Sister of Mine

by Laurie Petrou

  But then it started to go sour. It’s difficult to find the exact moment when things changed and I could no longer keep the balance—but something was pulled below the surface with a jerk, an undertow, when Hattie learned that Elliot had a preoccupation with fire.

  Elliot and I were entwined like a secret and its keeper. We had an unspoken ease together, were similar in the peaks and valleys of our personalities; we spent hours in happy silence or in excited storms of imagination. We had long ago transformed the barn into a place for him, for us, for solace and company, and it was now the most perfect hideout for an almost-eight-year-old with swings and ladders, a trap door and a switchboard I’d found at the dump that I screwed in under a steering wheel. There’d been no whiff of Mac Williams there for a long time—perhaps the childlike presence had spooked him—but at any rate, it was a happy place.

  Elliot had a small group of close-knit friends: three boys, including little Jamie, and a girl. They plotted and ran about, riding their bikes on our street after a day of playing at “the barn,” muddy and sunburnt during the summer, rosy-cheeked and frozen in the winter. I was friendly with the parents of his friends, but as they mostly ended up at our house, I felt like I was mother to them all: handing out Band-Aids and popsicles and hot chocolate.

  Elliot’s preoccupation with fires, with “my” fire, continued. Most disturbingly, I had once found a drawing of what looked like our barn with a fire blazing in the background. My heart swelled, a large, breath-stopping thing, and I felt dizzy. It was too close. I wanted to scorch the memory, the history. I wanted to tear up his drawings so no one would ever see—Jameson, Hattie, no one—but was almost afraid to touch them at all, like they contained a kind of mystic magic that would ruin everything if I went near them. And so they continued to appear on tables and surprise me by falling out of the pages of books. I left them there, and they stung me at random irregularity. I started to feel jumpy and easily startled. The house, which had offered so much comfort, was making me feel trapped. I lightly suggested to Elliot that other people may not enjoy the drawings of fire as much as I did, that perhaps he should keep to doing them only when he was at my house. My home, holding in everything it witnessed.

  And then, on a day in late August, Hattie took a closer look at a pile of Elliot’s drawings as they lay, those ticking cross-hatched time bombs, on a bookshelf. There was silence where moments before she had been humming to herself, a cigarette in between her fingers, the smoke whirling away from her. I was washing dishes, she was on drying. I turned to see where she’d gone. Her back to me, a towel slung over her shoulder, her hair up in a messy bun. I turned off the tap. And then.

  “What’s this.” A mutter.

  I said nothing. I’d worried it would happen. I knew she’d see them. I don’t know why I hadn’t tried to hide them. Elliot was outside playing. It was a Sunday. We were going to have burgers for dinner. There was a bottle of wine open on the counter. End of day.

  “Your son,” she said more audibly, “he’s quite an artist.”

  “Don’t call him that, Hattie.”

  “How does he know about the fire?” She still had her back to me, was rifling through the drawings now, pausing occasionally.

  “I told him there was one. When I first took him to the barn.” I stopped, then, “I told him my husband had died.”

  “Died, eh?” She ashed her cigarette on the floor.

  “Hattie, please. I had to say that.”

  “You sure like your secrets, Penny.” She shook her head slowly. “But of course. He can’t know the truth about the fire. No one can. But boy,” and here she dropped them all, some of the drawings floating gently to the floor, others gusting across the room, “it’s such a good story.” And then she just walked straight out of the house.

  * * *

  Hattie began to needle, to push, to play with me, through Elliot. She took a sudden interest in his fire drawings, encouraging him, inquiring about them, teasing out conversations, asking how he knew how to make them so realistic, how did he manage to capture that movement so well? She took him to the library to take out books on famous fires, to the fire station to talk to fire fighters in person. She fanned the flames of his obsession where I had tried to dampen them. Fire is so . . . alive, isn’t it? I can see why you’re fascinated by it. I wonder sometimes if Elliot’s interests were encouraged by Hattie’s urgings, if things might have ended differently if she hadn’t pushed him like she did. It wasn’t right, what she was doing. She bought him paints, and then the images came alive with action: fiery yellows and oranges bursting off the small canvases she’d provided.

