by Abi Maxwell
Henrietta hovered near her as she spoke, but I stood in the doorway between the two rooms, staring at Les. I suppose that she had already disappointed me. Upon seeing the doctor, I had immediately imagined the sort of woman he would be married to. She would be tall and thin—of course she would be, I was still so young, so brainwashed—and her hair would be slightly tousled and she would float about rooms while she perpetually held a glass of wine in her long fingers. But here was Les, Les, no taller than I was, with short but overgrown hair, no makeup, and jeans and a sweatshirt that looked appropriate for mowing the lawn.
“Of course,” my sister said now and then as Les spoke. “Right…Absolutely.”
Eventually Les walked past me, to the closet by the front door. She removed her coat, and just then the doctor walked in. “Ashley!” he called. “Amber! Get down here!” This time they marched down immediately. They were identical, dressed in matching spandex-and-sequin dance costumes, with high, swinging ponytails that were just the color of the fallen yellowed pine needles.
“Ready?” Dr. Hennessey asked his wife. With her, his tone seemed different, at least from my view. Sharper. But what did I know? She reminded us once more to lock the doors and then she put her coat on, kissed the girls, and walked out.
* * *
—
Later that night, when babysitting was through and Dr. Hennessey dropped us back home—for our mother had insisted that we were not to walk down the road by ourselves, not that late at night—we would find our mother on the couch, alone, and because Henrietta would disappear upstairs, to the privacy of her own room, I would be given a rare, delicious moment of time with her. “It was spectacular,” I would tell my mother, and explain all the individually packaged snacks, a totally foreign commodity in our own home. I would tell her about the second refrigerator in the pantry that was devoted entirely to canned and bottled drinks and she would say “Sounds like a waste” and “Sounds like a hassle to me” and, simply, “Well then,” all so clearly unimpressed. And though I still felt utterly taken with the life that I had just witnessed, I would decide right there on the couch with my mother that such an existence was not what I was after. Instead, I knew right then, I would become a woman like my mother: distant, unengaged, artful, and decidedly un-rich.
* * *
—
That night, as soon as the parents left, I plopped down on the old-fashioned spotless white couch in the front room, but before I could even lean back Ashley scolded me, saying it was meant for adults only. I jumped up, ashamed, but my sister strutted right over. She said, “Well, how lucky that I am an adult.” She spread her arms easily, then fell back onto the couch’s low arm. She put her feet up on the cushions—shoes still on—and leaned over toward the glass coffee table. That table was empty, save for a fountain pen in a marble holder. My sister grabbed the pen and held it to her lips, pretending it was a cigarette. The girls folded over with laughter, and from that moment on they loved Henrietta, and not me.
Anyway, babysitting that night was uneventful, or relatively so. Right away the girls led us to the second floor, where a rope hung from the center of the hallway. Together they tugged on it, and down came a folding staircase. We followed them up and Ashley pulled the light on. The attic was long and wide and just as I had imagined it would look. The ceiling was sharply slanted, and we had to duck and even crawl near the edges. The falling sun streamed in through the window I had spent so many afternoons staring at. There was another window just like it at the eastern end of the attic, with a table and chair right next to it. That, a broom, a small boom box, and a black camp chest of costumes made up the entire contents of the space.
“This is how you tell us apart,” Ashley said as she stood in the center of the attic, the sun bathing her face. She tugged on her left earlobe, showing us her scar. She said that she had once torn her own earring out, and now, for life, she had a slice right through the flesh that split the pocket of fat in two. She then grabbed Amber and pointed to a red splotch on her neck. “And this is her mark,” she said.
“You mean her hickey?” Henrietta asked.
I froze, shocked and disappointed by my sister, but the twins just kept on, undeterred. One of them said, “Our mother said our house is probably haunted, so we’re trying to call the spirits.”
“Have you seen any ghosts?” I asked unabashedly.
The girls didn’t answer. They just said, “Want to see our spirit dance?” and then they turned the music on. Suddenly they were leaping slowly around the attic to strange, ethereal music, towing long scarves from the costume box in their wake.
My sister stood up and turned the music off. “Lame,” she announced. “Spirits don’t even exist, but if they did that is not how you would call them.”
The girls wanted to know how else to do it.
“Later,” my sister said firmly. “Right now I want to see the rest of your house,” and with that she went down the stairs. The girls looked once at me and then ran right after her. I walked across the attic, to the window that looked out toward our woods. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, then heard a noise. I opened my eyes and turned around quickly. Surely the noise had come from below me, but suddenly I felt just as the twins did: The house was probably haunted, and if we wanted to call the spirits, the attic would be the place to do it.
* * *
—
The Hennessey home, to us, was totally lavish. The girls each had their own pink-carpeted rooms with canopy beds, and a small, low, cubbylike passage had been installed in the wall between the two rooms, with a little square door that opened into each. The girls showed us how they could pass things to each other through the cubby, and could even squeeze themselves through. The only instruction our mother had given us, aside from not walking home alone at night, was to not go into the parents’ bedroom. “Common decency,” she had said, but during our tour the girls led us right in there, and we did not stop them. The room had a king-size bed stacked high with matching throw pillows, and, the girls showed us, a sliding door at the far side that led out to a balcony.
