Little Sister Read online

  “Ava, darling, we’ll give them a nice burial. Get up now.”

  Ava shook her head.

  Gordon scooped Ava into his arms. Rose expected her to protest, but she stayed folded like a lawn chair, and they all ran for the house.

  He lowered Ava onto the porch sofa. He called her Red: “There we go, Red.” He brushed dirt from her bare thighs and from beneath the hem of her shorts. Fiona, occupied as she was opening the kitchen door, didn’t notice. Rose noticed.

  “I want to clean that cut,” Fiona said. “I won’t be a minute.”

  She went into the house. Gordon pulled the string on the bare lightbulb. It reflected minutely in his hard hat, as if he had an idea. Rain pelted the metal shingles. Rose sat, turned away from him, and brushed her sister’s legs herself.

  “You put some food out,” he said, “the mother might come back.”

  THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2005

  Rose slept soundly and dreamlessly until her mother jostled her shoulder and said, “It’s twenty to eight. The breakfast room’s closing.”

  About two mornings a week Fiona got dressed in white sailor pants and a green-and-white-striped jersey and set about exploring the cruise ship she believed herself to be on. Notes taped to the fridge and bathroom mirror, saying, FIONA—YOU ARE AT HOME IN YOUR HOUSE, sometimes snapped her out of it. Not today, obviously.

  “It’s me,” Rose said. “Rose.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “Mom, he died.”

  “He didn’t die.”

  “He did. Nine years ago.”

  Fiona peered around as if for her purse or the exit. “I want to go home.”

  “You are home,” Rose said. “In your house on Millwood Avenue.” She got up and went to the window and threw back the drapes.

  The sky was hazy. The grass steamed. She opened the drapes wider to bring their bird feeder into view. “The thugs are back,” she said.

  Fiona joined her, and they watched two grackles fling seed. Clumped along the power lines, a dozen sparrows waited in silence.

  “Song sparrows are your favorite,” Fiona said.

  “I think those are chipping sparrows,” Rose said. She didn’t have her glasses on.

  “Chipping sparrows,” said Fiona. Her face showed an intensity of thought.

  “There might be one song sparrow,” Rose allowed.

  “Mother of God,” said Fiona in her regular voice. “I’ve done it again, haven’t I?”

  “You should actually go on a cruise,” Rose said.

  “And hire somebody to toss me overboard. I’m sorry, Rose. Can you get back to sleep?”

  “I’ll stay up. I’m seeing George, so I may as well make an early start.”

  In the shower Rose decided that she would see their accountant. For the sake of not lying to her mother, and to get help with the tax questionnaire, she would drop by his office after her visit to Goldfinch Publishers.

  Naturally she wanted to see if the Harriet from her episodes was anything like the real-life Harriet. She was more than curious, though, she was compelled, and she didn’t understand exactly why. What she told herself was that the real-life Harriet would spark a memory, a recognition, and in a way not yet clear to her, the episodes would make sense.

  She set out on foot shortly before nine thirty. Downtown was no great distance, three or four miles, and she felt she needed the exercise and extra time to marshal her nerve. She crossed the park and headed south to Davisville Avenue, a little astonished that she was going through with this, she who had a dread of drawing attention to herself.

  And yet here she was, hoping to lie her way into Harriet’s presence, and not only that, she was wearing a loud turquoise-and-orange, Indian-patterned dress, ankle-length, flowing, something she had bought years ago and never until this morning taken off the hanger. It was the kind of dress she imagined a writer, or the daughter of a writer, wearing. She would breeze into Goldfinch and say, “I’m here to see Harriet Smith.” The receptionist would ask for a name, then check with Harriet, who (this only now occurred to Rose) might not be inclined to come out and talk to a person she didn’t know. In that case, Rose would say, “I have a manuscript for her. I just need to tell her a few things about it first.” She rehearsed these phrases in her mind. She walked more aggressively.

  It was hot, and as much as possible she kept to the shade. But there was no escaping the humidity, and by Yonge Street she was soaked with sweat. She hailed a cab. In the backseat she fished Kleenex from the bottom of her purse and dried under her arms.

