Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  Janie got up twice and checked to make sure the stove and oven were off, and seemed distracted. I figured it was Bob The Man in Charge.

  ‘Are you going to call him?’

  ‘No. Yes. No. Too scared.’ She tapped her fingers together.

  I remembered that rhythmic circling Bob did with the pencil.

  ‘I think you should.’ I handed her the cranberry nut salad. ‘Take a dare.’

  ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ She steepled her fingers. ‘I’m so strange. He’ll think I’m strange. A nut-head, nutcase. What would Emily Brontë do?’

  Baffled me, it did. ‘I’ll ask her,’ I drawled. ‘I think the Ouija board is still in the attic.’

  Grandma interrupted our conversation by lifting her middle fingers in the air. ‘Amelia Earhart does not have time for sexual frivolity. I will not be a servant to what a man with a pea brain wants. That’s no way for a woman to live her life, by golly! Who cares what men want?’

  We all held up our wineglasses – we always use wineglasses even when there’s milk in them – and cheered Amelia Earhart.

  ‘I will abstain from intercourse until I am married for religious reasons,’ Kayla said. She put her hand on the Old Testament.

  We quieted down a bit.

  ‘That’s the best thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth for ten years,’ Cecilia growled.

  Kayla glowered at her.

  ‘To abstaining!’ Janie shouted. We cheered and clinked glasses again.

  ‘And cheers to physics,’ Riley said. ‘Especially quantum.’

  ‘I Bat Man!’ Henry announced, climbing on his chair and swirling the cape. ‘I got a cape.’

  Grandma farted, middle fingers pointed upward. ‘Gas in the tank!’

  ‘Remember,’ Velvet intoned, adjusting her pink flowered hat. ‘Men are treats, not meat.’

  After the girls were in bed, Cecilia, Janie, Henry, and I danced around the bonfire, twirling and spinning. Henry insisted that we do the hokey pokey. He loves the hokey pokey. ‘Put your whole self in, Is!’ he encouraged me. ‘Put your whole self in!’

  I thought that was rather philosophical, but Henry really gets it. Gets life.

  The tears streamed down Cecilia’s face, but she didn’t stop hokey pokey-ing.

  Henry saw this and said, ‘I kiss you! I love you, Cecilia! You my sister!’ He kissed her on the cheek.

  See? He gets it.

  We hugged in a mob as the ashes of the wedding dress drifted towards the night sky on a spiral of wind, the stars sprinkled above, Henry’s laughter bopping all around us like peace.

  Later we put Henry to bed with a heating pad. His stomach was hurting, and we have learnt over the years that this is the way to handle it. He said he ate too much Alice in Wonderland cupcake.

  The three of us sisters collapsed in my bed. I woke up the next morning hugging Cecilia’s backside, Janie hugging me.

  I felt better.

  The darkness on the edges of my brain matter was back in its cave again. I knew it was waiting for me, waiting for a weak moment, but at least I had it contained, controlled, if only for a little while.

  ‘Your mother, Ms Merry Sunshine, is ready to go, ladies,’ Dr Janns announced with great gusto. ‘The ship is leaving the port. The shuttle is ready for takeoff. The quarterback has thrown the ball.’

  I raised an eyebrow at Dr Janns. Janie giggled. Cecilia sighed.

  He shot his arm across the air in front of him, signalling a shuttle blasting off.

  ‘He always does things like that,’ Momma complained from the bed, her pink robe wrapped around her, as she fiddled with her crocheted shawl. ‘He’s a midget.’

  ‘A bit out of the midget range, I’d say,’ Cecilia said, tilting her head up at Dr Janns.

  ‘He’s a midget,’ Momma insisted. ‘A midget in his head. Dr Janns, you have a spot on your coat that reminds me of blood and I am uncomfortable with your hygiene.’

  Such a genteel lady, our momma.

  ‘And I’m uncomfortable because you won’t get up and dance with me, Mrs Bommarito.’ He bowed. ‘I have been craving a dance with you since the second you told me I reminded you of a bad crossword puzzle.’

  I had no idea why she said that.

  Momma waved her hand in the air. I could tell she was trying to hide a smile. ‘I’m not going to dance with you. You would crush my feet. Your shoes are the size of canoes. Dear me.’

