The Other Sister, page 22
When I finally worked, cajoled, and cheated my way into the folklore program at Lillywell, I met earnest, intellectual kids who had grown up with Disney and all the other sanitized versions of the Grimm canon. They talked about feminist interpretations and patriarchal iconography. They didn’t understand what the stories said.
Tyler understands. And that’s the problem. He understands about monsters and castles, and what it’s like to have to search for some way to explain the insides of your mind to yourself.
But Tyler is still from the outside world. I can’t let Outside into this house. Outside asks stupid questions, like, why doesn’t she just leave? I cannot, no matter how hard I’ve tried, make Outside understand what it is to be us.
I climb stiffly to my feet and fish my panties and flannel shirt out of our pile of clothing. Minimally dressed, I tiptoe into the decimated kitchen.
So far, Tyler and I have devoured two of the party trays Dad brought, and even cracked open the rum. I ignore the sweating remains of unrefrigerated snack food. Instead, I lean my back against the wall and fold my arms.
What am I going to do?
Because it is becoming increasingly clear I am not going to do the smart thing and send Tyler away.
It’s not a big deal. He’s got a job. He can’t stay here for that long. I’ll just tell him…I’ll just tell him…
The lie won’t form. Not even in the privacy of my own mind. But there is no way I can keep my promises to Marie and keep Tyler in my life at the same time.
Maybe if I hadn’t lost my job, it would be different. I could play my part and I could leave.
That was the original plan. My original plan anyway, no matter what I told Marie. But now…but now…
Now, what?
From here, I can see the old store. Its back porch is listing visibly. Cornflowers, lamb’s tongue, and one determined sumac sapling poke green fingers up between the slats. A goldfinch lands on the rusted gutter, dips its beak for a quick drink, and flies off again. My fingers rake against the counter and come up against the house keys. I tuck my finger into the ring and twirl them restlessly.
And stop. And stare.
I’m still staring when I hear footsteps pad against the floorboards. Tyler rounds the corner. He’s dressed, mostly. He’s also carrying my jeans.
“I brought you pants.”
“That’s a switch.”
“I like to keep you on your toes.”
I put the keys down and pull my jeans on. He watches, lovingly, hungrily. It’s exasperating. It’s exhilarating.
He waits until I’m all zipped and buttoned to talk again. “You look like you got some bad news.”
“No. Well, yes. No. I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
Where do I even start? “My sister, Marie, she’s been looking after the house. She said there was some trouble, kids and drugs or something, and she had the locks changed.” I rattle the key ring at him. “She gave me the keys for the house, but not for the store.”
“Maybe she just forgot.”
“That is not the kind of thing Marie forgets. She didn’t want me in there.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I want to know.” I stare at the store again. “I mean, there shouldn’t be anything left in there.”
Curiosity itches hard. Curiosity, and that old craving, not the one that screams for the junk and the pills. The one that screams for me to break something, just to show that I can.
Maybe they’re the same thing.
This is me just wasting time. It’s not like it’s important. Except it is. Because it’s a detail, and Marie does not forget details.
It’s important because of what David told me down by the beach. I do not want to believe it, but it won’t go away.
Tyler wraps his arms around me from behind and rests his chin on my shoulder. His beard scrapes my cheek. “Tell you what. We can either go try to get inside, or we can drink rum and Diet Coke, and finally have that meaningful conversation about how you and I move forward from here.”
There is only one answer to that.
“Get your shoes on.”
2.
“You got a jimmy in the car?”
“What, you don’t?”
Ty is back in less time than it takes me to drag the rusted chair over to the store window. I choose a back one, so we can’t be seen from the road. This really isn’t breaking and entering because the store is my property, but old habits die hard.
This window still has a screen, but that’s easy to take down from this side, if you know the trick. The glass is so filthy it’s impossible to see inside. Ty passes me the jimmy. It’s nothing but a thin strip of metal with a hooked end. He steadies the chair and I slide it between the window halves and wriggle until I feel the latch snap back.
I hand Tyler the jimmy. We grin at each other. Tyler puts his finger to his lips. I cannot believe I am doing this. I cannot believe I am enjoying this.
No, actually, I can.
I heave the window open, scramble through, and drop onto the other side. Tyler is right behind me.
“Well,” he says as he surveys the dim space. “Something of an anticlimax.”
It takes me a long time to answer. I knew it’d be hard standing inside the store, just like it was walking into the house. But the blow catches me dead center anyway.
Like the house, the store has been stripped down to its bones. Empty shelves—too heavy or awkward to move, I guess—line the walls and stretch down the center of the single long room. A couple of rusted wire racks stand sentry by the counter where the register used to be.
God, I used to love this place. Before I learned to hate it. Before I learned how to use it.
When I loved it, I’d stand on cases of beer or Coke to help smear peanut butter and grape jelly onto slices of white bread. Me and Mom would sing along to the classic rock radio station. Sometimes, she’d grab me around the waist and we’d dance up and down the aisles.
