Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  Henry burst through the door after volunteering at the animal shelter, came to an abrupt halt, and started wailing, ‘What happen Is? What happen Is?’ He held his arms way out to hug me, his face flushed and scrunched in pain, but Cecilia and Janie had to hold him tight so he wouldn’t squeeze me in a vicelike hug, possibly undoing what little was holding my ribs together.

  ‘A bad guy get you? I get him!’ he yelled. ‘I get him!’ He tried to get away from Cecilia and Janie, but they held him tight, his inherited Bommarito rage growing rapidly.

  ‘Henry, calm down!’ Cecilia yelled, but it didn’t reach him, the tears dripping down his red face.

  ‘I get him, Is! I get him!’ He pretended he was punching someone.

  Grandma popped up over the couch and started shouting, ‘SOS! SOS!’ through her tears.

  Velvet ran into the room and, though momentarily startled by my face, instantly went to help Henry, who had started howling, the sobs coming from his scared, dear soul.

  ‘SOS! SOS!’ Grandma said, voice hoarse, before pulling into her tight ball again.

  ‘Oh, Is!’ Henry yelled, collapsing to the floor. ‘Oh, Is! My sister!’

  I went to hug him.

  ‘Easy, Henry, be gentle,’ Cecilia said.

  ‘Soft hug, Henry,’ I said.

  ‘I know, I know. Soft Henry hug,’ he croaked out.

  I got down on the floor and he reached for me, Cecilia and Janie and Velvet ready to jump in if he couldn’t resist a tight hug.

  But Henry was gentle, so gentle, his sweet face next to mine as he melted down into his meltdown.

  Janie ran to Grandma.

  ‘SOS! SOS!’ she yelled. ‘Help us, help us!’

  Being naked after a beating is not a pretty sight. Janie and Cecilia both lost it when they saw me. For once there was no anger from Cecilia, no swearing, but I could feel her misery choking me. ‘Cecilia,’ I whispered.

  ‘Don’t…say…anything…’ Cecilia sobbed. ‘Nothing…I can’t handle…anymore…’

  Janie’s hot tears fell on my shoulders, her fingers cool, as she helped me with my clothes. I could hear her chanting to herself as she lightly touched my wounds and cuts and bruises.

  When I was in a pink flannel nightdress and lying in bed, my sisters crawled in with me and we emotionally unravelled together, holding hands.

  I had done this.

  I had brought this grief to my sisters.

  I brought their hands up to my mouth and kissed them.

  Under a moonbeam slanting through my window, my guilt converged from all corners of my body into my stomach and became a writhing, burning mass.

  I had done this.

  Oh, how I hated myself.

  The next few days did not go well in the Bommarito house. Henry refused to leave for any of his volunteer responsibilities at the church, the animal shelter, Cecilia’s school, or the senior centre. He refused to go to the bakery. He would not let me out of his sight.

  When I took a nap in my bedroom, he stayed with me and quietly played with his marbles or his stamp collection, or he read his comic books.

  I would wake up with him anxiously examining my face for any signs of life from about five inches away.

  ‘You OK, Is?’ As soon as I said I was, he’d burst into tears and I’d have to hug him and pat his back until his tears stopped running down my neck. ‘Your face! Your face! That bad man! I get him!’ He pounded the air. ‘I get him!’

  During the day when I rested on the porch, he sat next to me and we read his animal magazines together. When I limped around the property, he came with me. We talked about animals and our favourites: favourite colour (green), favourite state (Florida), favourite ice cream (chocolate mint).

  At night I would pretend to go to sleep as he sang me songs. When he thought I was asleep, he would go to bed, but only after making sure that Cecilia or Janie was with me.

  ‘I love you, my sister, Is,’ he told me a thousand times, his chin quivering.

  ‘I love you, my brother, Henry.’

  This was pure Henry: the man simply loved. He loved people wholly, innocently, sweetly. There were no strings, no manipulations, no qualifiers, no arguing, no games, no competitiveness. It was pure, it was everlasting.

  He was complaining more about his stomach hurting and I knew it was because he was upset.

  I had done that to him. I had done that to my brother.

  Grandma’s natural courage and pluck and fury boiled over the third day. ‘I’m going to kill the motherfucker with my plane!’ she shouted at me on a regular basis. ‘Yes, I am!’

