Sister

by A. Manette Ansay

The bus finally arrived in Pineland, which was no more than a dozen houses, a gas station, and a fruit stand. We stopped at a crossroads, where several people got off, before continuing on toward the Pleasant Acres Adult Community, two miles down the road. I carried my duffel up the long crushed-shell driveway, past the trailers with their birdbaths and plaster rabbits and windmill ducks, until I reached number 26, solemn and plain, its curtains pinched like wary eyes. I saw the Ford in the carport, and I knew my father was home. Slick with sweat, I climbed up the porch steps, dropped my duffel and rang the buzzer. Immediately I heard footsteps moving away from the door. The light behind the front curtains dimmed. The rooms seemed to hold their breath.

  I leaned on the buzzer again, imagining the sound like a needle, stinging the tender back of my father’s neck. I pictured him flattened in his La-Z-Boy, the volume on the TV turned down to a hum as he waited for me to go away. Or perhaps he was crouching below the kitchen counter, the way Sam and I once did, warned not to let anyone into the house while our parents were at work. We’d take turns peeking out the window over the sink, popping up like startled jack-in-the-boxes, knees cracking. Eventually, the stranger—a girl selling cookies, a woman with a Mary Kay smile—would go away, though we always worried someone might think to lift the welcome mat and discover the spare key.

  That was an idea. I lifted the braided plastic mat that grinned the same Welcome, and there it was. I picked it out of the diamond pattern of dirt and rang the doorbell one last time. “Dad,” I called, and the front curtains moved slightly. He’d seen me. He wasn’t going to let me in.

  The sun was starting to set, sending orange streamers across the crushed-shell driveways, and I noticed that faces had begun to appear in the windows of the neighboring trailers. A man came out onto his porch to give me a hard stare. I unlocked the door, but it would not open. Furious, I threw my weight against it. I pounded it with my fists. More people appeared on their porches, and I was yelling at them to mind their own goddamn business when the sirens, no longer in the distance, distracted me. Two police cars fishtailed up the driveway, skidding to a halt in a spray of shells. I picked up my duffel bag as doors popped open, uniformed men launching into the air like springs. “Drop it, man!” one of them yelled. “Hands in the air, move, move!” Man? They weren’t kidding. They had guns. I leaned against the door, arms and legs apart, the way I’d seen people do in movies.

  I’d forgotten about my haircut. In Georgia, two little boys had run over as I opened the door to the women’s room. “That’s for girls,” they said, and even when I spoke, they were not sure what to make of me. “My name is Abigail Elise Schiller,” I called over my shoulder. “This is my father’s house.”

  When the officers heard my voice, they seemed to relax a little, but they cuffed me anyway. The cuffs were hot, like everything else. They led me to one of the squad cars, which, mercifully, was air-conditioned. In the front seat, an officer was punching my name into a computer. On the porch, two more officers were opening my duffel bag, rifling through the manila folder of flyers my mother had sent me. They opened the map she’d marked with red circles—one around each town where she hoped I’d post the flyers. The officer rattled the cage that separated us from each other, and I squinted at him pleadingly, remembering the long interviews after Sam disappeared, the scribbling pens that meant no one believed what you were saying.

  But all he asked was, “Do you know that man?”

  My father was standing on the porch, gesturing grimly. The officers followed the movements of his hands, as if he were hard to understand. He’d lost most of his hair and at least twenty pounds; his blunt chin was hidden in his collar. Only dogs look at the ground, he used to say, his chin pointing at you, a challenge. “Gordon Schiller,” I said, trying not to sniffle. “That’s my father.”

  “He doesn’t seem real glad to see you,” the officer said reflectively.

  “We don’t get along.”

  By the time I was allowed to step out of the car, most of the neighbors had accumulated on their porches, smoking, sipping cool drinks, exchanging comments. The men wore polyester pants held up with broad leather belts; the women reclined in floralprint dresses, nylon hose, cracked white sandals, floppy hats. They looked past me without curiosity, as if they’d seen my type before and knew exactly what to make of it. It was my father they were all staring at. He ignored them, watching closely as the officers removed my handcuffs, wearing the expression he always wore when observing anything vaguely mechanical.

