Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  I rolled my eyes. Must Momma and Grandma be so disrespectful to doctors? Must they be?

  ‘In 1935 I was the first person to fly all by myself from Los Angeles, the city of angels,’ she shouted, ‘to Mexico City, land of piñatas and burritos and banjos! That’s how I got my bottom bullet wounds!’

  When the nurse brought in a tray of food, Grandma gobbled it up, then declared, ‘The pygmies know how to make someone feel welcome on their island!’

  When the doctors wanted to examine her, she hit one in the chin and kicked the other. ‘Savages! All of you! Run to the plane!’ she instructed us.

  When the nurse adjusted the IV line, Grandma yelled, ‘I won’t be injected with your tribal poison!’

  There were no cuts or bruises on her body, but she was pretty seriously dehydrated.

  For days it remained a mystery how Grandma got to the airport.

  Finally, a teenager from a neighbouring town confessed. ‘I sees this old lady on the road, you knows? She’s wavin’ and salutin’ me and I stop. So she tells me, like, to take her to the airport because she’s going to fly her autogiro. I dunno what an autogiro is. Sounds like a sandwich to me, maybe turkey, but she’s already in my car and I gotta go to work in Portland at the dock sos I take her. So why not? Like, she’s a nice lady but I think somethin’s wrong with her, you knows? She kept tellin’ me she flew across the Atlantic twice by herself and she could fly at fourteen thousand feet. But she never said her name, said she was on a secret mission and she was a secret agent. Sos she tells me to drop her off near the runway so I did. Am I gonna, like, be arrested? Hey, I’m sorry, dude.’

  We took Grandma home and put her to bed. She told me she had to go and ‘check on her secrets in the tower,’ I assured her she could do it tomorrow. She woke up only once during the night. I was sleeping on the floor next to her bed.

  ‘Fly!’ she sat up and yelled, ‘Fly! Fly away!’ She pointed at the closets. ‘Fly high!’ She lay straight back down in bed and didn’t wake up for sixteen hours.

  The next morning I headed to the river to throw rocks before going to the bakery. Janie would stay with Grandma for a while today so the rattled Velvet could ‘gather her bearings unto her rattled bones and rest.’

  The windsurfer was out there again.

  I watched him for a while, but mostly I let the sun do its work on me as it scooted above the horizon. I was breathing hard, exhausted, my heart pounding. My heart always pounds when I, or Cecilia, is super-stressed.

  I was overwhelmed with…what was it? Bitterness? Anger? Pain? Recognition of defeat? I tossed a rock.

  I tried to figure it out and gave up. Why are emotions so hard to name? Shouldn’t we be able to put a finger on one and say, ‘Today what I’m feeling is…drum roll…shame!’ And, voilà, we could tackle it down, shake it up. Handle it.

  But no. Trying to pull through the mass of your own emotions is like trying to pull a piece of yarn through a ball that’s all tangled up. It gets stuck, knotted, twisted, frayed, and the harder you pull it the harder the knot sticks.

  So I could hardly figure out what I was thinking, but it basically went like this: I was emotionally whipped from trying to find Grandma.

  But what to do? Move her out? Grandma would hate not living in the home she’d lived in for sixty-four years around people who loved and cared about her.

  Henry needed attention and care.

  Momma could not handle a mother with dementia and a special-needs son alone anymore. She wasn’t as weak as she pretended, but she wasn’t as strong as she’d like to think herself, either. The bakery was a whole other issue, too.

  Cecilia had shouldered Momma and Grandma and Henry too long. She had more crap coming down the pike with Parker. Her kids were screwed up and needed her.

  Janie had her books and her compulsions and obsessions and could help some, but eventually she’d probably go back to her houseboat and shut the door.

  And that left me.

  It left me. I threw another rock in the water. The sun inched up over the river, the gold splashing onto the waves.

  I did not want this role. Imagining myself living with, or near, Momma again made this rush of anger and hurt come at me like a tsunami. I could not become a caregiver to two people and a target for the third. I also could not live in this small town again, especially with my sterling ex-slut reputation.

  I couldn’t do it.

  I can’t do it.

  No.

  But that niggling question kept hitting me in the cranium: if you won’t do it, who will?

