Lindstrom Alone Page 4

  A scream shattered the ominously quiet proceedings. Wheeling around to see where it came from, Isabella’s hand slipped off the cedar and she went under, swallowing water, then gagging, sputtering, coughing, spitting bile when she surfaced. Ignoring her brother, she scrambled up the ladder, seized hold of her towel, and wrapped herself, all the while scanning the surface for her sister, waiting for her to burst into the air.

  There was not a bubble, no waves, nothing.

  Isabella yelled at Bernd to get help while she clambered awkwardly into a bathing suit and, yanking the lifebuoy off the side of the boathouse, she plunged back into the water and swam in the direction her brother had been staring. Bernd didn’t move. She shouted, telling him to run for help. He stayed perfectly still, absolutely silent, hands cupped in front of his stomach. Frantically, Isabella swam, dove beneath the surface, peering through layers of morning sunlight aslant to the surface.

  When she found her sister, doubled up on the sandy bottom, she gathered her into her arms and rose to the lifebuoy, weeping, shaking, overwhelmed with sorrow, and yet she was able to haul them both toward shore.

  Her mother and the au pair had heard Giovanna from the wraparound verandah but they paid no attention, it was the girls playing, until something in Birgitta was stirred by the solitary scream without laughter and she looked down and saw Isabella towing the lifeless body of her older sister. She rushed to the boathouse, where Bernd was standing transfixed, and she plunged into the water fully clothed. With the help of the au pair, they lifted Giovanna out onto the dock and the au pair performed CPR but they knew it was too late. Isabella slouched against the boathouse wall, too exhausted to cry.

  Bernd moved out of the way but not so far he could not survey his sister’s naked body. He was fascinated by the way her nipples puckered and her breast tissue quivered as the au pair pounded her chest, hand over fist. His own nipples were slight in comparison. He knew about pubic hair but he had never focused on it before and at first he thought it obscured something secret but when he manoeuvred around he could see there was nothing but folds that neither repelled nor attracted him. He touched himself through his Christopher Robin pyjamas for reassurance.

  He ran down the length of her legs with his eyes, intrigued by how they twitched with each thrusting lunge of the au pair’s fist. Then slowly his gaze rose up her body, past her arms, which draped listlessly at her sides, until he reached her head, which was tilted back to accentuate the smooth arch of her neck as her mother breathed with suppressed anguish into Giovanna’s mouth. He was astonished by how expressive her features were, frozen into a kind of horrified smile. It occurred to him that she was quite beautiful, dead.

  Satisfied there was nothing more to see, he wandered away, looking for something to do until breakfast was ready.

  WHEN HE WAS ten, Bernd discovered a passageway that ran from the back of a closet in the third-storey hall of the Ghiberti house in Rosedale, behind the sloped walls of the hip roof, all the way to the back of the closet in Isabella’s room. He had known about it for years but never explored it, since it was dusty and filled with spider webs and gas pipes and water pipes to supply Isabella’s bathroom, and he was quite fastidious for a ten-year-old, and more adventuresome in mind than in fact.

  On December 21, 1988, Bernd lay sprawled across his bed. He was thinking about Christmas. This would be the fourth without his father. There were presents under the tree in the living room labelled Isabella, Sigrid, and Bernd, signed Papa in an unfamiliar script, but nothing for Birgitta, of course.

  That’s where Sigrid would be, in the living room. Her favourite pastime had recently become staring at the tree and smiling wistfully, like an old woman reminiscing. The tree was a blue spruce and he could smell its pungent scent wafting up the stairwell. He was the only kid he knew who had a real Christmas tree that only a few weeks before had been a living thing. It had been cut down in the snow and was slowly dying, but its life would be prolonged in an extravagant celebration before it was finally discarded. Other kids in his neighbourhood had expensive plastic trees and pine-scented incense, but it wasn’t the same.