  “You called the police,” I yelled. “I don’t believe this.”

  “I didn’t know it was you.” He scratched at the seat of his pants unselfconsciously, the habit of someone accustomed to being alone. A few thin, greasy strands of hair had fallen across his forehead.

  “You looked out the window!”

  “With that hair, you look like a goddamn boy.”

  Furious, I rubbed my wrists, more for show than because they hurt. “What if I’d been Sam?”

  I recognized the haughty look he always got when someone said something stupid. “You and Sam look nothing like each other.”

  I picked up my duffel and started to walk down the driveway, back toward the road. A woman followed me, carefully lifting her feet as if she were walking through several inches of water. The sandals she wore had three-inch heels, and her face creased with makeup when she spoke. “He’s missing a few pieces to the jigsaw,” she called to me.

  “What?” I stopped. Back on the porch, my father was going through all his gestures again, the officers nodding, shifting their feet. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. My eyes watered, and for a moment the woman’s face blurred into a clown’s colorful leer.

  “He’s cuckoo.” She twirled her finger near one ear. “We’ve been worried over him. You family?”

  “Daughter,” I said, and, for the second time that day, “We don’t get along.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to do something about him.” The rings she wore were attached to one another by a delicate web of gold chains. “My name’s Lily,” she said, and she encircled my wrist with her fingers. “You come by and visit me tomorrow. Number thirty.”

  I waited for her to release me. A flock of iridescent grackles landed on the single grassy plot, where there were park benches and a fountain spouting colored water. They argued in their wheezy voices, gobbling up things I couldn’t see. It occurred to me that I didn’t know where I’d go and how I’d get there once I reached the foot of the driveway. And what would I say to my mother? Lily, as if sensing my change of heart, let me go with a little wave in the direction of my father, as if to say Shoo! I turned around and walked back up the driveway to his trailer.

  Inside, the living room walls were bare except for the owl shaped clock that had once hung in our kitchen. There was a short couch, covered with a plastic sheet, a glass coffee table, a squat porcelain lamp. In the kitchenette, there was a table with one chair. The countertops were empty. Spotless. My father’s black lace-up shoes were cuddled head to toe by the door; beneath the window was a stationary bicycle, its split seat held together with duct tape. There was no sign that anyone else was here, had been here, or would be coming. I didn’t see anything of Sam’s. I watched as my father wedged an iron bar between the doorknob and the floor, twisting and double-checking the door locks as if they were delicate controls on an unstable aircraft.

  “Is the neighborhood that dangerous?” I said sarcastically.

  “You never can be too careful.”

  My nose was running again, and I searched my pockets for a tissue. He turned and stared at me suspiciously.

  “You got a cold?” he said.

  “Me and everybody else in Baltimore,” I said, and I waited for his favorite lecture, the one on Mind Over Matter that he always gave whenever Sam and I threw up or coughed or asked to stay home from school. Sickness, he claimed, was all in the head—after all, he hadn’t been sick a day in his life. But now, instead of lecturing, h
e seemed to shrink a little. “You keep away from me,” he said. “Come all this way to give me a cold.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, bewildered.

  “I go to bed early,” he said. “You can sleep here on the couch. Wash your hands and don’t touch anything. That’s how a cold spreads, hand to hand.” He didn’t ask me why I’d come, how long I wanted to stay. He took a deep breath and walked down the hall to his room, and it was then that I realized he’d been holding his breath—afraid of my germs. My father, who had never been afraid of anything or anybody, was nearly paralyzed with fear.

  I remembered him instructing Sam about bravery. Without warning, he’d strike out at my brother’s face with the back of his hand, stopping a bare whisker away from contact. “Made you flinch,” he’d say, and Sam’s thin shoulders hunched with the weight of his shame. He was eight, or nine, or ten, and always small for his age. “Try me,” I’d say, but my father never would. “You’re ready now,” my father would tell me. “It doesn’t count once you’re ready.” Our relationship wasn’t a physical one; my body was something delicate and, by implication, slightly inferior, something to be protected.

