mother? Your little sister has been hit by a car!"
She was gone before I could come in from the back steps and tell her that Mother was in the bathtub. I stood there for a minute, not sure what I should do and wondering how it was possible that my stomach suddenly felt like I was going to throw up. Then I ran into the bathroom, where I told my mother what Mrs. Hoch had said. I wish I could remember more about how I told her, but I can't. I turned around and ran out the front door and down the court to the sidewalk.
We lived on Fourth Street near Orange Avenue. It was a beautiful bright sunny day in early January of 1940. I seemed to be aware of that as I ran to the car that was stopped by the curb, where I could see people lifting my little sister into the back seat. I pushed through the crowd and tried to see her, but could only catch a glimpse of her eyes, wide open and puzzled. It was January 6, 1940, four days before her sixth birthday.
I was twelve when Catherine Ann (mostly known as "Toots") was struck down in that pedestrian crosswalk in Long Beach. She was with one of the other neighborhood children, and they were going to the Saturday afternoon double feature at the Ebell Theater, two blocks away. I didn't want to go because I had a homework assignment I wanted to finish. I am not sure I ever got over feeling guilty and responsible for her death. I know I never got over the sight of her body in the casket at the funeral home. I didn't want to see her dead, but my mother and father would not listen to me.
"Of course you want to say goodbye to your little sister", they said. I tried to tell them how I felt about being responsible for what had happened.
"Maureen," my mother said, "it wasn't your fault. I allowed her to go. You couldn't have stopped the car, and how do you think Daddy and I would have felt if you had been killed too?"
The man who struck and ran over my little sister was eighty-eight years old. He pulled out from the end of a row of cars waiting for the two little girls to cross in the crosswalk and he just kept going. Toots died of internal injuries they said, and I never heard whether the man was punished in any way.
Our family was never the same. My parents' marriage, I realized later, had been shaky for a long time because of my father's drinking. Mother and Bill and I moved back to El Paso and our parents tried to make things work, but it wasn't long before we moved back to Long Beach, leaving my father to live alone in Texas. It was a long time before I saw him again.