When I hated it, I sliced pieces of apple pie and thought about slicing my father’s throat with the same knife. That was when every day started with checking to see if Mom was too hung over to open up. Which meant being late to school again, or skipping altogether. The people would come in for their sandwiches and whatever and they’d say, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“We’ve got a day off,” I’d say back, and they’d move on to asking about what grade I was in and did we have any of those hand-warmer things and could I get down another pack of cigarettes?
Not that all that time on my own wasn’t educational. For instance, I learned to fake the inventory so no one would notice how much stuff was going missing, especially the beer. By the time high school hit, I supplied pretty much every party in Whitestone, even before I started a sideline in low-grade weed.
I also learned how to shortchange people and pocket the extra cash, along with anything else I could get my sticky little fingers on. More than a few driver’s licenses and credit cards went missing from tourists when I was behind the counter. The same kids I supplied with beer were willing to pay some pretty decent money for those.
That was why when Dad tried to hand me that wad of cash to leave town for good, I was able to tear it up and scatter the little green pieces all over his study floor, and leave anyway.
Tyler prowls the edges of the long room, rattling windows and going up on his toes to try to adjust the cover over one of the fluorescent lights. “So, what was the big deal in here again?”
“No idea.” I drift behind the prep counter to the register counter and slide the drawer open. It’s empty: of cash, of pill bottles, of everything except my jumble of memories. “Maybe she thought I’d give into an uncontrollable fit of sandwich making.”
“Sounds good. I’m hungry.”
“There’s a surprise.” I roll my eyes.
I close the drawer. There’s nothing here. Nothing at all. Time to move along. But I don’t. I can’t get past the fact of the missing key. I should wait and ask Marie. That’d be a perfectly normal thing for normal sisters to do.
Instead, I head for the door to the basement. That’s locked, too. I rattle the knob a few times, and of course Tyler notices.
“Need the jimmy?”
“Nah. Credit card should do it.”
Tyler extracts his wallet and hands one over.
“This is why you love me,” he reminds me as I wriggle the card back and forth between the tongue and the threshold.
You have no idea. The tongue snaps back and the knob turns under my hand.
The stairwell is dark. I try the switch and the light snaps on down below.
I feel Tyler come up behind me. I expect him to start humming the Twilight Zone or Jaws theme or something, but thankfully he doesn’t.
The cellar is much older than the building above. The floor is dirt, packed hard as cement. The walls are undressed fieldstone. The place smells of dirt and damp, mildew and skunk.
And it is full to its dark, dank gills.
Cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid tubs stand on wire shelves. Furniture has been wrapped in plastic sheeting and duct taped to the point of unrecognizability. Tiles are stacked beside plastic portfolios, and three-ring binders are shelved like library books.
“Smugglers’ cave?” Tyler suggests. “Illegal PB and J?”
I don’t bother to answer. I just reach down to one of the binders and flip it open.
It’s a scrapbook. Carefully clipped articles and Polaroid photos have been pasted onto (I’m sure) acid-free paper.
I recognize them all. The grass and the clouds and the birds. The twining roses, the tall dark pines (where the sun never shines, whispers Aunt Trish from memory). And the bright-eyed crows perched above and around the chimney piece.
“It’s the murals,” I breathe.
“What murals?”
“All the rooms in Rose House used to be painted, by one of our ancestors. Addison Walters. He…my aunt said he was crazy and the family had him shut up in there.”
“Was he? Crazy?”
“I don’t know.” I turn the pages. The photos make a kind of timeline. Marie must have taken some of these before Dad’s first big remodel, because they’re showing the ruin from when Aunt Trish lived alone there—the gouged-out patches, red and black obscenities painted with great slashing motions, the water stains and the clumsy attempts to “fix” the fairies and the songbirds.
I remember Aunt Trish, creeping around with her bucket of brushes. She talked to the fairies and the birds and the clouds. She begged them to be patient with her.
This time it will be okay, she told them. This time for sure.
Tyler whistles. “These are amazing. Where they aren’t, like…” He draws his fingertips down a photo showing a beach scene made leprous where patches of paint have fallen away.
“Dad painted over them.”
“What? You’re kidding.”
I shake my head. “He made Marie do it. I remember when I came home the first time and saw all those blank, white walls.” I touch a close-up of a pair of piping plovers from the front room. “I felt like my skin had been scraped off.”
Tyler pulls down a magazine sheathed in a plastic cover. Michigan Country Home. There’s a picture of the Rose House on the cover. I put the binder back and pull down another magazine. Home and Garden, 1939. And another. Gracious Living, 1932.
All of them featuring the Rose House. And that’s when I realize what my sister has done.
Dad made Marie dismantle the old house. I’m sure he watched while she dutifully stripped it of everything that would remind everybody of Patricia and any other Burnovich, including his wife. He gave good little Marie precise instructions on how to rework the past according to his exacting specifications. No detail would be left to chance.
And Marie obeyed, because she is the good daughter. But the good daughter gathered up all those bits and pieces. Just like she gathered up all her old photos that didn’t fit in the life he envisioned. But this time, instead of sending things to me, she hid them down here. Because that is what Marie does. She puts the keys in a drawer, and she waits.
