Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  The future—that’s one of our industry words. Suzanne is finding her funeral voice.

  On the bier between us, the body’s arms are bent at the elbows in soft forty-five degree angles. I’ve slid the mu-mu up the length of the legs, snugged it beneath the hips, and I’m rolling one of its sleeves into a cuff. “Questions?” I say. “Fine. Ask away.”

  Suzanne is rounding the end of the bier, standing at the head. “I read that cremation destroys one hundred percent of DNA. Is that always true?”

  I slide the cuff over the wrist and ease the sleeve around the bend in the arm. “Yeah, it’s true if you use one of our state-of-the-art gas-fired retorts. But those guys in the developing world who still use traditional ways, burning away on riverbanks with soggy wood fires and stuff? They could leave some genetic material intact, like, especially in the marrow of the larger bones—femurs and pelvises.”

  Suzanne nods toward the face on the table. The head and neck twist against a plastic brace—nothing like a pillow—as I tug on the arms. Suzanne lays a hand on either side of the head, cradling and supporting it as if it’s a patient’s. It’s not helpful to me, but I do admire her for handling the body without making a fuss. The dead lady’s family members would probably balk at touching her body by now.

  Suzanne tilts her own head. “You’ve done something to the eyes and mouth, haven’t you? They always loll right open at the hospital.”

  “Yes, we took care of it,” is all I say.

  Suzanne presses one finger to the forehead. “They’re always colder here than at the hospital too.”

  I nod, walking around the bier to dress the opposite arm. “Thank you, refrigerated crypt.”

  Suzanne taps the forehead, gently. “It feels like my own skin when I come inside from shovelling snow.”

  “Suz-anne,” I say in the voice the girls call bossy, though I prefer the term matriarchal. “Tell me what’s the matter with you. You’re about to burst into tears. I’m happy to see you anytime, but maybe my workplace and my dead people aren’t what you need when you’re feeling glum.”

  She steps away from the bier, clearing her throat. I take her arm and lead her to a chair. “Just sit over here,” I say. “We’re almost finished. Sit right here and say nice things to me. Tell me something rosy and uplifting.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like—May. You haven’t had much to say about her lately. So tell me: how is May doing on her mission of tooth mercy in El Salvador?”

  “Guatemala.”

  “Guatemala, right. Tell me all about it. What could be more uplifting to talk about than charity like that?”

  Suzanne coughs, hoarse and noisy, like she’s sucked in a lung-full of dirty smoke. It’s loud, and I twitch, jostling the body. Her racket is involuntary, not Suzanne’s fault, but I’m shushing her anyway.

  Her voice rattles as she finds breath to speak again. “So if someone found a big bone—like, from a body cremated in something not much better than a campfire, like you were saying, then they might be able to isolate enough DNA to tell who it belonged to?”

  I furrow my forehead as I pull the mu-mu’s long zipper closed under the chin. “Yeah, maybe. As long as whoever finds it has access to their own forensics lab. Where are you going with this?”

  Suzanne tries to laugh at herself. “Nowhere. It’s just a morbid question.”

  I sigh as I wheel the cosmetics tray to the edge of the bier. No one has idle questions about death. These questions are always intensely personal. Suzanne is acting. I am acting. Without a word, we will work together to preserve the illusion of her idle curiosity. I don’t understand it but I have to respect it—her yearning for illusion, her faith in it.

  No matter what the girls say about me, I am willing to play along. I’ll mince through their rickety sets full of crude scenery for as long as I can—as long as they’ll let me before they knock it all down themselves. The truth is I want my sisters’ official messages—their pretty fictions that don’t make any sense—to be their real stories. But nothing will stop them from revealing the tumult of their non-fiction to me. I can’t stop them from showing me everything, daring me to tell them what it is I see.

  “So what’s that stuff?” Suzanne asks. She means the powder on the puff I’m using to dab the face and hands.

  “It’s just talc. Their skin is always terrible. It helps a bit.”

  “Talc? Like Mum used to get from Avon?”

