Little Sister Read online

  She went to MySpace. Harriet Smiths aplenty, just all the wrong ones. She tried various people-search sites, pointlessly, since you had to provide a phone number to get an address, or an address to get a phone number. Entering Harriet Smith sent her back to the Harriet Smiths she’d already scrolled through on Google.

  The phone book offered more hope. It didn’t have a listing for Harriet Smith, but there were twenty-five H. Smiths, plus a further six where H was the first of two initials, and then nine where an initial preceded the H. Forty possibilities. She called H. Smith on Aberdeen Avenue. Nobody would be home in the middle of the day, she told herself.

  H. Smith on Aberdeen Avenue was Hailey Smith. Rose phoned the next listing and went into Hugh’s voice mail. She kept going. If Harriet answered, she couldn’t imagine saying anything other than “Sorry, wrong number.” But at least she would have an address to drive past. To park outside of.

  A third of the way through the H. Smiths she was surprised by a live person answering, a man. “I won the free tickets,” he said.

  “Pardon?” said Rose, then realized his caller ID displayed Regal Theater.

  “The raffle,” the man said. “I won, right?”

  “No,” Rose said. “No, sorry.” The raffle was months ago.

  “Drat,” the man said.

  “Actually, I’m looking for someone named Harriet Smith.”

  “Harriet Smith. The last name rings a bell.”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Wait. What’s showing tonight?”

  “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

  “What else?”

  “It’s too long for a second feature.”

  “I’ll bet you sell a lot of drinks during spaghetti Westerns.”

  “Not”—she began scrolling her cell for messages—“particularly.”

  “Turn down the air conditioning.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s a nice laugh you have.”

  Had she laughed? “I’ve got to go.”

  “You’ve got to find Harriet.”

  She switched to her cell, which showed up as Private Number, but as if some connecting force had been awakened, she reached a spate of live people. The older the voice, the more help was offered, along the lines of “My cousin Tom might know a Harriet, except we’ve been out of touch since he made the move to Fort Lauderdale.” She phoned the last dozen numbers with her eye on the advancing storm. She hung up on Y. H. Smith’s machine and stood to look out the window.

  Minutes passed. Black clouds were approaching, and the servers at the café were lowering the umbrellas. Rose returned to her desk. But the storm held off. When Victor phoned, blue filled the western sky.

  “Anything happen?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It missed us here.”

  “I’m seeing pop-ups on the radar. You might get one in another hour.”

  Rose’s heart skipped. “When?”

  “Another hour. Then that should be it until tomorrow.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Oh, and stay away from Wang’s.”

  Mr. Wang, the grandfather, the dumpling maker, worked in the front window. “Sit anywhere,” he said as Rose entered.

  She paused to ask if they used MSG.

  “You not allergic,” he told her.

  “I don’t think I am, but—”

  “We no use.”

  By the time she returned to the theater, more leaden clouds had amassed, and Lloyd stood out front, smoking and surveying the scene. “What’s with this weather?” he greeted her.

  “You’re early.”

  “My buses dovetailed. Then I go and forget my key.” He licked his finger and tapped the spittle on the end of his cigarette.

  “Can I bum one of those?” she asked

  They crossed the lobby to the kitchen, where he got out his tobacco and rolling papers. They smoked in the alley.

  “My first,” she coughed.

  “This is strong stuff to start with. Homegrown.”

  “Bring it on.”

  He pocketed the lighter. “Bad day?”

  “Weird day.”

  “I hear you.”

  Did he? What constituted weird in his life? Oh, Rose knew—your seventy-four-year-old boss confiding that she sleeps naked. “Just for the record,” she said, “my mother sleeps in a full-length nightgown.”

  “She’s feeling frisky,” Lloyd said. “More power to her.”

