by Annabel Lyon
“When they die, it’s mine,” Jenny said. “You can have the rest of their crap.”
Saskia spun the chair in slow circles, propelling herself with a socked foot on his desk drawer, the way she had done all her life. It was raining quietly. In a little while she might pour herself a drink and light the gas fireplace in the sitting room and try the photos again.
The room that was briefly Jenny’s had been stripped and redone—new paint, and pale wood flooring where before there had been pale carpet. The hospital bed and the monitors were gone, of course. The room was bare but for a mirrored wall and barre, a green yoga mat, a green Swiss ball, and a CD player on the floor. Saskia pressed play and listened to the beginning of a guided meditation. She pressed stop.
Her parents’ bedroom was unchanged, except that the framed family photos were gone. Her mother’s chic silk jersey dresses still hung on the left side of the closet, her father’s pinstriped suits on the right. In their bathroom, Saskia uncapped and sniffed her father’s vetiver shaving cream. She sprayed her mother’s Chanel onto one wrist and went through the bathroom drawers, slowly, looking at hairbrushes and prescription tubes of eczema cream (her father) and facecloths and manicure scissors and blood pressure pills (her father) and dry shampoo (her mother, for days when she was too hungover to shower). They had kept their frailties neatly in bathroom drawers, like the old people they were.
Back downstairs, she opened the fridge and studied the condiments: grainy mustard, Major Grey’s chutney, lemon curd, butter, Maalox, mayonnaise. Tonic water, but no milk or fruits or vegetables. But of course they had gone on holiday and her mother would have given these to a neighbour before they left. In the freezer were ice cube trays, blueberries, coffee beans, and a couple of small steaks wrapped in butcher paper. Saskia left these on the counter to thaw.
The mail was piled on the island. Her mother would have given the key to a neighbour and asked for it to be brought in, and the plants watered. Saskia would have to retrieve that key tomorrow. Bills, flyers, a newsletter from the Law Society, and a postcard from their old friends the Shaws, who were also vacationing, in Chiang Mai. The Shaws were having a wonderful time. The phone bill included a reminder that their three-year family plan was coming to an end. The Law Society was hosting its annual colloquium on legal aid.
The radio was tuned to the CBC. The television was tuned to the CBC. Their “recently watched” list on Netflix included a travel documentary about Scotland, a documentary about Churchill, Shakespeare in Love, the original British House of Cards, and Planet Earth: From Pole to Pole. They only got ten minutes into that one.
She was aware that she was making lists, probably some kind of anticipatory defence mechanism. There would be a lot of lists in the days to come.
The closed basement door, just off the kitchen, stared at her.
The wine was kept in the kitchen, the liquor in the sideboard in her father’s office. Saskia poured a gin and tonic and found some water crackers in the cupboard to have later with the steaks. But she left the drink on the kitchen counter when she went downstairs because she was not her mother. She didn’t need to dull anything.
They had clearly not been down here since Saskia left home. There was a coating of dust on everything, like volcanic ash, and a musty, unaired smell. The door to her old room was open, but Jenny’s was still closed. She stripped her old bed, sending clouds of dust skirling into the air, stuffed the linens into the suite’s washing machine, and hit start. The machine’s measured thump was reassuring. A plate and mug sat atop the TV. Whatever residue remained in the mug had long since transposed into a dense white cobweb of mold. Saskia took the dishes up to the kitchen sink and came back down. She opened a window to the cool, rainy night air.
They had wiped Jenny away upstairs. What had they done down here?
Saskia opened Jenny’s door and stood for a while leaning on the doorjamb. Nothing. They had done nothing, touched nothing, removed nothing that Saskia could see. The same dust was everywhere. Her bed was made, her closet was full, her laptop sat closed on her desk.
Saskia imagined herself as Jenny hearing the news of their parents’ death. No tears came. From a hook in the closet Saskia took one of Jenny’s scarves, a frothy pink thing of some tremblingly fine wool, and buried her face in it.
Upstairs, the phone rang. Saskia added a bullet point to her mental list: check phone messages. Then her cell rang in her pocket: Marcel, checking on her. That was kind. She answered so he wouldn’t come back to the house, and so he could hear that she had been almost crying. Doing the things, Saskia thought. Doing the healthy grieving things.
His voice was warm and rough with emotion. So he at least had been crying. They arranged to meet in the morning. He would pick her up at the house and accompany her through the day. He had already been in touch with the authorities in Edinburgh. They would have to visit the consulate for paperwork, call the airline, arrange a funeral home to receive the remains, and so on. There would be phone calls to make, informing people, but he said Christine would do those. Saskia was not alone, he stressed. They loved her like a daughter, and would be with her every step of the way. He probably meant it too.
After promising him she’d try to get some sleep, Saskia turned her phone off. She decided to spend the night in Jenny’s room. She moved around the house—making up Jenny’s bed, shifting the laundry to the dryer, pouring the gin down the sink, frying and eating the steaks, unpacking her overnight bag and getting into her pyjamas—while grief broke over her in waves. Far between, at first, and then closer and closer together, like labour pains, or (eventually) a heartbeat. Finally she went into Jenny’s room and got under the covers, but the thump of the dryer was overwhelming. It was so much louder in Jenny’s room than her own, and she thought about all the times she had set a load to run just before going to bed, and Jenny had said nothing. She got up to close the door.
Hanging on a hook on the back of the door was a black leather dog collar and leash. Someone had Sharpied remember what you are on the door with an arrow pointing to the collar. Someone not Jenny. It wasn’t her handwriting.
* * *
—
“Does your family have a dog?” the young woman named Madhu asked two days later.
“No, never. My mother was allergic.”
“And you don’t recognize the handwriting? No one in your family?”
Her father’s square printing, her mother’s scrawl, Jenny’s cheerful loops. “No.”
The young woman looked at the photo on Saskia’s phone again. “Does it mean anything at all to you? Remind you of anything? Even something that might seem irrelevant.”
Saskia shook her head.
“Looks like she wasn’t really trying to hide it.”
“I don’t know. She always left her bedroom door open, and it was on the back of the door. There’s no reason why anyone but her would have seen it.”
“You’re sure no one’s been in her room since the accident? Two years is an awfully long time.”
“It was so dusty, so unchanged—I think my parents couldn’t bear to, and I left home.” To this Madhu bowed her head in tactful acknowledgment. “Does it mean anything to you?” Saskia asked.
Madhu kept her face blank. “Pretty standard BDSM gear. Was your sister into—”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“No.” Saskia touched her temple. “I mean, I guess I’m not sure, no.”
“We can look into it.” Madhu touched the dog collar and leash, which Saskia had brought in a Ziploc bag. It sat on the table between them. “Where this might have been purchased. Clubs she might have gone to, that kind of thing. Depending on how far you want to take this, we could take a look at her room. Her laptop, her phone. You have those?”
“The laptop is on her desk but her phone got mislaid. I don’t know where it is.”
Madhu hesitated. “You could also just let this go. It might not mean anything much and it doesn’t change who your sister was to you.”
Saskia looked around the office, a Yaletown loft with exposed brick walls, pipes running artfully along the ceiling. They sat in low chairs with a Plexiglas table between them. Across the loft sat a couple of young men at another such table, busy on their laptops, occasionally glancing over at them. Her colleagues, Saskia guessed. They were a living TV show, three millennials running an investigative agency, and today’s client was the woman with the dead twin who had sexual secrets. Fun!
“I’d like to know who wrote that on her door,” Saskia said. “I’d like to know who thought she was a what and not a who.”
Again, that carefully blank face. “Again, kind of standard BDSM…” Madhu searched for the word. “Role-play.”
“Role-play,” Saskia repeated.
* * *
—
Marcel Bouchard was as good as his word and guided her through every step. The funeral was expensive. Her parents’ trip to Scotland was expensive. Shelby, her mother’s clinic, was very expensive. The house was worth a lot of money, but they had used retirement money on their abortive attempt to bring Jenny home, and then on all the lawsuits her father had launched and lost after that. Still, there was enough in the estate that Saskia wouldn’t have to work for a few years, if she was frugal. She might not even have to sell the house right away.
“Though maybe better to get it done, no?” Marcel suggested. “A fresh start?”
“Not yet.” Saskia hadn’t told him about what she had found in Jenny’s room. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her sheaves of lists in front of her, talking to him on the phone. She had given notice at the coffee shop. Next on her list was to cancel the lease on her crappy apartment and move her few belongings back here. She would drop her student furniture at the Sally Ann on the way.
The doorbell rang. “I have to go,” she told him. “There’s someone at the door. More flowers, probably.”
“Nous t’aimons, Saskia.” It had become his sign off. We love you.
Downstairs, she opened the door to Madhu and her colleague, whom she introduced as Jay. Jay held up an iPad, where he had written nice house! He grinned widely at her.
“Jay is deaf,” Madhu said. “He reads lips.”
“Nice to meet you,” Saskia said.
Nice to meet you too!
Saskia led them to the door to the basement suite. “Down here.”
“Could we see the whole house after?” Madhu asked. “I mean, if it’s okay. You never know.”
Jay nodded vigorously.
“Sure, I guess,” Saskia said.
In Jenny’s room they were methodical, going through drawers and closets, putting everything back neatly as it was. Maybe they really had done this before. May I? Jay wrote, pointing at Jenny’s laptop.
Saskia took Madhu around the rest of the house while he sat with Jenny’s computer. “Jay’s my cousin,” Madhu said. “He’s really thorough, especially on the tech side.”
“Have you had cases like this before?”
Madhu looked through her parents’ bedroom window into the backyard. She turned back, her eyes roving up and down, but unlike in Jenny’s room she didn’t open any drawers. “Not exactly. No two cases are exactly alike.”
“But some parts are?”
Saskia saw her choosing her words. “We get a lot of sexual behaviours,” she said finally. “Lot of adultery. Lot of questions after a person has died and their pay-per-view statement comes and there’s all that porn or whatnot. Lot of figuring out after the fact that someone spent their life in the closet. Loved ones don’t always like what we have to tell them.”
