Sister Mine

by Nalo Hopkinson

  It was really our mom. “Fine, then,” I muttered. “Tell her you started it.”

  Abby laughed. “She says she heard that.”

  “Does she know what happened with Dad and the kudzu?”

  “She says she can understand you, so you should talk directly to her.”

  I looked up at the two glowing saucers. “Do you?”

  There was a longish silence while Mom answered.

  “She says yes, and it broke her heart that she couldn’t be at the burying. But she knows that Dad isn’t really dead. Hang on; I’m going to try to talk back to her the way she’s speaking to me.”

  I sat on a cold slab of crumbling concrete and watched the miracle as my sister and my mother, one on land and one in water, one stumbling for lack of balance and the other wheezing for lack of breath, danced with each other at the shoreline.

  Abby and I were maybe nine years old. It was a perfect and rare summer morning; sunlight the colour of tea-stained white cotton. The light kissed the skin softly, like a blessing, and there was just enough of a breeze that you were neither sweating nor chilly. I was lying on my stomach on the front porch, head propped up on my hands, reading a book. I don’t remember which one. I think it had a magical goat in it, and maybe two children, and a mountain. I had put the book down to watch a tiny green inchworm measure its way along the porch floor. From inside the house, Abby kicked open the screen door, used one of her crutches to hold it open, and swung through out onto the porch. “Hey!” I called, “Come see this!” I figured that Abby would either really like the inchworm, or she’d think it was gross. Either way, her reaction would be entertaining.

  She frowned at me. “No, don’t tell it to me, stupid. It’s ugly that way. Sing it to me.”

  “How?”

  “Sing it with your body. Like this.”

  And my crippled sister threw down her crutches and began to dance. She ceased being a little girl constrained by braces and crutches. Her body moved in its own language. Suddenly, her shorter leg wasn’t disabling her. It was the crook of a comma, the illustrative pause in a devastatingly meaningful statement spoken in movement. It was the length and shape it needed to be. She made a clicking noise, punctuating her body’s gestures and flourishes. Abby had some serious mojo. In the weeks, months, years to come, she would demonstrate it to me. You know that song that goes “You can dance if you want to”? Even sitting mostly still, Abby could dance. The mere flick of an eyelid was articulate; the slightest quirk of her lips. Abby sang tenses with her voice, danced sentences with her body. Abby spoke volumes. But that day, the first time she danced for me, her body was saying the simplest, most childish thing, “I’m bored, Makeda. Come and play with me.” I understood it as clearly as if she’d spoken the words. Even the language that only she and I shared was clumsy next to the grace that was my sister.

  Locomotion. The one thing I’d thought she needed my help with. The only use I was to anyone in this world, she took away from me. She and I used to get on each other’s nerves a fair bit; just the usual squabbling and jockeying for position that happens between siblings. Before that, we’d done so as equals. But the day that Abby danced was when I first understood that I was something lesser than she was.

  “She says you have Dad’s mouth more, but I have his eyes more. Or maybe she’s saying she’s glad I have eyes. Either way, I think it’s good.” She laughed out loud at some gesture from Mom that I couldn’t see, or that I couldn’t perceive as communication. “Mom! Stop teasing!”

  I’d had enough. “Oh, this is some bullshit!”

  Mom and Abby both swivelled to look at me. “What’s gotten into you?” asked Abby.

  I stood and confronted the bulbous, long-necked, yacht-sized lump that had beached itself on the shore, halfway out of the water. “OK, OK, we get it. She looks like Dad, and I look like Dad, and we both look like you used to before you got turned into a cross between a plesiosaur and a beached whale—”

  “Makeda!” Abby, in full-on mommy mode, actually stamped her foot at me. “—and it’s all blah, blah, blah. What I want to know is, where have you been all these years?”

  “Sis, she can’t stay on land for very long.”

