Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  Grandma stood up and saluted and sat back down.

  ‘Janie writes frightening, graphic books and likes her houseboat a little too much.’ Janie nodded, wiped her eyes with a hankie. I let my gaze rest on Bob The Man in Charge, who had come for the service. How kind he had been when he saw me, giving me a hug and handing Janie a tiny, old book. Wuthering Heights. She’d clutched it to her chest, grateful beyond measure.

  ‘I take pictures of people living in hell and suffer from depression. My reputation in Trillium River during high school was not stellar.’ I heard some laughter. ‘Cecilia is an incredible teacher and mother with a mouth that could put a trucker to shame and a temper that could knock a roof off a house. You all know our momma. She is not exactly meek. Our parents have got back together after nearly three decades apart. Kayla and Riley are quirky, too. They inherited it in their genes.’

  The girls nodded. Kayla flashed me a peace sign.

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘The Bommaritos are not normal. I told Cecilia that it would have been cheaper for our family to keep a shrink on a monthly retainer than to make individual appointments. It wasn’t a joke. We are often half crazed and together we become fully crazed.’

  I paused.

  ‘Except for Henry,’ I said softly. ‘Henry has never been crazed. In fact, Henry is the only sane, completely stable person in our family. He’s the one who brought us together and kept us together. He’s the one who kept the peace. He’s the one who softened all of us when the world made us too rough, too hard, too jaded. He was the centre of our family.’

  I shuffled my notes. ‘Henry loved many things, but he loved God, he loved Christ, he loved his family, and he loved his friends – all of you, the most. He loved all of you so much.’

  I heard the sniffling start then – someone blew his nose, another muffled a moan. ‘Henry knew what friendship was all about. He knew what it took to be a friend.’ I waited so my voice wouldn’t wobble. It wobbled. ‘From Henry I learnt what kindness and selflessness looked like. From Henry I learnt how one kind word, from one person, can change the day, maybe even the life, of someone else. From Henry I learnt to be. Be there. Be in the moment. Be in life.

  ‘There was no show with Henry, no airs, no false values, no pretences. He was our family’s constant smile during the hard times in our lives, the constant hope.’ I had to stop. ‘Henry brought us hope, and without hope, we have nothing. Nothing. Henry prevented us from buying into the nothing.’

  I struggled with a wave of emotion. ‘Henry told me that he was going to be with me after he died. I know he told many of you the same thing.’

  I saw heads nodding.

  ‘So let’s assume that Henry is here with us now. That he’s here, in the front row, right where he always sat, helping Father Mike at church.’

  I didn’t know how this part was going to go over, but I figured I would try it. What the hell. I knew Henry would love it.

  ‘I don’t think I always gave Henry all the appreciation I should have. Why? Because I wrongly assumed he would always, always, my whole life, be here with me. With us. I never envisioned that he would die first. I actually never envisioned he would die at all. I never imagined my life without him and I have to say—’ I had to stop again. ‘I have to say that I don’t know quite how to go on here.’

  Momma moaned in her seat and rocked back and forth.

  ‘In about thirty seconds I’m going to start clapping for Henry. For the innocent and pure love he brought into my life, for his laughter and for the way he made each stranger a friend. I’m going to clap for his forgiving heart, his love of pancake breakfasts and for all the times he flew with Amelia Earhart. I’m going to clap for the way he took care of me a few months ago, and all the times when we were kids when we could not protect him, and yet he still loved us. I’m going to clap for the strength he showed then and the strength he showed recently when he was dying. I’m going to clap for the faith he kept in other people, even when people weren’t kind, or good to him, and for the way he embraced each day as the gift that it is, then embraced anyone standing around him. No one, and I mean no one, has taught me more about living life than Henry.’

  I walked out from behind the podium and said, ‘This is for you, Henry. This is for you.’

  I started clapping. Clapping for Henry.

  There was a shocked pause; it did not last long.

  Momma was the first to struggle to her feet, with Dad’s help, and they started clapping and crying at the same time. Cecilia and the girls sprung to their feet and hooted, and Janie put both hands in the air and waved.