  “Those free gifts with purchase? Yeah, pretty much.” I wave my arm through the dusty white cloud the powder puff has sloughed into the air in front of my face. “Look out. It gets everywhere.”

  Suzanne watches motes of powder drifting onto the plush carpet the new mortuary apprentice will have to vacuum later. “It’s like when you’re sanding drywall and the dust gets all over everything,” she says.

  I snicker. “Yeah sure, Suze. Actually, I’ve been fooling you guys all these years. Every time you thought I had drywall dust in my hair I was actually covered in this funeral home talcum powder.”

  Suzanne doesn’t laugh. Even without funeral powder, her face is white, blown blank by the candour of disgust.

  “Kidding, Suzanne. I’m kidding. It’s always been drywall dust you’ve seen in my hair. Seriously. Don’t look at me like you caught me embalming myself.”

  She sits quietly, her revulsion subsiding. She doesn’t speak again until I’ve moved on to colouring the lips with a brush. “So how come it’s okay,” Suzanne begins. “How come no one minds when you guys do creepy awful stuff to dead bodies in here?”

  I snort even though I’m still dangerously close to the talc. “People do mind. They just mind it less than handling their dead themselves. Or, at least, they think they mind it less. Hardly anyone tries it for themselves so, honestly—”

  “So what would you do,” she interrupts, “what would you do if someone took a body home from the retirement community and let all the blood out and washed it and dressed it and made it up in their own kitchen instead of sending it here? Like—what would happen?”

  “No one ever asks.”

  “No, of course they wouldn’t ask permission,” Suzanne says. “They’d never tell you. But Heather, what would happen if they did it anyway and kept it hidden?”

  I’m wiping the lipstick brush clean, staring past my sister to the canned landscape painting hung above her head—a mountain reflected in a lake. Her weird hypothetical is not a funeral question. It’s a legal question, a criminal question. “Ewan would know,” I say.

  Suzanne recoils like she’s been hit in the stomach. She bends forward in her chair until her long hair hangs over her knees. “Ewan? You mean it’s illegal—to do what you do anyplace but here is a crime? If we were doing this outside Ewan would take us away and have us punished for it?”

  “What? Ewan?” I drop the brush back into the cosmetics tray. “Suzanne—”

  She’s coughing again, deep, clenching spasms. A hacking crescendo is building. Suzanne is gagging as if she’s going to vomit. And in this place, vomiting—getting sick in the presence of a dead body—is everything weak and incompetent.

  I can’t have it. I hoist Suzanne to her feet. “Okay, that’s enough. You’re done here.”

  We are moving down the hall, not reverently silent at all. Suzanne is bent over, stumbling as I push her along. I am nodding, almost bowing at my colleagues who have come to stand gravely in their office doorways.

  “Bronchitis,” I am calling over Suzanne’s noise. “She is fine.”

  I am pounding on her back, driving her toward the doorway, forcing her, choking, out into the sunlight.

  Suzanne

  [16]

  The house is dark except for the greasy light bulb glowing inside the kitchen range hood. My shift at the hospital just ended. The kids will be up for school in three hours. I should go to bed,
to sleep next to May’s son.

  It’d be nice if I was the sort of pensive person who stays up alone at nights to enjoy the quiet. I’m enjoying nothing. I’m a criminal fixated on May’s bones—the last repositories of any of her intact, incriminating DNA. They’re stashed in their temporary hiding place, waiting for Durk to tessellate the stack of bricks in my backyard into a barbecue-shaped columbarium.

  Alone in my dim kitchen, at the end of my shift, I soak my sore feet in Doctor Troy’s new ionizing foot bath. The clear tap water I originally poured into its basin is now deeply orange, like a fancy tea. Troy admits colour changes in the footbath water don’t actually reflect any health effects. If some know-it-all doofus were to come to the clinic for a footbath and then pull his feet out of the water as soon as Troy’s assistant left the room, the water would still change colour. That doesn’t mean the therapy is a sham. All it means is the machine doesn’t work like people expect it to. The change in the water’s colour is a coincidence, not a placebo. That’s what Troy says. That’ll work.

  I’m sleepier than I realize. I sway in my chair, half-dreaming this orange water is the colour of my soul, seeping out of my feet.

  All souls are stained, right? What colours would my sisters’ souls be if I could see them suspended in warm water? I do this with everything: find a category of items or attributes and divide them between my sisters. When I did it with punctuation, I decided Meaghan was a comma—adding and adding, unfinished. Tina was a period, a full, jarring stop. Ashley was parentheses—this but that but this. Heather was a colon—the hard pause before the proclamation. And I must have been—I don’t know—question marks, ellipses, it doesn’t matter.

  I’m doing it again, with the soul colours. I’m not sure what makes me decide Ashley’s would be aqua blue, like the minerals in glacier water, up in the mountains. Tina’s would be lavender-pink, like new baby’s flesh. Heather’s would be clear and golden brown, like her topaz ring. Meaghan, I’ll let her have the verdant green she would have chosen herself. There they are, a little like the colour-coded hair ribbons of the Dionne quintuplets Meaghan’s been talking about all spring—the colours of my sisters’ souls.

  I look into the orange water at my feet. Whatever colour a perfect daughter-in-law’s soul may be, it’s too late for me to find out. I admit it. Hiding May’s death has saved nothing for me. I failed her, defiled her, destroyed the final traces of the faith she once had in my perfection—the faith that made perfection viable and real for me. It’s over. Daughter-in-law Suzanne is over. Troy and the kids believe May is alive, but for me, she’s gone—worse than gone. The smoke from May’s pyre is the only thing left inside me, wafting through the vessels where my blood used to flow. I’ve dried up—my mouth, throat, my eyes. I cough and cough but the smoke stays inside. I can’t hack it out. And there are no grey traces of it in the detoxifying water at my feet.

  I didn’t kill May. That much is true. Accidents are awful but they aren’t always crimes. That’s what I’ve been told. May’s fall was not a crime. What came after May’s fall was a crime. Heather didn’t finish telling me exactly how or why it’s illegal. She must know. Crimes against the dead fall into the area where her professional world overlaps Ewan’s. She’d probably know the precise, technical names of all those crimes along with their section numbers in the Criminal Code and appropriate sentences for them—jail, fines, probation, all of it served with a well-deserved dose of grisly notoriety.

  I am a criminal, a deceiver, an orphan-in-law, a perfect nothing. And I don’t know how to reckon with any of it. Everything went wrong when I went to see Heather at the funeral home. That stupid mortuary talcum powder, light and dry like insecticidal diatomaceous earth, abrading and desiccating my already smoke-infused insides. I’m fairly sure I never intended to confess the whole thing to Heather, but I did want to start telling someone something—open a dialogue, like the Nurses’ Union leaders say. I tried to be subtle, but Heather is the enemy of subtlety—except when she’s its master, wielding it. The funeral home should have been the ideal setting for our first post mortem conversation about May. Private, and if we were overheard talking about disposing of a body it would’ve sounded like harmless shop-talk.

  I’ve set up the footbath where I can rest my head on the breakfast table while the water does its magical, detoxifying, definitely-not-a-placebo work on my immune system. My arms are folded like a pillow under my cheek and my face is turned to the sliding glass doors that lead to our patio. In the quiet, over the hum and bubble of—ions, I guess, moving through the footbath, I hear a noise. It’s like a rattling sound slowed down enough to make it more like a wave. I sit up straight in my chair.

  Something flashes outside the house, reflecting back the light from the bulb burning over the stove. It flares, small and white, against the glass of the patio doors. Something about the size of my hand has pressed itself to the pane for an instant. I wait, pulling the power cord of the footbath out of the outlet.

  There it is again, the white on the glass. It’s not just the size of a woman’s hand. It is a woman’s hand.

  I stand, my feet still inside the footbath even though the instruction booklet has told me never to do that. I’m watching as one of the glass doors tips back and out of its frame, opening the wall of my house to whatever’s outside.

