Sister Moon

by Kirsten Miller

  ‘I wanted to go home but I couldn’t find it. It’s not there any more. What have they done with it, Monkey? Where have they taken it?’

  It’s the house we lived in when I was a little girl. When I was his Sea Monkey.

  ‘You’re right. It’s not there any more.’ Clear, straightforward answers are all that are needed now so that the world is decoded for him as its meaning begins to disintegrate. How can I explain the alterations done to it over the years; that the house that is there now has a different face entirely. ‘You can stay here, Samuel. You’re safe here. It’s okay.’

  He looks down. I expect him to ask about my mother, but he does not. Instead he speaks on a soft breath. ‘I’m sorry about your sister.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Devin. I’m sorry about what happened to Devin.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Now I’m the one who is afraid. I wasn’t prepared for this. I don’t know how it will end.

  My father stands, all bones and angles, swamped in the oversized jersey. He pushes his chair back and doesn’t wait for me; instead he makes his way towards the door. ‘I’m tired. Walking makes me tired. I’m going back to my room to have a rest.’

  I don’t follow him. I sit for a long time after he is gone. Through the window of the dining room I see two butterflies skirmishing against the sky, and trees that wait forever, content with the world. I see the low white-flecked mountains in the distance, monstrous houses encroaching slowly towards the summit. I pick up my bag from the floor and make my way out and I do not follow my father to say goodbye.

  Nine

  The day we moved to my uncle’s house my father said little. He stole glances at my mother, but she kept her face away, gazing out of the window as though we did not exist at all.

  Devin sat beside me on the back seat. ‘Will we ever go home again?’ she asked.

  ‘Ask your father.’ My mother spoke in a tone that was flat and tired. I knew that tone, what was behind it, and I lived in fear of hearing her voice like that. If she was punishing us, I know now that she did not mean to; my mother was one of those women who had no idea that behind the eyes of a child lies a deep emotional life and its validation or neglect becomes the imprint on that growing being forever.

  When the traffic lights held us up, my father’s fingers drummed the steering wheel. ‘Come on, Dawn. A life in the suburbs!’ he said, too brightly. ‘I’ve always wanted to try it out.’ My mother’s gaze was fixed, her silence forcing me to bottle any questions of my own. I leaned forward and put a hand on Samuel’s shoulder, but for once he didn’t seem to notice me. We had nothing at all but a suitcase each that held our clothing in the boot of the car. A strange nugget of anticipation expanded in my chest. Set adrift from our roots and the only home I’d yet known, I felt strangely free.

  In the afternoon, Samuel stood beside the giant brick fireplace in his brother’s house. He looked wrong there. His face cracked into a broken smile and his mouth split his face into two: our family’s past etched furrows in his forehead, and his hope for our future played in his smile. He ran a hand through his thick dark hair.

  He said the house had never really been ours, that it had always belonged to the bank and the bank had taken it back, that in life these agreements were made and broken and they were nothing but pieces of paper and the words of men and what we would always have was only what we held inside of us. Like a wound spring released, the explan­ations tumbled from his mouth.

  ‘But it was your word,’ my mother said. Her hands clasped each other in her lap for comfort. ‘What kind of man are you?’

  ‘What about our furniture?’ Devin said. ‘Will the bank give it back?’

  Samuel’s crooked smile stayed steadfast and I wanted to go to him and wrap my arms around his denim leg, hold onto it like a sinking sailor to the mast of a beloved boat. But I stayed still, with my arms at my sides, and Devin sat alone at the far end of the room and played with the tail end of a strand of her hair, curling it around a single finger.

  Samuel put his hands to his head and closed his eyes. He told us that we were a family, and family was the real house on which a life was built. He said that storms might take away the foundation of every structure we might build around ourselves, but so long as each of us still breathed and slept and opened our eyes together, then we would always have a place to be.

  ‘And what to eat?’ my mother snorted. ‘What, Samuel, will this family eat?’

