Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  “Fine. Bye.”

  I flick back to Ashley’s line. She’s too mad to wait and she’s gone.

  I sit with the quiet telephone cradled in my hand. As I wait, my tremor is abating. My grip is strengthening. I am waiting, maybe it’s for Meaghan or Tina to ring the phone and complete—something.

  It’s time to alert official personnel about this rapidly cooling emergency. The ambulances and police cars won’t have their sirens on when they arrive here. Maybe they’ll use their lights. They’ll clog up my cul-de-sac and spook the neighbours.

  May is dead and sliding, crumpling into a heap at the bottom of the stairs. She’s going away, leaving me. My mime act is exposed. I’m not standing behind an invisible wall, measuring out its length and breadth with the palms of my hands anymore. I am standing in the open, unsheltered, imperfect.

  I make a noise like a sob—just once, all voice, no tears. “Don’t go. You can’t go.”

  She’s leaving anyway. My mother-in-law is dead, like Heather’s and Tina’s and maybe even Ashley’s, for all we know. When the ambulances and police cars leave here today, I’ll be in the no-mothers-in-law club right along with all my sisters. I’ll be there with Heather, the spoiled monster, punished and punished by our mother. I’ll sink to the level of Tina, the ignored and betrayed. I’ll be in line with Ashley, who is more like a probation officer than a wife on mornings like this. Maybe I’ll even be more like Meaghan, the girl so traumatized by a botched brush with motherhood she’s convinced no one can love her properly—not any of her fiancés, not any of her sisters.

  In a few hours, everyone will know. It’s time to begin telling them. I’ve got the phone in my hand. The act of making the call that will begin the processing of May’s death is all that keeps me from a passing away of my own. It is the death of myself as a daughter-in-law. It is the death of what little perfection I have. Daughter-in-law Suzanne—the one aspect of my being that was flawless—she dies with May.

  Maybe I’ll wait a little longer.

  Maybe I’ll get up off my knees, go into the kitchen, finally drink a cup of Troy’s purifying serenity herbal tea, eat a piece of toast, cherish the dying moments of the perfect daughter-in-law.

  May won’t mind the wait. Take care of myself before worrying about her—wasn’t that what she always wanted? She’d eat standing at the counter so other people could sit down at the dinner table; she’d ride sitting on the parking brake, squeezed between the front seats of an overcrowded car so someone else could be safe in a seatbelt. If May could tell me to take a moment for myself to calm down and think, I know she would.

  The dark brown, overcooked rhubarb muffins are out of the oven, the kettle is boiling, and the toaster is making a dangerous, burning smell as it cooks my breakfast. The kids must have accidentally torn off a bread crust and left it caught inside the toaster elements again. It smells like it’s about to catch fire.

  Is May about to catch fire? Heather is always proseletyzing cremation to everyone. She loves it, like real fireworks. Her mother-in-law was cremated, of course. Everyone knows that. I can’t remember whether May has told us how she wants her body dispatched in the end. Knowing May, there’s a sensible will written somewhere. The funeral is probably pre-arranged and paid for and everything.

  Tina’s mother-in-law is buried in the antique part of the graveyard with the rest of her dead, old-money family. We’ve seen pictures of the grave in Tina’s family album. She takes her kids to visit it every year on her mother-in-law’s birthday—takes photos of them standing next to it holding bouquets: tea roses for the girls, lilies for the boys, yellow pollen smeared on their white shirts. The gravestone itself is so fancy Ashley whistles every time she sees a picture of it.

  No one’s ever told me how long Tina’s mother-in-law stayed in the garage, in her Bentley, before anyone found her. I asked Heather once how long Carol, her mother-in-law, had been lying dead in bed before she found her there. Hard-faced lab technologists can pinpoint times of death to the minute on television crime shows.

  “That kind of forensics is fiction,” Heather said. “After the first few hours, once the rigor comes and goes and the blood settles to the low spots, it’s all muddled and confounded. It’s fiction, Suzanne. And the truth is, when it comes to old people with pre-existing health conditions, the police seldom ask.”