  She handed me sheets of pink paper about five times a day. ‘This is the knife I’m going to use!’

  There was an extremely unhappy face on it.

  ‘Thank you, Amelia.’

  ‘This is the gun!’

  Another unhappy face.

  ‘He deserves to die!’ she yelled. ‘The motherfucker. He made you crash-land!’

  For a millisecond, her expression sometimes changed, and her old self shone through. ‘I love you. I love you. I love you.’ She lightly cupped my pounded face with her hands. ‘I love you.’

  I hugged her, her little body so tiny in my arms.

  ‘I must go now!’ she announced. ‘I’m taking off at first light to find the motherfucker!’ She ran up to the tower.

  I drank a glass of Velvet’s lemonade, which she regularly brought me.

  ‘Remember, it’s my mother’s recipe, sugar peach. When she was poor they sometimes had to eat possum and they always had to have lemonade with it, family tradition. Strong stuff, but it’d hide the possum taste.’

  Once again, Velvet’s lemonade had enough tart in it to blow the ears off a peacock.

  The bone-chilling nightmares came at night and during my naps. I even had bone-chilling nightmares when I was awake. Russ Bington was chasing me, giggling, laughing. He put his belt around my neck and pulled. A bat flew out of my mouth and a snake slithered in.

  He giggled.

  In my dreams I couldn’t breathe. He grabbed the mermaid table that Cassandra gave me before she’d jumped off the building downtown and he smashed it on my head. The mermaids tried to protect me, but he still bit me on the neck.

  When I felt myself dying, I would wake up, sweating, paralysed, yelling.

  Janie slept with me at night, after she embroidered for about an hour. My yelling woke her up and she’d start yelling, which woke up Grandma, who would start to bellow, ‘My engine’s on fire! My engine’s on fire!’ and Henry, who would babble, ‘Momma, Momma, Momma,’ then hide in the closet.

  Velvet would sprint into my bedroom, her flannel nightgown flying behind her. ‘Gracious me…gracious me…’

  We’d stumble to Grandma’s and Henry’s room and comfort them. A few times one or both of them wet the bed in fear, so we’d have to change the sheets, clean them up, put new sheets down and, with Henry, start his goodnight routine again, which consisted of milk, a story, a back rub, a hug, and bed.

  We were all exhausted.

  One morning I found Henry tucked in bed beside me, an orange juice glass on the nightstand, his hand clutching mine. Henry never drank orange juice. That he would even touch a glass with orange juice in it was a first in twenty years.

  Henry had good reason for never drinking orange juice. The last time he’d had orange juice he’d been drugged up to his eyeballs and had ended up hiding in a tree from two juvenile delinquents.

  I stared at his sweet face, his brown lashes curling on his cheeks. I brushed my fingers through his brown curls.

  He had survived many, many traumas. He had learnt to laugh again, to be joyful, to trust, to live with gusto and courage.

  Would I?

  I ran my hands through his curls again.

  Would I?

  She was dressed like a nun.

  Kayla held her head high as she reverently touched the giant wooden cross laying flat on her chest. She had on a black, long-sleeved shirt and ankle
-length black skirt and had somehow created a black veil with a white band across her forehead. When the bells on the bakery door jingled and she, Riley, and Cecilia noisily entered, I had to do a double take.

  ‘Peace be with you,’ Kayla said to me. She reached out to shake my hand. We shook, my own hand speckled with flour and cinnamon from my cinnamon loaves.

  She crossed herself and said, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’

  ‘Peace be with you, you odd child.’ I turned to Riley, who was wearing a purple headband with rhinestones. ‘How ya doing?’

  ‘I’m doing well except for I’m going to be bald like a chicken soon.’ She said this in a funny way, but I saw that broken, quaking hurt swimming in her eyes.

  ‘I like chickens,’ I told her, hugging her.

  ‘Me too, but I don’t wanna look like one.’

  When the girls had seen my battered body and my mushed-up face, which by then resembled a beaten-up blowfish, they had been rocked to their cores, which ramped my guilt-o-meter up ten notches.

  I told the girls I’d had a bad date.

  I believe I’ve scared them off dating for good.

