I’ve been leaving dusty fingerprints on everything I touch, all over the store. I’m carrying a plastic shopping basket full of paper hats, flaccid balloons, and tubs of barely edible, over-dyed candy. It’s one of my girls’ birthdays this weekend. I’m going to use Meaghan’s employee discount to buy the party supplies. The discount is nice but Meaghan still isn’t the best source in the family for this kind of thing. Everyone knows the prime place to find excess party stuff is in the back of Tina’s luxury SUV—in the space beneath her hatchback window where she chucks unused pearlized balloons, metallic doilies, pastel mints tied up in tulle, and individually boxed truffles left over from the fancy charity parties she throws in the name of Martin’s company.
The fact is I feel funny taking things from Tina right now, in the thick of her betrayal. It’s probably dumb. She loves showering us with gifts. But even if she doesn’t know anything about what Martin is up to she needs me to be giving, not taking from her right now. It wouldn’t be right to raid her stash even though all I want are things she doesn’t need, clutter—balloons that are going to dry out and crack, chocolate doomed to melt in the greenhouse of her vehicle.
And really, birthday party shopping is just an excuse to meet Meaghan. I have a sisters’ errand that feels like it demands a team effort. Getting Meaghan to help me salvage Tina—that’s the real reason I’ve come here today.
Meaghan is sweetness and smiles when I ask her to do me the discount party-junk favour. I get it. It’s nice to have something to offer an older sister even if it is just fifteen percent off all merchandise at Quali-Drugs, excluding lottery and tobacco purchases.
In a few minutes, her shift is over and we walk through the store together, all the way to the front where the main cash registers bar the exits. Meaghan stands beside me, brushing dust from my jacket as I unpack birthday stuff and air freshener refills from my basket. In a minute, she’ll show her employee card to the cashier who thinks the pharmacy staff prancing around in fake lab coats along the back wall are way too full of themselves.
Meaghan pokes at my pile of stuff. “Party time?”
“Always,” I say. For large families living close together, almost every gathering doubles as someone’s birthday party. There aren’t enough weekends in the year to live any other way.
“And,” I add, “it’s also time for this.” At the bottom of the basket is a photofinishing envelope. The pictures inside it are the ones Suzanne took of that idiot Martin kissing his girlfriend in public.
Meaghan knows what’s in the envelope. She raises her eyebrows. “You printed the pictures?”
“Yeah. I had to do something. No one else is doing anything for Tina. But it’s time to end this.”
“This? End this—‘this’ as in Tina’s marriage?”
I tug my bank card out of the machine. “Well, I can’t stand it anymore. We can’t keep this a secret from Tina. If it really is just a misunderstanding, then Martin needs to straighten it out—like, now.”
We’ve finished in the store and we’re sitting in the front seat of the Dash Fireplace and Monument truck, in the parking lot.
“Okay,” Meaghan begins, arranging her seatbelt into her cleavage, “so we take the pictures and go to Tina’s house—”
“No! We find a public computer, set up a fake throw-away email address, and send the picture from there so she can’t track the IP address back to any of us.”
Meaghan laughs. “Oo, so techie.”
“What? Tina has her company’s whole IT department at her disposal. We have to be careful or they’ll know right away who sent the pictures.”
“Or maybe,” Meaghan interrupts, “we can handle this old-school. Look.” She waves the envelope in my face. “You’ve already got them printed, Ashley. And it’s Thursday, the day Tina goes into the office to run her community outreach committee meeting or whatever Martin’s calling her charity party planning these days. Let’s just drive over to their parking lot and slip this envelope under her windshield wiper, if you’re sure you want to break it to her anonymously.”
My plan is cooler but Meaghan’s plan is easier—more like something that could actually happen. I’m not too proud to submit to it.
