Little Sister

by Barbara Gowdy

  On the way back Rose told Ava about the lean-to, and after recovering from the fact that Rose had gone to the other side of the cornfield, Ava said, “What about the planks in the loft?”

  Rose wanted to take them from that filthy room to the meadow behind the barn, but Ava wasn’t able to carry her end. By herself Rose lugged one as far as the doors, where, arms aching, she had to put it down.

  “We better ask Gordon,” Ava said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s his wood. He might not like it getting rained on.”

  “This is Gordon’s wood?”

  “He’s storing it.”

  Rose dragged the plank back.

  She found a broom down below and spent the rest of the morning sweeping the dirt and rodent turds into piles, and Ava—bravely, for her—whisked the piles into a dustpan and deposited them outside. At lunch Rose told Fiona what they were up to. Fiona saw no reason why they couldn’t borrow Gordon’s wood, not to lean against the wall, though. “You’ll knock them over,” she said. “You’ll brain yourselves.” She had another idea. She went with the girls to the barn, and she and Rose created two solid stacks of different heights. They’d brought a couple of worn chenille bedspreads and they draped one across the planks to serve as a slanted roof. The other they bunched on the floor. They’d also brought supplies—a deck of cards, apples, grape juice boxes, and a bag of almonds. Only when Fiona said to Ava, “You’ll be all right?” did Rose remember that Ava was claustrophobic.

  “I’ll be at the door part,” Ava said. Fiona left, and she revised that to, “I’ll stay out here and guard.”

  “There’s lots of space,” Rose assured her. There was too much space. And too much light, the depthless, dreary light of a classroom. “We should have built it in the meadow,” she said.

  “I like having it here,” Ava said. She crouched down.

  “Then come in.”

  “I like it for you.”

  “Don’t you want to have a spirit vision?”

  “What’s a spirit vision?”

  Rose was only trying to dredge up a little atmosphere. But as she answered Ava, she got that sensation she’d had with Shannon, of a mist falling on her arms, and she said, “Come right now, the vision’s starting,” and Ava let herself be pulled in.

  “Okay, settle down, close your eyes,” Rose said. She took Ava’s hand. “It’s the year 1786,” she said, hushing her voice. “We’re Oneida Indian sisters. We have jobs. We pick blueberries. We gather kindling for the fire.” She saw the fire: a tepee of logs, and the black, whipping smoke.

  “What’s that smell?” Ava said.

  “There’s no smell.”

  “Like vegetable soup.”

  “That’s our campfire,” Rose said, although she didn’t smell anything.

  “No, it’s like . . .” Ava freed her hand and scrambled out. “It’s like Campbell’s vegetable soup.”

  Rose kept her eyes shut. She strained to preserve the smoke but it was narrowing to a strand.

  “Are you still having the vision?” Ava asked timidly.

  “No.”

  “Did I ruin it?”

  “I probably wasn’t having one anyway,” Rose said. “You need to be in the bush.” She crawled out and stood. “Well, that’s that,” she said, looking down at the windows, the source of all the light. A few of the panes were broken, and fluffy gray feathers quivered in the cracks. This must have been a chicken coop, she thought. She had the most dismal feeling.

  “Oh, I know!” Ava blurted. She ran gawkily to the cupboard. “I’ll have my lean-to here. It’s even leaning.” The door opened with a wail. “We’ll each have our own one,” she said and tucked herself into the bottom shelf.

  Rose went over and looked at her sister’s petrified, grinning face beaming up out of the impossible folds and angles of her limbs. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said. “This is smaller than what we have.”

  “But it doesn’t smell bad,” Ava said. “It smells nice.” Her freckles were vivid against her white skin. “You can shut the door.”

  “Get out of there.”

  “You can shut the door.”

  Rose shut the door.

  She left the room.

  “Are you in your lean-to?” Ava called. “Rose?”

