Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  Henry considered that. ‘I dunno. I pet the dogs. The dogs miss me. Bark, bark. Lacie a new, nice dog. So will Paula Jay. I go see her so she won’t miss me.’ He swung his feet over the bed.

  ‘Henry, I will go and bring Paula Jay to you so she won’t miss you so much.’ I put a hand on his shoulder.

  Henry’s face lit up. ‘On the motorcycle? You’ll bring her on the motorcycle?’

  I snapped my fingers. ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll bring Paula Jay on the motorcycle!’ She’d do it. That daredevil.

  ‘Hmm.’ He put a fist under his chin. ‘No, not work. I help with Bunco.’ His feet hit the floor. ‘They need me at senior centre. They need Henry. I serve lunch and clean up and put forks in the box and bring Bommarito Cupcakes. Yummy.’

  ‘Now, Henry, how about if I bring Mr Howard to you and you can tell him how to run things when you’re not there? That would help.’

  He thought about that.

  ‘No. You need my help at the bakery.’ He stood up. He didn’t notice that he needed my help for balance.

  I put on my most serious expression. ‘You’re right, Henry. We need your help. But I’ll hire someone until you get back to help us. How about that? I’ll hire someone.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He cupped his chin, then tapped my nose. ‘You hire my friend, Lytle?’

  ‘Lytle?’ I knew Lytle. He was Henry’s checker-playing friend. He was in a wheelchair and had trouble moving his hands in the right directions. His parents and four brothers adored him.

  ‘Good idea!’ I smiled. ‘I’ll hire Lytle.’

  ‘Good. And you bring Lytle here play checkers?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll bring him here.’

  ‘Hmmmmm…’ he said.

  We all waited. No one wanted to wrestle Henry into bed. ‘OK dokay. Henry stay here for few days. But you bring Henry’s friends to Henry!’

  He smiled.

  I promised.

  ‘I love you, my sister, Is.’

  ‘I love you, my brother, Henry.’

  I had no idea how many friends of Henry’s would come and visit Henry.

  None.

  None of us did.

  We should have got him a larger room.

  Two larger rooms.

  That night I again stayed and slept by Henry’s bed. Momma and Dad stayed until eleven when Dad insisted Momma leave. She was a greyish-white, her eyes were swollen, and her face was lined with grief, as if the tear tracks had dug tunnels into her skin.

  ‘I’m staying with my son,’ she protested for the third time, but her protest was weaker.

  ‘River,’ Dad spoke, his voice brooking no argument. ‘You are coming with me. We are leaving now.’ He dropped her sweater over her shoulders and pulled her up. She bent to kiss Henry, who was sleeping.

  She turned to me and gave me a hug. ‘Stay with your brother, Isabelle.’

  I was surprised at the hug, but I held on tight. Hugs were few and far between from Momma, and though I had schooled myself not to want them, I was brought to tears by this one.

  She hugged Janie, kissed Henry on the lips again, and left, her walk unbalanced.

  Cecilia had left earlier to be with the girls and Janie and I settled down. The nurses had brought in two lounge chairs. Janie and I held hands between the chairs. Within a few minutes we were both asleep.

  It was the sleep of grief.

  I woke up around three in the morning to Henry singing the ‘Jesus Loves Me’ song.

  For a while I listened, the room illuminated only by the tiny lights on a couple of machines, his IV line eerie in the blackness. The song was almost haunting, each word lonely, coming from far away, the notes pitch perfect.

  ‘You have a good voice, Henry,’ I told him when he finished the third round. I’m going to miss your voice.

  ‘Isabelle?’

  ‘Yep. It’s me.’ It’s me, Henry. I’m here for you.

  ‘You and Janie still here?’

  ‘We sure are, Henry. We’re not leaving.’ I would never leave you.

  ‘I was in my dreams and I woke up because Jesus told me to sing the song. So I did. I sung the song.’

  I sat on the side of his bed. He reached his arms up for a hug and I hugged him, laying down with him on the bed. We held hands. I would miss holding hands with Henry.

  ‘Go back to sleep, Henry, it’s late.’ I kissed his cheek.

  ‘I know. I see the star shine. I see the moonbeams. You know how to go to heaven, Is? You gotta get on a sun ray or a moonbeam. That the way up.’

  ‘I’ll remember that, Henry, I will.’ And I’ll remember you, Henry.

