Little Sister Read online

  “Conjugal.”

  “Con-ju-gal,” Fiona said, overenunciating to imply that the word was ridiculous and therefore rightly forgettable. She capped the lipstick. “I hope it isn’t ratatouille again.”

  Every Monday and Wednesday Rose’s boyfriend, Victor, showed up with dinner for the three of them. He got it simmering in a slow cooker before work and ten hours later transferred it to a casserole dish and ferried it by bicycle across the city. He had started doing this after his mother died. He could have joined Fiona and Rose anytime—he didn’t need to bring the meal. But the preservatives in the takeout food they ordinarily ate gave him a rash.

  Victor was a meteorologist for Environment Canada. From nine to five he issued forecasts, warnings, and advisories. He was good at his job, he’d won an industry award, but he thought himself a writer, and a tortured writer at that. Most of his nights and weekends were given over to the books he’d been working on for as long as Rose had known him. One was an encyclopedia of world climates from the dawn of time. The other, also potentially infinite, was an almanac of celebrity trivia. Mention any movie star, living or dead, and there was an excellent chance Victor could reel off his or her net worth and father’s occupation. Whenever somebody told him he looked like Paul Simon, he’d say Paul Simon once went by the stage name Tico, and then he’d ask, “How tall do you think Paul Simon is?”—his way of pointing out that the physical resemblance ended with their heads. Paul Simon was five foot one, Victor five six. Rose, who was five foot ten, had been dating Victor several years before she realized that the pleasure he took in her long limbs was undermined by the shame he felt toward his own short ones. And yet he seemed at ease with what, to Rose, should have been the far more sensitive matter of his lazy eye. Every morning he peered through pinholes in a square of black cardboard, but this, he claimed, was to stave off myopia.

  He was forty-four, ten years older than Rose, a serious, steady person, a person of strict routines. But then, she was much the same. You couldn’t be disorganized or irresponsible and run a theater. They saw each other Mondays and Wednesdays for dinner, Tuesdays and Fridays for late-night sex, and Sundays for brunch and a first-run movie, unless he wanted to write, in which case she spent the afternoon with friends.

  The sex happened at his house. When his mother had been alive, they’d made do on Rose’s narrow bed down the hall from Fiona. Now, after closing the theater and driving Fiona home, Rose continued on to Victor’s. For several years she’d been faking her orgasms. Trying to have one took too long, while pretending to have one allowed her to settle into the less fraught, more giving end of the business.

  She used to sleep over. These days she returned home to be there when her mother woke up. Victor always walked her to her car, although Rose thought if either of them was going to get mugged, it would be him, the little guy with the penlight. Driving off, she saw his forlorn wave in her rearview mirror. He said he understood, and then he telegraphed his disappointment with that wave.

  She, on the other hand, was grateful for an excuse not to stay. She didn’t like his house. Beyond the dim, cramped rooms, it was tainted by the seedy circumstances of its acquisition, which were that Victor’s father had used money from the sale of stolen alexandrite gemstones smuggled over many borders by Victor’s mother in what she called “the lady part” of herself. Rose, sleepless in Victor’s bed, a bit sore after sex, always thought about the gemstones, how frightened his mother must have been, and then how embarrassed, confessing her “sin,” as she called it, to Victor. By the time of this confession Victor’s father was dying from kidney failure, and his mother had Parkinson’s and an invincible fear that with the house about to be transferred to her name, there would be an inquiry by the bank or the lawyers. Why had there never been a mortgage? How had these impoverished Russian immigrants managed to pay cash?

  There was no inquiry. What there was was a widow who, along with Parkinson’s, suffered from excessive timidity. Concerned neighbors lifted the letter slot and called her name, and she hid behind the furniture. Whenever Rose came by, she shuffled off to her bedroom. She liked Rose, however, and cast her apologetic smiles. Once, as she escaped, she gestured toward an end table on which she’d left a note that in her shriveled Parkinson’s handwriting said, Rose, please forgive my disappearance acts. You have a smile like an angel.

