“How about Aunt Zeels?” Abs asked.
“No, she thinks she’s prettier than we are. She’d give us attitude.”
“Yeah. I think we’d need someone kind. Someone willing to take their time.”
“Someone who wouldn’t laugh at us for being inexperienced.”
Abs giggled. “I guess that rules out Flash, then.”
“Yikes! As if!” I mimed gagging.
From between my knees, Abs looked up to meet my gaze, her eyes merry. “He’d tell us we should be making more noise.”
“And that he couldn’t really date us because our clothes weren’t brightly coloured enough.”
“I know!” said Abs.
That was the problem with dating and mating when you were one of the Family. The only beings of the same species were, well, Family. Kinda limited your choices, especially for those of the Family who’d been mired in sibling bickering for millennia. The wonder wasn’t that Dad had chosen a human being as his partner, but that more of that lot didn’t.
Abs chortled. “We could ask Grandma Ocean!”
I whooped with laughter. “Or Hunter!”
We’d been playing this game for a few years now. We knew the basic mechanics of sex, but we had so many questions. We wanted someone more experienced. Someone who could initiate us.
When I was a kid, I wondered what life had been like for the twins and their wives. Wives! Those guys had married sisters. Chang had ten children with his wife and Eng had eleven with his. This in the Victorian era, a time when sex just wasn’t spoken about in polite company.
“Aunt Suze?” asked Abby.
“Ew! She’s so old! Besides, she’s claypicken. You know how weirded out their kind gets about family-on-family nookie.” Uttering the word “nookie,” I felt so worldly, so sophisticated.
Abs replied, “Hunter’s old. Grandma Ocean is older.”
“I know, but they’re old celestials. Auntie Suze is pure claypicken. They age faster.”
We’d already considered and rejected Uncle, or Dad. They used to change our diapers. It would be too strange, even for us.
You would have said, “Chang and Eng’s sex life,” wouldn’t you? Like they were one person, Changandeng, emphasis on the second syllable. When you’re a twin, the world has its ways of letting you know that you and your sib are a package deal. Everything I had, Abby either had an identical one, or she and I would share one. It was like we’d never actually been separated at all. As really young kids, Abby and I had been so close that we’d occasionally try to sit on the toilet seat together, laughing so hard that we sometimes fell off, and Dad would have to clean the mess up. Abby’s body was as familiar to me as my own.
I said, “How about Beji?”
Abby considered. “Or maybe the other Beji?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe. They’re kinda like us.”
“And they’re nice to me,” I pointed out.
Abby sighed, pouted. “It’d be our first time. I just wish there was someone to show us who was really like us, you know? Part claypicken, part celestial.”
“Mm.”
Then the pick I was using to tease knots out of Abby’s spring-coiled hair slipped from my hand and landed in her lap. I leaned down over her to get it. My fingertips brushed against her naked thigh. The texture of her skin was as comfortingly familiar as my own, but in that moment, so new it was electrifying. Jolted, I dropped the pick again. Face flushing, I reached for it once more. Before I could touch it, Abby retrieved it herself. She put it into my hand. Bent over her like that, I was achingly aware of the radiating heat of her, newly woken from sleep. The scent of her breath, like warmed milk on a cold day. I took the pick from her. She let her fingers trail along the back of my hand as I straightened up. Goosebumps rose along my arm. Her girlish nipples poked twin bumps into the thin singlet. Shyly, I made to continue plaiting her hair, but she turned her face upwards to look at me. “We are like us,” she said delightedly, like it was a new discovery.
For years I’d been wondering what Eng’s and Chang’s involuntary threesomes—and maybe foursomes sometimes?—had been like. Could the brothers each feel it when one of them got excited? Did the sights, sounds, smells of sex turn on the brother who wasn’t having it? Suppose one of them was doing the nasty, and the other one really just wanted to have some supper and chat with his kids? Before they’d been married, hell, even afterwards, had they ever touched each other?
