Meaghan hasn’t been staying in the spare bedroom of Mum and Dad’s place for very long when Troy comes home from a Saturday afternoon of golfing and notices my phone vibrating on the kitchen counter.
I’m outside, standing on the lawn, my back bent in an awkward sweeping stoop as I finish the last of the grass clipping with a noisy electric trimmer. It’s not hot anymore, but the grass is still growing. It’s important to me to keep the tall, seedy stalks sprouting around the condemned barbecue cut low and neat and out of Troy’s notice.
I don’t see him crossing the lawn, waving my phone. I can’t hear anything over the high, hungry whine of the grass trimmer’s motor. As I work, I’m playing my sister classification game again—not with soul colours or punctuation this time. Today, it’s parts of speech, grammar, conjunctions. Meaghan would be “and,” Ashley would be “but,” Tina is “so,” and Heather is “because.” I’m just deciding I must be “if” when Troy taps my shoulder.
I squeal and twitch, whipping the trimmer’s nylon flail against the brick-face. “Troy!” I exhale when I recognize him.
“Sheesh, Sue. Sorry. You’ve got a text from Meaghan,” he tells me. “Looks important. She says your mom fell down the stairs and they’re all gathering at the hospital.”
My face blanches so quickly it hurts. “Mum? Is she okay?”
Troy sees I’m scared. In truth, he doesn’t have anything to offer to reassure me, but he still says, “I sent back a message asking for details. No one’s replied yet. But no one said she’s not okay so—”
“It doesn’t say she is okay either.” I’m talking too loudly, dropping the trimmer onto the lawn, snatching my phone.
“Sue, you need to calm down,” Troy tells me as I read Meaghan’s message. “People fall down the stairs all the time without getting badly injured.”
“At her age?”
“Sure. And then they head to the chiropractor in the clinic next door to mine, he fixes them up, and that’s the end of it.”
“And sometimes ladies like her fall down the stairs and wind up paralysed or—dead.”
Troy catches my arm as I’m rushing past him. “Suzanne, calm down. Your mom didn’t paralyse or kill herself.”
He’s feeling for an acupressure point in my wrist but I tear my arm out of his hold. “You would say that, wouldn’t you Troy?”
“Suzanne,” he calls after me. “Let me drive you to the hospital. You shouldn’t go out into traffic when you’re upset like this.”
“I am not upset,” I yell to him, over my shoulder. “At least, I won’t be as soon as I see for myself she’s okay. You need to stay here and watch the kids for me while I’m gone.”
My pulse is crashing behind my temples as I drive to the hospital. I’m still able to navigate the complicated exchanges, in and out of fast, dense traffic. Maybe Nurse Suzanne has surfaced to take the wheel.
As she drives, my memory is working, flipping pages, skimming records, scanning for references to my mother—some testament of her strength or hardiness. I find something—not quite my mother’s image but close. It’s Tina, in her own house, between pregnancies, pink-faced, punishing Martin for something she won’t fully explain to us. He’s away on a business trip again, and she’s determined to drink an entire bottle of his best, most expensive Scotch before he gets home.
“Hey, you don’t give whisky to the baby sisters,” Heather scolds as Tina pours shots for Ashley and Meaghan. “What’s the matter with you? If the point is to mortify Martin, just flush it down the toilet.”
The three of them laugh, hissing fumes into our faces. It’s goofy enough for Heather and me to be standing to leave when Tina stops us, clawing at our sleeves, ranting about Mum.
“Girls, wait. It’s important. My kids discovered that show—that old cartoon about the giant robot.”
Heather yawns. “Sweetie, all cartoons are about giant robots.”
Tina shushes her. “Do you guys know it? It looks like it’s from Japan, I think. It’s got that look. And it’s about a giant robot made out of five other robots all stuck together. Five. It’s the most powerful machine ever.”
Meaghan knows the show and hums something that must be its theme song. “Defender of the universe!” she sings.
Tina flaps her hands. “Ssh. Yeah, this robot takes care of the whole universe. It’s, like, the ultimate mother of everything—fix you, help you, save you.” Tina stops to nod at us. “Get it? Do you get it, Heather?”
Heather piles both of Tina’s hands between her own. “Tina, honey, it’s late and you reek and you’re—”
Tina extracts her hands. “We are that robot. All us girls—we’re five things stuck together to make one super-thing.”
Ashley throws her arms around Tina. “Aw, nice.”
Tina is reaching, gripping my wrist and Heather’s in each of her hands. “No, it’s not nice,” she says. “You know why we have to make the super-thing out of ourselves? You know, Suzanne. Tell them. Tell everybody.”
She blinks at me, slow and drunk, no mascara, light brown eyelashes soft and straight like little-girl Tina’s. I don’t drink but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand why other people do. Sometimes, they do it hoping to be treated like children again. They want other adults to handle them with the same tender bemusement, sympathy, and pity normally reserved for noisy, naughty children. They want someone to take responsibility for them the way no one will when they’re sober. They want the same thing they always want. They want love.
I turn up the palm of my free hand to show my drunk sister it’s empty. “Sorry, sweetheart. I got nothing.”
“Tell them, Suzanne,” Tina insists. “Tell them it’s because there’s no super-thing in our universe. There’s nothing much to mother us. Our mother—no, she always says it wrong, makes us lonely, takes us apart.”
Ashley seems to understand. She keeps one arm around Tina as she grabs at Meaghan, pulling her to where the rest of us are crowded together, hands and arms fitting in and around each other like plugs in sockets. I give in, cupping the crown of Tina’s head with my palm. Heather plays along too, patting Meaghan’s back, adding percussion to the cartoon robot’s theme song the girl won’t stop humming.
“We have to build it out of ourselves,” Tina calls over the humming and thumping, “because there’s too much space and she can’t come near us.”
Outside the Grey Nuns Hospital today, Nurse Suzanne finds a place to park in the crowded lot, moves through the motions of paying at the meter, like a good citizen.
Nurse Suzanne looks like every other woman walking through the hospital atrium to the information desk. She doesn’t storm the clerk and demand to see Mum. She smiles, waits patiently to be told where to find her. When the clerk doesn’t say, “In the morgue,” she doesn’t let out a huge sigh or anything so dramatic. She just says thank you and heads for the elevators.
Maybe Nurse Suzanne can’t exist when there’s no one around to see her. Even if it’s just the other drivers on the Whitemud Freeway, someone has to be able to see her or she can’t be real. There’s no one else in the elevator when it lands on the main floor. When Nurse Suzanne steps inside and its doors slide closed, she is cut off from her audience. She dissolves even in this small, brief bit of solitude and I fall into the elevator’s wall. I slide downward until I’m squatting on the dirty floor. Against the wall, my breathing is loud and heavy. My hands have nothing to hold but each other.
Tina
[22]
There’s no point freaking out when I find Suzanne down on the floor inside the hospital elevator. The doors clatter open, and there she is, head bowed into her knees. I see her before she sees me standing at the vending machines.
“Suzanne? Suze, honey, get up.”
I step into the elevator to tug her to her feet. We don’t clear the doors before they start to close, banging against me and b
ouncing back into the sides of the box.
“Hey, you look like you could use some juice,” I say. “Take this.”
“How is Mum?”
Suzanne is stunned, flattened and single-minded. I laugh—not because her fear is funny but because laughing will fight it off. “Mum is fine,” I answer, latching my arm through Suzanne’s. She is older than me, but not by much, born in the frenzy of the oh-so fruitful middle of our parents’ reproductive career. It’s weird for me to be guiding her along the hospital corridor like she’s an old lady crossing the street in a 1950s Boy Scout manual. “Mum is fine,” I say again. “But she did break her ankle.”
Suzanne hands my bottle of juice back to me, unopened.
I keep talking. “They say it looks pretty good for a break, but there’s still a chance they might have to operate. They’re keeping her in here until she can bear weight on it, just to be sure.”
