The deaths: this was what it was called. The cataclysmic event of June 19, 1981 when Rick Eley killed his wife Lorraine with a claw hammer, smashing her skull as she ran screaming from him on the beach at Olcott, and when Rick Eley subsequently killed himself by driving his car into a highway abutment later that night.
Logical to think then, as Crista grew to do, that the deaths had occurred at the same time. Not one death on the beach down beyond the Eleys’ cottage on Lake Ontario, and, about forty minutes later, and fifteen miles away, the other.
The deaths. The deaths. Not murder, suicide but the deaths.
In time, in Crista’s reasoning, her brother would be absorbed into the deaths, too. Exactly when this happened, how old, or young, Crista was, she wouldn’t afterward recall. For Aunt Ellen never spoke of Henry, it was as if he’d vanished. If vanished, died. Telling her account of her childhood to others, which was always brief, seemingly impersonal, Crista would say that her mother had died of breast cancer (for so many women, mothers of school friends and acquaintances, seemed to die of or be stricken by cancer, this was a logical explanation), and that her father and nine-year-old brother Henry had died in an automobile accident only a few weeks afterward.
How terrible for you…
Well. I was very young.
Sometimes, not often but sometimes, Crista felt a pang of guilt for having killed Henry off. In the car crash with their father south of Lockport that same night. And why had she done it? She hadn’t wanted to talk about him. She hadn’t wanted to think about him. She hadn’t wanted strangers to her life to inquire too closely into her life. She dreaded the inevitable prying query. You and your brother must be very close, you must see each other often?
Crista’s mother’s older sister Ellen Ward had been a public schoolteacher in Utica, New York. Unmarried, which was convenient. Her father’s parents, devastated by what their son had allegedly done to his wife and to himself, moved from the small city of Lockport where they’d been living and resettled in Cincinnati. The driving distance between the households was less than six hundred miles but would seem to have been six thousand miles. Never were the children taken to see each other, and they were not encouraged to write or to speak on the phone. The adults became estranged from one another, as well. What had Aunt Ellen to do with the Eleys? She had not married into that family.
Strange how, at first Crista cried herself to sleep every night, she’d missed her Mommy and her Daddy and her brother Henry so badly, but then suddenly, overnight it seemed, she was forgetting. Since Aunt Ellen refused to speak of the deaths it was natural to begin to forget. Where there are no words, there memory cannot take root. By the first heavy snowfall in November, the child was well into forgetting. By the turn of the year, numbness had taken hold. Numbness like the falling snow. Numbness like sinking into sleep, in snow. Numbness that crept into her mittened hands, and into her booted feet. Wool mittens, wool socks, and waterproof rubber boots were not sufficient to keep out this numbness. For it was a delicious numbness, too.
No family? None?
I was taken in by an aunt. I didn’t lack for love.
2.
THEY WERE SPEEDING westward across the hilly underpopulated breadth of New York State. On the map, their destination was a pinprick on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Crista kept checking the map as if fearful of losing it: Olcott. Henry talked.
“Are you surprised to see me, Crissie? I mean, to see me. As I am.”
“No. Not really.”
“I look the way you’d imagined me? Really?”
Her brother was right to doubt Crista: for of course she wasn’t telling the truth. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to speak the truth, for that wasn’t her practice. As a lawyer, in the hire of a large Albany firm, one of a team of lawyers, she was accustomed to dealing in expediencies, not truths.
In fact she was shocked by her brother’s appearance. Shocked and disconcerted. She was wishing she’d never agreed to see him. She was wishing he’d never called her, she’d hung up the phone on both his calls. She was wishing he didn’t exist.
