Sister Mine

by Nalo Hopkinson

  A loud thunderclap made me jump. Cathy and Flash? Were they both in on this? What the hell was going on?

  And suddenly, buckets of water were sheeting down from the sky. Holy shit; the sky was lead-lined with storm clouds as far as the eye could see. When had they shown up? This was a full-blown spring storm. “Thank you!” I shouted at the sky. Then I hauled ass.

  The boiling thunderclouds weren’t actually right above me, yet the fists of rain from them were pounding me and the surrounding area for many yards around. Probably something fancy to do with the curvature of the Earth and the speed and direction of the wind. Daddy would have known how that worked. Did know, somewhere inside that softening mind of his, if the gradual smoothing out of the wrinkles of his brain hadn’t already taken the knowledge.

  Oh, crap. Dad. I’d totally forgotten that last night had been my night to drop in on him. Abby was going to rip me a new one for this. I’d just go see him right now, after I went home and changed into dry clothes. Abby was teaching all day today; with any luck, she’d never find out that I’d missed my visit with Dad. He probably hadn’t even noticed.

  And shit, I hadn’t taken my meds. The little bottle of vileness was also in my room back at Abby’s. Stupid, Makeda! I was flirting with liver failure for sure.

  I hurried along the path. The ratio of raindrops to air approached fifty-fifty. Rainwater pockmarked the surface of the lake. The susurrus was an almost-comforting white noise. Thunder rumbled and chuckled. A bright stitch of lightning tore the sky in half a few miles away. I wished I hadn’t left my jacket at Cheerful Rest. I was chilled through, shivering; the gifts of the gods are two-edged things, sometimes way more than two. The lake had turned an oddly pretty greenish blue. Sort of Ty-D-Bol mixed with almond milk. The rain was sheeting down so hard that it was difficult to make out detail. I only knew I was still on the bike path because of the wet crunch of gravel under my feet. Water trickled from my hair into my ears and down the back of my neck. I couldn’t help sucking some of it in from my mouth corners. It tasted so sweet, though I knew the skies were as polluted as the soil. Dad was forever ranting about it, even in his mostly mindless condition.

  I walked through the occasional little cloud of tiny flies, hovering unerringly at eye and ear height. I hated the damned things. How’d they stay flying in this downpour? You’d think one good raindrop would easily kill a few of them at one blow. I contemplated being a creature so helpless that a raindrop would kill it. Decided that wasn’t so different from being me. The surface of the lake danced crazily, pounded by the bullets of the storm’s friendly fire. Then, gradually, the downpour lessened to a light drizzle. Still enough to keep my haint away.

  What could I make with today’s haul? I hadn’t stumbled on any cobalt driftglass just now; not even the tiniest bits. Not any red. It was one of the rarest colours. In all the years I’d been looking, I’d found barely enough pieces to fill a thimble. Someday I was going to save up enough to buy a trip to Puerto Rico. I’d read that the shores there were a trove of ocean-tumbled cobalt driftglass pebbles. Apparently Puerto Rico used to use a lot of cobalt glass in olden times, and much of it made its way into trash heaps there and, eventually, into the water. I’d never been to the Caribbean. Ever since I read about the Puerto Rican driftglass as a kid, I’d had this fantasy image of myself down there, surrounded by an ankle-height circle made up of hundreds of perfectly rounded, frosted pieces of deep-blue driftglass, each one found by me personally. My mother’s favourite colour. Of me standing in the middle of the circle, spreading my arms wide, throwing my head back and summoning my mother forth from the depths of the waters. Of hoodooing her back into a woman from the sea monster shape they’d told me she’d been forced into. Of having a mother. One whose face I could come to recognize in all its moods, not just the way she smiled for the camera in the couple of old photos my dad had of her.

  A man’s voice yelled, and I jumped. A couple of cyclists, guys in baggy shorts and loose football T-shirts, came around a bend in the path, going the other way. They were hallooing for the glee of wind and rain, and weather almost warm enough for enjoying both. I relaxed a bit. Whatever form it showed up in, my haint always came alone, and never in the rain. One of the guys splashed his bike through a puddle, holding his legs and feet out straight ahead of him. Got himself splattered in mud, which the rain began immediately tattooing patterns in on his pale skin. He grinned shyly at me. I was still too shaken to grin back, plus I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet. They zipped past me. Probably heading towards the beach I’d just left.

