Lizzy Enders and Elena’s sister-like relationship

Lizzy Enders and Elena’s sister-like relationship begins when Lizzy, herself an only child grieving her mother, imagines the orphaned baby as a younger sister. What starts as a private fantasy becomes a practical responsibility: Lizzy repeatedly cares for Elena, confronts the possibility of taking her away from New Mexico, and eventually travels with her toward a new home in Texas. The bond matters because it turns Lizzy’s longing for family into a choice she acts upon, rather than merely a comfort she imagines.

An imagined sister

Elena enters Lizzy’s life as a child whose survival and future depend on other people’s care. At her christening, Lizzy volunteers to remain behind from the funeral procession and mind the baby. When the wet nurse, Teresa Espinosa, appears in the church with Elena, Lizzy receives her in the hall. The infant’s lively, knowing-looking face seems to encourage Lizzy onward, but the care that follows is not only a moment of enchantment: Elena is vulnerable, and someone must look after her.

That night, Lizzy falls in love with Elena and pretends she is her little sister—or, at first, that she is Cassie’s. The qualification suggests that sisterhood is initially a role Lizzy tries on, a way to make a place for the baby in a family life she has not had. The next morning she seeks Elena out in the kitchen, where the wet nurse is feeding her. Her desire to see the baby has already become part of her daily attention, not just a tender thought at the funeral.

Longing made visible in care

Lizzy’s attachment grows alongside her awareness of how much Elena needs protection. The nuns keep the baby’s cradle where someone can always see her, and Lizzy often picks her up. When she finds Elena asleep in a linen gown and little bonnet, she feels love sharpened by the child’s helplessness. While the other girls are absorbed in their own concerns, Lizzy repeatedly makes time for her; she even anticipates helping Ramona bathe Elena.

This caretaking answers a lack in Lizzy’s own childhood. She recalls that her classmates in Independence had brothers and sisters while she had none. Being an only child had felt smothering, because she believed that everything she did could either make her parents happy or break their happiness forever. Imagining Elena as a sister offers something different from that anxious responsibility: a relationship in which Lizzy can give affection and protection. Her kiss over the cradle makes the imagined bond bodily and specific, even before she knows what future she can offer the baby.

A promise tested

The relationship becomes a consequential choice when Lizzy speaks to José about leaving. She says she will take Ben and Cleo, then adds that she will take Elena and ask Mother Magdalena for permission to give the baby a home. The proposal is tied, in that conversation, to persuading José to remain for another week; Lizzy admits to herself that she is lying about the reason. She tells him she has always wanted a little sister, but cannot meet his eyes.

Lizzy does not simply dismiss what she has promised. Later, she volunteers to watch Elena after her last class and takes her, bundled in her cradle, into the garden beneath the arbor. The act becomes a test: Lizzy wants to find out whether she meant her words or had spoken only to influence José. She insists to herself that she could leave without caring and that the nuns wanted to keep Elena. Yet the need to test her own indifference exposes how uncertain—and important—the attachment has become. She has not even mailed her letter to her father, so a future with Elena is still only a possibility, not an arranged outcome.

From imagined kinship to a home

That possibility takes practical shape when Elinora argues before Bishop Lamy that Lizzy’s father is expected to manage Santa Gertrudis Ranch in Texas. She presents the ranch as a place where Elena could grow up in health and love, and warns that Ramon Baca could find the child if she remained in New Mexico. Lizzy confirms that her father expects to run the ranch. The prospect of bringing Elena is no longer only a private wish: it becomes part of a case made to the person who can authorize the child’s future.

The journey is eventually arranged by Bishop Lamy. Four months after Lizzy leaves the convent, Elena travels with her in a wagon, accompanied by Teresa Espinosa, Teresa’s husband Georgio, their baby boy, and an escort of six riflemen and scouts supplied by Abeyta’s father. The scale of this arrangement contrasts with the intimate beginning of the relationship: the infant once watched in a convent kitchen is now included in the plans for Lizzy’s departure and destination. Elena is already asleep in the wagon when Lizzy prepares to climb onto Ben.

The meaning of the bond

Elena’s place in Lizzy’s life is both emotional and chosen. Lizzy’s first explanation—that she wants a little sister—comes from the ache of having grown up without siblings. But the relationship develops through repeated acts of attention, and through the uncomfortable recognition that her promise may be more than a tactic. Lizzy does not begin with certainty about what she wants; caring for Elena is what makes that uncertainty difficult to evade.

The ending gives sisterhood a material consequence. Lizzy does not merely imagine Elena as family or express concern for an endangered child; she leaves for Texas with Elena included in the journey and in the home she hopes to make. Their bond thus marks a change in Lizzy’s understanding of family: it can be formed through care and responsibility, not only inherited from the household into which she was born.