Peace and Quiet (2023)
“I want to go with you to your next appointment,” Lisabetta said. What she meant was, “I never want us to be apart again.”
BY LINDA MORRA
IMAGE BY CHESLEY DAVIS
“I have a sage plant for you,” Helena announced over the telephone one early summer morning. She heard the sharp intake of her sister’s breath the moment she added, “And I have cancer.”
“I’m coming,” Lisabetta said.
She spoke over years of thorny quiet, a desert of yearning, a period that seemed almost emptied out of love or connection; she spoke as if her two words could flex or knuckle down, holding more weight than those decades of loss.
Lisabetta loved order. More than loved—it was her oxygen. It drove her to run her household with military precision, placing towels or baskets at particular angles, knowing instantly if anything had moved.
“Cripes, Lisabetta!” Sean yelped whenever she ran after him with a small plate, because he was munching on a cookie and trailing crumbs behind him. Her family adored her, but they leapt out of her way when she mopped in a frenzy or cursed at lint, dirt, and stray hairs on her shining hardwood floors. She didn’t like clothes crumpled on bedroom carpets, strewn over chairs, or dropped on bathroom tiles; she liked closets with clothes pressed and arranged like dominoes. She didn’t like dirty dishes and cloudy glasses, morsels of food on counters, or cutlery with gummed-on food in her sink; she liked polished marble and pristine aluminum that gleamed. She scrubbed surfaces in kitchens, hallways, and bathrooms, even her own skin; after showering, she brushed her hair into a shiny helmet, arming herself with jewelry and severe, black-framed glasses.
But on the day her sister called, she threw on a tracksuit, snatched up keys and purse, and jammed herself into the car. She was already halfway down her street before yanking her seatbelt on. No makeup, unbrushed hair. She drove and drove, flickered to turn onto the roadway leading to Helena’s house, and stopped short of the driveway. Then she pulled over, chasing tears that coursed down her face. At last, she buckled under their insistence: there was no point in trying to make them stop. They wouldn’t.
She drove up Helena’s driveway, screeching to a halt, leaped out of the car, and banged on the front door until Helena opened it. Bawling and sloppy, Lisabetta threw her arms around her sister and buried her face in the crook of her neck. She then followed her sister into the kitchen, where she had not sat for almost thirty years. It was familiar in its shape, but shifting details startled her. There was a clutch of papers and a child’s painting, splotched in shades of red and blue, pasted to the fridge—whose was it? A tray of vitamins and supplements was nesting in the centre of the dining table. At some point, a new bay window had been installed in the kitchen, now flooded with light.
But Lisabetta was most surprised—no, dismayed—by her sister’s emaciated figure. “You’ve lost so much weight!” She swallowed, then held her breath, refusing to weep again. Helena looked scrawny—her skin blotchy, sagging around her neck, her complexion pallid, almost grey, although her eyes sparkled still.
“Sit.” Helena smiled. “I’ll make us coffee.” Then she patted her hips. “It’s true, though. I haven’t been so slim in years. Look!” she said, twirling around. “If being sick was what I needed to get back to my original weight, so be it.”
Original weight meant what Helena had looked like in her early thirties. It was true: they had both become thick in the middle, childbearing and menopause intransigent barriers to a return to their youthful waists. Lisabetta missed her former slimness too but felt solid and sure in the body she now had. She shook her head, dismayed by her sister’s unnatural calm.
Helena poured the coffee into lemon-yellow shapely cups, which Lisabetta remembered and was surprised she still used.
“I’m going to be okay. Really,” Helena reassured her, pouring cream into her sister’s cup, then handing her the sugar she recalled her sister liked.
But Lisabetta persisted, stirring and stirring her coffee without adding any sugar: “What stage? What kind?”
“Colon cancer. They don’t know yet, but they think it has spread.”
“I want to go with you to your next appointment,” Lisabetta said when she finally stopped crying. What she meant was, “I never want us to be apart again.”
They had buried their father a decade earlier, their mother within months of their father. At first, Lisabetta had hoped the sisters would cling to each other after their parents’ passing. Their mutual struggle over the care of their mother and father pulled them apart, brought them together, and then pulled them apart again, at last snapping like a desiccated rubber band. Sixteen years earlier, their mother landed in the hospital following a stroke that caused hemorrhaging, a dark red flowering across her brain. Helena bought a cot. She planted it beside her mother’s bed in the ICU unit, and she and Lisabetta alternated nights sleeping beside her, stroking her hands, her hair, her cheek. The nurses did not interfere.