“Do you ever not tell them?”
“Sometimes.” Madhu peered into her parents’ closet. “If someone might get hurt. I mean really hurt, like revenge. Some secrets are nobody’s business.”
“So if you don’t take my money, I’ll know there’s something you’re not telling me?”
“Oh, we’ll take your money,” Madhu said.
When they got back downstairs they found Jay at the kitchen table with Jenny’s laptop. He signed something to Madhu. “He wants to look for your sister’s phone,” she said.
They all went back downstairs to Jenny’s room again and Saskia retrieved the purse, Jenny’s camel suede Longchamp that she had spent an entire paycheque on, from the closet. She dumped the contents out on the bed. Wallet, makeup, keys, tissues, a travel tube of ibuprofen, and nail polish in the sky blue Jenny had been wearing at the time of the accident.
“Maybe your parents put it somewhere for safekeeping?” Madhu said.
In-home safe? Jay wrote. Bank safe deposit box?
Briefly, Saskia wondered if this was all a ruse for them to rob her. She shook her head. “I would have found it in those places already.
“What about the find-my-phone app?” Madhu asked.
Saskia shook her head. “She disabled it. She hated the idea of being tracked.”
Try calling it? Jay suggested.
So Saskia called Jenny’s phone number, and they all listened in case it rang somewhere in the house, but it went straight to message. Jay slapped his forehead and grimaced at his cousin, because of course the battery would have died long ago. Saskia listened to her twin tell her to leave a message and she would get back to her.
* * *
—
Saskia took to calling her sister throughout the day, just to hear her recorded voice. Of course her parents hadn’t cancelled Jenny’s phone, couldn’t bear to. These voicemails studded her days, like pills or cigarettes. She’d pull her phone out whenever she had a moment, or whenever she felt her chest tighten. I’ll get back to you.
Saskia also searched the house relentlessly, soon ritually, but the phone never surfaced. She contacted the cell phone company and got a log of her sister’s calls and texts, but they only showed the times they were made, not the content. She searched her sister’s room inch by inch: prising up the vent grills, shining a flashlight under the bed, unzipping the mattress cover, going through all the pockets in her clothes. Nothing.
She debated painting over the Sharpie on the back of the door. The words changed inflection almost every time she looked at them. They were sinister that first night, soiling her sister’s memory. They had less power in sunlight. Sometimes they almost seemed affectionate. Dogs had many admirable qualities, didn’t they? Loyalty, and so on? At times Saskia even allowed herself to contemplate the obvious: that her sister had had a sex life she kept secret, had tastes she knew her twin would neither share nor understand. Her sister was into role-play, BDSM. So what?
I don’t understand, that’s what, Saskia thought. I’ve had to understand so much, all my life. Be understanding. She thought of the times she tried to explain to Joel what it was like. It sounds lonely, he said once, which made her laugh. It was the opposite of lonely. Jenny was her sun and moon: there was no escaping her. Saskia was ever alert to the ways her sister could hurt her, ever afraid of the ways Jenny might hurt herself. She had quoted Archilochus back at Joel: A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing. Saskia knew Jenny. She’d suffered that knowledge all her life. Jenny didn’t get to have secrets now just because she was dead.
In the local paper she looked at the personal ads. She searched for clubs online and found many. She thought about visiting one, but she wanted only to see what her sister had actually seen, know what her sister had known. Since she didn’t know which clubs or fetish nights Jenny might have frequented, Saskia stayed home.
She dialled her sister’s number again and again. She listened to her sister’s voice.
Within a few days, her research into the BDSM world had begun to bore her. She remained doggedly unaroused by it all, the leather and whips and clips and
so on. On one of the club websites she’d found: Please wipe down dungeon equipment with disinfectant provided! On another: Let’s play it safe, sane, and consensual! Her own tastes were mainstream and perfunctory. She never had difficulty masturbating, or took long. With Joel she had rubbed her breasts in his face and then assumed the missionary position. He had wanted to be gentle because she was grieving, and because he was essentially a gentle man. Not long after the funeral he told her he’d been accepted into a graduate program in International Policy at Stanford. Saskia told herself she didn’t care. After all, she’d won Jenny’s ten-dollar bet. She didn’t need him anymore.
* * *
—
Christine Bouchard cooked cassoulet with a big green salad. For dessert was tarte Tatin served straight from her cast-iron frying pan. It was the first time since the funeral that Saskia had agreed to a meal at their house, though they’d asked many times. “Oh my goodness, Christine,” Saskia said, as they took their coffee cups to the living room. “That was amazing.”
“You come live with us and I’ll feed you every day of the week. Now that my nieces and nephews are grown, I only have Marcel to spoil. It’s not enough.”
“Her heart is too big,” Marcel said affectionately.
And yet, Saskia reflected, Christine had never come to see Jenny after the accident, neither in the hospital nor at their home. She knew what Jenny was.
What, but not who, Saskia thought. She didn’t need mothering from Christine.
“I’ll keep asking until you say yes,” Christine was saying. Saskia smiled and said how appreciative she was, but that she wasn’t ready to leave her parents’ house.
