Sister Mine

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Where the hell were you?” hissed Abby. “You told me that you were going to stay with him last night!” Mr. Tankhouse pretended to be very interested in the pattern of linoleum on the floor.

  The bars on the windows were rusted through and broken. “I guess I found somewhere else to stay,” I muttered absentmindedly. There was a sweetish smell in the room. I couldn’t quite place it.

  “You did what?”

  “All the nights I’ve overnighted with him, nothing unusual’s ever happened.”

  “Unless you count the bobcat,” said Mister Tankhouse meekly. “That was quite an interesting morning, I must say.”

  “Abs, Dad should have been OK for one night.”

  “Well, he wasn’t!”

  A woman in a baby-blue pantsuit popped her head in the door. I nodded at her. “Hi, Mrs. Pereira. We seem to have caused you even more excitement than usual.” I was playing it cool, I always did, but I was itching to get out of there and start combing the city for Dad. The spring nights were still freezing. We had to get him back before nightfall!

  She replied, “Hello, dear. I’m sorry you had to have such awful news today.”

  Mister Tankhouse told us, “The police say he can’t have gotten far in his condition.”

  Mrs. Pereira picked her way delicately through the pieces of smashed television. “Something was upsetting your father last night. Perhaps the break in his routine? He’s always agitated when one of you girls isn’t there to tuck him in at night. Oh, my, are those snails?”

  Abby peered at her name tag. “Ms.—Pereira, is it?—I gather you were on duty last night?”

  Mrs. Pereira replied, “Yes, I—”

  “Then perhaps you can enlighten me about how my father managed, in his advanced state of confusion and mental deterioration, to make his way out of a locked facility and find himself at large?”

  Hoo, boy. When Abby started in on the ten-dollar words and subordinate clauses, there was going to be hell to pay.

  Mister Tankhouse ventured, “Perhaps an orangutan?” His smile had more fear in it than jocularity. “I believe there are some in the zoo. They might be strong enough to force those bars open.”

  Abby snapped, “A kitten could break those bars! Look at how rusty they are!”

  I said, “They weren’t a couple of nights ago.”

  Mister Tankhouse put in, “The bars are cold-forged steel, top of the line. We had them installed after the brown bear got in.” He shook his head sorrowfully.

  “It was just a baby,” I said. “I gave it a bit of Dad’s salmon and it nodded right off to sleep. Mrs. Pereira, do you know exactly what time it was that Dad disappeared?”

  “It would show on the video.”

  Mr. Tankhouse said, “It most certainly would. Might you ladies perhaps like to see the playback from the camera monitoring your father’s room?

  Abby blew out an exasperated sigh. “You keep camera surveillance on the rooms? Well, why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

  We gathered around the video monitor in Mr. Tankhouse’s office. He flipped the playback on. Took me a second before the image on the small, low-res black-and-white screen began to look familiar. It was Dad’s room, all right. The spider’s-eye view from the camera mounted in one corner of the ceiling was throwing my perspective off. My heart twisted a little in me when I saw Dad. He was sitting upright in bed, the bedsheets pulled up over his legs. He paid no attention to the restraints around his wrists. The bulk of him nearly filled the small twin bed. He picked at the sheets repeatedly with one hand. His blank gaze was fixed at a point somewhere halfway up the wall. It tore at me to see him so absent from himself.

  “What’s he staring at?” Mr. Tankhouse asked Mrs. Pereira.

  Abby frowned. “He likes to watch TV,” she replied. “At least, it seems to capture his attention. Not the nature shows, though. Those send him into a fury half the time.”

  They did. Dad couldn’t bear the least inaccuracy in those programmes. He knew the living world too well. He loved watching Japanese tentacle hentai, though. For humans, it was porn. For Dad, it was high comedy. I’d snuck a few DVDs of it in for him once or twice. Watched it with him. He would cheer right up. His laugh still sounded like him. But in the past few months, he’d been losing the ability to keep his attention on the images.

  Abby said, “I came to sit with him right after class. Like I was supposed to. Got him to take his dinner and his meds.”

