Sister of Mine

by Laurie Petrou

  “Oh my darling, Pen-entine,” he sang out, the door jingling merrily behind me. There was a cracked-open toaster in front of him that he was fixing—these machines were his bread and butter, he used to joke.

  “Jay-sus, Mary and Joseph,” I called back, walking around the counter to accept a fuggy hug of aftershave and mechanical grease. It rang through my heart like the best kind of love. I breathed in the smell of my old friend, pulling up a dusty stool with a torn leather cover.

  “Where’s the wee one?”

  “At school, Joseph. It’s not like when you were there and kids played hooky just ’cause it was Monday, ya know.”

  “Right you are, Penelope. Keeps him out of trouble. Would hate for him to get up to any kind of mischief.” He lowered his voice: “But you know, if he happens to get bored”—and here he rooted in the drawers of his work table, pulling out a dusty old package of small firecrackers—“I found these, and thought the lad would like to experiment with them—you know, under supervision.”

  I laughed and took the little paper bag. “Thank you, Joseph. I appreciate your continued horrible influence on my nephew.”

  “Your ‘nephew.’ Bah.” He waved a hand. “He’s your son through and through. And,” he put up a hand as I began to protest, “that is not because you’ve got a biological bond. Nope. You’re his mother because you bloody well act like it.”

  I put a finger to my lips, and Joseph zipped the imaginary zipper of his own.

  I had, over a number of months, brought Elliot many times to visit Joseph. The two of them had sat side by side surrounded by tools, the old man’s hands guiding Elliot into exploration of nuts and bolts, wires and thingamajigs. I had alluded to my sister’s demons, and Joseph had woefully shaken his head, giving Elliot handfuls of candy as we left.

  I wondered, for the hundredth time, where Hattie was now, and with whom. Something dark worried at me, gnawed at the edges of this new life. I saw her around every corner, often hearing her voice in a distant laugh or shriek, with every call and cry and giggle. She had become a child to me again, in some ways, and when I thought of her, it was of her over the years: as a kid, as a grinning and rebellious teen, as a tenacious youth, as a friend, as a foe. My blood, my poison.

  “No offence to your sister, you understand,” Joseph said.

  “Of course not.” I paused. “So, I’m thinking of taking Elliot to see the barn today.”

  “Excellent idea. Kids love barns. Nice day for it, too. Maybe take him out early?”

  I chuckled and pointed to a toaster. “So, what have you got here? A four-slicer, I see.”

  We chitchatted, and I helped him with some of his heavier tasks in the back room, and did his dishes as well. Threw in a load of laundry and opened his windows a crack to let in the warm fall. I visited with townspeople who needed keys cut or were picking up fixed fans and VCRs, laughed happily at all of Joseph’s corny jokes, swept the floor, and soaked up the time with this man who was the nearest to family that I had. He had rented the apartment out to one of his poker buddies, Sid, who shuffled downstairs around eleven o’clock, raising a withered arm in a wave to me before taking to the sidewalk for his daily walk around St. Margaret’s.

  “Grumpy bugger,” Joseph grumbled, not looking up as the door closed behind Sid. “Nothing like you, Penelope, I tell you.”

  “You tell me all the time, actually.”

  “Well. It bears repeating.”

  “At least he’s not having babies up there. I mean, that’s a bit disruptive.”

  “You haven’t heard him on the old commode. Sounds like he’s giving birth half the time!”

  * * *

  The fireworks in their paper bag scrunched into my purse, I picked up Elliot from school. Hattie had taken Mum’s old car with her, and I had gotten myself my own little beater. I had come to love its cantankerous sound when I started it. I rooted through the tapes in the glove compartment and pulled out one that I hadn’t heard in a while. I pushed it in the tape deck, and it took a tipsy second to catch up to itself midsong. I rolled the window down even though it had become cooler as the day wore on.

  “Did you bring me a snack?” Elliot asked as he was buckling himself into the back seat.

  “I did. Here.” I tossed an apple from a fresh bushel that I had picked up earlier. It was giving the car a new, un-Hattielike, autumnal smell. He caught it and grinned, surprised at his own reflexes.

  I drove to the barn, to the site of my old life, ashes to ashes. We climbed from the car, the doors slamming into nothingness, echoing the silence. Elliot followed my cue, keeping quiet but for his crunchy apple. My skin was tingling. Since I had returned to St. Margaret’s, I had made pains to avoid this place. Even when it made sense to take this route, I found another way. I hadn’t been here for years.

  It had grown wild and had an abandoned, lonely air about it. Grasses and weeds and wildflowers sprung in all directions. The barn, except for one large graffiti tag, was largely untouched from the outside. I had half-expected it to be gone: razed to the ground, burnt down, blown away in a freak wind of change. But it stood, steadfast and true, waiting.

  “Is it a grass farm?” Elliot asked, lifting his legs through the wild grass towards the barn.

  I laughed, lifting him onto my back. “No, we’re not growing grass to harvest it. I just haven’t come by in a while.”

  “It’s pretty crazy here, Auntie Penny.”

  “You can say that again.” I got ahold of the sliding door and gave it a large tug.

  And then there it was. It stank like cigarettes and booze and piss. I thought of Mac, and wondered if perhaps this had become his haunt on a more permanent basis. It needed a good cleaning. But it was my barn.

  “It stinks in here,” Elliot said. I nodded.

  We agreed we needed a swing.

  “And a slide,” Elliot said, “from up there.” He pointed to the rafters.

  “A swing’s enough for now.” I was surprised to see some of my things were still there: pots and pans, a can opener. Things that I imagined had been made good use of by others who were looking to skip out on their lives for a spell.

  “Did you used to live here?”

  “Not really. Well, I would camp out here sometimes.”

  “With my mom?” I felt a pang. I saw in Elliot the same urge to learn about, to keep love lit, for his mother that Hattie and I had as children for our dad. More and more often he had begun to ask me to fill in blanks in family stories with color about Hattie. It hurt, that she was gone. It was a familiar sting.

  “No, honey. By myself. But I did live here in a way. There used to be a house over there.” I pointed through the opening of the door, the sun in my eyes as it made its way down. “Where all the mud is. Shall we get those fireworks?”

  “What happened to it? To the house?”

  “There was a fire.”

  I hadn’t meant to tell him. In one of those moments that is over before you can stop it, I just said it. Would I change my answer now, given the chance? I doubt I could have stopped myself. Secrets have a way of fragmenting like a kaleidoscope.

  “A real fire?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “A cigarette.”

  “Smoking is bad.”

  “It is, yes.”

  “Is that why there was a fire? Did God make that happen?”

  I knew that Hattie had occasionally taken Elliot to church, and I could see the echoes of my own childhood obsession with retribution.

  “No, sweetie.”

  “But there was a fire because someone did something bad.”

  “I—”

  “Where is the house now?”

  “It’s all gone. The fire took it, Elliot.”

  “Did anyone die?”

  He stood rooted to the spot, as though moving would make it happen all over again, like he could keep us safe by staying still. The apple in his hand, brown creeping into the white. I nodded. He stoo
d perfectly still. His face was a white mask.

  “Who?”

  I took his hand and broke the spell. Walked with him out the door into the failing light towards the car.

  “His name was Buddy. He was my husband.”

  26

  First he had the dreams. They began when he seemed to accept that his mother wasn’t returning, not in the same way. He would tell his friends, “My mom doesn’t live here anymore.” He seemed fine with this. But sleep knows better. Dreams have a will of their own.

  More like night terrors. Elliot woke yelling about fires. The first time it happened, he had walked in a glassy-eyed haze down to the main floor, crying out for me in a sleep stupor. When I finally woke and rushed so quickly I slammed my shoulder into the railing as I fumbled up the stairs, I tried to snap him out of it. His black-brown eyes wide and horrified, he covered his face and wailed. The next day he remembered nothing of it. Over and over this happened, and, Jameson told me, at his house as well. There would be a span of a few weeks without them, and then the terrors would start up again, always with the garbled moan about fire fire fire. They haunted me, these panicked, middle-of-the-night fire dreams. I had my own burning ghosts to contend with, those that Hattie had so often comforted me out of. But we held each other, Elliot and I, and soon, he’d fall back into fitful sleep.

