House of Sighs Read online

  The spirit of a girl who would not allow herself to grow into something she didn’t want to be, the ghost of a teenager who hoped for happiness holding hands with a woman who never existed and only aspired to. Liz was happy in the clearing.

  But every winter there were spiders waiting to spin webs and snakes eager to come out of hibernation. She walked back to the house, twigs in her hair. Nothing lasted.

  Liz Frost was born on the sixteenth of August, 1963 with her umbilical cord tight around her neck. She fought from the start. On November 12th, 1995, at seven forty in the morning, she sat on her bed, put a gun in her mouth and closed her eyes. The day was just beginning.

  One Hundred and One: Sarah

  Sarah Carr ran down her hallway and stopped before a mirror to check her cropped, spiked hair. She was sixty-three, “But I don’t look a day over forty-five.” She laughed, a sad and husky sound. These were the small thoughts that got her through the day.

  Her flat shoes thumped against the floorboards as she searched for the house keys. Sarah considered herself (and with a certain amount of pride) as a hip nanna. The kind of nanna any one of her grandchildren could approach about any issue. Nobody could deny that she was open-minded, maybe even a little different by Bridge standards…yet still those shoes. Sensible flats, as reliable and well-worn as her wisdom.

  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself,” she would say to her grandkids, their round, innocent faces staring up at her. “And those aren’t my words.” It was one of her recycled lines, often said at random, which left her feeling a little flat, a little well-worn herself. Though she sometimes spoke His words, she didn’t give a flying fuck about God any more.

  It was early but the day was hot. Unusual for spring.

  Her blouse was tucked into her high-waisted jeans. Around her neck hung a large, garish crucifix. “Every nanna needs her bling,” she once said to parishioners after a Palm Sunday luncheon, her face still streaked with ash. They looked at her, shocked. “Oh come now, Madame here isn’t fading into the background,” she would say, knowing how desperate she sounded. “How else are the young going to know who to turn to if us old biddies are invisible?”

  She doubled back to the mirror and snarled at her reflection, checking her teeth for lipstick smears. She was the type to notice it on someone else and be unable to continue conversation until they had wiped it off. “Oh don’t be bashful, Joan. If a bird shat on my shoulder and I hadn’t noticed, wouldn’t you hand me a Kleenex?”

  “Sarah!” A long, heavy voice floated up the hall.

  “Oh, what do you want?” She laughed.

  “I’m dy-iiinnnggg.”

  “Oh jump in the lake!” She picked up her over-the-shoulder purse and went in to her husband.

  Bill Carr was propped upright in bed with tissues stuffed up his nose. “I thought you’d gone and left me for the crows.”

  “No, sorry, sweetie. I’m not having any dirty old birds flying around my house, thank you very much. When you’re a hairsbreadth away from meeting our maker, I’ll ever so gently throw you on the lawn.”

  “Your kindness knows no bounds.” He chuckled, coughed, a wet rattle in his throat.

  “Love, I’d fix you another batch of warm lemon tea if I had the time.”

  “No, it’s okay. I like sounding this way. I sound all gangster.”

  “Ah posh.” She waved him off and returned to the hall. “Gangstah! So have you seen the thingies?”

  “The what?”

  “Oh you know, the thingies?”

  “What thingies, you silly old bat?”

  “The doo-en-acky. Oh shit.”

  “English, woman, for Heaven’s sakes. Swear jar please. I may be bedridden and dying but I’m not deaf. Dollar to the fat lady, thank you muchly.”

  Sarah went to the mantelpiece and found her husband’s leather wallet. She took a dollar coin and ran back to the hallway table. Upon it was a wooden moneybox in the shape of a female Islander. The coin slipped through her breasts and disappeared.

  “Done.” Then back to her search. “Now where is it? If I keep this up, I’ll miss the bus to town.”

  “I’m a sick man! Enough with the badgering, you coot!”

  In the living room she lifted a lounge cushion, revealing a set of keys bound to a ring with a thumb-sized photograph of her grandkids in a tiny silver frame dangling from it. “Found them, Bill, you can stop searching.”