  We watched our demented dad on the screen, twisting the sheets.

  Mrs. Pereira looked at Abby with no expression at all, then took my hand in both of hers and patted it. “You’ve been very good to him, Makeda.”

  She was making me uncomfortable. “Abby visits him, too. She’s just got a lot more going on than I have.” All kinds of people paid to have Abby come and perform for them, teach and lecture. Hers was a small world, but she was queen of it.

  Abby frowned. She pointed at the monitor screen. “What’s he doing?”

  In low-res black and white, the miniature image of our Dad hadn’t changed position much, but there was a definite difference; his whole body was at attention now. His hands no longer plucked at the sheets, but gripped the bed railings at either side. Not for very long. Too many straight lines and right angles to them, even though they were rounded right angles. His mouth had snapped shut, and he was staring intently at the window. That was the most shocking shift; everything he was doing now, he was doing with intent.

  Whoops. What had just happened on the screen? I jutted my chin at the monitor. “He’s trying to get free!” I said.

  He was pulling at the strap around one wrist.

  “Those restraints are foolproof,” Tankhouse told us. “I don’t see how he could have removed them.”

  Dad gave up after a second and looked frantically around the room. The intelligence in his eyes nearly broke my heart. He hadn’t looked like that in years. Even though it had prompted him to escape, I was almost thankful for whatever it was that had brought him back into himself, even briefly.

  A snaking web of black lines fell across the screen. Behind it, a square white flash fell downwards.

  “Did you see that?” asked Tankhouse. As we watched, the lines on the screen thickened—some of them flattening out into trilobed leaf shapes—till we couldn’t quite make out what was happening behind them.

  “Oh, my,” said Mrs. Pereira.

  “Oh,” said Abby.

  A few seconds later the screen jerked, and the web of stuff fell away. Dad was no longer in the bed, and near as we could tell, the room was empty. There were tiny black marks dotting the screen.

  “Son of a gun,” said Abby.

  I’d realized the same thing she had. “Was that—?” I began. Abby flashed me the Look. I didn’t finish the question.

  “There was nothing covering the camera when we checked his room after he went missing,” said Mrs. Pereira. For the first time since we’d met her, she sounded flustered.

  I said, “Mr. Tankhouse, can you go back a few seconds? To just before the television fell? That white square?”

  After some fumbling back and forth, he found the spot on the playback.

  “Pause it, please.”

  He did. There was a blur in one corner of the screen. Our view of the television was obscured by what looked like a long, many-fingered shadow about to fall on it. Only slivers of the screen were visible.

  “Monstera?” I asked Abby.

  “Use your eyes. It was Pueraria.”

  Right. The outlines of the stems and leaves that had swelled on the monitor screen had been wrong for Monstera. I exclaimed, “Grape hard candies!” The others stared at me. “That’s what Dad’s room smelled like just now.” Abby gave a tiny shake of her head to warn me not to say anything more. Pueraria—kudzu—blossoms smelled like grape candies. If he was going to get one of his plants to help him escape, it made sense that he’d ask a Pueraria. That stuff could grow a foot a day all on its natura
l. Even with his mojo as severely limited as it was, Dad could work literal miracles with plants. But it was easier to enhance their natural tendencies than work against them. At least, so he’d told me. Sure, he could sometimes make a bougainvillea thrive in the winter, but a Douglas fir would be much happier with the arrangement, and thus more cooperative. Some people talk to their plants. With Dad, the plants talked back. I didn’t know quite what to do with the perilous joy, the hope. Dad hadn’t been able to so much as sprout a seedling for a couple of years now. In fact, we’d been regularly bringing him Pueraria infusions from the vine of it that grew outside Suze’s place. It seemed to have some small effect against Alzheimer’s. Dad had taken to fondly calling the vine Quashee.

  “Mr. Tankhouse,” I said, “you have both our phone numbers, yes?” He nodded. “Then please call us the minute you have any news.”

  “Oh, dear,” he whiffled, “the temperature’s supposed to drop below freezing tonight.”