  “So we could have had picnics, right here on the shore. At night. I bet she would have brought the freshest salmon ever. She’s been meeting Dad here once a month forever. Couldn’t she have dictated a note to him for us, or something?” I turned to Mom. “Anything we could have gotten to know you by?” I found I’d sat down on a nearby boulder. “You don’t even look like the picture we have of you! That beautiful Mom-lady with the puffball hair and the cute little red dress…” I was blubbering. “Look at what Granny Ocean did to you! Look at what she turned you into.”

  Through Abby, Mom said, “I am beautiful. Your father knows it. I am a living thing, and therefore beautiful to him. Your uncle knows it. I am a being that will know death, and therefore I am beautiful to him.” She’d moved her head closer to me. “Hey, I’m lecturing you, like a real mother! I’ve wanted to do that for decades.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry.”

  “Besides, the original kingstie is mad jealous of my fat, round tummy.”

  Abby said, “Wait; there’s an original kingstie? I thought that was a hoax!”

  “She’s real, but I don’t see her often. We’re not very sociable creatures. Maka, I know everything about you two that your dad and your uncle could tell me. With all the tears I cried from missing you, I’m surprised the lake level hasn’t risen.”

  “You cried for us?”

  “Nearly every day. Still do, sometimes.”

  “I came down here a lot as a kid,” I confessed grudgingly. “I would comb along the beach, looking for, well, messages from you.” I made my eyes meet hers. “I kinda thought that if I arranged pieces of driftglass and other stuff I found just right, I’d be able to read what you were trying to tell me.”

  There was a strangled laugh from Abby. She saw me glaring at her and tried to compose her face, but that just sent her into another fit of giggles. Eventually she was able to stop laughing long enough to translate Mom’s reply:

  “No, sweetie. I never sent you any magical messages. I’m not magic. I was just made this way by magic.”

  I hung my head. “Yeah, I know it was childish of me.”

  “There is one little thing…”

  “Yes?” I reached out to touch her head. Her skin was raspy, like sharkskin, only more so.

  “One time, I was missing my girls so terribly, wishing I could hold you and be part of your lives…”

  Abby said, “Oh, Mom.”

  “And—” It took Abby a couple tries to get the next word right, probably because she didn’t realize at first that it was a nickname—“ Legs would tell me stories about what you two would get up to, what tricks you’d try to play on him and Boysie.”

  “ ‘Legs’ is Uncle Jack?” I asked Mom.

  “Yes. So that day, after I finished eating some shellfish, I took one of the shells and whispered something to you into it. Then I threw it back into the water.”

  My mouth dropped open. “I knew it! I knew it! What did you say into it?”

  “It’s silly.”

  “Mom, just tell me!”

  “I said, ‘Makeda, eat your peas.’ ”

  “Yes! Yes!” I did a jubilation dance. I stuck my tongue out at Abby. “In your face! Didn’t I tell you that Mom had sent me a message in a shell?”

  Abby looked bewildered. “Yes, but how did it…?”

  “Who cares? Maybe a tree never talked to me the other day, but I did hear Mom in that shell! I did!”

  Abby didn’t translate what Mom said next. She just hung her head and said, “OK, OK. Makeda, I’m sorry I laughed at you just now.”

  “Wow. You apologizing to me. Mom, there’s no way you can hang around, is there?” I rubbed an itchy spot at the back of my head.

  “I have to go soon. Girls, I miss your two dads. Now only one of them come
s, and now he’s started avoiding me out of shame that he lost Boysie’s soul. The three of us love each other to the ends of the earth and back. Without Boysie, Legs and I are like a stool with one leg chopped off. We’re toppling. Please find him for us. Find Boysie.”

  “Son of a gun,” I breathed. “You got Uncle Jack, and you kept Dad, too. Mom, if you could high-five, I would so throw one up to you right this minute! It almost makes it worth it that I’m carrying around Dad’s mojo.”

  Mom’s head jerked upright. “What?”

  Abby’s eyes went almost as wide as Mom’s. “Oh, crap. I think she doesn’t know what happened.”

  “Tell me.”