  The driver maneuvered his mirror to see her better. He had a pretty pink mouth and plump cheeks. She wondered if he wasn’t actually a woman until he spoke. “Are you married?” he asked.

  His soft features somehow divested the question of intrusiveness. “No,” she said, “not married.”

  “Do you make a good living?”

  “I get by.”

  “If you were my woman, I would lift weights all day so that when you came home from work I could make love to you all night.”

  “I’m in a relationship.”

  He reached over his seat and handed her a card. She tried to give it back but he said, “Give it to one of your girlfriends who makes a good living.”

  Many of the office towers in this part of town were glass. It was not amazing, therefore, that Harriet’s should be. And yet Rose was amazed. In a state far more dreamlike than the episodes, she entered the lobby and took the elevator up to the seventeenth floor. The doors opened onto a mahogany-paneled reception area. This, too, was dreamlike: the absence of an intervening corridor.

  The receptionist stood, not to greet Rose, rather to start sawing open a cardboard box. “Good morning, Goldfinch Publishers,” she said into her mouthpiece, halting Rose with a tilt of her knife. Her hair was pulled back tight, and she had the lean features and severely arched eyebrows Rose associated with women not easily charmed.

  The call dragged on. Rose crossed to a wall of photographs, the largest a blown-up newspaper clipping. Birds of a Feather Flock Together, she read. Vireo Press and Cardinal Publishers join forces to create Goldfinch.

  Vireo and Cardinal were familiar, especially Cardinal and its red paperbacks. Rose looked around, and now everything was familiar enough for her to conclude that these were the old Cardinal offices and that she had collected her father’s manuscript—the manuscript she carried with her—from this very place, although too long ago for Harriet to have been here.

  “May I help you?” said the receptionist.

  Rose swung around. “Oh, hi.” She stepped closer. “I’m here to see Harriet Smith.”

  “Reception,” said the receptionist and turned to her computer screen. A narrow braid, like a zipper, bisected the back of her skull. “Tomorrow at noon,” she said. Then, “She isn’t in today.”

  It took a moment for Rose to understand that this second statement was meant for her. “Harriet isn’t in?”

  “She’s working from home.”

  “But we had an appointment.”

  “She isn’t here, I’m afraid.”

  “I have a manuscript for her,” Rose said.

  The receptionist pointed her knife at a coffee table already piled with padded envelopes. “You can leave it there.”

  Rose considered. Although Harriet wasn’t in, her boyfriend, the man from the car, might be. “May I use your washroom?” she asked.

  “They have a washroom in the ground-floor coffee shop.”

  “It’s a bit of an emergency.”

  The receptionist eyed Rose’s body, as if the emergency were connected to her flashy dress. “Through that door,” she said. A curt nod. “All the way to the end.”

  All the way to the end was a long way. On either side were identical offices, the windowless ones scarcely bigger than their desks. Nobody glanced up. She passed the washrooms, rounded the corner, and kept going. Ahead of her a man and woman were in conversation. “Keyless entry,” said the woman, “pu
sh-button start.”

  “Sorry,” Rose said.

  They shifted to let her by. “Rear-seat DVD,” the woman resumed.

  The next office was unoccupied. The office after that was not.

  He stood at the window. From his back, she knew him.

  He turned. “Looking for me?” he said, smiling.

  “No, I . . . no,” she stammered. “I was . . . Is the washroom?”

  “End of the hall.” He pointed the way she’d come. “Hang a left.”

  “Thank you.” But she couldn’t bring herself to move.

  The long, angled eyes ransacked her face. “Anything else I can help you with?”

  “No, sorry.” Thermal waves pulsed from Rose’s midriff. “I just . . . have you ever been to the Regal Theater up on Mount Pleasant?”

  “The Regal? Sure. Not lately, but yeah.”

  “Okay.” Her face, she knew, was flaming. “I thought I’d seen you before.”

  “Do you go there a lot?”

  “Actually, I own it. With my mother.”

  “You own that gorgeous building?”

  “Well, the bank does.”