  Suddenly he heard giggling and cringed at the possibility of humiliation. But the giggles ascended the open stairway near his door, and by leaning his head far back over the side of the bed he could see part way up the flouncing skirt of his sister’s friend, Rose Ahluwalia, as they climbed to the third floor. He knew Isabella was very attractive, but Rose was pretty and wore short skirts and would sometimes flirt as if he were sixteen, which excited and puzzled him.

  After the girls had reached Isabella’s bedroom and closed the door, the music descended. Rush, from four years earlier, heavy on synthesizers: Grace Under Pressure, booming through the floor, zinging down the staircase, pounding on the walls. Bernd liked Rush but on principle despised this album.

  He tried to lose himself in the din by self-consciously thinking about Rose, drawing naked pictures of her in his mind. He could do the general outline but when he tried to colour in the details he got lost.

  She wasn’t like his sisters, who were blonde, even the one he barely remembered who had died in Muskoka. Blonde with blue eyes, the same as their mother. Rose had dark brown hair, deep brown eyes, and a tan complexion. Not dark like his father. More like himself. His father had an almost olive cast to his skin and his hair was shimmering black. Bernd and Rose were hybrids, although he was a blend of Swedish and southern Italian while she was Greek and Bengali.

  The music stopped. Bernd rolled onto his feet and slipped furtively into the hall, only to be assailed by a mounting crescendo of synthesizers, again from Rush. Instead of retreating, he smiled to himself and, under cover of “The Enemy Within,” he slowly ascended the creaking stairs and moved stealthily along the corridor to the empty closet. Once inside, with the door slightly ajar for the light, he lifted away the panel at the back and crawled through into the cramped passageway, which smelled of mildew and dust. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see skeins of cobwebs. Reaching out, he swept his hand tentatively into their midst and was pleasantly surprised to find them tingle as they adhered to his flesh.

  His mind focused on Rose, on the challenge ahead, he forged onward. The air in the passage was thick and tasted stale; the music was muffled into a throbbing assault; the smell was strangely exciting. The dull gleam of diffused light articulated an almost impenetrable maze of copper tubing, air ducts, insulated electrical wires, and drainage pipes.

  As he edged closer to the light streaming from the back of Isabella’s closet, Bernd began to breathe through his mouth. He tried to wipe away the cobwebs that had accumulated on his face but they adhered like a mask of finely spun silk. It made him feel strong.

  Months ago he had ventured up to the third floor to use Isabella’s bathroom. Sigrid was dawdling interminably in the one they shared on the second floor and he didn’t dare use his mother’s en suite. Isabella was out. After he was finished, he had slipped into Isabella’s room and removed the panel at the back of her closet from its frame. He had set it upright on the floor in front of the opening so the gap across the top wouldn’t draw attention to the adjustment.

  Now, with the closet doors open, he could see most of the room, cloistered by the deep shadows of Isabella’s clothes hanging just above eye level in front of him.

  The girls were smoking furiously. The gable window was frozen shut and a blue haze swirled through the room as they danced in spastic gyrations, trying desperately to synchronize the poetry of their bodies with the cacophonous throb of the synthesizers. Every once in a while they would shout something at each other. He even heard his own name in the din, followed by laughter. Rose danced close to the closet and collapsed on the floor, giggling, reached up, and Isabella handed her a lit cigarette. Rose lolled on the hardwood, her clothing askew. By adjusting his posture and leaning low he could see up her skirt.

  When she gyrated to Rush, lying prone, and rolled to the side, he could clearly see bl
ue underwear. His favourite colour was blue sky over fresh snow. He was touching himself through his clothes. He desperately wanted her to take her underwear off but he didn’t want to see anything more. He pinched the tip of his penis and shuddered.

  Suddenly the music stopped. For a desperate instant he thought it was because of him. He leaned deeper into the shadows until a sharp protrusion dug into his back. He stiffened and stayed perfectly still, waiting. They didn’t know he was there. They were both on their feet.

  Isabella came perilously close, lifting clothes from the rack in her closet. He pursed his lips after licking them and tried to breathe through his nose but the sounds of moving air echoed in his head and he resumed breathing through his mouth, the sibilance of each quavering exhalation resounding but unheard.