But even after their mother recovered—a miracle, the doctor announced—their mother could not follow their conversations down long, meandering corridors, nor could she bake, or knit, making instead unrecognizable items out of yarn with gaping holes in patterns where both stitches and memory failed. For the six years that she lived after her stroke, she constantly wailed about her childhood horse, Minnie. She sometimes forgot she was married. When she spoke with shocking and elaborate candor about her freigne, even translating the word for her daughters at times as her “pussy,” her daughters blushed, smiled, and looked away. She was never the same.
Neither were the sisters. Birthdays passed, anniversaries, the communion of Lisabetta’s daughter; the children took up sports, graduated from high school, and then university. It was true that Helena’s daughter, Margaret, had stayed with Lisabetta where she had found a temporary escape from Helena’s stern parenting. Still, she eventually returned home to settle back into an easier rhythm with her family. Lisabetta herself was never invited.
Helena’s coolness was about the fact that Lisabetta had absorbed Margaret into her home when she ran away, Lisabetta was sure. Helena had read Lisabetta’s gesture as a betrayal of her own parenting for giving Margaret a place to stay. But then later Margaret married—a traditional Italian dream of a wedding, with 300 guests, a six-course meal, and a lean and poised groom. There was a collective sigh of relief, even from their mother. And still, Helena maintained an icy reserve that Lisabetta could not penetrate.
That phone call was the first chink in the wall that allowed Lisabetta a glimpse in, and, after sitting with her sister over coffee that morning, she worked steadily over months to punch through it further. She accepted the sage plant, nursed it with care, watched it flourish over several weeks, reporting back to her sister about its growth. She went with Helena to the next appointment and learned about the scheduled surgery. She sat with her in the hospital after it was over, although Helena’s second daughter, Diana, was there to pick her up and bring her home once the hospital released her. Lisabetta did not want to press too far, grab too much. She was greedy for longer intervals with her sister knowing she could only have stretches with her one handful at a time.
They learned the results of the surgery just before Lisabetta flew down to Florida with Sean for the winter. They’d removed a part of her colon, but Helena would still have to start chemotherapy in two months’ time, six or seven sessions for the first round. Stage four.
“I’ll cancel Florida. I don’t need to go,” she argued, first with Sean, then with Helena.
Sean shrugged, gave in easily, telling her to do what she wanted. He knew better than to quarrel with her.
But Helena refused outright. Stephano, her husband, was going to take her. “And Diana is coming to stay with us for four months while I go through it. She’ll be here the entire time. There’s nothing for you to do.”
So Lisabetta booked the trip, cutting time on either end to have more with her sister before she left, and more again when she returned. She called from Florida twice a week and sometimes even more, risking the patience of her sister, asking for updates, often speaking directly with Diana to make sure the information was honest and true.
Lisabetta changed her flight again. She flew back earlier from Florida to accompany her sister for her third dose of chemotherapy and sat with Helena in the room among the other patients. The chemo patients all sat facing each other, as if in some confessional circle of conspiracy or solidarity. Some came with partners or adult children, others with a friend. Some came alone.
Lisabetta remembered not to use scented soap or perfumes, but even the fragrance in her shampoo made Helena’s nose crinkle.
“I’ll remember next time,” Lisabetta said, silently cursing.
Helena brought books and snacks but often just laid her head back in the large antiseptic green chair and dozed off.
“Like this?” Lisabetta asked, fluffing up a pillow she had found nearby to tuck behind her sister’s head. She fetched ice water, laid a warm blanket over her knees, and kept up an endless stream of chatter with the nurses. She reminded her sister about their convent school days, the way that she, Lisabetta, would constantly provoke the nuns, a contrast with Helena’s dependable obedience. She rippled with pleasure, gratified whenever Helena laughed.
“Did you know,” Helena mused during the next round of chemo, “that sage has properties? It helps to counteract cancer cells.”
Lisabetta smiled but said nothing. Even if it were true, it was too late for the plant’s healing powers—the cancer had advanced too far.