  Once she pulled out her lighter and lit a small piece of paper while she was sitting with him, his eyes suddenly aglow, the two of them watching it dance threateningly before she dropped it into a water glass with a laugh. “Boy, we’re like two peas in a pod, aren’t we?” And Elliot had laughed, reveling in this time with his mom, while I stood wringing my hands behind them.

  Late last night, while we were all in bed (dum dum dum)

  Old Lady Leary lit the lantern in her bed (dum dum dum)

  And when the cow tipped it over, she winked her eye and said,

  It’s gonna be a hot one in the old town tonight—Fire Fire Fire!

  Hattie, singing that goddamn song, “Old Lady Leary,” about the woman whose cow started the Chicago fire, over and over, whistling the tune at all hours, bursting out with the end bit, startling me when I didn’t know she was there. She was making me crazy, Mum. She had changed. Something had snapped in her. What a hoot, Elliot must have thought, what fun. His mother was back, and they had a sudden kinship. “I’m not afraid of fires,” she’d tell him, “but don’t bring them up to your aunt. It will only upset her.”

  I snapped at Hattie in these moments, found myself short tempered with Elliot. She just smiled at him and shrugged, provoking him to follow suit. She had done it; flipped the switch and put a gulf between us. I was unraveling, Hattie holding onto the thread of my sanity. All she needed to do was pull.

  And if I’m honest, in my very heart, I wished her gone altogether. I fantasized about her death, about her dying, and having Elliot to myself. We’d gotten away with our secret, but now there was so much more at stake than law and liberty. Our son, my son. And so, yes, I thought of it. I lay in bed and wished she would just choke on her own vomit, would trip down the stairs. I’m a monster, perhaps. Once a murderer, always one. But I’m a mother now. And wouldn’t any mother kill for her son? I lay and wished away my darling girl. I even saw myself, grief-stricken at her funeral, genuinely heartsick about her death. I love her, I loved her, I hate her, I hated her.

  27

  When Elliot was ten, Joseph died. Quietly, and in the shop, after he pulled down the CLOSED sign one last time. I came to visit him the next morning, and he didn’t open up. Whenever this had happened before, I had felt panic rise in my chest, and this time, what I had been fearing all this time was waiting there. I used the key I had for the shop, my hands fumbling. He was sitting in his recliner in the back. His mouth and eyes open. It scared me terribly. I cried out, yelling uncontrollably. Finally, his tenant, Sid, old as time but alive, came in and closed Joseph’s eyes, like he’d done it before, held my hands firmly, calming me down almost silently with the great care of an near stranger. Would I never grow accustomed to death?

  Elliot had never been to a funeral, but he insisted on coming to Joseph’s. The two of them had a strong bond, Joseph had been like his grandfather, and Elliot took the death badly—heaving in my arms. It is so painful, and we never do get used to that horror, that shock, the injustice of being robbed of happiness and normalcy.

  Elliot had been going through a difficult time, something to do with being his tender age, I guess. He was, like all kids, sometimes lonely and misunderstood, angry and unique. He still had the same friends, his best being Jamie, with whom he had bonded over having a “broken” home. Jamie’s mother, however, had recently remarried,
Elliot had told me. I hadn’t met the stepfather, and only really knew the mother by phone, keeping my distance as was my wont. Elliot spent a lot of time at Jamie’s house now, for dinners and sleepovers and after school. I was glad for him that he had someone, because when he was home, he was often sullen and preoccupied.

