“It was a hiking accident. A rock came away from part of the cliffside where we were hiking, my brother and I. It came out of nowhere and pinned my arm. My brother rolled the rock over with incredible—dare I say superhero—strength, and ran two miles to get help. It was too late to save my arm, but he did save my life with some quick-thinking first aid.”
Jameson smiled, and silently lifted his smaller arm up and down. Shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh my God,” said Hattie.
“What did you think? When you were waiting for him to come back?” I asked.
I was overcome with the urge to touch his arm. I felt myself touch my own where his ended. A spider dropped down from a hanging vine and skittered across the table.
Jameson paused, and then his face broke into a wide grin.
“Pathetic. Both of you.” He laughed. “I was born this way. Never knew any differently. Never wanted a prosthetic. This is my arm, not a tragedy. Although, it’s also amazing how people who suffer from trauma adapt.” And what could we do but agree? I felt Hattie look at me quickly, and I was reminded of her love, her protection, our secrets. I looked into my lap and saw a long, red hair folded there like a promise, like a threat. Hattie’s voice rang out.
“Well, now you’re even more exotic to the women of St. Margaret’s!” She poured the remains of her beer into her mouth. Winked. Jameson nodded his head in thanks, his neck going quite red. He glanced back at Hattie, and I saw their eyes meet. She didn’t look away.
The night was clear and humid, and the three of us thrived in the warmth of the season, laughing and sharing stories and topping one another with witty barbs and outrageous anecdotes. Hattie was lovely and vivacious, and the night just made her more so: she bloomed like she couldn’t help herself. But I knew she could. I knew I had to concede, then: take myself out of the running so at least I had some feeling of control. Let her think this was my idea. Something lurched in my stomach. I had been here before. I had seen the eyes of someone I loved shift towards my sister. I recognized the boiling hate that would start as a simmer, but become a fire. I stamped it out. Refused to let this happen again. And so, I told myself it was what I’d wanted all along, Hattie with Jameson. I could trust Jameson. He was an outsider like us. I could keep them close. Yes. It would be good for her. Almost like a gift to her. I let out a breath, and smiled.
* * *
She met me in the kitchen a little later.
“Wow, he is great,” she said.
I laughed and nodded. “He seems to like you.”
She looked worried. “No, not at all! He is totally into you.”
“Hattie.” I leveled my eyes at her. “Please. Don’t bother with the act. It’s already done. He’s all yours. I actually, you know, think he might be a little too goody-goody for me.”
“Sure?”
“Sure. But,” I put my hand firmly on her arm, “he can never know. Never.”
Hattie took a deep breath, and nodded seriously.
“I promise,” she whispered. And then, in a blink, she was smiling again. Took a deep breath like she was ready for it, ready for something wonderful.
“Okay. Wow, you know, he is so great.” She looked out the window at Jameson, his back to us. “What are the chances? I mean, this could be something, you know?”
I watched while she put a grape in her mouth, eyes twinkling.
“Steady on, girl,” I said.
She snuggled up to me and kissed my cheek, and her gratitude threatened to relight my irritation. I shook my head, smiling, shook off my frustrations.
* * *
We stayed out on the patio late into the night. Eventually I rose to leave Hattie with Jameson. Her eyes on him, her face rosy, her hands moving as she spoke. I pushed my chair back against the stones, making a choice. I went inside without a word and didn’t come out again. Washed a wine glass carefully, my hand fitting into the fragile bowl, knowing what a dangerous mess it would make if it shattered.
I heard Hattie’s voice through the open window over the sink, mentioning my name, and I couldn’t help but listen, my body frozen like a bloodhound.
“Her husband, Buddy, died in a fire.”
3
Buddy was gone, but he visited me at night. He did then, and he does now. It would have been easier if he was angry in my dreams, but with his rough, tough love, he tried to convince me that it wasn’t justice, that it wasn’t justified. It was.