  They cried and cried, cried more, and I felt like the worst aunt who had ever scuttled about the planet Earth.

  Janie came out from behind the counter to say hello. She had flour in her hair and a green streak of icing on her cheek.

  ‘Peace be with you,’ Kayla said, shaking Janie’s hand.

  ‘Peace be with you, honey, why are you dressed like a nun?’

  ‘Because I’m thinking that’s what God is telling me to be, and I want to make sure that I’m hearing God’s voice and not the devil’s. He’s tricky.’

  Cecilia groaned and went behind the counter. ‘I’m going to go and smash challah bread between my hands for a while. You two handle them.’ She disappeared into the back.

  Riley plucked a hair out.

  ‘Do you want a cupcake, Riley?’ I asked.

  She pulled out another hair.

  ‘I told you not to do that in here, Miss Dreadlock.’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Are you planning on plucking out all your hair?’

  ‘No,’ she said, her face crumpling. ‘It’s not like I want to do it, Aunt Isabelle. I have to. My fingers…they’re always going up to my hair. I have to feel it and I have to pull it out and I feel better right after I’ve done it but then I feel like I’m gross, you know, and I know I’m ugly. I am so ugly.’

  ‘Honey!’ Janie said, reaching out to hug her close. ‘You need some Yo-Yo Ma and mediation time!’

  ‘You are not ugly, Riley, not at all,’ I hugged her, too. ‘You have the Bommarito Family Trait of Disasters and Discomforts. It’s a family curse. I get depressed, so does your grandma. Janie counts and obsesses about stuff. Your mother eats. Kayla is trying out religions and is dressed like a nun.’

  ‘But I’m a sicko,’ Riley said, running her hands over her face. ‘I’ll sit in front of my mirror at night and I’ll promise myself that I’ll pull out only one hair, maybe two, but hours go by fast and I’m still pulling! I can’t go to sleep ’til I’m done.’

  There was silence for a bit.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ I asked, gentle, so gentle.

  ‘It relaxes me. If I’m all nervous, by the time I’m done pulling I feel better. But in the morning I feel like an ape, picking away at myself like they pick away at each other’s lice, and I’m balding in spots!’

  I wanted to cry.

  Riley’s face crumpled. ‘All the kids say I’m a freak! A bald freak!’

  Kids are so nice.

  Kayla stepped up close to her. ‘I’m gonna pray for you.’

  ‘Pray all you want, Kayla,’ she said, angry. ‘It’s not gonna help. I can’t even go to sleep at night unless I pull out my hair.’

  Then Janie said, ‘We Bommarito women are all…celestially unique, effervescent, flowing…’

  ‘We’ve got a screw loose somewhere,’ I said, pulling Riley in closer. ‘And that loose screw keeps screwing us down the generations. So, be weird. Accept your weirdness. Be one with it. And chat with your shrink.’

  ‘I don’t like my shrink,’ Riley said, miserable. ‘Her head is shaped like a cone and her nostrils are the size of the Grand Canyon.’

  Janie tilted her head to the side. ‘One of my shrinks spoke to spirits she said were sitting around us. Another believed in reincarnation and she was in her fourth life. I still went.’

  Riley had refused to speak to two shrinks and had run away from the third. Cecilia had not been able to find her for four hours. That run-and-hide thing ran in the family, too, just like hiding in closets.

  ‘Why did you go, Aunt Janie?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I thought I would drive myself insane if I didn’t. I love my therapist now. She’s soothing and serene, like waterfalls and rainbows, and she doesn’t make me feel like I’m an object to be studied. I’m a person to her, not a caseload. I’ve got issues, she’s trying to help me with the issues, but basically she’s trying to help me like myself.’

  ‘Don’t you like yourself, Aunt Janie?’ Kayla asked. ‘God almighty has blessed you. You’re a bestselling author and you got a cool Porsche and a houseboat.’

  Janie thought about that and said, ‘That’s all stuff, Kayla. Stuff doesn’t make you happy, but I’m liking myself better since we came to Trillium River. I’ve actually left my houseboat. It’s not easy for me being out of my houseboat, and sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe, and I have to hide in the back of the bakery, or count or tap, but I’m doing it. I believe I’m coming into some cosmic peace. Plus I have you two. I love you girls so much.’