  Her limbs began to stiffen. Victor fixed her up with a medical-alarm bracelet and a cane, and bought the slow cooker to get dinner going before he left for the office. Late one night while he and Rose were drinking wine and snacking on vintage cheddar cheese at his kitchen table (another of their routines), he said he’d started to research long-term care facilities.

  “That’s jumping the gun, isn’t it?” Rose said.

  “You’ve seen how she drags her leg. She’s having difficulty getting in and out of the bathtub.”

  “What about home care?”

  “I like the idea of a facility. They have specialized equipment, for one. They have yoga classes, movie nights, outings to restaurants.”

  “Victor, she’s pathologically shy.”

  “She’ll adapt. She’ll have to. It’ll do her good.” He was cutting his cheese into tiny squares. “Do you have any idea what in-home nursing costs?”

  “Borrow against the house.”

  His response was to get her to look at the websites of places with cringe-making names like Evermore and Goodness. He drew her attention to the smiling residents.

  “Don’t be cheap about this,” Rose said. “It’s too important.”

  His wandering eye slid to the outside corner. “Not everyone inherits a theater.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “My point exactly.” He shut the computer down and started clearing the table. Neither of them spoke as she put on her coat and let herself out.

  She cried herself to sleep. How could she be with a man who put his agoraphobic mother in a nursing home? Over the following days she let his calls go into messaging, and then she played them back and listened to him defending his decisions with arguments such as that his mother didn’t like the house and it badly needed repairs and she would have a harder time dealing with workmen than with nurses. One morning the message was that his mother had died in her sleep.

  Rose made up with him. He was an orphan now, and her love widened accordingly. He began bringing dinner to the theater. Whether he did this so as not to eat alone every night or to restore himself in Rose’s opinion didn’t matter to her. They talked about living together in an apartment or condo, making a fresh start.

  Six years on, Rose still lived with her mother, and Victor with his mother’s fake-wood paneling and high-gloss paint. Unlike Victor, Rose had left home. During university she’d shared an apartment with another business major, and during her first year working full-time at the theater she’d rented an apartment above a pet shop that specialized in exotic birds whose squawking and peeping gave her an invigorating sense of living in a jungle tree house. She returned home because her father died. “Don’t stay on my account,” Fiona said. “I like my own company.” If Victor had applied more pressure to move in together, it might have made a difference. But Victor had become devoted to his writing, and Rose to keeping the theater afloat. And Fiona, while still insisting she was fine, so plainly wasn’t.

  This particular Wednesday, Rose and Lloyd were lugging the heavy stanchions into place and Fiona was clearing out the free-magazine rack when Victor arrived. He and Lloyd had met, and after some initial misgivings Victor had conceded that Lloyd’s employment history since serving his jail sentence couldn’t be faulted. Even so, he flung troubled glances at the older, taller man, and when Lloyd offered to relieve him of the casserole, he said tersely, “I’m fine.”

  “What’s in it, gold bullion?” Fiona said.

  “I filled it too full,” Victor said. He relented and held the casserole out. “It’s been spilling.”

  “I’ve got it,” Lloyd said.

&n
bsp; Victor eyed the bowl’s passage to the kitchen. “The back door was bolted,” he told Rose.

  “Oh, was it? Sorry.”

  “You didn’t hear me knocking?”

  “We were all in here.”

  He pulled off his helmet with its mounted rearview mirror. He unzipped his orange safety vest and yellow raincoat. A whistle circled his neck, blue neoprene overshoes covered his sneakers. There was nothing new about any of this, but Rose, imagining the whole overwrought package from Lloyd’s perspective, was embarrassed, then ashamed of her embarrassment. “Poor Victor,” she said and kissed his cheek.

  “Was it you who put out that special weather statement?” Fiona asked.

  “I okayed it,” he said.

  “Flooding in low-lying areas,” Fiona quoted scornfully. “My shoes didn’t even get wet.”

  “But you always take the high ground,” he said, cheering up. He was under the mistaken impression that Fiona enjoyed their bantering exchanges. “I made your favorite,” he told her. “Jambalaya.”