  A plump male pigeon and a slender female were strutting in front of Gordon’s shingles, making their bubbling coos. The wind whistled. The windmill creaked. Rose walked around the barn to the meadow and swam her hands over the goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. When she returned, the pigeons flapped up to a beam.

  She never remembered what happened after that. She was told what happened, the details it was decided she should know or could tolerate. She overheard certain things between her parents and the forensic team, and years later she read the police and coroner reports, and learned that at 1:45 she used the hose to top up Major Tom’s water tub. This was a regular chore, and Fiona, passing through the kitchen on her way to the cellar, witnessed it. The time of death was put at 1:30, so Rose might have already discovered the toppled cupboard, pulled Ava’s lifeless body free, and covered her with the chenille bedspreads.

  Roughly two hours later Fiona found Rose drawing in her sketchbook on the living room carpet. She asked where Ava was, and Rose apparently related the dream she’d had a week or so earlier, telling it as if it had really happened: Gordon driving up the dirt road behind the house, stopping by the barn and opening the passenger door, Ava jumping in, the two of them continuing on north.

  Fiona called Gordon’s home. Nobody answered. She called his wife at the Honda plant to get the number for his pager, but the wife had left work early. She called Rose’s father, who called the police and began the hour-and-a-half drive from Toronto. The police issued an all-points bulletin. An RCMP squad car with two officers, a man and a woman, showed up within fifteen minutes.

  Rose’s answers were described in the police report as definite. She herself was described as mature for her age and reasonably calm and collected. She had entered a state of shock, but no one, least of all her, realized it at the time and therefore nobody doubted her, this reasonably calm and collected child with her definite answers. She told the police she’d left to give Major Tom his water, and when she got back, Ava wasn’t there. She heard Gordon’s truck and looked out the windows. “The loft windows,” she said in an unconscious modification of her dream. She said that she didn’t think Gordon saw her looking out, and that she felt funny about Ava driving away with him but guessed he must have phoned their mother first. No, Ava never mentioned Gordon coming to get her.

  The policewoman asked the questions. She wanted Rose to take her to the loft and show her the view from the windows. Rose volunteered to draw a picture of the view instead. A second squad car arrived. Only minutes later Gordon pulled up in his truck.

  One day Rose would mark the sight of that truck parked at an angle on the grass as the moment she returned to life. The male and female pigeons flapped to the barn roof, and the next thing she knew she was in the house and her face was pressed to the torn screen door with its rusty metal smell. There were police cars, and policemen putting Gordon in handcuffs. Why? What had he done? He wasn’t resisting, he was saying to Fiona, “I didn’t take her. I swear to you, I didn’t take her.” His round, pink face. His wobbling chin. “Why would I be here if I took her?” He appealed to the officers, looking left and right, landing left. “Tommy, come on, man, why would I be here?”

  “You tell us,” said the officer to his right. He wore mirrored sunglasses.

  “That’s what I’m doing!”

  “You drove up the dirt road,” said Fiona. She was half the size of the policemen. From the back, in her painting shift, she could have been Ava. “You stopped at the barn.”

  “I never use that road,” Gordon pleaded.

  “We have to take him in for questioning, ma’am,” said the officer with the sunglasses.

  “Question him here,” Fiona sa
id.

  “Sorry, ma’am, can’t do that. We’ll keep you posted up to the minute.”

  They started leading Gordon to the squad car. He balked. “Hold on, Tommy. I got to scratch my head. I’m going crazy, man. It’s the cancer.”

  The officers looked at each other.

  “You scratch it for me, then.”

  The one named Tommy unclipped the hard hat, removed it, and there was Gordon’s bald pink skull and the dent. Tommy hesitated. “Where do you want it?”

  “All over.”

  Tommy used his knuckles.

  “You drove up the dirt road,” Fiona said, starting over.

  Gordon shut his eyes to soak up the scratching.

  “Listen to me!” Fiona screamed.

  His eyes flew open. Tommy dropped his hand.

  “You drove up the dirt road,” Fiona said, not screaming but shrill. “You stopped at the barn. You opened the passenger door.” Each action punctuated with a stab at the air. “Ava got in.”