  He came closer and extended his hand. “David Novak.”

  Her hand in his felt like mush, as if he had pressed a nerve that collapsed her joints. “Rose Bowan.”

  “I love the, what do you call it, the dome.”

  “The cupola.”

  “Cupola. Right. It’s spectacular.”

  Should she mention Harriet? If he offered to give Harriet the manuscript, would that help Rose meet her in person? Probably the receptionist was wondering what was taking her so long. “So the washroom . . . ?”

  “End of that hall, turn left.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  Back she went, as fast as her rubbery legs would carry her, past the washrooms, through the reception area, and across to the open elevator.

  At one of the coffee shop’s window tables she drank iced tea. She would come back tomorrow. Or, no, tomorrow was a holiday—she would have to wait until Monday. She would show up early, before eight, stand at the ground-floor elevators and catch Harriet arriving for work.

  Had she ever been this turned on in her life? She had, yesterday, straddling David’s lap, or rather her fantasized version of his lap. This arousal wasn’t strictly hers then, it was contact arousal, generated by Harriet. Who also happened to be a fantasized version. So, really, the arousal was Rose’s, but for reasons she didn’t need years of therapy to identify, although those years were there, she could access it only through a made-up woman based on a real woman she’d forgotten ever having laid eyes on.

  Straightforward truths did exist, she reminded herself. David, for example. The Goldfinch reception area.

  Suppose she had asked David what kind of car he drove, and he said a Camry, and she Googled Camry, and there was the car interior from her second episode? How would she account for it? She’d have to think: I was in a Camry once and remembered the dashboard, even though I have no interest in cars and no memory of the occasion itself. Or: I’m making things up as I go along. I see a car online and alter my perceptions accordingly.

  Sort of like how a stroke victim thinks.

  She allowed the analogy because she didn’t really believe it. Her mind was too available to her, too aware of itself. She leaned closer to the window and peered up. From what she could see, the sky was mostly blue, but the wind had risen. Her heart pounded. Forget it, she told herself. Even if the storm brought on another episode, the odds that she would enter Harriet and encounter David—David as he’d just been, Harriet similarly un-morphed, the pair of them following to the letter their earlier narrative—were astronomical.

  Forget it.

  So she forgot it. She was accustomed to keeping her hopes low. On the subway she read the tax questionnaire. At her accountant’s office she paid close attention to the Regal’s humble investment portfolio. Afterward, taking a taxi back to the theater, she listened to messages on her cell.

  The first was from Victor, an abrupt, “Hi, give me a call.” The last, from Fiona, was an ominous, “He’s out there.”

  Rose phoned her mother. “Who’s out there?”

  “The old man. What’s-his-name.”

  “Charles?”

  “He’s on his porch.”

  “So?”

  “He’s leering at me.”

  Charles lived across the street. He was an eighty-five-year-old former government chauffeur from Kenya. This past December he’d arrived in Canada to live out his days with Caroline, the youngest of his grandchildren. He’d stayed indoors until spring, and then he’d taken up residence for hours at a time on the porch sofa, a tall, straight, pole-limbed man wearing a light blue or gray three-piece suit, motionless apart from the levering of his right arm as he brought a cigarette to his lips.

  “He probably can’t even see you,” Rose said, watching the sky. The streamers were sailing in. “You’re probably a blur.”

  “He’s waiting for me to bend over. They’re like dogs that way.”

  Rose hung her head. By “they,” she devoutly hoped her mother meant old men, not black men. Old people had a right to find each other repellent.

  “I want you to talk to Caroline,” Fiona said.

  “It isn’t his fault if he can’t take his eyes off you.”

  “He’s gone through four wives.”

  “Mom, do something out back. I’ve got to go.”

  “Well, you phoned me.”

  She called Victor next.

  “You had Chinese for lunch yesterday,” he said. “Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “MSG. Major migraine trigger.”

  “Wang’s doesn’t use MSG.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not really.” She reached to pay the driver. “So around two o’clock for the storm?”

  “More like two fifteen, two thirty. I’m betting it’s MSG, but let me know.”