  She took a moment to look around the room. It was small. Neat. She kept a clean house and was sure to open both front and back doors every Saturday to allow the breeze to flow through. There were times when she would take a kitchen chair and sit in the airflow. Bill would often find her there, silhouetted against the sun, cursing. The cross about her neck was a reminder of who had betrayed whom. And Sarah never forgot those who had crossed her.

  Congratulations, ma’am. You’ve won our annual sweepstakes. And your prize—yep, that’s right, your husband has cancer!

  Sarah thought it a terrible injustice to witness her husband’s death, and to have to go on living after he was gone.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked, the last word dropping as Sarah emerged in the doorway, straightening her collar. She showed him the keys.

  “Ah, keys! Keys they are called. You're losing it, old woman.”

  She checked that her cowboy belt was buckled. She had lost weight. Stress took its toll and she felt haggard. “This old gray Dane, she ain’t what she used to be.”

  “What do you need them for anyway?” Bill coughed again. “I’m not going anywhere so you don’t need to lock up.”

  “Bill, you never know these days. Anyone could just waltz on in and rob us blind. God only knows you’re not going to get up off your throne and defend our telly, right?” She ran to the foot of the bed. “Oh and don’t forget, our darling daughter is coming by with Madame Five to see her pa-pa after lunch, so don’t you go and, like, die or anything on her before they get here, ’kay?”

  “Be gone, foul hob!” He threw his arm at her. “The power of Christ compels you!”

  “Oh jump in the lake. Bye-bye, baby-luv.”

  “See you later, Peggy-Sue,” he said.

  Sarah ran out the door and slammed it shut. Silence descended over the house, disturbed only by the occasional shuffle as the near-dead man wrangled with his bed sheets.

  One Hundred: Peter

  As far as Peter Ditton was concerned, a little sun was always a little sun too much, so he settled for whatever shade the STOP HERE sign granted. His fair, handsome features were already burning.

  He shielded his eyes from the red cloud of dust stirred up by a passing truck. It was the first vehicle to come by in over an hour. He mistook the weekly route for the weekend and had expected the 243 bus to Maitland earlier than this. In his hand was a notebook, the spine all cracked and a sliver of twine marking his page.

  The plan was to skip church and visit a friend. Together they were going to a creative writing and poetry class at the Rotary club in town. There they would pour out their souls to the laughter of slot machines chewing up pensions in the adjoining room. The room stank of beer and old paper. Sometimes the organizers provided tea.

  Peter was always embarrassed standing in front of the group, knew he was a joke to them because of his age. He was only eighteen. On his last visit, the writing group’s leader had urged him to write something real and this time, Peter felt he had done just that. Until then his poems had concerned girls and echoed the rhythmic timing of pop ballads.

  Peter wrote to calm himself, and he always found he needed calming after his mother had finished with him. She had been furious that he was missing another Sunday sermon and had refused to drive him. And so the pen scratched hard and fast, the words spilling onto the page. He felt better afterwards, a little less like punching someone.

  On the bus stop sign someone had written the words “die aids breein faggets”. He turned away, bothered, and fiddled
with his notebook, the end of the scarlet twine looking like a cut in his palm. He could not imagine why someone would choose to be homosexual—didn’t they know what they were condemning themselves to? He had read that one out of every ten men was or had the possibility of being gay. If that were true, then the graffiti was directed at someone he went to school with.

  He had nightmares about diseases like AIDS. In one there was a man, whose flesh had been eaten away. When he spoke, corn-kernel teeth fell from his mouth, clattering on the floor. The man put his palsied hand on Peter’s shoulder and he understood—He’s got the disease! When he awoke, he could still feel the man’s clammy hand on his skin.

  Peter held the notebook so hard his fingertips turned milky. He cocked his head at the sound of crunching gravel, the shadow of a man mingling with his own.

  Ninety-Nine: Steve

  Steve Brown felt like screaming. Instead he focused on catching his breath. The skinny kid next to him at the bus stop (who looked like he had been too busy doodling his notebook instead of some schoolgirl like other normal kids his age) had not reacted. Poor little shit, he thought. He’s better off. Or maybe he knows something about women that I don’t.

