Fleet had been only twenty-three years old? My skin went all creepy-crawly as I remembered the high I’d gotten from the Soul Chain performance. Fleet had liked them, too. A lot. When she talked about them just now, she’d sounded like an addict, not a fan. “But I don’t want to leave,” I said.
“You have to. Every second you stay here brings you closer to my having to reap you prematurely.”
“Uncle, I want this to be my home now. I don’t want to run away from it. Besides, I have you to look after me.”
He caught my gaze and held it until I looked down. I really hated it when he put on the aspect of a maggot-ridden corpse. “Oh, so now you’re all grown?” he said. “Well, I guess you won’t be needing me to babysit you any longer.” His half-eaten lips mangled the words. His breath stank like rotting beef jerky. “Makeda child, please do as I ask. Your mother will never forgive me if I have to take you before your time.”
“Mom? You talk to Mom?”
Quick as a blush, his face flipped to whole, and human. It bore the vulnerable, melting look of a young man in love. The change seemed to surprise him. He smiled shyly. “All the time,” he replied.
“You never told me that!”
He was in control of himself again. “You might want to call someone to collect that shell in there.” He nodded towards Fleet’s door. “You know they get smelly if they hang around for too long.”
I shuddered.
“If I let you keep the rug, will you get the hell out of here?”
My heart leapt. “I can keep it?”
He was fading away, Cheshire cat–style. “Yes. So long as you get out of here tonight. And so long as you don’t use it any more. To, for instance, go for one last jaunt. Because you know there’s no way I would ever, ever encourage you to do something so rash as that.” He winked out, leaving his smile behind.
I chuckled. “Sure. ’Cause it’s not like you’re a trickster deity, or anything.”
The smile said, “Your mother would be so proud if she could see what you’d made. And I’ll talk to Suze and Roger about their servitude.” Then it was gone, too.
I could keep the rug! Abby would be pissed enough to spit bricks. Now I just had to convince her to let me come and hang for a few days until I found somewhere else.
Halfway to my unit, I remembered Fleet. Crap, crap, crap. I had a hard time summoning up the courage to go to her door. Despite my uncle’s profession, I actually hadn’t seen a lot of death in my time.
I knocked gently. “Miz Fleet?” Could Uncle ever be wrong about whether someone had died? He said he’d already carried her over to the other side, but how did I know what that meant? Suppose she was only sleeping? If so, I wouldn’t want to disturb her. I knocked again, harder. Nothing. I looked around to make sure no one was coming, then got to my knees and peeked under the badly hung door. The light was on in there, and just in front of the door I could see something that looked a hell of a lot like pink chenille. Gods, suppose she’d been lying there unconscious, needing help, while Uncle and I jawed?
I made myself open Fleet’s door. I peeked inside, then closed it again. I got my cell phone out of my pocket and called 911; told them I’d heard the thump as I went past Fleet’s door, and gone in to investigate when she didn’t respond to me. And I kept my supper down.
When they came, the paramedics told me unofficially that she’d probably died on impact. By the time all that kerfuffle was done, I’d been awake almost twenty-four full hours. Very full. I was nauseous with fatigue. I needed sleep, pronto. And I knew how to get to Abby’s place in mere minutes.
This time, I had the rug fly high in a route that took it over as many parks as possible until it deposited me at Abby’s. When she opened the door, bleary-eyed, to my ringing, and saw the rug floating six inches above the ground beside me, she only said, “Holy fuck,” and stood back to let me and it in. An acorn pinged the back of my head before she closed the door behind me.
Abby began, “What—?”
“Uncle says it’s OK.” He sort of had, anyway. I’d give her all the details tomorrow. “I’ll tell you everything in the morning. After I’ve slept for, oh, a week.” I put the rug down on the living room floor. Butter, her eyes wide in alarm, crouched in a guarding position beside it.
My bed was at Cheerful Rest. “I’ll take the couch, Abs.”
“OK,” she said, her voice modulated with unspoken questions.
I fell asleep to the quiet whirring sounds of the birds on the rug, and Butter chittering back at them.