  Several nights later, after I’d made a baby shower cake in stork shape, a batch of butterscotch cubes, three Marion berry pies, a wedding cake with a blue icing waterfall (the couple had met at a local state park under a waterfall), and countless other sugary delights, I headed home.

  As I rounded a corner, I saw the same man with white hair staring at our bakery across the street from under a trellis at our local park. I pulled over and watched him watching our bakery until he turned and left.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I headed to the cool grass and the willow tree late the next night and found the dippers and the North Star.

  The constant trips to the hospital for Momma and Grandma had tripped me up. It was the smells that triggered the memories. The antiseptic, soapy, sterile smell of the hospitals that did it.

  I had tried to get rid of those breath-sucking memories, pushing them into a mental box and nailing the lid on, but it hadn’t worked, no surprise there. I have learnt that sometimes you have to let your breath-sucking memories have their way with you if only so they will go back into your brain caves and you can continue on your merry life. I braced myself, and the memories slithered out of my brain caves like sea snakes.

  There was so much blood that afternoon. Blood soaking the mattress, dripping to the floor, seeping from Momma, then clinging to us, hot and sticky.

  I didn’t say anything at first when I saw it, a hot, sticky red river. I couldn’t speak. My shock sent my nerve endings hollering in disbelief and my brain shut down.

  But even though I didn’t speak, in another room, Cecilia felt me, felt my terror, my frozen horror. She screamed. Her scream exploded in me, as if she were in my body, howling, frantic, terrorised.

  My scream joined hers, a room apart, one twisting, keening, horrific howl of pain.

  It was about six weeks after Momma had returned from the hospital after the lice incident with the trailer in the thick of the woods.

  She was doing well at the women’s clothing store. No one would ever guess that behind the perfect face and the bell-shaped hair lurked a woman who could dive into a black pit so windingly deep, you’d figure you could find worms squiggling away at the bottom of it.

  She refused to sign the papers we brought home from school that would have given us free breakfast and lunch, saying she could provide for us now. She tossed the papers in the garbage. ‘They think we’re poor, don’t they? We’re not. We’re not white trash. We don’t need charity.’

  Janie forged her signature.

  That fateful day Janie and Cecilia and I picked up Henry from his special classroom at his school. No one had harassed Cecilia for being plump, Janie for being nerdy weird, me for being a super-smart loner, or Henry for being Henry, and there’d been pizza for lunch, so the Bommarito kids were fairly happy.

  We were headed to a neighbouring school, about a mile away, where our principal told us they were giving out free clothes. ‘Have your mom drive you on over, Isabelle,’ he’d whispered to me, and handed me four passes to get in. Well, there was no way our momma, ‘We don’t take charity,’ was gonna take us, so we went on foot and came home with a huge bag of clothes each and cookies in our stomachs that the smiling ladies handed out.

  I had found two pairs of cool, bell-bottomed pants, one with purple butterflies on them; a pair of jeans; four T-shirts; and a couple of sweatshirts, no stains or rips. I had even found a pair of tennis shoes with pi
nk laces that weren’t beaten up, a red jacket, knitted gloves, and a package of new underwear with pink flowers.

  I had started wearing a bra and had found one at a garage sale, but the straps had broken and I was hooking them together with safety pins. My other bra had to be taped together by Cecilia each morning. I found a soft pink one and a white, lacy one that day and felt like I was wearing gold.

  It was the start of my fetish with bras.

  Henry shared one of the two bedrooms in our dimly lit apartment with Momma, so when we got home, I took his bag in, intending on putting the clothes in his drawers. I figured Momma was still at work.

  So I dragged the bag into the room Henry shared with Momma, and that’s when I saw the pool of blood.

  Momma was in the middle of that pool, in the middle of the bed, in the middle of the carnage.

  It was like her entire life had bled right out of her. I thought she was dead. She was ghastly white, her mouth open only slightly, her head bent at almost ninety degrees, her legs splayed out like a chicken’s.

  That’s when Cecilia screamed even though she hadn’t seen what I was seeing.

  By the time Cecilia, Janie, and Henry rushed in, I was patting Momma’s face, blood sticking to my fingers. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. I yelled her name, but she didn’t respond.