  I kept going. I was shivering badly. I needed to get somewhere warm soon. Would my cell phone be OK inside the knapsack? I might need to swallow my pride and call Abs for help. The knapsack looked sturdy enough. It hadn’t been out there long enough for the elements to rot it or rust the metal clasps. A good brand, too. Fancy hikers’ make.

  I stopped. There was a snake lying near the edge of the path, half in and half out of the underbrush. It was smallish as snakes went, about nine inches long. Darkly gleaming greyish black. Curled in a figure eight. Melanistic garter snake. Dad had a soft spot for those. My first alarmed thought was that the cyclists had run over it out of spite or ignorance, as we monkeys will. But it seemed whole. It glanced sideways at me, its tongue flickering to taste my air. Why was it there? If it’d been sunning itself on the path, it should have gone back to its lair when the rain started. But there it lay. I looked at it and it at me. For a few seconds we stayed still, cocooned together in the soft sound of the rain. I took a small step towards it. It jerked, twisted its body into a shape that looked uncomfortably rectangular. Then it shook itself loose again, slithered into the new spring thistles and violets lining the path, and was gone.

  Something was wrong. Other than the haint attack, that is. I couldn’t suss out the snake’s exact meaning, but I knew that right angles were mostly anathema to Dad. He was OK with the ones that occurred naturally in the jes’-grew world, but artificial right angles were like nails on a chalkboard to him. If I was understanding the snake correctly, Dad was in trouble. Damn. I should have been there.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Nothing coming after me. I sped up. I was only a few minutes away from Lakeshore Boulevard. Hang on, Dad. I’m coming.

  From inside the knapsack, my cell phone started to ring. Crap! If I took it out in the rain, that’d be the death of it. I hurried a little farther, looked around for somewhere that’d be shelter. Only saplings, the open beach, water pattering down from the skies. The phone rang and rang. Twelve rings. Fifteen. It was only set for nine. That kind of music mojo meant only one person. “Fuck, Abby!” I said. “I’m trying!”

  The hell with it. I reached into the knapsack for the jangling phone. Maybe I’d be able to hear enough of what Abby had to tell me before it shorted out.

  “Here,” said a soft voice behind me. “Allow me.”

  It was the guy on the motorbike. He sat the bike securely, as though it were a horse. He was holding up a vast golf umbrella decorated with a swirl of rainbow colours. He smiled and twirled it. The colours appeared to spiral into its white centre.

  “Thank you,” I said. I stepped into the shade of the umbrella, fumbled the phone out of the knapsack with wet, cold-numbed fingers. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Took you long enough,” said Abby’s voice. “What the hell are you doing down on the Spit?”

  I’m on the run from a creepy baby with a mouth big enough to eat the world, I thought. “Abby, what’s wrong with Dad?”

  “Meet me at the nursing home right away. Lars’ll bring you.”

  “Lars?”

  “At your service,” said the man holding the umbrella. His voice was quiet, but rumbly. I could feel it in my belly.

  “You gonna tell me what’s up with Dad?” Please, Dad. Please be OK. I won’t do it again, I promise.

  “His room is empty. The people at the home haven’t seen him in hours, and they can’t find him anywhere.”

>   “Shit.” Officially, Dad had advanced Alzheimer’s. The care home kept him carefully under lock and key.

  “You were supposed to be watching him, Makeda!”

  Oh, gods. “He’s gotta be there somewhere.”

  “Well, he isn’t. I know you’re mad at me, but did you have to do Dad like that, just to spite me?”

  “I’m sorry, OK? I’m on my way.” I dropped the phone back into the knapsack.

  Lars smiled at me. “Can you hold the brolly a sec?” he asked. Black man, Swedish name, English accent. And now that I was close to him, I could see the Shine on him like emerald dust. Abby’s boyfriends were always interesting, but she’d never dated a Shiny one before. I hadn’t recognized him. Which side of the Family was he from?

  I took the umbrella and held it over us both. He turned behind him and pulled a couple of helmets and a wad of plastic sheeting out of a bag attached to the back of the bike. One helmet was fluorescent aqua splashed with lemon-coloured lightning bolts. The other was scarlet with beige and purple smiley faces. The words “Voodoo Chile” were splashed across it in a bulbous hippie-style font. The plastic sheeting was fuschia with starbursts of an uncomfortable green, outlined in chocolate brown. Lars balanced the lot between his wide thighs, tucked under his overhanging belly. The plastic sheeting turned out to be rain ponchos. He pulled one on, slammed the red helmet onto his head. Took the umbrella from me. “Your turn.” He handed me the remaining gear.