  Rose started to shake. Having blanked out everything she’d said and done for the past three hours, she couldn’t understand how her mother could be telling her dream. She went out onto the stoop, and the policewoman put a hand on her shoulder and tried to escort her back inside.

  “Let’s get you something to drink,” said this woman.

  Rose held her ground. “Are they talking about Ava?” she asked, although she knew they were.

  “We’ll find her, sweetie. Don’t you worry.”

  “But she’s in the loft.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Ava’s in the loft. She’s in the cupboard.”

  Gordon died of his cancer a month later. Rose’s father went to the funeral, making the trip from Toronto, where he, Fiona, and Rose, the shrunken family, were living again. Filtered down to Rose was the understanding that Gordon’s death had been accelerated by the hour during which local news stations and CB radio operators had connected him to a missing young girl. Also that his death was a minor casualty, a small thing compared.

  To Rose it was nothing. There was only the one death. She sobbed and thrashed in her father’s arms. “You wouldn’t have shut the door!” she cried. “You wouldn’t have left!”

  He said he would have. The latch was broken, he reminded her. “Ava could have pushed it open if she’d wanted to.”

  “She did want to! That’s why it fell over!”

  “We’ll never know why it fell over. She died instantly. She didn’t suffer.”

  Fiona, rocking herself nearby, begged Rose to stop: “No more, no more,” she said.

  Another time Fiona said, “When I was twelve, I threw a brass vase at my brother and cracked his skull open.”

  This helped somewhat, temporarily. But her mother threw the vase in a fit of temper. Rose shut the door in a fit of calm. She couldn’t tell this one thing, it was too evil and, in any case, indescribable: the luxurious feeling that came over her as she walked away. How easy and funny it was, floating off, ignoring Ava’s trusting, “Are you in your lean-to?”

  SUNDAY, JULY 3, 2005

  Rose prayed for Marsh to be at the yoga center. She appealed to God, and then—it felt more straightforward and promising—she routed the prayer through Harriet. Tell him not to leave, tell him to wait, she said, a variation of the same words she’d directed at Harriet six hours earlier.

  She made it five minutes before closing time. The doors were already locked. She pounded on the glass. “Hello!” she shouted. “Hello! Open up!”

  “They won’t be opening up,” said a raspy male voice. It came from a figure in a wheelchair. “You can yell till you’re blue in the face.” He pushed himself closer. He was old and black, and missing a leg.

  Rose pointed to a second-floor window. “A light’s on.”

  “They all done for the day,” he said heavily, as if speaking for himself.

  Maybe there was a buzzer or entry panel. She felt around the doorframe. “You don’t happen to have a key, do you?”

  “Me?” He took the question seriously. “No, I don’t have a key.” He wheeled over to her and turned up his palm. “Are you going to help me out?”

  Aside from a fifty, all she had in her purse was two quarters. She gave them to him.

  “Do you need that watch?” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  He nodded at her wrist.

  “It isn’t real.” Her real Rolex, her father’s Rolex, she reserved for industry events. “It’s a knockoff.”

  “That’s all right.” He turned up his palm again, and in her distraction, her bewilderment about what was expected, she pulled the watch off and gave it to him.

  “Try the back door,” he said.

  She ran on the soaking lawn between the yoga center and a parking garage. Surely, they wouldn’t have left the back door open.

  But they had.

  There were no stairs down, however, no obvious way to reach the basement offices. She climbed to the second level and entered a narrow hall of darkened rooms. The door to the first room was open. She peeked in. A massage table, a sink. She kept going. Light shone from the window of a closed door farther along. She drew closer and heard what she thought was crying. She tiptoed. She told herself she shouldn’t look but, of course, she did.

  A large naked man was bent over a table, legs braced, hips moving. Beneath him, legs in the air, lay another naked man. It was this man who was crying out. The standing man was Marsh.