  Steve doubted that.

  His thoughts turned back to his wife. She had the wonderful ability of confusing him into anger, which hurt, because he loved her like the world was ending. No wonder he felt like screaming.

  Bev had appeared okay with him quitting his job as janitor at the James Bridge Public School. He gave his reasons, citing differences with the principal and harassment in the workplace. Bev nodded, understanding. Or so he thought.

  In reality he had been fired—caught smoking pot under the year-six dormitory where the kids left their bicycles. “You can do whatever you damn well want in your own time,” yelled the principal, “which, Charlie Brown, there is going to be plenty more of. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and let you burn the place down. Jesus, there’s a fire ban at the moment.” Man, he’d hated being called Charlie. Fuckers.

  Bev had only stared at him. Her look was almost cat-like, and right then he understood why Babylonians had sealed felines up in bricks. “Okay,” she said. “Well I guess I’ll pick up a couple of extra shifts at the mill. Just until things pan out. You’d do the same for me, right?”

  It was a test. He just knew it. “Oh you got it, babe.”

  Two days passed and over a dinner of mashed potatoes and homemade rissoles, Bev snapped. “Would you fucking eat with your trap shut! Watchin’ all that meat there going in and out of you is making me wanna puke, you lying cockroach.”

  Only she’d pronounced it cock-a-roach, like a sing-song.

  He swallowed, hard and slow.

  “Nope, don’t say anything! Don’t say a single bloody word. I don’t want to hear it.” She stood and left the table. From the next room he listened to her bang plates, to her mutterings that were loud enough for him to hear—an aggravating, deliberate move. “I work so hard. I work so hard and he does this to us.”

  Steve just didn’t get it. I try to do right and hold back on the details so she doesn’t have to worry, because she’s the one making the dinner and buying the food as well, he thought. And look where it gets me? Steve hated the entire situation, especially now that every time he laid money on the televised dog races down at the James Bridge Federal Pub, he was racked with a guilt so strong it almost crippled him. It didn't stop him from laying that spectacular “winning” bet, though. And losing. He loved his wife, but he didn't think that was enough any more. Not by a long shot.

  Bev had blown her top when he told her he was thinking of going to the Maitland golf club with mates. “It’s okay, babe, Eddie’s gonna pay for it and you know it’s only a couple of bucks. They’re going to be showing the Grand Prix on those big screens they just put up near the bar, and I read in the Saturday papers that Bon Jovi’s going to sing afterwards. Bon Jovi! Come on, Bev, it’s a Sunday.”

  “Sunday? Jesus, Steve, you’re on the dole!” she said, shaking her head and banging her hand against the kitchen countertop. He grabbed his wallet out of Saturday’s football shorts, traded flip-flops for running shoes (club regulation required closed footwear on the course at all times) and pulled his jersey over his bare chest.

  “If you’re going, don’t even think about taking the car,” Bev told him.

  “Oh come on, babe, there’s never police on the road. Not here.”

  Her look silenced him. Babylon had it right, he thought.

  “Shaping up to be a hot one, eh?” Steve asked the kid standing next to him.

  Peter turned towards the man. “Excuse me?”

  “Hot one, don’t you reckon?”

  “Oh right. Yeah sure is.”

  A moment passed. Peter broke the silence. “Aren’t you hot in that jersey?”

  Steve laughed. “This ain’t no jumper here, mate.” He puffed his chest out and raised his chin. “This here is a second skin. You follow the Newcastle Knights, then?”

  “Ah.” Peter looked at his pigeon-toed feet, then straightened them out. “I don’t really follow League all that much.”

  “Oh shit a brick, don’t tell me you’re a Union fan?”

  “Yeah, don’t really follow Union either. Soccer’s all right, play it at school every now and then.”

  Steve snorted. “Soccer. Ha.”

  Peter felt his notebook going slick in his hand. He picked his backpack up off the ground. “Ah, looks like the bus is going to show after all.”

  Steve looked at the horizon. He saw the reflection of sun against glass. Heard the dull whine of an approaching vehicle.