  “I hope you made enough for Lloyd,” she said as Lloyd came back into the lobby.

  “None for me, thanks, I had a late lunch,” Lloyd said. He crossed to the projection booth staircase. They all watched him, this aging, athletic ex-con with his tattoos and ponytail.

  The kitchen window was stuck shut. Even Victor, who was strong, couldn’t budge it. Rose got a broom handle and wedged open the door to the alley.

  “You should open the lobby door as well,” said Victor.

  “We never leave that door open,” said Fiona.

  “Go on, Fiona, live recklessly.”

  “As if I haven’t.”

  Rose let them natter away. She was reviewing the dreams and trying to recapture the weightless, humming feeling of being inside a body so slight and wound up.

  Shortly before seven Lloyd popped his head in. Fiona had asked that he put on a suit jacket for the shows, and tonight he wore a blue blazer.

  “Don’t you look dashing!” she said.

  “They’re lining up out there.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

  Victor waited until the door swung shut. “What’s going on?” he said then. “Are you mad at me or something?”

  Rose told him. Not the whole story. Not her paranoid suspicion that Lloyd had slipped her a drug, and nothing about the kiss in the car or the man’s erection. “Whoever they were, they’d just had sex,” she said and went on to describe her research and her theory.

  Trust Victor to have heard of silent migraines. He speculated that sleep apnea might be in the mix as well. “Then again . . .”

  “What?”

  “It might be narcolepsy.”

  “Narcolepsy!”

  “You dropped off pretty fast.”

  “I didn’t fall over.”

  “How tired are you lately?”

  “I’m tired now. But the falling-asleep part isn’t important. It was this feeling of being inside another person, this Harriet person, having her flesh and bones, all her physical sensations, but not having any physical control. Or mental control. Like when I was holding the cigarette with her fingers, which had become my fingers, she was the one who decided when to inhale and where to look, whatever she did with the body. Do you see what I’m saying? It was like I was wearing her.”

  “A Harriet suit,” he said.

  “Exactly. A living Harriet suit, and I was lost in it. I was a thread. A glint.”

  “You had a dream. We invent our dreams.”

  “It’s just that everything was so solid, so right there. Like you’re right there, and this table. I could smell things. Have you ever smelled things in your dreams?”

  “I’m sure I have.”

  “I smelled the car. I smelled the”—she’d been about to say semen—“new car smell.”

  “Did you notice a digital clock on the dashboard by any chance?”

  “Why?”

  “One way to tell if you’re dreaming is to watch a clock. The minutes don’t change. Light switches don’t work, either.”

  “But I wasn’t questioning whether or not I was dreaming. I mean, very distantly I figured I must be, but it was like being awake. And what about it happening twice? Twice, I was inside this tiny person with a husky voice like Demi Moore’s.”

  “Really?” He had a crush on Demi Moore.

  “Isn’t that weird? Isn’t it weird that I wore the same clothes and was talking to the same guy?”

  “It’s called a progressive dream. You pick up where you left off.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “They’re quite common actually. And I don’t see any reason why silent migraine dreams can’t be progressive. Did you drink a lot of coffee today? Caffeine’s a migraine trigger.”

  “I had two cups.” She laid her head on her arms. The lobby tugged at her, the people talking out there, the smell of popcorn.

  “Thunderstorms are a trigger, too, come to think of it.”

  “But in both dreams everything was exactly the same. Exactly, right down to the pattern of the skirt.” She rubbed her forehead on her folded hands. “That’s what you don’t seem to get.”

  “I get it.”

  “Right down to the cuticles.”

  “We’re going to be hit with more storms tomorrow. The first around three o’clock.” He pushed himself up from the table. Wednesday nights he worked on his almanac, and he’d already stayed longer than usual. “You won’t want to be driving.”

  “Oh. You’re right.”

  She helped him into his cycling gear and kissed him on the lips. She waved from the back door until he was out of sight. She was making amends for the kiss in the car, the quiver it still sent through her. If she fell into another dream, would she be inside the woman? She bolted the door, and then she leaned against it and exhaled a breath she felt she’d been holding for hours.