  Durk isn’t the only person who knows how to gain entry through a poorly secured patio door. I’m stumbling backward on my wet feet, feeling for the doorway behind me. Outside, on my patio, someone is coughing. I hear talking and wheezy laughter. And then he tumbles through the gap in the wall and onto the floor—a man falling like a rolled up camping mattress dropped into my kitchen. He’s lying on his side with hanks of long brown hair veiling his face. A woman is leaning into the kitchen, over his body.

  She’s speaking to me. “You Ashley?”

  I should refuse to tell her anything, demand she explain herself. But I don’t. “No, I’m Suzanne.”

  “No? Durk, you son of a bitch, you sent us to the wrong house.”

  Of course, the man on the floor is Durk. I’m kneeling, pushing his hair away from his face, pulling his eyelids open. “Ashley is my sister,” I say as I shush the woman.

  She’s covering her mouth with one hand. She has a raspy voice that can’t drop into a whisper without disappearing into a wheeze. “Excuse my French,” she says from behind her hand.

  I flick a glare at her. “Just be quiet.”

  Durk reeks of booze and pot and probably a few substances I don’t recognize. I’m getting used to finding him here, crashed out and self-poisoned. He usually arrives in better condition than this—more like a party, less like a suicide attempt.

  Who is this lady who got my brother-in-law messed up and then brought him over here, thinking she was bringing him home to Ashley? She’s way too old to be partying with Durk, though until I got close to her, it was hard to tell. She’s dressed like a 1980s teenager, one so thin her once skinny jeans have been stretched out around the sharpness of her bony knees and hips. Her black leather jacket is scuffed grey, ratty with long, tangled fringes across the shoulder blades and down each arm. It’s hard to tell where the fringes begin and her over-dyed black hair ends. She might be an escort Durk hired just to make sure he made it home.

  “Sorry,” she rasps at me. “It must sound awful for me to talk like that to him. But I’m not hurting no one’s feelings when I call this boy a son of a bitch. If anyone has the right to call him that, it’s me.”

  I gape at her. She can’t be saying—

  “Because if he’s the son, that makes me none other than the bitch herself.” She grins all over her face, heavy makeup folding and cracking.

  I can’t hide the tension in my upper lip, the revulsion that shows on my face.

  “Oh, and sorry about taking your door apart,” she continues. “Popping it out takes the breaking out of breaking and entering. I learne
d that trick from an old man of mine. Don’t ask.”

  I don’t. In her thigh-high boots, she straddles Durk’s legs and bends, boring her hands underneath his arms, talking to him. “Come on, baby. Up ya get.”

  She tugs and fusses, trying to scrape him over the threshold, into my house. She is Durk’s mother—his blood-mother. That’s why she’s old but still so young. That’s why her body is bone-thin and flint-hard. That’s why even when she’s breaking into my house in the middle of the night I can’t be mad at her, shoving Durk through the back door, looking like a computer-aged police poster of one of my little nieces.

  “Here, let me help.”

  We get Durk through the doorway and onto the couch. His mother smooths the fringes of her jacket before she goes to the opening in my kitchen wall to reinstall the patio door. She doesn’t look like she should be strong enough to lift it, but I know she will be.

  “You must be some kind of crazy good sister to put up with this,” she says, easing the glass into the doorframe.

  “And you’re—”

  “Bio-mom, like I said. My name’s Danielle. And I do get it. I got no right to know Durk now but—you must be a mom. You must get it, right? I poked around until I found him, and once I knew he was so close, I couldn’t stop myself from taking a look at him in person—even though, back in the day, the adoption people told me never to do that. ‘Closed adoption’—yeah right. They never seen the Internet coming, did they. Good thing I spelled his first name so weird and he was too old for them to change it on us when I gave him up. Good thing for me, anyways.”

  She sits on the arm of the couch where her son is sleeping on his face. She looks up at the ceiling, as if she’s got an audience with the heavens opening above her head. “God, he’s beautiful.”

  “What was he taking tonight?” I ask. “He looks awful.”