My heart’s agitated fluttering regulated into a fast, excited rhythm. I returned Abby’s smile. Simultaneously, we both said, “D’you want to?” then laughed at our twin synchronicity. Then we were serious, searching each other’s faces. I wanted this.
Abby nodded; so did she. In a second she had her singlet off and was using her crutches to lever herself upright. She let herself fall, laughing, onto my bed. She reached for me. “C’mon, silly,” she said. “Take that thing off.”
We spent the rest of the morning giggling and tumbling puppylike over each other, sniffing, probing, and tasting, urging each other on, till Dad knocked on our door and said it was time for breakfast and lessons. We were studying fractions and basic oceanography that week.
For the next few years, Abby and I were each other’s eager study partners in things sexual. Abby liked to roughhouse, and the nip of teeth on the sensitive bits of her, except her toes. I liked to have things inside me. Anything that looked likely was fair game. We both liked long, slow kisses. In theory, she liked spooning afterwards as much as I did, but it tended to make her leg crampy and she’d have to wriggle out of my arms. We thought we’d stay partnered. After all, Aunt Cath and Uncle Flash were sibs, and they had made a go of it for aeons. We knew ourselves to be more even-tempered than either of them. And we had Dad’s and Uncle’s blessings. But by the time we hit our late teens, I was feeling shut out from Abby’s life. She had her music. Unlike her, I had nothing that absorbed me so fully. Except, of course, her. But I was tone-deaf. I could hear musical notes fine, just couldn’t sing them for the life of me. And then I heard Abby joking with Uncle Flash, both of them calling me the donkey. The word pierced me through like a spike of ice, and I hadn’t really warmed to Abby since.
When you abide with someone so closely they might almost be inside your skin, sometimes words aren’t necessary. You learn how to signal each other to butt the fuck out. Outwardly, Abs and I were still loving towards each other, but I froze her out bit by bit, with a slight shake of my head no here, a subtle shift there of my shoulder away from her reaching hand. I ignored her looks of puzzled disappointment. I hid my things and my self away from her. I’d lie in my bed at night, hearing Abby’s breathing from the bed on the other side of the room. She had to be as lonely for me as I was for her, and as horny. I learned to mostly ignore the shifting of the bedsheets and the occasional quiet groan from my equally pubescent sister. She got the message and did the same for me. I yearned for the easy bond between my sister and me like lungs yearn for air. But if I was to be a donkey, I could go her one better; I could be as stubborn as a mule.
Truth was, I kind of envied Eng and Chang. Yoked permanently together, they had to figure out how to get along, and how to disagree. They had no choice.
Stacking plates into the big dishwashers at work was like lifting boulders. I felt feverish from sleep deprivation. I chewed down some Tylenol. It helped a little. I could not come down with something right now.
I was a wreck. My heart couldn’t figure out whether to grieve for Dad or not. And I was so angry at my family that I scarcely trusted myself to speak civilly to anyone at work. I kept having to clamp down on storms of weeping and fits of rage. Near the end of my shift I was clearing a table when I lost my hold on an almost-full bowl of hot pumpkin soup and dropped it right into some guy’s lap. Boss chewed me out but good for that one. Thank heaven I only had a few more minutes on my shift. I sleepwalked through them. Left on the dot of two a.m. Crawled home. Let myself in, hoping Abby wouldn’t hear me an
d come and try to have a heartfelt talk.
In the dark living room, two dollar-sized silvery green circles floated just above the coffee table. Then they blinked. Butter, the cat. “Stool pigeon,” I said. “I’m going to tell Abby that you were on the furniture.”
Butter got to her feet and stretched. The light from the street glinted off her fangs. She watched me head down the corridor to my bedroom. I heard the velvet-pawed thump of her jumping down off the coffee table. I slipped quickly into my room and shut the door to keep her out. Let her go sleep on Abby’s chilly feet if she wanted company tonight.
I pulled my clothes off in darkness and dropped them on the floor where I stood. I’d clean the mess up tomorrow. Right now, I needed to let sleep muffle the memories of the past day for a few hours. I climbed into bed. I reached to pull the blanket over me and touched warm flesh. I screamed and flung myself out of the bed. I hit the ground tailbone first, hard.