He would crash about my subconscious, his boyish face looking irritated, which was always a short jump to anger. He was sometimes the life of the party—loud, fun and affectionate—but could just as easily be sullen and short-tempered. He was an unpredictable drunk, something his friends knew well, but that I knew better. I had to be ready for when he might slip into the worst side of himself.
I wasn’t all that bad, Penny, he muttered in my dreams. You make me sound like a monster. I mean, didn’t we both get carried away? Did you really need to go that far? Did I deserve to die? He rubbed his stubbly face, grinning, like it was all a game. You could be such a bitch, Penny. He laughed, gruffly. I love how you think you’re such a fucking saint. Smiling, rolling up his sleeve. We were good fighters. Like Sid and Nancy, isn’t that what Mac used to call us? Scrappy. We fought all over town, didn’t we, Pen? Come here. Reaching out, smiling. Smile fading. I said, come here.
In the early months after the fire, I often dreamt of being stuck in a room with him. His huge body blocking the doorway. Hattie on the other side.
Sometimes I woke in a sweat to Hattie sitting at the edge of my bed.
“He’s gone, Penny. It’s okay, he’s gone.” Running her fingers through my sweaty short hair. “Go back to sleep. You’re safe.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to have these nightmares, Hattie.” My fingers reached to touch an earlobe, where an earring would be.
She would pause for a long time.
“I dream about fires, Penny.” Covering me with a blanket and turning out the light. I would watch her silhouette retreating from the doorway. “But when I wake up, they have always gone out.”
* * *
The night Jameson came to dinner, I fell asleep quickly, but was soon awake again. I tossed in my sheets. Convincing myself I’d had too much to drink, I stumbled to the bathroom to get a wet cloth for my face. The window was open and I stood still, damp terry cloth on my cheeks, listening to the cicadas chirping rhythmically. Taking deep breaths. It was summer. My favorite time. I was safe. I was right.
* * *
The next day, Jameson sought me out in the children’s cubby room. He looked a little pale, standing among the rubber boots and sun hats, the handprints and photo collages, but was smiling and I knew that Hattie was at the bottom of it, sloshing about with the beer and wine. That morning she had giggled her way through breakfast while I rolled my eyes, asserting myself as older and wiser and not putting up with nonsense. I thought I’d try the same with Jameson.
“Well, helloooo there,” he ventured, sidling up to me while I tied my outdoor shoes. Giving me a nudge with his elbow.
I laughed. “How are you feeling?”
“Ah, you know. A little fragile, a little tender, thanks to the Grayson sisters and their magic elixirs. You two are trouble.” He deadpanned. “Really, I blame the town of St. Margaret’s. No one warned me. There was nothing in my welcome package.”
“Ha. Maybe one of us is more trouble than the other.”
He nodded, a goofy smile spreading on his face.
“Yes …?” I looked at him with the same impatient look I’d given Hattie that morning.
Jameson laughed. “Oh! Right, right. Uh, okay, here it is: Would you mind if I asked out Hattie? There, I said it.”
“Please do. Really.” I stood and patted his shoulder, like he was doing me a favor, and pushed that jagged shard of jealousy into the breast pocket of my wounded heart. “You two really hit it off.”
He grinned, and looked away, happy.
Later on, Hattie was taking laundry off the line outside.
“He’s different, Penny.”
“You said.”
“Seriously. He made a very good first impression.”
“So did you. First class, Harriet.”
She grinned and sniffed a towel. “Don’t you love the smell of stuff that has dried in the sun?”
“There’s an earwig on that towel.”
She screeched and shook it out, laughing hysterically.
* * *
That first night became a series of the same, for that threesome of bosom buddies that was Jameson and Hattie and me, lounging and listening to the sounds of trees and insects and feeling the yawning space between reality, and the dreamy, sticky draw of new love, of sisters, and friendship closing like a lazy trap.