Lake Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes, clocking in at a mere 19,000 square kilometres, or 7,300 square miles. It’s nearly the size of New Jersey. It’s about 244 metres at its deepest point. It’s roughly the same length and breadth as Lake Erie, but holds about four times as much water, due to being much deeper than Lake Erie. It has 726 miles of shoreline. I know all this because for a while, I was obsessed with Lake Ontario. I did so many homeschool projects on it that Dad finally told me I had to pick other topics.
I don’t care how small it is by Great Lakes standards; 104,000 cubic miles is a lot of lake. I used to dream about finding her there, the mother I knew only from a couple of photographs that Aunt Suzy had. I had fantasies of setting sail on Lake Ontario, like the owl and the pussycat, in a beautiful pea-green boat. (For years I thought it was a pee-green boat. I once asked Dad what was so beautiful about the boat in the poem, and then grumbled, “Besides, who pees green, anyway?” He fell out laughing for a good five minutes before he could collect himself enough to explain my mistake.) I would imagine myself lost somewhere on the lake with no land in sight, on a warm, sunny day. And my mother would hear my frightened sobbing and would arise out of the depths. With her nose, she would gently nudge my boat to a safe shore.
Since I was forbidden to do any more projects on Lake Ontario, I fell instead to looking up everything I could find about legendary freshwater monsters. No one had ever gotten a clear look at one, so I was free to theorize. In my childhood imagination, my mother looked something like a cross between a dolphin and a mermaid, with a bit of dragon thrown in for good measure.
When I learned that the Saint Lawrence Seaway connects Lake Ontario to the Atlantic, I wondered whether maybe Mom had found her way through it to the ocean. I looked up the dimensions of the Atlantic Ocean. The number crushed me. I couldn’t fathom it, figuratively or literally. I couldn’t look for my mom there, I just couldn’t. I pestered Dad and Uncle Jack with questions about whether Mom might accidentally find herself in the ocean and not be able to get back. About whether lake monsters could breathe in salt water. In desperation, Dad started taking me and Abs to walk along the Spit, where we could at least be close to the lake that had swallowed our mother. But after the first few times, Abby didn’t want to go any more. So it would be just me and Dad and the water, and a little pea-green boat bobbing in my imagination’s eye. Those walks along the Spit relieved a little the helpless lostness I felt whenever I thought about my mother. I wasn’t sure why they made me feel a bit better.
6
GOT IT!” Sitting at the living room table, Abby threw triumphant hands in the air. “I’ve been trying to work out this arrangement for three days now. Couldn’t make sense of it for the life of me.”
“That’s the new blues suite?” I asked. “For your gig at the Music Gallery?” I had unrolled my rug on the floor nearby and was repairing some sloppily laid adhesive on a few of the visible birds.
“ ‘Weeping, Not Gently.’ Yeah. The theremin needs to come in on the upbeat after I start singing, not the downbeat. And the whole slide guitar part needs to go up a fifth in the final movement.”
“I like that suite a lot.” I used the tip of a toothpick to put a dab of epoxy on the bottom of a clawed wire foot, then pressed the foot back into place on the rug. “The bit where you harmonize with your own recorded voice sounds so ghostly. For some reason, it makes me think of old, scratchy records. Hey, you have any thoughts about how
you want to cook that salmon you have thawing in the fridge?”
But Abby had gotten a faraway look. “Ghostly…” she murmured.
“ ’Cause I’m getting hungry, and I bet you’ve been sitting in that chair since this morning with nothing but a cup of green tea.”
“What? No. At least, I don’t think so. I can’t remember…” Her voice trailed off into silence.
I wasn’t going to get anything intelligible from her for a while. I went and rummaged around in the kitchen. There was fresh kale, and ginger, and garlic. “Abs?”
No answer. My tummy grumbled. Next thing you know, I was baking the salmon for dinner, and tossing the kale in the frying pan with some olive oil, lemon juice, and ginger, and using the rest of the ginger to make self-saucing ginger pudding for two for dessert. At some point during the cooking, I heard Abby exclaim, “Candy wrappers! Maka, you’re a genius!” I smiled and looked for sour cream to go on top of the pudding.
