1henrietta
2000
I’m in the photo studio on campus preparing for my last months of college when B.B. calls to tell me that our father is dead. I haven’t spoken to my dad in months—six, maybe seven. The last call was about my final tuition payment and whether he would cover it. He always came through—at least with money—but never on time and rarely without argument. He was stubborn, my father. Grizzled and aggressive and unable to bend to my or anyone else’s point of view.
“Hattie”—he was the only one who called me Hattie—“college is a scam and you’re paying for an entire extra year? Ridiculous.”
“Well, Daddy, I thought you wanted me to spend that first year on drugs and boys.”
My father chuckled at that. Sarcasm always worked best on him.
He could never abide that his daughters might lead normal lives. When I told him I wanted to join the Girl Scouts, he said, “Hell, no. Those ladies are fascists.” In high school, I asked for an SAT tutor to supplement my “fancy” off-island high school, and he said, “Those tests are some extra kind of bullshit, my dear. Try smoking a little weed! Have some fun!” When I decided to switch my major to mathematics in my fourth year so I could add something more sensible and structural to my life, he told me I was going to “turn into a goddamn robot. Study philosophy or poli sci. Or better yet, don’t minor in photography. Major in it!”
I’ve spent my whole life trying to rebel against my father by being a good girl. Stand up straight. Be kind. Live every day like it’s a goddamn pop song. It works, mostly.
Now I can hear the background noise of the island over the phone—like a bundle of cats, spitting and scratching, water lapping at their mangled tails—and the sound of it triggers something animal in me. A need to run. To scream. To strip myself bare.
“I’ve got news, Henrie,” my sister says in a quiet voice amid the island noise. There’s still no cell tower on Fowler, apparently, so you have to go down to the dumb ferry dock and stand on the edge of it while pointing your body toward the off-island town of Marblehead to get a call out. I picture B.B. there, tall and beautiful. Her hair blowing in the wind.
My sister is like my dad. Quick to temper. Does what and whomever she pleases and never hesitates to tell me exactly what she thinks of me whether I’ve asked or not. It makes sense, after all: she was the keeper. The one who got to stay on island with my dad after the divorce.
B.B.’s voice is different tonight though. Hesitant. She shouldn’t even be on island. She should be in Boston. In graduate school. The semester hasn’t ended yet. All my senses heighten at the realization that she is not all right. She sounds sad, uncertain.
I’m dressed for a date, legs shaved and covered by jeans. I have on a white tank top and a white blouse with bright red mouth-shaped flowers and thick green vines embroidered around the collar. Bluebirds dot the vines.
I came to the studio tonight to develop one more photo before heading to the bar to meet my date, but two hours have passed. He is no longer waiting for me.
“What news? I have a date to get to.”
“It’s eleven p.m. Jesus, Henrie. You stood him up, didn’t you?”
“I can’t hear you.” I hear her perfectly well.
“Stop saying yes to dates you never plan to go on. It’s cruel.”
“I don’t do that,” I snap at her, but I do this all the time. When I agree to a date, I have every intention of going, but then I just don’t. I lose track of time, I fall asleep, I remember he has some sort of annoying mannerism that I don’t want to sit across from. B.B. thinks I’m afraid to get rejected. She always says, “You can’t be afraid to get your heart broken.” I never tell her that fear of getting hurt isn’t the issue. Not really. It’s something else. Something I don’t want to explain. It’s like not wanting to stand at the edge of a cliff because I’m afraid I’ll jump. My brain goes to how I will mess it all up. Crush him. Stab him in the heart. Push him under until he drowns. I’ve never hurt anyone or anything—I move spiders outside rather than squish them—but there is and has always been this part of me that knows I’m capable of far worse.
“This is serious, Henrie.” Crackle cackle crackle—the phone’s voice is as real as my sister’s, and I have a sudden memory of the quarry, the feel of it on the pads of my feet. Rock and pine needles pressing into the palms of my hands.
I tilt my head left, then right. My neck cracks loudly, my back aches. I push the paper down into the developer. The liquid swells up over the rectangle of white, and the rubber-tipped tongs squeak against the tub. Outside the small building, the campus pounds with Friday-night music—something electronic, a hundred pairs of feet jumping and landing again and again and again. That old island rage rises in me. I push it down, shove and shove until I can latch myself shut.
“You still there, B.B.?”
“Sit.”
“You sit.”
“No, Henrie, seriously. Sit down, then I’ll tell you.” I hear a new layer of noise. B.B. is crying.
I let the tongs rest in the developer and prop myself up against a metal stool as my mind races through the possibilities that would be bad enough to merit silence and tears from my older sister. I come up with nothing solid, but a vague memory of a tire swing curved around my body—the rubber smelling softly toxic, not unlike the darkroom—and a little bit of that feeling I latched shut pushes at the lid.
“Daddy died. I found him this morning.”
“What? How? He’s only sixty-five.”
“He was turning seventy this year.”
“He was?” Suddenly I feel the cold water of the quarry pond lapping at my ankles. The sharp limestone slick under my feet. I want to howl.
“We think his heart got him. But it could have been his kidneys, his lungs. His brain. All of it was fucked-up. He’d been drinking and smoking more and more.”
“How long have you been on the island?” The latch pops. Anger oozes out, a slip of bile-colored cloth peeks through.
“A day, a week. Hardly matters. He wasn’t answering the phone even though I could tell he had it plugged in.”
“You’re supposed to be in Boston.” I’m having trouble keeping up with the conversation. I’m falling behind. He can’t possibly be dead. He didn’t call. He didn’t warn me. He wouldn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t abandon me again.