  Grandma joined me on the podium, pulled her flight goggles over her eyes, and saluted Henry several times, her eyes at the ceiling, as if she were seeing him.

  Didn’t take two seconds for the whole church to join in.

  We clapped and clapped. A standing ovation. For Henry.

  All for Henry.

  Before and after Father Mike and I spoke, incense was burnt, holy water was sprinkled, Dad and Cecilia and Janie read Old and New Testament scripture, Father Mike led us in prayer, we knelt and stood, knelt again. We took communion. A group of teenagers came up and played two of Henry’s favourite Christian rock songs with electric guitars and drums. Kayla and Riley led the congregation in ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Two rounds.

  Then it was over and there was Henry’s coffin, in the aisle, covered with a wreath with white flowers that Dad had bought.

  That was Henry in there. In that box. Gone.

  As we filed out, Grandma leant down and kissed the coffin. ‘Goodbye, co-pilot,’ she announced, then saluted smartly one more time. With solemn care she took her flight goggles off her head and laid them in the middle of the wreath on the coffin. She bowed, slow, deliberate, then zigzagged down the aisle, her back bent over like a pretzel, eyes on the floor.

  We helped Momma struggle out of the pew, then she leant over the coffin, her pathetic, broken wail echoing through the church and off the walls and down into everyone’s bones.

  Dad half carried her down the aisle with the help of Dr Silverton, Cecilia’s principal, who rushed to help.

  Kayla and Riley stood together by the coffin, their bare heads shining. ‘Bye, Uncle Henry. We love you,’ Riley whispered. ‘Thanks for always telling me I’m pretty. You’re the only one who believes it.’

  ‘I love you, Uncle Henry,’ Kayla said. ‘In all my religions, you’re going straight to heaven, so don’t worry.’

  Riley slung an arm around Kayla’s shoulders as they headed out.

  Then it was me and Janie and Cecilia, Henry’s sisters, together. We held hands, then bent to kiss the head of the coffin, together, right where Henry’s smile would be, our bald heads touching.

  ‘I love you, my brother,’ I whispered.

  We used to be the four Bommarito kids.

  Now we were three.

  Plus one in heaven, waiting for us, his angel wings flapping.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Six months later

  Grandma did not mean to burn the parlour down. It was, after all, one of her favourite rooms. She stored her aeroplane books in there and the aeroplane models she and Henry and Dad built together.

  I heard the fire engines zipping past our bakery, in the distance I saw smoke, and within minutes I got a panicked call from a neighbour.

  Janie and I rushed out of the bakery. I turned to Bao.

  ‘Go, go!’ he insisted, worried. ‘Go. I come help later!’

  ‘Bye-bye!’ Belinda called.

  ‘Grandma’s fine,’ Cecilia shouted at me and Janie as we roared up the drive on my motorcycle. ‘Momma’s fine, too. Dad’s coming home from work.’

  ‘What happened?’ We whipped off our helmets. The house seemed like it was mostly intact, except for that parlour. The flames were gone, but the black smoke still billowed.

  Cecilia took a deep breath. Although she’d run towards us, she wasn’t winded. Losing seventy pounds and walking
endless miles daily (‘So I don’t crack up’) had done wonders. Losing Henry had also killed Cecilia’s appetite. It had almost killed her.

  ‘Where are they?’ I asked.

  ‘Back of the ambulance.’

  We ran over, every nerve still jangling with fear.

  Behind us we heard Dad’s SUV roar up the drive. I tell you, it was a relief to see him. He had been demolished by Henry’s death and yet…he’d propped us all up, held Momma together, insisted we keep living. His gentleness, his strength, his calm in the face of our spiralling emotions, was the rock that kept us all from sinking back into our own demons. He understood us, he listened to us, his love was steady.

  I could see why Momma never stopped loving that man.

  I waved and ran for Grandma and Momma.

  ‘Grandma,’ I said to her, dropping to my knees. She was strapped to a gurney in the back of the ambulance with Momma.

  ‘You’re confused!’ she declared weakly. ‘I am Amelia Earhart, United States pilot.’