  “Frisky,” Rose said. She looked at a cobweb of cracks in the pavement. Provided her vision didn’t suddenly sharpen, and the storm held off, she could stay put. “This is totally foul.” She coughed again and leaned against the wall. Inside Harriet’s body, cigarette smoke was a soothing vapor.

  “Hold on,” said Lloyd. He went in and returned with two kitchen chairs.

  On the crumbling pavement she had to anchor hers by opening her legs. Positioned thusly, in her long dress, smoking a cigarette that tasted of manure and had been rolled by an aging former convict who wore beat-up cowboy boots, she felt like a pioneer lady, the gritty, strapping one from the movie Westward the Women. “She isn’t driving you crazy?” she said.

  “Not at all,” he said.

  “She’s chewing your ear off, though.”

  “She’s got her stories to tell.”

  “They aren’t all based on fact.”

  “Is it a fact you were born on the table in there?” He gestured behind himself.

  Now, this was interesting. Either her mother had deliberately avoided mentioning Ava or she had mixed her babies up.

  “And your father”—Lloyd chuckled—“he ran into the auditorium and got to deliver the line, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’”

  “It was my sister, not me.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “Ava. She died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Twenty-three years ago. In an accident.”

  “Shit.”

  “Pretty much.” She pulled longer drags into her raw throat. She expected that soon enough, and without asking, he would get more details from her mother. Or—actually, this was more likely—he would get a complete fabrication designed by Fiona’s broken brain to console itself.

  A blast of thunder and a sudden downpour had them bringing in the chairs. Rose sprinted to her office, locked the door, and settled behind her desk. There was the spell of anticipation as her vision sharpened and the flecks materialized, then relief as her skin cooled and tightened.

  She stood at the doorway of a bathroom. Ivory-tiled walls, white towels, pedestal sink, polished chrome taps, each immaculate feature reassuring to Harriet. She ran her tongue over the narrow vault of her mouth and rubbed one cold bare foot on top of the other. Thunder sounded miles off.

  She switched off the light and went down a high-ceilinged hallway to a pale blue bedroom. You could smell the fresh paint. A gust of rain like thrown gravel hit a window in which the bulb from a bedside lamp was reflected. At the edges of her vision were bookshelves and cardboard boxes. A calico cat slept on the bed next to an open manuscript, and she closed the manuscript, put it on the floor, and lay alongside the cat. Her cell beeped. She checked the display: Incoming Call.

  “Hello?” she answered.

  “Did you get the pills?” said a woman.

  “Not yet. I’m picking them up later.”

  “You have to take them with food, or they upset your stomach. You won’t feel anything for about a week, but gradually you’ll start feeling, you know, just lighter, easier. You’ll think, oh, yeah, this is how I’m supposed to feel.”

  “So how’s the physio going?”

  “Fine,” the woman said impatiently. “But you’ve got to take them, Harriet. You can’t miss a day with antidepressants.”

  “I know.” The conversation was making her anxious. She plucked a cigarette from a pack of Du Mauriers.

  “And you’ve got to stop researching nooses.”r />
  She went still. “You were on my computer?”

  “I was checking my e-mail.”

  “You were checking my search history.”

  “Well, I’m worried about you.”

  “Did you even feed the cats? They were both yowling when I got home.”

  “Of course I fed them. Jesus. You tell me you’re depressed, I want to help. And then I find out you’re researching goddamn nooses.”

  She fumbled for her lighter. “It calms me down.”

  “Calms you down.”

  “I need to know the option of suicide exists, I don’t need to act on it. Remember how Dad used to put a cigarette in his mouth but not light it?”

  “That was Mom.”

  “Was it?” She lit her own cigarette. “I thought it was Dad.”

  “It was Mom.”

  Along the middle shelves, in front of the books, were statuettes of horses: wooden, ceramic, soapstone, bronze, about two dozen, placed equidistantly. Her gaze paused at a rearing wooden horse, and she got off the bed and went over to it.

  “Have you told David?” the sister asked.