  So we told her. A kingstie in a rage is a terrifying sight. “I can’t translate that,” said Abby, watching the splashing and writhing happening in the water. “I don’t know what half those gestures mean, even if she weren’t doing most of them underwater. And there are concepts I can’t catch. I think there are patterns of bubbles involved.”

  Mom surfaced. She opened her mouth scarily wide. Hard to be sure in the dark, but I think kingsties have three more pairs of canines than most creatures need. Abby said, “No, Mom. Please don’t do that to them! I’m not even sure you can tie a knot in a leg like that. Oh. You don’t mean a leg.”

  “I can’t do anything to them! They are gods to us! I sent them across the border to give Makeda breath, not to turn her into a… perch with a lamprey attached to it!”

  Abby said, “I think she means something like—”

  “Mule. I know. Mom, maybe it’s for the best. I came back with my brain fixed, after all.”

  Her tail slapped the water. “I didn’t care what condition your brain was in!” She heaved herself out of the water and humped, walrus-like, over to where I stood. She touched her forehead to mine. She opened the lamps of her eyes. There were worlds afire in the depths of them. Such glory. “You are my daughter. I was happy that you had come to me alive.”

  “Mom, it’s not that simple. Looking after me as I was, it would have been exhausting.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “Sometimes you would have hated me.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “And then hated yourself for hating me.”

  “I know. I knew it then. But looking at you, in that moment, I did not care.”

  Something in me broke open. The next breath I took was sweeter than air had ever tasted to me. I kissed my mother’s raspy forehead and closed my eyes against the brilliance of her. I still saw a circle of red on each closed lid. “Abby, how in the world did you manage to translate ‘nevertheless’?”

  “You think that’s hard, you should try everything she put into the past perfect. And now she’s laughing at me.”

  She didn’t seem to be doing anything different to me. Maybe it had to do with patterns of bubbles in the air.

  My phone rang. It was from Brie’s number. “Sorry,” I said. “Gotta get this.”

  She and Abby continued their odd dance at the shoreline. I wandered a little way away from them. Deliberately cheerfully, I said, “ ’Sup, dude?”

  “You haven’t been here.” Brie’s voice was sullen.

  “For one whole night, yes. Charmed you noticed. What’s it to you?”

  “Tonight’s show sucked. Plus you find Fleet’s body, you don’t even tell me, then you just leave?”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I know you liked her.” Or he wanted to know whether she’d told me anything.

  “Makeda, Fleet used to be in my band.”

  Oh, shit. I swallowed around the sudden lump in my throat. “And she was only in her twenties.”

  His voice got guarded and sullen. “Did Fleet tell you that?”

  “No, my uncle did. He knows stuff like that.”

  “He a cop?”

  “He’s a firewall.” Mom dipped her head into the water and came back up. That was my mom over there! “Brie, was there something you wanted to tell me about all this? That’s why I’ve been phoning you.”

  “No.” The single, bitten-out word carried more than its weight of anger. “I don’t want to tell you shite.” I heard his exhaled breath. “But could you come over anyway? You’re the only one I know who I can talk to about, you know, what I do.”

  “I’m not going to end up like Fleet, am I?”

  “No! God, no. Never again.”

  My skin prickled. “Oh, that’s reassuring.”

  Over by the water, Abby did a pirouette. What were she and Mom talking about?

  Brie said, “Really, you’ll be fine. It’s been years since anything like this has happened. I figured out how to stop hurting people.”

  “Again with the reassurance.” I thought for a second. “OK, I’ll come.” But I would bring reinforcements. I rang off and walked back to the water’s edge. I said. “Mom, Abby and I have to go and do a thing.”

  “We do?”

  “I have to go soon, too, my darlings. I need to be deep in the belly of this lake before the fishing ships come out, and if I descend too quickly, the bends are murder.”

  “All right,” Abby replied. “But Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “You and Dad and Uncle Jack…”

  “I’m pissed at your Uncle right now. But I do love him. He’s messed up and he or somebody better fix it. But he helped save Makeda’s life, and he continued to look after you both, and he’s one of the hottest honeys in this world, and probably in the next.”

