The Other Sister, page 8
Please understand. Please go away. I love you. You have to stay away. I can’t let my father know I’ve found someone. He’ll pick us apart to find our weak spots and pour the poison in. Just like he did to Marie and David. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop him.
“I love you, Gerie,” Ty says.
I shut the phone off. I drop it into my purse and grip the steering wheel so tight the plastic is pressing against bone.
“Don’t call me Gerie.”
2.
I met Tyler while we were both attending the same conference in Las Vegas. Even experts in anthropology and European folklore get a conference in Vegas at some point in their careers. We didn’t actually meet at the conference. We met at a magic show in the next hotel over. We’d both forgotten to take off our name badges. We laughed about it and sat together. Afterward, we went disco dancing and ate too many mini eclairs at the buffet and drank Asti Spumante like freshmen at a Sweetest Day sorority party. We watched the rows of women playing the slots and made up fairy tales about them, and then numbered them all according to the Aarne-Thompson folktale classification system. Then we admitted we both hated the Aarne-Thompson system. We laughed until I was regretting the eclairs, but not the fact that I was falling fast and hard for the first time in a very long time.
He wasn’t my student then. That didn’t happen until September rolled around. He walked into my lecture, and we stared at each other, both utterly blank-faced.
He should have walked out, but he didn’t. He slid into his chair in the auditorium, flipped up the desk, and pulled out his laptop.
I should have walked out. I should have written him a tidy note explaining that my having crazy-hot sex with a Lillywell student—any Lillywell student—while employed as a lecturer would be considered entirely inappropriate by the department. I was not a professor. I didn’t have tenure. I could be fired at any time, with or without cause. With or without the fact that the dean and I went waaaaaay back.
But I just dimmed the lights, made sure the connection between the screen and my laptop was working, and launched into my introduction about how the popular culture influences of the Brothers Grimm had expanded beyond the Household Tales into ideas and pop myths about Jacob and Wilhelm themselves.
Tyler came to my office hours. I locked the door. We talked. I cried.
“How the hell did I pick now to finally fall in love?” I demanded, in a whisper, because the walls and the door were both really thin.
He wrapped his arms around me before I found the nerve or the strength to get away. “You need to stop talking like you’re in this alone, Gerie. I’m here with you.”
That was that. End of discussion. We thought.
I eat the rest of the strawberries for breakfast and drink the coffee left in the Starbucks cup in the dash holder. It is truly terrible, but we do what we have to.
I stare at the long, low prefab building across the yard that used to be Stacey B’s Sandwiches and Stuff. Like the house, the old store has gone gray and green from dirt and mildew. Random memories waft in through the open window. Summer days when the tourists came for Pringles, Coke, beer, sandwiches, and slices of pie in polystyrene clamshells. The clusters of tourists. Mom and sometimes Dad. Me, and everything I turned into.
The house keys sit in the coin tray down by the stick shift. I squirm in my seat. I’m going to have to either go inside or use the woods, real soon. But I know what’s waiting for me among the trees even better than I know what’s waiting for me in the house.
So, which do I go and face first? Woods or house? Life or death?
The petty urgency of biology makes the choice for me. I grab the house keys, shove them in my coat pocket, and climb out of the car.
3.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…
The line from Rebecca drifts through my brain as I round the house’s corner. My old boots crunch down dandelions, lamb’s tongue, and ambitious raspberry shoots that have pushed their way up between the gray gravel that used to mark the parking lot. Not that the little white house I’ve been staring at all night is our Manderley. That title belongs to the Rose House up on its hill. This…this is just the place I grew up. Bequeathed with the Rose House to me and Marie by my mother and my aunt, partly so we’d always have a someplace of our own. Partly to stick it to my father in the only way they had left.
A maple sapling sprouts out of the sagging gutter. Half the roof is covered with moss, dead leaves, and maple seeds. The rest is wrapped in a blue plastic tarp to try to keep out the weather.
One white metal lawn chair lies on its side, a leftover corpse from when we used to sit out here in the shade. I set it carefully upright, then wipe my rust-smeared palms on the seat of my jeans.
That’s when I realize the big maple is gone, and everything freezes.
Somebody cut down our tree.
Some goddamn bastard cut down our tree!
I walk over, slow and tentative, like if I give it enough time I might realize I made a mistake. No such luck. All that’s left of the broad sugar maple is a gray stump. Black, spongy rot has hollowed out its center. The tree’s heartwood had gone bad. I can see it needed to be taken out before it broke and fell. That doesn’t stop my surge of anger at whoever gave the order.
It might even have been Marie. I turn away toward the house. I’m sick and sore and I haven’t even gotten inside yet.
Shit.
The aluminum screen door has no screen left, and no spring. It flaps open, exhausted. The front door is steel. Its paint is flaking and it’s rusted around the edges. The new key fits, but the lock sticks. I rattle the key, kick the door, and swear a few times. One of those does the trick, and I’m in.
I make a beeline for the bathroom. Marie has kept the water and the electricity turned on. I’m not surprised. My sister would never make me come back to a dead house. I use the toilet (I keep a roll of paper in my backpack, because you never know). I wash my face with my bare hands and rinse my mouth out in the sink. The water still tastes like iron and sulfur. I wipe my face on my hands and my hands on my jeans.
