SISTER OF MINE
Laurie Petrou
A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves—a special kind of double.
—Toni Morrison
For Judy & Phil Petrou, Jay, Eli & Leo, and Nicole Bell
She breaks into a run as soon as she clears the flames. Tripping and falling through trees, galloping like a confused animal, head turned over shoulder, fire in her eyes. She hears a window break like a firecracker, branches snap against her shoulders. Her knees scraped, her hair singed, her breath sour and pressing, pushing out foul words and curses, knowing that she has done it now, goddammit, she has really fucking done it now.
She runs through the forest behind the property, out to the back roads, ducking into hedges with every sound of a car approaching. Eventually she hears fire trucks screaming dimly behind her, where she can see a thin column of smoke if she strains her eyes, lifting her chin and squinting over poplars in the dark sky. A deer startles her, leaping over shrubs, its tail in the air. Her long, thin summer dress is muddy at the bottom, torn in places, a lacy hem pulling away from the skirt. She pushes fingers through her hair. She swears and pants and refuses to cry.
Blocks away, she knows that her sister, curled in her tangled sheets, is waiting. The old clocks ticking, the big old house holding its breath, about to take in another secret. Can her sister hear that siren start to wail?
Mouth dry, body hopping with ragged energy, she takes a familiar route though an alley, passing light, metal fencing wound up with a dead vine, and moves quietly to the back of the old house. Like when they were young, and would slip in after curfew. Not so long ago. When she was silly and bad, but not as bad as this. Not as good as this. She reaches into the bird feeder in the apple tree and pulls out a key, a magic ticket, shaking off sunflower seeds like fairy dust. She opens the back door, letting the screen butt against her leg, into the quiet of the lower hallway. She breathes in the flowery, soapy air of her childhood.
She climbs the stairs, and tells herself she’s been there all night; that she had been there in the early evening, just before supper—washed the lettuce in the sink and wrapped it in a towel, pushing out the moisture with the heels of her hands. She tells herself they had eaten and gone to bed early, that if she says this enough, if will be true. She passes the kitchen, her heart slowing down at last. One of the wooden chairs is pulled out from the table, the newspaper lies open. A whole life that took place before now. And then just like that, she wonders what it feels like to burn, to be caught in smoke and flames, and she has to stop and hold the doorframe to support herself. It comes so fast. This is it; this is how it will be. Get used to it. Push it away. Douse the fire.
A creak from a bed, the sound of someone sitting up and listening. She takes the second flight of stairs with purpose. She speaks, and hearing her words for the first time in hours makes her aware of her voice: scratchy, soft, scared.
“It’s me. I’m home.”
Part I
1
There are people who, when you hear the thump of their car door close, when you sense their feet on the steps, make your body tighten just a little. Even when you love them. Especially when you love them. You find yourself wishing them away, praying that a bluster, a breeze, a patron saint of snatchers will nip them off the porch and leave you be, without them—without who you are with them—for just a little longer. And if you have a freckly fire-haired sister who breathes in all the air of any room she enters, well then, all the more.
Hattie burst into the house. Officer Moore was with her, smiling at her back, his hair trimmed neatly, his pants pressed.
Hattie stopped when she saw me.
“Oh! Hi, Penny,” she said, her smile wavering, dropping her purse on the bench where the purses of all the women in our family have been dropped over the years. Her keys jingling, an impotent wind lifting the hem of her skirt behind her as she closed the door.
A year after the fire. A year of her entrances in this two-person, sister-only life raft of a house.
I nodded in mock formality. “Hattie. Officer Moore. This is a pleasant surprise.”
He smiled awkwardly. “Hello, Penny. It’s Iain, you can call me Iain, of course. Nice to see you, too. Sorry, I was just,” he looked at Hattie, “I just bumped into Hattie, and was walking her home. I was heading in this direction anyhow.” He brushed his hair from his forehead, self-consciously. In his civilian clothes—khaki pants, button-down shirt—he looked like any other young man in our small town. Plain, baby-faced, his neck red from the sun.