  “I know that!” I growled. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  Abby’s voice was already well below freezing, “Our family will find him before then. I consider our contract with you terminated as of this moment.”

  “Abs, that’s a bit hasty, don’t you think?” If Dad came back home, I’d be practically on 24/7 caretaking duty. I couldn’t go back to that. It filled me with shame that I couldn’t, but there it was. Mr. Tankhouse looked relieved at first, then quickly schooled his features to show regret. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Mr. Joli was one of our more lively guests. But if you feel you must, I do understand.”

  Abby stumped out the door of the room. I followed her. Then we had to talk to the police, give them a bunch of details. I’d shivered myself and my jeans dry by the time we were done. As I warmed up, the scent of Lars began to emanate from the sweatshirt. It was like man-sweat with a charged vacuum-tube tang of superheated amps.

  I marvelled again that my sis was dating a guitar. I couldn’t dwell on that right now, though.

  Once we were done with the police, Abby and I took the elevator down to the first floor. My purse with my cash in it was at Brie’s place. I borrowed a few bucks off Abby and bought myself a candy bar and a pop from the vending machine at reception. We exited the home in silence. I waited until we were outside and well away from the building, heading for the parking lot. Then I asked Abby, “Why’d you give Dad a kudzu plant?” I knew I hadn’t.

  She frowned. “I didn’t. You know how he feels about stuff like that.”

  I did know. Dad loved kudzu, kept a small vine of it growing indoors at home. But he had been very careful about not letting it spread. He would incinerate the few blossoms and seed pods that his tame plant produced, even though kudzu rarely propagated that way. The plant wasn’t native to Canada. Its vines grew at an enormous rate and would quickly cover and strangle anything in their way, edging out the native flora. The new Dad probably didn’t even remember what kudzu was. I said, “So somehow he got some. Is that how he got down three floors?” I banished the image from my mind of my dad, heavy but frail and more than half out of his mind, clambering down the outside of a building on a rope of green vines.

  Abby replied, “But how’d he make it grow so quickly?”

  She had a point. Sure, Dad was a genius gardener by claypicken standards. But stuck in flesh as he was, he’d have a hard time making a plant grow and move as quickly as that kudzu apparently had.

  I gasped. “Abs, do you think they’ve finally set him free? The Family?”

  She gave me an odd look. “No. They haven’t.”

  “But how can you be sure? Maybe they decided that his punishment was over, and they let him out of that body, and now he’s a full celestial again and he can do plant magic like he used to!” And if they’d done that, maybe they’d release Mom as well. Maybe that’s why they’d helped me back at the lake? All was forgiven? Please, please, let it be so.

  “Stop it! They didn’t. He can’t. I just know, OK? So drop it. We have to find him.”

  That was just like her. Keeping secrets, dumping ash on my hopes. Keeping me tame. “Fine,” I replied. “Be like that. But what do we do now? Gods, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here!”

  “You’re always fucking sorry! Do you know what I was doing last night? Marking about a million papers. Earning the money that pays for keeping Dad in care. We can’t depend on Uncle all the time. Don’t you think I’d like to have a carefree evening sometimes, too? I can’t work and look after Dad!”

  She saw my crestfallen face. Hers fell to match it. “Oh, Maka. I don’t mean to bust your hump. You do the lion’s share of looking after him. Let’s just find him, all right?”

  “Sure.” Her too-ready apology had left me still feeling like a shit. I followed her across the full parking lot. I looked around for Lars, but I didn’t see him, and I didn’t ask. Kinda didn’t want to confirm whether the two of them were actually an item. It was too weird.

  The sun was out, sprouting tiny rainbows in the puddles of brown water that dotted the parking lot. But tonight, all those puddles would become blocks of ice. If Dad didn’t have shelter, his ailing body might not withstand temperatures below freezing. I knew what we had to do. Reluctantly I said, “I guess we should go ask the Family whether they’ve seen him.”

  Abby literally started. “What? Why? Can’t we just let the police handle it?” She looked scared for some reason.

