The Lost Sisterhood

by Anne Fortier

  These romantic cameos were always carefully cropped to exclude troublesome details. Gone was the workaholic father and hospitalized mother. Gone was the fact that Mrs. Winterbottom—a housekeeper by profession—was a stern, plastic-gloved presence in whom efficiency and cleanliness left tenderness no quarter. Left was only a little boy and his garden, framed by seasonal foliage and ever so lightly dusted with glitter.

  Poking my head into the basement I found, as expected, a handful of women astride stationary bikes that were positioned toward an exercise video. “Hello, Mommy!” I called. “And hello, ladies!”

  “Hi, sweetie!” My mother was dressed in the yellow jersey I had given her for Christmas, her silver bob pushed back by a bandanna. She was one of the only women I knew who were not afraid of sweating, and from being a source of tremendous embarrassment this had, over the years, become one of the things I admired most about her. “Ten more minutes!”

  As I returned upstairs to find my father still fiddling with the birdfeeder outside, a sudden swarm of nerves hatched in my stomach. Ten minutes. Precisely what I needed.

  MY FATHER’S STUDY WAS a dusty cubbyhole with all the trappings of a Victorian gentleman. The walls were completely covered in sagging bookshelves, and here and there among the books sat his special treasures: bugs pinned in wooden cases, worms and snakes preserved in glass canisters, and extinct birds with bright glass eyes watching from the top shelves like predators perched on a crag. For as long as I could remember, I had found the smell in this room dangerously compelling; it was the scent of history, of knowledge, and of childhood trespassing.

  Older now but nonetheless nervous, I accidentally knocked over a wobbly mug on the desk, and for a few anxious seconds, pens, rulers, and paper clips skidded in all directions. Jittery with guilt, I fumbled everything back into the mug and placed it on top of the monthly bills, where it belonged.

  My father appeared in the door.

  “Why, hello there!” he exclaimed, his bushy eyebrows colliding. “Should I be flattered that you find my correspondence so interesting?”

  “Terribly sorry,” I muttered. “I was looking for my birth certificate.”

  His brow softened. “Ah. Let me see now—” Sitting down heavily on the office chair he opened and closed a few drawers before finding what he was looking for. “Voilà!” My father took out a fresh new folder with my name written on it. “These are all your papers. I’ve been cleaning up a bit.” He smiled at last. “Thought I would spare you the mess.”

  I stared at him, trying to see beyond the smile. “You haven’t been … throwing things out, have you?”

  He blinked a few times, baffled by my sudden interest in his projects. “Nothing important, I think. I put most of it in a box. The family papers and all that. You may wish to burn them, but … I will leave the decision to you.”

  THE DOOR TO THE attic was squeaky, and it had always been nearly impossible to keep one’s visits to the room a secret.

  When we were children, Rebecca and I had kept a small box of keepsakes in a corner of this gloomy room tucked under the roof, and we would sneak up to check on it only as often as we dared. There was a miniature bar of soap from a hotel in Paris, a dried rose from a wedding bouquet, a golf ball from the Moselane Manor Park … and a few other treasures that could not fall into the wrong hands.

  “What are you two doing in the attic?” my mother had asked one day at lunch, causing Rebecca to spill her lemonade all over the kitchen table.

  “Nothing,” I had said, with forced innocence.

  “Then go play outside.” My mother had spent most of a roll of paper towels cleaning up Rebecca’s mess, but had not said a word about it. Rebecca was, after all, the vicar’s daughter. “I don’t like you being in that dusty room.”

  And so, just as children learn to please their parents by riding bicycles and falling asleep on Christmas Eve, they furtively work up darker skills, often involving perilously stored cookie tins, and, in my case, the ability to open and close the creaky attic door with no sound at all.

  Although I had not needed the trick for many years, I was happy to see I still had it mastered. Pausing on the doorstep, I briefly listened to the sounds from below, but all I heard was the occasional clinking of china. Through the day, my parents really had only one predictable habit, and that was to share the newspaper after lunch. It was no use trying to engage them in a three-way conversation during this time; once the dishes were aside and the coffee poured they were happily lost in a world of cricket and corrupt politicians.