  She rotated the horse so that it faced forward. “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “There’s no point if I have an abortion.”

  “So you’ve decided.”

  “Not a hundred percent.”

  “What kind of man . . .”

  Harriet’s equilibrium teetered. “Don’t start.”

  “No, I have to say it. What kind of man fools around on his pregnant wife?”

  “What kind of woman fools around with a man”—she waved her cigarette—“who has a pregnant wife?”

  “Well, that’s another story. He’s going to have to choose.”

  This provoked a high, jittery laugh. “Between who? Lesley and me, or the babies?”

  “Have the baby, then. To hell with him. She doesn’t need to know.”

  “He works down the hall from me.”

  “I mean she doesn’t need to know it’s his.”

  “People find these things out. Anyway, I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” Her breath caught.

  “Okay, honey, it’s okay.”

  The eyes Rose opened were her own. Blood was dripping onto her keyboard, and she yanked out a Kleenex and blew her nose. Compared to the hand that had held the cigarette, this hand felt swollen and clumsy. The rain had let up, and she went to the window. She cried helplessly. Yesterday she’d told herself that the odds of having another episode were astronomical. But it had happened. She stood there, dumbfounded, watching the clouds.

  When Victor called she was Googling antidepressants pregnancy.

  “Well?” he said.

  She said yes to the storm, no to the migraine symptoms. Both honest answers, since she’d stopped believing that “silent migraine” described her episodes. She still believed they must be some form of rarefied dream, but she didn’t want to get into an argument.

  “It was the MSG,” Victor said.

  Most antidepressants, especially the selective serotonin reuptakes, are generally safe, Rose read. She clicked off the site.

  “MSG stimulates a nerve that causes the release of neurotransmitters,” Victor went on. “Which causes inflammation of the blood vessels around the brain.”

  “It’s clearing here,” she said to change the subject.

  “Clear skies overnight. More pop-ups early tomorrow afternoon. Basically, we can expect a similar pattern through to the middle of next week. There’s a humid air mass stalled over the whole southern part of the province.”

  “Thunderstorms every day for a week?” she said, keeping her voice level.

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  MAY 1982

  The coffin was a Tupperware container. At the sight of the kittens curled up, side by side, Ava snapped out of her stupor and began tucking pieces of Kleenex around the bodies. “They’re hibernating,” she said.

  “A long summer’s nap,” Fiona said. She went to the barn for a shovel.

  Somebody had to do the crying, and it was Rose, although not until later, when she and Ava were in bed.

  “Think how safe and warm they are,” Ava urged through the heating grates between their rooms.

  “I can’t.”

  “Pretend.”

  Rose made an effort.

  “You pretended about Gordon’s brains,” Ava said. “Oh,” she said, “we were so mean to him, and he was so good.”

  “Carrying you to the house and everything,” Rose said. But the sight of Gordon’s hand swiping dirt from Ava’s legs a little too high up and lingeringly was snarled in Rose’s mind with an uncovered skull, and the idea of him disturbed her more than ever.

  They followed his advice and every night after supper put out a bowl of Cat Chow. If Duchess ate it, she never showed herself. There were other feral cats slinking around and running off, keeping their distance. The girls began to search, calling her name. Rose shook a bag of Pounce, Ava waved a catnip cigar. Their route took them into their own hayfield, down the first, stunted row of the neighbor’s corn, around to the meadow behind the barn, and then into the barn itself, where evidence of Gordon’s having collected or deposited his roofing supplies was of absorbing interest to Ava. “He saved Duchess’s life,” she said reverently, as if he’d leapt in front of a hail of bullets. She refused to entertain their old Gordon fantasies, and dropped her Popsicle-stick knife down the well.

  For Rose, the searches gave a spark of meaning to the long, dull days. Their realtor had said that five young girls lived close by, in the farmhouse two concessions over, but he was behind the times. In the farmhouse two concessions over—and it was hardly close by, more like a ten-minute walk—lived an old couple whose grown daughters had left the farm decades ago and who told Fiona they were grateful it wasn’t jiggers who had bought Windy Acres.