“The widow’s walk,” Ashley said. “It’s the best part, besides the attic.”
“But there’s no ocean,” I said. “Widow’s walks are so you can see ships.”
“Whatever.” Ashley shrugged. “It’s a widow’s walk.”
“It’s great,” my sister said, awestruck. I looked at her. She was staring out at the expanse of untouched woods below, which was just barely visible in the remaining light. The placement of the Hennesseys’ house was high up on the hill, and it made the view much larger than we could see from our own home. My sister’s statement was so plain and true, so unlike the self she’d become, and it became a little glimmer of hope for me. Somehow, it said that she cared, though about what I was not sure.
* * *
—
In the kitchen, my sister threw a piece of spaghetti at the ceiling to test whether or not it was done.
“Holy crap, my mom will kill you!” Ashley said.
“First rule of babysitting,” Henrietta told her. “Do not tell your parents.”
We sat on the stools at the kitchen island to eat. My sister let the girls have two cans of soda each, and after dinner gave them two heaping bowls of ice cream.
“Repeat after me,” she said as she scooped. “Do not tell your parents.”
“Do not tell your parents,” they repeated together.
“Swear it,” Henrietta said. She leaned forward and crossed herself. It was a motion I had never before seen her make. Her hands floated in front of her face and her voice became cryptic as she said, “Swear it on your virgin bodies.”
I don’t know if the girls were shocked by that word, virgin, or by Henrietta’s manner—likely both. Anyway, they were silenced, as was I. My sister looked hard at them, then pulled the bowls of ice cream toward herself
and guarded them with her arms. “I’m waiting,” she threatened.
“We swear,” the twins said, and one after the other they crossed themselves.
* * *
—
That night, after the girls were in bed, my sister led me back through Les and the doctor’s bedroom, to the balcony. There, she leaned back, put her feet up, lit a cigarette, and said, “I still smoke. Keep your mouth shut about it.”
“I will,” I said, careful to sound indifferent, but inside I was thrilled. No matter what I had done, my sister had brought me back into her fold.
Henrietta continued to talk as she smoked. She said she had decided that she wanted to become a therapist, and that she liked getting her period because it made her feel powerful. She asked me no questions as she went on, and did not even leave room for me to speak. She just talked and smoked, and then she stubbed her cigarette out on the bottom of her shoe and threw it over the banister, into their pristine lawn. Then she stood up, slid open the balcony door, and announced, “These people are rich as stink.”
* * *
—
That night it became clear that our mother’s decision to not let us walk home was certainly not the safest. “D-R-U-N-K,” Henrietta would say proudly to me of Dr. Hennessey after he dropped us off. “Drunk as skunk.”
When we climbed into the car that night he said, “Cold as Canada out there. You girls ever been to Canada, eh?”
We told him we had not. Next he asked if we had ever fishtailed. “Speed up, slam the brakes on. Need snow. Or rain, maybe. The car slides. Fishtails,” he explained.
“Yes,” Henrietta said. “I’ve done that.”
“When?” I demanded.
“I do have a private life,” she announced.
Jack gave a hearty laugh to that, then said, “What do you girls like to do, anyway?” We were coasting slowly down the hill, his foot resting heavily on the brake, making the minute’s drive last so much longer.
“I like to ride horses,” Henrietta said.
“God, doesn’t that sound good.” He said that our father had told him about our barn. “A tragedy,” he said heavily, and waited a beat before telling us that he’d gone to college in the West and had once taken a horse-packing trip into the wilderness there. Henrietta responded by telling him that she preferred western to English riding, and that what she really wanted to do was become a barrel racer.
In the backseat, I seethed. I felt I could see clearly what was happening. Whether or not she still loved Kaus, my sister had already developed a crush on the doctor. It wasn’t my practice to speak up to her, but in the darkness of the backseat I felt emboldened. I said, “Dad’s horses weren’t even for riding. It’s not like you’re a rider, Henrietta.”
She twisted her body around to look at me. The dashboard lights were bright enough to make her face just barely visible. It had gone to ice, but for the doctor’s benefit her voice remained upbeat, almost singsongy. “My god, Jane,” she said. “How can you know so little?”
Jack pulled into our driveway, handed Henrietta a twenty-dollar bill, and said good night.
“Thank you for the ride,” she said easily to him. And then, to my utter shock, “I love your car. I love driving a stick shift, if you know what I mean.”
“You can’t drive!” I barked, but my sister said nothing, just scoffed. We got out and went to the porch. He waited while we opened the door, and then he pulled back out, but he headed toward town rather than his own house.
“Bone doctor,” my sister said flippantly. “Boner doctor, more like.”