When I put a plate of hot food under her nose, she started, then looked up at me with a tired smile. “Cellophane candy wrappers. If I crumple them while I’m singing, it’ll evoke that old record sound.” Then she saw her dinner. “Oh, Maka, thank you! You didn’t have to do this.”
“Enlightened self-interest,” I joked as I put my own plate down on the table. “You know I won’t be having any salmon dinners with my salary from Burger Delite.”
Her face hardened. “You’re going back to live in that place, then?”
“Sure,” I lied. Cheerful Rest had me seriously spooked. More truthfully, I continued, “Or somewhere else. I really think it’s for the best, Abs. ’Bout time I started learning to live like a claypicken, don’t you think?”
“But you’re not a claypicken.”
“Might as well be.” She shrugged. “Your choice, I guess.” She tucked into the food. She slowed down somewhere around bite three. She closed her eyes. Chewed. Sighed happily. “Really, Sis,” she said, “thank you.”
I hated myself a little for how wonderful that simple thanks from my sister made me feel. Trust me to be able to simultaneously feel good and to feel shitty about feeling good.
Abby asked, “We still on for tonight?”
“Uh-huh. In about four hours.” I’d promised her that once it was good and dark, I’d demonstrate my flying carpet for her. “Where would you like me to take you?”
“I don’t know. You choose.”
“OK.” In the meantime, I would keep trying to reach Brie. I’d been calling all day, but he hadn’t answered and he wasn’t returning my calls.
When we were done having supper, I did the dishes; if I left them unwashed, Abby probably wouldn’t notice until the bits of salmon stuck to the plates and the baking pan started to rot. Then I went through the living room into the hallway and pulled on my jacket, which was hanging on the peg there, and my boots. I would have a little more privacy for a phone call if I was out in the backyard; along with a supernatural talent for music came excellent hearing.
Abby didn’t notice me leaving. Butter did, and tried to follow me, but as she came to the door, I gently pushed her back inside with my foot and closed the door behind me.
When I turned around, a flung acorn almost blinded me. “Stop that!” I hissed in the general direction of the oak tree. “Thank you, but we’re not hungry, all right?”
It was that hour of magic light when the setting sun and the rising night painted the world in hues of old gold and royal blue. An ice-cream cart must have come by recently. The sweetish scent still lingered on the air. It was a little early for ice cream, but I guess everyone was eager for the warmer weather. Willing summer to come by acting as though it were already here was a bit of claypicken mojo. Sometimes, Dad had told me, it even worked.
The ground in the back of the house was spring-squelchy, loam-dark. It was going to be a bitch to get the mud off my boots. I rang Brie’s number again.
“Hello?” said a man’s voice, and my heart triple-hammered.
“Brie?”
“No, it’s Hallam. Who’s this?”
“It’s Makeda. You know, I just moved into the unit across from Brie’s?”
“Oh, right! Listen, I’d call him to the phone, but we’re in the middle of a rehearsal, and he’s in a bitch of a mood. The others sound like shit today, and I swear, I’ve suddenly grown two left feet.”
“Oh. Uh, OK. But you guys will be all right, won’t you? I mean, frankly, you sounded like shit during practice the other day, too. But the show rocked.”
He laughed. “You’re onto us already, huh? But something’s really off this time.”
In the background, Brie’s voice yelled, “Hallam! Get your frigging lazy ass over here, or you’re out of the band!”
Hallam said to me, “See what I mean? Gotta go. I’ll tell him you called.”
He hung up before I could say goodbye. I wished I could have kept him on the phone a little longer, but what would I have asked him? Do you notice yourself getting a little older and a little weaker after every show? And the people in your audience, too? I was starting to fear that the mysteriously Shiny Brie and his music were the cause of my high, and the thing that had drained Fleet and that guy Win. How old was Win, really? But how would I explain my suspicions to a claypicken like Hallam? Instead, I just ended the call and went back inside.
