The Almost Archer Sisters (11 page)

“She could still be alive,” Beth said.

I started to cry as a reply.

“Go see,” she said.

“No. Dad says it’s dangerous. We can’t play up there. You go,” I whimpered.

She looked up at the tree house. Her eyes were dry.

“I dare you,” she said.

I took the dare because I wanted my mother, and part of me thought that, indeed, she could be still alive and this could all be written off as a big misunderstanding, a joke even.

I moved as slow as a bear. At the top I stuck my head inside the tree house, but my hands wouldn’t let go of the rung. From the dark doorway I could only make out Nell’s slippered feet, the rest
of her body covered with her army blanket. I could see the dust floating in the slices of sun poking through the wooden slats of the tree house. I knew she was dead.

“Mum?” I whispered. I wanted to touch her foot; I wanted to reach out and pull her down with me. I stared at her foot, willing it to move. I had never been in so still a place. “Mum?”

“What can you see?” Beth yelled.

I don’t remember the climb down, or walking past Beth and into the house. I don’t remember pulling down a towel in the bathroom and draping it across my knees. And I don’t remember how much time had passed before I heard Lou’s truck pull up along the shoulder of the road. He’d been gone for two days on a run to Sault Ste. Marie, and was supposed to have picked us up after school and taken us to dinner, to give Nell a bit of a break. Instead he found me fitfully churning with a sweaty fever near the toilet.

“Teacher said she sent you home. Jesus. Are you alone, goddammit? Nell! Where’s your sister, Peach? Where in the hell’s your ma? Nell!”

I said nothing as he bobbed his head in and out of all the rooms, checking the closets, the carport, the old barn. I followed him into the side yard, where we came upon Beth crouched under the rotting willow. When Beth saw him, she didn’t run to him as always. She just lifted up her face and then the letter she’d been clutching in her fist. Her features seemed shrunken inside a big skull.

“We went to the store. I made us late,” she cried. She was eight years old. I was almost six.

I watched Lou bend down in front of her and take the note from her hands. He read it and looked up into the tree house and said, “You weren’t late, Beth Ann. This is not your fault.” And with that he lifted her into his arms and carried her into the house.

When the firemen took Nell’s body down, they kept it draped
in the army blanket she slept with, laid under, napped on, clutched hard, absently smelled, never washed. There was no blood. She had taken pills.

Years later Lou admitted that he too knew that Nell had killed herself when he walked into the house that day. Though he eventually forgave her for doing it, he never forgave the fact that I had found her first. We kept her suicide note and read and reread the thing as though its letters would somehow miraculously reassemble themselves into much better news. Then it took the consistency of inky feathers, then damp toilet paper, then around the time Beth moved to New York, it just kind of disappeared.

I
WAS DEEMED
too young to go to the funeral, a relief, frankly, but it was after Nell died that things got complicated for Beth. She said she’d always vaguely known that she wasn’t Lou’s biological kid, but she had no idea that she wasn’t his legal kid either. Beth didn’t even have a formal birth certificate, which was why Lou had never gotten around to fully adopting her when he married Nell. Beth had always had questions, but by the time she became old enough to ask them, Nell’s depression obscured her desire to know. Then her death brought up the necessity to settle all of them.

During a long series of interviews conducted by well-meaning social workers, and at least one lawyer, all eager people who pulled up to our acreage to make better sense of a family whose precariousness was unknown to even us, Lou carefully meted out some of the details. Beth and I sat like two still owls, bookending Nana Beecher, who’d driven up from Florida with five suitcases, one filled with paperbacks, another with clips and bows to accessorize her stupendously long hair. Every morning she’d separate her hair into two pale rivers, braid each, then roll them into buns next to
her ears. She reminded me of Princess Leia from
Star Wars
, only old, blond, and wrinkly.

She was my mother’s mother, though having never seen them in the same room, it was a fact that never seemed quite true to me. But she knew the farm. She’d walk about the place like a bored mistress, demonstrating to Lou how toaster ovens and mixers work, what tampons and pimple cream were for, even though we were years from those dilemmas. She was efficient and severe, with the terrifying habit of filing her nails while driving, polishing them at red lights, and drying them on the dash. Still, I clutched at her with such embarrassing ferocity I accidentally turned myself into her favorite.

