by Jud Widing
More worth answering was the question Nur asked her sister after they had laid on the ‘well we’re heading out see you later’ song and dance for their Aunt and Uncle.
“So what are you doing with your night out?” she asked with enough innocent curiosity to put several cats to death.
Deirdre shrugged and replied “oh, you know,” which, like, come on.
“Actually I don’t.”
“Well,” was the beginning and end of Deirdre’s riposte.
After a lapse into silence, Deirdre returned fire: “What are you doing with my night out?”
Nur’s shrug was but an echo of her sister’s practiced gesture. “I’ll be wandering around, I guess.” Which was true enough.
“Mhm.”
Thus ended their second song and dance of the evening. About ten minutes after that, Deirdre lost her tail.
“Well,” the young De Dernberg reprised as she turned to the doors, “this is where I leave you.” She weaved between the closing doors of the T, leaping out of the train at the Hynes stop.
Nur leapt up from her seat. Curses! She had thought nothing of it when Deirdre remained standing, because that was the posture they’d always taken. How did I not see this coming? she wondered as the Hynes stop, and a waving Deirdre, made a speedy exit stage left.
Shit shit shit shit shit, she added as the T sped through the grim, dim tunnels of Boston. Shit.
Of course Deirdre had anticipated that Nur would be following her. So she had planned on losing her. Why hadn’t Nur anticipated that? She had been blinded by a temporary feeling of sisterhood, that’s why. The translation thing had gone so well! Was a good faith performance too much to ask from her sister? Nevermind the fact that Nur herself had been planning to act in ways that fell short of ‘good faith’; she was the big sister! She was supposed to look out for her little sister! Ends justifying means, and what not!
She alighted at Copley, nearly shouldering the accordion doors off their runners in her haste. Taking the steps two at a time, she emerged into a dusky, cold evening, the Old Church now fully visible between the palsied, cracked fingers of the denuded trees. The sight that had so impressed her that first day failed to register in the slightest, except as one of many material obstructions that could well be concealing Deirdre, directly or indirectly.
Scratch that – unlikely. She looked to her left, down Boylston, in the direction of the Hynes Convention Center. Two paths suggested themselves: sprint down the street, head on a swivel, hoping to catch a glimpse of her sister…or cross the street, catch the first outbound T and get out at Hynes. For all she knew, the timing could well work out to be approximately the same. The only advantage to the former plan was that, if Deirdre had come wandering this way, Nur might spot her…but in all probability, Deirdre would have anticipated this as well, and so taken her one-woman uh-oh roadshow in the exact opposite direction.
“How did I not see this coming?” Nur reiterated for the benefit of everyone in earshot who understood Seychellois Creole, which is to say nobody. She added, “aaaaaaaah…”
Every moment of indecision was a moment in which the distance between Deirdre and herself grew. That was not a helpful thought to think, but it was the thought she thought.
“Aaaaaaah….ha!” There was triumph in that ha, because coming to a decision was a small victory and she’d take what she could get.
Swinging her upper body like a runningback, she teetered to the left until the teeter turned into a sprint.
The deciding vote had been cast by that unhelpful thought. The idea of sitting around and waiting for a train in a moment like this would have been more than she could bear. Even if it took her slightly longer, running along Boylston would give her the illusion of being actively on top of the situation, rather than being passively ferried along by the wretched public transit system that caused this whole mess in the first place. Damn the MBTA, that’s what Nur had to say about this!
Or would do, once she got her breath back. Wheezing her way along semi-crowded sidewalks, she wasn’t looking to say much of anything just then, except maybe how did I not see this coming, because she couldn’t imagine it being possible to say that too many times.
Deirdre looked the wrong way when crossing the street and was hit by a truck.
Deirdre slipped on a banana peel and fell into an open manhole.
Deirdre took a pamphlet and joined a cult and spent fifteen years worshipping a stinky man in a bathrobe and then committed suicide.
Deirdre fell through a portal to an alternate dimens-
This line of thinking was not productive, but Nur couldn’t much help it. These and other mortifying images of mortal peril came to her unbidden, and hung along a burning thread of rage like sheets so soiled they needed to be dried before they could be washed.
Deirdre could be anywhere was also not the start of a productive run at deducing her whereabouts, so with her overtaxed heart thudding in her throat, Nur decided to narrow things down as best she could.
Where would Deirdre definitely not go?
Uncle Bernard’s, duh.
The School…almost definitely not. But that would be closed anyway.
