Henry's Sisters. Cathy Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ smiled.

      I smiled with my teeth only, like a tiger in menopause, and sidled by her. She was playing a Vivaldi CD.

      “Thank you,” Janie said. She patted her reddish hair, which was back in a bun.

      Cecilia and I are protective of our younger sister, Janie, and her… quirks. As she said one time, “The whole planet does not need to know that I have to touch each one of my closet doors in the same place with the same amount of pressure before I go to bed each night and if I do the wrong amount of pressure on one door I have to do it again. And again. Sometimes a third time.” She’d let a little scream out and buried her face in her hands when she’d told me that one.

      “What do you think of this knife, Isabelle?” she asked me.

      Janie’s eyes are bright green. I mean bright green. Luminescent. As usual, she was wearing a prim dress with a lace collar and comfortable (read: frumpy) shoes. She wore sensible beige bras that a nun might wear if she was eighty and blind. She was also wearing a white apron.

      “I think that knife is sharp and twisty.”

      She sighed. I had disappointed her.

      I headed toward her great room. Janie’s houseboat is located on a quieter part of the Willamette River, although you can see the skyscrapers in Portland from the front decks. The windows are floor to ceiling, and the river rolls right on by, as do storms, ducks, Jet Skis, canoes, and drunk boaters.

      The rain made the view blurry and gray.

      “But do you think it offers up a sufficient amount of blinding fear?”

      I turned around. “Yes. I’m blindingly scared to death of it.”

      Janie uses white doilies and has plastic slipcovers over all her pink chairs. She has pink flowered curtains and has tea —tea with scones and cream and honey and sugar—every afternoon, like the British; listens to classical music; and reads the classics, like Jane Eyre. If she’s feeling wild, she listens to Yo-Yo Ma. She takes one bite of food, then four sips of tea. One bite of food, four sips of tea.

      When she’s done with her tea she goes back to wringing people’s guts out of their stomachs with cattle prods.

      “You know, the next killer in my book is a grandma. She goes after mothers,” Janie said. “She hated her own mother. Her own mother made her work all the time, locked her in closets, and schlepped her around the country in a dirty white trailer. She worked in a bar. The kid got lice.”

      I stopped at that. “Now that’s special, Janie. Special. Think she won’t recognize who that is?”

      “I’ve changed her name.” She said this with not a little defiance. “And we were never locked in closets. We chose to go there all on our own. To hide.”

      I put my hands on my hips and stared at the ceiling, imagining how bad things would get once she got her hands on it. Oh, it would be ugly.

      “And!” Janie said, stabbing the knife in the air. “The grandma in my book has white hair, she volunteers at the hospital in the gift shop, and at night—whack and stab, whack and stab.”

      I groaned. “Must you be so graphic?”

      Janie put the knife back in a case on her kitchen counter, slammed the lid, and tapped it four times. “Well, then. Fine. Fine. ”

      I ignored the tone.

      Janie patted that bun of hers. “This grandma scares me. Last night, after I finished writing at 2:02 A.M . I went in my own closet and hid.”

      “The woman that you created scared you? ” Gall. “So, even though she’s only in your head, you hid in your own closet from her.”

      She stared off into space. I knew she was waiting four seconds to answer my question. Why the obsession with the number four? I had no idea. Neither did she. She told me one time it was the “magic number in her head.”

      “She’s so uncontrollable. I can’t even control her when I’m writing about her. She does things and says things and I follow her around and write what I’m seeing and hearing and smelling. She’s a sick person. I don’t like her.”

      “Me, neither. Maybe you should embroider her out of your life.” Janie has to embroider flowers each night or she can’t sleep. When she’s done, she sews a pillow up—always white—and gives them to a group that counsels pregnant teenagers.

      She fiddled with her apron. “Stop telling me you think my embroidery is stupid.”

      “I didn’t say that,” I protested.

      “You didn’t need to. I can hear it in your tone.”

      “My tone? My tone?”

      “Yes, that condescending one!” She turned around and faced the front of her house, then gasped.

      “What’s wrong?” I got out of my chair.

      “Oh, nothing. It’s nothing. ” She turned around, fiddled with her apron.

      I moved toward the front window, so I could see the walkway in front of her houseboat. I saw a man. Brown hair. Tall, a loping stride, bigger nose than normal, but not too big. Not big enough to snarf down a fish. I figured he lived in the houseboat down the way.

      I turned around. Grinned at Janie.

      “Don’t even think about it—” she breathed.

      “Is that?” I raised my eyebrows, laughed, and made a dart for the door.

      “Oh, no, you do not, Isabelle Bommarito!”

      I opened the door and the rain came on in.

      “Come back here, right this minute!”

      But I had already stepped over the threshold to the wood walkway. She was right behind me and grabbed me around the waist, both arms. “Don’t you dare.”

      I whispered, struggling, “I can help you to meet him—”

       “I don’t need your help!” she hissed.

      “Let go of me, Janie,” I whispered. “I’m helping you!”

      I tried to pursue Big Nose, but she held on to me like a human octopus, one leg twisted around mine, both of us grunting with effort. “Get off of me.”

      “Never.” She tightened her arms and lifted.

      I wiggled around and tackled her and we ended up in a heap by her front door. Both of us went, “Ugh,” when the air knocked out of our lungs. I held both her arms down, then whisked myself off her zippity quick and got a few steps. She scrambled up after me, her footsteps thudding, and shoved me to the ground. We rolled twice to the left, twice to the right, huffing and puffing.

      She yanked at my ankle, tried to drag me back in. “You’re always trying to butt in—”

      “I am not trying to butt in.” I tried to kick her hand СКАЧАТЬ