Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  Durk shrugs. “I don’t know. We’ll meet whatever we meet.”

  I watch the road go by for another minute before I look away from the windshield and say, “This is far enough now, right?”

  He squints down the road. “Not yet.”

  I’m frowning. “I don’t believe in the witch-doctor tea story, Durk. I know you did this for no one’s sake but mine. Every bit of it—you did it for the part of Suzanne that overlaps me.”

  No one sighs as heavily as Durk. “This is far enough,” is what he says.

  A sign on the side of the road is marked with a yellow stickman holding a walking staff. It means there’s a trail here, branching away from the road, into the forest.

  Durk steers the truck as far off the highway as he can before it would have rolled into the steep ditch. When he’s outside, I crawl over the centre console and out the driver’s door. The unrefrigerated air hits me like steam shot out of a kettle. I’m instantly sweating as I step into the road behind Durk. He’s pulling my nearly empty green suitcase from behind the front seats. He rips the lining out, exposing the bag of bone and ash.

  The cremains come into plain sight, under a high, equatorial, noonday sun. The plastic shroud crackles, moving between Durk’s fingers. The grit inside it is dull—no tiny flakes of quartz to reflect the sunlight, not like real inorganic sand. I hate it.

  I’m staggering, sick. Maybe it’s from the light, or the heat, or a blast of the same chi that moves through the graveyards back home—the bad energy that used to knot up Durk’s stomach when we’d worked too long among the dead. It’s funny. Ever since this thing with May, graveyards don’t make him sick anymore. I’m the one who’s sick now, doubled over in the middle of a highway next to my gutted suitcase.

  Durk doesn’t see me sinking toward the hot, oily surface of the road. I want to call out to him but the need to keep quiet and unseen as we finish this errand overwhelms me. I can’t speak. I snatch at his free hand.

  “Ashley? Hey, you okay?”

  I’ve got him. My grip is strong and I’m moving, lunging forward, foot in front of foot, dragging Durk out of the light, out of the open roadway. I’m sick but running through the heat, toward the trees.

  “Not the trees, the trail,” Durk calls down the length of our arms.

  I veer toward the trailhead, to the space where the trees are farther apart than in the rest of the forest. On the path, beneath the trees, it’s instantly green and dark—dark enough to dilate my pupils. I halt. Durk runs into me, knocking me forward and grabbing me backward at the same time, trying to keep me upright, setting me onto my feet again. The bag of bones in his grip crunches against my back as he reaches for me. Something in me so desperate and visceral I hardly recognize it throws my body away from him. I’m on the ground, scuttling away from my husband in a crab-walk through the forest litter.

  “Ashley, get up,” he pleads. “There might be centipedes.”

  “Dump it.”

  “We’re still too close to the road.”

  “Dump it out!”

  “Not yet. A little longer.”

  I give up and sit there, on my tailbone, on the ground, looking almost exactly like Suzanne must have looked the morning they took May to the gravel pit. Only I’m crying, sobbing into the palms of both my hands. I’m telling Durk what Suzanne has never told him.

  “Durk—we’re all so sorry.”

  He’s on his knees in spite of the centipedes. “I know,” he says. “I know. Come on. Let’s go.”

  He’s hauling me upward. When I’m on my feet, he tucks my head under his chin. He keeps the bag of bones away from me as he bends his neck and kisses the top of my sweaty head. “You okay? You ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what kinds of animals do they have out here, anyway?” he asks, because it has nothing to do with a burned-up mother-in-law. “You spent all that time on the boat reading those books Ewan gave us. Did they say anything about monkeys?”

  I sniff. “Uh, yeah. But there probably aren’t any up at this elevation. We’re too close to the mountains.”

  “What about jaguars?”

  “They’re down in the lowlands too.”

  “Eating the monkeys?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How about alligators? Are we in danger from alligators?”

  “Only if we’re near water.”

  “Okay, so what’s the scariest animal threatening our lives right this minute?”

  I stop walking and look into the green canopy over our heads. “Boa constrictors.”

  Durk twitches. “That’ll do it.”

  He stops and turns in a slow circle. “Time to make a resting place for our passenger. How’s right here?”

  He’s got a small trowel with him, like the kind we use to plant tulip bulbs in the fall. He takes it out of his pocket. Both of his hands are full. One holds the trowel, the other is holding May.

  “I can take her.” I’m tugging on the edge of the plastic bag. “It’s not like I haven’t held her before. I’ll take care of her while you dig.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t like seeing the direct sun on you and her at the same time. But it’s not so bad in the trees.”

  I slip the bag from his hand as he crouches to scrape a hollow out of the earth. It’s about a metre away from the edge of the hiking trail. I stand behind him, gripping the edge of the bag in one fist, watching the trailhead. “Not too deep,” I remind him.

  It doesn’t take long to prepare the shallow trench-grave. In a moment Durk is stooped beside it. I hand him the plastic bag.

  “We can’t leave the bag behind,” he says. “We’re going to have to take her out of it, scatter her inside the grave.”

  There’s no wind in the trees, and the humidity of the place makes the light ash and grit instantly heavy and damp. May’s remains fall out neatly, filling the hollow without drifting. Durk uses the trowel to pile a layer of dirt over them. With the side of my foot, I heap dead leaves and indignant insects on top of it. A cracking sound is muffled as I pack the mound with the sole of my shoe. It’s not all that gross or sad. It’s final, like good punctuation.

  Durk tucks the trowel into his back pocket and glances up the path to where the hot metal of the pickup truck blocks the trailhead.

  “Steel,” I remember. “On our eleventh anniversary, we’re supposed to give each other gifts made out of steel.”

  There’s still no one here to see us. Durk finds his lighter and flicks a flame out of it. He touches the fire to a corner of the plastic, and the whole thing disappears into smoke. It happens so quickly he hardly has time to let go.

  “Should we,” he begins, “should we, I don’t know—pray, or something, before we leave?”

  I let my head droop. I haven’t prayed since I was a kid, since we all used to go to church together. “What could we possibly have to say in a prayer?”

  “Nothing. But talking isn’t the only way to pray.” Durk closes his eyes and spreads his arms. He tips his head back, facing every boa constrictor in the canopy above. “Like this,” he says.

  I raise both my arms, exactly like his, leaning back so the dappled green light colours my face.

  We blow all the air we can out of our bodies. And as we pull it in again, Durk speaks. He says, “Adiós.”

  Suzanne

  [27]

  From our winter-dark early morning bedroom in Canada, Troy places a phone call to Dental Vision International, the agency May volunteered with in Central America. On the edge of our unmade bed, he sits down with the phone and a pad of paper right at eight o’clock. He’s been fretting all night.

  “Are you sure they’re in the same time zone as us?” he asks, fingering the keypad, stalling now the time has arrived.

  “Positive,” I say. “Mountain standard tim
e.”

  “May?” says the American humanitarian on the phone in Guatemala. “When she didn’t report in last spring, we figured May must have made other plans.”

  “Made other plans” is his polite term for “flaked out.” The humanitarian on the phone is not Mother Teresa—not yet—and he’s a bit cynical when it comes to good intentions.

  “So you just let it go?” Troy prods. “You didn’t try to find her when she didn’t show up?”

  “Oh no,” the humanitarian rushes. “We did try. But we couldn’t contact her at either of the numbers we had on file. We did leave quite a few messages on her voicemail.” He hates the sound of his own cynicism, reverberating through Troy’s silence. “Sorry.”

  “You just—gave up on her?”

  “Unfortunately, we have to give up on people all the time around here. Volunteers come to us when they’re dumped or grieving or flunking out of school, trying to redeem themselves. But once they start to cheer up, they can get distracted and forget about our work. And then they can’t bring themselves to face us and they just ignore our calls. I’m not saying May is like that. But thanks to everyone who is, we don’t have the resources to chase down prospective volunteers who lose touch with us. I wish we did.”

  Troy hangs up the phone and claps his hand on the back of his neck. I flip his notepad to the page with the number for the Canadian Consulate in Guatemala.

  Embarrassed by his meek neediness with the aid organization, Troy takes a different approach with the Consulate. He speaks to them coolly, almost disinterestedly. He’s saying, “You probably get pestered by jumpy relatives making requests like this all the time but ...”

  Of course, they haven’t heard from May either. They agree to start looking for her.

  The phone calls don’t last long enough to cause Troy to open the clinic late. He tells the officials in Guatemala I’m authorized to speak for him for the rest of the day, and then he rushes down the stairs for his shoes.

  I follow, watching as he scuffs his loafers onto his feet. Before he goes, I kiss him goodbye. I kiss him goodbye whenever he leaves the house. It’s not because we have a good marriage but because we don’t quite have a good one. Our kiss is a wish, or a prayer. I bow to it every morning like a ritual performed by rote. But today’s parting kiss is useful. It’s dry and tight and quick—so hard it knocks me slightly backward, as if Troy can’t calibrate his force. He is starting to panic.

  He can’t work. The clinic closes early when Troy leaves at lunch. He’s not coming home, but driving to May’s house. “Who knows, Sue, she could be in there. She could have come back and just laid low, taking a break from everything or—or—I don’t know. We shouldn’t have let her work so hard when she came to visit us.”

  I mind our home phone while Troy goes questing for his mother, alone. If we were Heather and Ewan or Ashley and Durk, I would go with him. He wouldn’t be able to stop me. But we are Suzanne and Troy. He goes. I stay. From an upstairs window, I watch him reversing into the icy street, backing away from our house with his arm thrown over the top of the vacant passenger’s seat, jaw tight over straight, white, gritted teeth.

  It’s not until Troy is standing on his mother’s front step, between two huge blue willow bushes, that he realizes he’s forgotten to bring May’s emergency spare key. He comes in through the patio doors, the way Durk taught him. It’s okay. Breaking and entering is lawful in exigent circumstances. That’s what Ewan will say when Troy confesses to him, later.

  Stomping through her empty house, Troy calls May’s name, loudly but not yelling. She’s not there. Nothing is there. The fridge is empty and her parakeet, her papers, her purse, her pink cell phone, her biggest suitcase are all gone.

  Troy returns home, a jittery wreck. I meet him at the door. I already know he’s found nothing at May’s house but I listen to his report anyway, my head bowed, face hidden as I tidy the pile of boots in the front hall closet. His hair is matted where he’s been rubbing at the back of his skull, a nervous habit he’s hardly ever nervous enough to activate.

  He’s anxious, asking me for a report from the Consulate in Guatemala. I stand and close my arms around his ribcage. When the Consulate called this evening, I tried to sound confused as they told me they couldn’t find any written record of May entering the country. What no one in the office wanted to admit is how un-extraordinary this is in that part of the world.

  “They say she’s officially missing,” I tell Troy. “And they said we should keep it quiet and out of the news for a while. There are people who might hear an affluent foreigner is unaccounted for and try to extort a ransom from us whether they know anything about where she is or not.”

  He pulls away from me, stooping to sit on the bottom step, right where I found May.

  I hate this house.

  “Anything from Mexico?” he asks.

  There has been word from the officials in Mexico. It’s new information—and it’s worked out far better than I imagined it could.

  If the search for May had started in Canada, following a trail of circumstantial evidence southward, it would have been clear she never boarded a plane. She used her airline’s online service to check in and printed her boarding pass on the computer at our house the morning of the fall. That’s the closest thing there is to a paper trail of her trip. It’s short and it ends right here, in my house.

  But the search for May doesn’t begin in Canada. It starts in Guatemala, working northward, traveling backward through stranger territory.

  We’ve told the Consulates May planned to fly from Canada directly to Mexico. She meant to stop to visit the Mexican village where she did her last humanitarian mission—a homecoming for the angel of floss and fluoride. From there, she was supposed to ride a bus across the border into Guatemala.

  In Mexico, bureaucrats tried to find a record of May arriving in the country. They were still looking for it when something arose that trumped a mere paper trail. Ewan says direct evidence—things like eye-witness reports—are always considered superior to circumstantial evidence like scraps of paper and electronic blips. And somewhere between the people in the little village on May’s itinerary and the police officers the Consulate sent to investigate, everyone agreed they’d seen May—the tall, old, white lady with the case of shiny metal hooks for picking at teeth. They’d seen her, fed her, and sent her safely on her way. That’s what they all said. No one wants their hometown to become part of an international incident involving a missing aid worker. They want her to pass through safely, even if it takes all the powers of their collective imagination to make it so.

  Everything is easy—everything but the sight of Troy on the bottom stair with his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced through his hair.

  I didn’t do this to him. I made it stranger and more difficult than it has to be, but May would have died whether I’d been standing here to see it or not. And since then, I’ve given him months and months more of his mother’s life than the cosmos ever intended him to have. I’ve kept May alive. A person’s official death date isn’t declared until someone living knows for sure they’re gone. That’s what Heather says. Remember? What was it Durk said in the gravel pit? What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve? I don’t know if it’s true. I’ll find out when Troy finds out.

  The day we call the Consulate, my sisters post a new picture from Belize. It’s a shot of Ashley and Tina beside a low, five-headed waterfall. The girls are standing on wet, dark rocks at the bottom of the falls, and at the edge of the frame, floating in a pocket of still water, is a large, green suitcase. The suitcase’s zipper is undone. The flap is wide open and the whole thing is inverted, face down in the water—empty.

  “Check out this crazy waterfall we found,” Ashley writes. “You’ll never guess what they call it. Someone who’s never even met us named it The Five Sisters.”

  By the time Tina and Ashley an
d the rest of them fly home, May’s disappearance has become part of suppertime television news after all. It leaked into the tiny town where Troy was raised—a town where everyone is a little bit related and a secret shared among family is the same thing as common knowledge. The news coverage comes with a grainy reproduction of a photo of herself May posted on an Internet profile ages ago.

  Martin tries to lighten the funk by making up stories about May falling in love and eventually turning up happier than any of us have ever known her on a beach somewhere in the Dominican Republic. It’s as typical of him as it is excruciating.

  “Or maybe,” he says, “she’s joined the Castro brothers and she’s part of the revolution now.”

  The scenario is goofy even for Martin. He’s in full-throttle improbable happily-ever-after mode. None of us knows it yet, but it’s part of his denial that his marriage to Tina is over.

  The day Ashley and Durk went into the jungle to bury May, Martin fell asleep on the pool deck at the resort. As the planet moved him out of the shade to where the sun’s radiation could burn him up, Tina tried to tow his wheeled lounger back into the shadows. That’s when his phone slid off his chest and onto the concrete. She picked it up to see if the screen had cracked. The glass was intact and beneath it was a photo not of any long-lost sister but of a woman Tina knows well: Martin’s assistant—the one with the brand new comic book breast implants—completely naked.

  “It was not pretty,” Tina will tell us after Martin starts sleeping in his office. “The stupid girl was splayed out like something in a medical textbook, like she was prepped for surgery.”

  There’s no cute route around it this time. Martin is the cheating brother-in-law, the ex-brother-in-law. I suppose it was inevitable. What are the odds five sisters would all marry and stay that way for life? Not one of the Dionne quintuplets did it. Divorce, vows of celibacy, death—statistical probability will not abide a universe of well-loved girls.

  While Martin is glossing over the immediate future, pretending catastrophes like May’s disappearance can always be softened into charming capers, Ewan is expecting the very gloomiest outcome. Heather has kept my secret from him, but his well-developed sense of foreboding tells him May is dead. Ewan can’t help being a doomsayer. If something doesn’t end in carnage, no one puts it on his desk so he can make it right. He’s got no faith in any happy ending but his and Heather’s. There isn’t much happiness at the police department, only justice—all that horrible justice.