Henry, her brother she’d adored. He could not have weighed more than one hundred thirty-five pounds. He was tall, perhaps five feet ten, yet emaciated. Willfully so, you could see. His beard was unkempt as an old brush, and prematurely graying. His hair was thinning at the crown of his head, falling to his shoulders. A sly skinny ferret-face out of which ghoul eyes shone. Shallow chest, a maddening Christly manner. His skin was sallow, and, on the cheeks, acne-scarred. His voice grated like sandpaper. Every utterance was a tease. Within five minutes Henry had identified himself to his sister he hadn’t seen in twenty-one years as a Citizen of the World, but nominally a Citizen of the United States. He was a vegetarian, a licensed practitioner/instructor of Yoga. He’d been living in northern California since the age of seventeen when he’d “fled” Cincinnati. He was manager and part-owner of a “locally renowned” organic food store/restaurant in Oakland and he was “on TV, sometimes, cable, discussing the Yoga way of life.” He’d been in Manhattan, in fact, being filmed for a documentary, and delivering a second manuscript to his publisher. He said, “That’s my first book, Crissie, on the backseat. I mean, it’s for you. It’s gone into eight printings since last September.”
Crista was surprised: the book was an attractive paperback published by Ballantine. Yoga: The Art of Living Life by H. S. Eley. On the dedication page was inscribed in red ink For My Beloved Sister, Crissie E. After Long Absence. Always, Your Brother Henry. 18 June 2002.
Crista murmured, “Thank you.”
She leafed through the book’s pages without seeing a word. She would never read it. Yoga! Ridiculous. She was feeling cheated: her brother had had his life apart from her. A northern California life. A wholly invented life. Her older brother who should have protected her had forgotten her, obviously. He’d obliterated her, as she had obliterated him. Easier to imagine the child Crissie dead. One of the deaths.
Henry said, in that grating-teasing way of his, casting her a sidelong ferret look, “You look terrific, Crissie. You’re beautiful like Lorraine was. Except your hair…”
Lorraine! Crista felt a small shock.
“What’s wrong with my hair?”
“It’s so, somehow, sculpted. It doesn’t seem real. Is it?”
Before Crista could prevent him, Henry actually reached out and touched—fingered—her hair. She recoiled from him, offended.
“Sculpted things are real.” Crista spoke adamantly, in her logical-lawyer voice. “Sculpted things are no less real than non-sculpted things.”
She was surprising him, she saw. Good! If Henry had been thinking of her as his baby sister, the one who’d been permanently traumatized by the deaths, he would have to modify his thinking.
Henry said, gently, “But your eyes, Crissie.”
“What about my eyes?”
“Lorraine’s eyes. I saw that immediately.”
“No.”
“Certainly, yes. You have her features.”
“That’s ridiculous. I do not.”
“Crissie, you do.”
“I do not.”
Crista was staring at the map. Throbbing with indignation.
“And I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Crissie,’ do you mind? No one else does.”
“But no one else is your brother.”
He meant this jokingly. He was trying to make her laugh. Tickle her as long ago she’d been tickled, the baby of the family. They had all loved her. Crissie, the sweetest prettiest little girl. All that was finished now, of course. Yet, Henry would remember. “You’re a lawyer, Aunt Ellen said?”
Crista shrugged. On the map she was moving her neatly filed un-polished fingernail along the Thruway, westward past Syracuse, the Finger Lake Region, Rochester. They would exit beyond Rochester, and take a country highway north to Lake Ontario. In twenty-one years she had never returned. As an adolescent of fifteen, sixteen, she’d thought briefly of returning, bu
t had not. To walk along the beach. To run. In the direction she’d run.
As in adolescence we torment and comfort ourselves with thoughts of suicide. A punishment to expiate all sins: our own, and those that have been perpetrated upon us.
“A lawyer. ‘Corporate.’ In Albany?” Henry laughed, that sandpaper sound. He had no idea how abrasive and disagreeable the sounds that issued from him were, there was a curious sexual complacency to him. A man to whom women were attracted? What sort of women? Crista saw with repugnance his fingers gripping the steering wheel, like talons. “You like that life-style, do you, Crissie?”
Crista was tempted to say No. I hate it. I’ve made it my life because I hate it, asshole.
Aloud she said, “You know nothing about my ‘life-style,’ Henry.”
“You’re not married, eh.”
This wasn’t even a question. Crista didn’t trouble to respond.
“I’m not, either. Never will be.” Henry laughed. “Not me.”
