Sister Mine

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Fleet stared at Brie. Swallowed. “Are you playing tonight?” she whispered.

  “Yeah, hon. Every Saturday night, you know that.”

  She nodded. “Can I play with you guys this time?”

  “Not tonight. But come and see us, OK?” He grabbed my hand and drew me over in the direction of the girl with the braids. He said, sotto voce, “She calls herself Fleet ’cause she used to be a flute player, back in the day. BC, you know?”

  “British Columbia?”

  He looked sad. “No, Before Crack.” His hand was warm, almost hot, and dry. It covered my whole hand so entirely that one of his fingers was curling almost the whole way around my wrist. I looked over my shoulder, but Fleet had already closed her door.

  The girl who’d called us over nodded at me. It made her braids bob. “Maturity,” she said, while fingerspelling it. She giggled. For a split second I thought she was teasing me for being immature. Or Fleet for being old. Then I understood that it was her name. What was it with the single-barrelled names in here?

  I nodded back. “Makeda.”

  She stepped out to hold the door open for us. “There’s some pizza left,” she told us, and I remembered that I hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning. Maturity was plump and pink and beaming. She wore a crisp white gauze tutu over a pink-and-white crinoline, over striped pink-and-black tights tucked into black Victorian-style heeled boots. She was popping out of the tops of the two old nylon slips she was wearing, one black and one burgundy. She’d slit them both up the sides, presumably so she could get the froth of tutu and crinoline on under them. She looked like the topper on an angel food cake.

  Brie held the door open so that Maturity and I could go in first. Gentlemanly and well-spoken; nice combo. I had to brush close to him in order to get through. He smelled of lemons and coffee.

  As I walked in, the first impression I got was of a black yawning mouth of space. It dwarfed the four people sitting on the floor in front of the stage, eating pizza out of the box and sharing a two-four of Blue. A stage took up about half of the black-painted room. The rest was bare, black floor. There was room enough for an audience to stand, maybe do a little dancing. There was a stack of iron folding chairs leaning against the stage. Brie opened his arms to indicate the whole space. “This is where we practise,” he said. “And these guys are”—he silently counted them off—“most of the band.” The three guys and the chick stopped scarfing down pizza long enough to nod in my direction. Maturity curtseyed.

  The next few minutes were a flurry of cold pizza, warm beer, and meeting the members of Soul Chain that were present. Maturity, go figure, did sign language interpreting. The other woman, Raini, was dark brown with long, straight black hair. She wore faded jeans, a plain black T-shirt, a rainbow-coloured metal bracelet on each wrist. She played drums. Jeff, a pudgy, light-skinned brother with freckles and cornrowed red hair, guitar. Solaris looked to be about fifteen, but was probably older. White. Thin to the point of transparency, but with a strong handshake. Bristle of blond hair. Piercings everywhere, seemed to be wearing a brace on one leg, under the jeans. Mid-range, androgynous voice. I first thought that Solaris was a guy. Then a girl. Maybe. Then I gave up trying to figure out which. It would become obvious at some point, or not. Andy, an older guy with black earplugs and a sleeve of tats on both arms, played button box. Brie, of all things, tambourine. Brie sang lead, the rest of them backup vocals (Maturity signed as she sang), though they all teasingly accused Andy of only mouthing the words. Hallam (he of the thumping bed) and Cleveland would show up later. They were dancers. As people introduced themselves, I wolfed down a slice of cold pepperoni pizza and knocked back a beer that Brie brought me. Turned out that most of them lived in this building. Like family. Yikes. Warily, I asked, “You guys eat together like this for every meal?”

  There was an astonished silence, then they all fell out laughing. “As if!” said Jeff.

  Solaris gave Maturity a gentle slap on the shoulder. “If I had to listen to this one complain about work every time I sat down to eat, I’d probably go postal.”

  Raini said, “Got lives. Know how to use them.”

  Was she making fun of me? I studied her face. Oh, of course not. She didn’t know me at all. I grinned like a fool, contemplating beginning a life in which my pariah status didn’t figure in the least.

  “And you… live in here?” I asked Brie, looking around the bare, open space for where he might have a bed, someplace to stash his clothes, stuff like that.

  He laughed. “No, but sometimes it feels like it.”

  Jeff shook his head. “Yeah. Slave driver there only makes us practise most weekends. But I swear he’s in here 24/7, trying out new songs—”

  “—testing the lights—” Brie explained.

  Jeff continued, “—wanking, God knows what else.”

  Raini and Solaris grinned. Maturity and Andy had their heads together over the button box. I heard Maturity say, “So, you come in on the third note?”

  Brie gave a big, theatrical sigh. “These guys, nothing but abuse I get from them. But yeah, I have two units side by side, made them into one. My room’s over there.” He gestured vaguely at the light-swallowing corner of the space. “I’m afraid you’re going to find it loud in here on Saturday nights, especially with you living across from me and all. And you get to help me clean up the mess on Sunday mornings. Plus side is, I give you free beer!” He beamed at me. Nice smile he had. It had slowly dawned on me that it was his band. He wasn’t just a member of it. I suspected I was going to like living here.

  “Hey, wanna see the rest of my kingly domain?”

  I hesitated. Maturity looked up from her confab with Andy. “It’s all right,” she said. “Brie’s cool.”

  “Jesus, of course I’m cool! Why would you even talk like that?”

  “Oh, get the knot out of your panties.” She smiled to take the sting out of it. “Girls gotta watch out for each other, jeez. Try thanking me for letting Makeda know that you’re not a skeez.” She turned to me. “So he’s OK, but watch out for that bloody ankle-biter of a cat. It’ll try to slash you if you get too close to it, or to Brie.”

  Brie smiled ruefully. “Yeah, she would know. I’m still apologizing to her for that.”

  She waved the concern away. “Not a big deal.”

  I said, “I would like the grand tour.”

  “Sweet.” Brie took me over to a door hidden in the shadows. He pulled a key fob out of his jeans pocket and used one of the many keys on it to unlock the door.

  “Am I going to get a set of keys like that?”

  “Sure, I’ll cut you a set.”

  Me, in charge of a building. I could just imagine the astonishment on Abby’s face when I told her.

  The door opened. Brie went in ahead of me. From just inside the doorway, he said, “Come on in. And leave the door open, OK?” Smart of him. No matter what Maturity had said, I still didn’t know this guy.

  I stepped through the threshold into the unit. I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room. Naked lightbulb, high up in the ceiling. Tiny LED bulbs in the sconce lights lining the walls of the entranceway. The sconces themselves were black mesh in the shape of small pouched triangles. “Those seem kinda Martha Stewart for you,” I said, pointing at one of them.

  “So I have a gentle side. I made those things out of screen door mesh, though, all manly-like.” He made fake bodybuilder muscles.

  His room was a big, open space, like mine. Old couch against one wall, with some kind of fancy embroidered cloth thrown over it. Slab of a wooden table in the middle of the room. It was oval, long enough for two people to lie on it head to head. Mismatched chairs all around it; everything from a pilfered park bench to woven plastic lawn chairs. Through the legs of the chairs I could see that the table legs were scrolled iron. The loft that Milo had described to me was built into the far side of the unit, complete with wooden stairs slanting up towards it. Underneath the loft was a computer, sitti
ng on a warped piece of particleboard balanced on two sawhorses. The upper floor of the loft held an honest-to-God four-poster bed, complete with a translucent white canopy. “You have got to be kidding me,” I said, pointing to it.

  He smiled. “I like to be comfortable.”

  “Decadent, more like it. How come you can have two adjoining units? You make enough as a musician?”

  “Hell, no. We have a lot of regulars that come to our shows and buy a lot of cheap beer, so Milo cut me a deal.”

  “You, too, huh? What is he, some kind of philanthropist?”

  Brie smirked. “Hardly. He gets the bar tab. Unofficially, that is. This place doesn’t have a liquour license.”

  The cat stuck its head over the side of the loft and gave me a questioning yowl. Brie said, “Hey, Yoplait.”

  “How’d he get back inside?” I headed up the steps towards the cat, remembered my manners, stopped halfway up. “May I?”

