Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  ‘What happened, Thelma?’ Momma asked, clutching Henry. She was still trembling, but not as much.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Thelma snapped. She crossed her fleshy, age-spotted arms over her cannonball stomach.

  ‘Now, Henry, tell your mother what you did.’

  Henry’s eyes flew open wide. He flung back his head and howled, a howl from the bottom of that poor boy’s soul. ‘I no tell I no tell I no tell!’

  Momma’s face registered her shock, as did Thelma’s and Trent’s.

  To the side of the house, I saw that those two bony boys with the maniacal grins had their hands over their mouths so they wouldn’t laugh.

  Henry whipped around to the boys. ‘I no tell I no tell I no tell!’ he shouted at them. ‘I noooo tell!’

  I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what. People didn’t talk back then about that type of secret, plus I never even knew that crime existed. It was beyond my imagination.

  ‘I wanted him to tell you, Ms Bommarito’ – Thelma’s upper lip arched in disgust – ‘that Henry went to the zoo with us.’

  ‘I no tell! I no tell!’ Henry sobbed, clinging to me, eyes squished shut.

  ‘I think we’re done here,’ Thelma said, her disapproval dripping and sticky. ‘I would like to inform you that we will be imposing discipline on Henry. He may not like it, but he needs it. We can’t have him out of control like this. Emotional. Needy. Even these people can learn new tricks. They can be trained.’ She made to shut the door. ‘Like pets.’

  ‘He needs a man’s hand, River,’ Trent said. ‘A man’s hand. Not a woman’s weakness, and I aim to give Henry the discipline he needs. Women alone can’t raise boys to be men.’

  ‘You big fuck—’ Cecilia started.

  ‘You watch your mouth, missy,’ Trent roared. ‘I can see you’re going to take after your mother in your behaviour. A husband’s gonna have to take a firm hand to you—’

  ‘I’d like to take a firm hand to your face,’ I said. ‘Maybe I could slap it back into shape.’

  ‘Shut your mouth—’

  ‘Shut yours or I’ll nail it shut,’ Janie whispered. (That line went in her first book years later.)

  Trent’s eyes popped.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Thelma snapped. ‘See you on Sunday.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ll see us on Sunday,’ Momma yelled over the din of Henry’s screams.

  ‘Well, dear, I don’t think you have a choice. You have a night job, right?’

  Thelma’s husband smirked. I saw the way he stared at Momma and I wanted to smack him. ‘Yes, you’re busy nights, aren’t you?’

  Momma turned red. ‘Come on, Henry. We’re going home.’

  ‘I no tell I no tell!’ Henry howled, his arms locked around my waist as I tried to reassure him, comfort him.

  Impossible.

  We went home.

  As soon as we got there, Henry started throwing glasses. We had to duck. We had to hide behind the couch. We had to hide under the table.

  Calm, sweet, loving Henry was enraged.

  One glass cracked and somehow split Momma’s hand open. Blood gushed.

  ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ Henry screeched, cowering in a ball and covering his head. ‘Oh no! Blood! Blood! I sorry Momma! I sorry!’

  To get Henry to go back to the group home on Sunday night, we had to drug him.

  ‘Should we keep him home?’ Cecilia whispered Sunday afternoon, before the drugging, while inhaling her fourth ice cream bar.

  ‘He hates the foster home,’ Janie said, rocking back and forth as she embroidered. ‘One…two…three…four…’

  ‘I know he hates it,’ I said, clenching my teeth. My nerves were fried, my head ringing from stress. ‘But what about Momma? I think she’s about ready to jump off a roof.’ I wasn’t kidding.

  ‘She still wants to die,’ Janie sobbed.

  ‘We need to send Henry back,’ I insisted. ‘Maybe this week will be better. Momma needs time to sleep during the day and not worry about anything. We may have to take her back to the hospital to stay while we’re in school.’ I paused. ‘Henry’s going to be hysterical or Momma’s going to go over the edge. Which is it?’

  We drugged him.

  Momma put two of her sedatives in his orange juice. When he was asleep, we hauled him out the door and to the car.

  Momma’s hands were white, trembling doves on that steering wheel and she did not speak.

  The weekend had been fraught with Henry’s hysteria. He see-sawed from tears to rage and back again. We lost five more teacups, and one green and one red bevelled bottle to the wall. He clung to us, weeping.

  He barely made it to the toilet to defecate. Janie and I had to yank his pants down for him and shove him to the toilet. He screamed, as if it hurt, and told us to ‘Get out get out get out! Privacy! Privacy!’

  We got out.

  Later he had diarrhoea and told us his bottom ‘ouched.’ We kept asking him what was wrong, but he yelled, ‘I no tell, I no tell!’ and we couldn’t get anything from him.

  We took the sleeping Henry from the car and into his bed at the group home.

  Thelma watched disapprovingly from the doorway of his bedroom as Momma limped out, head held up. She did not acknowledge Trent standing there, who we were later to discover went to watch Momma all the time at work.

  ‘Your momma’s got good tits,’ he told us, smirking, when Momma was out of earshot.

  ‘And you have a small dick,’ I told him. ‘Flaccid. Weak.’

  ‘And a fat ass,’ Janie added. ‘Like blubber cannons. I’d like to chop them off with a hatchet.’ (Line in her second book.)

  ‘Are you related to a pig? Your nose, it’s amazing,’ Cecilia said. ‘Piglike. Snort for me, would you, you ugly pig?’

  Over the next week, Momma relapsed.

  She spent all day in bed, dragging herself out to strip at night. She was seeping away from us, minute by minute. I had found a large stash of sleeping pills under her mattress and when I held them in front of her, she moaned again, not speaking, not arguing, moaning.

  She told us that she loved us on a Thursday afternoon. We’d gone to the church in town after school and she’d clutched her rosary on the altar as she said her prayers.

  It was sad that the love declaration had to come pre-suicide attempt. ‘You are the only good things I’ve done with my life besides Henry.’

  We knew then she was done. Done. She’d given up.

  ‘Momma,’ Janie said. ‘Please don’t do this. Please don’t. What would happen to us? To Henry?’

  Momma shook her head and left for stripping, though we begged her to go back to the hospital. We waited at home, wide awake in bed, hoping to hear her key in the lock, panicked that Momma would drive down some curving lane and go to sleep forever.

  We found a pink note on the counter. It said, in a shaky scrawl, ‘I love you.’

  We drove a weak, almost stumbling Momma to the hospital the next morning, skipping school again. We hauled her in to her doctor. The appointment lasted two hours and she came out clutching two new bottles of pills.

  We got the call from Thelma the ugly man-woman at eight o’clock on a Thursday night.

  ‘Henry has run away, young lady. We can’t find him.’ Her voice teetered and I could tell that even she was upset.

  My mouth went dry. ‘What do you mean he’s run away?’ I yelled. Cecilia and Janie came running in from the kitchen and picked up the other phone to listen in.

  ‘He tried…’ She stopped.

  ‘He tried what?’

  ‘He wasn’t happy when he woke up here on Monday morning and he’s been trying to run away since. We had to put him in…’ She coughed. ‘We had to put him in…in restraints.’

  ‘Restraints?’

  ‘What the hell is a restraint?’ Cecilia shouted.

  ‘It’s a…’ Thelma faltered. ‘They’re leather straps that go on the wrists and the ankles—’

  ‘What?’ W
e all wailed like banshees.

  ‘You tied Henry down?’

  ‘You put leather straps on Henry?’

  ‘I’m calling the police!’

  ‘We already did,’ Thelma said. ‘They’re looking for him.’ She muttered, ‘God help me.’

  I turned to the window. It had rained all day. It was still raining. Shadows swished and shifted. And Henry was out there by himself. Soaked. Scared right out of his sweet mind.

  ‘How long has he been gone?’

  ‘I’m not…we think hours…we’re not sure… Someone took the straps off him, they must have. It wasn’t me.’

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know? He’s in your house! Weren’t you watching him at all?’ Cecilia shrieked. ‘What if he had to pee? What if he had to shit? What if he was scared to death? Dammit, you fat cow, how long was he in restraints for?’

  There was silence on the other end.

  ‘How long?’ I yelled.

  ‘We have to restrain these retarded people sometimes so they don’t hurt themselves, they can be animalistic in their behaviours…’

  ‘How long?’ Janie demanded. ‘Tell me or I’ll come over and slash your face with my pocket-knife.’ (Line from her third book.)

  ‘We can’t let retarded people have the same freedoms as normal people, they’re not normal, they need to be handled…’

  ‘I am going to handle you, you stupid bitch.’ I could hardly suck in air. ‘Now how long was it?’

  Thelma sighed. ‘He was in restraints twice. Once for ten hours because he wouldn’t calm down, then a break. He had a temper tantrum about two o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, so we had to put him in restraints again.’

  My head swam. ‘But you checked on him at night – you stayed with him, right?’

  A long pause. ‘Well, no. My husband and I say goodnight to the boys and then we go to our home next door to sleep.’

  ‘You don’t sleep in the same house?’ I said, fighting a wave of nausea. ‘Henry was left alone, tied down to a bed with leather straps? Is that right?’

  There was no answer.

  I felt sick.

  ‘You’re going to regret this,’ I told her. ‘You are so, so going to regret this.’

  I hung up. Cecilia slammed a fist into the cupboard and cracked it. My hand instantly ached. Janie folded in on herself and fell to the ground, fingers twitching.

  I called the police because I didn’t trust that Thelma had actually done it.

  Miraculously, they already knew about the case and were organised and searching for Henry.

  Our next call was going to be much, much worse.

  One minute later I had the strip club on the line. Cecilia hit the cupboard again, the fake wood split, and the bones in my hand felt like they’d cracked. ‘Stop it, Cecilia!’ I told her, holding my fingers. ‘Stop it!’

  A man picked up on the twentieth ring. ‘I need to speak to River Bommarito.’

  ‘She’s dancin’, can’t talk now.’

  ‘I have to talk to her.’

  ‘Call back later.’

  ‘I can’t, it’s an emerg—’

  ‘She ain’t comin’ off that stage.’

  The dial tone zinged in my ear.

  Janie groggily sat up with Cecilia’s arm bracing her back.

  ‘Momma’s not home for another six hours. We have to go and tell her,’ I said. ‘She needs to know.’

  We breathed deep.

  ‘On the count of three,’ Janie moaned. ‘One…two…three…’

  We all turned at the same second, grabbed our coats, and stumbled through that front door as if we were being chased by a band of Satan’s terrorists.

  We ran through all the shifting shadows of the night to the strip joint, the rain drenching us straight through. In the distance I could hear thunder, with lightning forking through the electrified blackness.

  It was named ‘The Gentleman’s Club’. The doorway had a hint of an Asian influence with a semi-elaborate arch and two fake trees in front. Obviously, there were no windows.

  But, as always in these places, there were not any gentlemen inside. Not that I’d been in one, but I knew it, even as a kid: gentlemen do not go to strip clubs.

  We panted as we raced to the back of the building, knowing there was no way anyone would let us in the front. We tried one door and the next, but they were locked.

  I bit my mouth until I tasted blood. I was so furious I cried.

  ‘Stop crying, Isabelle!’ Cecilia hissed at me, even though tears were running down her own cheeks. ‘You baby.’

  ‘Shut up, Cecilia.’

  ‘No, you shut up.’

  ‘Both of you shut up,’ Janie told us.

  We waited for a back door to open, and the second it did we slid into the shadows, then slipped into the building like ghosts.

  The door clicked behind us, the corridor lit by a single bulb. We heard women chattering in a room to our right, and I edged myself around the corner. It was the dressing room. I saw three women, all in various states of undress, their hair teased out, make-up heavy, cheap perfume wafting out, but no Momma.

  We sneaked along the cement walls, the smell of decades of smoke and alcohol and hopelessness and moral depravity clinging to them.

  Maybe there was another place Momma would be? Another dressing room?

  We rounded another corner and landed about four feet from the stage. The spotlight shone down, some silver ball spun on the ceiling, men hooted and hollered, the music pounded, and there was Momma, made up, a long blonde wig on, swinging around a pole, almost completely naked, only a sparkly sash wrapped around her body in strategic places, with a ton of money stuffed in a tiny G-string.

  Janie burst into tears.

  Cecilia made a gagging sound.