In minutes, we’re deep downtown, parked on the street, walking through the asphalt lot of the building where Martin’s company fills the top three floors. Tina’s vehicle is barely contained in a narrow parking spot near the backdoor. Why does BMW bother to make an SUV anyways? Don’t they know it’ll end up packed with fancy car seats, driven by nannies most of the time, taken to drive-thru restaurants until the new car smell gives way to the reek of the old French fries?
Meaghan and I are standing on the pavement beside Tina’s fancy, dirty driving machine. I’ve just pried its windshield wiper away from the glass when Meaghan’s hand covers mine.
“Ashley, wait. This is serious now. Let’s just go. Let’s take the envelope and go home for today. Let’s talk to the rest of the girls before we do anything rash.”
We’ve each got a hand on the envelope, leaning together over the hood of Tina’s vehicle like a pair of squeegee kids. “What? Why?” I say. “We can’t wuss out on this now. It’s not like this doesn’t hurt Tina just because she hasn’t seen it for herself.”
“Maybe, I don’t know, but I—I’m just not sure this is the best way—”
And that’s when we hear it: a man announcing, “Look, Peaches! It’s your sisters!”
That voice—as usual, it sparks an invisible wincing reflex, not on my face but deep in my guts.
“Girls! What’re you doing here?”
It’s Tina and Martin.
I let the windshield wiper snap against the glass, withdrawing with the envelope still in my hand. Meaghan and I are both flushed and breathless when we turn to meet Tina with expressions she’ll recognize as copies of her own smile when it’s totally phony.
She’s wearing her phony smile too. Martin has taken her arm to escort her back to her vehicle at the end of her meeting. They are playing perfect business-couple for the office. At least, that’s what they think they’re doing. They’re actually more like perfect-business-couple’s monster, basted together with scavenged, lifeless, mismatched pieces of what they imagine such a creature should look like.
Martin doesn’t have any idea how to behave in a marriage or in a family, so he’s beaming at Meaghan and me like he always does, like we’re valued clients, VIPs, like he’s hard at work, punched into some sort of in-law time clock.
“Hey, you guys,” Meaghan greets them. “We were just passing by, on our way to my place, and now we’re—leaving.”
Tina blows at the dust in my hair. “Yeah, good. Ashley needs a bath. Look at you.”
I force a laugh.
“Hey, what’s that?” Tina notices the envelope. “Did I get another parking ticket? They keep ticketing me here as if I don’t own the damn lot.”
I’m wussing out myself, folding the envelope in half so it can vanish into my jacket pocket. I never meant for Tina to find the pictures while she had Martin on her arm. “Oh, no ticket here. It’s just—”
“Pictures,” Meaghan says. “We were going to leave you with some pictures from—from the last birthday party. But it looks like it might rain and ruin them. There’s no rush anyways. We can all look at them together, some other time.”
“Hey, don’t fold them. You’re wrecking them,” Tina says, snatching the envelope from where it juts out of my pocket. “Sheesh, Ashley.”
“Just—wait, Tina—”
For Tina, if there can be a “now” then there is no such thing as “later.” She’s opening the envelope right away, right here. Tina is bringing the pictures into the daylight to see if I’ve creased and damaged them. She’s finding out they’ve got nothing to do with a family birthday party.
I clamp one hand around Meaghan’s arm. In front o
f us, Tina is turning a stupefied face up at Martin.
“We’ll let you guys talk,” I say.
I’m dragging Meaghan away. She’s hissing at me as we strain against each other, stumbling in a jagged line across the parking lot. “We can’t just leave them there like that,” she says. “What if it gets crazy?”
Behind us, Tina is waving her arms. Her voice is getting loud. The truth is even when times are good, everything involving Tina is a bit crazy—not brooding crazy but blaring crazy. That’s why she’s so much fun. That’s why she’s everyone’s pet sister. But when she married Martin, Tina broke one of the cardinal rules of crazy—the rule I follow every day, the one that lets Durk and me live in harmony. In a keeper-marriage, only one person can be actively crazy at a time. There isn’t room in a marriage for more than one mad or bad spouse. Martin and Tina don’t seem to know anything about rules like this. Or maybe they just don’t care. Whatever it is, they are two full-time insane people locked together in one marriage. Sometimes, it’s terrifying. Right now, it’s terrifying.