  Hattie didn’t come to the funeral, although she was home again. She was working at the DMV, which she said was ironic given that she’d been charged with a “tiny” DUI last year. After coming and going on a whim for two years, staying for sometimes short, sometimes long periods, she claimed she was finally back for good. She said that she would find her own place, but I had insisted, feeling I’d rather know where she was. There was plenty of room at the house. Here we were again: my sisterly conscience, my dark heart, was in the house. At home, she had said. Her anger had dulled somewhat. She seemed to be surrendering something, was tired. Was giving up.

  * * *

  On the way to the funeral, I talked to Elliot.

  “How are things going with your mom, El?”

  “It’s okay. It’s nice, actually.”

  “Yeah. It’s good having her home.”

  “She had dinner at Dad’s with me the other night,” he said.

  “No kidding? Did your dad know she was going?” I felt a twist in my belly.

  Elliot smiled. “No, but he was happy to have her, he said.”

  We didn’t talk for a bit. We were pulling into the gravesite and I looked at Elliot, his baby-face, freckly profile. A bird swooped low in front of the car. I ached thinking about Joseph. His empty bed, a book open on his chair.

  It was April. Chilly and wet, not much in the way of sunshine. Crocuses peeping through the mud at the gravesite. Jameson had parked close to my car, and he walked with us and stood between us during the burial. Standing close to me, his arm around Elliot. I thought about all the single gloves he didn’t use. I watched, detachedly, as dirt was thrown on the grave. I was crying, and Elliot, too, his head turned into Jameson’s chest. We three, like a family, standing among Joseph’s poker buddies and lifelong friends, daughters, customers, and the people of St. Margaret’s who knew Joseph, the repair man. That was the end of that kind of thing in our town. Soon a time would come where people threw it all away, all their useless things, just to buy a new one of whatever it was. Broken toasters rusting in the sun on heaps of garbage.

  Someone read a line from The Giving Tree, and then it was over, and we were all making a lonely shuffling line back to our cars. Poor Joseph. The thought of his store, in all its immaculate chaos, saddened me, and I rubbed my arms to beat off the chill.

  Elliot walked ahead of Jameson and me, and in his retreating figure I saw so much of my own sullen ten-year-old self that my heart swelled a little for him, but really for me. Watching your child grow up is a life flashing before your eyes, a sentimental death by a thousand cuts. The endless stream of little bath toys and scribbles, of homework and broken zippers, tears and confessions and then suddenly-finally, they are there walking ahead of you, their figure getting further and smaller with every step. What would I tell my mother about him, if I could? He is your grandson. He is the son, by way of this strange life, of your two daughters. I was proud and protective of him, but also scared for him because he was dipping his toe into mischief now. He was failing and flailing the way so many kids do but the way each parent thinks is unique. We fought more—and not the frustrating bickerings of a young child and his parent, but some knock-’em-down rows that ended with his door slamming and my head in my hands. You’re not my mom! Grades and friends and teachers and getting into trouble, getting swirled into a tangle of best intentions and poor judgment.

  But still. He was a small boy to me in so many ways. Prone to tears occasionally, his face scrunching up and looking just as it had when I had first met him and something hadn’t gone his way.

  Sometimes I walked with him to school, still, and hugged him well before the entrance, heading back feeling like I’d stolen a moment. The days and months were slipping so quickly out of my reach and so was his childhood. One of those days I had seen Iain Moore driving by in his cruiser, and I raised a hand in greeting. I felt a shiver run down my back at the sight of him but smiled. He gave a cursory nod and drove on. I dropped my hand lamely at my side, and went straight into work, losing myself in busywork as a distraction.

  * * *

  Nothing stays the same. Mothers and sisters know this. Autumn comes.

  There was an incident.

  One weekend afternoon, there was a knock at the front door, and when I opened it, Iain Moore was there with Elliot. I couldn’t hide my shock; my mouth fell open. Elliot stood sheepishly behind Iain, who was out of uniform in plain pants and a golf shirt, and I tried to understand what brought them there together.

  “Penny,” he said, nodding. And then, looking past me into the house: “Is Hattie here?”

  “What? No. What is this about? Elliot, are you okay?”