  “What’s up with you? I’m the one who doesn’t travel there well, not you. And I’m the one they hate.” Then I understood. “It’s that Lars, isn’t it? The tool.”

  “Hush. Don’t call him that.” She looked around, probably to see whether Lars was in earshot.

  “No problem, my bad. But you know that even if I don’t call him that, Dad’s folks will. You guys really are dating, aren’t you? And you’re afraid they’ll find out. That’s why you don’t want to go to the palais.”

  The fright on her face would have melted a statue’s heart. Completely ruined my enjoyment of the moment. “C’mon, Abs. I won’t tell them.” For all their power, the old guys didn’t know everything. It was possible sometimes to keep secrets from them.

  She searched my face, then straightened her shoulders. “You know what? I’ll tell them. I mean, it’s not like our paternal relations are the best dating prospects out there, and anyway, they’re not the boss of us. Right?”

  Had she gone nuts? “Wrong. They totally are. Our uncle is pretty much the Grim Reaper, remember?”

  “Will you stop it, already? I’m trying to have a moment here. Anyway, Uncle won’t mind me dating an inspirited instrument. He’s not stoosh that way. So let’s do this, before I change my mind.”

  I shrugged. “Your funeral.”

  “Will you stop that?”

  I hushed and went along with her. My ears were ringing from lack of sleep, and my heart was wrung with worry about Dad. Plus I had just rented a place on my own for the first time, and had maybe been slipped some Rohypnol by my new neighbour and coworker. This last twenty-four hours had been entirely too full.

  Abby’s car was parked in the fifth row of the lot. “Taking up hiking?”

  “Some bastard took the last disabled space just as I was driving up.”

  “His car didn’t have a ‘handicapped’ sticker?”

  “Her car. No, it didn’t. I fixed her wagon, though. Shattered her brake lights.”

  “Red glass?” I asked, fancifully imagining the shards being washed into the storm drains by the rain, then tumbled through the sewers all the way down to the lake. A delighted nessieform Mom finding them gleaming on the lake bottom. Mumbling them delicately up with her monster’s muzzle and spiriting them to her lair, which I envisioned as a hidden, semi-submerged cave. Adding the pieces to her precious stash of glittering reds, oranges, blues, even a pink or lavender nugget or two.

  “Plastic,” Abby replied. For a second I didn’t know what she was talking about, so lost I’d been in my reverie. “They don’t make brak
e lights of glass any more.”

  “Oh.” I shrugged. Didn’t matter, anyway. Took decades for the lake to grind broken glass into smooth, frosted lumps. “Didn’t know you could break plastic like that.”

  “I wish. I used this.” She lifted one crutch up and mimed jabbing it at a brake light. “Sure, you can sing anything to splinters if you hit the right note. But some of those notes are beyond the range of the human voice.”

  We were at her car, the one that Dad had deeded to her along with the house. With the seizures I used to have, he’d figured it wasn’t safe for me to drive. I hadn’t had any for years now, but chickenshit Abby didn’t want to take the chance and let me use the car.

  I loved that ride. It was a 1950 Plymouth station wagon, the kind with a body and dash made of real wood. Uncle had found it years ago, in the barn of a solitary old soul he’d gone to collect up in Kapuskasing. Dry rot had gotten into parts of the body, but Dad knew how to handle wood. He pretty much rebuilt the Plymouth, using local woods to replace the rotted bits. He’d left it to me to get the engine working, since I could handle all those acute metal angles without wincing. Dad found the woody wagon easier to ride around in than in other cars. Some day I would get my license, and then Abby would have to share the car with me. Pity I hadn’t already done so. If I’d been able to drive, it would have kept my mind off the trip we were about to make. I went over to the passenger side, Abby to the driver’s. She unlocked her door and tossed me the keys over the body of the car.

  “Why d’you do it that way?” came a quiet, buzzy voice from behind me. Startled, I spun around, fist cocked. I barely managed not to clock Lars. Though I doubt the blow would have seriously connected, seeing the thick arm he’d instantly put up to block me. “Don’t do that!” I said to him. “Don’t sneak up on me!”