  The doctor leant way, way over to gape sorrowfully at his canoes. ‘Big and healthy. Please, relieve me of my broken heart. Dance with me down this hallway.’

  ‘Never,’ she said. The smile curved up again before she forced it right back down.

  ‘A tiny waltz? A tango? A fox-trot? I take dance, you know, at a studio right around the corner from here.’

  ‘You’ve told me, midget,’ Momma said.

  ‘My happy days at this hospital are numbered, Mrs Bommarito. You’re leaving me.’

  ‘These girls are insisting that I go to a retirement centre to rest up. I don’t need to rest. I’m fine. Fit as a fiddle. They’re forcing me against my will to go and live with old people. Old people. How boring.’

  ‘They’re smart daughters.’

  Momma was still weak and there was no way she could handle Grandma and Henry and the business.

  Mostly we bad daughters were not prepared to handle Momma.

  We had discussed the ‘movin’ and groovin’ retirement centre again with Dr Janns. It cost an arm and a leg, but Janie and I were going to pay for it.

  ‘She’ll love it!’ Dr Janns had told us. ‘It’ll groove her out. It’s not for old, sick people, it’s for old people who wanna live, rock out, go on trips, meet people. My aunt was there for twenty years. She lived to be 106.’

  Spare us, I thought. Oh, spare us.

  In the end Momma waltzed with Dr Janns, gently, gingerly, elegantly, down the corridor of the hospital, doctors and nurses clapping.

  Momma smiled, her beautiful shawl swirling around her.

  She cried and cried when she hugged the nurse who gave it to her.

  It was a long afternoon, but we got Momma settled in Brickstone Retirement Centre in Portland.

  She hated it. (‘It’s a prison. You’re putting me in a prison.’) She hated all the other residents. (‘Old people. They’re all old, creaky old. I am not old.’) She hated her room. (‘Too small. The view is of the city skyscrapers. All that crime!’) She hated the dining room. (‘Big enough to hide a molester.’) She hated the location. (‘Portland! Liberal freak town. Earth lovers and savers. Bicyclists who don’t pay attention to road signs. Hippies with dreadlocks. Women with no make-up.’) She hated us. (‘Ungrateful daughters. After all the years I spent caring for you all…’)

  We were so exhausted on the way home to Trillium River, we didn’t even speak.

  I spent a long time laying on the grass studying the stars that night, wondering if other aliens on other planets had mommas as difficult as mine.

  Did they have to go on drugs?

  The Man in Charge called Janie. For a manly man, and a tough-ass attorney at that, I could tell the poor guy was nervous.

  I took the call – Janie was at the bakery at the time – and relayed the message.

  ‘Oh, I can’t call back!’ she said, tap-tap-tapping her fingers on the kitchen counter that night.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ I said gently.

  ‘I can’t. I’m odd. Weird. Then he’ll know I’m odd. Weird.’

  We argued.

  She couldn’t. She didn’t.

  ‘She’s gone!’ Janie yelled as she burst into the bakery, the door smashing into the jamb. ‘She’s gone!’

  I jumped in my seat in the booth, as did Bao, who actually leapt out and got in a crouched position. I gaped at him, baffled for a second, but then threw my attention back to Janie. Half her hair was out of her bun and she clapped her hands together four times, paused, clapped them together again.

  ‘What? Who’s gone?’

  ‘I�
��ve been trying to call you on your cell!’ she said, trying to catch her breath. ‘I called and called. I left the house without checking the stove and the oven and the door and came here right away because she’s gone. I have to go back and check—’

  ‘Who is gone?’ I shouted. Momma? Henry? I fought down panic.

  ‘Grandma. Grandma’s gone.’

  Grandma? Gone? Grandma should never go ‘gone’. I felt my stomach dive-bomb to my toes.

  Janie grabbed me and shoved me towards the door.

  ‘Velvet called a few minutes ago,’ she puffed. ‘One, two, three, four. Grandma was taking a nap on the couch, so she darted out to drop Henry off at his art class and when she got home, Grandma wasn’t there. Velvet searched for about a half hour and couldn’t find her.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ I said. I took off after Janie, then stopped. There were ten people in the bakery and we were closing soon. ‘Bao? Bao?’