The story of Beth, the parts Lou didn’t know, Nana Beecher filled out like they were subplots in a novel. It made Beth seem terribly famous to me, a real, live American orphan living in Canada, the product of romantic youth, geography, and war. As Nana Beecher recounted Beth’s journey, she might as well have been talking about something that happened to someone else on the other side of the planet, which she was of course.

She told us Nell met Sam Drysdale in San Francisco. Like a million other kids who staggered blinking from the darkness of the fifties and into the diamond skies of the sixties, my mother had long straight hair, a talent for socialism, hatred for Nixon, a guitar, and a crush on George Harrison. Against Nana Beecher’s highly vocal wishes, after graduation, Nell had hitchhiked west to San Francisco to live in a city park with other damp hippies. That’s where she met Sam, a gangly Oklahoman, whose nickname was Tooey, though no one knew how he’d earned it.

“He was one of the arresting officers during a raid on some park where she lived. One of the nicer ones, apparently,” said Nana Beecher.

Just after learning she was pregnant with Beth, Nell tried to
talk Tooey into coming to Canada instead of going to Vietnam, but he said he was a born soldier. Even after Beth was born he couldn’t be talked out of his commitment. They said goodbye at a dock in San Diego. Three weeks into his first tour of duty, Tooey was shot in the back and killed, a victim of friendly fire.

For the next few months Nell went into a kind of critical shock. Friends were worried for the safety of the baby, whom Nell would often forget to feed or change. Nana Beecher convinced her to bundle up the baby and move to Florida for a while, even though Nell was worried she’d lose Beth to Nana Beecher.

Nell packed the Dart and planned on driving across the country alone. But then Lou stuck out a thumb north of Tyler, Texas, having just received his own draft papers. He was heading for call duty in Macon, Georgia. According to Nell, God was giving her another opportunity to save a man’s life, something she wasn’t able to do for Tooey. Lou too saw it as a sign from God, someone he’d gotten a lot closer to since he’d stopped drinking a year and a half earlier. It didn’t take much for him to fall for his sad Canadian savior and her lively baby. Before they even crossed into Louisiana, they’d decided that Lou’s reply to the draft board (“Fuck you”) would sport a Canadian stamp.

When they reached Georgia, Nell called Nana Beecher and broke the news. Needless to say, no mother wants to hear that their daughter plans to marry a recently recovered alcoholic hitchhiker, but she wired the couple some money. Nell and Lou were married in Marietta, the town in which they’d later learn I was conceived, after which I was almost named, but Nell didn’t like the sound of Mary.

They camped for two days, then took another two days to reach the Detroit border. When they showed the guards their marriage certificate, no one asked about the baby, whom Nell kept wrapped in Tooey’s old army blanket. It wasn’t uncommon for hippies to
skip steps on their way to forming their ridiculous families, so as far as the border guards were concerned, Beth was simply no longer Lou and Nell’s bastard child.

Since Nana Beecher had retired full-time to Florida, the house hadn’t been properly lived in, so it needed a lot of work—a new septic tank, for starters, which couldn’t be installed until the thaw. They used an outhouse Lou built from scratch, and though most of the land was still brush back then, the working land was fertile. He tried to grow soy, then corn, but farming wasn’t in Lou’s blood. So they leased a chunk of land to the bachelor brothers next door and lived off the proceeds. After I was born, Lou took up truck driving for a few years, so long as the routes kept him on the friendly side of the border.

Beth had relatives in Oklahoma. After they were notified of Nell’s death, they sent their condolences, best wishes, and a half-dozen pictures of Tooey. They’d also promised to put money into trust for Beth, whatever the army had given him, whatever he might inherit, and what he had had in savings. It wouldn’t be much, they said, but it might matter around college time if she decided to go. They sent Christmas cards for a few years, and Lou returned their queries with photos. Plans to visit were recycled but never fulfilled. As a draft dodger, Lou wasn’t allowed into the United States, and he’d never put Beth on a plane alone. But even after the presidential pardon, he had long washed his hands of the American part of his life, especially after Ronald Reagan became the president.