“Maka,” said Abby, “don’t be scared! It’s just me.”
My brain had already figured that out, but my body was a hair behind, scrabbling crabwise away from the bed. At the sound of Abby’s voice, I jerked to a stop. I rolled into a ball and whimpered.
In a few seconds, Abby was kneeling beside me. “Sorry.”
I was still shuddering, but I replied, “It’s OK. You startled me, is all.”
“I was lying in my own bed and I couldn’t get to sleep, and my brain wouldn’t stop churning. I could use some company tonight, Sis.”
“What about Lars?”
“He’s not into threesomes,” she deadpanned.
“Not like the Bejis, huh? Though I guess those were technically foursomes. At least, I think so. Sometimes the Bejis are kinda like one person.” My breathing was beginning to return to normal after the scare.
Abby said, “Lars offered to stay with me, but I asked him to give me a bit of space tonight. But once I went to bed and I started feeling even worse, I realized I should have let him stay. I kept telling myself that I was going to call him back, but it got to where I was so panicked that all I could manage to do was come and lie here. Your sheets smell like you. Like family.” She touched my shoulder. “Please, Maka?”
I sighed. “It’s all right,” I lied. “I could use the company, too.”
“Thank you.”
I got to my feet. “There just won’t be lots of room.” It was a three-quarter bed.
“Look, you don’t have to do this. I’ll go back to my room. I can take a sleeping pill, or something.”
“No, those things always make you woolly-headed the whole next day. It really is OK, Abs. Come on.”
We got back into the bed and pulled the blanket up over ourselves. Like me, Abby slept naked. I could feel the warmth radiating from her. Basking in our shared heat, I began to relax for the first time since I’d found myself down on the Spit that morning. My aching muscles relaxed. My eyes began to close.
She’d known all this time that I was toting Dad’s mojo, but she hadn’t told me.
I came awake with a jolt. I didn’t want to be soothed by Abby’s presence. I wanted to stay pissed at her. I made myself stiff as a log beam, arms clamped firmly by my sides so that I wouldn’t touch her by accident. And there I lay, gritty-eyed with exhaustion, desperate for a few hours’ rest before Abs and I had to deal with tomorrow’s ordeal of arranging an interment for Dad’s body.
Abby made a soft murmur of discomfort. “Ow.”
“What?”
“Nothing. My leg.”
She shifted and stretched, trying to get comfortable. Her knee brushed my thigh. I nearly jumped out of my skin. She said, “Sorry I’m so twitchy. I usually prop my knee up a little with a pillow.”
“I remember. Let me go and get one from your room.”
I threw back my side of the blanket.
“Maka?”
“Yeah?”
“You were partly right. About why I smother you the way I do.”
“I’m listening.”
“I would see you having those terrible seizures when we were kids. I was terrified that they would kill you. Then one day I overheard Dad and Uncle Jack talking. That’s how I discovered that Uncle Jack had grafted Dad’s mojo into you. They caught me eavesdropping and told me the whole story, how Dad’s mojo had helped your brain develop, and how Dad figured it was better to let you hang on to the mojo for as long as you needed it.”
“Right. So he was doing me a favour.”
“He was. He is. He loves you.”
“Hee-haw.”
“Oh, Maka.”
“What? Did Dad and Uncle Jack downplay the part where they’d made me their mule without giving me any choice in the matter?”
“The living get culled every day, and their souls reaped. What does their consent matter to the likes of Dad and Uncle Jack? We may be their kin, but we’re also their subjects.”
“Right now, I don’t care. They fucked with me. I don’t so much mind that, because it helped Dad out. But they’ve been lying to me about it all my life, and that bites.”
“When they told me, what I understood was that if you died, you would go away, so then Dad could have his mojo back, and then he would go all godlike on me, and I figured he would probably go away, too. It made me frantic. Since then, I’ve been trying to make sure that nothing ever happened to you.”