  At fourteen, Sam was still small for his age. One morning, when my father came downstairs for breakfast, Sam whipped his fist into the cushion of air around my father’s chin. My father slapped him hard, a reflex. “Made you flinch,” Sam said. His cheek was already swelling like a yellow pear; my father knew how to hit a man so it would count. My mother started yelling at them both. “This has just got to stop,” she said. But it never stopped, it went on and on, my father and Sam like precarious lovers, testing each other until the time came when neither of them flinched, ever.

  At the end of the hall, across from my father’s room, there was a single door, which was locked. Beside it was a bathroom, cramped with a toilet, a sink, and a shower stall. There were no towels, no soap—just a roll of white toilet paper. I stripped off my clothes and showered in the empty chamber, letting the water beat my chest like pointing fingers, you-you-you. In Wisconsin, my father’s clothes dominated the closet he shared with my mother; their bathroom was tangled with cords from his shaver, his electric toothbrush, his nose-hair clippers, toenail clippers, soaps, after shaves, tweezers, foot powders, tiny scissors and combs for his on-again/off-again mustache. And his smell—Old Spice cologne and something else, not unpleasant, but heavy, pungent, spilling out ahead of him, claiming space.

  When I stepped out of the shower into the steam, I felt as if I were still underwater. My cold made me shiver, feverish. Dripping, I pulled my clothes back on and walked around the house, searching for…what? In the kitchen, I looked in each of the cupboards: empty, empty. I opened the refrigerator, and there I found a few plates and cups, pieces of silverware, pots and pans. The door was crowded with bottles of vitamins, white-capped rows like cadets. The only food was on the top shelf: bottled water, stone-ground bread, organic peanut butter, a paper bag of apples. Health food. I selected an apple and bit into it, the cold electrifying my teeth. The Florida detective had been right. There was nobody here but an eccentric old man, and I had arranged to visit him for a week. I lay down on the couch, put my head on my hand to keep my face from sticking to the plastic cover, and slept.

  In the morning, I got up and ate another apple, waiting for my father until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to come out of his room. “I’ll be back for lunch,” I hollered through the door. I could hear a TV, the chatter of morning talk shows. Outside, the fine morning mist was already burning away. The heat felt good. I walked past the tiny grassy park toward the canal, eager to see the water. The trailers were like dolls’ houses, squatting exactly in the middle of their lots as if placed there by a child’s careful hand. Each was equipped with an air-conditioning unit, and the humming was like the sound of distant traffic, constant, dull, distracting.

  It was quieter by the canal, except for the boats and, occasionally, an airplane passing overhead. I saw an anhinga—a bird I’d read about in books—spread itself over a clump of mangroves like a shiny black scrap of cloth. Woodpeckers rattled the palm trees, and tiny lizards scuffled in the dry fronds beneath them. There were only two trailers at this end of the park, and one, I realized suddenly, was Lily’s—number 30. The mailbox was shaped like a bullfrog with a wide-open hungry mouth. LILY ANN SWEET was painted in pink block letters down the side of the post.

  I knocked at the door, and after a moment Lily appeared, in a satin nightgown. “Yes?” she said pleasantly. A matching sheer robe hung from her shoulders like a bridal train, and her slippers were covered with peach-colored feathers. “Oh!” she said then, recognizing me, and she pulled me over the threshold. Within minutes I was sitting in the sunny kitchenette, with an antique teacup balanced on my knee and my mouth full of English muffin. “Thanks,” I said gratefully. “My father doesn’t have much in his refrigerator.” Lily’s trailer was identical to my father’s, only here the windows were an explosion of greenery. Furniture turned the rooms into a flowery obstacle course.

  “I’m not surprised,” Lily said. “It doesn’t seem like he’s taking good care of himself.”

  I asked her if she had ever seen my father’s place.