Out in the main house, the morning scents of earth and leaves are warmed and concentrated by the sun streaming through the windows. The mice have been, well, everywhere.
Marie has kept me updated. I know this place has changed hands three or four times since I left. There was a family who wanted a summer cottage, and at least one experiment with a manager to rent it out during the summer, like Dad does with his starter mansions for the one-percenters. I don’t feel any of those other people. This is our house. We—my sister, me, my mother, our father, the living and the dead—we all haunt it together.
There is where I discovered that if you throw spaghetti at the wall, it really does stick.
There’s where Mom always hung the calendar. This is where Marie and I spent two weeks putting together the thousand-piece candy jar jigsaw puzzle.
This is the place Marie once swore she’d never go back to, after I’d pulled her out of the snow, frozen close enough to death that I thought we’d never get warm again.
I turn one more corner. I walk down the dim hallway. My damp boots squeak on the scuffed floorboards.
The door to our old bedroom is closed. All the other doors have been hanging wide open, but not that one. I need to go in there. There’s something I’ve left behind. For Marie. She never told me if she found it, not even during our recent flurry of phone calls. I have to know if she found it. It’s going to make a difference about what happens next. All the difference, actually.
I wrap my palm around the smooth, familiar knob and push.
I come up into our old room like I’m coming up for air. I have to wait for my heart to slow down and for the ripples of memory to finish sloshing against my skin and my mind. Eventually, though, I can see I’m just standing in another empty room of my empty house. The metal blinds are down over the windows, and it’s as stuffy as the rest of the place. The damp smells are just as strong. There’s a dead moth on the windowsill and a cobweb in the corner where our bunk beds used to be.
Our room has one heating vent. The cover’s got thin, vertical bars and is painted over with the same dull white paint as the walls. Like kids do, Marie and I figured out that if you scrape the paint away, you can loosen the screws and take that barred cover off. It became our hiding place. Packs of Twinkies and Ho Hos we stole from the store went in here. Allowance money. Marie’s notebooks. My stash, for a little while anyway.
And one other thing.
A week after Mom died, we moved into the Rose House. A week after we moved into the Rose House, I left home with a pocket full of cash and a prepaid credit card that did not belong to me. I did it in the middle of the night so Marie wouldn’t try to stop me. I was afraid if she did, I might end up telling her about my last conversation with Dad.
Not the one at the bottom of the gully behind the house. The one after that.
But before I met up with the kid who would drive me out to Buffalo in exchange for gas money, I came back here. My home was already empty, already cold. Left for dead, just like Mom.
I used a quarter to unscrew the vent, and I put a note inside. It was my confession to Marie. All of five words long.
I did it. I’m sorry.
When I decided to kill myself, I didn’t leave a note. But when I decided to stay alive, I also realized Marie deserved to know I was the one who killed our mother.
I have never known whether this was because I loved my sister, or because I hated her, or because I wanted her to be able to hate me like I deserved. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Like the door, the vent takes some work, but I’m ready for it. I carry a Swiss Army knife in my glove compartment for the same reasons I carry toilet paper and a flashlight. Because you never know. I use the screwdriver blade to scrape away the four or five layers of cheap white paint that have been slapped over the vent and its screws since we left.
If the space is empty, Marie found the note: I did it. I’m sorry. She read it. She knows what I did, and she wanted me back anyway. She trusted me. She kept this house, our real home, so there’d be someplace for me to come back to.
There are only three screws. One vanished down a crack in the floorboards when we were still kids and was never replaced.
If the note’s still there, she didn’t look. She didn’t trust me and she still doesn’t know what I did. She kept the house alive just because she’s Marie, and Marie keeps up appearances.
I line the screws up by the baseboard. My hands have gone cold. I hear the songbirds and crows and the wind outside. No cars, though.
I curl my fingers through the grating and lift the vent cover away.
Inside the hole, there’s more dust, more old mouse droppings and desiccated insects. There’s a gray stone too, the size of my fist. It sits on top of a slip of paper that’s gone as brown as the dead leaves littering the sagging roof.
It’s still there. Right where I left it. She never found it. She never even looked.
I’d been so sure. I just knew that after I disappeared, my sister would go to the old hiding place. I was positive she must have read the note and forgiven me, or at least understood on some level what I’d really done. Almost positive. At least, I wanted it to be true. Badly.
That’s why I listened when she called last summer. That’s the real reason why I came back.
I snatch up the pointless, childish confession that my asinine, shallow, selfish bitch of a sister couldn’t be bothered to look for. The rock rolls aside, clanking into the little dark tomb, and there’s something else. It rustles and it flutters.
Another paper.
It’s old and dirty and stained and speckled and nibbled around the edges. It’s been here a long, long time. Almost as long as the note I left, but not quite.
I unfold it. I see my sister’s handwriting, and I read her message to me. Mine was five words long. So is hers.
I did it, Marie writes. I’m sorry.
4.
Gradually, I am able to move. Eventually, I can put my note back into its place. I lay my sister’s on top of it.