“Henrie.”
“What?”
“Dad is dead. I’m a fucking orphan.”
“B.B.,” I snap. She’s called to share her latest problem with me. Her current sorrow. This news, in her head, has nothing to do with me. Not really. It’s her dad that’s dead. I want to reach out and claw her face.
“What?”
“You are not a fucking orphan. You have Carrie, and Ms. Sonia.” I haven’t thought about Ms. Sonia in a long time—it was too painful, but we loved her as kids. We spent tons of time with her on island, and according to my mom, Ms. Sonia helped raise B.B. after B.B.’s mother died.
“Carrie is not my mother.”
That’s true. My mother is her stepmother, B.B. my half sister. After the divorce, B.B. made it clear my mom was not necessary to her life. B.B. never returned a single note or phone call from her. Even went so far as to send back birthday and holiday gifts, marking them with her own bad handwriting: No longer at this address. I’m the peacemaker. The one who always made sure to send cards. To remind Carrie to call B.B. on her birthday. To sign both our names—mine and B.B.’s—to gifts on Mother’s Day.
“And Ms. Sonia is a joke. We don’t even talk anymore. Henrie, I think Dad died a few days ago before I even thought to check on him. It was horrible. His body…”
“What?” I ask, this time really not hearing.
“… like a whole separate thing had sloughed off…”
“I can’t hear you, B.B.”
“It’s like he shed…”
“What?” An inexplicable fear rolls through me. It floods my ears and I go under. The surface of the quarry pond far above my head, the water icy. My foot caught in something, a trap tightening around my ankle. I can’t breathe.
My sister is angry with me now. “Are you freaking out? I can hear your fucking teeth chattering!”
When we were kids and on island together, we would pretend we could toss thoughts between us, without speaking. Legend was that Eileen Fowler was a bit of a mind reader, so we figured that tiny piece of her could have been passed down to us. It was fun to try, and we did become good at knowing each other’s thoughts. It seems silly to me now that we ever thought of ourselves as miraculously powerful or even on the same team.
“The funeral will need to be next weekend, Henrie. And it’s Masquerade.”
Fowler Island has its annual spring masquerade in early April. When our parents divorced, I was fourteen so I never got to attend a Masquerade. B.B. stayed on island with our dad, but I left with my mom and never went back. Not once. Still, I’ve grown up hearing all about Masquerade. It’s a legendary event. College students flock to it, and B.B. always calls to tell me the gory details.
“He probably did this on purpose so he could have the weirdest funeral ever,” B.B. says.
I’m told Masquerade has become an important event for the economy of the island. The two ferries unload passengers who have been packed in like sardines. It started modestly—normal clothes a bit torn and bloodied, skin yellowed with proper zombie makeup, a sort of second and exclusively gruesome Halloween—but then it grew, as good traditions do, to allow for more elaborate and far sluttier and bloodier costumes. I’m told that the bed-and-breakfasts fill up with these drunk ghouls, who do shots and dance all night to music that blares out of every available island speaker.
“You’ve got to get here, Henrie. And come alone. Don’t bring Carrie.”
“What? Why?”
“I need you to myself.”
“That’s ridiculous. She’ll want to know, and she’ll want to be there.”
“Whatever.” The line goes dead.
The red light in the darkroom suddenly seems murderous, and I flip on the overhead, my heart beating fast, sheets and sheets of photographic paper now ruined.
I lower my body to the floor. My cell phone is held tightly in my closed fist. There are things I should now do. Call my mother. Rent a car. Talk to my senior project adviser. But the rage is growing in me. Curling my toes. Pushing my fingernails into my palms. Fuck him for dying.
“Fuck you,” I say out loud. It doesn’t help. The anger itches at my joints, makes me jump to my feet. Pace.
What did my father look like as he died? Did the pain show on his face? Was his mouth pulled downward by sadness? Was his face scrunched up in fear? I pause, turn to the full-length mirror hung on the back of the darkroom door, and imitate the possible expressions. I do not recognize him in me. I never have. I don’t look like my father, sound like my father, or act like my father, so I keep going, stretching my face until, suddenly, I catch a flash of him. My mouth monstrously wide, my hands at my neck, teeth looking more numerous than they are as they disappear back into the dark of my throat. I see in that brief scream of an expression that I have his cheekbones, his too full eyebrows. I see, if I’d been a boy, where my Adam’s apple would protrude too short and too high like my father’s. A shiver rumbles through me.
He is dead. I will never see him again. There will be no moment of reconnection. No proud hug at my senior show. No moment when he realizes that I was the more talented sister. No confrontation when I tell him all the things he’s done wrong. I want to dig my teeth into his throat, rip out his jugular so he can feel the loss I’ve felt. Shame comes next. A rush of it so swift and sharp I lower myself back to the floor. Then I begin to cry, sob, unable to stop.
The cell phone buzzes again in my hand. I answer it, zombielike.
It is B.B., of course, her voice inexplicably clear. “I can’t do this without you.”
“I know.”
“I haven’t even cried yet. Not fully.”
“Okay.”
“You weren’t close to him like I was. You have no idea how much this hurts.” She sounds angry with me. Really and truly pissed.
Something wrenches so sharply inside me that I press my hand to my throat, as if the pressure will ease the wound. “I’m on my way,” I say in a whisper.
“The island misses you, Henrietta Volt. It misses us.”
I wish she hadn’t said that. A memory surfaces, the feel of a growl, the dark of the quarry around me, and my body strong and hungry.
Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Eve Moulton