  I exhaled. She was covered in soot and smoke. I could see her pants were burnt. ‘Pardon me. How are you, Amelia?’

  ‘Fine. My plane crashed and I inhaled smoke and my pants caught fire. There are some bottom bullet wounds. I have a note for you.’

  She handed me a pink piece of paper. There was a smile on it.

  I smiled. I couldn’t help it. ‘Oh, Amelia!’ I hugged her.

  ‘Friendlies,’ Grandma wheezed. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘You’re fine, Momma?’ I asked, turning to her.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine! Are you blind? I’m sitting here, aren’t I?’

  I laughed.

  She scowled and smoothed her silk shirt, which had soot all over it. Her face and short, blonde hair were streaked with black.

  I got up and gave her a hug. She was shaking like a leaf. It was Momma who had dragged Grandma, coughing and sputtering, out of the house.

  ‘Oh, now, stop.’ She clung to me tightly. ‘You’re getting all gushy on me.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I insisted, not leaving her clutch. ‘But I’m glad you weren’t incinerated in the parlour. That would have been unpleasant. It would have messed up your military crew cut something awful.’

  ‘My crew cut!’ she exclaimed. ‘My hair is growing faster than yours! Isabelle, what do I do with you? Your sweet, dear Grandma could have been burnt alive and this is all my fault, my fault—’

  I heard Dad clamber in behind me and felt Momma’s talonlike clutch loosen.

  ‘River!’ he said as he shot into the ambulance, his bum leg not slowing him down. He was as white as a sheet. He held Momma close, his scarred cheek next to her smooth, sooty one. ‘You’re all right, sweetheart?’

  ‘Yes I am, young man,’ she said, pulling back to cup his face. Dad was often ‘young man’. ‘Yes, I am.’

  They went forehead to forehead and he reached for Grandma’s hand. ‘Had a plane crash, Amelia?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I did.’

  See. Dad understood our family.

  He winked at me.

  You might think that we would have moved Grandma into a home after the parlour incident.

  We should have.

  We didn’t.

  The accident happened when Velvet was visiting her girlfriends in Vegas. We decided the next time Velvet was on vacation, we sisters would switch off watching Grandma like hawks. Momma had taken a brief afternoon nap and that was that. Flames went a’leapin’.

  Momma had been tired because we’d all gone together to the movies to see one of Janie’s books transformed to the big screen and returned home late. The movie was so scary, so suspenseful, Janie had to scuttle from the theatre in fear and tap her fingers together by the popcorn machine. We huddled in her closet that night while she embroidered. I held the flashlight. The movie scared the pants off us and neither one of us could sleep.

  It was a blockbuster.

  Grandma had stood and said the Pledge of Allegiance at the end of it.

  The next day Grandma decided that she needed to build a fire in the parlour to keep herself warm that afternoon after her flight while Momma slept. She found the matches and whoosh. Her fire was made.

  After the fire, Momma wouldn’t hear of moving Grandma. ‘We will not put that sweet, dear woman in a home after all she’s done for me, for us, after all she’s sacrificed.’

  We sisters did not laugh at that, but a vivid image of those two throwing ornate glass bottles at each other, locked in another power struggle, did spring to mind.

  ‘I’m putting my foot down.’ Momma literally put her foot down. ‘Grandma stays here.’

  So we locked up the matches, the iron, anything else that could get hot, and put funny things on the stove and oven to lock ’em up. We put alarms on all the doors.

  Who was to argue with a foot going down? Especially Momma’s.

  Plus we loved having Amelia around.

  Three weeks after Henry’s funeral, I started working again. I flew to the Sudan with Stefan Morticelli, an international documentary filmmaker I’d worked with many times who was livid with me for not returning his calls or e-mailing him back these past months.

  I endured his screaming at me for about two minutes, then said, ‘Whaddya got?’

  He told me.

  We went and shot what we could of the atrocities in the Sudan and managed not to be literally shot. I was worried my mind would collapse again like an origamically folded kite, but it didn’t.