  I pressed her anyway. “But they still need a death date—something they can write down. What do they write when they’re not sure what day someone died?”

  The official date, she told me, the one on death certificates and gravestones and everything, is the date when a body is discovered. It’s the date the police and the medical examiners and the undertakers and the government use in spite of everyone knowing it’s wrong.

  It’s a sham, but I can see why they do it. Once a life ends, what matters are the perceptions of the people still alive—what we know and feel and see. My sisters’ mothers-in-law weren’t dead—not really, not fully—until someone else discovered them, wrote it down, took them away, and planted a stone over them.

  Maybe there’s no meaning in dying when no one’s looking. If a tree falls in the forest—we all knows how that goes.

  The toast pops in my face, black, smoky, and shrunken.

  I know what will happen next.

  First, I’ll wake Durk.

  He is still sleeping on the couch. My shadow darkens his profile as I lean over him. In this dimness, the dark circles and tiny lines around his eyes are obscured. He looks like a photo of a rock ’n’ roll angel in a magazine—our family’s very own Kurt Cobain surviving to have a bunch of kids and his own masonry shop.

  Where on his body should I take hold of him to shake him awake? There’s his foot, still in its untied sneaker. A disturbance at his foot, so far from his central nervous system, might not be compelling enough on a morning after a night like the one he’s had. Maybe I should shake him by the hand. I could finally press my thumb against that scar and see if there’s any heat left in it. Instead, I grab his shoulder, pushing and pulling until his arm rolls in its socket.

  “Durk,” I say. “Durk, you need to wake up now.”

  His eye, the one that isn’t mashed into the cushions, squeezes tightly closed before it opens, looking into my living room without any recognition.

  “Get up, Durk,” I say. “You’re at Suzanne’s house, mostly passed out on the couch.”

  He rubs his eye with the heel of his hand as he pushes himself to sitting. “Suzanne’s?”

  We’ve got to stop talking about me in the third person. “Yeah, you’re on my couch. And I think you’re still partied out,” I say. “Let me get you some tea.”

  “Tea,” he repeats as I walk to the kitchen. “Ashley.”

  “She called already,” I tell him over the whistle of the kettle. “She’ll be too mad to see you for a while.”

  “But work—”

  “She says just to stay away for today.”

  Durk hangs his head and swears at my shiny walnut floor. “It’s worse than I thought.”

  I glance into the stairwell as I approach the couch again. “Oh, it could get worse. Take your tea, Durk. It’s lemon with cinnamon, Doctor Troy’s own blend.”

  He shudders. “That means there’s fish oil in it.”

  I try to laugh. “Maybe a little. That’s okay. You look like you could use some detoxifying.”

  Durk sighs and stands to collect his teacup. I rush to meet him in front of the couch. I move too quickly, and a wave of hot, yellow water surges over the rim of the cup and scalds my hand. I don’t react. If I pause, I won’t reach Durk in time to stop him from seeing what’s in the stairwell.

  I’m stepping into him like a bad dance partner, forcing him backward with my movement and the hot liquid I hold in front of myself, keeping him in the living room. “Sit down.”

  He takes his tea and
slumps into the cushions. “Thanks,” he says. “You guys are always so good about this.”

  “Well,” I begin, “it is kind of a bad time for you to crash here, actually. M-May is in the house.”

  “Troy’s mom.”

  “Yeah. She’s been staying here. She was supposed to be leaving for Guatemala today but there’s been a glitch.”

  “Yeah?” he says, not bothering to seem interested.

  My throat ripples as I swallow. “Durk,” I say. It’s all I say before I start to move toward him again, advancing in slow steps, faintly rocking, side-to-side, like a cobra.

  He looks up from his tea. “Suzanne?”

  It’s like a movie—a stupid, sleazy, sickening movie. I do love Durk. Don’t misunderstand. I can’t fail to love one of the few adults in my family who never begins a sentence with the words, “Think, Suzanne ...” But this is the part of the movie where I have to press myself as close to Durk as I can. I am about to step further into his space than I’ve ever been, saying something creepy about the powerful connection that has always existed between us. Is it even real?

  It doesn’t matter. As I stand here, I can’t bring myself to say anything like it. I can only speak his name again, lower and slower. “Durk.”

  “Uh, yeah?”

  Ashley, I tell myself, look at him the way Ashley looks at him.

  The next time I speak, my voice sounds exactly like my sister’s. That’s the real secret of imitating a voice: don’t mimic only by trying to sound like someone else. Begin the imitation by trying to look like someone else. Ashley—I open my eyes wider, turn out my lips to make them a little fuller, thrust out my jaw the slightest bit further.

  “Durk.”

  Of all the sisters, Ashley and I are the ones who look most alike. It’s the shape of our faces, the colour of our hair, our brow bones, the way our legs are attached to our hips—something. It’s always made me feel weird about Durk—like we have some unintended carnal kinship, like he might have a pretty good idea what I really look like all over, if you know what I mean. It’s funny, but I’ve never wondered if Ashley feels the same way about my Troy.

  I never wanted this connection to Durk. But it’s here. And right now, I need it.

  “There’s been an accident,” I tell him, right out of the sleazy movie script.

  Durk looks around the room. “Huh? Is everyone okay?”

  “No.” I touch him. I mean to smooth his early morning hair the way Ashley might if she saw him looking like this. But when I try to be her now, I’m Ashley taking care of a child, and I sweep Durk’s hair into place deftly and quickly, nothing like a lover. But the voice is still working. “The accident involves my mother-in-law. She fell down the stairs.”

  “Dude.”

  I sit beside him on the couch, setting my hand next to his thigh. “She fell all the way down the stairs, with her suitcase in her hand and everything.”

  Durk looks around the room one more time. “Where is she now? Is she taking it easy in bed?”

  “No.” I move my fingers and they graze the fabric of his jeans. “I need your help Durk. There’s trouble. But it’s not like I’ve done anything wrong.”

  This is where most anyone else in my life would have bolted. Durk, however, waits—wide open as ever. “What exactly’s going on?” is all he says, as he sets his teacup on the coffee table.

  “May fell—on her neck—and it killed her.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes.” I take his hand as I stand. “She’s dead. Come here. I’ll show you. She’s stuck in the stairwell.”

  He yanks himself out of my grip, raises both of his hands in front of his face, palms turned toward me, as if he’s deflecting something I’ve thrown at him. “No. I can’t. I don’t want to see.”

  “I need you to see. You can’t help me if you won’t see.”

  “No.” He’s moving away from me, off the couch and onto the floor with his head between his knees. “I’m not like you guys. I don’t play with dead people. I don’t like them. I don’t look at them, not even at funerals.”

  “They’re just people.”

  “Not anymore they’re not.”

  I kneel next to him on the floor. “I can’t have May die. Not right now. I’m not ready. I’m scared. I need to stay a daughter-in-law. It holds me together. It holds everything together.”

  He hasn’t stopped shaking his head. “Then call the ambulance and maybe they’ll be able to help her.”

  “No. She’s been dead for a while now. Right from the start, no one could have helped her. I wish there was some kind of mistake but I’ve worked in a hospital way too long to be wrong about this.”

  He wants me to be wrong badly enough to get to his feet and takes four brave steps. It’s enough to bring him to where he can see May lying upside down on the stairs. He gags, doubling over, pivoting back into the kitchen.

  “Her face—”

  He’s bent in half and I can see the stairs over the hump of his spine.

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s okay. All her blood is settling into her face and head because it’s the lowest point on her right now. That’s just gravity doing its thing. It’s normal. But it is kind of gross. So we should move her before it gets any worse.”

  “Call the cops,” he pleads. “Get Ewan and his cops over here. Get Heather—get anybody.”

  “But then everyone will know she’s dead and—and it’s too soon for that. I can’t do it. It’ll wreck me. I need May alive or I’ll—I don’t know what I’ll be but I won’t be me anymore. Me—this Suzanne, right here—I’ll be gone too. And I can’t face what might take my place—not yet.”