  ‘Call an ambulance!’ I screamed, putting my head to her chest. Her heart was beating. I put my cheek to her mouth. She was still breathing, God only knew how.

  Janie immediately passed out on the floor. I saw her slump and grab the corner of a dresser, her body and face hitting the bloody mattress, before slipping to the floor. Cecilia vomited.

  ‘Call an ambulance, Cecilia! Hurry! Hurry!’

  Cecilia crawled to the phone, flicking the vomit away from her face, not caring that her knees were carving right through it. I heard her screaming into the phone, her words hardly coherent.

  A primal roar ripped out of Henry’s throat. He rushed for Momma, hugging her close to him, Momma’s head lolling to the side.

  ‘Henry!’ I yelled, grabbing at him. ‘Put her down! Put her down!’

  ‘Oh, Momma! Momma!’ He cradled her to him, his body now covered in her blood. ‘Momma!’

  ‘Let go!’ I screamed at Henry as more blood seeped out of Momma, my knees sinking into the blood on the mattress.

  ‘No! I hug Momma! I make her better!’ Henry insisted.

  ‘Henry, stop it, stop it!’ He gripped her harder.

  It was the only time I hit Henry, my fist cracking hard against his forehead. He fell off the bed, tumbled flat to the floor, then huddled in a ball and wailed. I grabbed for Momma.

  I could do nothing about him. Nothing. As I could do nothing about Janie breathing shallowly on the other side of the bed, her body crumpled up.

  I laid Momma down and yanked up her dress.

  I could hardly comprehend what I was seeing. The blood was new, it was caked, it was seeping out, it was dry. I stripped off a pillowcase, wadded it up, and put pressure on Momma’s vagina so her life wouldn’t slip out of her.

  ‘Momma!’ I shouted, frantic, shaking her shoulder. ‘Momma!’

  Cecilia crawled back in and I yelled at her to get a towel because the pillow slip was soaked.

  She retched again on her way to the bathroom and I felt my stomach heave. She grabbed a white towel, then got on the bed with me. We pressed the towel in tight. I pushed back my hair and felt Momma’s blood on my face.

  ‘Are they coming?’ I yelled at Cecilia over the din of Henry’s pathetic wailing.

  ‘Yes, they’re coming. Momma! Momma!’ No response. There was nothing coming out of Momma except blood. ‘God, is she dead?’

  I put my bloody, trembling hand on her neck. ‘No, there’s still a pulse.’

  ‘I hug Momma. I hug Momma,’ Henry pleaded. ‘I make her better.’

  Janie, white as snow, struggled up and pulled herself to Momma’s face, ignoring the blood from the mattress that soaked her T-shirt. She cupped Momma’s face with her hands. ‘Don’t die!’ she begged. ‘Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die.’

  I will never forget that begging, that wretched begging, as Janie beseeched Momma to stay with us.

  The white towel was now red and I grabbed another one, pressing my hands on top of Cecilia’s, all four covered in blood, our heads together over Momma’s still body, tears mixing.

  Henry continued pleading, his voice raw; Janie kept begging Momma to live; Cecilia swore and panted; and we held that towel tight.

  Seconds later I heard the scream of the ambulance, the pounding of feet up to our apartment, the staccato knocking on the door.

  The doorbell rang and Henry let loose with a primal roar. Another gush of blood spewed from Momma, and Janie screamed. Later I heard that the paramedics and police heard those spine-tingling sounds and didn’t wait. The door was almost instantly kicked down, the hinges splitting, the wood crashing to the floor.

  Paramedics and policemen rushed in and they’d hardly known where to start. Cecilia and I had blood on our faces, hands, and arms. Janie had passed out again and collapsed to the floor, blood covering her T-shirt, her body curled up.

  Henry was in a corner, hysterical, seconds ago passing into a place where no one could reach him. The room smelt like impending death, vomit, and free-ranging fear.

  ‘Oh God! Help us!’ Cecilia screamed, ‘Help us!’

  Within nanoseconds, those guys were on their radios screaming for back-up, and soon the sirens were ripping through the neighbourhood, men filling our apartment in suits and uniforms.

  Later I was told they thought we’d all been attacked by some knife-wielding psycho.