  It had been two years now since Hattie had moved out. She rarely visited or called. Her appearances were frantic and stressful for me, fraught with expectation for Elliot, who saw them as monumentally important. She whirled into our lives, bringing gifts and taking Elliot out for dinners, then spun away again, leaving a cloud behind her.

  Christmas came. Hattie called to tell Elliot she was going to visit in the new year. I spoke to her briefly. It sounded as though she was on a bar pay phone, chatter and clinking in the background, a pause as Hattie covered the mouthpiece and said something to someone. When I hung up, I expect she replaced the phone into the metal cradle and lit a cigarette, swinging her hips on her way back into the spotlight, her shoes on a sticky bar floor. I wrung my hands, fretting over loose lips, wondering when she’d come.

  But there was life to be lived. Elliot, and Jameson just out of reach. Christmas lit up our lives with Elliot in it. I wrapped presents, hung holly, filled Elliot’s stocking, which I had found in a box under the stairs with all of our family’s Christmas decorations, including those Hattie and I had made as children. There were times, and Christmas decorating was one of those, when the house was like a museum that I had stumbled into by accident. All those old memories packed in cardboard boxes.

  For Christmas, I bought Elliot a real sketchbook and a long, flat tin box of differently graded pencils. His eyes shone when he opened the lid, and we tested the softness of the pencils on the white paper that had protected them. Our fingers smudged, we ate chocolates and watched It’s a Wonderful Life until Elliot fell asleep against my shoulder, his mouth lolling and his cheeks glowing happily. I carried him up to bed, in the room that was once mine, and crawled sleepily into bed in Hattie’s old room so I could be nearby. He was having such nightmares I couldn’t continue to sleep in the basement. It was my room now, it had to be.

  * * *

  He began to draw fires.

  I tried to steer him back to battleships and spy boats, but they held none of the draw of a fire. Almost off the page, black smoke as dark as he could make it without tearing the paper, his hands charcoal black moving across the white. Pages and pages of them. Famous fires, house fires, forest fires, and river fires. The fires of London, Boston, Chicago, Rome, wars, battles, car fires, and gas fires. I found the drawings around the house like terrible talismans pointing to the disaster of my life. They unnerved me so, those sketches of smoke curling away in dark scribbles. Elliot wanted to know everything about fires: how they could start, how to prevent them, if being “good” would stop them, famous fires in history, and most terribly, everything I could tell him about what he called “your fire.” My fire. I had spent years running away from that fire, its sparks nipping my heels, only to come back home and be haunted by the imaginings of my son. I wanted to snap his pencils in two.

  “Were you sad?”

  “Terribly sad. But not anymore, Elliot. You make me so happy.”

  “You’re lucky you weren’t there.”

  “Very lucky.”

  “Were there any animals?”

  “No, sweetie.”

  “Was the house all gone?”

  “Mostly, Elliot. But, I don’t really like to talk about it, honey.”

  “I know, but, was it, like, all gone?”

  “Yes, mostly.”

  “What was left?”

  “Me. I was left. Let’s talk about your day at school.”

  Jameson noticed it, too. He felt sorry for me, knew this fascination would drudge up old memories I didn’t care to remember. He tried to discourage Elliot from asking me about the fire, because I had lost my husband there.

  “You didn’t lose him, though.”

  “That’s what they sometimes call it when someone dies.”

  “He would have been my uncle, if he was your husband, right, Auntie Penny?”

  And here I almost laughed in spite of it all. “Yes, honey. But he’s gone. And can I tell you something? He wasn’t all that fun.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that, I don’t know that you would have liked him all that much.”

  “Oh. Okay. Because he was bad?”

  “No, honey.”

  “It’s still sad, though.”

  “Yes, still sad.”