Suzanne isn’t saying anything, so I speak for her. “I know. I kind of spazzed out when I got Meaghan’s text too. She’s not the greatest communicator sometimes—sending out a vague, scary message like that.”
“Yeah.”
There, I finally got Suzanne to agree to something.
“Where is she now?” she wants to know.
“Mum? She’s here, in room four. Dad’s out of town, of course. Heather already phoned him. Don’t worry. He’s heading back—not that there’ll be anything he can do once he gets here.”
There’s a nurse coming out of room four. He’s a young, cute guy with fuzzy blond hair all over his bare forearms. He’s carrying a capped, empty syringe. “Hey, look at you,” he greets me. “You went and found another sister?”
I grin at him. “Yup. This is the last of us. All five accounted for.”
“What? There are only five of you? That’s a shame.” He laughs and waves the empty syringe. “Well, you’d better hop inside and say ‘hi’ to Mom quick, before she falls asleep. We gave her a hand managing her pain, and it’s already making her mighty drowsy.”
None of us appreciates cute guys more than Suzanne, but she doesn’t say anything to the nurse—doesn’t even identify herself as a fellow member of their nursing sister—er—siblinghood.
I tow her through the doorway. Mum is in bed—safe, drugged, dozing. Heather is leaning into her face, way too close to Mum’s closed mouth and eyes. “I think she’s asleep already,” Heather says.
“It’s not just the drugs,” I add. “She’s probably exhausted from being in shock from her injuries, right Suze?”
We always defer to Suzanne’s professional medical experience at times like this. She never gets uppity about it. She’s smart, but she’s still Suzanne, all sweet and modest. It’s weird that she’s got nothing helpful or reassuring to offer us today. Instead, she’s got questions.
“How did it happen?”
Meaghan sighs. “You guys have heard me explain it three times already. Why doesn’t one of you tell her?”
Heather sighs right back. “Because that would be a hearsay account, and it’s not as good as an eyewitness report.”
“What the hell happened?”
It’s Suzanne—or, some kind of crazy version of Suzanne, yelling over their voices in the hospital room like an idiot. It’s loud, but Mum doesn’t twitch in her sleep, under the flannel blanket.
I’ve had enough. “Okay, Suzanne. You know how Mum always piles stuff on the stairs, so she won’t forget to take it up with her?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she forgot she’d left a stack of clean towels—”
“Actually, it was a pair of sandals,” Meaghan interjects.
“Whatever. She’d left something on the stairs and then she forgot it was there and ended up tripping on it. It was a fall sixty years in the making.”
“So anyways,” Heather interrupts, as if I’m not telling it right. “Mum hyper-extended her right ankle and broke it trying to catch herself on her feet at the bottom of the stairs.”
“I heard the crack all the way from the kitchen,” Meaghan adds. “I’m just glad she didn’t tumble down head over heels. It was really more of a slip with a bad landing than an actual fall.”
“Yes,” Ashley says. “Yes, it’s a good thing Mum landed on her ankle and not on her neck. Isn’t that right, Suzanne?”
Suzanne looks up from where she’s been watching Mum revving up her snoring engines in the hospital bed. Across the room, Ashley is leaning against the wall. Her chin is tucked and her eyes are slightly narrowed as she watches Suzanne. I’m pretty sure that’s considered glaring.
And I feel it—I think we all do. Ashley and Suzanne are the edges of two tectonic plates about to slip against each other. Something is shifting.
We can’t stay like this. I’m talking again. “So, yeah, the ankle is in a cast under the blankets there. Maybe you want to take a look at it, Suzanne. They say operation or not, she should be totally fine in a few weeks.”
Suzanne stares into the hospital bed.
“Smile, Suzanne,” Meaghan says. She bats Suzanne lightly on the arm. “Mum is going to be fine.”
“Be happy for her,” Heather adds. “We’ve all heard her say she loves being in the hospital. It means she doesn’t have to get dressed, or cook, or clean, or answer the phone.”
Suzanne starts to cry. She’s not crying with her breath but with her voice, sobbing like a kid.
“Hey, hey. It’s alright.” I put an arm around her but she hops away, retreating into the corner between the oxygen port and the window, raising a racket from the plastic vertical blinds.
“Okay, what is going on with you, Suzanne?” Heather moves to stand in front of her, taking that wide stance.
In the opposite corner of the room, Ashley is shaking her head. “It’s time to tell everyone, Suze.”
Suzanne raises her head, burbles, speaking through a sob, talking to Ashley as if the rest of us aren’t here. “You know. Durk told you.”
“Of course he told me. How could he stop himself from telling me?”
“When did he—?”
“Right away—the same day you did it.”
Meaghan looks like she might puke. “Suzanne and Durk did it?”
“No!” Ashley and Suzanne answer in unison.
I’m shaking my head. “What are we talking about?”
Heather pounces. “Is this it? Is someone finally going to explain why Suzanne has been in mourning all summer?”
“Yeah, Heather says you’re acting bereaved.” Meaghan tells Suzanne. “And I think she could be right. But I can’t imagine how it’d be true. My theory is you killed someone’s pet. But Tina accidentally killed the cat that was sleeping in the guts of her car last winter and she says you’d be over that by now.”
I did say that.
“So she figures it’s got to be something worse—like a secret unreported car accident, maybe.”
I gasp. “What? I never said that! I never meant it seriously, anyways. Sheesh, Meaghan. Shut up.”
I can’t face Suzanne. I look at Ashley instead—this strange seething, glaring Ashley. I’ve never seen her and Suzanne look so little alike.
“See,” Ashley says, “they’ve been waiting for months, Suzanne. No one has any secrets—not for real and not for long. So how about I get your story started for you? Girls, this isn’t the first time this year a lady we know has taken a bad fall down some stairs.”
We wait.
Ashley scoffs. “Oh, come on. You’re still not going to tell them, Suzanne? Fine. Girls, last spring—”
“Wait,” Suzanne blurts. “Ashley—just—wait.”
Suzanne is panting, struggling to breathe. “My mother-in-law—May—she fell down the stairs and landed on her neck. And she died.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“In Gua
temala?”
Suzanne gulps at the hospital air. “No. She fell and died in my house, while Troy was at work, about four months ago.”
Suzanne
[23]
I am braced against an onslaught that is not coming. Huffing, denouncing, swearing, slapping—that isn’t it at all. My sisters’ response to the news that my mother-in-law is secretly dead is restraint—cautious, slow, almost dense.
As always, Tina is the first to risk speaking. “Wait, Suzanne. If May is dead, how come we never heard anything about it? Are you sure—”
“She is dead. It’s true. The only reason no one knows is because I purposely postponed telling anyone about it. Troy himself doesn’t even know.”
Ashley yells out a humourless laugh. “Postponed? You hid it.”
“Shh.” Heather leans forward. She’s sorting through the archives of the criminology degree lodged in her head. She’s in the abnormal psychology section, under “d” for delusional. “Suzanne, you’re very close to your mother-in-law, and you haven’t seen her for a long time now. That’s got to be scary and stressful but—”
“She’s dead,” I interrupt. “She really is. It was an accident. And it wasn’t my fault. It was even more innocent than what’s happened to Mum today. It’s not like I left tripping hazards all over the stairs. May just—slipped.”
Heather taps her forehead. “You’re trying to tell us May fell, died, and then, since no one else was in the house at the time—”
“What do you mean, ‘no one else?’” Ashley tears in. “What about Durk? Go ahead, Suzanne, tell them what you put Durk through.”
My head droops. I can’t speak.
Ashley is talking, not speaking for me but against me. “Durk was crashed on Suzanne’s couch that morning. He was still lying there when May fell. So Suzanne got him to help her move the body out of the house and drive it into the country to cremate it.”
Tina snaps. “Oh, come on. The corroborating witness is Durk? So Durk told Ashley another crazy story. So what?”
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