  Even so, I was only too aware they were both downstairs as I flicked on the lonely bulb that appeared to be hanging from the attic ceiling by thick strains of spiderweb. As I made my way across the floor I tried to remember which floorboards squeaked and which were safe … but soon realized that many years had come between me and the path I had known so well.

  Pinched under our steep roofline, the attic was essentially a triangular vault with no source of natural light except a half-moon window in the north-facing gable. Although it was dusty and deserted, the place had always held a strange fascination to me; whenever as a child I peeked into an old leather suitcase or wooden trunk I fully expected to find something magical. Perhaps it would be a forgotten jewelry box, or a ragged pirate’s flag, or a bundle of brittle love letters … there had always been a promise of family secrets and portals to other worlds in that dusky room and its quaint smell of cedar and mothballs.

  And one day, when I was nine years old, the magic door finally opened.

  Granny.

  I could still see her standing there, back turned, looking out through the half-moon window for hours on end … not with the wistful resignation one might expect from someone kept under lock and key, but with active determination, as if she were keeping watch for some inevitable attack.

  All I had ever known about my father’s mother was that she was ill in a hospital in a country far away. The bit about the country far away had been my own invention, probably to explain why we never visited her, the way we went to see Grandfather during his own long, nameless illness. Without giving it too much thought I imagined her lying just like him, with plastic tubes going in and out of her clothes, but in a foreign setting with whitewashed walls and a crucifix hanging over her bed.

  Then one drizzly afternoon, with no forewarning, I came home from school to find a strange, tall woman standing in the middle of our living room, a small suitcase on the floor beside her and a look of uncommon serenity on her face. “Diana!” my mother said, waving at me impatiently. “Come and say hello to Granny.”

  “Hello,” I muttered, although, even then, I felt the greeting to be utterly inadequate. There was something about this long-limbed stranger that was completely out of place, I could see that much, but I remember being unable to determine what it was.

  It might have been the fact that she still wore her raincoat, which made her look as if she were merely a random passerby waiting for the bus, and who might be off again any moment. Or perhaps I was confused because, in my experience—obviously rather limited—she did not look like a grandmother at all. Instead of the cauliflower perm favored by the local village ladies, she wore her gray hair in a braid down her back, and her face was almost without lines. In fact, it was almost without expression altogether. My new granny merely looked at me with an open, straightforward stare, and there was no particular curiosity, nor a hint of emotion in her gaze.

  I remember feeling disappointed by her impersonal behavior, but I also knew, with the unwavering certainty of a child, that because she was my grandmother, she would inevitably come to love me. So I smiled, knowing we were destined to become friends, and saw a tiny flicker of amazement in her gray-blue eyes. But still no smile.

  “Good afternoon,” she simply replied, with that curious accent of hers which made it sound as if she had rehearsed the words without fully understanding what they meant.

  “Granny has been ill,” my mother explained, takin
g the schoolbag from my back and pushing me closer, “but she is feeling better. And now she is going to live with us. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Nothing else was said on that particular occasion; Granny moved into the attic room, which, I now discovered, had been cleaned out and furnished, and although she was unusually tall with—in my nine-year-old estimation—exceptionally large feet, she was so quiet you would never have known she was there, were it not for the attic door’s squeal whenever I went to see her.

  Years later, I would look back on this period and laugh at myself for having been fooled by that serene air, and for thinking Granny’s silence was somehow a consequence of her long, mysterious illness. It used to unnerve me that she could sit on a chair in our parlor for hours doing absolutely nothing while my mother would run to and fro, cleaning and fussing as if her mother-in-law were just another piece of furniture in her way.

  “Lift your feet!” she would demand, and Granny obediently moved her feet out of the path of the vacuum cleaner. On a few occasions there was no immediate response, and the vacuum cleaner was unexpectedly brought to a stop, until it eventually occurred to my mother to add “please.”

  In her better moments, my mother would chastise herself for her own impatience toward Granny, reminding us both that, “It’s the medicine. She can’t help it,” and pausing briefly on her way through the room to pat the sinewy old hand lying on the armrest, even though there was rarely a response.

  Several months went by after her arrival before I had an actual conversation with Granny. When it finally happened, we had been sitting in her attic apartment for the better part of a Sunday afternoon, left to each other’s less-than-riveting company while my parents were in town for a funeral. I had been laboring over a particularly boring school essay, and for quite a while—somewhat to my growing irritation—I had felt Granny’s eyes on my pen as I wrote. At one point, when I paused for inspiration, she leaned forward eagerly, as if she had been waiting for an opening, and hissed, “Rule number one: Don’t underestimate them. Write that down.”

  Unnerved by her sudden intensity, I obediently wrote down the words in the middle of my essay, and when she saw the result, she nodded her approval. “That is good what you are doing. Writing.”

  I barely knew what to say. “Do you not … write?”

  For a moment she looked stricken, and I wondered if I had insulted her. Then she looked down, suddenly fearful. “Yes. I write.”

  For Christmas that year I gave her a notebook—one of my unused red exercise books from school—plus three blue pens I had bought at the store. She didn’t say anything right away, but as soon as my parents were busy with their own stockings, she took my hand and squeezed it so hard it hurt.

  I did not see the red notebook again until years later, long after she was gone, when I was eavesdropping on an after-dinner conversation between my parents and my father’s old school chum, Dr. Trelawny, who was then a psychiatrist in Edinburgh. Perched on the top step of the staircase I was able to overhear most conversations going on in the living room, and I could also swiftly retreat to my room if need be.

  On this particular occasion the subject was Granny, and since all my questions about her were usually met with reproachful silence, I was naturally determined to ignore the biting draft in the stairwell and take in as much information as possible.

  My father was evidently showing Dr. Trelawny a collection of medical files, for they were talking about such things as “paranoid schizophrenia,” “electroshock treatments,” and “lobotomy,” most of which was gibberish to me at the time. At one point there was a prolonged shuffling of papers, interspersed with Dr. Trelawny exclaiming, “How extraordinary!” and “This is remarkable!”—all of which made me so agog with curiosity I simply had to descend another few steps and crane my neck to see what was going on.

  Through the half-open door I saw my mother sitting on our yellow sofa, nervously twirling the tassels of her shawl, while my father and Dr. Trelawny stood by the fireplace, their whisky glasses resting on the mantelpiece.

  It took me a moment to realize that the object eliciting such excitement from the otherwise exceptionally dull Dr. Trelawny was the red notebook I had given Granny for Christmas six years earlier. Clearly, the three blue pens had been put to good use for, judging by the doctor’s fascination with each page, the notebook had been filled from cover to cover.

  “What do you think?” my father eventually asked, reaching out for his whisky glass. “I have shown it to a few specialists in London, but they say no such language exists. An imaginary dictionary, they called it.”

  Dr. Trelawny whistled out loud, oblivious to my mother’s warning grimace. “The make-belief language of a delusional mind. I thought I had seen it all, but this is something else altogether.”

  Unfortunately, the whistle prompted my mother to close the door to the hallway, effectively cutting me off from the rest of the conversation.

  Ever since that evening I had been itching to see exactly what Granny had written in the notebook. But whenever I dared approach the subject, my mother would spring up from whatever she was doing and exclaim, “Oh, that reminds me! Diana, I want to show you something—” And off we would go upstairs, to sort through her clothes, or shoes, or handbags in search of something I was old and responsible enough to borrow. It was, I suppose, her way of apologizing for all the unanswered questions.

  Once I inadvertently surprised my father as he sat bent over the notebook at his desk, but the clumsy urgency with which he shoved it into a drawer was further evidence that this was by no means an object he cared to discuss. And so I waited and waited, very much aware of the notebook’s presence among the family papers, until one day, I could stand it no longer.