  Durk is shaking from his ankles to his head, his back pressed against my kitchen wall.

  I’m leaning into him, talking. “Now that she’s dead we have to think about ourselves, right? It’s okay. May would understand. She always thought of me before herself, always.” My silky coolness is flaring into desperation. This isn’t the way to convince him. The strongest hold I have on Durk—the only thing close to strong enough—is Ashley. I revert to it.

  He’s slid down the wall and is sitting on the floor again, turned away from where May lies. His face is shiny with sweat. I sit on the floor, holding Durk’s cold, slick face between my hands, his jaws cradled in my palms. My own face is as close to Ashley’s as I can make it.

  I hold Ashley’s look, pausing, remembering one of the nights we made an emergency trip to Tina’s after Martin stormed off. He was cooling down in a posh hotel lounge somewhere, after breaking plates and screaming at Tina in spittle like an overwrought Shakespearean actor.

  “This is not how we fight,” Ashley said as she swept shards of bone china across the marble-tiled kitchen floor. “Durk and me, we fight close and quiet. He winds his arms around me, I thread my fingers into his hair, and we whisper vicious things into each other’s necks. If anyone found us fighting, they’d think they’d caught us making out.”

  In my kitchen, over Durk’s upturned face, I brace myself and come closer to him. “Last night,” I say in Ashley’s voice, “you were wasted and you tried to hide it. We hate that.”

  He chokes, like he’s about to cry.

  “But it’s okay,” I say. “Everything is going to be okay. You’re not bad. You’re going to help Suzanne. And we’re going to forgive you. We won’t be mad anymore. We’ll understand everything.”

  He’s looking at me, our noses almost touching, so close our images are blurred in each other’s eyes. There’s a kaleidoscope of feelings tumbling through his face—surprise, relief, terror, joy, horror, disbelief—they’re all there, whirling and changing, turning inside out, over and over again. “We?”

  “We.”

  He’s looking at me, not blinking as a glaze forms over his corneas. “Ashley.”

  “Ash-ley.” I sound like a s
tage hypnotist. I know it and I don’t care. It’s working. Durk’s mind is wide open. His mysticism, his transcendence, his hangover, his desperate unworthy love of Ashley—I’ve marshalled all of it against him. For the moment, Durk may not be sure which sister I am.

  I tip my face into his neck and whisper his name.

  Durk’s hand is moving toward my head, into the depths of my hair. “Ashley.”

  “Yes. We know,” I say. “We know you got sick and you couldn’t make it home safely so you stayed at Suzanne’s all night. We understand.”

  Durk exhales against my skin. He closes his eyes and his hand sinks deeper into my hair. Rough, brick-abraded fingertips move across my scalp.

  “We’ll help you,” I say into his ear. “But you need to help us first, Durk. You need to help us move May out of here. We need to make this go away.”

  He’s bending his neck to look at my face—at Ashley’s face.

  I take his head in my hands again and draw it into the side of my neck, his chin on my collar bone, as I wrap my arms around his shoulders. “Yes. We’ll forgive you.” I turn and kiss his forehead. “All of us.”

  I call Ashley’s cell phone, lying, telling her Durk has a fever. “He got sick and dozed off watching the game with Troy last night so we let him sleep. You hung up without giving me a chance to finish explaining.”

  Ashley scoffs. “I didn’t give you a chance? You were the one who put me on hold.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Heather was calling about the Martin thing.”

  Ashley hums.

  “Anyway,” I say, “Durk is here, and he’s safe, and his temperature is starting to come down.”

  She hums again, more like a grating sound. But she says, “Don’t give him any aspirin. He can’t take it. His stomach lining freaks out.”

  In truth, Durk is in my garage pulling a yellow foam camping mattress out of the rafters. When I hang up the phone, he’s standing in the doorway that connects the garage to the rest of the house. “Good. You found it,” I say.

  He pushes the mattress through the jambs. As long as there’s a chance he might see May again, he won’t come into the house.