I needed to remind him he was Officer Moore. That he shouldn’t be here, mooning over Hattie. He could cause us trouble. I didn’t underestimate the threat he posed, baby face or no. I thought, as I always did when I saw him, of the very first time we’d met. How my hands had shaken then; I remember holding them behind my back. Would you like some tea, Officer Moore? We’re not coffee drinkers, I’m afraid.
I waved him off now. “Please don’t let me interrupt your visit. I’ve got business in the kitchen anyway.” I fixed Hattie with a bland smile and moved into the next room. I heard her, speaking loudly for my benefit.
“Well. Thanks, Iain.”
“My pleasure. I …” I heard him say, quietly, “I enjoyed seeing you.”
“Me too.”
“I’ll call you later?”
“Of course. Anytime. I’ve got a busy few days, but yeah, let’s see.”
“Okay, I’ll just work around you.”
I knew she was blushing, smiling.
The door closed behind him, and the room shrank to the size of an acorn. I called through to Hattie.
“Why is he here again, Hattie?”
“No beating around the bush for you, I see.” She joined me into the kitchen.
“Seriously. How many times?” I stood watching her, cornering her. “It’s a bad idea. I think I’ve been pretty clear on that.”
“I’m not doing anything wrong, first of all—and it’s certainly not an ‘idea.’ ” She paused. “It’s been a year, Penny. And—he’s nice to me.”
“I don’t want him coming here.”
“You’ve said.”
“And what do you mean, ‘he’s nice to me’? Tell me you’re not that desperate for attention. If it’s nice you need, I can start bringing you flowers.”
“I’m not like you, you know.”
“You can say that again,” I said, darkly.
“Look, I like being with people, okay? It’s a distraction. I actually like to leave this house once in a while. You used to understand that.”
“I do understand that. He’s the wrong person to do it with.”
“He’s not that bad.”
“No? Well, then he’s definitely too good.”
“Maybe it’s wise to have him onside. Have you thought of that?”
“Onside is one thing. Inside is something else altogether.”
“Jesus, Penny. Fine. I’ll … I’ll let him down easy.” She shrugged, as if she didn’t care about ending the friendship, as if it were her choice.
I paused, knowing that while she may not do it right away, she would sooner or later. She would do what I asked.
“You hungry?” I was heating up some leftover soup.
* * *
We sat down at the large cherrywood dining table that our mother had bought at an auction when she was pregnant with me. The story was that she had cravings for antiques the way other pregnant women crave pickles. The house was riddled with them: crocks and old farm equipment, wash basins and mismatched chairs. I loved to imagine her, body full to bursting, perusing antique auctions and estate sales, overlapping birth and death. We never really redecorated. I had always insisted, despite Hattie�
�s attempts to usher in some new style, that we honor the house, our own grand madam of the town of St. Margaret’s. The odd chair or couch was recovered, but the house was a snapshot of our lives as children, of a life that our mother had pieced together. It had become our sanctuary and our prison. As I’ve often reminded my sister, change isn’t always good.
We sat near each other, but there was no denying the table’s size, its ornate carvings casting their own presence.
“What’d you get up to today?” I asked.
“You know, not much. Perm, trim, updo. Really exciting.”
“Getting any time to read while you’re there?” Hattie had a voracious reading habit, always had done.
She smiled. “When I can, when I’m on break. I’m loving Jane Eyre. All those English moors and twists of fate. Beats the hell out of washing someone’s hair.”
“Good. That’s good. I’m proud of you, Hattie.”
A look, a chink in the armor.
She smiled again, a shy thing. I returned it, careful, though I was proud. She was smart and lovely. I almost reached out to her, across the abyss of highly polished wood and a whole lot of years, but held back. Saving for when it counts. We silently ate our lunch. She leaned over her bowl of soup, the steam in her face, and I saw white scalp glowing from her center part, waves of orange bursting from that most pale divide.