  His face grew serious. He whispered, ‘I gotta tell you something, Isabelle.’

  ‘OK, Henry. Tell me anything.’

  He whispered, ‘I sick. The doctor told me. I bad sick.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re sick.’ A sob stuck in my throat. I wish it were me.

  ‘I know that, silly Isabelle. I know you sorry. No one want Henry sick.’

  I patted his hand. I thought the pain in my chest was gonna kill me.

  ‘I got pain-cree-at-ick cancer. Say it like that. Ick. Because it’s icky.’

  ‘Yes, it is icky.’

  ‘Isabelle’ – he raised himself to whisper in my ear – ‘I no get better. I sick.’

  I paused mid-pat. No one had told Henry that he wasn’t getting better.

  ‘Why do you say that, Henry?’ The pain in my chest got worse, spreading like the wings of a sick eagle.

  ‘Because in the dream Jesus said I come to him soon.’ He smiled.

  I could hardly move. ‘Jesus told you that?’

  He bit down on his lip, a big grin. ‘Yep. I go to heaven soon. I go see Maries.’

  Maries was a cat we had when we were younger. It was gold. It had got hit by a truck.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Jesus smile at me. He said I done good. He said I go up up up to heaven.’

  What do you do when someone’s dying and they talk about dying? Deny it? Dismiss it and miss out on an honest conversation the dying person needs to have? Offer up hope of a miracle when there is none coming? Henry was special, but he wasn’t stupid. The tears started sneaking out of my eyes and I snuffled and I coughed. I wish you weren’t going to die, Henry.

  ‘Hey, Isabelle! You no cry! No cry for Henry.’

  That made me cry harder. I knew I had to be strong, but inside I felt like I was folding in on myself. I was devastated beyond devastated. The only reason I believed in hope was because of Henry. He was the only constant joy in my life. My truest friend.

  ‘I love you, Isabelle.’ He stroked my cheek. ‘Don’t cry or I cry!’

  I couldn’t stop.

  So Henry started crying. ‘Don’t cry, Is!’

  I couldn’t stop. ‘I’ll miss you, Henry.’ I cannot tell you how much I’ll miss you. I can’t tell it to myself because then I will die of grief.

  ‘Yeah, yeah!’ He wiped his tears. ‘Me too. But you silly, Isabelle. I right here.’ He touched my heart with his pointer finger. ‘I right here. All the time. I right there.’

  My heart thumped and thumped and I reached for Henry and hugged him tight.

  ‘You my sister.’ He smiled. ‘I your brother. We the Bommaritos. We always be together.’

  I buried my face in his shoulder. Why Henry? Why him? So many horrid, murderous people in the world, why not them?

  ‘Jesus loves you, Is, and he take care of you when I in heaven. I catch a moonbeam or a sun ray!’ He grinned. ‘That fun.’

  No, that not fun. Because I would be here, at the end of the moonbeam, at the end of the sun ray. Alone. Without my hope.

  ‘I sleep now, Is. I go back to sleep. Night night, Isabelle. You pretty.’

  ‘And you’re beautiful, Henry, so beautiful.’

  He touched the tip of my nose, then slept.

  I grieved, deep, seemingly endless grief. ‘I love you, my brother,’ I whispered.

  Henry being in my heart wasn’t good enough.
I wanted Henry with me. With us. With the Bommarito family.

  More test results came in over the next few days, which confirmed what we already knew.

  Janie and I alternated days at the bakery along with Cecilia, who often brought the girls. Dad also took shifts, when he wasn’t at the hospital, his hands flying as he made one confectionary miracle after another.

  We kept our word and hired Lytle. He came with a different brother each day and they cut out cookies with cookie cutters. Lytle smiled the whole time.

  Momma was at the hospital every day, going home when exhaustion took over or she was too overwrought to function.

  If we went to the hospital to keep Henry company, we were hardly needed. I had called Father Mike and Janice at church, Mr Howard at the senior centre, and Paula Jay at the animal shelter and told them the situation and that Henry wanted to tell them exactly how to do things in his absence.

  Shocked and saddened, they all understood the situation exactly. They came with pencil and pen and wrote down word for word what Henry said.

  ‘I don’t know how we’ll do it without you, Henry,’ Father Mike said. Father Mike does not believe in hiding emotions from Jesus or anybody else. He blew his nose in his handkerchief. ‘I can’t wait until you come back.’

