Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  It’s still winter when the Canadian Consulate in Guatemala finds remains that might be May’s. A federal police officer—not one of Ewan’s city cops—comes to our house with latex gloves, a sterile bag, and a swab to rub against the inside of Troy’s cheek. They’re trying to match his DNA to whatever might be left in the densest part of charred human bones they’ve found.

  “The remains in question were located near the Guatemalan border,” the officer explains. “Off in the east.”

  “East?” Troy echoes. “There’s no reason my mother would have been way over by the border.”

  “The remains weren’t necessarily found at the site of the fatality. The area of interest is utilized by a large and mobile wildlife population and there is reason to suspect some animal involvement.”

  Troy drops his head into his hands.

  The officer knows he’s wrecked it. He’s panicking. “What I mean to indicate is the area where the remains were subsequently located might not be the same as the location wherein they were first deposited.”

  The DNA match between Troy and the bones at the Guatemalan border comes back from the lab quickly enough to impress even jaded Ewan. He says so when he arrives at our front door with the official letter explaining the remains have been identified as May’s.

  The police theory tacked to the bones is that something living in the forest found and unearthed them. Eventually, they were noticed by a troupe of amateur European lepidopterists on vacation, hiking through the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest, near the Guatemalan border. By now, pictures of May’s bones are probably posted in travel galleries all over the Internet alongside shots of rare, equatorial butterflies.

  Despite any guidelines about conflicts of interest, Ewan is now personally involved in May’s case. The “animal involvement” officer comes along with him, but only Ewan speaks to us. It’s sweet but terrifying. The possibility of Ewan assuming his badger form and clamping onto May’s suspicious burial has been something I’ve dreaded and avoided from the moment May fell.

  But he seems satisfied with the story the police and the consular officials have agreed upon. He repeats it to us in our living room. “They’re saying May could have just as easily suffered an accident or a natural death—like a stroke or a fall or something—as a homicide. All it would have taken would have been for whoever found her to see she was a foreigner, panic, burn her remains, and hide them in the jungle.”

  Troy sits through all of it leaning forward on the couch, pinching his hands between his knees, agitated but grave.

  “Oh, May,” I say. There’s no acting, no pretending to be gutted. I thought I’d be fighting the urge to high five my sisters when we got to this point. But I’m struck with a funny nausea, not in my stomach but in my chest, around my heart itself.

  I will mourn May, now it’s possible for me to do so. I will miss her. I will miss what I see of her in Troy as he covers his face with both his hands and finally starts to cry.

  Ewan pats him hard on the back and takes leave of us. The remains, he says, will be released for burial in a few days. There are arrangements to be made. Heather will help.

  The front door clicks closed, and I go to Troy. I cradle his head in my arms. I try to smooth the knot of dark hair on the back of his head. I kiss his crown. The rote prayer of my kiss has traces of soul in it.

  What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve. I know this for what it is now. It’s a lie and that’s all—fantasy, delusion. Troy’s sorrow for his mother isn’t only for her death but for the time he carried on eating fish oil, sniffing eucalyptus, golfing, drilling teeth, living as if his mother was safe and well when she was not.

  The moment Ewan arrived here to reveal the results of the DNA test was like the point in a pool of water where a stone is thrown into it. Ripples move away from the point in unbroken concentric circles, waving in all directions, the same speed and size, disturbing all the waters. In the same way, Troy’s grief flows away from here—from this evening, this room, these tears—filling the immensity of his entire life. It’s as if there’s no such thing as time, nothing aligning and separating the events that make up our lives. His mother’s death floods into every minute before and after this one. And we are left with one great waving sea of pain.

  Those months I thought I spared Troy suffering are shot through with grief now. In his sobs I hear that I’ve spared him nothing.

  The eye—what’s seen with the eye is no gauge of what the heart will grieve.

  The son whose mother lives, spry and happy, on and on, is gone. He joins my perfect daughter-in-law persona in a place neither Troy nor I will ever see again. Neither the son nor the daughter-in-law was meant to last forever—not as we knew them, anyway. It was madness for me to fight against their endings. But don’t we all fight against our endings, every minute of our lives? I missed the signal, somehow—the sign we all acknowledge as the point where resistance must end.

  I accept the endings—all of them—as Troy’s arms clamp around my waist. I am horrible and wrong, but my body is here to comfort him anyway, still soft and warm, still keeping its promises. It is what I can offer—for the moment, all I can offer.

  All

  [28]

  We are sitting the way everyone wants us to sit: lined up in the descending chronological order of our births.

  At the head of the line, there’s Heather: the eldest of us, loud, bossy and faded, like a tea towel someone’s left hanging on the clothesline all winter long.

  Suzanne comes next: tall for one of us, and the only sister who looks any good wearing a colour known as lime green. She won a poetry contest back in high school, and if she hasn’t got over it by now, she never will.

  Tina is next: stark mad but rosy and robust the way some ladies get when they’ve had a lot of children—like flowers might spring from her footprints as she walks away.

  Second from the end of the line is Ashley: the pretty little sister. But she’s had too much sun lately, and it’s beginning to make her older, like everyone else.

  Meaghan is last: arms folded, all curves and plastic and irony. Out of habit, we were about to add “sadness” but it’s just not there, not today.

  We’re together—all of us and the husbands we’ve kept—a party of nine gathered for Meaghan and Riker’s wedding trip in Niagara Falls. All that water is the backdrop for a family picture. We’re perched on the edge of the heavy, quarried stone and iron fence that runs along the edge of the cliff overlooking the falls. We have been here before. Mum and Dad brought us when we were kids. Meaghan doesn’t remember anything about that visit. And Ashley admits what she believes she remembers might really have been planted by a Superman movie and a Travel Ontario ad campaign.

  When the five of us first looked over the railing as grown women, Ashley’s big, bright eyes started to tear.

  “Here, honey,” Heather said over the noise—water on rock, water on water. “Quick, throw a nickel into it.”

  Ashley took the coin. She flipped it into the river below the way Dad taught us to flip coins, working our thumbs like catapults. The silvery disc seemed to vanish before it broke the surface of the water. It hadn’t sunk; it was more like it had been vaporized, scattered into infinitesimal pieces, becoming part of the spray.

  Maybe this is the kind of maelstrom where anything—anyone—could disappear. That’s what each of us will think for the rest of our lives every time we lean out over utter destruction like this waterfall. We will think of all it could consume.

  Even destruction usually leaves ruins. And ruins are found, documented, guarded like the death-defying artefacts in the museums here. The museums tell us the first person to survive riding this water over the cliff was a woman wrapped in a mattress inside a barrel. She was called “Queen of the Mist”—or maybe that’s just what she called the barrel. She was an old lady, like May and, more and more every day, a bit
like us.

  After one accidental death, one cremation, two false burials, and thousands of miles over land and sea, the remains of Suzanne’s mother-in-law are where they belong. She’s planted in the cemetery of the flat brown town where she was born and raised, lying within arms’ reach of the bones of her homesteader ancestors.

  May’s funeral was a massive event. With as many third cousins as she had, it would have been a big funeral no matter how or when she died. Being found dead and incinerated after going missing in Central America elevated it to a celebrity funeral. The nearest television station sent a news crew to wait outside the chapel to film May’s older brother marching toward the funeral limousine, holding her urn cradled in one arm like the most precious of all footballs.

  Her final urn was a steel capsule coated in enamel and painted to look like Mexican pottery—a sign from Troy’s family that they held no grudges against Latin America.

  May’s burial monument (“headstone” doesn’t make much sense for cremated remains) is mounted flush to the ground—a granite slab the colour of cooked salmon’s flesh. The death date forever carved into the stone is eight months too late.