  “Sure, I’ll wait down here.” He pulled out one of the chairs and plopped himself down onto it. “Careful, though. Maturity wasn’t kidding. He bites.”

  Yoplait didn’t let me get too close. He scowled at me, leapt off the bed, and disappeared below it.

  “He’s pretty wild,” said Brie. “I’m guessing he has lots of reasons not to trust human beings.”

  “That’s sad.” I came back down the steps, sat on the lowest one.

  Brie replied, “Funny thing about that old cat.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a dead ringer for a cat I found as a boy. Maybe that’s why I’m so taken with him. Lord knows it’s not his winning ways. The one I found when I was a kid, I think a car must have hit it, or something. It was half-dead, lying on the side of the road. Back legs and jaw broken.”

  I winced.

  “Which didn’t stop it from trying to sink its teeth into me when I went to pick it up. It was so scared.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It was bleeding, and its legs were hanging all floppy.” The memory was making him sound like the kid he used to be. “After the first try, I couldn’t bear to touch it. Made my stomach squirmy. But I couldn’t stand to leave him there, either. Street was full of people, too. When I got older, I wondered whether the poor thing might have gotten helped quicker if there hadn’t been a fourteen-year-old black boy with his hair in cornrows on his knees crying beside him.”

  “Me, I would have called my dad. He has a way with living things.”

  His face set into a hard look. “I didn’t have a dad to call. I had a foster home that, let’s just say, wasn’t working out too well.”

  “So what happened?”

  “White lady came by who wasn’t afraid of me or of an injured cat. She sat right down at the curb beside me. Called Animal Rescue and then waited with us both until they came.” He smiled a little. “She was a little confused at first when she found out it wasn’t my cat, but she dealt.”

  “Did you ever see the cat again?”

  Yoplait had stuck his head over the edge of the top step and was staring at me wide-eyed with what looked like combined curiosity and alarm.

  He shook his head. “The lady who’d helped us called me the next day to say that his injuries had been too extensive. He died.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “That afternoon, I was walking by the place where I’d found him, and there was a torn-up cat collar lying there. No ID on it, but it showed somebody must have loved him at some point, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “I kept that collar for a while. Wore it on my wrist, doubled. But I lost track of it in the many moves from foster home to foster home. Then Yoplait here just wandered in off the street one day. Got into the kitchen, was helping himself to our bacon when I caught him. He was nothing but fur and bones. I let him finish the bacon, and he just stayed. Finally let me get close enough to him to touch him. Nowadays I have to watch where I put my feet when I roll out of bed in the mornings. Yoplait has a way of leaving four or five still-bleeding mouse torsos right where I’ll step.”

  I grimaced. “Gross.”

  “I know. Scared me shitless the first time it happened. Maybe it’s his way of paying rent, I dunno. He arranges them neatly in a row for me. Just their front halves. Their heads and their little front legs. I guess the back halves are meatier. I think he eats those. At least, I’ve never found any hairy mouse butts hanging around.”

  “My dad used to bring live mice into the house. I mean, they would come looking for him.” I realized my slipup when I saw Brie’s startled face. I tried to think up a reasonable explanation.

  “Brie!” yelled a voice from outside. “We’re starting up again!”

  Brie called out, “OK, just a second!” He stood up.

  Whew. Saved by the bellow. I was going to have keep a close watch on what I said.

  Brie said, “Right; here’s what you need to know about this building.” He ticked off on his fingers. “If it’s raining on the outside, it’ll be raining on the inside, so get yourself a bunch of tarps and use them.”

  “Oh, shit. Now I find out.”

  “Don’t leave your soap and shampoo in the bathroom, unless you really want to share. Ditto with your food in the kitchen.”

  “Got my own bathroom in my unit.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot. Anyway, garbage and recyclables go out onto the curb every other Thursday morning before seven a.m. Organic waste goes out every Wednesday morning. The big bins for all that stuff are downstairs. Wheeling them out to the curb every week is my job and yours. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Now, you wanna watch us practise?”

  Why not? I wasn’t working that night. “OK.”

  “Great. If you’re gonna stay for the show, you can leave your jacket and purse in here. Safer that way.”

  “Thanks.”

  As we were walking out into the performance space, I checked my phone: six messages, all from Abby. I turned the phone off and stuck it back into my pocket.

  Soul Chain started practising again, and that’s where it stopped being romantic. They were struggling. Jeff didn’t seem to know half the set tunes. Brie kept forgetting the words to the songs and jumping in either too early or too late. And when he did, his voice wasn’t great. Guess I had been spoiled by Abby’s perfect pitch. Man, this was going to be one clunker of a show. I got glimpses of raw talent from them, but with no finesse behind it.

  But let’s be honest; they all sounded better than I did. Abby and I were twelve the first time I saw her perform live. After that, I didn’t want to even sing in the shower ever again. Maybe Soul Chain would get it together in the adrenaline high of playing live. So I stayed right through the practice, piqued by the twinkle in Brie’s beautiful brown eyes, and the brief seconds where they all came together and sparkled before crashing again in a tangle of notes. The walls of the building exuded ghosts of all the smells it had absorbed over the centuries. Ashes, stale beer, pot, a brief hint of perfume; tantalizing hints of the stories that had played out inside it, and promises of the ones that were yet to come.

  Like two pigeons in one nest

  Folded in each other’s wings,

  They lay down, in their curtained bed:

  Like two blossoms on one stem.

  We’d had to be cut free of our mother’s womb. She’d never have been able to push the two-headed sport that was me and Abby out the usual way. Mom was still human at the time. My dad’s family hadn’t yet exiled her to the waters. After the C-section, just for a few days, she was kind of sidelined while she recovered. That gave Dad’s family the opening they needed to move in and take over. ’Cause from their perspective, things were a mess. Abby and I were fused, you see. Conjoined twins. Abby’s head, torso and left arm protruded from my chest. We shared a liver, both kidneys, and three and three-quarters legs between us. We had two stomachs, two hearts and four lungs, and enough colon for us each to have a viable section, come to that. Abby and I could have
lived as we were, conjoined. Between us, we had what we needed. But here’s the real kicker; Abby had the magic, I didn’t. Far as the Family was concerned, Abby was one of them, though cursed, as I was, with the tragic flaw of mortality. Abby and me, my mom brought us that gift.

  You might say that my dad married outside the family. To hear some of them tell it, outside the species. Most of his family would barely give Mom the time of day while she was still around, despite the fact that she and her kin had done steward service to them for centuries. Or rather, because of it. Dad’s family could have stood it if she were just some dalliance of Dad’s, a bit of booty call. Even love might have been OK, if they’d kept it to a dull roar. Wouldn’t have been the first time that a celestial had knocked boots with the help. But no, Mom and Dad had to go and breed.

  With Mom unable to interfere for the time being, Dad’s family decided that obviously, the human doctors of the hospital where we were born had to surgically separate Abby and me. They put pressure on my dad till he agreed to it. They’re not really venal, that lot, just too big for their britches. They’ve been emissaries of the Big Boss for so long that they forget they aren’t gods themselves, just glorified overseers. But overseers with serious power. Mom’s kin didn’t say boo. They knew damned well that they didn’t have the cash to buy that much trouble.

  The second we were separated, Abby began to die. There was something vital she needed that my body’d been supplying. No one could tell exactly what, but we were losing her.

  There’s a guardian that attends births and deaths. He keeps his eye on the young and on the old; the former having so recently left the other world for this one, and the latter soon to depart that way again. That guardian, you might say that he’s a border guard. It’s his job to send the living on their way, and the dead on theirs. If it’s not your time, you’re not going anywhere. He was there, ready to do his job, when Abby and I were born, the semi-celestial child and her human donkey of a sister. Now it was time for him to escort her back across the barrier between the quick and the dead. He lingered over our cribs in Intensive Care for an instant. He smiled at us both, chucked us under our tiny chins. He thought we were kinda cute. Then he kissed us each on the forehead and gently picked Abby up, cradled her in his arms. My dad, grieving, watched him. The guardian gave him a rueful look. Have I mentioned that the guardian is our uncle? Dad’s brother? He took Abby, leaving my dad to weep at my bedside.