Sister of Mine

by Laurie Petrou

  * * *

  I heard something rattling about one Sunday as I turned over in my bed, pulling the covers to my eyes to push away the chirping birds in the still-dark morning. It was coming from downstairs. Thumping, the occasional giggle, at first moving into my pre-waking dreams, that slippery limbo of real noises and subconscious stories. There was a crash, and I pulled off my covers, heart beating, and moved quickly to the hallway.

  “Hattie?” I called.

  There was a small gasp, then Hattie said, “Sorry, Penny! We didn’t mean to wake you!”

  I groaned and rubbed my face. There was no crisis.

  “What the hell are you doing down there?”

  Jameson now: “We’re gonna go fishing. Do you want to come?”

  “Absolutely not.” I turned to go back to my bedroom when I saw Hattie coming up the stairs. She was wearing a large green fishing vest with bright things hanging off it. Grinning like a fool.

  “Come on, Penny! It’ll be so fun. We have all Grandpa’s old equipment and Jameson has some stuff, too. We’re all sorted. We even have hip waders!”

  “Huh. Do you think maybe you could have gotten it all out before bed last night instead of, say, now?”

  “Sorry. That noise was the fishing rods. I don’t know why Mum stored them so high.” She grasped my arm.

  “Probably because no one has ever used them before. Hattie, just let me go to bed.”

  “Sorry, can’t do that. I really think this is something you need.”

  “I do not need this, trust me. Come on, Hattie.” I moved towards my bed. But she was like a small yippy dog and nattered at me until I agreed, angrily, to join them. We piled into Mum’s old car, and I spread out on the back seat as I had so many times as a child. Jameson drove us to the lake, minutes away, although I had fallen back asleep by then. Tires on gravel. We walked along the dock of the marina, where other fishermen were pushing off and starting their mornings.

  “Do we even have a boat?”

  “A friend of mine said we could use his. It’s not much of a boat, really, just a row boat—ah, here it is.” Jameson located a rusty old red rowboat that looked like it belonged hidden in some reeds at an old cottage and not at the marina with all the yachts and large motor boats. He heaved our bag of bait and other fishing odds and sods into the boat and it rocked alarmingly.

  “Is that going to fit us all?” I asked, hoping I could go back home.

  “Oh yeah. We’re not leaving you, Penny. And come here,” Jameson took my hand, and helped me in, “I’ve got some special coffee for us.”

  Even for a tea-drinker, Baileys in coffee makes for a much more interesting fishing trip. The sun coming up bright and warm, soon we were laughing in our cups with fish flapping around in the bottom of the boat long enough to make us scream and scare the rest away. We threw them all back, their slimy tails in our hands for just a moment, we three cackling and causing a ruckus. Scowls from other boats.

  Eventually we tired of fishing, and lay lazily, rocking gently, Jameson at one end and Hattie and me at the other. My arm dangled over the side and made a trail through the cold water. My eyes closed, the Baileys easing me into a sunny morning catnap. Light playing colorfully behind my eyelids. Hattie’s and Jameson’s voices blended into the lapping water. There was a childlike safety in being with them, never feeling like a third wheel but more like a coddled youngster; they were both so afraid of leaving me out that I was at liberty to do what I liked in their company without criticism or judgment. For now, anyway.

  I woke with the sun prickling brightly. Hattie was sleeping, head on arm. I sat up, and cleared my throat. Jameson turned around and smiled.

  “Morning, sunshine.”

  “I forgot where I was,” I said, rubbing an eye.

  “I’m so glad you came.” Jameson reached over and squeezed my arm. “You make everything better, Penny. And …” he turned to root in his tackle box, “I think it’s a goddamn shame that you haven’t heard that more often.”

  I was quiet. He was talking about Buddy. Hattie had told him about Buddy’s hands on me, his fists and fury.

  He turned back to me and took my hand. His was soft and warm. “You are loved, Penny.”

  My face went hot and I was overcome. I wanted him, all of him. I wanted to push Hattie out of the boat and take him away. It flitted in my brain like a fish jumping out of the water, but in the next moment, Jameson was breaking the tension with a joke about the one-armed fisherman, because frankly, despite his best efforts, fishing was not a sport that came easily to him. Desire dove out of sight. I pulled myself back. Kindness. Love. Hattie stirred and yawned and I remembered who I was: older sister, best friend, guardian.

  4

  In the time before Mum died, before I met Buddy, Hattie and I were navigating who we were, and where we each stood on the moving map of growing up. I got a call, in the city where I was living. Far from St. Margaret’s, but not far enough.

  “I’m coming down to visit, Penny.”

  It was Hattie. She was sixteen, and her loud voice broke through the phone like an electric shock.

  She was so bold now, her confidence growing with her years, and it was unnerving. I didn’t feel quite so self-assured, trying on my different selves like masks. I dreaded the thought of my younger, increasingly attractive sister bursting on my carefully constructed scene.

  “It’s really not worth it, Hattie. There’s nothing going on tonight.”

  “I don’t care. I have to get out of here.” I heard her inhale.

  “Are you smoking?”

  “So what?” Her voice holding in the smoke and letting it out in a dramatic relief.

  “Jesus. Hattie, don’t come down. I don’t think it’s a good idea.” I thought of my friends, alternately doting or being turned on by my pretty little sister with her radiance alive like a man-eating plant. I was being protective, but I didn’t know of whom.

  “I’m not asking your permission, I’m just telling you.” She paused. “Anyway, Mum says it’s alright.” I heard a scramble and noise in the background. “Mum! Do you ever knock?”

  I heard Mum. “Good Lord, Hattie, are you smoking in here?”

  “No. Can you tell Penny it’s okay for me to go visit?”

  “It’s okay, Penny! Try and knock some scholarly sense into her, will you?” She shouted in the direction of the phone.

  I rolled my eyes and lay back on my bed. “Fine. Just—just try not to get out of control, okay?” This was my life, after all, and if anyone was going to let it go to shit, it was me.

  I left St. Margaret’s right after high school. Said goodbye to small-town gossip, judgment, and Hattie. I had been growing my hair for five years, and it was long and lusty and black and I was ready to fling it over my shoulder while dancing and drinking cheap beer in the city. I had been accepted at university to study the Romantic languages, and dreamt of living in France one day. I moved downtown immediately, months before school started. At that moment, my aspirations were more about shaking off what it meant to be one of the Grayson girls. I’d grown resentful of St. Margaret’s, a place that had turned its back on me. I wanted to reinvent myself, as so many teenagers do. I had laughed at the rear-view mirror, checking my eyeliner and kissing the wind as it blew by, my hand at the wheel of an old, unreliable car I had bought myself as a graduation gift.

  I got a job straightaway at a bookshop, to help me pay for my crappy apartment, tuition, and books. I moved in with four other girls in a tiny apartment downtown, near Heaven, a disco bar that would eventually exchange its glitter balls for the glam rock and hair bands, but for now it lit up in mirrored optimism. We shared the rent and the rooms, enacting a repeating and overlapping cycle where at any given time an unconscious girl could be found beside a high one near someone making food, and another crimping her hair. Then we’d switch, round and round we’d go.

  School started, and I buckled down during the weekdays after months of partying. I soaked up everything my
professors said, desperate for my education and grades to be the currency of change in my life, if not the world. I wrote letters home to Hattie, telling her about other students, about lecture halls and crazy librarians, painting a picture of vaulted halls of learning, trying to impress her, but of course, the letters were accidental lures, and she was the big fish.

  Hattie, sixteen and wild—trying to be like me and different from everyone else—began visiting constantly. She borrowed our mother’s car, smoked all the way, arriving coughing and hacking through a cloud of hairspray and smoke. She’d open the door to my apartment with her arms wide open, laughing loudly, hooting like an old friend, drinking and trying more, but wearing and caring less than I did. Who’s Red, people would ask me, while I sat one out, leaning against the corner of a dirty bar. I’d squint into the smoke, not wanting to see the girl of my childhood. She had no interest at that time in following my dreams of higher learning, but opted instead for just getting higher.

  When I’d found her making out with a much older musician who happened to have come back to our apartment, I pushed her towards the front door, grabbing her knapsack and purse on the way. I shoved her keys at her and opened the door, hustling her outside.

  “Out.”

  She looked at me, furious, and pointed at my ears, where I was wearing Mum’s earrings. I touched one of them self-consciously.

  “I see you didn’t leave home without your prized possessions,” she scoffed. “Too bad you forgot everything else important.”

  I ignored this comment. “Hattie. Please. You’re just acting out to get attention. You and I both know it.”

  I closed the door and turned up the volume.

  I told her she couldn’t come anymore, told Mum I needed to focus on school, and that Hattie was out of control, a distraction, a nuisance. The next day Hattie screamed into the phone at me that I had ruined her life, that she hated me, and hated Mum, and hated me all over again for telling Mum to keep her at home. After that, I let the phone ring when I thought it might be her: it rang and rang, and I tried to ignore that fiery sister who was scowling into her pink phone a childhood away.

  The weekend after I banned Hattie was unseasonably warm. It was a blazing hot autumn, fall trying to wear summer’s clothing. I remember this because I can’t help it.

  When something changes your life, you remember everything. The colors are brighter, the sounds louder, the emotions greater. And you keep those things, all the small things, in your memory, for years. I’m sure Hattie has a different version of events, but I’m not interested.

  That afternoon, Hattie, pouting about staying home, was parked in my old room in front of a fan, with her earphones on and the music blasting her brains out. She didn’t go outside, where the sun was dripping like a juicy peach, where Mum was wiping her forehead and drinking in the sweetness of gardening on a dopy fall day that thinks it’s summer. Lazy bees flying drunkenly around in the twilight of their days. I remember this, I swear I do. I wasn’t there, but I know what happened.

  A bee. A swollen, overfed, over-the-hill soldier took a break on the grass. And in that tiny moment, a moment the size of a bug, Mum leaned back—I can see it in my mind’s eye—and put her hands down on the grass behind her. Her palm flattening the big little bastard.

  Hattie was inside, listening to records I’d left behind, feeling so damn sorry for her poor self that she could hardly even get up. The unfairness of life weighing her down like a lead blanket.

  Outside, there was a yelp, I imagine. A yelp, and a quickening of her breath. Oh, but if I had been there to hear her. A last word, a tiny murmur, a plea for help, anything.

  Maybe everything jumped into focus for her, too. She knew Hattie wasn’t coming. She knew she was on her own. If I’d been home, I would have sprung into action. I would have sucked the stinger out of her hand and held it tight all the way to the hospital. And Hattie, upstairs, then and always, aware of nothing beyond her perky nose.

  What did my mother see as she lay in that garden, an expanse of green and red and pink and yellow? The Russian sage waved no no no and the sumac hung its head. The sunflowers leaned right over as if to lift her up, but by then her throat was swelling like a tomato full of the heat of the day and if only someone had bitten in, she’d have had some relief.

  * * *

  “What song, Hattie? What fucking song were you listening to when you let her die? What. Fucking. Song?” I had grabbed her thin shoulders.

  “Penny, please. Please stop. Please.” She was sobbing. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry, Penny.”

  I pushed her away.

  “Fine. Don’t tell me. It’ll haunt you for the rest of your fucking life anyway.”

  When you are sixteen, like Hattie was, you are in between. You look like every grown-up tries to look for the rest of their lives, you are in full bloom. You are legs and boobs and hair and skin. But only five years ago you were holding your mother’s hand, ten years ago you were sucking your thumb. And if, when you are sixteen, you are the absent witness to the death of your mother, who lay in the dog-tired tomato plants for far longer than she should have, then, well, it’s no joke, that will fuck you up forever.

  But when you’re nineteen, and your sister couldn’t unplug the curly black cord of her own self-absorption long enough to save the one person who was like a real, live saint in your life, well, you can’t help but be full of a reasonable amount of hate, can you?

  5

  After our mother’s death, I was in charge of Hattie. I became her guardian. I should have rushed to her side, but I didn’t. I left her in the house alone. I made her lie for me when people asked after me, told her to tell people I was tying up loose ends in the city. Sometimes she stayed at our neighbors, the Carrs, and I told myself she was fine. That I was, too. But I know now I wasn’t. On the outside, I put on phony smiles the way I caked on makeup. Fake it till you make it, right? That’s what they say. They don’t know.

  And one day, a guy walked into the bookshop, and he looked familiar and big and good-looking and like he didn’t give a shit about music or books or art or anything cool, which was exactly what I was looking for.

  “Hey,” he said gruffly, a bit of a frown on his face. My stomach jumped. “Do you guys sell maps?”

  “Sure. Are you lost?” I smirked, sure I knew him from somewhere. His brow furrowed at the jab, but just for a moment. Then he smiled and looked me up and down, and I reddened a little. That face, those youthful dimples that belied the huge frame. Goddamn, he was cute. I was done for.

  “No. Well, I’m hoping to avoid that. I need to get to McCaul Street.”

  “You’re close. You look familiar. You live near here?” I laughed at my mistake. “Right, obviously not.”

  “I recognize you. You’re one of the Grayson girls, right?”

  St. Margaret’s had found me in the city, and rather than repel me, that drew me to him. I wanted to be wanted by this guy. I wanted him to carry me through doorways in his arms. I wanted to be under him and on top of him.

  “Penny. I’m Penny.”

  He put out a meaty hand. “Buddy Collerfield. I think I was a few years ahead of you at school.”

  I nodded, recognizing the name. Shook his hand. Large, soft.

  And I went home with him. All the way home, back to St. Margaret’s.

  * * *

  Buddy seduced me, mind, body, and soul. He was unpolished and a bit defensive, but good-looking and sexy, and didn’t want anyone else looking at me. It was intoxicating. As I got to know him, I saw that he was also proud, competitive, and argued too much with his friends, especially Mac, a man who was more like a brother, who brooded and snarled, fighting dirty like the runt of the litter when they got into scraps. I thought Buddy’s passionate personality was conviction, found his temper sexy and commanding. He flirted with me and flattered me. He often pulled me tightly to his body, moving his large hands all over me, hushing me when I tried to protest.

  “You’re too sm
art for me,” he said one night, while we sat on the hood of his truck and looked out over the town from the top of the hill. “I’m a little more,” he ran a finger up my arm, “basic, in my needs.” He sipped from a bottle of beer from the case beside him.

  I looked out over the town. The city had, in spite of my grand plans, left me feeling untethered, unanchored. In all the years of fighting against the suffocation of St. Margaret’s, I had come to depend on it. It was what I was used to, for better or worse. I was resignedly glad to be back. This was familiar, if not entirely good.

  “You’re wrong,” I said, burrowing myself under his arm and shivering. “I am just the right amount of smart for you.”

  He chuckled and kissed me hard, and I melted into him.

  Down there, in the sleepy town, was my house. Waiting patiently. And my sister, who was also waiting. But I didn’t see them. I saw hair that fell into Buddy’s eyes, and pushed it aside.

  “I have to make sure you don’t go leaving me for any of those university nerds,” he said, gently, his face clouding over in a way I was now familiar with.

  “Never,” I soothed, stroking his large arms.

  “I have to keep you. I love you, Penny Grayson,” he said, his voice catching. In that moment, the hill could have eroded under us, taking the truck and the trees and destroying the town beneath us. And I would have floated above it all. Youth. Love. Grief. Put them together, and it is the most dangerous elixir. His strength and protectiveness would become bullying and violence, but I couldn’t imagine that then.

  He had lifted me out of the well. Out of my grief. And because of that, I avoided Hattie. In her, I only saw sadness, and I couldn’t go back down there. Instead, I pushed her away so I could breathe. She’d held on to me in solidarity, assured that I would raise her and save her; I shook her off and made promises to myself instead. I got a job back in town, at the daycare. I spent my days doting on children, a cozy future on my mind.

  Buddy asked me to marry him. It was not unusual for people to marry straight out of high school in St. Margaret’s, and so we fit right in. I didn’t mind being typical. It appealed to my new desire to be part of everything about Buddy’s life. I no longer wanted to be an outsider to St. Margaret’s; I saw the comfort in being back in the fold.