  ‘Maybe your shrink can give me some of that cosmic peace?’ Riley asked.

  Janie smiled at her. ‘I’ll call her! Hey! We can shrink-out together!’

  ‘And I’ll get you a cupcake,’ I told her, kissing her cheek. ‘Chocolate, right? With the shavings?’

  Riley nodded, wiped a tear from her eye. ‘Yeah. Cool.’

  ‘Praise the Lord. I’ll have the cupcake with the cats,’ Kayla said. ‘And don’t worry, Riley. I’ve already beaten up six girls who made fun of you, and I’m good for more.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, Kayla.’ Riley ran a fist over her eyes. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No problem. I like to get in fights. I’m good at punching. God made me a fighter. Peace be with you all,’ Kayla said.

  Peace be with you two girls, I thought. Bommarito women never live easy lives.

  Bao had not responded well when he’d seen my mangled face.

  He had brought me dinner several times while I was at home, but we had not seen each other. The dinners were Asian works of art. He constructed a little house made out of noodles for one of my dinners and had created a 3-D design with chopped vegetables for another. I could hardly eat them they were so beautiful.

  I watched as his expression morphed from delight at seeing me back at the bakery to devastation.

  ‘I no understand…’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘Your face… Ah, Isabelle, Isabelle…’

  ‘I’m OK, Bao, I’m OK. Please don’t worry.’

  ‘Ah, Isabelle…’ Tears sprang to his eyes before his whole face froze, not a muscle moving. It was as if he was moving to another part of his mind. ‘You been shot?’

  ‘Bao?’ I said.

  His eyes didn’t blink. His mouth opened a little and he seemed suddenly petrified, as if he were in the midst of his own horror movie. ‘You been shot.’

  ‘Bao!’ I said, louder now. ‘Bao!’

  ‘Attack. Attack.’ He didn’t move, but his mouth closed, then opened and he made low, moaning sounds as his eyes skittered back and forth.

  I grabbed his arm when he started muttering in Vietnamese.

  Grabbing Bao’s arm was the wrong thing to do. He instantly crouched, arms out at the elbow, hands in a karate-like position. He spoke again but the words were chopped and fast, as if he was giv
ing orders. He hunched down.

  I instantly let go and threw up both hands up in the I’m-not-going-to-mess-with-you position.

  He made a few sharp commands, still in Vietnamese, then got on his stomach.

  ‘Bao,’ I said, so gentle. ‘It’s Isabelle. You’re not in Vietnam. Bao…’

  One tear trickled from his eye. It dribbled past his nose and off his chin. When it hit the floor, he suddenly lurched up, hands in a defensive position, and limped out.

  I saw his profile as he hobbled by the window, mouth open, eyes wide, his expression encased in fear. I took off after him, as fast as I could, which wasn’t fast at all because my shin felt like it was splitting again, my ribs, I was sure, were recracking, and my split chin sent jolts of pain to my ears.

  Two giant trucks had to rumble out of nowhere, so I had to wait to avoid being turned into a human pancake. For a short, skinny, scared man, he was moving right along.

  When the trucks finally moved, I limped down the sidewalk but lost him when he left the main street and shuffled up a hill lined with houses.

  When I rounded the corner I caught a glimpse of Bao opening and shutting a white garden gate. The gate was attached to the side of a triplex in truly stunning disrepair.

  On the front lawn of two of the three dwellings, there was trash, a beat-up trailer, an old car with no windows, broken kids’ toys, and a creepy guy out front who barely noticed me through the haze of the pot smoke encircling his head.

  Bao’s side was different. It was the lush gardens of Eden compared to the burning dry desert. His home had a curving rock pathway to the front door. Both sides of the path were covered in flowers and shrubs with two flowering pink trees spreading majestically over the tiny lawn. A white, curving arbour led to the front door.

  I limped across the road and opened the white garden gate, my body almost splintering from my venture. I saw Bao crouched behind a tulip tree in his little garden.

  ‘Bao?’ I said, coming closer.

  He spoke, but it was still in Vietnamese. I could tell he wasn’t with me yet, still in his own terrified world. I crouched in front of him and he kicked his feet out at me and put his arms up in that karate style again.