Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  She touches him, smoothing his hair. “Mostly booze, nothing new. Nothing I didn’t take myself, right along with him, and I’m just fine. Funny thing is, it helps me figure out which of the two contenders is probably bio-dad. I was with this one guy who could party for days—a dumb guy with a wicked car, massive shoulders, played on the offensive line. And then there was the other guy—the one who talked big but always flamed out and fell over around two in the morning. And by the looks of things, he’s probably the winner of the daddy sweepstakes here. I liked him. He could have played quarterback if he had a daddy of his own to bully the coaches into it. No pedigree, no shoulders, but light and fast, kind of a smart guy too. Is Durk here smart?”

  I nod. “Sure, in his way.”

  “Well,” she says, “don’t go thinking I set this up as some crazy, quick and dirty paternity test. Honestly, it was just that Durk needed all kinds of loosening up before he could talk to me tonight. Guess I freaked him out a bit. Just imagine: some old skank follows you from your work all the way to a happy little pub and then corners you while you’re trying to watch the Outdoor Life Network and tells you she’s your mom. I’d say that’d make any guy tense right up.”

  She traces his nose with one finger. Durk’s mom—this Danielle person—is rough but not stupid. She’s got that same sheepish self-awareness Durk carries with him. Tonight, there in a booth in the bar and then later in her car with the windows rolled up—did she tell him why she let him be poisoned and burned, scarred and abandoned?

  She’s standing up. “Well. It’s pretty obvious he didn’t want me showing up at his place if he had me bring him to his in-laws’ instead.”

  “He usually doesn’t go home when he’s like this.”

  She smirks. “Home is where he keeps my grandkids and my daughter-in-law—my bio-daughter-in-law, if that expression makes any sense.” She laces her fingers through Durk’s hair. “I went through his wallet while he was blitzed and found pictures of them. Cute kids. Your sister’s really beautiful. The two of you could be twins, for all I know.”

  “We’re not, but thank you.”

  Danielle is nodding. “Beautiful. Yeah, it’s all my own fault. And it’s a shame.”

  She lifts Durk’s hand, flips it over on her palm like it’s a pancake. I hear his skin smack against hers. I can’t tell if she’s looking for his old scars—if she understands they’re still there to be seen.

  Feet shuffle on the stairs behind me. Troy is coming to investigate the noise—something faintly chivalrous and much too late. “Suzanne, what the—?”

  “Troy, Durk’s here again.”

  He shakes his head at the floor. “Great.” His voice is flat with duty. “How much do you need to cover the fare?”

  He’s talking to Danielle.

  She drops Durk’s hand. “Huh?”

  “For the cab. You’re the driver, right?”

  Danielle is laughing at him, though it sounds more like there’s a pinecone caught in her throat.

  I step between them. “No,” I say. “No, Troy. This—lady—this is—Ashley’s mother-in-law.”

  Troy doesn’t flinch. “Sorry. Hi.”

  “Yeah, hi,” Danielle says. “There’s no charge. No worries. Hey, you probably just want me to go out the way I came in.”

  I shake my head. “It’s okay. I’ll let you out the front door.”

  Walking on the balls of her feet, she keeps her high heels from clicking on our hard floors. She is leaving, moving past May’s stairwell, toward the door.

  “Don’t tell no one you seen me,” she says. “Just pretend I was a ghost or a bad dream or whatever you gotta do.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  She’s waving, standing in the dark of the open doorway, orange streetlight behind her, illuminating the frizz of her hair, the worst halo ever.

  He’ll be thrust into horrifying flashbacks if I lean over the couch and wake Durk exactly the way I did the morning May fell down the stairs. My kids wake him instead—wholesome sunshine and pink exuberance. They turn on the television as loudly as they like it and frolic all around him, chattering about sleepovers, sliding plastic tiaras onto his head, piling stuffed animal toys around him. There’s preliminary talk of giving him a makeover before Uncle Durk finally sits up, rubbing his forehead, trying to smile at them, more unable than usual to reciprocate the shrill friendliness of my daughters. The best he can do is leave the tiara where they put it, dangling from his party-matted hair by the teeth of a broken comb.

  In the kitchen, I’m making him another cup of lemon-fish-oil tea.

  “Is she still here?” he asks after I chase the kids upstairs to get dressed for school. “That woman—you know.”

  I almost smile. “No. She’s gone. She left while it was still dark—told me to think of her as nothing but a bad dream.”

  He hums into his teacup. “Still no coffee around here?”

  “Never. Coffee is a diuretic anyways,” I say. “It makes you eliminate water faster. And you need your essential waters replenished right now, not chemically removed.”

  He murmurs as he sips.

  “Durk,” I begin. “I hate to ask but I really need you to help me finish.”

  “Suzanne, no.”

  “Come on. Not everyone’s mother is a bad dream, Durk. Some are real and they won’t just wander off into oblivion on their own.”

  He sets his teacup on the coffee table and exhales from the depths of his guts. “You still haven’t found a good place to keep—her.”

  I shake my hair out of my face. May is not buried yet. I bought a metal toolbox from the hardware store, one big enough for everything, even the largest fragments—bits like the ball joints of her hips and shoulders. Right now, the box is tucked inside the rim of the access hole of our rough, uninhabitable attic. It’s a decent hiding place, but not a perfect one. The truth is Troy won’t find anything in this house that I haven’t deliberately laid out for him. The kids are just as bad. The truth is if I hid May’s charred bones in the mass of shoes in the front hall closet, no one would ever find her there but me.

  It’s still not good enough. Everything I see—everywhere—is immediately sorted into three categories: an impossible hiding place for May, a possible hiding place for May, and the only hiding place for May. There’s just one place I’ve imagined that fits the third category. And I can’t get May anywhere near it without Durk’s help.

  “Durk, you remember what I said about building a barbecue mausoleum and making it a Fathers’ Day gift to Troy.”

  He sighs again. “I remember.”

  “I have the supplies ready,” I say. “The bricks are out in the yard, and the rest of the stuff is in the garage. I got a few tools, too, so you wouldn’t have to corrupt your own with something as nasty as this. Fathers’ Day is this weekend, but we can probably finish it in a couple days if we get started on it as soon as the kids are gone.”

  If Durk keeps sighing this deeply, he’s going to pass out. “No way. It’s not that easy, Suzanne. That much finished brick work will be really heavy. It needs to be built on a sturdy foundation, like a concrete pad, or it’ll sink and break apart. I’d have to excavate and backfill and compact it and pour the foundation and leave it to cure for a few days before I could come back and lay the bricks.”

  “Yeah, I researched it already,” I say. “And luckily for us there’s already a small concrete pad in the back yard, just sitting there. It’s by the fence. The people who owned the house before us had a shed there that they ended up tearing down, or something.”

  Durk leans forward, letting his forehead roll against the low tabletop in front of the couch. By now I recognize the meaning of it. It’s surrender—his signal that he’s going to give me whatever gruesome thing I need.

  Ashley must know him with near perfection to have been able to tell which line of work Durk ha
d to be in, years ago when she borrowed that money from Dad and bought the masonry shop. Brickwork’s order—the straight lines, the plumb pull of the centre of the earth, the fitting and fitting and fitting together—it’s what an overly simplistic Westerner like me might call Zen.

  Brick by brick, Durk seals May away. And this time, I’m the one who’s hypnotized, standing behind him, caught in the scrape and squash rhythm of his work. It’s as entrancing as those geometric stop-animation films from the old kids’ shows my sisters and I used to watch on public television when we were little.

  I’d expected the connections between the bricks and the mortar to be something like the bonds between gumdrops and icing on a gingerbread house. It isn’t like that. It’s like the mortar is the ideal sand for sandcastles, and Durk is building the best sandcastle ever, one that will harden into something that could last forever.

  “I can still see the bricks going into place when I close my eyes,” I say. “It must be like that for you too.”