  “Oh, we all used to visit him, the way we do each other,” Lily said. “But now he won’t let anybody in. The death of a child, it’s hard on anyone, but he only makes it worse by shutting himself away.”

  I must have looked at her strangely.

  She said quickly, “He told us about the accident when he first got here. He showed me the room where he keeps your brother’s things.”

  I put down my teacup. “What accident?”

  “The car accident?” Lily’s earrings and bracelets were jangling like alarms.

  “Oh,” I said, trying to sound casual.

  “It sounds like your brother was a wonderful young man. Makes it all the harder, I suppose, when you think of all the things he might have gone on to accomplish.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “What did he tell you about my mother and me?”

  She seemed to relax. “Why, nothing,” she said. “He never mentioned his wife. Or you. I didn’t even know you existed.”

  It was worse than any lie he could have told. The sun had found its way through the plants and was warm on the back of my neck. “I’d better get back,” I said. “I don’t want my dad to worry.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’re doing him a world of good,” Lily said. I thanked her, trying to gauge how quickly I could pack up my things and get on the next bus. But my father was waiting for me at the door. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on yesterday: pants too big around the waist, a soiled white shirt buttoned all the way up to his chin. “You left the goddamn place unlocked!” he shouted. Sweat rolled down his face like tears; his hands clutched each other, slipped free, then fluttered at his sides. “Just waltzed right out, leaving everything wide open!”

  “How else was I going to get back in?” I said, trying to step past him, but he blocked my way with his body; I realized he was offering me a key pinched between his thumb and index finger.

  “The one under the mat is for the first lock,” he said. “This is for the second. For Christ’s sake, keep the house locked up or we’ll end up with our throats slit.” He dropped the key into my hand. “You can’t trust anybody,” he said. “You can’t let down your guard for a goddamn minute.”

  “Why can’t you trust anybody?” I said. “Is that why you lied to Lily?”

  He backed down the hall and pounded his fist on the door across the hall from his room as if he expected somebody would open it from within. “This is all I have left of him. All I have left!” It had to be the room Lily had seen, filled with Sam’s things, the things my father had taken. And I realized each of them was a clue that would help me to know the difference between what I remembered and what I’d been told, between the answers I’d given to neighbors and friends and detectives and the unspoken ones I’d learned to
hide even from myself. You’re exaggerating, my mother said whenever I tried to talk about Sam. I don’t remember anything like that. But my father had the evidence, facts I could pick up and hold in my hand. I knew I wouldn’t leave until I’d been inside that room.

  Over the next few days, my father and I settled into a wary routine, avoiding each other politely unless I happened to violate a rule, in which case he would come to me, shaking, sometimes too terrified to speak. The pots and pans and plates and silverware had to be washed in special detergent. The curtains could not be opened because someone, a stranger, might look in; also, the sunlight raised the temperature of the air, which made it more hospitable to bacteria. He kept his toothpaste in an army trunk beneath his bed, in case, he explained earnestly, someone spiked it with acid like what happened to that retired man in Punta Gorda.

  “Maybe you should see a doctor,” I told him.

  “I never felt better in my life. Remember how my back used to hurt me?”

  I nodded, recalling his slipped disk.

  “Cured it myself,” he said proudly. “High-protein diet. Low sugar, low fat.”

  Mornings, he vacuumed, exercised on the stationary bike, and then scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom with ammonia. I offered to help with the cleaning, but it was clear I was not reliable—look at me, sick with a cold! I might miss a spot in my youth, in my carelessness, in my eagerness to get outside and into the carcinogenic sunlight. My father avoided sunlight, drafts, hot drinks, cold drinks, synthetic fibers, furry animals, and all situations where there might be spiders, mosquitoes, or flies. He rarely left the trailer more than once a day when, late in the afternoon, he walked to the Pleasant Acres Community Service Center to buy whatever food we needed for our evening meal. I trudged behind him like an uneasy pickpocket, hovering a bit too close. Once, we ran into Lily, but he scurried past her, leaving me to exchange pleasantries for us both. Lily didn’t take offense. “Poor man,” she said, shaking her head.