Thought You Were Dead

by Nick Craine

  “Sure, wonderful, I’d love to. Although I hope it wasn’t my obit that made you leave the convent. The world outside isn’t really as amusing as I may have made it seem.”

  “Chellis, you still don’t get it, do you? I’m your sister.”

  “You’re saying that Nobodaddy has assigned a nun to me? Sort of like a spiritual personal assistant?”

  “I’m saying we’re related.”

  “No we’re not.”

  “I’m your half-sister actually.”

  “Which half?” He gazed at her ruefully.

  She laughed.

  “This is a joke, right?” Who in his finite social circle would pull this kind of stunt? Both Hunt and Mrs. Havlock were experiencing their own bad jokes at the moment, although either might have set it up beforehand. Why, though? It wasn’t Hunt’s style, nor Mrs H’s, he didn’t think. That left Elaine, who wouldn’t bother, or Vaughan? Not likely. Other various acquaintances didn’t know him well enough for ribbing. Besides, the packaging of the jest might be gorgeous, but the intent was cruel, n’est pas?

  “No joke,” she said. “Here, why don’t you take this.” She handed him the bottle. “In case you think I mean to crack you on the bean and rob you.”

  “Why thanks, and no I wasn’t thinking that. I’ve already been cracked on the bean and robbed. You wouldn’t get anything.”

  “You’re serious? That’s terrible. I’m going to want to hear all about it, but I have the feeling I’d better vanish for awhile and let you digest the news. I know it must be overwhelming. It is for me.” She gave him an ardent look. He tried not to wince. “I only found out a few days ago where you live and I should have sent you a letter or something, but I couldn’t wait. I had to see you, meet you. Finally. But I understand, honestly I do.” She started to turn away.

  “Don’t vanish,” he said. “No, don’t do that. I’ll admit this is pretty wild. Totally amazing and . . . sorry, I’m a bit stunned. More than usual, that is, but come in, come in. Let’s open this baby.” He held up the bottle, stepped smartly aside, and using his free hand executed a gallant sweeping motion, welcoming her into his bachelor pad.

  As he followed behind he was able to observe other fetching assets of hers. Not bad. For a sister.

  So-called.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  Chellis sighed. Partly because of the Burgundy, which was heavenly, but mostly because of . . . “Bethany?”

  “Bebe. I hardly ever get Bethany.”

  “Sounds Swedish.”

  “Funny, that’s what Mother said. She always called me Bethany.”

  “Mother?”

  “My mother, your mother.”

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “Your adoptive mother. I’m so sorry, Chellis. You obviously loved her very much.”

  He shrugged, and pressed his lips together as though he were holding a dime between them. Who was this person, this lovely home invader?

  “I want you to know that our mother loved you very much, too. She never forgave herself for abandoning you, which is why she kept me, I guess. But she was young, Chellis, far too young, and desperate. You were her big secret, until she became ill. That’s when she told me about you. A brother! I couldn’t believe it.”

  It was hard to swallow. Unlike the wine.

  “She tried to find you. Ads in the papers. Sometimes she’d disappear for days, and I’m sure she was searching for you.”

  Hooey. He was radiating enough skepticism to strip the hardwood.

  “It’s true,” she said simply.

  “Where did she leave me?” Testing, testing.

  “At a hot dog stand, I think she said. Here in Farclas, I forget the name.”

  “Lloyd’s.” An archival search of the local rag would have turned up that tidbit, his fifteen minutes of fame already expired by the time he was only a few weeks old.

  “That’s it. That’s what she told me. Lloyd’s.”

  He refilled her glass, then his. Sat back, crossed his legs, he liked a good story. “Tell me about her, Bebe.” Bee-bee? He recalled the one that Hunt once planted with a soft pock in the calf of his leg. He still bore a faint scar. Hunt had been trying out the new air rifle Rennie had given Chellis as a grade eight graduation present. Both he and Hunt had packed in their outlaw ambitions after that. “You don’t mind if I call you Bethany, do you?”

  “I’d love that.”