  Bao was up from his crouch. I saw a line of sweat on his brow. The man did not like sudden noises. It had to have something to do with that scar, but I didn’t have time to think of it.

  ‘Go, go, Isabelle,’ he said, his voice strangled. ‘I take care of bakery. Go. I help find Grandma when I done. I help find Grandma.’

  Belinda sat up in her booth and burst into tears. She gets scared easy, too.

  ‘Help Belinda, Bao,’ I said. We were off and running.

  ‘We’re going to check the river again first thing in the morning, Ms Bommarito,’ the police chief said to me. She nodded at Janie. ‘Ms Bommarito. First thing.’

  Lyla Luchenko was about fifty-five years old. Her white hair was in a ponytail and she had a youngish face. ‘It’s midnight. We can’t search it any more now.’

  The two other detectives in our grandma’s parlour were almost ashen. The entire police force and hundreds of volunteers had been searching for hours.

  I had called Father Mike and he immediately put out the call to the congregation for help. They had responded in force, as had our neighbours, Cecilia’s teacher friends and students’ parents, and almost all the other people I’d ever even seen in Trillium River. ‘My prayers for Stella’s safety begin now!’ he boomed.

  Headquarters for the search was our house. There were people in our home I’d never met working the phone and handing out stacks of fliers for other people I didn’t know to take and hang up in stores, bus stations, truck stops, and restaurants.

  Police and other searchers were studying maps and ordering people to different areas to search for Grandma, including a state park, logging roads, and smaller towns.

  I stumbled out onto the deck and put my head on the rail. Oh, Grandma, I thought, devastated. Grandma. All alone. Maybe outside. Cold. Scared. So confused.

  The wind whipped up my hair, back and forth, back and forth.

  I heard the police giving orders to drag the river.

  Please. Not the river.

  We didn’t sleep. We were out the door by four thirty. By five o’clock, a mass of boats were out searching the Columbia River. Cecilia, Janie, and I stood huddled at the river’s edge as the sun rose, without much colour, without fanfare. We had left Henry with Velvet, quivering with fear over Grandma, clutching the pilot’s hat she’d given him.

  Under that sun, and the wind that never quit, we waited, grim and deathly afraid.

  I felt myself age about ten years standing on the side of that river. We watched search boats scour the sides. We wanted them to find Grandma, but on the banks of the river, not in the river, bloated full of water and nibbled on by fish.

  The media was there and we tried to avoid the cameras and the reporters. We asked that they not take photos of us. Having Janie there made it all the more newsworthy. All I wanted to do was smash their cameras.

  At one point, we got in Cecilia’s van and drove down the river to another spot to avoid the cameras.

  ‘Stop it,’ Cecilia hissed at me.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Your stomach. It’s lurching all over the place and it’s making me feel sick.’

  She was right. It was lurching. ‘OK, sure, dandy, Cecilia. Hang on a sec, I’ll bend over and tell my stomach to be calm and serene. Zenlike. But if your breath would stop coming in gasps, like a drowning rat, I could breathe better, you high and mighty—’

  ‘Me, high and mighty?’ she screeched.

  ‘Yes, you high and mighty drama queen, bossy—’

  ‘Me, bossy? You’re the worst, you control maniac, you self-destructive—’

  ‘Me? You’re the one who is self-destructive, always angry, you’ve got the personality of a bulldozer—’

  ‘And you live like you’re on a roller coaster with no damn seat belts, Isabelle, hands up in the air like a maniac—’

  ‘Stop fighting, please,’ Janie begged. ‘Stop.’

  We glared at each other.

  ‘Your stomach is disgusting, Isabelle.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, I can’t breathe, Cecilia.’

  We glared again, then glared at the river.

  ‘She’s not there,’ Cecilia said after a while, brushing her blonde hair out of her eyes as the wind sailed on past. ‘We won’t find her in the river.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  She ran her hands over her face. ‘She’s not that interested in it. Never has been. She told me when she was still relatively sane that the only thing she did by the river was to make River. But, damn, where would Grandma go? Where would that skinny, demented woman head to?’

  ‘I can’t imagine anyone would kidnap an old woman,’ Janie said. ‘Did I lock the door when I left the house?’

  ‘Who cares?’ I said. ‘Velvet’s there.’