  He reached slowly behind him and, turning a little, his hand came to rest in the darkness on a lever attached to a copper pipe. He tried to move it but it was stiff, so he edged forward a bit, toward the light. Both girls were in their underwear. Rose was wearing a sky blue bra to match her panties. His sister’s underwear was blue as well, but more like the blue of a moonlit night, silky and gleaming. They were handing each other clothing and shimmying in and out of skirts and blouses and modelling for each other, still smoking furiously.

  Bernd was excited and bored. He wanted them to do something else; he didn’t know what. His sister changed bras and his interest returned. He was fascinated by the gyrations, the way she did it up in front, then slid it around and leaned over, draping her breasts into the cups, standing and twitching her shoulders as she pulled her flesh up into mounds, like it belonged to somebody else.

  “It was my sister’s,” she explained to Rose.

  “Sigrid’s? She’s only twelve. What’s she want with a push-up?”

  “My older sister. Giovanna.” Her voice dropped an octave. “She died, she was two years older than me. Like, she’d be a year younger than I am, now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rose responded, not knowing what else to say. “It’s very pretty.”

  “It’s slutty. She bought it by mail from Victoria’s Secret. Vittorio would have freaked. She only wore it once. I keep it … How macabre is that?”

  “Very macabre. I gotta get home.”

  “Okay,” said Isabella without getting up. “Better put your own clothes on. Merry Christmas.”

  “You too.”

  “You celebrate Christmas?”

  “No. We always have fold-up trees in our living room this time of year.” She paused. “January 6th, that’s when the wise men turned up on the scene. We get two Christmases, plus some neat stuff from India.”

  “Well, who knew!”

  Rose retrieved her clothes from the tangled mess on the bed while Isabella remained on the floor, in front of the closet, not a body’s length away from her trembling brother.

  After Rose left, Bernd wanted desperately to escape. Isabella lit another cigarette but left the CD off, and cried softly. He was puzzled by the look on her face. He had expected pain, to accompany her weeping, but when he tipped his head to see her better, she was registering a depth of loneliness and anguish he could never have imagined.

  He backed off slowly. He needed to get away from her. His sweater caught at the lever on the copper pipe. He didn’t care if she heard him; he wanted to run but there was no room. He yanked at his sweater and the lever gave way. He was terrified she’d hear him. He didn’t care. Glancing back he could see her face and she was serene.

  He pushed at the lever and slowly hoisted himself around and began to crawl toward the back of the hall cupboard in the gloom in the distance. Behind him, there was a small tinkling sound, like a dime dropping on a hardwood floor.

  Years ago, there had been a gas fireplace in Isabella’s room but it had been disconnected and removed long before the Ghibertis moved in. The gentle pressure of the flowing gas had pushed off the copper cap on the end of the pipe in the crawlway when Bernd opened the valve. Slowly, gas filled the air behind him as he crawled toward his escape. The unfamiliar smell, like hard-boiled eggs gone rancid, a sulphuric odour meant to raise an alarm, meant nothing to him. He rather liked it and felt a surge of regret as he sealed the panel and quietly closed the door to the closet before descending the stairs to his room, as strains of a Beatles tune drifted down after him.

  The explosion shook the house to its foundation and lifted the roof off one end, sending shards of charred detritus through the air, but the fire was extinguished quickly, with only water damage to the lower levels. Birgitta was able to move back in, with her two remaining children, Sigrid and Bernd, by early spring.

  Christmas had been ruined, of course, but Rose Ahluwalia came to the funeral on Boxing Day with her family, and when she bent close to Bernd to whisper her sympathies, he thought he could feel her right breast press into his blazer and he imagined it was covered in sky blue satin.