Sometimes it felt like our lives were made up of summers. My memories of early childhood, before our father left, of growing up and out, opening my arms to possibility like Maria from The Sound of Music. Something about the heat and the humidity made us rash and impulsive. Summers held a spell on us that winters never could. In our drafty old house, a season that brought the clanking furnace and heavy blankets, built up unshed energy that we could hardly wait to blow off come the spring. All the big things happened during the summertime, like the Fates were saving their strength in the cold, pooling their resources to let loose a spark of events after the thaw. The summer was our season: open windows and doors, breezes blowing right through the house, bringing all manner of mischief with them.
In the ways that young people are so good at, Hattie and Jameson and I slept late, started the ritual of summertime partying early, drinking and singing and twirling our hair in our fingers; we made exotic food and still settled for potato chips, told awful jokes, bumped into each other in the middle of the night, and did the whole thing again the next day. For Hattie and me, work ended each day while the sun was high in the sky, and soon Jameson was done teaching for the year. Often we came home to find him in the kitchen, making a mess, half in the bag, happy as can be. Music was loud but always perfect, the beer was always cold. Hattie’s arms around his waist, and there we were: children playing parts, sweet summer fruit dribbling down our chins.
Hattie and Jameson were falling in love right in front of me; we were always together, but somehow, she and I were cut loose from each other.
Maybe I didn’t need to watch her so closely anymore. She didn’t seem to need me as much, or require me in the same way, she didn’t seem so unpredictable. Secret safe. Game, set, match.
Late one Saturday afternoon, when the three of us were trying our hand at making fancy cocktails, there was a knock at the door. Jameson went to answer it.
“Hi,” I heard him chirp cheerfully.
“Oh … hello.”
Hattie and I exchanged looks, and she hurried into the hallway, wiping her hands on a towel.
“Iain, hi!” she trilled.
I watched them from the doorway, lifting my hand in greeting to Officer Moore.
“I was just,” he cleared his throat, “just nearby. Thought I’d pop by to say hello, but, I see,” he looked at Jameson, who had put his arm around Hattie casually, “that you’ve got company.”
Jameson removed his arm from Hattie’s waist and shook Officer Moore’s hand, introducing himself, inviting him in. Iain ducked his head and, mumbling an excuse, made his exit, walking almost silently down the path. Hattie looked at me, a faint smile on her lips.
I shut the door, thinking foolishly that our worries were behind us. We returned to the frivolity of the kitchen; the sweet, minty drinks all the more refreshing for the interruption.
* * *
It was a trick. Our happiness couldn’t last, and sure, part of me knew that even then, but I needed to believe that I could be free. I let the summer wash over me in a flood of music and late nights and long talks. It was just the three of us. The sisterhood, the secret club, had widened its membership, but only by one. We had let Jameson in, wholesale—nothing gradual—and shut the gates with a clang, turning up our boom box in the garden, grape leaves hanging down into our conversations, while down the street the local pub rang out the same hits for people from our high school who were playing darts and forgetting us until the gossip came around to our tragic loss. But Jameson wasn’t from St. Margaret’s; he was a cut above, just as I’d always, frankly, considered myself, and even Hattie to be. We were different from our peers, from those people we went to high school with who never had a kind word to say about us anyway. They could have their stag and does, their nights at the Legion—I had tried it all once already, with Buddy—I would take our house over that life any day.
* * *
“It’s crazy to think that we’ve been in this house our whole lives,” I mused one day, while we were peeling peaches in an eleventh-hour bid to do some preserving. Jameson lifted the lid on the canning pot to inspect the sterilization process. Hattie was sitting at the table reading. She lifted her head.
“This house has seen a lot.” She gave me a tiny smile.
“I bet,” Jameson said. “Were there a lot of kids on your street, growing up?”
“Sure,” I said, glancing at Hattie, “our house was kid headquarters for a while.”
She nodded, dropping her eyes. There was a time, she and I both knew, when everyone stopped coming. At first out of our control, and later, much later, by our design.
I thought of young Hattie now, in those early days.
“God, Hattie, you were irresistibly cute. Jameson, we’ll have to show you some pictures. No one could say no to her, even then.”