  ‘Yeah, me too, Father Mike. But you can do it!’ Henry cheered. ‘You can do it!’

  ‘Thank you for telling me about Bursom, King Nap, and Lady Elizabeth, Henry,’ Paula Jay said, her hair messed up from the motorcycle ride. ‘They have tricky personalities. I didn’t know that Lady Elizabeth was stealing King Nap’s treats. Do you know how I should handle Scotty?’

  ‘OK, let’s go over it one more time,’ Mr Howard croaked. The man must have been eighty-five. He had come with three other people who could not have been any younger. ‘Help us out, Henry. Tell us the order again for getting ready for lunch, then Bunco.’

  Henry had told his visitors, ‘Visit Henry! Tell all my friends I happy to see them!’ So they did, and people came.

  Lytle arrived with his brothers who brought a checkerboard and checkers for him and Henry to throw.

  People from the senior centre came in groups, and the staff and volunteers at the animal shelter visited in shifts, as did three noisy groups of teenagers from church, many sporting Mohawks and pink hair. Customers from the bakery, Bao and Belinda, friends from his day centre, neighbours, and most of the rest of the town, including the mayor and town council, firefighters, police officers, and teachers from Cecilia’s school, also visited.

  It was a good thing he ended up being there for six days, or we would not have had time for all his visitors.

  When Henry was released from the hospital, he hugged his doctor. ‘Hey, you get those dogs married! They in looooove!’

  Dr Remmer assured him she would.

  He high-fived the nurse, a man with tattoos up his arms of his mother and grandmother. They were homely women. ‘You be good, Henry. Hang gently.’

  ‘Hey, hey. I good. See ya, Mac. Mac the Big Mac.’ He laughed.

  Outside the hospital, I handed Henry a helmet.

  ‘Here goes Henry! I on a motorcycle with Is!’

  ‘I still can’t believe you’re doing this,’ Momma protested.

  Dad put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s what Henry wants to do.’

  She tried to protest again.

  ‘Let him, River,’ Dad told her. ‘Let him go.’

  Momma snuffled as Henry got on the back of my bike.

  I started the motorcycle and pulled out, slowly, with Henry holding my waist, whoo-hoo-ing. Carefully we pulled away. In my rear-view mirror I could see Momma waving and waving.

  Waving goodbye to Henry and me.

  Henry, for his part, was holding on tight, screaming, laughing, smiling. ‘This fun, Is! This fun! Go fast! Faster!’

  When we pulled in front of the house, Grandma and Velvet were waiting on the porch. Velvet was waving, Grandma was saluting.

  As soon as Henry saluted back, Grandma ran down to the motorcycle.

  ‘My co-pilot has returned in victory!’ she shouted. ‘In victory! I’ve kept our secret hidden in the tower!’

  Henry guffawed and hugged her, then hugged Velvet. ‘You need some mashed potatoes and gravy to put some meat on your bones, Henry!’ Velvet twanged. ‘And some of my grandma Ellen’s pecan pie!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Henry said, still weak but fighting. ‘Henry home. I home!’ He put his arms straight out like a plane and hobbled after Grandma.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  We met in the sunroom that night, the moonbeams shining through the trees. I hated the moonbeams now, I did.

  For three sisters who talk almost incessantly while together, or fight, or laugh, we were strangely, ghastly quiet.

  About five minutes later, I heard Janie muttering.

  ‘What are you counting?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m counting the tiles in the floor.’ She made marks on the journal she was holding.

  ‘You’ve already done that,’ Cecilia said. ‘Many times.’

  ‘I’m counting them again,’ Janie said, her voice wispy, like wind. A lost wind.

  Cecilia was gobbling down a cherry pie, as if it would fix her life if she ate fast enough. Her mouth opened and I watched her shove one bite in after another. Maybe that’s why I was rarely hungry: because Cecilia ate so much, I always felt full.

  Her hair fell forward and one of the gold strands dipped into the red gook. When she put her head back, the gook landed all over her sweater.

  ‘You have cherry gook on your sweater, Cecilia,’ I said.

  ‘Who cares?’

  I sat there for a second. Who cared? I cared. I cared that Cecilia was inhaling a pie. An entire pie was going straight down her mouth. I cared that she was huge.

  She took another bite, her mouth stretching like a rubber band. This time, hair on the other side dropped in the red gook.