“We’re sisters. You and I shared a bloodstream in the womb. Why did you keep the big secret from me for so long?”
“Dad and Uncle Jack said it would upset you too much.”
“Abby, you know me better than anyone else does. Didn’t it occur to you that I might have felt honoured to know that they’d given me something so precious to protect?”
“It really didn’t,” she said wonderingly. “But wait; you didn’t sound so honoured just a second ago. That was pure resentment.”
I sighed. “It was. And then you talked to me, and suddenly it wasn’t any more.” I lay back down and put my arm around her. The touch of her skin on mine was so right that there were no words for it. Her body untensed. She slid right up against me. My arm fit across her breastbone just as it used to. My hand cupped the curve and weight of her breast, so like my own. I said, “You can prop your knee up on my leg.”
“Mm-hmm. That’s how I used to do it.”
“Before we started sleeping in separate beds.”
She took my hand. Kissed it. Put it back on her breast again. “See?” she said. “We’ll be fine. You don’t need to move out.”
She was asleep in seconds, while I was still trying to work out how to reply to that. “Fuck.” I listened to her breathing and to Butter scratching at my bedroom door. The arm on which I was lying fell asleep. I wanted to get more comfortable, but Abby was still holding tightly to my other hand, and I didn’t want to disturb her.
4
IF YOU’RE GOING TO ARRANGE A FUNERAL, you probably shouldn’t be one of the bereaved. Not that most people have any choice about that. For Abby and me, the next couple of days were a miasma of relentless detail, fatigue so profound we didn’t even have the energy to weep from it, and of the myriad emotional jolts of loss. The faint and fading smell of Dad’s sweat on his clothes as we cleaned out his closet; the junk mail addressed to Mr. Joli; getting a bill from the rest home that had the word “FINAL” stamped on it. There were kindnesses, too: flowers from the shop owner who’d found Dad in the alleyway, Lars and Beji doing the dishes and the laundry that we’d neglected for days, squirrels raining acorns down on our heads every time we stepped out of doors. Abby said the squirrels meant well. They were trying to make sure we had enough to eat.
No one had found Dad aka Quashee the kudzu vine yet. There’d been sightings in the city and even one blurry satellite photo, but by the time anyone arrived on the scene, Dad and Quashee would be long gone. Whether or not the two of them understood it, they had good reason to be so evasive; Uncle Hunter was looking for them, too. He was thrilled to know that Dad was so defenseless in hi
s mindless, mojoless state. Uncle Hunter was ruthless with his prey, and he had every intention of turning his position as interim Lord of the Forest into a permanent posting. He was making sure to point out to everyone how seriously he was taking his responsibility. “I’m sorry about Boysie, but he brought this on himself. And now he’s spreading an invasive species all over his own daughters’ home soil! The entire opposite of what a nature celestial should do. It’s unfortunate, but if I find him, I’m going to do what I have to. It’s my duty, after all.”
Uncle Jack wasn’t too worried about that. He figured Hunter wouldn’t take the risk of breaking the celestials’ biggest tabu: killing one of their own. But Uncle was worried about Dad’s well-being. “I don’t know how long Quashee can keep carrying Boysie,” he said. “Kudzus need to root to live. If Quashee withers away, that’ll leave Boysie bodiless. A haint. Haints don’t survive on this plane forever, no matter who they were when they were alive.”
Dad’s body had already been cremated. I was on the phone with Aunt Suze, finalizing details of the wake, when Abby came home with the ashes. She put the container down on the living room table and pulled out a chair for herself. She sat with a groan.
“Auntie?” I said into the phone. “Call you back, OK?”
“Sure. Do you have white Barbancourt on your list, though? Mister Cross says he’s going to be drinking a lot of it.”
“Got it.” The old guys didn’t eat, but they sure loved their white rum.
I rang off. The ashes were in a matte coal-coloured urn fashioned, oddly enough, in the shape of an anvil. “Where’d you get that urn? I don’t remember seeing it in the crematorium’s catalogue.”
Sister Mine Page 13