Two weeks after Nell’s suicide Lou called the bachelor brothers and coaxed a conversation out of them. Then he picked up an ax and walked across the street to the Rosarios to introduce himself. Nell never spoke to the neighbors, had avoided them since her return to Canada. We were told it was because of her depression, so when I was younger, I thought sadness was contagious, like colds. Lou told his new neighbors and eventual friends that in exchange for pulling down the willow tree they could help themselves to the firewood
until it was gone. And that’s when it began, when our farmhouse evolved from being a dark place to a light place. People drove up with gifts of day-old donuts, casseroles, carpool offers, and kittens. Behind our backs they referred to us as
the Archer Girls, those poor Archer Girls, did you hear what happened to the Archer Girls?
They talked to Lou while petting us, everyone hoping for an update, an explanation.
How are you faring? How’s little Peachy? What’s the situation with Beth? How’s having June back from Florida? Is she still, you know, cuckoo?
Not long after, Lou started up his men’s meetings on Sundays, much to Nana Beecher’s consternation.

“It’s fine now, Lou, but when the girls become teenagers, I don’t want these drunks hanging around the house ogling them,” she said.

“They’re sober drunks, June. There’s a big difference,” he said.

“You confuse me, boy.”

Beth did change rapidly after Nell’s death. The first symptom of her motherlessness was that our sisterly scrapes turned biblical. Beth’s sharp kicks and well-landed punches were accompanied with screams so high-pitched they’d deafen dogs. Her skills arrived almost overnight as though Beth had been replaced by a tiny ninja. You could see the transformation on Beth’s face. I once compared her school picture from the year before with those taken the year after our mother died, and she had definitely become weary-looking and stiff, her very cuteness sucked from her cheeks, taking her dimples along with it.

For the few months she was with us, Nana Beecher did her best to dismantle Beth’s bombs. She’d often stumble into one of our arguments brandishing a spatula, or a spoon, which she’d use to pry Beth off of me. She’d send Beth to her room and take me aside, her favorite granddaughter, and say: “If you feel like crying, don’t. Tears are energy and they’re a waste of time on someone like your sister. Turn them into something useful. But don’t just sit there and bawl, Georgia Peach, it is of no use.”

Lou took great umbrage with her no-crying rule.

“June, that’s wrong. All’s depression is is uncried tears. Don’t listen to Nana Beecher.”

Poor Lou. The man fell asleep with more self-help books than dates splayed across his white-haired chest; books with anthemic titles featuring low ordinals, hard steps, and easy promises, and always the A.A.
Big Book
, the consistent tent under which we’d find him snoring.

Just before Beth’s adoption was finalized, she began to call our father Lou, and he didn’t mind. “Call me anything that makes you feel natural,” he said. “You’re both still my girls.”

Nana Beecher disagreed.

“Technically speaking, Lou, Beth’s an orphan.” She was sitting on the love seat wrapping an elastic around her long, damp braid. Once a week she washed her hair with Dove soap, then gave it an expensive hot-oil treatment. “You might as well stop pretending otherwise, because the damage of keeping the first secret is evident enough.”

“What do you mean by that?” Beth asked.

“I just mean, Beth Ann, for a little girl who’s almost nine, you have a lot of anger on account of people never telling you the truth. I am trying to change that, which I know sounds mean, but it is for your own good.”

Beth had been using a heavy pair of pinking shears to cut out duplicate hearts and crosses for an Easter art project. “Nana Beecher, are you trying to kill me with depression?”

“No, Beth Ann, I am not. I am trying to cure you with the truth. Now come here and sit next to me and I’ll help you cut your stuff,” she said, patting the cushion on the love seat then splitting open one of her fresh romance novels. The cover featured a hunky slave ripping the dress off a deliriously busty woman.

Beth ignored Nana Beecher and walked over toward Lou, who
was reading the paper on his La-Z-Boy. She put her heavy head on his chest and he patted her spine.

“June, don’t ever say that again,” Lou muttered over the top of his bifocals. “No one’s an orphan here except me. And these girls are all the family I got. Why do you have scissors, lovey?”

“Because, I have to make hearts and I don’t want to have depression,” Beth whimpered.

“You won’t have depression, Bethie. Who told you that?”