  Her mother and Lloyd were talking about pajamas. “I sleep bare naked,” Fiona said. “I always have.”

  Lloyd, sweeping popcorn, said, “Ah!” He seemed unfazed. “Good-sized crowd,” he told Rose. “More than I would have thought.”

  “Henry Fonda brings them out,” she said.

  “Those blue eyes,” said Fiona. “If Henry Fonda had walked in here and asked me to run off with him, I’d have been sorely tempted.”

  “I’ll be down at intermission,” Rose said.

  In her office she dropped onto the sofa and looked at the photographs. Her father used to bring new subscription members up here and without a shred of modesty, boyish and old-fashioned in his delight, would open his arms and say, “The Wall of Stars!” A mid-1950s shot of Merle Oberon was the oldest, Merle gazing sidelong at his meaty hand on her shoulder. The most recent showed him and Michael Caine toasting each other at an after-hours party for Without a Clue. As little girls Rose and Ava had made a game of monitoring the evolution of their father’s appearance over the years: the graying of his hair, the arrival of his moustache, the coming and going of his goatee, the unbearable tenure of his leisure suit, which Fiona had thought so elegant.

  How chagrined Fiona would have been to think that one day she’d be saying to a man she scarcely knew (lying to this man, in fact), “I sleep bare naked.” There was a medical word for her descent from ladylike to coarse. Dis something.

  Disinhibition—that was it. A small victory but stimulating enough to get Rose to her desk, where she took a stab at filling out an epic tax questionnaire. After two pages she switched to watching promotional clips for the cinema chain that employed her as its booking agent.

  The dreams scraped at her: the man’s erection, the sweet, sweet kiss. She stood and walked around the office, tidying up, filing a few paid invoices. She sorted through a stack of old DVDs and repeated to herself things she had said in the dream: I thought we had a deal. I’m not cut out for this job. When you say her name, I can’t do this. She scratched her arms and fought to ignore the echoey voices from the movie do
wnstairs. She was tired again, and she lay back down on the sofa and sank into a dead, dreamless sleep. Lloyd changing canisters on the other side of the wall woke her briefly.

  The next time she woke, she stumbled to her desk and hauled out her old phone book. She slapped through to the Gs: Gold, Golden, Goldfarb, Goldfield Plumbing, Goldfinch Publishers.

  The offices were closed, not surprisingly, but there was a directory. Rose entered H-A-R, and a man’s recorded voice began, “You have reached the office of Harriet Smith, senior editor. To leave a message, press one.”

  Rose hung up. High static filled her head. I must have heard of her, she told herself. When? Under what circumstances?

  “Harriet Smith, Harriet Smith, Harriet Smith,” she murmured. Not the faintest image or memory presented itself.

  She phoned Victor and left a message, asking him to call. She then redialed Goldfinch’s number and got the mailing address: 90 King Street West, Suite 1702. The seventeenth floor sounded right when she remembered looking out the office window. She could go there tomorrow morning. As an excuse, she would bring along her father’s unpublished manuscript about the history of the Regal.

  His papers were stored in banker’s boxes behind the credenza. She found the box that held “Best Seat in the House” and removed the top copy and turned the pages. An ache under her ribs reminded her why she never did this. Every rejection letter had said more or less the same thing: well written, enjoyable, limited market. One time her father neglected to include return postage, and it was Rose, on her way home from the dentist’s, who collected the manuscript.

  She was composing a letter of introduction to Harriet Smith, Senior Editor, when Victor called. Her news didn’t impress him. He said she’d heard the name Harriet Smith on the radio or in the newspaper, a story about Goldfinch: “It’s a multinational.” He began typing. “Let me just see something. Hypnagogic—”

  “What?”

  “Hold on a second. Okay, here we go. Hypnagogic hallucinations, otherwise known as lucid dreams, are fifty percent higher among people with sleep apnea and twenty-five percent higher among narcoleptics. But you didn’t have lucid dreams.”