Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  There’s an awful pause.

  I break it before Ashley has to do it herself. It’s the least I can do after all I owe her and Durk. “No. Believe him this time. Believe Durk. And I’m not deluded. I understand perfectly. May is dead. She’s cremated. I did it myself. I made Durk help.”

  Heather pulls the hair at her own temples. “Oh, for the love of—I never should have let you visit me at work, Suzanne. I should have never told you about my mother-in-law’s ring either.”

  “No,” I say. “No, it all happened way before I knew there was anything strange about the ring. And it wasn’t neat and sterile. There was no talc or lipstick. It was nothing like what you do at work.”

  “Yeah, Durk said they made the fire at a bush-party site, in the old gravel pit, with gasoline and pallets in the dirt,” Ashley finishes.

  “So why?” Heather says in a whisper-yell. “Why wouldn’t you call the ambulance as soon as she hit the ground? The paramedics and the police would have come. Ewan could have been there. I could have been there handling everything properly, legally. Instead you’re telling us you went mucking around committing indictable offences with Durk.”

  They’re still talking like this isn’t quite real, like it’s still negotiable—“would have, could have.”

  I tighten my hands into fists. “This was my mother-in-law. This was the lifeblood of Daughter-in-law Suzanne. This was perfection. Perfection—I had it between me and May. I had it. I couldn’t lose it.”

  Tina shakes her head. “Lifeblood—metaphors. Every time Suzanne’s in a panic—”

  “What she means,” Meaghan takes up my explanation. “Is that Suzanne did—what she did—for the reason exactly opposite to why I imploded my engagement to Ian.”

  Tina scoffs. “Suzanne did it because she fell out of love with a video game store clerk?”

  Meaghan swallows a calming breath. “Remember? I wanted to make sure I never had a mother-in-law so I could become just like the rest of you. But Suzanne—Suzanne wanted to make sure she kept her mother-in-law forever, no matter what, so she wouldn’t ever have to be just like—”

  There’s no need to finish it.

  Heather looks like she wants to hit me.

  Tina is kinder. She takes my hand. She says, “Sweetheart, the five of us are not all the same just because we are all the same.”

  I sniff. “You’re about to start with the giant cartoon robot again.”

  “Robot? What?” Our family’s connection to the defender of the universe must have left Tina’s mind when she threw up Martin’s whisky in her kitchen sink. She doesn’t remember—not in those terms, anyway.

  She laces her fingers through mine and raises our hands, holding them between my face and hers. “Look. We’re like five fingers on one hand. Separate but inseparable, all fused together at the roots—and better that way. See? It’s okay. It’s good.”

  I look where she tells me. I examine our clasped hands, turning them on the ends of our wrists. My sister’s hand is whiter than mine, and rosier. But the symmetry in our hands’ shapes is unmistakeable. Each finger, the palms and knuckles—the hands are not perfect, but the way they fit together, there’s something sublime about it anyway. It’s the fit that’s perfect. It always has been.

  My body is losing its rigidity. I sag at all my joints. My movement drags my hand out of Tina’s grip. I’m slumping onto the hospital bed, falling next to Mum’s casted ankle as she sleeps her deep, codeine sleep.

  I hear Heather speaking as I crumple. “Okay, Suzanne, we get it. Your mother-in-law is dead. Troy thinks she’s cleaning teeth in Guatemala but in reality, May is dead.”

  And with that, May is indeed more dead than she has ever been before.

  My range of vision has shrunk. The blinds in the window, the signs taped to the walls, every one of my sisters has drifted out of scope. The only thing I have left to see is my body against this blanket, my thighs in mottled grey faux-ga pants with grass-stained knees, my hands empty and clenched.

  There are arms around my shoulders. I am propped up, sitting. Meaghan’s cheek is pressed to mine. She’s saying something vague and sweet like, “Oh, my girl …”

  My sisters’ hands smooth my hair, wipe tears from the sides of my nose. This time it’s me. I am the one with the catastrophe that disrupts and devastates everyone. Birth, death, botched birth, botched death—anger is never my sisters’ answer, never our answer to something so vast. This is our answer—a closed circle, arms and tears, time.

  When I can see the rest of the room again, Ashley is still standing in the corner, arms folded. Heather is holding one of my hands. Meaghan is finger-combing my hair. Tina is settling a box of tissues into my lap.

  She remembers her lines. “Okay,” Tina says, “let’s fix what we can fix.”

  “Right. First, the practical problems,” Heather agrees. She is actually rolling up her sleeves. “Suzanne, where are May’s cremains right now?”

  Ashley snickers. “You’re going to love this. You know Troy’s new barbecue, the one Durk built right where Suzanne told him to? The one the city condemned?”

  “She’s in there,” I say. “May is packed inside a toolbox and bricked up in the barbecue.”

  “I don’t get why Durk went along with it.” Tina is addressing Ashley, not me.

  Ashley snorts. “Suzanne got him to drink some kind of witch-doctor tea.”

  “I did not.”

  “It was yellow and fishy and unholy.”

  “It was a detoxifying infusion. Troy developed it himself. It’s a cleansing, rehydrating, completely legal herbal remedy.” This protest is a mistake. The witch-doctor tea story is a less bizarre explanation for Durk’s cooperation than the real one—the one where I manipulate him, blending and shading the already smudged lines between Ashley and myself, tapping into that needy obedience he uses to redeem himself whenever he’s let her down.

  Heather is rubbing my hand between both of hers. “We need to figure something out. We can’t erase this, but we can edit it—fix it up. Right, Suze? We’ll find a way.”

  I’m pulling my hand from hers. “If you mean Ewan’s way, the one where I walk into the police station with May’s bones under my arm—”

  “No, of course I don’t mean Ewan’s way,” Heather calls over my voice. “There’s got to be something else we can do.”

  There’s another pause. And then, finally, someone says it. “Poor old May.”

  Yes, it’s taken too long for someone to say it. But it’s not because my sisters are without sympathy for May—the grandmother of their nieces, the noble humanitarian who fell to a quick, secret death on a set of wooden stairs she’d probably cleaned and polished herself out of love for me. Any sorrow, any grief my sisters have for May is crushed beneath something more pressing in their hierarchies of compassion. Everyone has a ranked order in which we’re able to feel for people. It’s the reason no one for thousands of miles was on the news talking about children in refugee camps the morning the World Trade Center collapsed. The toxic dust cloud that obscured my sisters from the pity they eventually found for May was their concern for stupid, sneaky me.

  Tina raises one finger. “Suzanne’s mother-in-law is supposed to be in Guatemala, right? And that’s the country next to Belize, isn’t it?”

  None of us knows.

  “Sure it is,” she continues. “Now, Martin has been saying he wants to take his new mom on a reunion vacation. It’s all garbage. He doesn’t mean it, of course. But I can call his bluff anyways. I’ll go ahead and book the trip. And I’ll book it for Belize. Vacationing in Guatemala would be a stretch, but there’s nothing suspicious about traveling to Belize.”

  Meaghan is figuring it out. “You could take May’s remains with you on vacation to Central America. And then leave her right where she’s supposed to be. So if someone finds her, so what?”


  “Wait.” I shake my head. “You can’t just pack her up in your suitcase and walk past the sniffer dogs at the airport. You’ll get busted.”

  “No, silly.” Tina pushes my knee. “While I’m on vacation, I’ll open a post office box in Belize. And then you can mail her to the box.”

  I gasp. “Can we do that? Can we mail charred human remains across international borders?”

  “You mean, the same way I mailed my mother-in-law’s ashes to the gemstone people in Arizona?” Heather reminds us. “Sure you can.”

  Dead stuff in the mail—it does happen. Troy tells about working in a university zoology lab as a summer student when a parcel arrived labelled “most of a mole.”

  Tina looks at her hands. “But it will be tricky for me to get away from Martin and his mom long enough to—handle things.”

  “Then take me and Durk with you,” Ashley is saying. She may have been angry, but she’s always intended to help rescue me anyway. “Suzanne can watch our kids while we’re gone. Durk and I will make up some excuse to go off on our own in Belize, get as close to the Guatemalan border as we safely can, and then—”

  “Bury her in the jungle?” I finish.