  Cecilia and I were forcibly carried from the room, struggling, not wanting to leave Momma, and shoved into an ambulance. Janie was strapped onto a gurney, an IV poked up her arm as her pale face wobbled side to side. Henry, bloody Henry, was picked up by three firefighters, all holding him as he slugged them in sheer panic.

  When we left, we saw the paramedics and firefighters surrounding Momma, quick hands working to save her life, radios squawking, men yelling, and one paramedic slumped in the corner, passed out.

  Momma stayed in the hospital for two weeks. We kids stayed overnight. The police came and asked us questions, the doctors and nurses never leaving us alone, patting us when we couldn’t hold back the tears, our arms around each other as we rocked back and forth. We insisted on sleeping in the same room, so they shoved beds together.

  Henry did not speak, not one word, his eyes vague, spacey, not with us. Janie started to count out loud, something she’d been doing softly for a long time, but now she didn’t bother to cover it up. Cecilia ate. Packets of cookies, whole pies, red Jell-O and pudding, entire pepperoni pizzas. I slipped into the darkness of my head.

  Miss Nancy came to get us in the morning.

  For the next two weeks, we all woke up with night terrors. More than once I woke up pulling on my own hair, dreaming blood was stuck in it. Cecilia had nightmares, too, and she’d whisper, ‘Stop the blood, stop the blood.’

  I don’t think Nancy slept.

  She never said a word of complaint, only came in with hugs and assurance, her cool hands stroking sweating foreheads, holding shaking hands, cupping lonely, lost faces.

  She helped Janie with her embroidery and put on more classical music.

  She tried to get Henry to talk, but he wouldn’t. Henry’s speech wasn’t super-articulate, and he regressed after that night. It took him about two years to get back up to where he was. He spent a lot of time petting the animals.

  She had Cecilia working with her at Sunday school and put me back in the church choir.

  We played in the stream behind her house again. Caught bugs. Watched a snake slither away. Spied on a possum we named Superman and a raccoon we named Grass.

  We didn’t know initially what happened to Momma. No one wanted to share anything with three young girls. We wouldn’t have known, except that Ceci
lia is an expert spy. When Nancy went outside to talk on the phone, we figured that was the conversation we needed to hear.

  It didn’t take long to hear the word abortion. It didn’t take us long to do a little sleuthing.

  So, that’s what it was.

  An abortion.

  An abortion gone hideously wrong.

  Pregnant by the violent trailer creep who called her darlin’ and hit her and her children. Pregnant by the trailer creep who sold us that white piece of trash for a piece of Momma’s soul that gave us lice and took her to a place where no one could reach her. Pregnant because she’d wanted something to keep us warm in the winter and it was all she could do.

  Not pregnant anymore.

  All that blood. I still remembered it.

  But Momma didn’t give up, even then. We didn’t move home to Trillium River and Grandma and her ‘I told you so.’ It took one more cruelty, one more perverse crime, to finally break her back and send her, one fingernail clinging to reality, back to Oregon.

  I wanted to go home and crash after a twelve-hour day at the bakery, but I couldn’t. It was Wednesday night, which meant I was singing at the church. As usual, we had rehearsal for an hour ahead of time.

  We had a guest musician that night. His name was Samuel Griffin. He was eighty-five and played the bongos. No kidding. The bongos.

  Right before church the teenage drummer and electric guitar players came up to me.

  ‘You’re the coolest mom ever,’ one said, enthused. He gave me a fist bump.

  ‘Yeah, I wish my mom was as awesome as you,’ the other said. ‘You’re awesome.’ Fist bump.

  Awesome. Cool.

  But I was not a mother.

  I buried that one, deep and hard. I buried that.

  I begged my brain caves not to let that memory out again. I couldn’t do anything about it, so why think about it?

  Samuel Griffin bonged it hard that night.

  Father Mike jammed.

  I sang.

  Like a nightingale who had no kids and never would.

  The familiar blackness edged up on me over the next ten days. I could feel it in my chest, my head, in the air I shakily sucked in. Depression, at least with me, comes in one of two ways: it sneaks up on me, bit by bit, until I’m enshrouded in it, or it arrives like a hurricane, blowing in all sorts of nasty feelings, mood swings, sad and terrible thoughts, followed by a spiralling sensation downward and, eventually, a shutdown on my end, where functioning like a human is iffy.