5
ANNE’S SISTER ELINOR HAD ONCE KILLED SOMETHING IN their uncle’s shop near the Royal Oak Cemetery on Vancouver Island, on the outskirts of Victoria. It was a small animal, probably a rat. She might have gotten it dead out of a trap and pretended to have killed it, but Anne didn’t think so. Her sister had been entirely capable of killing a rat or a mouse, or even a cat. It had been during summer holiday, a rainy July afternoon. Anne could picture it perfectly, every detail of her uncle’s house and yard, the rain, the dark line of trees beyond the wall, her sister’s precise pose where she sat in the shop in a kitchen chair, her back straight, stitching seams into one of the grotesque dolls that she fashioned out of nylon stockings….
Elinor’s dolls had become increasingly strange in the six months that she had been making them. She spent her time on almost nothing else—stuffing the nylon with cotton and then bunching and stitching the nylon into more and more lifelike representations of human figures. The anatomical proportions were purposefully, often grotesquely, wrong, the eyes offset, the mouths leering or pouting, the bodily parts so shockingly rendered that Elinor hid them from her mother along with the copies of magazines that provided her with models and inspiration. Elinor was a prodigy, and Anne had always been envious of her sister’s talent and offended by it at the same time. Anne’s own talent had been slower to develop, something that no longer bothered her as it had when she was younger. And now that she was older she knew that Elinor’s dolls were evidence of grossly disturbed sensibilities, but at eleven years old her sister both frightened and fascinated her.
At the back door of her uncle’s farmhouse there was a path that wound around the side of an old garage and into a barnyard walled with stone. The barn itself had been converted to a shop. It was small—a couple of tool-filled stalls, some open space with machinery, a wood loft, a generator. There was always the smell of petrol and wood chips, and on that day, she Recalled, there was also the smell of the damp wool of her sweater, still wet from earlier in the morning when she and Elinor had been out walking in the rain. Their uncle had been a boatbuilder by trade, living in Vancouver, but when Anne and Elinor were girls he had already retired from it and moved to the island, where he had started building cabinetry, more as a pastime than an occupation. The family had always had money, and owned hundreds of acres of timberland up near the top of the island.
Anne had walked down the path through the backyard early that afternoon, carrying an umbrella, although the rain had mostly stopped. The house lay empty and quiet behind her because her uncle and aunt had gone into town for the day. She had been looking for Elinor after having spent three hours reading in her upstairs bedroom. She and her sister were just ten years old. The day before had been their birthday.
Anne smelled the stench of burning fur before she saw what it was that had been lit on fire. An open stone ring, like a cistern, lay just ahead of her, an open incinerator where her uncle burned wood chips and scraps, and the smoke drifting up out of it was heavy with the smell of burnt bone and hair. The drizzle had put the fire nearly out, and it was only smoldering now, and Anne didn’t recognize the scraps of ash-smeared red fabric as her birthday coat until she was next to it.
Most of the coat was burned despite the rain, and her sister told her matter-of-factly, some time later, that she had doused it with petrol before lighting it on fire. The rat, or whatever it was, lay across the charred remains of the coat in the center of the stone ring, burned down to a thing of hair and bone and leathery flesh. Sickened, Anne had turned away, looking for Elinor and seeing her through the open door of the shop, sitting on the wooden chair, putting the final stitches into the face of a doll whose eyes were shut, as if in sleep, but whose mouth was open in a silent scream. As Anne watched her, her sister yanked the thread tight in the seam, her lips set in a slight smile as if she took a subtle pleasure in her work. She didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge Anne’s presence.
By the time their uncle and aunt had returned later that afternoon, the coat and the rat were gone. Elinor had taken them into the woods near the lake and hidden them, and then the next day Anne and Elinor had left for home. In order to protect her sister—or herself, she realized much later—Anne had told her uncle and aunt that she had already packed the coat, and that she didn’t want to unpack it to wear it home, despite the bad weather. And then later, when the coat was clearly missing, Elinor told their mother that Anne had taken it off during their morning walk and had left it absentmindedly by the roadside, the two of them going home without it. When they had remembered and run back for it, the coat had been gone. Somebody had walked off with it. Elinor had felt bad for her sister, who had been absolutely crushed by losing the coat, and simply couldn’t have told their uncle and aunt.
Anne had kept silent about the lie. Countless times since, she had wondered why. Perhaps it was fear that her mother would think that she was lying and that Elinor was telling the truth. Perhaps it was fear of Elinor. It had been one of a hundred exasperating lies that Anne had put up with in order to coexist with her sister. Her mother, as usual, had believed Elinor entirely. There was no reason she shouldn’t have. Elinor’s story made sense. Elinor had been brilliant at making up hateful stories that made good sense. If Anne had told her mother the truth, her mother wouldn’t have believed it. Later that same night, after Elinor had lied to their mother and Elinor and Anne had gone to bed, Elinor had explained to her in detail about killing the rat.
Some time later, after Elinor was gone, Anne had looked for the things that Elinor had kept hidden. The dolls and the magazines were gone. Their mother, apparently, had found them, although in the years after, even when Anne was an adult, there was no mention of any of it. And it wasn’t until after her mother’s death that Anne found the boxes that contained the dolls, packed away with the half-dozen paintings that Elinor the prodigy had finished in the span of her short life.