Bailey

Bailey is Lennie Walker’s beloved sister, a nineteen-year-old aspiring performer whose sudden death during a rehearsal becomes the defining loss of the novel. Though much of her story reaches the reader through Lennie’s memories and grief, Bailey is more than the absence around which the family reorganizes: her ambitions, relationship with Toby Shaw, and encouragement of Lennie’s adventurousness continue to influence the living.

Identity and Aspirations

Bailey is associated with performance and a future she has chosen for herself. In a family conversation about people’s natural inclinations, she declares that she is going to Juilliard School. Gram answers with teasing confidence, calling her a future star of Hollywood or Broadway; Lennie, meanwhile, quietly hopes the school will be close enough to visit by bicycle. The exchange captures both Bailey’s certainty about her ambition and Lennie’s wish to remain near her.

Bailey’s artistic future is framed through acting: Gram identifies becoming an actress as Bailey’s aspiration. Her declaration about Juilliard is therefore not simply a school choice but an expression of a life she imagines beyond Clover and beyond the family home. The future she names is one her family can picture, even as Lennie is reluctant to ask how far away it might take her.

Family and Relationships

Bailey’s bond with Lennie is intimate and enduring. Even after Bailey’s death, Lennie measures her own changing life against the sister she loved: she imagines that, had Bailey lived, she might have remained content in a quieter, more sheltered version of herself. Lennie recalls Bailey urging her repeatedly to come out of that shell. In retrospect, Bailey’s encouragement becomes a lesson Lennie can carry forward, though receiving it through her sister’s death makes the lesson painful.

Bailey is also in a relationship with Toby Shaw. He tells Lennie that he had asked Bailey to marry him, a revelation that catches her completely off guard. Both were nineteen, and Lennie understood Bailey to be strongly averse to marriage, so the proposal unsettles her picture of what Bailey had been planning. In her grief, Lennie also reproaches herself for making out with Toby, turning her attraction into a source of guilt because he had been Bailey’s boyfriend.

Death and Its Aftermath

Bailey collapses from a fatal arrhythmia while rehearsing for a local production of Romeo & Juliet. A month later, Lennie describes the family as if its horizon has been vacuumed away. The image makes the consequence of Bailey’s death larger than a single bereavement: ordinary life continues, but the family’s sense of what lies ahead has been abruptly emptied.

The grief persists in the household’s routines and silences. After school lets out, Gram follows Lennie with tea, trying to revive a late-afternoon ritual they shared before Bailey died. Lennie refuses to talk, while she recognizes that Gram is crying for long stretches in the shower so the others will not hear. Bailey’s absence thus changes the relationships among those who remain, leaving care present but difficult to receive.

Legacy and Narrative Significance

Bailey’s death intensifies Lennie’s awareness of the unequal futures left to the sisters: Lennie has a future, while Bailey does not. Yet the novel does not present Bailey only as the cause of Lennie’s sorrow. Lennie comes to understand that her sister’s example, rather than death itself, can teach her how to live with greater daring, spirit, and joy. Her grief remains inseparable from love, and Bailey’s remembered encouragement gives that love a direction.

Bailey’s gravesite preserves this continuing connection in concrete form. The family chose a grave where she could be near the river, and the marker includes a small reliquary cabinet with a bird engraved on its metal door. When Lennie visits, she traces Bailey’s name and the words she had written for the funeral. The scene brings together the irreversibility of Bailey’s death and the ongoing work of remembering her: Lennie cannot restore her sister’s future, but she can carry Bailey’s influence into her own.