  If the extended family and the townspeople in the chapel had known what happened to May’s body after she died, they might have found it ghastly when Troy broke down reading May’s eulogy, and Suzanne stood up, threaded her arm through his, and held onto him until he finished speaking. As it was, she was all grace and beauty, standing beside her husband at May’s funeral pulpit. It was true even for those of us who knew the real story.

  Don’t ever believe Suzanne was callous about May—not by the end, anyways. And in a world made possible only by forgiveness, the ending is the part that matters most.

  At the luncheon, after the memorial service and the interment of May’s urn, two tall, grey-haired women came toward Suzanne out of the crowd, walking arm-in-arm—Troy’s aunts, Julie and March, May’s sisters. Suzanne could not have them touch her, tell her how thankful they were, without crumbling into grief.

  Above Niagara Falls today, the sky is stratified—fog, rainbow, sun. Mist rises from the water. Tiny airborne droplets settle into our hair, frizzy and damp. If there’s one thing this family can do right, it’s grow hair. It hasn’t always been this way. When we were little, Mum kept us shorn. Now that we’re grown up, each of us keeps our hair long, without exception.

  Maybe all those shorthaired years Mum was toying with the fantasy of us ending up boys—five sons, not her image but our father’s. Not that Dad ever complained to us about being sonless. He called us his lucky streak, a complete set.

  Mum and Dad were here in Niagara Falls for the wedding earlier in the week. Riker’s parents from the video game store were here too. Dad stayed long enough to pull his favourite feminist stunt, where he refuses to give his daughter away at her wedding. It’s his chance to show his sons-in-law and anyone else that women are not goods to be traded. Dad is actually pretty cool. It’s too bad he kept so far out of this story—and out of all our other stories too.

  When the wedding ceremony was over, Heather bossed Mom and Dad into coming to dinner with everyone. But then they were gone. Mum hates it when we boss, and Dad hates it when we get married. They didn’t stay any longer than strictly necessary. We don’t know what’s become of Riker’s parents. Maybe they’re in a casino, or on a Ferris wheel, or down on the river, draped in rented plastic ponchos, holding onto each other, ogling the falls from below.

  Across the wide sidewalk from where we sit lined up on the stone wall, there are four cameras pointed at us. There isn’t much hope any of them will capture a decent image of all us at once. Our family portraits are famously bad.

  “Nice,” Ewan says, looking through his viewfinder with his camera pulled right up to one of his eyes, like it’s 1995. “The mist in your hair makes you look like a bunch of mermaids. Either that or a bunch of harpies.”

  He snaps a picture just as Heather is rolling her eyes. “Not harpies,” she says. “You mean ‘sirens.’”

  “Nah, I’ve heard you guys sing and I’ve seen you eat. Harpies.”

  Maybe Troy means to rescue Ewan when he breaks from the line of brothers-in-law and bounds to where we’re seated. Troy is trying to squeeze into our line, between Suzanne and Tina.

  “Hey,” he calls to the other men, “someone take a picture of me with my five wives.”

  Tina jumps, shoving Troy’s arm back at him as he’s draping it around her. “Gross.”

  Heather howls, and Ashley and Meaghan hop to their feet like they’ve been jolted with electric currents.

  Troy is laughing. “What’s the problem, girls? They say natural sister groups make the very best plural wives.”

  “Will you get out of here, Troy?” Suzanne is pushing him away, and he goes easily, laughing and tripping back into the line of brothers-in-law. Someone got a photo of him as he was sitting down and we were recoiling from him. It will be one of his favourites for the rest of his life.

  Troy’s stunt must have made Ewan possessive of his own wife, and he is through teasing us. He lowers his camera and speaks with senior-brother-in-law authority. “Honestly, you’re impossible to photograph en masse. In every one of my shots someone’s talking or looking sideways or pulling a piece of hair out of her mouth.”

  Heather stands. The oldest person in a picture is usually keenest to leave it. “Yeah, let’s just forget it and move on.”

  “No, no, no,” Durk drawls. “We can do this. We just have to mellow. Take a deep breath and say it, sisters: mellow.”

  And someone takes a picture of us saying “mellow” together, our lips formed into five Os. It’s an interesting concept, but it’s not what we were hoping for in a family picture.

  Troy slaps Riker on the back. “Get up there, dude. You’re our last hope at getting a nice sisters shot.”

  “No pressure, honey.” Meaghan chirps it at him, an apology for all of us.

  Riker has been less nervous of our harpy troop ever since that night in the karaoke lounge. The place had the feel of somewhere meant for tourists from overseas, but everyone there was polite when we took to the stage and did some kind of Japanese cheerleader routine Meaghan and Riker tried to teach us.

  Sitting on the wall over the falls, we remember a bit of the choreography and form our hands into the shapes of hearts, pulsing them toward Riker. With everyone watching and fawning at once, Riker is tensing again.

  Heather knows she must make the tension worse. “Come on. Make us smile, Riker. This is very important.”

  “Stop it,” Meaghan hisses down the line.

  Riker raises his camera. “Okay, everybody. On the count of three we’re all going to say one little word together as we smile.”

  We’re nodding at him, ready for our cue.

  “Everybody put your hands down, open your eyes, and say ‘quints.’”

  He gets a picture of us smiling, each of us charmed by his insistence, beyond all reason and mathematics, that we are quintuplets.

  Tomorrow, we’ll show Riker how much we want to love him by going in search of the remains of Quintland, hours north of here.

  “I already looked it up on the Internet.” Heather has told us. “It’s just a little old house on the side of the road.”

  Quintland is also a lawn, an empty space, the void left where Depression-era tourists used to queue to gawk at five little sisters. The freak show part of the original nursery complex is gone, torn down and swept away. There’s no sign of the observation area where crowds used to stand behind screens made of something like gauze bandages to watch the sisters play.

  That’s the story, anyway. Caught in the rippling currents of history—backward and forward—everything is a story. The strangest stories are the truest ones—a barrel over the falls, five babies born at once, maybe even our story. What matters isn’t always whether stories are
true, but whether they could be true—whether we could rise up and live through them if we were ever called upon to do so.

  When we get to Quintland, we will walk onto the grass and stand on the lawn. We don’t know what we’ll feel. Maybe we’ll be like the other pilgrims, thinking about the real Dionne quintuplets, feeling sad and guilty about children exploited for nothing but finding their lives in the same cells.

  Or we might not be thinking about the Dionne sisters at all.

  Maybe we’ll be thinking of Riker, worrying that the museums and shrines—the empty spaces and little wooden monuments—will be smaller and more tainted with ambivalence than he expected. Still, he’ll love it anyway.

  And the rest of us—my sisters and I—we’ll be standing in the ruins of Quintland, on the grass, together. We’ll reach out our arms, fingers splayed, until our hearts are braced open. We’ll tip our faces up to the sun, not looking into each other’s eyes, but out of them.

  Acknowledgements

  My first thanks go to my young sons, Jonah, Samuel, Nathan, Micah, and James. If any of them ever wished I were baking cookies instead of writing books, they never said so to me. As always, my husband, Anders Quist, was indispensably supportive throughout this creative process and not just for his familiarity with the Criminal Code of Canada.

  Especially in this endeavour, my family of origin must be acknowledged. This includes my parents, Lloyd and Pat MacKenzie, who are warm and caring, unlike the parents in the story. There are also my four blood sisters, the lovely non-committers of indictable offences, Amy Woolf, Sara MacKenzie, Mary Bourne, and Emily MacKenzie. It’s the connections between us, not our true life stories, that were the inspirations for this book. My sisters’ husbands must be thanked for what they’ve contributed to and tolerated in our relationships. Thank you, Curtis Woolf, Greg Bourne, and Allan Taylor.