  And I felt, with my arm around my son, like the worst kind of monster, like the best kind of saint. If Mum were to catch my reflection then, would it be of a mangy-haired, clawed and toothy creature, wrapping her murderous arms around an innocent child? Or of an angel who had rescued herself and then her son from the clutches of a desperately sad life? I kissed Elliot’s head, trying to ward off I don’t know what, to protect him from the deadly secrets of a life like mine. He turned a page to a fresh sheet in his sketchbook, sharpened a pencil and began again: drawing out my demons. Fire-breathing dragons. Their snouts just outside the frame, flames filling the white of the page almost all the way to the edge and onto the table. A dark curling madness filling the open, cloudless sky. An evil no one sees. And there, if you look: A tiny house at the bottom of the page. A triangular roof. A chimney. A square window with little curtains. A smudge of the pencil here and there, a carelessness, a trick of the light, and there seems to be a tiny shadow in that little window, just inside. Arms raised.

  And then, just as quickly, black hair hanging in his dark eyes, tongue sticking out in concentration, the fat of Elliot’s hand slips across the page, and in an instant, it is snuffed right out.

  * * *

  Our life was full of the kind of happy regularity that sometimes dips into monotony, not that I very often took life with him for granted. I still felt like I’d won a bet, gotten away with the easy end of a dare, slipped away with the loot while the other party wasn’t looking.

  Raising a child in a small town is a wonderful thing; nothing compared to growing up there, for me. My perspective had shifted to include hikes in sprawling parks, visits to farms, fort-building, and swimming in the lake—all of it close to our house.

  On one occasion, my arms wrapped around me in the cold, watching Elliot play with some other kids at the creek in a large park, I saw Iain Moore, out of uniform, opening his car door in the parking lot across the way. The kids were hitting the lightly frozen water with fallen tree branches, the ice snapping under their blows. He paused. I knew he had seen me, but there was enough of a distance that I could pretend I wasn’t sure who it was. He tilted his head, considering something. Then, looking in the direction of the boys, he got in, closed the car door, and backed his car away. I returned my attention to the children playing, the loud cracking of their sticks sounding suddenly frightening to my ears.

&nb
sp; * * *

  Hattie came to visit. She arrived with the new year, on the heels of a cold snap, with an overnight bag.

  “It’s me. I’m home,” she called out.

  I heard the declaration and the door slam almost in the same loud, banging moment, and felt a chill blast through the old vents and up my arms. I was in the laundry room, taking a load out of the dryer. Heard the keys drop on the bench by the door with that familiar jingling finality. It’s me. I’m home.

  I took a breath and lifted the laundry basket, carrying Elliot’s and my clothes in a warm bundle, up to greet Hattie.

  “Oh,” she said coldly, surveying me with a wry smile, “there you are. Still playing house, I see.”

  “Welcome back, Hattie.” I put down the basket and took a step towards her, then stopped, my arms dangling lamely at my sides.

  She chuckled and said with a new, quiet fury, “I don’t bite.”

  She embraced me. She was home.

  I worried: Hattie was a louder caricature of her former self. Her red hair was brassier, her makeup applied with a broader brush, her voice husky, her jokes crass. She was there somewhere, my little sister, under the boastful bravado she was using to bury everything that had come before. I tried to be patient with her, to cajole her, but there was anger there that I felt it unwise to provoke. She tried, in subtle and bold ways, to assert herself in the house, to tug at the edges of my insecurities. She knew I was nervous about her being in this space again: lifting up objects and inspecting them like the mother-in-law in an old TV show. It was laughable that she would hold how I kept the house to a high standard given the state it had been in when she’d left, but she still waltzed around the house some days with a removed and judgmental air about her, one that I’m quite sure she knew set my teeth on edge.

  There were other times when I saw my poor old Hattie, and she was regretful, sad, ashamed, swallowing her pride and trying to push the clock back. In those moments, when she was reading with Elliot or trying to help with dinner, I felt such a grieving sadness in my stomach, wishing it could all be as it was. But when? It had never been right. I know I never should have asked for her help years ago, Mum, but what would you have had me do? Maybe she had been too young, too fragile, and it had frozen her in time. I had tried; it wasn’t just me, but Hattie I had tried to save, hoping that the fire would keep her from harm as well, forgetting how embers smoulder long after a fire goes out. And as I watched her, trying to recover something, the sun coming through the window and touching that red hair I loved so much, there were times I wished she’d never leave.