  “A poncho’s no use to me now,” I said. “I’m already soaked.”

  He smiled. “Maybe it’ll delay hypothermia for a bit though, yeah? Got dry sweats in the trunk once I get you out of this downpour.” He patted the lidded fibreglass box at the back of the bike. He waited while I put the poncho and helmet on, then snapped the umbrella shut. The rain popcorned down onto my helmet. He slid the brolly into a sheath built into the chassis of the bike.

  “Handy,” I said.

  He grinned. “Hop on.” Not many words to him, Lars.

  I slipped the good strap of the knapsack over my shoulder, straddled the bike, wrapped my arms around Lars’s solid middle. He was good to hold, even through the crinkly plastic. I said, “ ‘Voodoo Chile.’ That was a Hendrix release, wasn’t it? Limited edition?”

  He raised up off the bike a bit, gunned it. It vroomed into life, and we took off. As we went by the dump-truck depot, I saw a tiny form huddled under the body of a garbage-encrusted truck. My haint. The wet side of its face glistened and ran a little more than you’d expect from just rainwater. Looked painful. The haint glared at me. I leaned into Lars’s bulk and stuck my tongue out at it. Suddenly, it smiled, its mouth too broad for its face. Something spilled, wriggling, from its baby lips. Hard to see through the sheeting rain, but it looked like the snake messenger I’d just seen. The haint bit down, and a writhing length of its snack fell to the ground. It landed, kept twisting as though it weren’t quite dead yet. My stomach twisted with it. Lars gunned the motor and the bike sped up. As we hit the main road, he leaned back a little so that his mouth was next to my ear.

  “I used to be his guitar,” he said in his soft voice. “Jimi’s, I mean.”

  The wind carried his words away. I was too stunned to reply. Make-no-waves Abby was dating an instrument?

  We sped on towards the Comfort Zone (I kid you not) Convalescent Home. Where the fuck was Dad?

  Me and Abby, we didn’t have exactly the same face. It was more like someone had dropped a funhouse mirror, cracking it into two related but uneven pieces. Abby’s left eye was about five millimetres farther away from her nose than mine was from mine; she and I had measured and compared once. The tip of her nose tilted ever so slightly to the left. Near as we could tell, mine didn’t. She and I had pretty much the same mouth. Her left shoulder hunched a little, hinting at the mild scoliosis that skewed her spine slightly to the left. The skin graft keloid scars on her from our separation operation were on her left flank. Mine, of course, were on my right. And her left leg was the one that was shorter, where both my legs were the same length. It was as though, in the womb, my body had been the lodestone that had drawn hers in. A head of boisterous dreadlocks concealed the tablespoon-sized indentation on the right side of Abby’s skull, where no hair had ever grown.

  She was standing near me in the corridor outside Dad’s empty room. She leaned on her crutches. Guilt nipped at my conscience. On bad days she used her crutches instead of her cane. Worry about Dad was taking it out of her today. Her elbows were locked to hold herself stiffer, and she was giving me her famous evil eye. As a kid she’d used the crutches all the time. Right now, she looked just the way she used to when she was a kid and she was mad at me. “Abby’s Glare of Hot Death” Dad called it, even now. Old, well-worn memories were the last to go.

  Lars had given me a dry sweatshirt and dropped me out front. He hadn’t followed me in. Maybe guitars didn’t like the smell of hospitals, either. And call it whatever they wanted, Comfort Zone had that unmistakable hospital bouquet. I’d had plenty of time to come to hate it during all the nights I’d spent curled into that bloody orange vinyl La-Z-Boy by Dad’s bedside.

  On Abby’s other side stood a slight, worried-looking man in a beige suit, so elegantly tailored it was practically invisible. Grenville Tankhouse was the currently quite-uncomfortable-looking director of the Comfort Zone Palliative Centre.

  “You’ve checked the grounds, right?” I asked him.

  “Ah…” Tankhouse took a quick glance up and down the corridor, as though Dad might be lurking in the doorway of one of the other patients’ rooms. “Yes,” he said, “we have searched the premises thoroughly. We’re going over it again, just in case we missed anything. And the officers—”

  “He’s not here, Makeda,” Abby burst out. “We went over all that while we were waiting for you. And I had a look, too. In here, around the grounds. Didn’t see him.”

