Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  He’s feeling for the acupressure point between my eyes. There was a special aromatherapy promotion at the clinic today, and he smells like spice bottles and flower petals and peppermint.

  “Aw, Sue,” he says. “There’s no need to overreact like this. It’s bad news, all right. It was a really nice present and everything. But it’s still just a barbecue.” He curls an arm around my shoulders. The crush of his kindness wrings a sob out of me.

  “Listen,” he says, flawless Sears model mouth speaking against the side of my head. “There’s a whole whack of official processes that have to take place before the city can legally oblige us to knock this thing down. They have to file papers, and get them approved, and everything has to move back and forth through the snail mail. And then there’s an appeal period and all sorts of other stuff that will take months to sort out.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. We can’t beat city hall but we can stall it.” He’s smiling at me. He reaches into the grass and picks up a fragment of brick, tossing it up and down with one hand as he speaks. “By the time the city gets its ducks in a row, we’ll have been out here eating ribs off this thing for a whole summer, and maybe the next summer too. How do you think these whiny neighbours would like that?”

  He pantomimes throwing the brick chunk at the upstairs windows on the other side of the fence.

  “Ducks in a row,” I say. And I laugh a little because saying “I love you” right now would sound forced and wishful, and because it’s funny—the resilience of the normal equilibrium of daily life. The hammer, the inspector, the barbecue, the bones—normalcy is already settling down over this absurdity.

  Troy presses his thumb between my eyes, like a button on a remote control that needs its batteries changed. “We’ll stall the city, Sue. Don’t worry. And don’t break anything else.”

  Stalling—that’s all any of us ever does, isn’t it? Living and dying—it’s only a matter of delay.

  Ashley

  [17]

  At our masonry shop, Durk is grooving on brickwork, light meditation, and a few discreet puffs of his favourite herbal remedy. He’s in the loading bay at the back of the shop. The overhead door is open to the hot, dry alleyway outside as he’s rolling the forklift back into its alcove more slowly than he realizes.

  I’m in the office with a paper cup of convenience store coffee, a fan blasting in my face. It’s buffeting strands of hair out of my ponytail and into my eyes and mouth. The desk is covered with invoices weighted down with damaged bits of the synthetic dry-stack stone that’s going to date everything we’re building right now as early twenty-first century construction.

  I don’t know exactly when someone steps out of the alley and rasps a greeting at my half-naked, half-baked husband. When I look through the window of my office, Durk’s visitor is already standing in the bay. He’s dismounting the forklift to speak to her.

  I can’t hear anything. But I see her craning her neck, like she’s trying to see into the office to get a look at me. I know what I look like, okay. I’m used to people trying to get a better view of me. Still, it’s distracting—and a little threatening.

  Durk glances over his shoulder, toward me, and I drop my eyes. I’m stabbing at a calculator with the eraser end of a pencil, like I don’t have anything to worry about when Durk whispers with strangers in back alleys.

  I can’t hold the pose for long. The smoky languor is gone from Durk’s movements and posture. His happy cloud is blown away. His motions are quicker, more clipped as he pulls his T-shirt over his head.

  The woman is louder now, “’Cause you never introduced me to her, that’s how come,” she’s saying. She actually touches Durk—pushes her fingertips against his chest. “And I get that,” she says. “But it don’t mean I’m not curious. Who wouldn’t be?”

  Durk scrubs his face with his hands. He knows how loud he’d have to speak for me to hear him from where I sit, and he deliberately speaks below that threshold. I read his pantomime instead. He extends his hand toward the woman like he’s presenting her to an audience, and then he lets the same hand fall against his thigh. It’s a rehearsal of an impossible introduction—the one he cannot make between this woman and me.

  I’m walking into the loading bay, frowning.

  “You want me to hoof it?” the woman asks Durk as I approach.

  He groans above the threshold of my hearing now. “Nah, it’s too late. She’s already seen you. She’ll send her sisters. They’ll be watching you when you don’t know it.”

  I’m standing next to the forklift, leaning against it with one hand, because it’s mine. “Hey, are you the new sales rep from the cultured stone supplier?” I ask her, acting a part to get this drama started. “Because in the last shipment—”

  “No, Ash,” Durk says. “No, this is—a relative of mine. I wasn’t expecting to see her here. She’s just passing by.”

  I let my hand drop away from the forklift. “A relative? Durk’s relative? No way!”

  “Yeah. I’m Danielle,” she says, grabbing at my hand, greedy, kind of like a striking snake. Her palm and fingers are dry and rough, as if she’s been lifting bricks all this time too. “And you’re Ashley. It’s great to meet you, Mrs. Durk. So great. You seem—really—special.”

  I’m smiling. “Yeah? Aw, thanks. Don’t stand out in the alley, Danielle. Come in. I’ve never met a single soul from Durk’s family—except our own kids, I mean. Come in.”

  Danielle covers her mouth, as if she knows what the cigarettes have done to her teeth and gums. She grins into her hand. “No, I can’t stay. Like Durk says, I was just passing by.”

  There are clunky, tittering good-byes, like we’re both seven years old, and she’s gone. I watch her go, spiky high-heeled boots even though it’s summertime and the backstreet pavement is full of tiny, dangerous pits. She’s getting into a low, gold-coloured car parked in the alleyway.

  “How weird is that?” is all I say as the lights beneath the spoiler of her old sports car flare red.

  Durk doesn’t say anything about the relative-lady until the day is over, the shop closed, and we’re headed to the monument factory to pick up the headstone we’ll need for tomorrow morning’s installation. We’re in the pickup truck with the Dash Fireplace and Monument logo stamped on its doors.

  “So I guess I should have something to say—about Danielle,” he begins.

  “Danielle—yeah, I knew there was more. Let me guess: she’s not really a relative, she’s an old girlfriend.”

  “What the hell, Ashley?”

  “I’m kidding.”

  He won’t laugh with me. “Can you spare me the suspicious sister-talk?”

  “Sorry. I am kidding.”

  “Well, don’t,” he says. “Danielle is so a relative. She’s my mother.”

  I cluck my tongue. “Wow. Holy—Durk.”

  “Yeah.”

  I cock my head. “I thought your mom would be an old lady.”

  “No, she’s not my social worker mom. She’s my mother. Danielle is my real, blood-mother.”

  I’ve seen Danielle myself. The claim feels real. It fits. She doesn’t look quite like I’ve been imagining her all these years. I thought she’d look—I don’t know—more motherly, more like Tina. It’s dumb, but whenever I’m reading a book or hearing a story, every mother I have to imagine out of nothing looks like Tina.

  I believe him, but Durk keeps explaining anyway. It’s a habit brought on by the way everyone insists on evidence and proof whenever he tries to tell them anything. What’s that line people keep quoting on the Internet to piss each other off? It comes from that 1980s TV science guy, with the hair and the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—something like that. It’s catchy and tidy but shaky when you get right down to it.

  Durk is shaken, alright. He’s nodding hard at the windshield. “It�
�s definitely for real, Ash. She showed me a copy of my original birth certificate and everything—the one with her name on it. And if you can see through her burnt-out party-chick vibe, she looks like our girls. It’s all for real.”

  I blow out my breath. “Yeah. Wow—your mother. Half of your genetic code walked right into our shop today, Durk. What’re we supposed to do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I do not know.”

  He’s squinting as we drive along the Henday Freeway, west, into the low sunlight. He’s troubled. That’s easy to see. I’ll have to look longer and harder to tell if he’s hurting.

  It’s difficult. I turn away from him, just for a second, glancing through my window at the smaller cars darting around our truck in the rush hour traffic.

  “Hey,” I say. “Is that her? Is that Danielle driving in the vintage Trans Am right there? It looks like the same car as the one in the alley.”

  Durk shifts his field of vision to include the lane beside ours. “Yeah, that’s her car.”