He knew where she’d gone to college, and where to law school, their aunt had told him. He’d dropped out of San Francisco State after three semesters, know why?
His voice was smug, insufferable. “Information isn’t knowledge. Knowledge is deeper than facts.”
Crista said, annoyed, “You don’t learn just facts in college. Not a good college. You learn methods. You learn how to think. You learn wisdom.”
“ ‘Wisdom’!” Henry laughed heartily.
Crista knew better than to quarrel, she was not one to be drawn into idiotic quarrels, yet she heard herself say, “I did. I read philosophy, I read Shakespeare. I read the tragedies. I read everything I could. Our parents were uneducated but I was determined that I would be educated, and I’m far from coming to the end of all that I need to know.”
Crista was breathless. As a lawyer she often made such spirited speeches on behalf of a client, yet never had she made such a speech on her own behalf. But Henry was unimpressed.
“What you need to know, Crissie, is with in.”
“ ‘Within’—what? My skull? My navel? What do yogins meditate on, isn’t it their navels?”
Crista spoke with shocking hostility, but Henry laughed.
“ ‘Attention is the appeal of the soul to itself.’ Meditation is many things, Crissie. You could do worse than begin with your navel.”
His manner was so jokey, so unpleasantly intimate, Crista steeled herself halfway expecting him to throw out his hand and grab and tickle at her belly. Instead, Henry did something yet more maddening: he began to hum to himself. Pushing his lank graying Christly hair out of his eyes and humming until the very car vibrated. They were passing exits for MEDINA, CHILDS.
Crista stared out the window, clutching at the map. How she despised whoever this was, this ridiculous man masquerading as her brother she’d adored.
Crissie! Come here.
He was screaming at her. Dragging her somewhere. Beneath the porch? She tried to fight him but he had hold of her wrists, her wrists would be bruised, he was so much stronger. The sweaty palm of his hand clamped over her mouth.
Had she seen what had happened farther up the beach, she had not because it was too dark. There was no moon, it was too dark. Waves breaking at the shore, rolling up hissing onto the packed sand, froth and foam and seaweed and the small lifeless gleaming-silver bodies of fish.
She was just a little girl, no one scolded her for shrieking and giggling when the chilly foamy water washed over her bare toes like nibbling fish.
Had she seen, she had not. Hadn’t seen, and hadn’t heard. Had not heard the woman who was her mother screaming for help.
“MY BROTHER? He died when he was nine.”
There was never anyone to whom she could speak of Henry. Shrewdly she’d erased him from all accounts of herself. While she’d lived in Utica with her fussy schoolteacher aunt she had not been encouraged to remember that she had a brother, still less to beg to see him. “All that,” her aunt said, with an annoyed flutter of her hands, as you might wave away flies, “all that is finished.” Aunt Ellen was one who could not even bring herself to refer to the deaths.
Hard to believe now, Crista had initially loved that woman. Desperately. A teacher of junior high English who gave Crista books to read, books and books, helped her with arithmetic. A stocky-bodied twitchy-faced woman with eyes like nickels who took satisfaction in her niece’s good grades at school, which reflected well upon her.
In early adolescence, Crista decided she hated her aunt.
Why? Why not.
Once she left Utica, and began the process of forgetting, she’d ceased to feel much emotion of any kind for the woman. All that is finished. She saw the logic of such a statement, it was only a fact. Yet, as a sentimental gesture, she invited her aunt to her law school commencement in Ithaca, for there were no other relatives to invite, and when the woman arrived, a woman of late middle age, frankly fat by this time, panting and overdressed and bearing spots of rouge on her sallow cheeks like a deranged clown, Crista had behaved coolly and politely as if she scarcely knew her. When her aunt said, clutching at Crista’s hands, eyes suddenly leaking tears, “Your mother would be so proud of you, dear, if—if only—” Crista turned away unhearing. And afterward when her lover of that time asked her about her aunt, Crista explained that the old woman wasn’t an “actual” aunt, only just a friend of the family.
She would never make a sentimental gesture again. That, she’d learned.