“No doubt.” He kissed the top of her head.
Our childhood: its sweetness, its sourness. Two sides of it.
A late afternoon hauled up from memory. She was ten and I was thirteen. I was curling my hair in the mirror. I looked at her in the reflection. She was a little leprechaun, I used to tell her. All except the luck. She was bad luck.
“Penny, is it because of me that he didn’t come back?” her image asked me.
I regarded her coolly.
“Sometimes I think so, yes,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure you didn’t mean to, but he did leave right after, didn’t he? I just wonder,” I brushed my large curls to the side, “if he’d have stayed if you’d never taken those earrings.”
Hattie twisted her fingers.
“Yeah.” She looked at me, and offered her hand for the curling iron. “It looks good. Want me to do the back?”
I handed it to her, and she worked silently. We could hear Mum in the kitchen, chopping something for dinner. The smell of pasta sauce and meatballs wafted down the hallway. She was singing from the kitchen. Out of tune, happily opening and closing cupboards. I looked at my reflection, solemnly assessing my likeness to a grown and sexy woman. My eyes kept straying to the red-headed kid in the background.
I often asked about our father, hoping each time that my questions would reveal new information that I could collect and store away. Our mother rebuffed my questions, changed the subject, making up for his absence in many large and small ways.
Hattie and I were lucky, blessed, doted upon, challenged, and truly loved by our mother, who had done a bang-up job at making up for our father’s abandonment of us. This didn’t stop me, though, from tormenting Hattie, who I blamed for everything. Sometimes I let her find me, crying dramatically in my bed, and I would tell her I missed Daddy.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said. “You didn’t really know him.”
I was both the tormentor and the tormented. I felt insecure at times, like a failure, I didn’t know where to put my arms, I sucked my thumb too long, and hated my hair. Hattie was a pain and a drag and got all the attention, and I loved her and hated her. Life was a tricky balance, but in the end, I knew I could curl up in Mum’s lap at any time and listen to her slow heartbeat and voice while she stroked my hair at the temples.
We told Jameson all about the happy parts of our ch
ildhood, and willed it back to clarity. This house, that had only ever seemed to have the capacity to hold three: Mum, Dad, and me, Hattie, Mum, and me, and now the three of us. Jameson listened, soaking up the memories we chose to tell him, like he was learning a language. Jars of peaches bubbled in the pot, and our faces got sweaty and smiley.
“Remember when Mrs. Donkersley was pregnant and on bed rest?”
“They wheeled her in a bed through the summer solstice parade!”
Moms and dads on the street brought cold drinks and watermelons and chairs that folded out in bright nylon criss-crosses that had begun to fray. There were two sets of wooden bleachers, side by side. I remember the weight of stepping down through them, coming from the top, the sound of my sandals hitting the washed-out wood. I’d wobble and grab a seat to right myself, a splinter occasionally slipping into my skin. There were games all day and into the evening. Races and tosses and watermelon-eating contests. Parents cheering from the stands, drinking from cans of beer, the sun reddening their shoulders. Three-legged and potato sack races, egg tosses.
But then, after, we didn’t go to the summer parties. It was an unsaid rule that we weren’t welcome anymore. Mum would have a picnic for us in the backyard to distract us, but nothing could take away the sounds of the parade, the games, the noise of people whose lives hadn’t been rocked by small-town scandal. Eventually we would go inside, and watch TV in the darkened den, turning up the volume to drown out summer.
I saw in that summer, with Hattie and Jameson, something of the old happy whimsy, the appeal of an unstructured game played outside, the avoidance of something dark behind the clouds. I know now that these things can’t go on, and maybe I knew it even then, that you can’t truly stop anything the Fates have in store, that the wind changes and a chill blasts through even the most enthusiastic summer plans with the force of a bottle rocket. It would come. But I will forever look back on that time and see us, crystallized in youth, and when I see Hattie in my dreams, it is that Hattie: the one with the hearty laugh, the blazing eyes, the gall.
Sister of Mine Page 3