  “Better late than never,” Steve said.

  Ninety-Eight: Diana and Julia

  The bus bench was a new addition by the council. It had not been long before when only a worn patch of grass signaled the stop. Two people sat there, quiet and unmoving, handbags clutched in their laps.

  Diana Savage was twenty-six but looked younger. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her face was covered in a thin film of sunscreen lotion. She despised putting it on—it felt like chicken grease. But she hated being sunburnt more, almost as much as she hated James Bridge. She would happily trade this moment, her job, her future in Australia for one more look at Astoria, Oregon, her home. She wanted to fish the Colombia River and laugh at the tourists walking up the private driveway, cameras clicking away, to where The Goonies had been filmed years before.

  She missed sitting near the E. Morning Basin at the end of Thirty-Sixth Street, smoking cigarettes and skipping class.

  Home was not dead trees and inescapable heat.

  It was yellow fire hydrants, pastel chalet houses, Pontiacs and GMC trucks parked at the curbs. It was watching the Fighting Fishermen play at night at the LCB Bowling Alley. It was an American accent.

  Home was the place where her mother was buried. Susanne Savage had wrapped her car around the girth of a Douglas fir, ripping herself in two. Diana was thirteen and had been at summer camp. There would be no more advice, no more discipline. No more Christmas presents signed Luv Mom. She faced womanhood alone. Memories bobbed like scattered debris in the ocean.

  Her mother taking her to the Haystack rocks on Cannon Beach, making sandcastles and waving to the joggers.

  Diana’s first taste of olives. She remembered holding the little green marble in her fingertips, a bead of oil slipping into her palm. She put it in her mouth and spat it out just as quick.

  That girl with a mother had little relation to the one tossing roses onto the casket, or the young woman who stood by and watched as her father met a new woman—the Australian tourist with a child of her own.

  Her stepsister sat next to her on the bench.

  Julia Belfry was sixteen, her narrow face hidden under a black bob. Her shoulders were slight and her cheeks freckled. My God, she’s like porcelain, Diana thought. And so stupid. Their secret hung heavy between them.

  It had been Diana who suggested
the movie. Clueless was playing at the Reading Cinemas in Maitland. Afterwards they could go to the mall and prowl the shelves at K-Mart, seeking out further distractions in the budget bins near the wraith-like woman at the front who checked your bags with the ferocity of an airport customs officer. If Diana’s car had not chosen to gag over and die that morning, they would be at the theater by now, chewing on their Coke straws and trying so hard to avoid what needed to be spoken.

  Ninety-Seven: Michael

  Michael Delaney used to be fat. Not puppy-padding fat—bursting-frankfurts-in-a-boiling-pot fat. He remembered gym class and swimming lessons. All of the thin guys who could be divided into one of two groups: those who looked but did not comment and those who looked and commented, with enthusiasm.

  Tubby Bitch.

  Fat Momma.

  Fanny Tits.

  Sometimes the ones who didn’t comment were the worst. They just stared.

  Fat kids are like alcoholics. They always have excuses.

  “I’m not big, just big boned,” he said. He could fool himself but he couldn’t fool the skinny kids. “I’m fat. Butterball fat,” he would tell the person staring back at him in the mirror. He was smart enough to know that no fat kid ever got thin unless they started calling themselves what they really were.

  “I’m Santa-Claus fat. I’m I-make-you-sick fat. I’m I-make-myself-sick fat.”

  He was something else also, but that was even harder to say.

  Michael remembered crying after swimming class, hating having to strip down to his Speedos in front of the other guys. He tickled himself to tighten his chest but the indoor pool was heated, and soon his nipples turned to marshmallows again. He once made a girdle out of Glad Wrap and wore it to school. It worked, even though it made breathing difficult. But come twelve thirty in the middle of Mrs. Montgomery’s Legal Studies class, he started sweating. Sweating bad. Every time he moved the plastic screeched. It dug into his skin and would not tear when he tried to get it off in the washroom. He had to slide the girdle up to his midsection, the top edge wedged into the cleft of his overhanging breasts. He cried in the shower that night so his parents wouldn’t know there was something wrong.