  “All in the family, eh? Great. So what was she like? I don’t even know her name.” Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a mouse tearing along the baseboard with a hoary snack clamped in its jaws, some artifact from the Ancien Regime, before there were any pretenders to the maternal title. Although, if this crock she was serving up, fishy as a bouillabaisse, had any truth in it, he might actually have to commit some vermin evictions, tidy the place up. Despite denying it for most of his life, he had always yearned for family, for an allembracing, idiosyncratic network of siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. So why was he already beginning to feel put-upon?

  “Fiona,” she said. “Fiona Gordon.” She leaned forward to place her drink on the coffee table, using an old sock of his as a coaster, and flashing a bit of harmless kin cleavage in the process. “It’s weird. Some of your mannerisms are so like hers. ”

  “Nature not nurture?”

  “In some respects, has to be. She herself never received much on the nurture side.” Bethany then proceeded to tell him about his unsteadfast and unremarkable mater, exceptional only in that she was pure invention. Chellis couldn’t help but think that if you were going to invent a whole person – as Elaine had obviously done with Vaughan, slapping him together in her workroom and installing a solarpowered enlivening device – why create someone so imperfect and depressing? A little sparkle and zip might have made her more credible, for she sounded more like the protagonist of some dreary, redemptive novel. But without the redemption, only cruel, unrelieved realism. A sob story so wet that even the punctuation damply sagged.

  According to Bethany, their mother, knocked up with Chellis, had fled small town life, some barbarian outpost north of Claymore, and a repressive-controlling-abusive (what else?) family, stopping off in Farclas only long enough to drop and ditch baby number one, Bethany. Baby number two didn’t arrive until several years later. Fiona had an unfortunate, B-movie attraction to cads and married men, and her second pregnancy may have been a bid to snag one of those. Or simply another mistake. Or the product of a longing for the baby she had given away. (Bethany sided with the last theory – “I probably owe my life to you, Chellis.” “Oh, probably, lots of people do,” he said.) Misfortune, the dominant and domineering theme of Fiona’s life, had kept her firmly in place. Her only social mobility had been neither up nor down, but sideways, and involved, besides the flat-on-the-back feature of her rotten love life, moving from one minimum-wage job to another, and likewise from one basement apartment to another on the ugly, urban sprawly edges of Toronto. Death had been her escape, and she had taken up residence in the ultimate basement apartment at the age of fifty via an inoperable, metastasized uterine cancer.

  At the conclusion of this uplifting bio, Chellis fled to the kitchen to hustle up another bottle and would have wept into the dishtowel if it weren’t a microbe metropolis. He discovered a half-full bottle of gin in the cupboard behind a whiskered turnip and could have fallen on his knees in gratitude.

  “Martinis,” he said brightly on returning to the living room with the bottle and two smiley-face coffee mugs. “I make the best in town, better even than Hef, the ever-ready bunny boy himself. D’you think the makers of Viagra gave it that name because it rhymes with Niagara? Whoosh, you know.” He gave the bottle a shake then glugged the gin into the mugs, filling them to the top. “Panty remover this stuff used to be called in my good old high-school days.”

  Bethany regarded him quizzically. He began to wonder if she was innuendo-proof, even lout-proof, for it didn’t seem as if she’d be ea
sily driven from her squatter’s claim on his couch by brainless and lightly threatening commentary.

  “Don’t be nervous,” she said kindly. “This is a shock, I realize that. In time, if you let me, you’ll see that I’m telling the truth. I wish she’d had a better life, don’t I ever, but she was as good to me as she could have been under the circumstances.” She nodded toward her mug of gin. “Mother liked her drink, too. But I’m not about to blame her for that.”

  He sipped his gin, giving her a level look. Not only was she personable and quietly self-assured, embodying virtues he sadly lacked, but she also appeared to be fully ready to accept him, no matter how goofy. She was a genie who had come tale-bearing out of a bottle of Burgundy, easily (too easily?) granting him his long-held wish for relatedness. Here she was, improbably, in his very own living room offering to relieve him of the uncertainties that had forever dogged him. What had he missed in his other unrealized life? In the scenario as presented only a grim, deprived existence. His birth mother, if Fiona Gordon was she, had done the best thing possible by abandoning him.

  “And our fathers?” Who art in hell, he prayed.

  “Took off, same old story.”

  “Which makes both of us the products of non-paternity events, as they say in the genealogy biz. Tell me about you,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Later.”

