The Laboratory of Love, page 18
Each half-glimpse of the wounded, wandering boy made it more necessary, and urgent, for me to see Lily. To sound out the feasibility of a visit—whether my sister’s condition would permit—I telephoned our Brale aunts. (If you call one of the four sisters, I still knew, you have to call all three; these are women who take offence easily, who like to nurse slights like a teetotal does drinks.) Each aunt sounded unsurprised to hear I’m in the area after being far away for so long; to their minds, only outlandish behaviour could be expected of anyone eccentric enough to leave Brale. “There’s no work around here,” Dorothy informed me, puncturing what could be the sole sensible reason for turning up anywhere. “A cabin on the lake,” echoed Madeleine flatly. “At this time of year.” Just hippies and crackpots and people who don’t bowl would make such peculiar living arrangements, then pretend they’re the superior choice. “She’d love to see you,” Kay decided doubtfully, giving me Lily’s telephone number.
That was in November. This is January. I’ve been to Brale and I’ve seen Lily. No deeply buried secrets were excavated by our encounter. Or was one? There is this: now the snow outside the cabin windows often holds footprints at morning; conceivably those of a child, they are sometimes confused by tracks of deer and bear. A handful of pumpkin seeds, twisted within a scrap of silver paper, waits in my mailbox beside the road at noon. And nearly every week, something in the winter night, perhaps the smooth glide of ferry lights across black water, insists that, despite what was or was not unearthed during our recent visit, I must call my sister.
This is never simple. If nothing else, during the past months I’ve learned that Lily tends to allow her telephone to ring unanswered. She disconnects the cord, forgets it’s not plugged in. Or a recorded voice says her number is not in service. For reasons I can’t guess, my sister frequently changes or cancels or unlists her number. I consider then decide not to call the aunts to ask if they know the new listing. To their injured puzzlement, they have little contact with Lily. I’m left to check directory assistance until a new number appears under—and this always startles me—our shared last name.
It has never been easy to reach my sister.
If she does happen to lift the receiver tonight, Lily won’t speak first. Like a secret agent trained not to reveal herself to a possible enemy, she waits silently for callers to identify themselves. Learning it’s me on the other end of the line will fail to ease suspicion; nothing resembling a conversation will follow. She’s well, the house is fine, weather isn’t unusual for this time of year. No, she hasn’t been away. Yes, her number has changed again. Lily won’t ask how I am, what I am doing. She won’t refer to my November visit. She won’t explain why she hasn’t called me since that meeting.
My sister has grown even more guarded than the child who concealed herself behind stony features and covert movement and silence. If I spent my first sixteen years living with Lily without fathoming her interior life, such ignorance wasn’t only mine. MJ, my older brother, and our parents, Ardis and Mitch, also remained uncertain why Lily’s bed yawned on summer dawns, whom she met on the mountain in spring, where she went on nights as cold and dark as this night that conceals the answer to a question, the identity of a corpse.
Lily finds him on the mountain when the November world is frozen and stiff, yet still unsoftened by snow; five months before we will search for pussy willows in April thaw. “Come,” she says, materializing in the furnace room doorway in an unfamiliar grey felt coat that looks several sizes too large. Lily has stolen it from the school cloakroom or from the change room at the skating rink. In a dim cave carved out of discarded furniture and abused boxes, and of hockey sticks that belonged to an uncle from whom I inherited a first name and sharp features and fear of smoke, I look up from my latest letter to Jesus. The furnace switches on; the blue pilot light hisses. The house suspends itself uneasily in Saturday quiet: Ardis escapes into sleep in the big bedroom upstairs; Mitch has shut himself in his study across the basement; and MJ spends most of every weekend with television and treats at Aunt Madeleine’s, by the river. “Come,” my sister repeats. It’s neither a command nor an invitation. Lily’s speech is usually uninflected; scant emphasis lies behind her words to lend them nuance. Her communication is blunt and flat as that of cardboard Indians in the westerns Mitch drags us to at the Royal Theatre, where from the front row he watches John Wayne, another simple man, with wide, admiring eyes.