  “But don’t bury her too well,” Heather says. “It’s alright if someone finds her. If they do, Troy can have his ‘closure’ and a funeral. Things go wrong and people go missing in Central America sometimes—more often than they do way up here, anyways.”

  I’m still stammering protests. “What about the forensic stuff they can do with human remains now? Won’t they examine her with microscopes and test her for pollens and dig out the last of the DNA in her big bones and find out who she is and discover she didn’t really die in Guatemala?”

  Heather rolls her eyes. “Forensics? I’ve told you this before, Suzanne. It’s fiction. Those dark, blue-lit labs in TV shows where beautiful people agonize over one case at a time until they’ve unravelled it all and fooled the perpetrator into confessing everything in the interview room—it’s not real life. That’s not real police work. In real life, forensics labs are the same old understaffed government departments you see everywhere. They’ve got fluorescent light bulbs and staff in hairnets trained to be more concerned with closing files than solving mysteries. I mean, it can take Ewan months to hear back from the forensics lab on something as simple as a rape kit.”

  There is a list of horrifying words Heather and Ewan say more than any other people I know. “Rape” is on that list.

  “But,” I begin again, “but what if Troy goes to some Foreign Affairs department and demands a full-scale investigation?”

  “Then he’ll be working from inside Canada to get an investigation started in Guatemala on a body found in Belize. It’ll be a dead end. The other governments will freeze up, juggle responsibility between them, offer some pat answers, and do everything they can to never talk about it again.” Heather says it the way she says everything, like she’s completely sure of it. She rotates her wrist to see her watch. “Honey, your mother-in-law is due at home in a couple months, right? When she doesn’t come back, Troy is going to start asking questions. We need to take control while we still can.”

  “Is Mum really sleeping through this?” Ashley asks.

  Everyone jumps. Tina leans close to Mum’s face but Heather shoulders her out of the way. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Here’s the test,” she says. “Hey Mum, Dad says my lasagna tastes way better than the crap you make.”

  We brace ourselves. Mum doesn’t stir.

  Heather stands up, arms folded. “Oh yeah. She’s asleep.”

  “Okay, so we mail—the package?” Meaghan says.

  I shudder. “No. No, we can’t be sure she won’t go missing in the mail. And we can’t very well write my return address on the parcel. Mail won’t work. It’s the worst combination of too unreliable and too traceable.”

  Ashley is getting mad again. “Come on, Suzanne—”

  Tina raises a hand to stop her. “There is one route left,” she says. “The sea.”

  Tina

  [24]

  Look, we are not sailors.

  But we can pilot our big, dumb husbands. At first, Martin acts happy when he hears I’ve invited his new mother, the humble former mistress now retired to the suburbs of Guelph, on a reunion cruise to Belize. I get a big smile and a “Nice one, Peaches.”

  Then little by little, he realizes there’s no way to escape coming along himself. Only after he agrees to come do I tell him the rest. It will be a private cruise on a chartered yacht with just the family and a small crew on board—no kids, not even our bottle-sucking baby. Martin cheers up a bit when he hears that. He starts to scowl again when I tell him the yacht sails out of Halifax, five thousand miles away.

  “Tina, why in the world—”

  Things get worse when I tell him I mean to drive with Ashley and Durk to southern Ontario to pick up my mother-in-law myself.

  “Don’t worry, Martin, I certainly don’t expect you to slum it on a long car ride,” I say. “You can fly to Halifax and meet us there right before we ship out.”

  It isn’t enough. I have to spin some crazy story about postpartum depression recovery and instructions from my therapist and indulging my nostalgia for those long cross-country car rides Mum and Dad used to take us on when we were kids. I tell him road trips build relationships—say it’s a reason my sisters and I are still so close despite the spying and squabbling and everything.

  Martin keeps trying to squirm out of the trip right up until I mention how much he owes me after spending the winter having an affair with his sister.

  “Well, it’s cheaper than divorce court, right?” he laughs when he tells his downtown fat-cat cronies about our trip. That’s how he describes everything important to me: cheaper than divorce court.

  I know. The trip will probably go more smoothly if I don’t force Martin to come along. It might be safer to reward him for paying for the yacht and its crew and the resort and all the drinks by granting his wish to stay home. But not everything is about Suzanne’s bag of bones. Maybe I’d genuinely like to go on a vacation with my husband.

  Before we leave, we all go to Suzanne’s house while Troy is at the clinic. Durk comes with us. We are a demolition crew with sledge hammers, crow bars, a wheelbarrow, masks, and big plastic goggles to keep brick shrapnel out of our eyes.

  In the weeks his mother was entombed there, Troy never looked closely inside the hole Suzanne bashed in the barbecue. He left it alone, and the hole stayed small and dark. The one time I looked into it a little spider with a spotty grey exoskeleton the same colour as the mortar had spun a cobweb over the open space.

  The day of the demolition is in autumn, almost cold. The brick and cement are brittle and shatter on impact. We haul the barbecue down in one morning. We have to. Troy can’t know about the demolition phase of the plan until it’s finished. He is one of the more difficult of our husbands to pilot. There is no guarantee Suzanne could get him to agree through civilized marital negotiation channels, or the currency of sexual favours, or anything. Headlong destruction—it’s an old family trick of ours, a way to avoid arguments and move right to asking for forgiveness. If Troy is angry about the barbecue, Suzanne won’t lose much by apologizing for destroying it.

  When the cleft in the bricks is barely large enough, Suzanne pulls the metal toolbox urn out of the barbecue, gingerly, like a live explosive.

  Inside the house, she spreads a sheet of plastic on her bed and opens the toolbox. It’s May like I’ve never seen her before—a few curved pieces of cranium, the knobs of hips and shoulders, ash, and some sand from the gravel pit where they cremated her. Suzanne empties all of it into an oversized plastic freezer bag and seals it shut.

  Ashley and I kneel on the floor and tamper with the big green suitcase Ashley is going to be using as her luggage all the way to Belize. We sew the cremains—Heather’s go
t us calling them that now—into the space between the suitcase’s silky nylon lining and its thick, woven outer shell.

  “You know, it’s a good thing she’s not broken up any finer or she’d look like cocaine,” I say.

  “You think being caught at a border crossing with cocaine would be worse than being caught with a burned up human body?” Ashley asks.

  I smirk. “Probably depends on which border.”

  Hurricane season is over, Mum’s ankle is healed, and our plan for taking care of Suzanne’s mother-in-law is underway. Ashley and I have left to cross the continent, driving to the ocean, getting as close as we can to the Guatemala-Belize border.

  Ashley’s daughters are staying at Suzanne’s house. No one’s said so, but it’s part of the penance Suzanne is doing for making Durk help her in the first place. The little girls’ stay started as a giddy cousin sleepover but degenerated into a complicated system of alliances and power struggles, like a tedious reality television show that cannot be edited. Troy can hardly stand it.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t so many girls.” That’s what he says, according to what Suzanne’s written to us.

  I fall in and out of sisterly love with Troy, over and over again. All in-laws spin in that cycle. This is one of the moments when I am in no way in love with him. But I do know what he means. Troy doesn’t mind the girls fighting nearly as much as he minds them running to tell him about it all the time. The problem with raising boys is they don’t pay enough attention to their caregivers. The problem with raising girls is they pay way too much attention to their caregivers. I’m not sure how we end up programming them to act that way, but there it is.

  My kids are with our lazy nanny, snug and filthy in their own home. Mum is supposed to stop in once a day. She feels bad for me, being married to Martin, so she’ll do favours like this sometimes.

  Since we left, Ashley and I have been keeping in contact with the sisters at home through some superficially typical travelogue emails and the pictures we post on the Internet. Our messages are the same kinds of lame posts anyone would make, except for one thing. Somewhere, in every set of photos, Ashley’s forest green suitcase has to be visible—safe and secure—included as a sign everything is still alright.