  “Wow. Eagle paintjob on the hood and everything.”

  His head droops toward the steering wheel. “It’s just a decal. She got the car from some guy in a separation agreement.”

  “How do you know all that? How do you know anything about her? How long has it been since you met her—again?”

  His head rolls from shoulder to shoulder. “Remember the last time—the very last time—when I spent the night crashed at Suzanne’s place? That was the night Danielle found me. She came and sat down, almost right on top of me, while I was watching cable in a pub after work. I had no idea how to cope with her, so I just got blitzed. And she went right along with me. It was totally stupid, I know that. Anyways, she did manage to get me to Suzanne’s.”

  At the edge of my vision, sideways sunlight glints on dusty gold enamel. In the lane beside us, Danielle’s car is picking up speed, manoeuvring as if she’s tracking us. “I think she’s trying her hardest to come home with us. She’s following way too close.”

  “Everyone has to use the freeway. She’ll split off and go her own way soon.”

  Durk hasn’t finished saying it before Danielle’s car shifts gears and jumps ahead of our truck, cutting into our lane of traffic. The Trans Am has gone from driving next to us to braking in front of us.

  Durk slams his foot down to keep from colliding with its rear bumper.

  I grab the handle on the ceiling above my window as my seatbelt locks across my sternum. “What is she doing?”

  Danielle’s car stays in front of us, moving slowly for a few seconds. It’s long enough for us to get a good look at the black louvers of her rear window, long enough for her to be sure we understand who she is. We hear her engine over the sound of our air conditioning as she sprints ahead again, speeding away, veering in and out of the dense traffic.

  “What is she doing?”

  Durk speeds up to follow her. He’s more careful than she is, as he moves around the slower cars, but he needs to be quick to keep her in sight.

  “Is she trying to get herself killed?” I ask.

  Durk accelerates into a gap just barely large enough for the truck. The cars behind him are braking, screeching, honking.

  “Is she trying to get us killed?”

  I haven’t heard Durk swear like this in a long time. He adds, “They’ve had that speed trap set up in the construction zone under the overpass all week. There’ve been at least two cop cars sitting there every time I’ve driven through it. Danielle won’t make it past them, the way she’s driving. They’ll stop her for sure.”

  I rise to my knees on the passenger seat, trying to see over the tops of the cars ahead without giving up the protection of my seatbelt. “Not if she guns right through the pylons,” I say.

  Heat rising from the asphalt bends the view into waves. It’s hard to see the Trans Am in the shiny smear of traffic.

  “There she is,” I say. “She’s just about at the speed trap.”

  “Is she stopping?”

  I yell something. It’s not a word. I catch my breath and call, “She rammed right through it!”

  Under the overpass, plastic flares are smashed and strewn all over the road. The police are abandoning the drivers they’ve got pulled over, climbing into their cruisers with half-written tickets in their notepads. There are lights and sirens. The police follow Danielle down the freeway, not exactly chasing her, but shepherding her away from the rest of traffic, toward other officers, waiting at the next exit to stop her.

  Durk tromps the gas pedal into the floor and launches the truck into the open path of the shoulder lane. He throws the truck into four-wheel drive as I grip my seatbelt with both hands like the idiot token woman flailing from the sidelines in every TV crime show. The passenger-side wheels beneath me slide through gravel and weeds and shredded tire rubber on the shoulder of the road.

  “Sorry, Ash!” Durk calls as I ricochet between my seatbelt and the truck’s upholstery. No one ever says sorry to the token woman. This isn’t primetime network television. This is a marriage on a Wednesday night commute.

  We’re driving off-road, following noise and red and blue lights, when I see the cars we’re passing aren’t moving anymore.

  “Traffic’s stopped.” I say it like I’m terrified.

  Durk keeps the truck off-road, closing in on the section of the freeway where flashing lights are spinning, cars parked, jumbled around—something.

  “Close enough,” he says, jamming the truck into park and vaulting out the driver’s-side door.

  He runs—that tense, trotting sprint of his, hands up, fingers spread, hopping and skirting the parked police cars. There’s a spike belt on the road, and past it is Danielle’s crippled Trans Am. The sirens are quiet now. We hear voices from her car. A policeman is stooping into the open doorway yelling in peace officer dialect, “Remain seated ma’am. Your vehicle stopped at a high rate of speed and you may have sustained an injury. You must wait for medical personnel who will subsequently attend you.”

  There’s another officer—a lady in a ponytail and body armour—crouched on bent knees, leaning into Danielle’s face hollering questions.

  Above both these voices, we hear Danielle. She’s loud, like she’s arguing, but desperate and sadder than she can stand. Her words don’t make any sense until we hear her shout Durk’s name.

  “Danielle!” Durk calls back to her.

  He’s close enough to come up against the whole “Sir, you need to keep back” bit from the police officers, just like you’d expect from watching TV. By now, I’ve caught up to him at the barricade. My hand grips Durk’s arm. I’m pulling at him, trying to get him to stand behind me as I shout at the officers, yelling about being their deputy superintendent’s family and needing to be let through the line.

  Over the epaulettes of the uniforms in front of him, Durk sees Danielle’s hand—flashing small and white—reaching through the open car door. Through the chaos, she knows he’s here. She’s reaching past the lady police officer who’s still calling out a list of slang names for cocaine.

  “Durk, baby. Baby—you got to be quiet when Mommy’s old man is here sleeping it off. And stay away from him when he’s got a hot cigarette. And—oh God—I’m sorry.”

  Heather

  [18]

  Mum is not speaking to me.

  I can hear her talking to Tina. Mum has called her on the phone, which is strange. Everyone knows Mum doesn’t initiate phone contact with us. She doesn’t have to. At least one of us calls her, every single day, while she manages us—peeved and distracted—like a switchboard operator.

  I imagine Tina in her big noisy house, answering Mum’s call like an alarm, pressing the phone against her ear so hard it hurts, terrified someone is dead or maimed or sick enough to make our mother use her switchboa
rd to dial out.

  “Yes, Tina. Hello,” Mum says.

  Mum’s tone is more like a whine than a knell. She doesn’t sound poised to tell Tina Dad has finally had the heart attack, driving between jobsites, collapsed against the wheel of his pick-up truck, idling in the drive-thru of a roadside Tim Hortons, Stan Rogers singing “Northwest Passage” out of the stereo. It hasn’t happened yet but I’ve seen it in my mind, over and over.

  Mum says nothing like this, but Tina is asking after death and disaster anyway. It’s plain from the way Mum clucks and says. “Of course we’re okay. But I need someone to come over here to deal with Heather.”

  There’s a pause in her talk. Unseen by my mother, I tighten my jaw and brace for the punch I learned how to take when I was still a teenager.

  “No. No, Tina, nothing happened to Heather. Nothing happened to anyone. The thing is, your father mentioned he wanted more light in the bedroom. So, of course, Heather hopped up into the ceiling, right up in the rafters like some giant rodent, and she’s hanging a hideous new light fixture while he’s out of town.”

  Yes, I’m in my parents’ attic, above the ceiling of the bedroom where my mother is complaining to Tina about my filial good deeds.

  It must have been back in the seventies when designers decided it would be sexy to wire master bedroom light switches to nothing but the wall outlets. I’m old enough to remember the enormous, urn-like table lamps that lit up the grownups’ bedrooms of my childhood—voluptuous lamps with three-way bulbs for sophisticated, sensual free-spirits. No more of those hard-wired ceiling-mounted fixtures glaring down like dour, parental, post-war oppression. But now, the sexy seventies crowd, our parents’ crowd, have reached an age where muted mood lighting isn’t working well with their multi-focal eyeglasses.

  I am helping. Natural age-related vision loss—that’s the reason I volunteered to wire a new bedroom light fixture for Dad. Mum makes it sound like a home invasion, but she gave grudging consent for this project weeks ago.