  I handed Stefan my film when we returned to Paris and he went to work. The world needed to know what was going on – these people were in dire, sick, atrocious circumstances, the women and girls endlessly attacked – and I was glad I went, though my bones were cracking with stress, my soul chipped from the things I’d seen.

  But I also knew I couldn’t work full time as I had before unless I wanted to re-electrocute my brain and end up muttering in group therapy again.

  My solution: about four times a year I leave the tranquillity of Oregon and head to a hellhole.

  Though I hate seeing people at the lowest levels of poverty and desolation around the world, my work is me. I am my work. I can’t give it up without losing a part of myself.

  Beyond that, I believe that the work I do is important. Part of our world is smothered in blood.

  People need to know.

  I held one of my cameras in my hand one afternoon in front of the Columbia River, the wind blowing my short brown curls, and took a picture of myself.

  This time, I did not have Momma’s handprints on my face.

  I was actually smiling.

  When the land next to Grandma’s Queen Anne went up for sale, Janie and I threw our money together and bought it. Janie and I hired two brothers we knew from high school to build a home for each of us on the five acres.

  I also bought the bakery from Momma.

  She told me she would accept ten dollars for it. I laughed, paid her a heck of a lot more. She wouldn’t cash my cheque, so I brought her the money, in cash, in a box.

  She and Dad sneakily took my bank card out of my purse, asked Janie for my PIN number, and deposited the cash back into my account via the cash machine, minus ten dollars.

  I have sold my loft and am now the owner of Bommarito’s Bakery.

  Bring on Bommarito’s Heavenly Cupcakes.

  Bob The Man in Charge and Janie often meet, here in Trillium River and at Bob’s house. They read the classics out loud together and have, apparently, got into reading poetry. Janie blushed when she told me this. They don’t like scary movies or reading violent stories in the newspaper.

  ‘He asked me about my tapping and I told him about that small compulsion,’ she weeped out one night under the willow tree. ‘He says he has some obsessive-compulsive problems, too. I was so happy to hear that! A feeling of peace and tranquillity came over me then and we put on classical music and reset our inner harmony, after I’d checked his stove.’

  How delightful.

  We all
need inner harmony.

  Even Cecilia has found some inner harmony. I grasped how far her harmony had grown when I thought she was having a heart attack.

  I was simmering the same, luscious spaghetti sauce that Henry loved when my heart started to race, a weight crashed on my chest, and I was hot. Rip-roaring hot.

  I slumped against the counter as a wave of breathlessness hit, followed by panic for Cecilia.

  I knew the girls were visiting Parker, who was struggling under the weight of giant bills from the long-gone Constance, including a Herculean loan for the boat, at least thirty pairs of high heels, and two vacations he did not go on with her during their marriage. He was working as a salesman at a used-car lot and living in an apartment in the suburbs.

  ‘He’s a lot nicer now for some reason,’ Kayla said, who had moved on from studying religions to studying world cultures and often wore a kimono or a grass skirt.

  ‘Yeah, I think it was getting his ass whipped that did it,’ Riley said. She still struggled with trichotillomania. Probably always would. But the bald spots were certainly less noticeable and she liked her shrink. ‘Dad’s so humble it’s sickening.’

  ‘Yeah, sickening.’

  I did not bother to knock at Cecilia’s door, sprinting through her house and pounding up the stairs to her bedroom.

  This is why you should always knock before entering anyone’s bedroom: they may have something personal going on. Intimate personal.

  I thundered through the door and flew into her room.

  And that’s when I had the pleasure of making Dr Silverton’s (naked) acquaintance again, as he was there, in my sister’s bed, candles creating a romantic atmosphere. I did note to Cecilia later that he had a well-shaped bottom.

  ‘Uh…uh…excuse me,’ I stuttered, waving my hands around. ‘Cecilia, sheesh. I’m sorry.’

  She laughed and wiggled her naked shoulders at me. I giggled, then slunk like a skunk right out of that house.

  Over my spaghetti, though, I laughed and laughed until my tears mixed with the sauce, the spices, and the stringy cheese.