My Pandemic Pastime

In Part One: After their abusive father abandons them, Lena and her sister, Stella, live with their mother Sylvie. Stella continually outshines her younger sister, Lena, but Lena takes it in stride. As teens, they work at a restaurant together when, at 17, Stella finds she is preganant and doesn't want their mother to know.

In the end, Stella had the baby. When she first learned about the pregnancy, Sylvie was shocked into silence. That was soon followed by a tirade of hysteria and disbelief, shame and disgust. Lena knew her mother would react like this, but she also knew Sylvie deserved some of the blame she was showering on Stella. She had turned a blind eye to the wayward behavior of her precious Stella Maris. Rarely was there any recrimination for her eldest when she had misbehaved or was caught in a deceit. Sylvie never even asked Lena if she’d seen her sister the days – and there were many – that Stella was AWOL.

Her mother’s reaction to learning about the pregnancy was only the warm-up act to her fugue-laced rant upon discovering Stella wasn’t certain who the father might be.

Quickly, to try and calm her mother, Stella settled on a boy she knew from school. Pete. Pete was the father. Stella had made an educated guess, summoned Pete and, confronted with Sylvie’s maniacal demands, Pete agreed to a pre-natal paternity test. Two weeks later, they were engaged. They got married a month before the baby was born. She was 7 pounds 9 ounces. Stella named her ‘Isabella Marie’, and the three of them – two-day-old Isabella and her 18-year-old parents – moved in with Sylvie and Lena.

When the next baby came a year later, and another 10 months after that, the house could take no more.

On a particularly cold winter night, Sylvie had dozed off in front of the fire. She had taken to smoking after everyone was in bed for the night. It didn’t matter which was the actual cause, whether it was an errant spark from the fireplace, or the cigarette in Sylvie’s hand burning into upholstery. All that mattered is that, in the fire, Pete was badly burned trying to get his family out of the house after Lena was awakened by the smell of smoke. Stella gathered Bella and Will in her arms, as Pete headed back for the youngest, Theo. Moments later, two firemen helped Stella and the two children out of the house, then rushed to the bedroom where they found Pete and Theo.

Both had been overcome by smoke inhalation and, only later at the hospital, was the severity of Pete’s burns assessed. He survived, but had to endure several painful surgeries over the next three years. Baby Theo was dead before the paramedics even got to him.

There is no bandage for hell. You can shovel as much dirt on the flames of horror as you can manage, but you will never alleviate the hell of someone who feels responsible for the death of a child.

After the fire, there were just not words. Pete was in a hospital bed, undergoing procedure after procedure. Stella was trying to keep her family together, her Bella and her Will, and what was remaining of Pete. She never thought of Theo. She couldn’t think of Theo.

How could she think of Theo? She had a husband undergoing life-threatening surgeries, the result of his trying to save her and her children; she had two children who desperately needed their mother, as they were placed in house after house through Social Services. They meant well, the government people, but they just had no idea as to how hellish it was for this small family.

Lena did what she could, taking care of the two children while Stella stayed with Pete at the hospital. Bella was a delight. Nothing seemed to faze her. Everything was new and just…great. Lena wanted whatever it was that animated her niece. Will was slower to acclimate to the new world that had arisen around him. He needed constant reassurance and, as she knew would happen, needed Lena with him always. His mother, Stella, had too many other people and problems with which to deal. Lena felt honored to be the person Will wanted as his safety net. When she thought about it later, she realized that Will needed her less than she needed Will. After so much tragedy and trauma, she needed to be needed. It was all she knew. And Will needed someone. He chose her. No matter what happened after that, she would remember that once she had been needed.

In the midst of so much trauma and tragedy, was Sylvie. There could never have been a day for Sylvie after the fire that wasn’t distressed with guilt. Had it been her fault the fire got out of control? Was it her cigarette burning down, as she slept, that had caused the conflagration? No one knew for certain. Had they been certain it was Sylvie’s fault, Lena had no doubt her mother would have spent the rest of her life in literal sack cloth and ashes. Sylvie was so in tune with the Catechesis of old that Lena didn’t know how she could possibly reconcile herself with the fact that young Theo – only five months old – had died because of her carelessness. It didn’t matter what an investigation found, Sylvie held herself responsible.

Though they would never say, so did Lena and Stella. And Pete.

Pete was lying on the living room recliner on a sunny Thursday in May. He was recovering from his third, and he hoped last, plastic surgery to restore his left side to something resembling human. The ‘Price is Right’ was playing on the TV as he did a crossword on his IPhone. Between the two, surely he’d win something. Lena had left work early because she wanted to take Bella to her swimming lesson, knowing Stella was busy with her sales business. Mary K? Or was it Arbonne, or Avon this time?

Sylvie, as usual, was getting dinner ready for everyone, in the new home they got when the insurance finally paid out. It was a much better house than they’d had before. Lena was pleased about that. But, her Stella had stopped being Stella. Losing Theo was beyond anything for which she had words. His absence was a word she had yet to discover. But she was who she was, and life was what it was, and Stella continued. Lena was ever more in awe of her sister. Theo wasn’t her child but losing him was a loss she couldn’t bear. Still, Stella continued.

Lena hadn’t had lunch because of a telephone conversation with this ‘Nicholas’ person Stella so wanted her to meet. She was hungry and in the mood for Sylvie’s Thursday dinner. Sylvie would deny it, of course, but every Thursday, she made shepherd’s pie for the family. More than was needed…enough for Friday lunches, and it was Lena’s very favorite Sylvie dinner. There was a bit of Sylvie’s Québécois in it, not unlike the odd tourtière to which she’d introduced them years ago. Lena tended toward veganism, but Sylvie’s dinners – no matter what the ingredients – were spectacular, and deeply familiar.

Familiarity was what Lena needed now. It was all she had ever needed. To be needed. To be wanted. To be a part of something. For Lena, it had taken this tragedy, this horrid, unspeakable tragedy to give her a role in something. It was she who Will wanted and needed. And it was at the family dinners, around the new table in the new house that she found herself in the place she wanted to be. Somehow, sadly, in experiencing so much mutual pain and loss, they had become an unshakeable unit. An entity. A family.

Sylvie had been dead at least a day before Lena found her, hanging from the shower rod in the posh new en-suite she and her mother shared, in the posh new house insurance had bought for them.

“Mama. Mama. Mama,” Lena had whispered again and again. In truth, she wanted to scream. Inside, she was envious. Sylvie had had the courage to put this hell behind her. Lena knew that Stella would interpret their mother’s death as proof Sylvie was certain the fire had been her fault, and could no longer go on living with that truth.

What Stella may not consider, and Lena knew, was that their Sylvie would have wanted, in fact demanded, the hell on earth that her ‘guilt’ required. Her mama, her Sylvie, could have lived, suffering, as long as God saw fit to keep her on earth. This Sylvie, the one who took her life because her crime overtook her, who deprived her own children of their mother…this Sylvie was one Lena did not want to remember. She couldn’t accept that her mother may have been less than perfect, subject to the intensity of grief that the exigencies and horrors of life might impute. That Sylvie was lost to oblivion. The Sylvie who remained for Lena and Stella was the strong, resolute and determined Sylvie. No matter what - not even if Theo’s death had resulted from her negligence - Sylvie would remain pristine. She had been the only good thing in their young lives, good being comparative to how much bad they’d experienced.

Theo was dead. Sylvie was dead. One cancelled out the other. Pete had recovered from his injuries. The family – including Lena – had a new, decent house. Life had taken a severe beating, but it continued unabated.