  “But what about Dad?”

  Did she still not understand? “Abs, get with the programme here, will you?”

  Abby continued, “Dad saved Makeda, too. It wasn’t just Uncle. And he looked after us every day. Uncle didn’t. And he loves you like air. I don’t know so much about the… the other thing.”

  “Don’t you worry; when he comes back to me and Legs, I’ll find out whether he still has his knack for… the other thing.”

  She asked, “Are you saying that you’re… with… both of them?”

  “And you two girls would know nothing about anything like that, would you?” Mom raised a vast tail and slammed it against the surface of the water. I jumped at the loud crack the impact made.

  “Abs, I think that’s Nessie for ‘Stop talking shit.’ Yeah, Mom, we had a four-way a few times with the Bejis. Big whoop. Aunt Cathy and Uncle Flash used to be married to each other, and they’re brother and sister.”

  Abby said, “I have no intention of marrying you, just so you know.”

  “And I am way relieved to know that.” I smiled at her. She smiled back.

  “Mom, do you miss being human?” Abby clearly wasn’t ready to let Mom go just yet. I knew how she felt.

  “Why should I? Especially now that I have my girls in my life. I’ll just snag some of those oranges for the road, shall I? Thank you, dears.”

  We watched her paddle out deeper, until her skin blended into the skin of the lake and we couldn’t see her any more. “Fuck,” I said. “I forgot to show her my rug that I made.”

  “You sound like a little girl bringing home a finger painting for her mother to tape to the fridge.”

  “Shut up.” Despite the words, I sounded happy. I was. Spring flowers were breathing their perfume into the air, and I knew that life was good.

  “So what’s this thing that you and I are going to do?”

  “I want to go to Cheerful Rest, but you remember Brie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think he’s some kind of scary hoodoo master, and I want to go and ask him about it. Will you and Lars come with me?”

  “Yup, you’re really living the dull claypicken life, all right. Do we have to ride on that wretched blanket?”

  “Aw, come on, give my ride a chance. She’s pretty cool once you get to know her.”

  “I don’t know…” Abby stared down at the rug, which had hunched its way over to lean against my leg, cooing softly.

  “You know you want to. Didn’t you feel like a queen, flying on a magic carpet high ab
ove the world?”

  “A terrified and somewhat motion-sick queen.” She smiled. “But yeah, it was kinda cool. I could stand to do that again.”

  I kissed her cheek. “Thanks, Sis.”

  “You realize it’s nearly three in the morning?”

  “I’m afraid that if I wait, Brie might freak out and run away.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sleepy, anyway. Too jazzed. As for Lars, he never sleeps. And he keeps complaining about how things were more interesting when Jimi was around. Maybe this talking-to-Brie affair will be interesting.”

  “I’m really hoping not.”

  She went and sat on the rug. “Either way, I’m in. Start this thing up.”

  Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,

  Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,

  Twitched her hair out by the roots,

  Stamped upon her tender feet,

  Held her hands and squeezed their fruits

  Against her mouth to make her eat.

  Abby clicked her cell phone shut. “Lars is going to meet us there.” She let her cane go to put her cell into her handbag. I caught the cane before it could roll over the side and tumble to the ground below. We were coasting along the wooded Lower Don Trail, threading our way through the branches of the tallest trees. I’d spotted a family of foxes and a skunk. Other than the animal people, the trail was pretty deserted at this hour of the morning. The rushing cold air made my cheeks feel rosy and crisp as fall apples. Abby was lying on her back with her head in my lap. “I could get used to this,” she said.

  The rug took us along the raised overpass that was the Gardiner Expressway. There were cars on it, though not as many as there would be come rush hour this morning. Abby rolled onto her stomach to peer over the side of the rug. Just in case the rug took a sudden dip, I hooked my fingers through one of the loops on the back of her jeans. She patted my hand. She said, “How come more people aren’t seeing us up here? The sky is full of cameras nowadays.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Dolly took me literally when I told her we didn’t want to be visible.”