  “Crap.” I’d tried to sop my hair dry with the wet sweater I’d taken off in the rest home’s public washroom. But my black girl’s hair held water like a sponge. Though I’d already squeezed my two plaits out once in the bathroom sink in the washroom, that had only slowed the flow down, not stopped it. Water was trickling off the ends of them. I could feel it streaking damply down the back of the sweatshirt Lars had lent me. And my jeans were still sodden. I shuddered. I asked Abby, “So what do we do now?”

  “I haven’t checked Dad’s room yet. Let’s do that together. Two pairs of eyes might be better than one.”

  “Please,” said Mr. Tankhouse, indicating the way.

  Abs and I went ahead of him. My running shoes made a squelching sound with each step. I was leaving wet footprints behind me. I said to Abby, “Take care you don’t slip in my wake.”

  She grunted an ungracious thank-you.

  Mr. Tankhouse said, “Please don’t worry about it. I’ll have it cleaned up immediately.” He chuckled nervously. “Heaven knows, we’ve had worse things on this floor. The scat of that raccoon, for example. Have I ever told you ladies how grateful I was for your indulgence in that incident? The Health Department could have closed us down in a second.”

  Abby glared at him. Poor guy, it wasn’t his fault. Living organisms liked to be near Dad. Since we’d put him in palliative care at Comfort Zone, they’d been experiencing a rash of little surprises: squirrels clambering down the chimney, alarmed deer in the foyer, roses climbing so avidly up the outside wall to get to Dad’s window that they’d had to assign one of their grounds staff to cut the rosebush back every few days. I’d taken to bringing a cage with me at night so I could quietly return the visitors to the outdoors. And after that business with the earwigs—thank heaven, the frogs had snapped up most of them—I’d started carrying a cricket cage, too. Dad had been no help. I would come to see him, and find him cooing at an intrusion of cockroaches, sprinkling a spreading patch of moss with water from the glass on his bedside table, or picking the fleas off a family of scrofulous foxes that was rolling around in his bed.
Once he’d tossed his eggplant sandwich into a corner, presumably to nourish the blue fuzzy mould that was creeping towards it. Still, I counted myself lucky. A couple of months ago, Mrs. Block two rooms over had covered her walls with her own shit, screaming wordlessly as she did.

  The three of us entered Dad’s room. High hospital-type bed, single, with bars along its sides. Those ubiquitous blue cotton hospital sheets, rumpled and flung aside. The awful orange La-Z-Boy. I frowned. There was crumbled dirt on the seat of it. Abby looked around, then stopped dead where she stood. Her mouth dropped open. “What happened here?”

  The floor was littered with shattered pieces of black and silver plastic and glass that had been the TV. Something had torn it from the jointed arm that swung down from the ceiling. Snail trails streaked the cheery poster on the wall that showed a boat on a lake or ocean. The handful of snails responsible for the silvery tracings dotted the walls. There was a small brown lizard stalking one of them. Lizards in Ontario?

  “Perhaps…,” ventured Mister Tankhouse, “some of your father’s strays?”

  I had him half convinced that the deer and the raccoon had been rescue animals that Dad was looking after until they could be returned to the wild. “No,” I said, “something else did this.”

  “Oh,” he said. “If you’re sure. I just wondered whether that boa might have returned…?”

  I shook my head. “I took her back to her owner.” Abby’d made her promise not to come back inside the rest home, but I didn’t need to try to explain that to Mr. Tankhouse.

  I stared at the mess in dismay. Dad’s potted plants were in a bad way. Half of them had been spilled from their containers. It looked as though they’d been dragged across the floor and the bed. I’d brought them for him in an effort to break up the right angles of the room so that he’d be more comfortable. I’d lined the windowsill with some of them, and hung others in planters from the top of the window. The organica broke up the smooth right angles of the room a bit, inserted more of the jes’-grew lines of natural things to conceal the rigid lines and angles of human-made objects. The plants had made it a little easier for him to be in here. That and sedatives. When was I going to stop feeling guilty that Dad had gotten too sick for us to take care of him? I’d been coming here almost every night since he was admitted last year. I’d swallowed the responsibility for his illness as though it were my personal fault.