“Henrietta!”
“Figures he wouldn’t go home,” she said. “Did you see how high she hikes her pants up? Rule number one of a healthy relationship: He’s got to want to fuck you. God, even I know that.”
* * *
—
After that first night babysitting, I stopped going out to The Den. I just hung around home, in the living room or at the kitchen table, waiting for Henrietta to come be with me. At night I could scarcely sleep for the nightmares. I dreamed of the fire, of the horses, and of a bottomless pit filled at the edges with Kaus’s eyes. They held me while I fell, beckoning me to rise back up with the truth but waiting to attack me when I did. I was sick with what I had done, but never, I was aware, so sick as I must have made Kaus. Still, that thought did not stop me. I told myself that I had given everything in order to keep my sister. I wasn’t about to lose her again.
But like usual, she scarcely even spoke to me. That whole week, she didn’t say a word until it was time to babysit, and then only “Hurry up.”
This time Dr. Hennessey opened the door and ushered us in. Neither Les nor the girls were in sight, so Henrietta and I stood in the kitchen, talking with Jack while he drank a tumbler of whiskey on ice. Henrietta asked him questions—how he’d chosen to be a bone doctor, what he liked about it, what the grossest injury he’d ever fixed had been. I stood there and wondered what my parents might say if they could see this version of Henrietta and not the silent, heartbroken one. The doctor gave hearty answers to all of her questions, and when he began to speak about a broken femur, Henrietta went right up next to him.
“Show me exactly where it is,” she implored him.
“It’s not like you don’t know,” I said from across the room. “You just studied this.”
“I don’t test well,” my sister said, as though that explained anything, and she lifted her thigh for Jack to touch.
Jack cleared his throat, put his tumbler down, and pointed to her leg. Would he have actually touched it? Just then we heard Les come down the stairs. She entered the kitchen swiftly, eyed his bottle of whiskey, then said, “Can you girls come tomorrow, too?”
“Absolutely,” my newly agreeable sister said.
“Four o’clock,” Les said, and then she began to give us our instructions for the night—spaghetti for dinner again, one soda, one dessert each. Henrietta listened to Les and gave occasional assurances that all would go as planned, but I swore that as they spoke, some other plane of language existed between my sister and the doctor. Now and then he looked at her and his eyes, I noticed, seemed to hold something in, just barely. Something beneath the surface that danced to get out.
* * *
—
“Our house is definitely haunted,” the girls told us once their parents had gone. They said that during the night, Amber’s porcelain cat had flown off her dresser and smashed into pieces in the middle of her room. They said we had to go back up to the attic and try to call the spirits again.
“Where are your parents going, anyway?” Henrietta asked.
Amber shrugged. She said, “They’re trying to put the love back in.”
“God,” Ashley said, “shut up! That’s private!”
“Is not,” Amber said.
My sister wanted to know whether or not it was true, but the girls just wanted to go to the attic.
“Take them up,” Henrietta ordered me.
“What about you?” they asked.
She absently told them to chill out, and then she went to the pantry fridge, got herself a can of soda, told us that she would be up in a minute, and in this way my sister left her role as lead babysitter just as quickly as she had found it, and my evenings in the attic with the twins began. That night, I taught them to play Bloody Mary, though we used the attic window in place of a mirror. We would spin before it, and I promised the girls that if done correctly, a floating figure would appear in the glass. We played light as a feather, stiff as a board, and we also chanted random, made-up strings of words. I even ran and danced with the girls to that strange music, towing a scarf in my wake.
Now and then we would call down from the attic for Henrietta, but for the most part she didn’t appear. Almost always, we could hear the murmur of the television below us, and when we eventual
ly went downstairs for dinner we would find her on the couch, a mess of snacks and wrappers spread around her. The twins would tell her what we had done, what they claimed to have seen. Sometimes they would put on a dance show for her. She would pretend to be interested, but only for a moment. Very quickly her eyes would jump back to the television. She would be involved only when it came time to tell them to go to bed, and despite becoming a total disappointment to them, they would still listen to her. After they were asleep, my sister would wander back and forth between the television and the balcony. The first few times, I followed her out there, but she told me to give her some privacy. Still, every single babysitting night, the minute the parents pulled back in, I felt I could actually see my Henrietta slip right back down into herself, just as sly and vital as she had ever been.
Weeks passed in this way. The leaves all glowed, but their show this year failed to astonish me. It was their fall that I waited for; I wanted the trees to be bare and the world to be cold, as I was. I wanted the landscape to open up, the view to widen, as though that change would somehow erase what had come before.
But the leaves hung on. It was mid-October before the first—the maples—let go, and when they did it seemed to be in one great sweep. Henrietta and I got off the bus and shuffled through them. Before going inside, we went to the mailbox, as was our habit. I opened the box, withdrew the pile, and gasped to see a letter for her on top. There was just enough time for my mind to photograph it before my sister grabbed it from me and ran inside.