  “Sooner than, I hope?”

  “I could drop by tomorrow if you like? But, you don’t have to work or anything?” She surveyed the living room, brow fetchingly crinkled, as if seeing it for the first time.

  “I do have a job, if that’s what you’re asking yourself.” Maybe she really was his sister. As soon as they got cozy, the nagging would start. “My employer’s out of town at the moment.”

  “Cat’s away, huh? Lucky you.” She stood up and hesitated for a shy, indecisive beat, before stepping over to him and bending down to give him a quick kiss on the forehead, her fingertips lingering briefly on his shoulders. “Time for me to go.”

  “Nice perfume,” he said, breathing deeply, breathing her in, letting the fragrance lift him to his feet. “What is it, Lifebuoy? Irish Spring?”

  “That’s about all that fits my budget,” she laughed.

  “How refreshing, a girl who appreciates a guy’s pitiful sense of humour.” He followed her to the door.

  “Oh, we gals are trained from birth to do that.”

  “I know one who isn’t.”

  “Someone special, is she? I’ll want to hear all about her, too.”

  “Say, Bethany, where are you staying?” It occurred to him that he was being inhospitable. Even if she was about as closely related to him as the starlet-of-the-day was – whoever that might be, he’d lost track – he could at least offer her a place to crash. Especially if she was short of funds. Especially since she was starlet quality herself.

  “Place called the Caledonia. On Bruce Street.”

  “But that’s a total dive. You can’t stay there, it’s not safe.”

  “That’s what makes it fun, plenty going on. Don’t worry, Chellis, I’ve stayed in worse. I’ve lived in worse. Adieu bro. Same time?”

  “Same station,” he nodded.

  She fluttered her fingers at him, then turned and strode up his front walk.

  After this, Chellis wandered around the house, checking for damage, a bomb had been dropped, after all. He went on a room-toroom tour, hands in his pockets. Walking and thinking, sibling activities suitable to the subject under consideration, the fantasy his visitor had spun out. Would it hurt to indulge it? It was a benign enough tale, and what if it were true? It might come to that peculiar pass: veracity. What if he really and truly had a sister? Too cool. Hot, actually, she was something else.

  He ambled past the closed door of Rennie’s bedroom and felt a stab of . . . a clutch of . . .a premonition of . . . fear? Hope? Emotions were such ill-defined creatures, it was sometimes difficult to tell one from the other. Love. Hate. Happiness? Would he recognize that if he saw it advancing down the road toward him with a big shit-eating grin on its face? He’d most likely cut and run. But then happiness was a state, not an emotion, wasn’t it? If so, he’d let his passport to that elusive place lapse.

  His journey, round trip, took him back to the living room, where he searched through his CD collection for some Water Music to go with the gin. Solomon he would have liked to hear, but he didn’t have that one. He put on the Handel, which made him feel instantly intelligent, and sat down. He may not have been prepared to plumb the depths of his neediness, but he did begin to weigh the pros and cons of what he was being offered. Mostly cons? She was very well-spoken and had refined musical tastes for someone raised in a social substrata. Then again, this wasn’t Victorian England or one of those countries where females never rise above the livestock in status. All one had to do here to crawl out from under one’s birth burden was catch some education. Not easy, but not impossible. His upbringing hadn’t been much different from Bethany’s, only sunnier in its deprivations. And Rennie had been a class unto herself, nobody stepped on her.

  The time may have come in any event to open up Rennie’s room, clean it out, get rid of her closetful of cowboy boots and strappy high heels, her corny knick-knacks, her clothes. His overlong, grief-induced inertia had kept it in shrine stasis. Why not set it up as a guest room? New, unbleached, bamboo-derived sheets on the bed, matching virginal towels neatly folded on the dresser, a bar of olive oil soap resting on top (or some non-flaying soap product), sprigs of dried lavender in the drawer. The works. Just in case. Which didn’t mean it would ever be occupied by anyone, say, who was as generously endowed as Bethany, with slender boyishh hips . . . .

  Incest, he was beginning to see what all the excitement was about. God knows what talk shows and contemporary literature would do without it.