Meaghan wrestles her arm out of my grip. “We can’t go. There’s nothing for them to smash on the ground so they might take it out on each other this time. We have to keep an eye on them at least. We don’t know what might happen.”
Martin’s voice is loud enough to hear from a distance too. Perfect business-couple hours are over. This is not what I wanted—to take Tina by surprise and set her off, exploding with shock and confusion right in Martin’s face.
Meaghan’s complexion is mirroring my own again, changing from florid pink to sickening white. Maybe we’re both remembering that time Tina had too much red wine and told us, “You know what, girls? I have never successfully denied Martin sex.”
Meaghan and I were young and dumb and had never thought through what a statement like Tina’s could mean somewhere as supposedly safe and staid as married life. At first we didn’t get it, not until Suzanne choked on her drink and Heather slammed the heavy bottom of her tumbler against the tabletop.
Heather spoke in that low, bossy voice she uses when she’s angry and scared at the same time. “What do you mean, ‘successfully?’”
At the edge of the parking lot where Tina is arguing with the serial rapist she’s been sleeping with for thirteen years, I blink deeply. Meaghan is right. We can’t leave. But simply staying here might not be enough either. I am covered in cement dust. I am as strong and tough as any mason. But Martin is not a brick wall. He’s something worse. He is a violent husband.
“I should get Durk,” I say, even though I hate it. “He’s at home with the girls, and he might not be up for driving but—”
Meaghan shoves me toward my truck, clapping me so hard a grey dust cloud rises from my jacket. “I’ll keep watch,” she says. “You go get Durk. Hurry.”
Meaghan [12]
If there’s one thing we’re all terrible at, it’s waiting. Tina says it means I’ll be just as miserable at pregnancy as the rest of my sisters. I don’t need anyone to tell me that.
Anxiety pricks at the backs of my calves as I watch Tina and Martin cursing each other in their parking lot. I’m peeking around the corner of a building, watching my sister scream at her bad husband, the man with a secret history of domestic sexual violence against her. He won’t attack her like that here in the street, in broad daylight, away from the treacherous privacy of their bedroom but—I don’t know what he’ll do, what she’ll do. By now, I know enough people with enough intimacy to understand there’s no way to predict for sure how anyone is going to behave.
Ashley will bring Durk as quickly as she can, lurching through traffic in her pickup truck, merging onto bridges, braking through school zones. At this time of day, it could take her an hour to get back here.
Down the avenue, Riker is probably sitting in his store, hunched over a comic book, useless, when he might be able to help us. Honestly, I think I’d have a better chance fighting Martin off Tina than Riker would if things got physical. People from large sibling groups are skilled grapplers. No one ever got a picture of the Dionne quints cleanin’ one anothers’ clocks, but I bet they were experts at it.
Riker can’t fight Martin, but he could probably settle him down without touching him. Everyone knows men act out hypocritical chivalry for each other—fakers, pathetic. The sight of Riker’s bearded face might be enough to convince Martin to get into his own car, drive away, and try talking to Tina later, when she’s no longer a live bomb but a field of burnt out shrapnel. I don’t know. But being here alone when Riker is so close by seems stupid.
I bolt down the sidewalk.
The door bangs past the stopper and into the wall. I tumble into Riker’s store, grabbing him by the placket of his shirt.
“We need you,” I say.
“Meaghan?”
“Come on. Tina might be in trouble.”
“Who’s Tina?”
I speak to him in language he’ll understand, in the esoteric passwords he’s taught me. “Cécile,” I say, giving him the name of the middle-born Dionne quintuplet. “My sister.”
He pulls the key from around his neck, locks the door, and chases me up the avenue.