  All of a sudden I was ravingly, smokingly, enraged. Did Cecilia want to kill herself? Would Henry die and then her?

  ‘For God’s sakes, Cecilia, stop eating!’

  Her head snapped up in shock, cherry juice dripping onto her chin when the fork wobbled. A cherry fell to her lap.

  Janie stopped counting.

  ‘Stop!’ I yanked the fork out of her hand, then snatched the pie pan.

  She instinctively grabbed for it, sputtering through the food in her mouth. ‘What the hell are you doing, Isabelle?’

  She yanked it back, but I was not going to let go. ‘You are gobbling up an entire cherry pie, for God’s sakes, that’s enough!’

  She stood up and glared at me, her hand still on the pan. ‘It’s enough when I say it’s enough—’

  ‘No.’ My voice was shrill and naggy. ‘It is enough now. Now, Cecilia.’

  She pulled at the pan again. Cherry juice splattered onto my shirt. ‘Give that to me. And don’t you ever, ever tell me what to eat or not eat. I don’t need you, you sanctimonious slut, to tell me what to do with my body.’

  I hate that word, slut, especially when it’s aimed at me. ‘You are the meanest person I have ever met, and you can’t do this to yourself anymore, to your health, to your body, you can’t do it to your girls—’

  ‘Do what? Embarrass them because I’m so fat? Puff when I walk down the street? Have a face the size of a cow’s? Enough fat to warm a group of Eskimos? I can’t do that? You think I don’t know that?’ she shrieked. ‘You think I don’t know all that?’

  ‘You know and you keep inhaling food like a garbage disposal.’ I fought for the pie pan. More cherry juice splattered. She hauled it right back and we were nose to nose.

  ‘Isabelle, Cecilia, I hate fighting. Please stop,’ Janie whispered. ‘We’ve had such a bad week, come on—’

  ‘Shut up!’ we both told her.

  ‘Don’t call me a slut again.’

  ‘Don’t call me fat.’

  ‘You are fat, Cecilia.’

  ‘And you are a fi
rst-rate slut, Isabelle, don’t get hoity-toity with me. I have been with one man, one, and you’ve been with enough to fill a US submarine.’

  ‘That was a bitchy, bitchy thing to say,’ I yelled.

  ‘And saying I’m fat isn’t bitchy?’ she yelled back.

  ‘You’re so thick into denial you can’t see straight. Cecilia, you’ve been hospitalised because of your heart! You weigh almost three hundred pounds! Don’t you get it? You are going to die, Cecilia, you are going to die, like Henry, if you don’t stop eating!’

  Her face paled. ‘Maybe I should go on the spinach and pineapple diet again? The liquid-only diet? The fourteen-hundred-calorie-a-day diet that made me feel faint? The fruit diet that gave me diarrhoea so bad I had to take a sick day?’ We struggled with the pie plate, cherry filling sloughing around. ‘All so I can lose weight and gain it all back plus some? Give me the damn pie.’

  ‘No.’ I can shout as loud as her. ‘You are fat enough as it is! Fat enough and that is enough!’

  Her face flushed, her jaw tightened, and she reached in the pie pan, picked up a handful of pie, and smashed it into my chest. The cherries slipped down my shirt.

  I thought I was going to shove her I was so mad. Mad at her, mad that Henry was sick, mad at being attacked and my scary nightmares, mad at the whole damn world. I was suddenly so mad, I felt as if a blowtorch had lit from my insides, the flames racing from my hair follicles to my toenails.

  I picked up a hunk of pie and palmed it into her fat face.

  ‘You bitch,’ she seethed.

  ‘Negative choices, negative choices!’ Janie said. ‘Please stop. Take a minute to reharmonise, rebalance yourselves with each other—’

  ‘There. Now you won’t eat it. Or will you?’ I clutched the pie plate again. ‘Maybe you will.’ I picked up another handful and rubbed it into her shirt.

  She slapped my cheek with crust and cherries. I felt pie juice run down my chin.

  ‘Reach inside yourself for peace,’ Janie fussed. ‘The atmosphere is charged with acrimony—’

  ‘Shut up!’ we both shouted at her, battling for the pie plate.

  I thought I was going to explode. I picked up a handful of gook and this time I went straight for that blonde hair.

  She returned the favour and I felt cherry juice on my scalp, slipping down the collar of my shirt. ‘Dammit,’ I breathed. I smushed some onto her face.