  He draws a long breath through his nose. At the depths of his exhale he answers, “All the time.” After the cremation of Troy’s mother and the resurrection of his own mom, Durk needs ritual. Maybe that’s exactly what building the barbecue is for him. Despite his initial dread, the work seems to have—I don’t know—a purifying effect.

  It’s the Taj Mahal of barbecues—a beautiful, sturdy thing, the opening above its grill curving in an elegant arch. The lines of its chimney are perfectly square, as if we built it under the direction of ancient space travellers, or freemasons, or something.

  Troy doesn’t know his barbecue is memorial architecture. Even though he’d already seen it through the kitchen window, our little girls drape a bed-sheet over it and unveil it like it’s an art installation in the fancy Fathers’ Day ceremony they’ve devised. Thanks to the ossuary chamber built inside it, the barbecue is a little over-sized. But its inflated proportions enlarge Troy’s love for it.

  The unveiling is over, and the bricks and mortar are cured, sooty, and a little sticky with barbecue sauce by the time the man with the clipboard comes knocking on our front door. At first sight, I assume he’s selling household security systems. Everyone knows I can’t have a security system if Durk and his family are going to keep arriving through the patio doors in the night. I’m about to close the door when he manages to pass me his business card, pinched between two of his fingers like chopsticks. He’s not a salesman but a building inspector from the city’s municipal compliance department.

  “I’ve got to take a quick look at your new barbecue,” he tells me.

  My nervous system fires a blast of panic signals. My fingertips prickle with electricity. I repeat the word, “Barbecue?”

  “Yes,” the inspector says. He’s leaning and straining, trying to see past me, through a rear window, into the backyard. “Some residents in the area have expressed concerns that it might be built on an easement.”

  I step in front of him. “Easement?”

  The inspector leans back, openly disgusted. “Yes, there’s a legally significant invisible perimeter inside everyone’s fence-line, all the way around.” He draws a square in the air with a corner of his clipboard. “And it needs to be kept free of any major, permanent structures.”

  “Major structure—it’s just a barbecue.”

  He’s nodding. “Well, you may be right. But we need to take some measurements—the kinds of measurements that should have been noted on the building permit application in the first place.”

  “Building permit.” I’m that echo again—that stupid echo.

  “You didn’t pull a building permit, did you.” It’s not a question.

  “For a barbecue? No.”

  “Thought the husband would do it for you?”

  “No.” I stop myself from saying, “It’s just a barbecue,” one more time.

  The inspector ducks past me, hopping over the threshold, moving through the kitchen to the patio doors. I stand in my open front door, my face and feet pointed toward to the empty street. Maybe this is the part of the story where I run away and never come back to Troy, or my kids, or my sisters, or May’s bones, or anything.

  I follow the inspector into the yard.

  “All-righty,” he says. He pushes against the new brickwork, shoving hard with his knee and shoulder. “Installed on a concrete foundation. Rock solid. Definitely a permanent structure.” He walks all around it, humming and frowning. “Really nice workmanship here, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Looks like something from a slick design magazine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You have this professionally built?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Expensive?”

  “Sort of.”

  “That’s probably a shame. Let’s get the height.” He unclips the tape measure from his belt like he’s drawing a pistol. “Yup, it’s easily over twenty inches high.”

  “Is that bad?” I ask.

  “Well, it’s not good. If it was under twenty inches tall, it would have been exempt from the by-laws, but as it is ...” He shakes his head. “One more thing to check.”

  He’s moving to the fence, the tape measure clicking out the distance from the property line to the edge of the barbecue. And it all makes sense. The empty concrete pad—the last owners must have had to tear down the shed that stood here because it violated the same rules about structures being built on easements. We have gone and done what the last owners had undone years before.

  Behind and above us, drapes are pulled closed over the windows of the neighbours whose backyards share the property line with us. Why would they do this? Who cares how tall their neighbours’ barbecues are or how far they are from the fence? Or maybe the call to city hall was made by someone spooked to see me slip the toolbox urn into the ossuary. It’s possible, but odds are no one but Durk saw me do it. The barbecue was built during the day, in the empty, deserted hours of the suburban lifecycle. Maybe, no matter what time it is, anyone looking out those upper windows can tell there’s something grim about our barbecue and understand it has to be destroyed.

  “You’re in clear breach of the easement by-laws,” the inspector says. “And we haven’t even begun to talk about the fire code you might have broken by building what amounts to a furnace so close to this dry wooden fence.”

  He makes no pretence of being sorry. He promises me an official letter from the compliance department, and leaves, closing the gate behind himself. I turn to look at the barbecue again—the ultimate resting place for my mother-in-law, now in contempt of city hall.

  There’s a sledgehammer hanging on the wall of the garage. I can see it in my mind. I’m not sure anyone’s ever used it, but it’s hanging there anyway. If I took it down I could desecrate May’s grave and disinter her right now. It might be better for me to do it myself than for Troy to come home and get mad enough to start smashing up the barbecue himself just to deprive the city of the satisfaction of ordering him to do it.

  The garage smells like sawdust and vulcanized rubber. It’s dim and dusty, especially in the corner where I find the hammer. The handle is long and the tempered steel head is so heavy I drag it along the grass behind me as I walk across the yard. My kids are following, heaping questions on me in that suffocating way of theirs. I don’t answer. Instead, I give each of them an ice cream sandwich on the condition they eat on the patio, away from where Mummy needs to work on the barbecue.

  Glancing at the time on my watch, I take it off and put it in my pocket. I’ve never demolished anything. The brickwork may be as strong as it is exquisite. It might take longer to smash it up than the time I have left before Troy will be home. If the traffic on the High Level Bridge is moving smoothly, Troy will arrive in time to find his wife—the one who’s supposed to be the good sister, the one who’s not morbid or crazy or deluded or self-destructive—s
tanding in a cloud of demolition dust, clutching his mother’s bones.

  Somehow, right now, I don’t care. It’s time to end this—all of it.

  I close in on the barbecue, dragging the hammerhead. When I’m near enough, I lift the sledgehammer over my shoulder, hoisting it so high its weight pulls me backward. I stumble sideways and the hammer thuds against the grass. I lift it again, more carefully, with stronger, stiffer arms. This time, I understand its momentum well enough to bring the black cylinder crashing into the corner of the barbecue. The impact rings up the handle, jolting through the fluid in my arms. Crumbly mortar and chips of brick spray into the air around me. Reflexes in my eyelids snap them closed. Without opening them, I raise the hammer again.

  The clatter of steel on masonry tells me I’ve connected with the barbecue. My lashes are full of debris. I’ve breached May’s tomb. Between the ragged edges of broken brick there’s a dark, black space about the size of my youngest daughter’s fist. I’m stooping, peering into the inner chamber. Even in the daylight, the hollow is a black void. But if someone were to shine a flashlight into the space, the beam of light would glint off the wall of the metal toolbox-urn buried inside.

  I raise the hammer again. The sound of metal on brick is the same pitch as a man yelling. I know it when I hear Troy hollering from the patio. “Su-zanne!”

  The hammer falls from my hands, onto the grass. Troy is threading through May’s grandchildren, where they stand stunned, dripping with melting ice cream on the patio. In shiny leather shoes, Troy is skidding across the lawn, cursing the damage I’ve done, demanding the explanation he’s owed.

  I’ve sunk to sitting on the grass, on the green space between my husband’s feet and the broken brick wall. I hate it, but I’m starting to cry.

  “Look what you—what were you thinking?” he asks.

  “Troy, there was a man here,” I stammer, “from the city ...”

  As I tell the story of the building inspector’s visit, Troy bends to sit beside me in the grass, quiet. He isn’t filled with rebellious rage against The Man. It was unfair of me to think he would be. He listens, leaning against the side of the barbecue, his shoulder inches below the fissure I’ve bashed into the brick.