Tina
[13]
The way my sisters go on, no one would believe I can speak for myself, even when it comes to Martin. They’re all touchy and skittish with me, like I’m a badly made bomb smack in the middle of our birth order. Sure, maybe I picked a gold-plated loser of a husband, but I can still stand in the street and scream him down without anyone’s help or protection.
Things do look bad when it first starts—when Ashley shows up with those kissy-pictures and springs them on us in the parking lot. Honestly, what the hell did she think was going to happen?
Martin is shouting, but it’s not scary. I know scary. This isn’t it. This is desperate. He’s only loud because I’m refusing to listen.
“Tina!”
“No, Martin.”
“Tina, this is stupid.”
“Stupid?” I lunge to push his shoulders with both my hands. “Who’s stupid, Martin?”
He staggers, not because I’m strong, but because he’s wrong.
We’re both yelling. He can’t hear what I’m saying, and I can’t hear him. I keep hollering until there’s a crack in my noise wide enough for me to hear him say one of the most potent words I know—two syllables: “Sis-ter.”
“Stop!” I say. “Stop it, Martin. Sister? You’re trying to blame this on my sisters? So what if they took the pictures?”
That’s not what Martin said. He’s shaking his head. “No—she—her, in the picture—she is my sister.”
I smack at the top of his head with the photograph, right where his hair is thinnest. “This woman in the picture is your sister?”
It’s ridiculous, but Martin is nodding anyway. I know Martin’s sister. We all do. Constance is almost fifteen years older than him—over-dyed and blue-veined and marked with the tiny tell-tale scars of last generation’s very best plastic surgeries. The woman in Ashley’s photo is not her.
Martin gathers both my hands and pins them between his. “Will you listen?”
I’m confused enough to relent—or at least to pause for breath.
And then, before he says anything more, I hear one of my sisters’ voices, shouting from not far away. Meaghan is back. She’s running, bouncing, her momentum gathering a rampaging force. She arrives, crashing boob-first into the Coach purse I keep crammed with clean spare diapers. She’s panting like someone who’s in the habit of saying she’s going to the gym but who hangs out in a video game store instead.
“Martin, Tina,” she puffs. “It looks bad but, just stay calm.”
A man I don’t know—some skinny, scruffy hipster with the standard-issue wispy brown beard—has come running along with her, openly ogling my marriage, as if he knows us.
Martin
lets go of my hands.
I wave the photo at Meaghan. “What the hell is this?”
“Were you guys stalking me?” Martin never knows when to shut it.
Meaghan bows her head and directs the answer to his question to me. “Stalking? Not really,” she says. “Suzanne was just in the right place at the right time.”
“Suzanne?” Martin says, still talking, for some reason. “How could Suzanne do that to me?”
It is strange. Conventional family wisdom says Suzanne is the least sneaky of all the sisters. Her job is to bring the sweetness not the surveillance. Still, it’s a stupid thing for Martin to be saying right now.
I shove him again. “How could Suzanne do that to you? How could you do that to me, Martin? You’re the one standing right out in the open, in the street, making out with a strange woman.”
Every part of his face curls and wrinkles. He is genuinely disgusted. “Making out—Tina, will you listen to me? That woman in the picture—she is my sister.”
“That is not Constance.”
“I know. I never said it was Constance. I’m trying to tell you I have another sister. My dad’s mistress—”
I suck in a sharp breath. “His mistress?”
“Yes!” Martin hops toward me, grabbing each of my arms again. “My father had a child with his mistress. And that child was me. Tina, my father’s wife took me in and raised me because she wanted to punish them.”
“Punish him for having a mistress? I’ve got some sympathy for that.”
“No, no. Having a mistress was pretty much expected of Dad in those days, in their circles. What his wife couldn’t stand was him having a child with the mistress. So after I was born, Dad gave my real mother a bunch of money and some love letters and some gentle threats, moved her out to Toronto, and brought me home to be raised in his house, by his wife.”
It’s too ludicrous. “Why would she want the mistress’s baby?”
“For spite, Tina. For nothing but awful, bitchy spite.”
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