  Rebecca and I had been alone in the house for an entire day, getting up to all the usual sorts of mischief, when we at last found ourselves on the threshold of my father’s study. “You have a right to know the truth,” Rebecca had insisted, when she saw me hesitating. “They can’t keep it from you. It’s so wrong. I am sure it’s even against the law. You are sixteen, you know.”

  Spurred on by her indignation, I had finally opened the drawer with the family papers, and we had spent the next hour riffling through my father’s file folders in search of the red notebook.

  During that hour, we found so many shocking papers that our eventual discovery of the notebook dwindled in importance. Yes, indeed, it contained a long list of English words and their apparent translation into a set of bizarre symbols, but Granny’s little dictionary, as it turned out, was not nearly as interesting as the letters from doctors outlining ominous-sounding treatments for her, including a stomach-turning description of the surgical procedure involved in a lobotomy.

  Somewhat stunned after this unforeseen jackpot of information, Rebecca and I had eventually put everything back in the file folders, including the red notebook, and had walked out of my father’s study with a budding appreciation that parents hide things from children for a reason.

  I had not laid eyes on Granny’s meticulously scribbled dictionary since that day, twelve years ago; in fact, I had barely allowed it to cross my mind. But it had clearly festered there all the same, in some cerebral cranny, and as I stood in the attic on this rainy October afternoon, I knew I couldn’t rest until I held it in my hand.

  It didn’t take me long to find the box with family papers. As expected, my father had done a halfhearted job of hiding it underneath a folded garden parasol, and it was the only box in the room that did not have its contents meticulously scribbled on the side. As I peeled off the adhesive tape one nervous inch at a time, I kept listening for steps on the staircase outside; once I felt confident no one was coming, I knelt down and started going through the file folders.

  When I finally spotted the red notebook, I was in such a hurry to test the wild idea that had possessed me since the night before that I nearly missed the two words Granny had written on the jacket: “For Diana.”

  T
he discovery that the notebook had always been intended for me filled me with sudden feverous certainty. I opened the cover with trembling fingers and, after a quick glance at the first few pages, could see right away that in her careful blue writing, Granny had left me the key to a language of symbols I would never encounter anywhere else … until the day a stranger stopped me in Magpie Lane and gave me a photograph and a ticket to Amsterdam.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NORTH AFRICA

  WE MADE IT, LILLI!”

  Myrina staggered onto the shifting stones of the riverbed. There was not much of a stream left; what must once have been a roaring waterway was now little more than a long, narrow crack in the parched landscape. But she was far too exhausted to feel any disappointment, far too exhausted to feel anything other than a faint throbbing as the uneven rocks scraped the last few patches of skin from her weary feet.

  “The river!” Falling to her knees by the water’s edge she could finally unfasten Lilli’s spindly arms that had been clasped around her neck since sunrise. “Do you hear me? It’s the river!” Myrina eased her sister’s limp body to the ground and began pouring water to the lips that had been far too silent all day. “Come, drink now.”

  The desert had been bigger than she thought. Their water-filled goat bladders had run dry before they were even halfway across it. She had kept assuring Lilli she saw trees on the horizon, beyond the blazing plain, hoping her words would come true. Yet as hour after hour went by without shade or drink, the conversations between the sisters became briefer and briefer, until there had been no words left to speak.

  Over the course of their journey those last few days, Myrina continually heard the patient, steady voice of their mother urging her on, on, on. “Must reach the river,” it said, with hushed intensity. “Cannot stop. Must keep moving.” The words never faltered, never faded; just as her mother had never left her side during all those nights of childhood illnesses and fears, so did she remain faithfully by Myrina’s side throughout these last stumbling hours, when there was nothing else to cling to but a few persistent words, throbbing in her head, “Must reach the river. At the end of the river lies the sea. By the sea lies the city. In the city dwells the Moon Goddess. She alone has the power to cure my sister.”