  ‘Oh, right. Did I turn off the stove?’ she fretted.

  ‘Nobody would kidnap Grandma,’ I said. We’d gone over this, but we had to reassure ourselves. No one would have done that, would they? An old woman?

  A lone plane flew over the gorge, a little plane, white with black letters underneath it. It wasn’t moving quick, as if it wanted to fly through the rays of the sun, enjoy the sparkle of the river, take in the cliffs lining the gorge and the waterfalls shooting from the ledges.

  It made that grinding sound those small motors make, and it cut through our silence like a machete cuts through bamboo.

  The conversation between us came to a shuttering halt, the quiet changing, the tension a quaking, shuddering movement.

  ‘She wouldn’t have,’ I said, denying it.

  ‘She couldn’t get there,’ Cecilia said, in wonder.

  ‘Oh no no no,’ Janie moaned. ‘Oh no no no.’

  As one, we hurtled towards Cecilia’s van, cranked out an illegal U-turn, and sped towards Portland International Airport.

  Portland International Airport is not a huge airport. It’s manageable, modern, very Oregon. There’s a long drive into the parking garage, which we bypassed and went around to the back side where the planes take off.

  Years ago, when I was a kid, you could watch the planes taking off from pretty darn close. Since 9/11 they’ve erected a fence, so it keeps terrorists and other home-grown vampires away from the runway. In fact, there are places where you’re not allowed to park.

  We parked there anyhow, got out, and started searching the perimeter. We had told Lyla where we were going and she had radioed ahead to airport security and Portland police, who soon joined us.

  We trudged along the fence as one plane after another took off and landed. The sun was now up and it was hot. We were all sweating, but Cecilia was awash in it, the sweat dripping off her nose, her hair sticking to her face in long strands.

  ‘Sit down, Cecilia,’ Janie begged her. ‘Sit down. Or get a ride with one of the police officers.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, you skinny Gumby doll,’ Cecilia said, not breaking stride.

  Now that roiled my blood. I shoved Cecilia with my hand. ‘Don’t talk to her like that. It’s abusive. You got that, Cecilia? I know you’re scared, but you can’t tak
e it out on us.’

  ‘OK, braid-woman, I won’t, but don’t pander to me because of my weight,’ she huffed. She shoved me.

  ‘That hurts my feelings, Cecilia,’ Janie said, standing right in front of Cecilia, legs spread to fight, which surprised me. ‘It’s OK for you to tell me I’m a skinny Gumby doll, but if I said you’re a fat-assed water buffalo and told you to shut the fuck up, you’d be screaming at me.’

  Whew! Now I was shocked.

  Cecilia tried to punch Janie, but Janie skittered away.

  Cecilia huffed, sweated. She tried a punch again. Janie skittered.

  That ticked Cecilia off even more. ‘Stop running, Gumby!’ She swung, Janie ducked.

  ‘Stop being mean!’ Janie said.

  ‘Knock it off, you two,’ I said, coming physically between them. ‘Cecilia, shut your mean mouth.’

  Cecilia swore.

  Janie counted planes, then started listing her favourite teas, in order.

  The sun burnt hotter and hotter and Cecilia panted and heaved. I insisted we sit down and said I was hot and tired and needed to rest.

  ‘Give me a shitty break,’ the kindergarten teacher said. ‘I know you want to sit down because you think I need a rest.’

  ‘I’m doing it because I’m afraid your heart’s going to explode and that may kill me.’ I put my hand to my chest. It was pounding like a drum.

  ‘Plan your funeral,’ she muttered, trudging on.

  After what seemed like hours, we finally saw a little army-green lump, curled up tight, right by the fence. The lump had white curly hair and was wearing goggles.

  We’d found her.

  We sank into the ground beside her.

  She was breathing.

  Amelia Earhart was alive.

  We got Amelia into bed after we took her to the hospital, by ambulance, for a check-up. The hospital visit did not go well. She was confused and angry. And angry about being confused. And confused about being angry.

  Near as we could determine Grandma had spent the night outside by the planes.

  I asked her how she had got to the airport.

  ‘By plane, you silly girl!’ she’d admonished me, shaking a finger. ‘I flew my plane.’ She glared at the doctors. ‘Modern medicine is full of quacks,’ she told them.