Then, I take the stack of two thousand dollars out of my pocket. I use the stone to weigh all that precious paper down so it can’t escape.
Lastly, I set the vent back in its place so no one will see what I’ve done.
Fathers in fairy tales do not receive a lot of critical attention, which is surprising. These are, after all, the men who marry the wicked stepmothers. Then they passively agree to abandon their biological children, or fail to protest when those children are turned into swans, ravens, or scullery maids. Sometimes they die before the story arc truly begins, which gives the stepmothers free rein for their evildoing. Other times, however, the father is right there when children return, having successfully avoided being eaten by the witch or burned at the stake for murder or witchcraft. At this point, King/Father typically demonstrates righteous remorse. He helps punish his new wife, and then it’s happily ever after.
I can’t help believing this all must lead to some awkward family dinners. Because the father did abandon his children. He did not curb the elaborate murder attempts. He didn’t even go looking when his children vanished.
Children tend to notice these things.
—Out of the Woods: Musings on Fairy Tales in the Real World,
Dr. Geraldine Monroe
MARIE, EIGHT YEARS OLD
GERALDINE, SEVEN YEARS OLD
STACEY B’S SANDWICHES AND STUFF
1.
Marie Monroe knew every hiding place within a half mile of her home.
The very best was the maple tree right on the edge of their full-acre yard. This was no skinny forest tree. It was a fat field tree, with three trunks and a sprawling crown of tangled limbs. It was as easy to climb as a ladder, even with Mom’s old purse slung over her shoulder to hold important items, like her notebook and pencils and a can of Faygo Redpop.
No matter how hot it was in the summer, up here it was green and cool and shady. It even smelled different—a sweet blend of warm leaves, bark, and maple sap. Marie could sit with her back against the trunk, as secure as if she was curled up on the living room sofa. Only here was better, because nobody could see her except the squirrels and the robins.
And her sister, of course. There was no hiding from Geraldine.
Marie had just gotten settled. She flipped back the cover to expose the page she’d been working on, and pulled out her pencil with her favorite pink pinwheel topper over the eraser. She opened the Redpop, sucked up the fizz as it fountained out, and then clamped the can between her knees so she could hold the notebook more easily. That, of course, was when the branches shook, and the pop almost spilled, and the little twerp practically hopscotched up the branches.
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Go away.” Marie hunched further over her book.
Geraldine stuck out her tongue. She also climbed up to the next branch, so she could look down. Marie snapped the book shut before Geraldine could see her sketch, splashing Redpop as she did.
“I said go away!” She blotted the cover with her bare arm.
But Geraldine just pulled down a handful of the tan, winged seeds everybody called helicopters and sent one whirling down onto Marie’s head.
“Quit it!” Marie swatted at the seed pod. Geraldine giggled and let another one drop. This one, by sheer dumb luck, slithered into the pop can.
“You little jerk!”
“Two points to Mighty G! Marie’s a loser!”
Marie dropped the can, sending up a shower of sticky red sugar water as it bounced to the ground, stuffed her notebook into the old purse, and yanked herself up after her sister, but Geraldine was already long gone.
Marie gritted her teeth and stretched her longer legs to climb after Geraldine, even though she knew this was exactly what Geraldine wanted all along. The next branch wobbled under her weight. Marie faltered and clutched the trunk. Geraldine grabbed her wrist. Her hand was warm and stronger than it should have been for such a little kid. Marie eased her hold on the trunk. Geraldine was a baby and a twerp, and had made her waste a whole can of pop, but Geraldine would never let her fall.
When Geraldine felt Marie find her balance, she let go and stretched out on the neighboring branch like a cat, her legs wrapped tight around the slender, bobbling end.
“One day, I’m going to build a bridge,” said Geraldine as Marie settled down in the fork between trunk and the new branch, letting her feet dangle. “A great big long rope bridge through the trees. And I’ll cross that, and sling another one, and another. It’ll be a whole rope highway.”
This was a make-believe they’d played forever. Lately, though, Marie had started to feel like she was too old for the Going To game. Geraldine was still only seven, but Marie would turn nine in three and a half weeks. Like her growing body, reality was getting heavier. It was harder to climb out from under it to think about rope bridge highways or castles made from sand or shells, or any of the other things they came up with.
But Geraldine was looking at her hopefully, so Marie sighed and dug deep in her brain.
“I’m going to build a tree mansion, off an exit ramp of your rope highway. I’ll live there all the time and never invite anybody.”
“Except me.”
“Except you,” Marie agreed. “You don’t count as anybody.”
While Geraldine was still trying to figure out if this was an insult, the sound of tires crunching on gravel rose up from the parking area. Geraldine twisted herself until she was sitting upright on the branch, one finger pressed against her mouth. Marie nodded. Together, they scooted closer to the trunk and craned their necks to see who was coming.
Both girls recognized the rusted-out, red pickup that rolled into view. It belonged to Uncle Pete, Dad’s brother. His jeans had patches on the knees and he wore a blue work shirt with the elbows so thin you could see his arms underneath. Everything about Uncle Pete was like that—worn down, beaten up, and awkward, like he wasn’t used to it, or to himself.