  Samuel reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out his closed fist. His jaw clenched tight and I breathed, afraid of his anger, the rarest form. He told her that we would eat cake if we had to, like Marie Antoinette’s poor, but in the meantime we could all suck on a mint. He threw his hand open and the falling sweets, each wrapped in cellophane, clattered on the floor. I bent and picked up two from where they lay at my feet. I unwrapped one and put it in my mouth, breathing a fresh icy air between my teeth. The wrapper was printed with the name of a nearby casino, one of the first printed words I could sight-read. I knew it as if it was my father’s second name, or the name of another house where he lived and it came into our house too, on his matches, on three of our drinking glasses, embroidered into the corners of the towels in the cupboard. I thought the name and the horseshoe that encircled it belonged to him. It was a part of him and I knew the sight of that symbol as I knew the shape of his boots, the texture of his hair against the palm of my hand. I thought it was part of who he was.

  In the evening my Uncle Marshall walked into the big house through the back door and into the kitchen where my mother was making egg sandwiches for our supper, his hands occupied with parcels and a bunch of flowers big enough for a whole hive of bees. He thrust these into my mother’s hands and she giggled, a sound I’d seldom heard before.

  He’d brought us gifts, but we were the refugees in his house and my mother was playing to that. My father was upstairs, taking a shower. I had seen Marshall before, once a few years before when we’d met him for dinner at a fancy restaurant, the time he’d decided to set up a business in our city. I remembered it mostly because my mother had bought us new clothes for the occasion, and Samuel had worn a suit. I knew Marshall’s face and it seemed so familiar because of how much of my father I saw in him. He was as big as Samuel but taller; his head came up to the top of the doorframe and his shoulders were broad and square. He was all smiles, all friendliness on that first day. He kissed my mother on both cheeks as if they were in a movie and she buckled under him; she took the flowers with flustered hands and fluttered around until she found a tall vase. She pushed the long stems into it before she added water. He picked me up high with his hands in my armpits and swung me around in a half-circle as though I was a baby or a small child, although I was already nine. He could hold me up only because he was so much bigger than me. Even my father hardly ever did that now.

  And then he saw Devin. He put me down. He didn’t try to pick her up. He didn’t touch her. ‘Wow,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘I can see you’re my brother’s child.’ He moved towards her, stretched out his hand. She stood where she was and she locked her eyes on him. He pulled back his hand when she refused to take it, and the room was quiet. ‘I remember when you were a baby,’ he said. ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘Eleven and a half,’ Devin said, and shifted to her other foot.

  He nodded slowly. ‘Nearly twelve.’

  ‘I’m nine,’ I said.

  He laughed and looked at me. ‘And still knee-high to a grasshopper. You’re a skinny little kid.’

  ‘Say hello to your Uncle Marshall properly,’ my mother said. ‘He’s been very kind to us.’

  ‘Do you live here?’ Devin asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ our uncle said.

  ‘Marshall has a few houses.’ My mother’s back was turned as she buttered the bread. ‘He can’t live in all of them at once.’

  ‘I have a factory in the city,’ Marshall said. ‘I spend a few nights a week in this house.’ Now
he looked at my mother again. His face was full, like Samuel’s. A smile pushed at the corners of it, ready to break out, but his eyes were different, his eyes were dull, like Samuel’s without the sun. ‘Your dad’s going to work for me in my factory while you live here.’

  ‘What kind of factory?’ I asked. ‘Do you make toys?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Cat,’ Devin said.

  ‘It’s a paper factory,’ my mother said.

  ‘Your dad’s going to manage the people who make paper. And he’s going to sell it.’

  My mother turned around, wiped her hands on both sides of the apron around her waist. ‘Uncle Marshall must be tired from his flight. Go and play upstairs so he can have a rest in his own house. I’ll call you when supper’s ready.’

  ‘Wait,’ Marshall said. ‘I brought some presents.’

