Sal

Sal is Josie’s sister, who died before the novel’s main events but remains an active presence in the family’s memories and choices. The few facts disclosed about her—her thoughtful and sensitive nature, her illness, and the failed attempt to preserve her through a doll—form a painful precedent against which the Mother and Paul confront Josie’s illness and the prospect of her replacement.

Identity and Family Memory

Sal first becomes visible to Klara in a photograph from Josie’s childhood. In it, a younger Josie sits at a rough wooden table beside the Mother, while a third girl, estimated to be about eleven, turns her back to the photographer. Sunlight falls across the table; behind the family, the image shows the blurred pattern of a waterfall. When Klara asks who the girl is, Josie answers that she is Sal, her sister. The photograph offers a concrete family scene but withholds Sal’s face, an apt visual form for someone who is remembered by others yet scarcely known by the younger sister who survived her.

Josie says she was small when Sal died and does not remember her much; she adds that she does not miss her. The remark does not mean Sal has vanished from the family’s emotional life. At Morgan’s Falls, the Mother explains that the family used to come there with Sal and remembers how much Sal loved the place. She recalls the photograph being taken on a bench nearby, with herself, Sal, and Josie together. The landscape thus connects a present outing to a shared family past that Josie herself can only partly recall.

Character and the Circumstances of Her Death

The Mother distinguishes Sal’s temperament from Josie’s. Josie, she says, speaks her mind without worrying about saying the wrong thing; this can irritate, but it is also part of what she loves about her. Sal was different: she thought things through before speaking and was more sensitive. The Mother also suggests that Sal may not have coped with being sick as well as Josie does. These descriptions are limited to the Mother’s recollection, but they establish Sal not simply as a lost child, but as a distinct person whose temperament shaped how her illness was experienced.

The novel does not specify Sal’s diagnosis or provide a detailed account of her final illness. It does show how her death returns in moments when Josie’s health becomes uncertain. After the Mother tells Klara that Sal died, Josie warns her mother not to make the same promises Sal made, because Sal could not keep them. Josie insists that Sal was sick with something different and that she herself will recover. In this exchange, the sisters’ illnesses are explicitly distinguished, but the memory of Sal’s death makes reassurance difficult: Josie’s confidence meets the Mother’s knowledge of a loss that once seemed to leave promises unfulfilled.

The Mother and Paul’s Bereavement

Sal’s death has left the Mother wary of hope and of any claim that a child can be saved by certainty alone. When Klara asks why Sal died, the Mother’s expression changes; she later rebukes Josie for believing that everything can be fixed and reminds her that Sal also made promises. Her response reveals grief that has not become a settled family story. Sal is spoken of tenderly at Morgan’s Falls, but her death also makes the Mother angry and frightened when Josie’s illness returns.

Paul’s response is different in emphasis but equally shaped by the loss. He opposed risking Josie’s health through being lifted, arguing that many children were not lifted and that the family should not take that risk after Sal. The Mother says she could not accept that future for Josie: she wanted the best life for her, and she blames her own decision for Josie’s present sickness. Sal’s death therefore enters the parents’ conflict over responsibility in opposite ways. For Paul, it is a reason to avoid another risk; for the Mother, it is part of the history that made her determined to give Josie every available chance.

The Doll and the Prospect of Continuation

Sal is also connected to an earlier attempt to make a doll after a child’s death. Henry Capaldi insists that what was made for Sal was only a bereavement doll, not a genuine continuation. The Mother rejects his confidence that a new Josie could truly be Josie: the attempt did not work with Sal, she says, and she asks why she should believe it will work with Josie. Her objection makes the earlier doll more than a technical failure; it marks the boundary between preserving an image and continuing a person.

The possibility of losing Josie makes the Mother’s plea to Klara especially charged. She asks Klara to do what lies within her power and to continue Josie, while promising that she might one day love Klara as Josie. The request draws its force from the remembered precedent of Sal: the Mother has already endured one child’s death and cannot imagine enduring another. Yet the earlier doll does not settle whether continuation is possible. It instead sharpens the question of what can survive a child’s death, and whether love can recognize a person in an artificial successor.

A Presence Beyond Memory

Sal’s presence recurs through the family’s language and objects: the photograph at Morgan’s Falls, the recollection of her sensitivity, the promises associated with her illness, and the doll that the Mother refuses to mistake for a successful continuation. Josie’s wish that Klara should have sole use of her room and come and go freely is framed against the family’s having sealed up Sal’s room. The contrast makes the treatment of domestic space another measure of how the family handles bereavement: one death has left a room closed, while Josie imagines a different arrangement for Klara.

Sal also briefly appears as a possible figure in the landscape when Helen says that someone she saw running from Chrissie looked like Sal, two years after Sal was believed to have died. Rick dismisses the suggestion as one of his mother’s strange theories; Helen clarifies that she is not claiming Sal survived, only that the person resembled her. The episode offers no confirmation that the figure is Sal. Its significance lies in how readily the dead sister returns as an image, even where the family insists that her death is real and her memory should not become a game.

Through these scattered recollections, Sal is defined both by what is known and by what remains unavailable: she was sensitive, she was ill, and she died while Josie was young, but the novel supplies neither her own voice nor a full account of her life. That absence is consequential. Sal’s death shapes the living characters’ decisions about risk, hope, and artificial continuation, while Josie’s limited memory prevents the family’s grief from being simply shared or inherited. She is at once a particular lost sister and the precedent that makes every discussion of Josie’s future more urgent.