  Rose gasped and stepped aside. Was she in her own body? Yes, these were her hands, her shoes.

  She could still say it, she could tap on the door, get Marsh to come out, and tell him what she’d rehearsed in the car: “Harriet tried to drown herself this afternoon. I saw her, I was really close. I know this sounds crazy, but just call her.” She would then turn and leave. But Marsh might come after her, grab her arm, demand to know why she was following Harriet.

  Better to write a note, she decided. She got out her pen and felt around in her purse for a scrap of paper. Meanwhile, the man’s cries grew louder.

  She lost her nerve.

  To avoid the legless guy, she circled around the other side of the building. She was whimpering at her failure and her violation of Marsh’s privacy. Between Harriet and him she was seeing too much, more than she had any right to see. And she’d been sure that he was in love with Harriet! Well, there went any hope of him marrying her and adopting the baby.

  She reminded herself, driving off, that Harriet had chosen not to drown. When she felt more confident about this, she started questioning her mania to bring Marsh into the picture. If she’d actually spoken to Marsh, and he’d spoken to Harriet . . . Only now did it strike her how disturbed Harriet would be to learn that a stranger was interfering so diligently in her life.

  Traffic was slow. Between the Bayview Extension and Pottery Road it stopped altogether, and an ambulance screamed past on the shoulder. She phoned the theater’s kitchen line. Lloyd answered, and she explained the situation.

  “Everything’s under control here,” he said. “No rush.”

  She spent the next hour reviewing the episodes, moment by moment, for anything else she might have gotten as wrong as assuming Marsh was heterosexual. But the moments wouldn’t bind together, they had the jerky animation of a flipbook, and she kept returning to the first and starting over.

  It was eleven thirty when she arrived at the theater. Her mother was in the kitchen, drinking tea and reading the newspaper.

  “Where’s Lloyd?” Rose said.

  “He came down with a migraine and didn’t have his pills. I sent him home.”

  “He was fine when I called.”

  “Migraines hit all of a sudden.”

  “They can,” said Rose, making note of another coincidence. Not that she’d had a migraine, but a migraine specter had been haunting the theater for days.

  “I called him a taxi,” Fiona said. “He wanted to take the bus, but I wouldn’t hear of it. And then he would
n’t let me give the driver any money.” She sounded gratified. Lloyd the martyr, Lloyd the gentleman. “Do we know a Henry Corrigan?” she asked.

  “I don’t,” Rose said. She went over to the sink.

  “Henry will be missed by his many friends at Dunkin’ Donuts,” Fiona read in the derisive voice she reserved for the obituaries. “Well, that explains his heart attack.”

  Rose opened the cupboard. “Where’s the purse?”

  Their arrangement was, if Rose couldn’t make it back to the theater by the end of the second show, Fiona would count the money and stick it in the leather cash purse, as she’d always done, but instead of maddening herself by trying to remember the combination to the safe, she would hide it under the sink behind the cleansers and detergents. Preferably, she would do this without Lloyd seeing.

  “I put it in the safe,” she said. “My hand automatically turned the combination.”

  Rose twisted around. “Mom!” she congratulated her.

  “Oh, I’ll forget again tomorrow.”

  “How did we do?”

  “Thirty-five seventy-five from the snack bar, and a hundred and forty, no, two hundred and seventy . . .”

  “I’ll go see.”

  The safe was in the utility closet, embedded in the floor and walls. It was as old as the building. It was open. It was empty.

  A film of sweat coated Rose’s skin. She touched her wrist. She had given the legless man her fake twenty-dollar Rolex, and her real, fifteen-thousand-dollar Rolex had disappeared. For a moment she seemed to grasp an occult, inviolable law. But everything was gone: her father’s diamond cuff links, Fiona’s diamond-and-emerald anniversary ring, the night’s take.

  She returned to the kitchen and opened more cupboards. She shoved aside pots and pans.

  “You’re making a terrible racket,” Fiona said.

  “The safe is empty.”

  “What do you mean, empty?”