The Library, which would also be closed.
The café they’d done their translation stuff…
Deirdre would probably not go to any of the places they had already been before. So, yeah. Was that helpful? Did that narrow things down?
Not really.
Deirdre could be almost anywhere, Nur concluded, which was progress of a kind.
She rounded the corner and skidded to a halt at the gaping maw of the Hynes stop, currently disgorging a mess of harsh yellow light and soft white people. Gasping for air in short, snatching gulps, she slapped her hands on her knees and leaned until her upper body was nearly parallel with the splotchy concrete beneath her, because that felt like the thing to do.
Take a breather, look at the problem from a different angle, OH NO.
Here was a different angle: Deirdre would eventually have to go home. Her sister was a rascal, but she wasn’t an idiot. She wouldn’t try her luck at shacking up with some stranger, and besides, Nur was relatively certain her sister was a virgin, and still retained enough of a romantic streak to keep that record intact until she met ‘the right guy’. So Deirdre would go home.
She would go home alone.
She would go home and Uncle Bernard would ask, ‘where is Nur?’ And Deirdre would respond, ‘I don’t know.’
And then they would both be in a world of trouble. Deirdre’s would just be a small, small world; the Wide, Wide, World of Pain would be reserved for Nur.
The worst part about this was that Nur felt certain Deirdre hadn’t planned this particular hitch in the plan. It was just that they had clearly expended so much mental energy on trying to outmaneuver each other, they’d forgotten about the final, essential step of needing to, uh, inmaneuver back together at the end of the night.
And then, the ultimate cackling horror of the situation revealed itself to Nur, backlit by giddy shafts of lightning. If one of the De Dernbergs has returned home alone, both would get in trouble. That was for certain. But whoever returned first could also control the narrative, and minimize damage for themselves. Deirdre could sing of Nur’s negligence, but Nur could just as easily spin the yarn of Deirdre’s deception. Perhaps the latter case would have been the more disastrous, as it implied willful chicanery.
A classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, then. Each sister could secure herself a measure of immunity from familial wrath by compromising the other. Not knowing what the other was going to do, it was in both of their best interest to go home immediately, before the other had the chance to get in first.
Nur froze and pondered this for five eternal seconds…and without quite knowing how, she arrived at her decision, without r
ealizing the degree to which it would set the tone for their relationship into the foreseeable future.
She smote her thighs and took off running around the station, back the way she came on Newbury Street. “How did I not see this coming?!” she shouted out loud once again.
“See what coming?” asked somebody at a bus stop.
“It’s a long story!” Nur replied.
Halfway to the café at which Deirdre had been so helpful just three days ago, Nur realized that by some stroke of impossible luck, that man back at the bus stop could understand and speak Seychellois Creole. She came as near to screeching as a halting human can, made a violent about-face and ran back to Hynes.
The guy was gone, presumably on a bus to wherever Deirdre and Amelia Earhart and the crew of the Mary Celeste had gone as well. This was the old De Dernberg luck! Nur said a rude word before it was back to wheezing.
CHAPTER 16
Luck once again broke Nur’s way: the café where she had heard about the most American thing Hyun-Woo had ever seen was open, and getting onto their Wi-Fi was relatively quick work. She didn’t know the word for “password”, but knew the words “this” and “please”, so it was a simple matter of pulling up the password entrance page on her phone and pointing.
She got on and sent Deirdre a message: “I’m at that café from a few days ago, please meet me back here ASAP.” The italics were implied, of course, but Nur liked to think that the ones and zeroes that comprised her message could retain the urgency of their inception as they zipped across the city to wherever the hell Deirdre had gone.
Then came the hardest part: she had to wait.
While she waited, she ruminated.
It was slightly disheartening that she should have not the foggiest idea of where Deirdre would go, wasn’t it? She thought she knew her sister relatively well, and would have said so to anyone who asked (though what an odd question that would be). But being forced to prioritize Deirdre’s interests, in the hopes of distilling them into places she might go as a result of those interests, made Nur realize that her conception of her sister was at least half a decade out of date. The dolls and baubles with which Deirdre was once so enamored had long since taken up a dusty residency in the closet, obviously, of course, and the adolescent fascinations had gone the same way. So why, as Nur struggled mightily to come up with the things Deirdre did like, now, in the present, couldn’t she put her finger on anything other than Pokémon and sharks (Deirdre used to know everything about sharks, for some reason) and Lisa Frank?