Abby was buried in her work again. Still a while to go before our magic carpet ride. I flopped onto the couch in the living room in front of the TV. Caught an episode of my soap, and one of those subtly everybody-phobic cop shows that zooms right on past ridiculous until it somehow bumps into fascinating. When it was done, Abs wasn’t ready to go yet. I could check online for more Dad sightings. My laptop was over at Cheerful Rest, but Dad’s computer sat on a round café table beside his armchair. For some reason, it didn’t bother him much to use a computer, particularly to surf the Web. He didn’t love the squared-off edges of the box itself, and touching the keyboard made his fingertips itch. But he said that the way the Internet worked was so jes’-grew and contradictory that it was like dealing with a very large, stubborn animal.
I went over to the computer and turned it on. Abby glanced up briefly when the computer made the bong sound that let you know it had booted. Sadly, she said, “I haven’t turned that on since Dad went into the rest home.”
On the screen, a message flashed in a small window. I read it. It made no sense. “Abs?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you come over here?”
“Now? I’m working.”
“A calendar reminder just popped up.”
Abby looked up from her marking at me, her face stricken.
“What’s it say?”
“It says, ‘Cora, two a.m.’ ”
“What? Our mom? Is it her birthday today, or something?” Abby reached for her cane and pulled herself to her feet.
“At two a.m.? Who has a birthday party at two in the morning?” I clicked on the icon. “It’s not just today. It’s a recurring entry. The same day every month.”
Abby came and hung her cane off the edge of Dad’s round desk. She leaned on me with one hand on my shoulder for support. She peered at the screen. “That’s weird.”
“The previous one was only a few days before I checked him into the home.”
Abby said, “Maybe Uncle Jack knows what this is about.”
I didn’t want to talk to Leggy John right now. No need for him to find out how liberally I was interpreting his tacit approval to ride the rug one more time. “What happens if you click on the day before?”
I did so. Maybe that’d distract Abby from the idea of contacting Uncle Jack. The note that popped up read, ‘Buy oranges, 31.’ It also recurred every month. “The hell?”
Abby peered at the note. “Why oranges, of all things? And why thirty-one of them?” Abs and I didn’t like oranges, and Dad refused to eat any of the “paipsey excuse for oranges these people have over here.”
“You really think that numb
er is the amount of oranges he was reminding himself to buy?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and I think Mom liked oranges a lot. I vaguely remember Dad telling us something like that.”
“So once a month he would buy thirty-one oranges that no one in this household would eat… and then he’d do what with them?”
“And what did it have to do with Mom?”
I had an idea. “Holy shit.” I checked the time on the computer. Twelve fifteen a.m. “Wanna go find out?”
“What? Where?”
“I think I know where. Does that all-night deli at the bottom of Woodbine still have a fresh fruit section? And can I borrow enough money to buy thirty-one oranges?”
Abby took her hand off my shoulder and slid the hook of the cane off the desk. “So long as I don’t have to eat any of them.”
“Come on, then!” I grabbed her jacket and mine, snatched her car keys off the kitchen table and tossed them to her, and whistled to my rug. Obediently it leapt up to shin height, its wings whirring. Butter, napping on the couch, sprang to her feet, all a-bristle and a-hiss. Abby made a yowly, gargly noise at her. Butter looked at her and obediently de-bristled, but she kept a distrustful eye on the floating rug. Abby said, “Butter’s right, that thing’s creepy. I can’t believe that Uncle let you keep it.”
“Don’t you listen to them,” I cooed at the rug. “Mama loves you. And I’m sorry, but you’re only going as far as the car for now. But I promise you’ll get to stretch your wings soon after that.”
Abby asked Butter to stay in the house. “See?” I said. “It’s like you have your familiar, and now I have mine.”
Butter made an offended noise that didn’t need to be translated. I stepped outside the house and ducked. A small rain of acorns pattered down onto the rug floating beside me. “Abby, can you please get them to stop trying to feed us?” I brushed the acorns off the rug.
Sister Mine Page 21