  But wait, wasn’t there something else he was supposed to be doing right now? Calling Dick to tell him that his missing wallet was missing? Elaine must have nabbed it when she’d stayed over. He did need a guest room, seeing as she’d practically wrecked his room trying to fix his broken bed frame. That must be it, Elaine had taken the wallet so she could stick pins in it, and not for the healing purpose of acupuncture, either. He’d call her, and then Moe to see if Hunt had surfaced yet, and what else? He jumped up, spotted Bethany’s untouched mug of gin, and sat back down. What else? Find Mrs. Havlock, yes, mustn’t forget. That too.

  17

  Fact

  A WEEK LATER CHELLIS STOOD UP. Not that he’d been sitting around on his duff (or his withered laurels) the whole time. Procrastination simply wasn’t what it used to be. These days, seven of them to be exact, he had been practising a more selective variety of indolence in between bouts of manic activity. The house was now middle-class clean, the fridge was stocked with an excess of broccoli – enough to club one’s bad gustatory habits flat as a baby seal – and Rennie had been evicted from her bedroom. He hadn’t seen Uncle Bob around for a couple of days and hoped he hadn’t ended up in one of the green garbage bags into which his mother’s worldly goods had been dumped and dragged out the door, rapidly, to avoid both separation anxiety and a disabling degree of guilt. After much badgering and suasion on his part, Bethany had given in . . . and moved in. He’d been worried about her staying at the Caledonia, a hot spot for the Farclas unsavoury – the desperate, the enraged, the cunning. The malfeasance conceived there by local bikers, druggies, and pimps, may have only been small-time, but was no less dangerous for that. He couldn’t bear the thought that his sister, so recently and miraculously found, might get caught in a bad scene, whisked away. Lost.

  She was his sister, their halves had bonded to make a whole, a family. She was his Eureka! the solution to his incomplete and fractional self. He had arrived at this conclusion after circling and circling the shaky evidence from what he considered to be an objective critical remove, like a hawk in a field zeroing in on its prey. And like a hawk he had finally pounced on a hitherto
unknown and unassailable fact and devoured it. (And on the subject of prey species, while he had given Rennie the boot, he didn’t have the heart to get rid of the mice. What kind of son is that?) Before making his discovery, he was willing to allow that since the whole human race had evolved from the same crew who’d emerged out of Africa eons ago, then naturally he and Bethany were related. I’m everyone’s brother, man. A heartwarming sentiment, if several millennia out of date.

  This had been his position immediately after finishing off her abandoned mug of gin. Then, with nothing better to do, he had gone for another stroll in the house, less aimless than he realized at the time. Pausing by Rennie’s door, he had put his ear against it, listening for . . . what? Who knows, the dust within might have pulled itself together, pulled up its socks (or hers), decided to live a little. Emboldened, he’d opened the door a crack and peeked in. His only discovery was that he’d been found out in a morbid cliché, that of giving the dead a long-term lease, not only in one’s heart, but in one’s house. Her room was as she had left it the morning she slipped chuckling out the front door in anticipation of her carefree bike ride. Bed unmade, dresser drawers hanging open, dropped bath towel dried into rigor on the floor, black bra flung across her radio, strap snagged on the volume dial.

  He’d ventured in, poked around, uncapped the bottle of perfume that earlier, obviously going bonkers, he’d imagined smelling in the house. Cheap stuff, but intoxicating by association. He’d been tempted to take a swig of it, just for the sake of being stupid, but had twisted the cap back on and set it down. As a kid, he’d never been nosy or interested enough to snoop in her room when she was out. Certainly his interest in women’s undies developed much later and was pretty much restricted to the lovelies who filled them, amply or no (he did feel that he had an all-round appreciation of the female physique). But way back when, if he had spent some time in Rennie’s room searching for Christmas presents like a regular kid, or searching for secrets like an apprentice shit-disturber, he might have easily found one. A secret. It hadn’t been all that well hidden, either, buried as it was in the bottom drawer beneath some sweaters, her old swimsuit, and the pair of pants that had gotten too tight at the waist, but were too good to throw out. Black, black, black. Her collected garb could have served as costuming for a low budget or snottily principled production of Hamlet. Rennie’s favourite shade (and now she was his). It was almost as if she’d been mourning herself in advance, a selfmade widow.