I’m standing on the brink of something in my own mind. My breath is harsh and heavy against my throat. Something is coming out of the dark to get me, but I can’t tell what it is.
That’s when I see the shoebox. It’s different from the rest of the tidy, secure packaging on the rest of the shelves. It’s battered, for one thing, and it looks old. Like the one full of photographs Marie sent to me. The seams at the corners of the lid are torn and mended with yellowing Scotch tape.
Don’t.
Whatever’s inside the box shifts as I pick it up. It smells like dust. The lid is held on with a rotting pink rubber band.
Stop. Don’t. You don’t want to know.
I carefully work the band off and I lift the lid.
Inside are two squat, heavy-bottomed tumblers, the kind used for basic, hard drinks—whiskey and soda, vodka on the rocks. They both have brown stains in the bottom, the ancient remains of whatever the last drink was.
And there’s a bottle of pills. A big one. It’s about half full of white tablets.
No.
I lift the bottle. The plastic is warm against my skin.
She didn’t. Tell me she didn’t.
I turn it over so I can read the label.
Stacey Jean Burnovich Diazepam 20 mg capsules. 1 capsule by mouth…
I go cold. Pain ripples through my bruises. Slowly, I put the pills back, close the box and return it to its shelf. I back away, like I think it’s going to reach out and pull me back.
“Geraldine?” says Tyler.
I’m not listening. I’m running up the stairs. I’m slamming against the door, cursing and kicking until I can make my shaking hands work the lock and I can fall out into the fresh air.
Because those are Mom’s pills. From her nightstand. Marie saved them. She tucked them away in a shoebox and hid them. Now I know what her note meant.
And I know who was supposed to be the one to die.
3.
“Geraldine?”
I make it as far as the stump of our old tree before I stop myself. I stand there, staring at the woods—where we went to live, where we went to hide, where Mom and Marie went to die. The wind feels like winter brushing across my skin. I can’t stop shaking.
“Come on, Gerie. Talk to me.”
I can’t turn my head. I can’t look at him.
“Don’t…don’t…”
Tyler sighs. There’s a rustling and I hear his voice coming from somewhere around my knees.
“When I was a kid, every night after dinner, my dad would make us all line up in the living room. We were a quiver family, you know? There were seventeen of us, born to serve God and spread the Word. So, of course we had to be raised with strict discipline. He’d go down the row, oldest to youngest, and each one of us would have to confess all the sins we committed that day.”
I don’t answer.
“The one who he decided sinned the worst would get the beating. Right in front of the others.”
I don’t answer.
“My oldest sister, Angela, she started making things up. Just whatever popped into her head, as long as it was bad. I’m pretty sure she confessed to screwing the Pope by the end of it. So, she was the one who got it the worst. But she was doing it to try to save the little ones.”
My throat loosens. “Did it work?”
“For a while. Then Pop figured it out and started beating the little kids anyway, to teach her a lesson.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“It’s supposed to let you know you’re not the only one with a massively fucked-up family.”
Finally I am able to turn. He’s sitting cross-legged on the grass. I kneel down beside him to wrap my arms around his shoulders, and press my face into the crook of his neck.
I don’t know how long we sit like that, with my arms around his neck and his arms around my shoulders, but eventually, my knees start to ache and I have to let go.
“So,” he says as I knuckle my dry eyes.
“So,” I agree. “You hungry?”
His mouth twitches, and I hold my breath waiting to see if he’s going to let me get away with changing the subject so drastically.
“Starved,” he says at last.
“Have you ever had whitefish?”
“Isn’t that grandpa food?”
“Shut your mouth, young man, and get in the car.” I swat him on the shoulder as I heave myself to my feet.
I’m just buying time, and we both know it. Tyler’s going along, because he knows every minute I let him stay will make it that much harder for me to break things off again. We have both, after all, been down this road before.
I tell myself it will be different this time. I do not let myself remember all the times and all the ways I have said that about other things, or how I have always, without exception, been wrong.
I just get us into the car, and drive up the hill.
4.
There’s a line.
Bob’s Fish Fry is a relic from my past. It’s nothing but a white shack perched on top of a long, sandy slope. Inside, there’re a couple of fryers and a flat top behind the counter. The only seating is the picnic tables on the dune. Bob’s been burnt brown by a combination of sun and fry grease, and he works the whole show with the flourish of a stage magician.
This is not nouvelle cuisine. But that beer-battered fish was alive at eight this morning, and it’s meaty and flaky and tastes like fresh water. The fries are hot enough that they burn your mouth. You can get a milkshake, or homemade root beer, or something God-awful from a can, like Pabst or Budweiser.
Tyler and I sit side by side so we can watch the sunset spreading melted gold over the lake. He puts catsup on everything, the Philistine. He also steals my fries, which is okay because I steal his. Around us, the other tables fill with locals and a few lifestylers who have ventured out from the brewpubs.