When we were kids that last summer that our childhood was sunny and bright, Hattie was sometimes called Little Red. Mostly by other kids’ dads, to whom she became a diminutive version of our dad, Big Red; cigarettes between their teeth, ruffling our small heads as they passed us on the sidewalk where we played, heading into our house. What’s the buzz, Little Red? Our bare feet burning up, Hattie’s skin going pink and her freckles revealing themselves like a seasonal invisible ink. My black hair a magnet for heat. Hattie looked like our father in miniature.
What were they talking about, all those men, with our father? I would watch them, a sharp-eyed eight-year-old, while my five-year-old sister played mindlessly beside me. He slapped their backs on their way out, chuckling and shaking hands. I wanted his attention for myself. He was funny and silly and generous. He was often on the road, and when he returned, he would lift us into the air and tickle us until we begged for mercy. Later, he dodged our mother when she asked him things: about money, about bills, about deals and promises he’d made. I learned, from listening near doorways, that deals fell through sometimes, that sometimes they were big and involved strangers, and other times were casual, between friends and neighbors. I heard snatches of familiar last names. Our mother didn’t trust that things would “work out,” something he always told her with a grin, and I scoffed, like he did, at her lack of imagination, her inability to believe in him. They fought often, quietly and in heated whispers, thinking we couldn’t hear. Sometimes he leaned in and kissed our mum, teased her, and made her laugh, but those times became further and further apart. There was a lot of talk of money. But to me, my parents were perfect: my mother, a queen, and my father, a magician. And then, like a trick, he disappeared.
It was after Hattie, Little Red, tried a trick of her own.
I remember it so clearly.
Hattie and I. Curled in bed together, under warm sheets. Her breath like a puppy’s, her eyes wide.
“Penny?” A whisper. A husky morning call. My eyes adjusting to her face inches from mine.
“Penny? Are you awake? It’s morning.” A tiny lisp. Sometimes I hear it still, hear it on the wind, all those sweet S’s of hers, gone with growing up. Zipped away by cigarettes and swearing, which never sounds right with a lisp.
“I’m awake.”
“I have a surprise for you.”
Awake now in earnest. My ears went up, up, up. But grouchy still. Older sister sneers, cherishing the chance to lord age over love.
“What kind of surprise could you have? You are too little for real surprises.” I pulled away from her.
A pout, quivering lip. She turned away from me, her hair wrapping her face in a red mask. I waited. Knew she would lie down in front of death for me.
A surprise?
“Okay, okay. What is it?”
She rolled back. She took my hand in hers and pulled it under her chin. She often got to sleep this way, with my arm tucked against her, hand under little chin. We had our own rooms, but Hattie always asked to sleep in my bed. She said she liked my room better. My bed, under the window, offered a view of our giant maple tree. Hattie followed its progress through the seasons with diligence. She was a restless sleeper, though, a dream-twitcher, and often I woke in the night with her feet at my back or in my face. Sometimes she was right flat against the headboard, like she was keeping vigil for the maple itself.
She snuggled against me now. Opened my hand. Opened her own sweaty palm and rolled the contents into mine. Two sparkling emerald earrings. They shone and dazzled, and I looked, shocked, at them and then Hattie. Our mother’s earrings, which she had told me I was too young to wear. That she only ever wore herself for very special occasions. She kept them in a box in her top drawer, to which we were only given brief glimpses as she readied for a night out. Once, as she pulled a long silky tangle of nylon out of the drawer, I asked her to see them, never imagining that anything so formal and striking could belong to her.
“When you’re older, you can wear those, Penny,” Mum had said. “They are only for really special occasions. Like meeting the Queen.” A smile, closing the box with a slight snap.
And now, here they were in my hand.
“For you, Penny. I got them for you!”
“Hattie,” I whispered. “We can’t.”
“It’s okay, don’t worry. You will look so pretty in them. We will only wear them here, at bedtime, okay?”