  MARCH 21, 1991. Bernd had just turned thirteen and Sigrid was almost fifteen. Their father had died three days earlier. No one expected it. Vittorio was a handsome gregarious man, a leader in the Italian community by virtue of his business success, his attractive family, and his inclination to take charge without reference to qualifications or deference to seniority. Born in Brindisi on the heel of Italy, he arrived in Toronto in his mid teens, moved in temporarily with an aunt and uncle, lied about his age, learned a trade as a bricklayer, and thrived. As the years passed, he lost his proficiency in Italian and spoke it like an educated foreigner. That made him less intimidating to those who depended on him as his construction business prospered and more responsible to those who counted on him when he switched to finance. He was fifty-one at his death; his heart gave out. Otherwise, he was bright-eyed and robust.

  Bernd and Sigrid attended the funeral service with their mother and sat in a pew near the back. Birgitta did not want to be a distraction for the widow and her children, two of them Vittorio’s, and one from a previous marriage. Nor did she want to compete, for her own children were beautiful and theirs were pleasantly ordinary. She herself, while a decade older, still had her figure.

  The woman had been widowed before. The Church permitted a full mass even though Vittorio was divorced. A bishop who spoke both English and Italian presided. Bernd wondered if he spoke Latin, too, or was that something people only read out loud. He would be starting high school in the fall and intended to take Latin, which was what the smartest kids did, either Latin or Chinese.

  Heavy March rains resounded among the beams in the spidery heights of the cathedral. There had been a deluge of wet snow or sleet for almost a week. The burial was postponed until the following day, which the forecast promised would be cold but dry. Bernd didn’t mind, he solemnly relished the trappings of death and was amused that some people apologetically explained to his mother, or to his father’s widow, that they had made the visitation, signed the register, hoped the family liked their flowers, and attended the mass, but previous engagements, work, travel, or other commitments meant they would have to miss the interment. Bernd had never seen anyone buried, but, from what he imagined, that promised to be the best part.

  After dinner, Bernd retired to his room. A few relatives had dropped in to express solidarity with his mother, since condolences seemed inappropriate, and she excused his rudeness for going upstairs as an adolescent expression of grief. He lay sprawled backwards on his bed with his feet propped up on the headboard, trying to see how many separate sounds he could identify.

  Apart from voices rising up the stairwell and the occasional decisive trembling as the front door opened and closed, the rattle of coffee cups and the ping of crystal, there was the water running as toilets flushed, the lashing of rain against the windows, the shudder of the furnace resonating up through the joists from the basement, the sibilant hush of warm air pushed through sheet metal ductwork, and from outside a siren wailing in the distance. If he listened carefully he thought he could hear the holiday traffic on the Don Valley Parkway, the omino
us squeal of tires and the occasional irritated blast of a horn.

  Listening even more carefully, he was sure he could hear the whispering rush of wind through the pines that towered over the graves at Pleasantview Cemetery, and the scrabbling of ravenous squirrels searching the rain-drenched darkness to find rancid nuts buried among the gravestones the previous fall. And he could hear the wind’s velocity pick up as the rain slowed to a drizzle and then stopped.

  In the room next to his, Sigrid was talking on the telephone. She felt closer than ever to her odd little brother. Somehow, she had been born into a large and boisterous family and now it seemed very small. No one else in the world shared the same history, from the same perspective, and she had grown to depend on him for emotional stability.

  Sigrid knew their mother was serene as a survival strategy. Her children adored her from a distance. But Bernd’s unnatural composure in the face of death drew her in, as if by sheer will he could protect them both from the unimaginable pains their mother endured. He seemed to understand things Sigrid couldn’t comprehend. His eerie indifference to the suffering of others she took as a measure of preternatural wisdom and spiritual calm. Still thirteen, a year and a half younger, he was her best friend and they spent solemn hours together playing Dungeons and Dragons in his room.

  Tilting his head backwards over the edge of the bed, looking upside down through his doorway, he could see the steps where he’d last seen Rose Ahluwalia’s legs as she flounced up the staircase with his dead sister, Isabella. He closed his eyes only for a moment to relieve the pressure of blood running from his inverted cheeks against his eyes, and when he opened them Isabella was standing in the doorway. Bernd stiffened and then with an explosive twisting he tumbled off his bed onto the floor and leapt to his feet.