  Several girls from the nearby private school were discussing the COMING SOON poster of Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop. “They’re like my legs,” one of them said, flipping her skirt, and Rose, walking past, saw that it was the same skirt as Harriet’s, exactly the same: pale yellow with dime-sized, navy-rimmed polka dots.

  An effervescent tension started up behind her eyes. It seemed connected to the polka dots. Was she about to have an episode? She frantically sorted through her keys while resisting an impulse to ask the girl where she’d bought the skirt. As if that would tell her anything.

  The tension vanished the moment she was inside. She went over to the staircase and sat on a step and kicked off her sandals. Her encounter with David, her mother’s hateful paranoia, the heat, the skirt. All this was taking a toll.

  She looked around the lobby, never at its best with daylight streaming through the glass doors. The widest cracks in the plaster Lloyd was beginning to repair. The carpet needed replacing, but he said he could hide the rips with duct tape on the underside.

  Her parents had laid this carpet, just the two of them. One of Rose’s first memories was of her mother on her hands and knees, and the raw sound of her scissors cutting through the nylon pile. The original carpet went down twenty years before that, during the theater’s massive overhaul. In those days, the early fifties, it belonged to Ricky Renaldo, and Rose’s father did little more than fly to New York City to meet with Ricky’s decorators and suppliers. Back in Toronto he was required to turn up at boozy lunches and listen to Ricky reminisce about the musicians and actors he’d rescued from poverty. Where had Ricky’s money come from? Investments, Ricky said. Crooked, offshore investments, her father heard. Whatever the source, it ran out a month before the grand opening. As uniformed men hired by Ricky’s creditors were carrying out the lobby furniture, Ricky was driving his Cadillac at high speed into a cement embankment.

  Rose’s father was too stunned to see his opportunity. Not so his bride. On the day of the funeral Fiona
talked her uncle into cosigning a loan that enabled the newlyweds to buy the restored former vaudevillian theater where, as a child, Rose’s father had watched a man in a rabbit costume jump through hoops of fire.

  Seldom did Rose think of those days, the heydays, before she and Ava were born. Normally when she thought about them, she was at home in bed, unable to sleep, worrying about money. This morning on the stairs, facing the vestibule and the retired box office with its gothic windows she otherwise never noticed, she marveled at her parents’ courage and faith in buying the theater and then making the risky decision to show second runs and classics. Her mother claimed that she had never doubted they would make a go of it. “Your father was a zealot,” she said.

  Rose was not a zealot. Rose lacked the single-mindedness and other necessary qualities, such as joy in mingling with the patrons (quizzing them, soliciting their opinions, offering men cigars after a screening of Dr. Strangelove) and the passion and gall it takes to insinuate yourself into exclusive publicity parties. Zealotry dies with the zealot. In that, Rose suspected, it was like genius, and she was like Frank Sinatra Jr. and Liza Minnelli. Even her extra job booking films for DeLux had come about through her father’s connections.

  But Rose knew herself to be lucky. This theater, this work, getting to screen great movies day after day and having people tell you how thankful they were. She kept to herself that the reason she could watch certain films five and six times was that she didn’t care much about story. What she treasured, because they comforted her, were the domestic details, the rooms, the furniture, the clothes, especially the women’s clothes and especially their footwear: pumps, heels, saddle shoes, moccasins, cowgirl boots, rain boots, slippers. Only actresses playing peasants or beachgoers ever wore flat-heeled sandals like hers.

  She slipped them back on. Harriet, in Rose’s first episode, had worn heels. Open-toed, quite high.

  She returned calls and drafted next week’s newspaper ads. Every so often she looked out the window to monitor the clouds, or she stared at a photograph plate to test her distance vision.

  She Googled car interiors. She couldn’t find David’s. She Googled Harriet Smith. Up came Harriet Smith radiologists, anesthesiologists, actresses, wedding planners. A narrower search—Harriet Smith Goldfinch—brought her to Harriet Smith as an attendee at a literary conference and as an editor mentioned in articles about writers Rose had never heard of. There were no photographs, and Harriet Smith Toronto brought nothing.