As a boy at Olcott, Henry had run with a pack of boys his age. Some of them were summer residents at the beach and others, like Crista’s family, were year-round residents who lived in bungalows and “winterized” cottages overlooking the lake. (Their father worked for Niagara County: road repair, snow removal. He was paid to watch over cottages owned by summer residents.) Henry had been a happy-seeming boy. He’d been loud, pushy, aggressive. A rough boy, with other boys. By nine he’d seemed to her one of the older boys: he rode a bicycle, he swam, dived off the wharf at Olcott Beach. He seemed to her physically fearless. In his play with other boys he was frequently dominant. Carroty-brown hair and a stocky sturdy tanned body, and strong. Only around their father had Henry been quiet, watchful. Deferential. If Henry gave their father what their father called “lip” the air crackled with excitement. (“Give me any of your lip, you little cocksucker, and your ass will be warmed, got it?”) The danger increased when their father had been drinking, but you couldn’t always tell when he’d been drinking. It was like easing out onto the frozen lake: you couldn’t tell when the ice would begin to crack and buckle beneath your feet.
Rarely was there a warning from their father, and never an apology afterward. Their mother tried to intervene, in her weak pleading voice. Honey, please! He didn’t mean it…
For some reason, Crista would always remember, it was crucial among all the households of that stretch of road above the lake that children be respectful to their fathers. You were risking catastrophe, like tossing lighted matches at spilled gasoline, to invite misunderstandings. Boys especially. Boys were vulnerable. Boys were apt to talk back, to give their fathers “lip.” Sometimes, a boy like Henry had only to squirm and to scowl in his father’s presence, to incur his father’s wrath. Little bastard. I saw that, think I’m blind? C’mere.
Crissie was such a little girl, and such a big-eyed pretty little girl, naturally she was Daddy’s favorite. Daddy never punished his favorite little girl who was so pretty and shy in his company, adorable as a doll.
Crista recalled some of this. Faces flicking past like rapidly dealt playing cards. The faces of her father and mother (so young! it was heartbreaking to realize how young) she didn’t retain, as she did not retain the sight of the bloodied claw hammer in her father’s fist. But the face of her boy-brother she saw clearly. She saw it, inside the face of this ridiculous bearded man with the acne-scarred cheeks. A child-face, trapped inside the other. She wanted to accuse him.
You turned out like this to spite us.
You did it on purpose. You aren’t even a man, the way our father was a man. You’re more like a woman. Like our mother.
“STORM CLOUDS, SEE? Like old times at the lake.”
He spoke with wry satisfaction. One of those who welcomed things turning out badly, to demonstrate his equanimity in the face of disappointment.
For by the time they approached the lake at Olcott in the late afternoon, the sky overhead was layered in gauzy strips of cloud. Above the almost invisible farther shore, in Ontario, Canada, were white, wind-braided mares’-tails stretching for miles. Storm clouds.
At the lake, weather changed with notorious swiftness. You could take nothing for granted. Sudden chill winds out of the north, thunderstorms and dangerous summer squalls. A pelting of rain turning to sleet like nails against the roof of their cottage was an old memory of Crista’s. The storm-ravaged lake. Angry waves breaking on the littered sand.
Once you lived on the lake, people said, all that empty space to look out on, you never wanted to live anywhere else.
As Henry approached Olcott Beach on the county highway, Crista was beginning to see that things were wrong. Not right. A boarded-up gas station, a run-down Days Inn. Businesses along the highway didn’t look very prosperous. Where was the Tastee-Freez stand? Where were the summer residents? Crista said guardedly, “Maybe—we shouldn’t be here.”
For a long moment Henry didn’t reply, as if he too were disoriented. Then he said, with an older brother’s annoying insouciance, “Where else? Where else should we be?”
“That isn’t the point.” Crista was becoming nervous. Children on bicycles were pedaling on the wrong side of the highway, very near the right fender of Henry’s car. She saw no sign of the Ferris wheel. The roller coaster. Unless the amusement park was in the other direction, and she’d forgotten.
I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories Page 25