  I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly freezing cold. And sick. I felt sick. Disgusted. Humiliated.

  A ball of blackness ping-ponged through my brain. Even then I recognised my depression, roarin’ on in.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Momma slithered down the pole for a grand finale, tossed off the sparkly scarf, stood with her shoulders back, and bent to bow.

  I turned away and bent over double. I felt like I’d been hit in the gut with a two-by-four. Cecilia motioned me to grab the other side of Janie because Janie’s eyes were shutting, eyeballs rolling back, her knees giving out. I knew she was shifting into faint mode.

  We caught Janie and propped her up against a smoke-infused wall down another creepy corridor. She made weak panting sounds, as if she were drowning in shock.

  Once I had her propped, I laid my forehead against the rough wall of that smoky hallway, too.

  I wanted to kill those men.

  I wanted to die.

  And, for a flash, I’ll tell you this: I hated my momma. I had hated her many times, especially for the stripping, but seeing it was another thing altogether.

  But along with the hatred and the searing anger, I recognised another emotion, one she would hate knowing I harboured: pity. I pitied my own momma for the gritty, dirty nightmare her life had become.

  And, in one corner of my selfish teenage brain, I knew this: she was doing it for us.

  When Janie was woozily standing upright again by herself and Cecilia had quit swearing and hitting the wall with her fist, and I didn’t feel shock cruising through me like liquid bile, we scuttled back into the dimness of the hall and hid in a tiny alcove about four feet down from the dressing room, closest to the outside door. Momma would kill us when she saw us, but at least she would never, ever know that we had seen her up on that smoky stage.

  Momma grabbed me by the ear and hauled me out of the Gentleman’s Club. I stumbled along behind her, worried my ear was going to be ripped right off my head, as she hollered at the three of us at once.

  ‘I am going to tan your hides!’ she shrieked. ‘You have done some stupid things, but this is the stupidest! I am so angry at all of you I could spit! In fact I think I will spit! Damm
it! This was your idea, wasn’t it, Isabelle!’

  She unlocked the door of our old, beat-up car and shoved me in before I could utter a word. She had taken one stricken look at us in the hallway of that strip club and had started yelling, throwing a sweatshirt and jeans on, but not before I saw the abject horror, the searing shame in her expression.

  I hit the top of my head on the way into the car but scrambled over the seat as quick as I could. Cecilia and Janie dove into the back. Janie was hiccupping she was so upset, and Cecilia was muttering swear words.

  Momma’s hands shook as she tried to turn the key of our old clunker. The engine didn’t turn over, not once, but twice.

  ‘Shit shit shit!’ She wiped the tears rolling out of her eyes with both hands. ‘Shit!’

  ‘Momma…Momma,’ I waved my hands and shouted. ‘Momma!’

  ‘You shut up! I am taking you home and we will discuss this later! I have to be back in twenty minutes or I’ll lose my job!’

  ‘Momma! Momma!’

  She closed her mouth for a millisecond at my high-pitched scream. I took a deep breath. This was going to level Momma, I knew it. Level her flat. ‘Henry’s gone.’

  ‘Wh-What?’ Even in the dim light, rain pouring down the windshield, I could see her face. It drooped, her mouth going slack. ‘What do you mean Henry’s gone? He’s not gone! He’s at the home.’

  ‘Yeah, Momma, he is, he is gone,’ Cecilia said. ‘The police have been called. He ran away.’

  I swear to this day that twice we took corners on two wheels on the way to Thelma’s as Momma yelled and swore. Her depression still enveloped her like an avenging spirit, but her instinct to save her child overrode it.

  Thelma, the man-woman, met us at the door, snuffling, her nose running, her blue robe stained. Trent stood behind her, tanklike, stale smelling and pale. About six policemen were also there, the blue and red lights flashing over their cars.

  ‘What the hell happened, Thelma!’ Momma spat out, ignoring the policemen. ‘Isabelle said you had my boy in leather restraints and that you tied him to the bed! Is that true, you bitch, is that true?’

  Thelma put her chubby hands over her face.

  ‘Is it, ma’am?’ the policeman asked, perplexed. ‘Was the boy in restraints? You never mentioned that. Neither did you,’ he accused Trent. The officer glared at them.