What the hell did Deirdre enjoy nowadays? Scratch “slightly disheartening” – this was shattering. Having the sibling close at hand meant she could always just hold something in front of Deirdre’s face and watch how it shone or contorted. Knowing what Deirdre liked had never mattered before, because finding out was so simple. What do you think of this? Nur would ask. Deirdre’s face would attain the Platonic ideal of Frown. Alright, not a fan then. It was as though she had treated her sister as an outsourced memory bank. There was no point in both of them remembering Deirdre’s likes and dislikes, after all!
Idiot. Nur nursed the wounds of the self-flagellation still in progress, staring out the window at the shafts of tree-sliced streetlight raking across Newbury like searchbeams. Masochism wasn’t usually her style, but she needed to be doing something proactive.
The café closed an hour and change later, at 10:00PM. Nur could at least understand that the helpful woman behind the counter was apologetic about the eviction, though that fundamental decency ended up being more frustrating than anything. If only I could explain the situation, this helpful woman would probably, well, be more helpful. Simple words trapped in her skull, yet again. Instead, Nur stalled long enough to compose a second message to Deirdre: “I’m getting kicked out of the café, so if you get this meet me…” where?
Where the hell could she have gone!? She won’t be able to get into half the stuff to do in this town, being a minor. And most businesses are closing, or already closed. So where?!
“…so if you get this meet me at the café anyway. I’ll be sitting out front like a chump.” Angels from the Cloud whisked the message off into the night, and Nur followed it with a final nod to the helpful (and real) woman from the café. Tugging the lapels of her coat, she hugged it closer to her body and hunkered down on the café’s frigid stoop. Unsurprisingly, the café’s Wi-Fi didn’t extend this far, so she was once again incommunicado.
A few days later, she would reflect with rueful mirth upon how wholly Millenial she was in that moment. Sitting on a stoop, waiting for something to happen, wracked with an existential sense of disconnection because she didn’t have any Wi-Fi service. Also wearing a terrifically fashionable coat she bought for a scandalously low sum, almost certainly the product of offshore labor conducted in deplorable conditions.
But this was a sneering grin for another time. In the moment, Nur could only bemoan how little she actually knew about her sister, her own sister, and how pathetic it was that her primary concern was not actually for said sister, but for herself, and what parental hell would rain down upon her if word of this wretched evening made its way across the globe, as it most certainly would if Deirdre went tottering home alone.
What an unspeakably short-sighted decision, to agree to this! And why? So she could have a mindless, nattering small-talk marathon with a crush?
(not just a crush)
Shivering on the top step of a commercial brownstone, the night was cold but her self-loathing was on fire, for all the good that did her, and the street was quiet and the passersby were lonely and the cars were fuel-inefficient and everything was garbage. Was English really that important? She was going to be working and living in Seychelles for goodness’ sake! Give it a few years and she’d be running the De Dernberg Towers – she could hire people to speak English for her! Or the guests could damn well take a stab at Seychellois Creole, how about that? Damn to them! They could and should be damned!
Deirdre sat down on the stoop next to Nur.
“…” said Nur.
“I got your message,” Deirdre replied.
Nur considered this carefully, and then said “…”
She wanted to be angry, but that would be stupid, because technically what had happened was precisely what she’d agreed to. Deirdre had simply bucked her attempt to get cute with the terms of the agreement.
Frustration seemed fair enough, just on the basic principle of ‘it’s frustrating to be deceived’.
But then there was relief. Mostly relief. Relief that Deirdre was safe, obviously, but also relief that she would be alright, and she wouldn’t catch hell from her family and be grounded until the sun exploded.
So there was also disappointment, that she could be so selfish.
Mostly the relief, though.
Nur leaned her head on Deirdre’s shoulder, and Deirdre leaned back. They sat that way for a long time, even though the night was cold.
On the T ride back, Deirdre told Nur about her big night out. It mainly consisted of riding high on the novelty of solitude for about fifteen minutes, and then a slow descent into the ennui of the same. Having a night out alone was fun in theory, but she had nothing to do. And sometimes those can be the best nights, as long as you’ve got someone fun with whom to do nothing. Instead, she just wandered around Back Bay for a while, until she realized precisely what Nur had about the catastrophe that would be Deirdre returning home alone. So she ended up spending most of her night out looking for a place with free Wi-Fi, to send Nur a message, in the desperate hope that her big sister would have the same thought and do likewise. