Sister Mine

by Nalo Hopkinson

  With no more warning than that, he closed his eyes. Naima opened hers. Her pupils were back where they should be. “Did he come, Mama?” she asked, then let the three bones fall to the ground, and fainted.

  Suzy tutted in exasperation at Mister Cross as she went to see to her child, but she took note that he’d stepped off the hard patio stones onto the soft earth before he let Naima fall. “Thank you!” she called to the open air. He’d know what for. “And thanks for letting me and Ma talk!” She had no idea what he’d been going on about with that stuff about ripping veils, but that kind of business was for the celestials to handle. Her job was to watch over the tree, which meant that she was currently without portfolio. Maybe when Mister Cross returned, he’d have a new job for her.

  Huh. Ma hadn’t asked after her other daughter. Ah, well. Maybe Ma had her ways of going to visit with Cora, too. After all, it wasn’t like a ghost could drown. Though water could get them powerfully confused, if the stories were true.

  Naima opened her eyes.

  “You OK, Lil Bit?”

  Naima looked a little doubtful, but nodded. “I’m tired,” she complained. “And my tummy’s not happy.” The celestial hauteur was gone. Now she was only precious Lil Bit, whiny for her post–Mister Cross nap.

  Suzy stroked Naima’s springy-haired head, smoothed back some of the naps. “I’ll make you some warm milk with honey. That’ll soothe your tummy.”

  “And cookies? You promised.” Suzy chuckled. “Not so stomach-soothing, I think. But yes, you can have five cookies. Real small ones.”

  Naima sat up. Wheedle cooed something at her. Naima made an oogly-boogly face at him until he chortled in that full-throated, belly-deep way that only babies can.

  Naima said, “Mom? What does ‘motherhumping’ mean?”

  Suzy looked to the heavens, whence there was no comfort. She growled, “It’s something I’d like to call Mister Cross.”

  “We must not look at goblin men,

  We must not buy their fruits:

  Who knows upon what soil they fed

  Their hungry thirsty roots?”

  I was standing. And walking. OK, all that was probably good, even if I felt like shit on a stick, with peanuts. Walking… where? It was daytime. I was on a narrow gravel path, stumbling past thistles with pinkish-purple blowout ’fros, past asters with their star-shaped flowers, past white-belled ladies’ tresses. Whoa. That was the lake over there, through the trees. I was walking beside it. I recognized this place. I was on the Leslie Street Spit. I had the feeling—more definite than a guess, not quite clear enough to be called a memory—that I’d been wandering the wetlands of the Spit for quite some time.

  What time was it? Man, that’d been some shindig last night. My mouth was dry. I felt light-headed, a little queasy. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d finished a night of partying in a drunken haze. There’d been that time with Abby and the Bejis. I’d woken up at home, though, not lakeside.

  Shit. Had somebody put something in my drink? I’d heard of that kind of crap.

  A red-winged blackbird cussed at me in song from a nearby maple tree off the path. Didn’t need Abby to tell me what it was singing; Get away from my nest, baby-eater!

  “Yeah, cool your jets,” I growled at it. “Do I look like a fucking hawk?” The sun was too bright. The trees and exploding spring undergrowth were too green. The path was too uneven, the light dancing off Lake Ontario too twinkly. Everything was too something. The world felt unreal. “Real” was back in Brie’s club at Cheerful Rest, grooving on some fierce-ass sounds and dancing with people of all colours, all ages.

  Thistle and chamomile bushes poked their way through rounded shards of broken china. I ambled past nipple-height chicory. The underbrush was growing so thickly, so energetically sprung by spring that I couldn’t see through it. The Leslie Street Spit was a semi-man-made wetland, a wild mix of junk and nature. It was one of those fascinating borderland places that cities foster so well. It used to be one of my favourite places to go and ramble. Yeah, that was probably the reason I’d come here. Even semiconscious, I didn’t want to go back to Abby.

  After a few more minutes, though, I was better. In fact, better than better. My tummy was no longer queasy, and I felt as though I could walk for miles more. Even my hunger had faded.

  I walked along a narrow dirt bike path that was hidden from the road by maple saplings. I reached down to touch an achingly perfect chicory blossom with crisp, royal lavender petals. The sun was pleasantly warm on my shoulders. Good thing, too, ’cause I wasn’t wearing my jacket. I’d probably left it at Brie’s.

  Through the trees, glimpses of the lake gleamed sapphire-blue. The burgeoning beauty of a perfect spring day took me away from myself. I meandered, outside time, mesmerized by the wilderness around me. Greens seemed greener, the calls of tern and geese more sonorous. It seemed entirely natural to spy through the bush and trees what might have been a panda bear pulling down a length of tasty bamboo, a brown monkey swinging on liana vines from tree to tree, a giant silk-cotton tree with its thorn-studded trunk, an iguana tearing its messy way through a ripe fallen mango, a rainbow-feathered lizard leaping from one soaring branch to another. In the back of my mind’s eye, everything had a fuzzy green haze on it, like a brand-new tennis ball. The world was getting its Shine on.

  Soon the narrow path veered off from the main road to run closer to the lake. I recognized the low cliff bolstered by big broken slabs of concrete and jabbing lengths of rusted rebar. I reached the edge, peered over the lip of the overhang. The beach below hardly deserved the name. Brown wet sand, and not much of that. Mostly rocks and detritus. I’d been coming down here in vain since I was a teenager. I’d sit down there for hours, hoping to see the mother I’d never met. Wishfully thinking that she might be in the area; maybe she even knew that this was my favourite place and she’d have left me a message in the flotsam and jetsam that littered the strip of shore. Eventually, the disappointment had become too much to bear. I hadn’t been down here in quite a few years. But today I was feeling all nostalgic. My Mom place. I decided to go down to the shore, for old times’ sake.

  I scooched down onto my heels at the edge of the lip. The idea was to get your butt and hands under you as you went over, and sort of slide a couple of feet to the place where the piled-any-which-way concrete slabs thinned out just enough that if you were careful, you could clamber down it to the few yards of narrow, rocky beach there.

  I was out of practice. Just as I edged over the low cliff, my foot caught on a small rock that was sticking up. I almost overbalanced. I put a hand out to steady myself, and scraped my palm on a boulder. I began to skid. I’d meant to do this carefully. Instead, in a crabwise panic of skinned palms and scrabbling feet, I half-slid, half-fell over the broken concrete teeth. Good thing it was only a few feet down. I reached the bottom and rolled. Fetched up against a broken jut of concrete. A cloud of annoyed sand flies rose up from beneath the shelter of the leaning slab and whizzed around my head. “Sorry,” I whispered to them. I stood and dusted pebbles off my stinging palms. About ten feet away, the lake lapped quietly at the shore, tumbling the rocks and pebbles there with a faint tinkling noise. A flock of geese paddled past, honking irritably at me for being on their beach. Blooms of green algae floated close by, probably enriched by goose guano; you could see smears of it here and there on the rocks. The combination made the lake smell, as always, vaguely rank.

  I used to imagine Ma hunting this lake, swirling slinkily through the cold, deep water and surfacing to gobble up the cranky geese. Abby and I loved roasted goose.

  Dreamily, I searched the beach. Waterfront dump sites made for lots of driftglass, beautifully weathered smooth into gleaming jewels. When we were little, Uncle had told us stories about Mom, about how much she used to love beachcombing. How she especially adored the scarcest colours of beach glass, cobalt and red and orange. Uncle would give me and Abby small, whorled shells, tell us that if we put them to our ear
s and listened carefully, we could hear our mother talking to us. Cipangopaludina japonica was the name of the molluscs that created those shells. Their common name was mystery snail. Some of the shells were scattered around the beach right where I was standing now. I could see the jagged holes in a few of them where gulls had dropped them onto the rocks to break them and picked the tasty meat out with their sharp beaks.

  I found a few pieces of beach glass, but only one nicely frosted one, and it was colourless. No Ma colours. In total, my finds were a handful of frosted beach glass pebbles; two black goose feathers and one white one; three of the ubiquitous mystery snail shells, bleached and empty, but unbroken; a small piece of aluminum tubing, surf-tumbled to smoothness; a handful of red insulating wire, tangled as a bird’s nest; and a bleached fish vertebra I’d found high up on the shore. It was a good inch across.