“Hurry,” says Lily, beckoning with one reddened hand. She invariably loses the mittens our concerned aunts give her. She doesn’t seem to feel the cold, roams without a hat or scarf in winter. Lily has been outside all morning, I can tell: waves of chill pulse from her poised form. She knows a way of leaving the house unnoticed; only half way through a weekend afternoon, or not until after the streetlamps blink on, might her absence assert itself. Where does she go? Mitch and Ardis don’t ask; it’s better not to. They accept that Lily fibs as lightly as breathes. “She’s different,” sigh the aunts, applying Brale’s catchall adjective for harmless eccentrics and non-practicing homosexuals and tentative pedophiles to a thin girl of twelve who goes where she wishes, takes what she needs.
Surprised by Lily’s rare summons, I emerge from the back of the furnace room. I believed that my hiding place, amid the asphyxia of oil and dust, was a secret shared only with my buried uncle; but Lily always knows how to find me. Even after she stops looking, even while I conceal myself beneath thick blankets of time and distance, Lily knows where I am.
On a late November afternoon I walk down Aster Drive to meet Lily for the first time in two decades. During two brief visits to Brale, in 1986 and 1995, when she was in the hospital on the hill, Lily wouldn’t see me. The lingering power of that double refusal, and the weight of all the years since then, made me nervous upon dialing her number from the cabin. When I spoke my name, silence followed. “Donald,” I repeated. Fumbling to speak words that received little response, I tried to believe the awkwardness of the call came from our not having spoken for so long. “If you want,” said Lily to my suggestion that I visit for a few days.
My small suitcase brims with questions concerning what happened to my parents and brother while I was embracing distance. Knowledge of their fates has been gleaned from what lay behind and between the lines of several brief notes from my aunts that somehow happened to find me during those years. We thought you should know, each one began. There is too much I don’t know, much perhaps only Lily can tell me. Did she ever hear from Mitch and MJ, anything at all, after they evaporated from Brale’s air? Was Ardis’s death easier than her life? And how has Lily been able to sustain herself?
Approaching the house, I wonder if anything will be learned inside it after all. The place looks small and shabby. A single-storey structure, similar to others on the block, with bare front yard and a vacant driveway. Although dusk hasn’t fallen, the curtains are closed. I ring the doorbell, touch it again when no one answers. Has Lily forgotten about my visit? As I am about to test the door, it opens.
Although thirty-eight—just two years older than me—Lily has turned mostly grey. A neat bun rises above a face whose sharpness has been replaced by puffiness, perhaps from medication. Grey eyes loom behind thick glasses, fail to blink at my hello. Grey skirt, white blouse, and dark sweater are as plainly cut as a uniform, and look homemade. The contours of Lily’s body have blurred like her features, but without concession to softness. She would feel stiff and cold in my arms, I suspect.
Lily glances at my suitcase, retreats down the dim hall. It strikes me that each of her steps is precisely measured to cover the same distance.
Taken aback by her failure to offer a token greeting, then recalling her distaste for words, I follow my sister inside. She pauses, partly turns. “You can sleep in your old room,” she says. Toneless as ever, her voice is pitched lower now. “The bed’s made. Supper’s at six.”
Perhaps because she didn’t initiate this visit, Lily continues with the housework it has interrupted. The living room she is dusting appears painfully tidy and clean already. I notice that old furniture retains its old arrangement. The bedroom that belonged to our parents stands shut, like Lily’s across the hall. Curtains from my childhood have faded in swaths; paths betray where the carpet has been most heavily trafficked. If the walls have ever been repainted, it was with the same colour. Turning on the stove’s back left burner, I hold my hand above it. The element still doesn’t work.
“Yes,” says Lily, not looking up when I mention that the house appears unchanged. “No,” she says when I ask if she’d like help with supper. I linger in the kitchen, uncertain how to give Lily the present in my suitcase. It’s a book about what I imagined happened to all of us.
Descending to the basement, I place my luggage on one of the beds in the room I shared with MJ, then glance into the furnace room. It remains crowded with broken tools and rusted skates, and with empty jars that hold breath beneath a film of dust. The scent of oil entwines my head, shuts my eyes. As if a finger of bone traced my spine, I shudder. In Mitch’s study, out-dated history texts weigh the shelves and the manual Olivetti still squats on his desk. Avoiding a sharp, exposed spring at one end, I curl up on the rumpus room couch that was once upstairs. At card-table islands, MJ, Lily, and I bent over homework in this sunken space, while Ardis lurched through medicated hours above and Mitch toiled at his memoirs. Without irony, my father titled them A Simple Man.
“Time to eat,” Lily calls down the stairs.
The kitchen table is set with two plates, two forks, two glasses of water. Lily serves a casserole made with macaroni and tuna; a child would enjoy such soft, bland food. Eyes focused on the wall behind me, Lily pauses eating only to sip water or to reply briefly to my tentative remarks. The neighbours to the east moved; she isn’t sure who lives there now. Yes, downtown Brale has changed some. No, she prefers to clear the kitchen herself. She knows where everything goes. Lily’s movements at the counter look carefully considered and cautiously executed; each one hints of obscure ritual, of secret significance. I realize how difficult it will be to ask the questions that have brought me here. Back turned to me, hands plunged into scalding water, Lily allows her shoulders to loosen then sag. Steam seems to rise from her body, drift from her skin; it hovers around her head. Lily stands before the sink as if she’s forgotten what she’s doing or where she is. The tap drips a persistent reminder. Abruptly, my sister’s back stiffens. She pulls the plug, dries her hands. “You must be tired from your trip,” she says, still faced away. “Good night.”
She turns the corner of the hall toward her bedroom. Or does she sleep in our parents’ old room now? Water runs in the adjacent bathroom. A door opens, closes. It’s seven o’clock.
What have I expected? What do I deserve? To be eagerly welcomed as a long-lost brother? To be greeted with open arms? Yes, Lily, I’m tired from my trip. My trip has been longer than a hundred miles from a cabin on a lake; I hadn’t realized how long my trip has been until circling back now to where it began. My trip’s been too fucking long, and it isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot, not by half. I grimace at my reflection floating on the kitchen window. Although I can’t see through the image, I know a maple tree, nude this season, rises half-way across the back yard. Beyond the fence runs another row of single-storey houses; past that, the highway. Then the mountain looms jagged and tall; bare rock even during summer, always splintering a chemical sky. Sometimes we tried to reach the top to discover what lay on the other side. But we never could conquer the peak; the slope was too treacherous, too steep. “I’ll reach it without you,” Lily said, after allowing me to attempt the ascent with her one last time, before she began, at twelve, to scramble alone upon the mountain, beside the cold, swift river.
No. Not the last time. There was at least one more time. Yes.
A November Saturday in 1972.
Something like a scrap of paper stirs in a dark room in my mind.
The house stands silent. Has Lily already gone to sleep or does her light still burn? She lies on a narrow mattress and looks up through the dark? Or tosses in the wide bed where Ardis sweated pills, where Mitch planned his escape? I’m tempted to steal down the hall and look for a stripe of light beneath a door, then remember that several floorboards creak.
All I know is that, for ten years after she turned nineteen, Lily passed in and out of the psychiatric unit of the Brale Regional Hospital previously haunted by our mother. I know only that, five years ago, just after Ardis’s death, she was permanently released. As far as I understand, Lily has never held a job and doesn’t own a car and rarely visits our nearby aunts. Although everyone in Brale knows everyone, she is without friends. There has been no lover. A solitary existence in this quiet house may be essential to maintaining a fragile stability. Lily may be unable, rather than unwilling, to answer questions. It may be reckless if not wrong to remind her of the past. It may be necessary for her to forget.
And me?
Downstairs, I sift Mitch’s study for his memoirs, without hope. Failing to discover a manuscript during my two earlier Brale visits, I was convinced my father had destroyed the work-in-progress or taken it with him when he vanished in 1978. I inspect the basement bedroom for any evidence of my brother: unblinking cat’s-eyes, model airplanes, baseball gloves. Although his transformation into thin air was apparently planned less carefully than our father’s, nothing remains of MJ either. Not anymore. The last time I was here, several such tokens still survived.
The house is the same, yes, but with a difference. Every artifact to evoke those who abandoned it has been scrupulously removed. Hidden away, destroyed. I envision Lily clearing out closets and drawers, wiping fingerprints from surfaces, stripping space of clues to crimes and keys to secrets until only intangible evidence remains. She stands before a backyard bonfire without flinching while flames leap at her face, inhales smoke as wisps of ash snow on her head. With a stick, she stirs coals; prods until they hiss, forces fiery eyes to blink sparks.
I lift my eyes to the narrow window set high in the wall above MJ’s bed, at ground level.
It lies out there, in the cold, dark night, the question I need answered.
It’s not a question concerning Ardis or Mitch or MJ, after all.
Hours later, sliding into sleep, I’m disturbed by a sound from above. The click of the front door. My watch glows three o’clock. I shove away sleep and wait for Lily to return. Didn’t she always come home eventually: when we were children, when we saw the truth?
A child stands above my bed of frozen earth and jabs her stick. “He can’t feel anything,” she informs a presence hovering behind her. The wooden point presses at my bare belly, seeks to pierce the skin, wants entry to entrails. The child pokes harder with her tool, she needs to see inside. Her grey felt coat flaps from the effort; her sharp face frowns. She’s angry that I don’t cry, moan, plead for her to stop. My eyes refuse to close against the intent face above. My gashed throat grimaces. A bubble bursts from my blue lips, escapes into sky. “His name is Billy,” she says, dropping the stick and turning away. The pulsing shadow separates from her, nears me, bends low. A warm hand, the same size and shape as mine, strokes my stone cheek. Scented breath urges me to speak.
At the kitchen table, Lily bows her head before a cup of coffee.
“Good morning,” I say, foggily filling a mug. My hands wrap around heat. I’m cold, despite the groaning furnace. Although it’s early, I feel like I’ve slept too long, too deeply. I can’t remember hearing Lily return last night. She wears the same neat skirt, blouse, and sweater as yesterday. Has she been to bed at all?
“Did you sleep well?” I stare at the scars. The one on her right wrist is thicker than the other. She did it in the back of the furnace room, Aunt Dorothy wrote me at the time. Ardis was the one who found her; the rest of us had left Brale by then. Come here, my asphyxiated uncle summoned Lily in the blue basement light. Dig deeper, he urged. See what’s inside.
“Yes, I did,” replies Lily, rising from the table and leaving the kitchen. The front door opens then closes. I move to the living room and part the curtains. Lily passes without a coat beneath the slate sky, between the frosted yards.
This house has to tell me something that Lily can’t or won’t. I open the door to our parents’ room. Obviously, Lily hasn’t made this room hers; the wide mattress below the bedspread lacks linen. Nothing litters the dressing table; closets and bureau prove bare. The adjacent bathroom contains toothbrush and paste, soap and towel. The medicine chest holds several vials of pills, with a prescription made out to Lily several years ago. Chlorpromazine. Across the hall, Lily’s old room is uncluttered as a nun’s; even during her childhood, it lacked girlish touches. The narrow bed is neatly made. A Bible rests on the night table. One bureau drawer contains underwear; like the closets, the rest are empty. Not even a small white valise, locked tight, lurks anywhere.
Wandering back to the living room, I realize with fresh force that it has no television or music system, no framed photographs or magazines or books. A small radio perches on the mantel. Turning the switch, I find it tuned to static. The buzzing seems to rise in volume inside me. It says these curtains upon the street are never opened. The telephone and doorbell rarely ring. My sister wears the same clothes and eats the same bland food each day, and late at night walks to the same dark place.
She lives simply, that’s all. Not everyone hoards old photographs and love letters, torn ticket stubs and tattered maps. Lily exists on a monthly government cheque that probably isn’t enough. She can’t afford sleek machines and the latest gadgets and an extra pair of shoes. Apparently, she no longer takes what she needs. Or no longer needs.
I move toward the old-fashioned rotary telephone. Aunt Madeleine expects me to visit today. In her house by the river, we’ll sip tea and nibble cake and skim lightly over the past and present. Lily will be mentioned cautiously, if at all. Then we’ll visit Ardis’s grave in the cemetery where my grandparents and uncle also shivers. We’ll drop in on Dorothy and Kay, end up playing dice and cards for quarters. I’ll catch my aunts peering at me sideways for clues to how their youngest brother might have looked if he hadn’t swallowed too much smoke at twelve. I won’t ask if they remember the murder of a child more than twenty years ago. I know their resentful answer already. Children have never been murdered in Brale, BC.