“Okay.” In a trance, the treasures glinting in the sliver of light coming from under the blinds. I have treasured those earrings my whole life. After Mum died, I wore them sometimes, on days when I especially missed her. They became like a secret light I sent out for her alone, given to me by my sister.
“I love you, Penny.” Hattie squeezed my neck with her tiny arms, and closed her eyes again. “Do you love me?”
You little minx. I hugged her back, nodding. Saying nothing, but nodding, which is not the same. But I did. I do still. Even after it all.
* * *
Our mother noticed they were missing, of course, and with a directness that shocked me, accused our father of selling them. We could hear them clearly, their voices rising up and out the windows. Hattie and I, in the backyard, froze. We locked eyes. See? I was saying with mine, you never should have taken them. But I didn’t tell her to return them. I didn’t slip them back into Mum’s jewelry box, or even tattle on Hattie myself.
Days passed. The fighting continued. It morphed into other things. Years of resentment and fear and embarrassment bubbled up, our mother’s voice breaking. And still: the earrings sparkled in my mind, but stayed hidden in my drawer. Hattie and I remained silent, creeping about with our secret, avoiding our parents. We saw a suitcase in the hall. Our father told us he had to go away for a while. And then, in the morning, he was gone.
Weeks passed, then months. I knew that he wasn’t coming back. Then our neighbors and his business associates began to drop by the house, my mother serving them coffee in the living room, her hands shaking the cups in the saucers. They left angrily, the front door rattling like a jaw snapping shut.
“You did this, Hattie. He left because of you,” I told her, one afternoon.
She looked confused, not quite up to the task of pinning it back on me. She hung her head and her eyes welled. I turned away to not to have to see that.
* * *
By the fall of that year, the seasons changed for us. The town, which had seemed like an open, sunny place until then, turned its back, and we were shivering in the shade. Our house, once a hub of activity and laughter, stood alone, a cage. The fathers of friends no longer ruffled our heads, but ignored u
s completely. No one came around, kids or adults. No more neighborhood girls to hold up the other end of the skipping rope for double Dutch. We just took turns skipping alone.
“Your dad’s a crook!” one boy shouted, launching a string of spit at us as he raced past us on his bike. We went inside the house, leaving our skipping rope on the sidewalk.
The phone, on the other hand, was the conduit of people’s private furies. It rang often and we came to associate its jarring rattle with our mother’s whispered apologies. And then, eventually, she told us not to answer it, and it rang and rang and rang.
Our mother got a job at Simpsons, the small local department store. I would see her sometimes, walking towards the house in her uniform, a cigarette in her hand, her face tired and worried, but by the time she opened the door, she had reverted to her old self: sunny and bright, making jokes and hugging us fiercely, asking how we were.
I was often left in charge of Hattie. I learned how to boil water for hot dogs, and pull them out with a fork. I barely spoke to her. She was confused and sad, and tried to fill my silence with her chatter. She told me boldly, one day, that she wanted to be called Red. The name, our father’s nickname, sent a shiver through me, and I lashed out, shoving her to the ground.
“Never,” I snarled.
I called her Harry instead, until I tired of it, running my hand down her thick red hair, and yanking it hard when I reached the bottom, like ringing a bell. I hated her hair, so like his. My own wiry and thick black mop, my soot to her fire, my long straight nose and the gap in my teeth conspired as elements to make me striking, if not beautiful. Black Irish. That was what our grandmother muttered, brushing my coarse hair in those early years. Black Irish, she said, as though it were a curse, a kind of black magic. There was a ginger majority in the family, our grandmother included, her hair fading from wild red to silver. Our father’s mother, like so many others, had forgotten us when he left. Eventually the phone went silent. The three of us on our own to fight for ourselves, amongst ourselves. Our shouts and laughter and tears bouncing off the walls of our stalwart house, becoming an echo chamber and a mausoleum of memories.
Sister of Mine Page 1