  “May we come in, please?” Iain asked curtly. “We need to talk about the fire.”

  I staggered against the open door. Iain came into the house, moving past me to sit down in a chair in the living room, Elliot on the couch.

  Elliot spoke up. “This is Jamie’s stepdad. His name is Iain.”

  And my life’s parts began to bleed into one another. Jamie and Elliot had been caught trying to start a fire in a nearby forest two weeks earlier, which Iain thought that Hattie and I would have known about already as Iain had made Elliot promise he would tell us. My ears began ringing as Iain explained that the two had been getting into mischief lately, staying out late when they were meant to be coming back to Jamie’s—and now Iain’s—house. While the attempted fire had been too damp for any spark to take, Iain insisted Elliot needed more discipline, that Hattie or I needed to enforce this, he needed to be made to understand the dangers of fire.

  “I’m sure you’ve told him about the frightening potentials.” There was an edge to Iain’s voice, but I nodded dumbly. “This isn’t arson, but it’s careless, and I needed you, as his guardian, to know. And Hattie, too, if she’s here. I had a feeling he hadn’t told either of you, and he confirmed that today.”

  I sat numbly through this brief meeting, feeling a frightened fool, quietly thanking Iain when it was over, and ushering him out of my house, trying to arrange my panic, quiet it, calm it down.

  I didn’t tell Hattie about it for fear that she would take advantage of the information. I was losing track of what I told her, what I kept to myself. A secret-keeper’s burden, and they were stacking up for me: what Hattie knew, what Elliot knew, what Jameson knew, but others didn’t. I had become so dishonest, such a hoarder of untold truths.

  * * *

  “Elliot, wake up.”

  “I don’t have to go to school today, it’s Saturday.”

  “Get up, Elliot. I have work for you to do. Up and at ’em.” I pulled off his covers.

  “Penny!” He groaned angrily.

  Elliot hadn’t called me Auntie Penny in a very long time. It was too fussy a name, too much distance in its formality, stretching between us and not accounting for the role I played, and for me, who I really was. So I was Penny to him, although more and more there was distance between us anyway, and lately he was using the fact that I was his “aunt” as a tool in his arsenal.

  Afternoon. I had given Elliot a hot and punishing chore outside in the fall sun: putting the garden to bed, raking up the summer and tucking it into a series of bags and piles, tying up the tender trees with burlap. I folded laundry and watched him through the window, marveling at how this boy had come to be in the yard of my childhood, where Hattie and I had run around, made forts, dug holes. Where he had done the same. Small for his age, spunky, strong, kind and sometimes cruel. This house that had held up so well through the years, that housed us all and provided warmth to murderous parents and blackmailing sisters, to love and sex and infancy. When we were gone, who would live here, and what more w
ould it know?

  Houses, homes: they kept our secrets. My house with Buddy, in its clean modest floors, its curtains and linens. No one would have known the smash-’em-up, burn-’em-down fights that took place there. No one knew how it haunted me still.

  I pulled a shirt of Hattie’s out of the basket and carefully folded it, started a pile for her clothes. Sorting, separating. Look out for your sister, our mum had always told us—she’s the only one you have. Look out, Hattie. Look out, Penny.

  Elliot had raked the leaves into a giant pile. The yard, which was more of a sprawling property, was deep, and so it wasn’t until I smelled it, coming through the open windows, that I realized what he was doing. I went onto the back porch and saw a column of smoke at the far end of the yard, a black and orange pile. Burning leaves. I called out to him, and he lifted his head but didn’t respond or wave.

  “Didn’t you learn anything?” I shouted at him, rushing outside. The same question I could ask myself.

  * * *

  Later, we sat at the kitchen table together.

  “I don’t think you know how dangerous it is,” I said.

  “Penny, you’re making too big a deal of this. I was just trying to get rid of the leaves. People do it all the time.”

  “Don’t give me that. This is not a coincidence. I don’t think you know how quickly those things can spread. Where did you even get matches?”