  Uncle wasn’t in the habit of lying. Abby used to hear Mom’s voice in the shells, she told me. Said Mom sang to her. I only heard a faint whooshing sound, except one time, when a Mom shell had clearly whispered, Eat your peas. That had been the first and last time, though. I’d been about nine. Never did start eating my peas. I mean, it wasn’t like she could make me.

  I put one of the shells to my ear. Only the usual slushing sound. Maybe. Maybe it was more than that?

  Yeah, right. And maybe I could understand what trees were saying, like my sister could.

  On the bike path above, a motorbike slowly puttered by, idling so low I couldn’t hear the engine. Its rider was a comfortably fat black guy. Big ’fro restrained by a bright orange bandana. Cheerful face. He looked like he’d be good to hug, share a doobie with, and just shoot the breeze with about life, the universe, and everything. He’d taken his T-shirt off and tucked its hem into the back waistband of his shorts. Smart. It was a hot day, for spring. I’d been longing to do the same thing, had been wondering whether the occasional hiker or dump-truck driver would be taken aback at the sight of a woman topless but for a heavy-duty sports bra. The Leslie Street Spit felt like the type of place where the social rules could be a bit relaxed.

  There was a bright blue knapsack lying on the ground near where I’d made my descent. It was on its side, gaping open. It had a crumb of sand crusting one edge. I went over to it, picked it up. Nothing inside. One strap torn, front pocket half coming off. Not too bad shape otherwise. I put my beachcombed haul inside it.

  An ozone effervescence to the air tickled at my nose. I looked up at the sky. I was right at the shore of the expanse of the eerie inland ocean that is Lake Ontario. No way to miss the determined little thundercloud trundling my way, literally out of a clear blue sky. Grey-bottomed, it was waddling towards me like a grimy toddler with a full diaper. A fat, wet drop landed on the back of my neck. The thundercloud was about to drop its load, and soon. It looked as though it only held enough water for a short burst, but spring storms were chilly. Wouldn’t be great to be caught out in one for long.

  The oncoming squall started herding wavelets ahead of itself to shore. They batted, catlike, at my boots. I said to the thundercloud, “Could you give me just a sec, please?” It was probably a natural storm, but politeness never hurt. Could be Aunt Cathy up there nudging that storm cloud along. Whatever the reason, the cloud advanced no farther while I took my cell phone out of my pocket and dumped it into the knapsack, too. If there was going to be rain, it’d keep drier there. There was a spectacular lightning flash. “OK,” I said, “I’m done now.” It was time to rejoin the world anyway. I hauled the knapsack onto my shoulders and climbed up to the bike path. I set off back through the trees towards the main road that led out of the Spit.

  I’d barely registered the rustling in the high undergrowth when a large pair of clutching hands grabbed my leg.

  I screamed. Terror lent me the strength to wrench my jeans-covered calf out of the handhold. I felt the scrape of claws slicing through the fabric of my jeans as I pulled away. My haint was upon me. Its small, heavy body scrambled, quarrelling, up my side. Hideously contorted baby face, brown as my own, its hair an angry, knotted snarl of black. Now it had those large hands at my throat. It punched small knobkerries of knees against my rib cage, all but knocking the breath out of me. I staggered. Managed not to fall. One of the haint’s searching thumbs pushed brutally past my teeth into my mouth. It tasted of dirt, and of nastily salty skin. The skin was looser than skin on thumbs should be. I gagged. I bit down, hard. The haint’s snarling became a whipped-dog yelp. More by luck than aim, I got my hands around its ankles. I tore it off me and swung it around, full weight, to crack it with a dull thud against the bole of a tree I hadn’t even seen there. The haint crumpled to the ground, its eyes closed, its spine oddly bent in the middle. Then it was up again, though its upper body hung wrongly to one side. It glared at me. Today my haint was wearing the form of a child just old enough to walk on its chubby legs. Its hair framed its anger-contorted cherub’s face.

  I chanced a look behind me. There was dense chest-high undergrowth barring my way to the paved entrance to the Spit where there might be people. Might; the place was usually pretty deserted. I took off, running pell-mell away from the haint along the narrow footpath. Would the haint recover enough to follow me? Fuck, fuck, fuck. Daddy! my brain screamed, regressed with terror. But Daddy couldn’t help me now. I took a sharp left over a low patch of scrub grass. Mom! Mom! Was that the thump of little feet behind me, or the thud of my own heart? I threw a terrified glance over my shoulder. I know; how many times had Abby told me not to look back at a pursuer? Not that she knew bugger all about running. But she was right. You only lost more time looking over your shoulder. Psyched yourself out and did stupid things. Such as tripping over your own feet, which is exactly what I did, for the second time that day. I tumbled ass over teakettle into the undergrowth. All the rolling made my head spin. I came to a stop with my cheek lying on a thistle. I hissed, jerked my head up off the ground, off the thorns. I was in a thistle patch that had grown so high and thick that it covered me completely. The prickles jabbed into my wrists and against my face where there was exposed flesh. My thick clothing protected me from the rest. But I didn’t dare move from my hiding place. I twisted my head away from a thistle that was scraping too close to my eye, and peered through the plants. My haint was tracking through the tall undergrowth a few feet away. It no longer seemed injured. We’d never been able to hurt it badly enough to stop it, though gods knew we’d tried. Looked like it hadn’t seen me. It had softened its appearance, trying to look more like a toddler. It was wearing rugged little baby jeans, turned up at the cuffs in the cutest way. A pair of sweet kiddie runners on its feet: white, trimmed with aqua and pink. They were the kind with a red light in their heels that flashed every time the creature took a step. It always got one thing wrong, though. Almost like it couldn’t help revealing itself. Itself or themselves. I’d never known whether it was the same creature hunting me, or whether a different one came every time. Whatever; it always looked different. At the moment, the detail that gave it away—other than the fact that it was, as usual, trying to kill me—was its hands. They were the size of a grown man’s. Not a small man, either. With those hands, the thing heedlessly uprooted the underbrush. It pulled up whole thistles, thorns and all, without any sign of discomfort. And here I was, wheezing for breath, watching that eldritch not-child get closer. Damn it, how could I have let Babyface sneak up on me like that? I knew better than to be so absentminded!

  Babyface gaped its jaws impossibly wide and stuffed a whole thistle plant into its mouth. Then it fastidiously brushed its hands off on the backs of its jeans. It was even creepier doing something so claypicken-normal. It stood up on its little tippy-toes and strained to scan the shoreline beyond the edge of the incline. I ducked my head down again. Had it seen me? I needed a miracle. I’d learned better than to hope for one. If only I could get to the lake! I knew what would rout the haint. Nasty brute was persistent, but we’d figured out a few reliable ways to discourage it over the ye
ars, Abby, Dad, Uncle, and I. Probably the only reason I’d survived to adulthood. Right now I had plenty water easy to hand, but no way to go and get it without alerting the haint to where I was.

  A drop of liquid landed on a leaf just in front of my eyes. It hung on the tip of the leaf for a second before falling off to land on my hand. Another drop hit my nose. The baby rain cloud! Hope unfurled in my chest, sweet as an inhaled breath. Maybe I was getting my miracle after all.

  The haint must have felt the raindrops, too. It flinched as though it’d been stung. It flinched again, yelped, and cast a panicked look upwards. Hallelujah! I mentally cheered for the storm to come on faster.

  A few more drops splatted down. The haint yelped. It scanned the underbrush, even took a few steps in my direction, but the rain thickened suddenly. The haint made a snarling face, then ran off, swatting at the air the whole time. I watched until it disappeared into the dump-truck depot off to one side. There was a steady drizzle spattering me now, but I breathed a sigh of relief. So long as the rain continued, I’d be completely safe. What an idiot I’d been, letting my attention slip like that.

  I stood up into the spring rain. The fine drizzle was beginning to weigh my hair down. Maybe the rain cloud wasn’t a result of divine intervention, but I still said a polite “Thanks.” You never know.

  As though in answer, the rainwater seemed to get a little more sparse. No surprise there; the Family members who could control the weather usually wouldn’t give me the time of day. The big surprise would be finding out that it really was one of them who had sent me even a few minutes of rescuing rain. I had to hurry. I was running out of rain cloud, and out of time. I had to get out of the Spit and home to safety. I wasn’t ready to go back to Abby’s yet, but that’s where my haint-repelling stuff was.