  “Jiggers?” Fiona said.

  “What’s the new name?” the wife said fretfully, appealing to Ava and Rose.

  “Ragheads,” her husband muttered from his wooden chair.

  “Oh, Sikhs,” Fiona said with an uncomfortable laugh. “You mean Sikhs.”

  “I mean ragheads,” he said.

  When Rose and Ava weren’t searching, they flew the box kite and ran under the sprinkler and walked up the road to visit a herd of cows and feed them dandelion greens through the chain-link fence. They looked for four-leaf clovers in the frame of grass their father kept mowed around the house. Friday mornings they accompanied him into town to do the shopping. He bought household supplies from the BiWay, and Bacardi rum from the Liquor Control Board. Monday mornings the whole family drove to Bert’s grocery north of Orangeville. The cigarette-smoking checkout woman, whose neck had the fine wrinkles of a breeze across a pond and whose stomach took the punch of the cash register drawer, raved about Ava’s hair, saying every time that it would cost a fortune to get that color at the beauty parlor.

  On rainy days Rose might start a jigsaw puzzle. Jigsaw puzzles oppressed Ava. They were vandalized pictures as far as she was concerned, and she worked on them in aggravated spurts. She would rather comb her dolls’ hair. Rose’s dolls had yet to make it out of the packing box. If she got bored with a puzzle, she helped scrape wallpaper, or she unlocked her diary and wrote down the days’ events accompanied by illustrations of cows and pigs and horses copied from her encyclopedia of world mammals. She developed an interest in her mother’s books. She read To Kill a Mockingbird, and Boo Radley was Gordon until Boo behaved heroically. She read The Diary of Anne Frank, and Gordon was the obnoxious Albert Dussel.

  They didn’t have cable, and the tower picked up only two fuzzy TV channels, so after dinner Rose and Ava watched the PG-rated movies that were sent to their father for consideration in second run. Amy, Neighbors, Time Bandits, On Golden Pond. They got in their parents’ bed, and Fiona told them Irish ghost stories, which the girls knew word for word but were still frightened by, especially up here at the farm, wh
ere the night seemed to go on forever and the wind sounded like banshees.

  Every five or six days the wind died, and from miles off, you could hear the barking of dogs and the beeping of gravel trucks. On one such afternoon Ava halted at the entrance to the meadow and said, “I’m tired of doing this.”

  Rose woke from her searching-for-Duchess trance. “Doing what?”

  “Calling and calling.”

  “She probably found a nice new home,” Rose said.

  “I don’t think she knew her name,” Ava said.

  The next morning their father told them they’d given it the old college try. He slapped his hands on the kitchen table and said, “How about we adopt a shelter cat? A tame one.”

  “How about we adopt a goat?” asked Ava prayerfully.

  “A goat,” he mused.

  “I’m not ready to take on farm animals!” Fiona called from the pantry.

  “Like in Heidi,” Ava whispered.

  A few mornings later their father said he had to meet a man about a dog and returned not long afterward hauling a rusty trailer. Rose and Fiona were doing the dishes and saw him from the kitchen window.

  “Sweet Jesus, what has he gone and done,” said Fiona.

  “Is it a goat?” asked Ava, who got to him first.

  “Better than a goat,” their father said. The coils of his hair sprang around. Something green and oily smudged his shirtsleeve. “Seventy bucks including saddle and lessons!” he yelled to Fiona, who stood frowning on the stoop. He unlatched the doors, hooked them to the side, and lowered the ramp. “Come on, boy,” he said, tugging the reins.

  “A pony!” Ava cried.

  “Purebred Shetland,” their father said. “His name’s Major Tom, but we can change it if you like.”

  “No, I like Major Tom,” Ava said.