  He handed me a package of brown paper with a blue ribbon fastened to the corner and I saw how big his hands were against the wrapping. Inside were a sheet of sea-creature stickers in cellophane and coloured markers and a book of blank pages bound in leather. Devin’s gift was wrapped in pink and she pulled the paper apart and dropped it onto the floor. She looked at the cardboard box with the plastic window in her hands.

  ‘I don’t play with dolls,’ she said simply, placing the box on the kitchen counter. For a second her eyes lifted bravely to Marshall’s face, and then she left the room. The doll inside the box stared back with unblinking eyes. Blonde, plastic white skin, inappropriate. Our entertainment had been far broader than any manufactured toy. We found play in the expanse of our landscape, or my sister’s imaginative depths.

  ‘Devin!’ my mother called after her, but my sister was gone. ‘I’m so sorry, my daughter can be very rude. She will apologise to you.’

  The smile didn’t leave Marshall’s face, but his arms hung uselessly at his sides. As though he suddenly found them again, he lifted them and folded them across his chest, and I wondered what it was like to wear a suit that was heavy and grey like that every day. ‘Please. Please don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Of course she’s too old for dolls. I’ll get her something else.’

  But my mother was already out of the door and after my sister. Marshall and I were left alone in the kitchen. His eyes fell on me and he seemed about to speak when my father appeared in the doorway, his hair still damp and carefully combed back, away from his face.

  ‘Sam,’ Marshall said.

  Samuel moved into the room and the men shook hands.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ my father said. ‘It’s a real break for me … for us.’ Their handshake never seemed to end, and then I realised it was my uncle who held his grip too long.

  ‘It’s no problem,’ Marshall said. ‘But you know my conditions.’

  ‘It will be a pleasure to work for you. Whatever you need, I’ll do it.’ I didn’t know this part of my father, this man who suddenly smiled too much, who now stood looking up to someone else.

  ‘We can start with a drink,’ Marshall said. ‘I like a whiskey in the evenings.’ He finally released my father’s hand.

  ‘Sure,’ Samuel replied. He ducked away, and left the kitchen.

  I shifted on my feet, awkward and afraid of this giant who smelled smooth as soap before me. But I needn’t have worried. I was as insignificant as an insect as he looked away towards his thoughts or somewhere else, before he picked up his briefcase and followed Samuel through the door and into the cavernous space of that big house.

  Ten

  There was a room in that house, tucked away at the bottom of the enormous staircase that seemed to ascend into heaven. In those first few weeks my uncle’s house was a kind of heaven to us, a mansion compared to where we’d come from, but it was suburban and far from the sea. The space, the novelty of it all, compensated for the loss of the house and the life we had known, if only for a while.

  Upstairs were the bedrooms and the bathrooms that provided more than the four of us would ever need. Devin and I each had our own room. We shared an interconnecting bathroom and it was easy to pretend that we now lived in a hotel. My room had a window that stretched across an entire wall, and at night I kept the blinds up and lay in bed and looked out over the city that twinkled between the dense leafy trees.

  Devin’s room was smaller with a window set high into the wall and we sat on the giant oak chest of drawers just to look out. She could have chosen any one of another three rooms almost as nice as mine, but these were far away at the end of the long passage, and in choosing the humblest of them all, she could stay close to me. We didn’t know what our lives would look like a day in advance. We had our differences, but at first the uncertainty of our new life strengthened our dependence on each other.

  The room at the bottom of the stairs was like a hole in the ground from Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes, when Marshall was home, the door was left open and my eyes were drawn there; I couldn’t keep them away. It gaped and beckoned, and from the darkness that spilled out at midday, I knew that there were no windows, or if there were, he kept the curtains closed. It was dark in there. It was dark except when he went there after supper and closed the door behind him. At night a thin strip of light spilled out from under that door. It never seemed to open when he was behind it, a line drawn that told me only that I was unwanted.

  ‘What is in there?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s none of our business,’ Samuel told me. ‘That’s his space.’

  ‘He needs to be alone,’ my mother said. ‘He works so hard and he’s not used to having people in the house all day.’

  ‘He likes to read,’ my father said. ‘He always did. He likes to be alone and he likes to read.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be his wife,’ Devin said. ‘I wouldn’t like to be married to someone who leaves me behind all the time, who comes to this big house to live here by himself.’

  ‘He’s not by himself,’ my mother said. ‘We’re here now, Devin.’

  ‘But we weren’t here before. Why does he live in such a big house by himself? Why doesn’t he have any children?’

  ‘He doesn’t really live here,’ my mother replied. ‘Only when he’s in town to run his business. And he’s not married.’

  ‘I don’t like him,’ Devin said.

  I said nothing. He was my father’s brother and I loved my father more than anyone. I didn’t know how I could dislike someone who was a solid part of my father, flesh and bone. When I thought of an echo, I thought of them. As though someone had put a piece of tracing paper over Samuel’s face and created another version of the same man, differently coloured and textured. But if you turned the piece of paper over, they faced different ways. When I looked at Marshall and caught sight of something else, it made me shrink and taste a sourness at the sides of my mouth and I teetered on the edge of falling over.

  We seldom saw him in the mornings. He was up earlier than any of us, in his blackbird of a car and flown away to work long before my father rose, ate and followed him there. Marshall drove a car the colour of midnight, sleek and smooth as it waited in the driveway outside; when he was away, it lived silent and obedient in the garage. When I saw that car standing outside in the gleaming sun after school some days, something dropped into the pit of my stomach. The house would never be our home. We could pretend that it was, when he was away and out of town, but he inevitably and frequently returned to remind us again of our place in it all.

  I wandered the corners of his house, marvelling at the space all round me. Stairs big enough to lie down on, a garden of ivy walls and hiding places that attracted birds and cats and sometimes even a squirrel. We fell onto soft mattresses and wrapped ourselves in the velvet curtains. But when he was there, it was different; he changed everything. The huge soft-papered walls retracted, the air between them became distant, remote. He kept to himself and he stayed in his room under the stairs and still he invaded every room, filled every crevice of the house. I could smell him from the kitchen, and I heard his footsteps long after he had go
ne to bed. I thought it was because he owned the house. I was too young to realise that, really, he owned us all.

  Eleven

  On a weekend morning when I wake there is a hand on mine and a warm arm curls around me.

  The room is warm with yellow walls and holds furniture from the separate histories of two families, soft and familiar pieces. A chair that belonged to his grandfather. An old tin trunk that someone in my mother’s family made. Our daughter smiles at us from the picture frames on the dresser; she is some of him and some of me, just flashes of familiar shade or ghost or shadow, but what I know is that she is most of all herself. She is here to replace us because we are fast becoming obsolete. She is young and fresh and tender and can still believe that old people were always that way, and that she will always be just who she is now.

  The sunlight pours through the window like soft yellow silk and it lands on the white cotton that surrounds me. The beauty of my world always catches me by surprise and I wonder what I have done right, what has redeemed me so to deserve what I have now.

  ‘I love you,’ I say.

  ‘I love you too,’ Auster replies. I turn around and he looks at me with one lid still closed, reluctant to depart from sleep. I never thought that I would be with anyone as pleasing to the eye as Auster. He is a handsome man.

  ‘Why?’ I ask him. ‘Why did you choose me and not Devin?’

  Auster knots his brow and looks at me, confused. His head shifts in a familiar movement against the pillow and I know he’s not prepared for this.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what. Why me? I thought that when you met her you’d … you would—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, fall in love with her instead. Change your mind about which sister you wanted.’

  He pushes himself up and away from me. His chest is warm and brown and a nutty smell emanates from the thickness of his sleep that I love to breathe in, drink deep through my nose before he gets up to wash the night away with his morning shower. He runs a hand over his head; his fingers part and comb the hair and his wedding band flashes its constancy at me. His eyes are closed and I think I might have irritated him, but my need to know is stronger than my dignity. I touch his chest, and then his cheek. Lines are already becoming deep cracks on his face.