“I should have done it a long time ago,” Helena added, laying her head back and closing her eyes.
Lisabetta wasn’t sure what her sister meant, but she didn’t pursue it. She let her sister rest instead.
She bought her sister sweaters for the days of chemo. Helena had learned to wear tops that unbuttoned at the front, a strange perversion of nursing, so the hospital staff could access the port that had been embedded in her chest. The nurses were bright and cheery, as if they were handing her a bottle of Pablum rather than a toxic, eerie yellow liquid.
After the first round of chemo treatments, Helena seemed to rebound, and Lisabetta began to believe with her sister that all would be well. She’d lost most of her hair, though, and asked Lisabetta to shave off the rest. She smiled and nodded, but her hand trembled when she first set the electric razor to her sister’s tender scalp. Helena teased her about taking after their father—she would be a barber like him after all—and spoke through its hum until Lisabetta was finished.
Then she laid the razor on the counter and cried until Helena stood up and wrapped her arms around her.
Lisabetta began to knit hats of various shades, striated in pinks and reds, sometimes more than one of the same kind so that they could wear them together in grocery stores.
“Now everyone knows we’re sisters!” she declared loudly as she pushed the cart for her sister, at times veering sharply down aisles of dried tea and herbal supplements.
Helena seemed to grow stronger throughout the summer, an illusion exacerbated by her unflagging cheerfulness. At times, in spite of what she knew, Lisabetta allowed hope to sprout, like the weeds she had to wrench from the soil when they pushed up alongside the sage plant. She fought against it. Hope eroded her vital understanding of what was happening to Helena, impeding the connection she wanted with her. At other times, Lisabetta knew better, and she wanted to pinch her sister, make her cry, get inside her mind, and unzip the place her sister was storing her pain.
But by fall, it was clear that Helena was faltering. Lisabetta went to Florida for the holidays, but returned as soon as Christmas was over. She arrived at the right time—as if any time could be right or would ever be right again.
Her sister received palliative care at home and scarcely left the adjustable bed that Stephano had bought for her. Now he wanted to buy her everything, anything—anything at all—and often stood by helpless.
Lisabetta, Stephano, and Diana took turns bathing her, lifting her to arrange pillows, changing her IV bag, and administering controlled doses of morphine. It was Lisabetta who often sat up in the early hours of the morning by Helena’s side, sometimes falling asleep with her forehead pressed into her sister’s hand. She woke instantly when Helena would stir ever so slightly, at times begging with parched lips for water. Lisabetta dampened Helena’s mouth and tongue with a wet sponge when she was no longer able to swallow. She placed cool cloths over her forehead, where she kissed her gently after removing them. Anything to alleviate her pain and discomfort.
But still, Helena woke one morning, gasping, eyes glazed over, in an agony of pain. Diana sobbed, begging the nurse who came daily to give her mother more morphine. There was little else they could do.
On the night Helena died, she began to choke in the throes of spasms that made Diana visibly tremble. Lisabetta shouted at her sister to leave—she couldn’t stand to see her suffering anymore. “Go!” she yelled, startling even Diana.
But even after the funeral parlour attendees arrived, standing like black candles on either side of her sister’s body, even after they hoisted her body into a black bag, pausing before zipping it up to allow her family to stroke and kiss her cheek one last time, even after they emptied the house of her, Lisabetta sat by the bed as if Helena were still there. She wanted to tell her sister about the pain clawing at her heart; she wanted to talk to her about what had just happened as if she still could, as if it hadn’t happened to Helena but to someone else. But Lisabetta also felt emptied out. She had poured herself into loving her sister, loving her as she gasped for air, loving her while the last rays of her life and spirit flitted above her body—and then she was gone.
And with her gone, Lisabetta was alone.
Linda Morra is a professor, writer, editor, and literary podcaster who lives in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke). In May of 2023, under the direction of Marina Endicott and as part of Humber’s Creative Writing Certificate program, she completed a novel, from which this piece emerges. You can follow her on Instagram at @gettinglitwithlinda or find out more about her at www.gettinglitwithlinda.com
Image: Peace and Quiet (Chesley Davis, 2023)
Edited for publication by Rebecca Starkman as part of the Creative Book Publishing program.
HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Humber’s Office of Research & Innovation and the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts.