Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  I bow my head. “Sorry.”

  “Meaghan, he seems fine.”

  “He is fine.”

  Riker is stepping further away from me, backing himself against the door of the store. “So then it’s not him that chases you out of your apartment and down here to my store every night?”

  “Not really,” I say into the end of my ponytail.

  Riker speaks to his feet. “Then what is it, Meaghan?”

  I toss my ponytail over my shoulder. Ian is not what’s troubling our relationship. Riker is right. Ian is a good guy—clingy and sissy, but good. What’s ruining everything is someone else, someone completely hapless who would be shocked to hear it, someone who isn’t Riker either.

  “Ian’s mom,” I begin. “She’s amazing. She runs marathons and grows her own organic food and doesn’t eat meat except at Christmas. She is going to live forever.”

  Riker is listening. But I can’t go on, not yet.

  “Look, it’s past nine o’clock now.” I try to redirect him. “We can leave the store and go for coffee without upsetting the owners.”

  “You mean, we can go for coffee so we can talk about how I cremated my mother, while your fiancé waits for you at home, by himself?”

  “Don’t make it sound—”

  “You know,” Riker says, pulling his keys from where they hang on a lanyard around his neck. “I’m not all that thirsty.”

  “Thirsty? What’s that got to do with coffee?”

  “You’d better go home, Meaghan.” He pulls the front door open. A tiny tornado of dust twists inside, spinning into the store from the long, dirty avenue outside. “Go home to your perfectly fine fiancé and your immortal mother-in-law and try to learn some hot new dance moves.”

  I’m stepping toward the door. Riker holds it open with his arm stretched out. It’s a mistake. As I leave, I’ll have to walk right through him.

  I stop in front of Riker in the doorway. If he dropped his arm, it’d fall around my shoulders. I can smell soap on him—flowery and lady-like, Yardley’s lavender maybe.

  “I am sorry,” I say. And I touch his face, dragging my fingertips across his cheekbone, next to his eye and his nose, one of the few bare places where his beard doesn’t grow.

  Heather

  [7]

  Someone is screaming in our backyard. It’s nothing. It’s typical. It’s me.

  If my sisters were left to tell our stories alone, the ones about me would always sound like monster movies—lots of screaming. Maybe that’s fair.

  Even if the neighbours weren’t used to it, my noise isn’t the kind that would make someone call the police, except maybe to complain about a disturbance. The energy and tone of my voice—it’s not fear, it’s not suffering, it’s—I don’t know—laughter.

  Don’t sneer at us. Some people are just happy. My husband Ewan and I, we’re happy. Or, at least, we don’t realize we should want anything more than what we have here.

  We’re in our backyard, a large, triangular piece of land at the end of a cul-de-sac in one of the city’s new neighbourhoods. The field behind our yard is slated to be crammed with thirty-two new houses in the next three years—hundreds of eyes forced to see us whenever they look out their windows. I’m miserable thinking about it. Here’s hoping the saplings we planted along the fence will grow tall and full quickly enough to give us some privacy. For now, our young willows and chokecherries and tower poplar trees look like leafy twigs stuck into the ground. We are doomed to become fully exposed once the pocket gophers and bees and wild canola are cleared to make way for people behind our house.

  “You cannot fly a kite on a day like today,” Ewan is calling to me from across the yard.

  I toss my hair into a gust of wind to clear it from my face. “You say that every time I want to fly a kite for the kids.”

  “The kids?” Ewan scans the yard. “Where are the kids, anyway?”

  “They went back inside because you won’t help us.”

  “They went back inside because it’s way too windy to fly a kite.”

  “Ewan, you are the only person I know who uses an abundance of wind as an excuse not to fly a kite.”

  “Why would I want an excuse? I love flying kites.”

  “Do you even know what makes kites fly? It’s wind.” I fling my arms apart, throw my head back, letting the air rush through my hair until my face is engulfed. “Nothing but wind!”

  Through the tangles, I hear him laugh. “Fine, give me that mangled kite.”

  Indulgence: this is how things usually begin with us.

  I take the spool of kite string, and we walk backwards, away from each other. Ewan stops, holding the ratty, dingy kite by its light, wooden frame. There’s a sun-bleached blue and red superhero grinning from the nylon sail, but Ewan looks sceptical anyway.

  He’s waiting for a suitable stream of air. “It is too windy.” He tries one last time.

  “Do it!”

  He jumps, throwing the kite into the air at his fullest height. I tug the string and the wind snags the kite in a tight, wild spiral. It never gets more than twice Ewan’s height from the ground. The kite is circling closer and closer to the earth with each rotation. It isn’t flying or gliding. It’s whirling fast, like it’s caught on the tip of a spinning power drill.

  Mishap: this is also how things usually progress with us.

  I scream. “Look out!”

  Ewan looks but it doesn’t help. The kite spirals into his forehead. He yells as the end of its centre dowel careens into his eyebrow. Staggering, he lets himself fall onto the lawn, spread out and helpless like a gigantic starfish marooned on the grass. He’s quiet, staring glassy-eyed into the sky.

  I scream again, tossing away the spool of string. The wind tumbles the kite against the fence in an irretrievably snarled mass of knots. I run to Ewan.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say, high and fast, taking his head in my hands. “You were right. It’s a terrible day for kites. I’m sorry.” I kiss his forehead from one temple to the other. “I’m so horrible. I’m so wrong. Are you okay? Did it hit your eye? Ewan?”

  He moans like an extra in a zombie movie.

  “Ewan?”

  He’s throwing one arm and then his other arm around me like they’re dead weights on the ends of his shoulders. Their heaviness traps me as he rolls over, on top of me.

  This: this is how things always end with us.

  I’m screaming again. See, I’m nothing like the monster everyone else knows me to be, not with Ewan. This thing with him—maybe it’s what keeps monstrosity from overtaking me.

  I’m laugh-screaming a set of numbers now, over and over again. “Two-seventy-one, two-seventy-one!” It’s the number of the Criminal Code assigned to the section on sexual assault law. I’ve known it for a long time. Don’t tell me it’s not funny. This is my marriage, safe, with its own code.

  There’s another voice, calling over mine, from across the yard. “Hey, you guys.”

  It’s Suzanne, singing out a greeting as she starts down the porch steps. To strangers—to our phantom future neighbours who are not yet afflicted with our family drama constantly unfolding in front of them—our sweet Suzanne might look menacing, closing in on my husband and me with a plastic bag and a sharp knife.

  Honestly, I can’t vouch for her state of mind right now. May, Suzanne’s legendarily perfect mother-in-law, has been staying at their house for two full days. Suzanne claims she loves it when May comes. She won’t shut up about it. It’s like bad, relentless propaganda.

  The rest of our sisters might accept it without question, but I remember visitations from a mother-in-law of my own. No matter how sweet May is, she is set in an opposing corner of a love triangle topped by Suzanne’s husband. Or, at least, she should be. If they had a more normal relationship, that’s how they’d be aligned—Suzan
ne and May each tugging at Troy. That’s how it was for Carol and Ewan and me. It’s not nice but it’s the way things are supposed to be. The shape drawn between Suzanne, Troy, and May is strange—oblong, bladelike.

  I’m not the only one who’d say things between May and Suzanne are—well, they’re not right. I studied classic in-law love triangles in a sociology course required for my criminology degree. My mouldy old criminology degree—it’s not much help with the work I eventually ended up doing at the funeral home, but it does apply to my family life with a frequency that’s a little disturbing.

  “May’s rhubarb!” I gasp and spring away from where Ewan and I have been lying on the grass. “I completely forgot about it until I saw you standing there.”

  “Don’t worry. I can cut it myself,” Suzanne says. “As you were, you guys.”

  I snort and give Ewan a parting shove. “Nah, we are so done.”

  I skip ahead of Suzanne, leading her to a spider-webbed corner between the shed and the house. This is where my electric clothes dryer vents out of the wall into open air. It’s also where the rhubarb is growing. We dug it up and moved it to a better spot once, but a few tiny rhizomes slipped through the transplant and the rhubarb grew right back.

  May has finished cleaning every part of Suzanne’s already clean house she can reach and now she’s sent Suzanne to harvest our early rhubarb. “Harvest” is a nicer expression than “clear-cut,” which is what we’re really doing by hacking it out of my yard today. Since the patch won’t go away, it needs to be pared early, before the rhubarb grows rampant, thickening into broad, stringy stalks and huge, toxic leaves large enough to fan a Pharaoh on a barge.

  “Make sure you wash it well,” I warn Suzanne, as we bundle the rhubarb into her bag. “It gets linty back here, and it might make everything taste like fabric softener. So what’s May got planned for all this anyways?”

  She shrugs. “Who knows? Rhubarb cobbler, pancakes, slushies, wallpaper paste.”

  Ewan has me in such a good mood, I’m finding Suzanne funny, and I laugh as I wipe pink juice from the blade of Suzanne’s knife against my thigh.

  I crush and fold severed rhubarb leaves into our composter, jabbing them into the cube of rotting plants with the end of a broomstick. It’s paranoia, but I’d be an irresponsible big sister if I didn’t cut the toxic leaves off the stalks before I let Suzanne take them away. The truth is I’ve been a person longer than any of my sisters. It means, for now, that I see farther than they can. So I worry.

  I tell Suzanne, “I don’t want to be sitting here, fretting about your mother-in-law poisoning you with rhubarb leaves I grew myself. What’s the name of the chemical in them again?” I call to Ewan.

  “Oxalic acid.”

  “Right.”

  Suzanne almost scoffs. “Don’t be silly, Heather. My sweet May is not exactly bloodthirsty.”

  No one out-scoffs me. “I didn’t say she’d poison you on purpose. I just can’t risk any accidents. The worst things in the world, Suzanne—most of the time, they’re just accidents.”

  Suzanne

  [8]

  I’ve finished the rhubarb harvest, and it’s time to leave Heather and go home, back to where May is not plotting to poison me with oxalic acid-enriched baked goods. I’m much more likely to go home and find her apologizing for having taken so long to pull the refrigerator away from the wall and wash the floor underneath it, where the juice pools whenever the kids spill it.

  It’s bittersweet, this time with May, as she makes one final, loving tribute to us before she goes to Guatemala for the rest of the year. Ever since she retired, she’s been travelling, exercising that practical dental hygiene compassion of hers. May’s savings—padded by the settlement Troy’s dad surrendered before he fled to live on a sailboat with that suntanned woman from the Internet—pay for it all.

  On the drive home from Heather’s house, I’m stopped at a level railroad crossing. Another badly scheduled heavy freight train is grinding its way through the city’s rush-hour traffic. May will have dinner on the table, early as usual, but I am late. Troy will be late too. The golf courses have just opened for the season, and he’s got a tee time this evening.

  I’ve heard policeman Ewan say it contravenes the law prohibiting texting and driving to look at my phone even when I’m idling at a full stop, but I still reach into my purse when the ringtone peeps. Troy is texting me. He mistakenly left his good shoes at the clinic when he bolted for the golf course and now he wants me to fetch them.

  I don’t sigh. Dinner—a lukewarm plate of May’s boiled potatoes and chicken legs made with love and a painfully old-fashioned culinary aesthetic—is already ruined anyway. I steer into an alley, away from the train crossing, veering north, toward downtown.

  Most of the rush hour traffic has emptied out of the city centre by the time I arrive at the clinic. I’m driving away with Troy’s shoes when I’m stopped at a red light, right in front of the tall building housing Martin’s company. This is where my brother-in-law spins his family’s old money into new money—the place where no one has ever seen him wearing anything but a great suit, where everyone laughs at his jokes, brings him coffee, and calls him Mister. I’m not exactly sure what kind of work they do—something about oil field contracting.

  This is the building Ashley wanted us to stake out and surveil. Looking up at it from the avenue is the closest I will get to doing that. At least I’ll be able to tell Ashley I was here. Martin’s upper floors are dark. It’s strange. This hour would be late for most people to be leaving work. But Martin’s company is his true love, his real mistress. He never leaves it before eight o’clock. Tina says, if he had to, Martin would work here for free just for the pleasure of it, kind of like Troy when it comes to aromatherapy.

  On its ground floor, the building is clad in sheets of mirrored glass lit with yellow light. And in the yellow light, on the paving stones of the building’s patio, I see Martin himself in a long cashmere overcoat. He is striding toward the sidewalk when he stops, swaying like he’s overcome with something strong and sweet. A woman is coming toward him. She looks fairly ordinary—dark-haired and thin, closer to Heather’s age than to Tina’s. At the sight of Martin, she skips to meet him, taking him by both hands.

  My heart thuds. The traffic light is still red. My phone is on the passenger seat. Honestly, I don’t want to be stalking or harassing Martin. Maybe I’m still patronizing Ashley. Whatever I’m doing, I’ve taken hold of my phone. I’m framing Martin and the woman inside the screen, through the camera lens. The woman is tilting her head to kiss his face, close to his mouth. The fake shutter sound snaps as I take a picture of them, just as her face is closest to his.

  There’s a heavy steel rectangle filling the road behind me now, a bus indignant that I’m stopped in its designated lane after the light has turned green. I crank the steering wheel and move out of its way. When it roars past and I glance over my shoulder, toward the patio, Martin and the woman are gone.

  And I drive away.

  Durk didn’t invent this. I glance at the screen of my phone as I drive. The picture remains. Martin kissed a strange woman right in front of me. I saw it. Of course I did. This is me—the eyes of the family, the watcher, the haunter, the ghost that will see everything but probably won’t do anything.

  “Martin,” I say out loud as the road bends on to a dirty black bridge. Of all the men we’ve brought into our family, the cheating one is Martin.

  With May in town, there’s no need to rush home to put the kids to bed. This is for the best since things never move quickly in the place I’m going now: Ashley’s house.

  I ring my sister’s doorbell and wait. I finish texting my profuse apologies to May and still no one’s come to answer the door. There’s usually a delay while Durk tucks away whatever he needs to hide. It takes time for Ashley to throw the windows open and douse the house in that Roasted Vanilla Bea
n Fantasy air freshener. Everyone knows what’s going on while we wait—even law-and-order Ewan knows it. No one ever says a word.

  “Martin,” I announce when Ashley answers the door and the wave of vanilla bean hits me. “I was coming home from the clinic just now and I saw Martin. He was with somebody.”

  She yanks the phone out of my hand. “I knew it.” She’s scrolling through the pictures, gasping. “You got them together—and kissing. I can’t believe you got them kissing.”

  “It wasn’t a long, mushy kiss,” I say, leaning to see the picture again. It looks far worse crowded onto my screen than it did in real life. It’s like one of those grocery store tabloid cover photos, capturing a split-second and holding it down until it becomes something torrid.

  “I don’t know, Suze. They look pretty close.”

  “They were close,” I admit. “But there could be an explanation other than—”

  Ashley is already opening the door to the basement, shouting down the stairs for Durk. There’s a shuffle of slow feet, and then he appears—shirtless, as usual, in a pair of long hemp-cloth shorts that sag around his waist. In my peripheral vision, he looks like a teenager—all lean and dishevelled. The effect disappears as he steps into focus.

  He’s rubbing his eyes, red and lazy. And he’s looking over Ashley’s shoulder, into the screen of my phone. “Yeah, there she is. Martin’s sexy lady friend.”

  Troy is still out with his golf buddies when I get back to our house. I haven’t been home all evening, but the jumble of sparkly shoes my girls usually leave in front of the door is neatly stacked inside the hall closet. The baseboards running along the walls—the ones Troy took pains to stain exactly the same colour as the hardwood of our floors and stairs—have been dusted and rubbed with lemon oil. In the morning, I will rave my thanks to May for all the work she’s done. I will rave and rave until we’re both exhausted.

  She and the kids are on the same early-to-bed-early-to-rise schedule. The house is dark and quiet. In the fridge, there’s a bowl of muffin mix covered in cellophane, waiting for the bundle of rhubarb I’ve left in the van. If I were a less than perfect daughter-in-law, I’d ignore it, make myself a cup of Troy’s purifying serenity herbal tea, and go upstairs to bed.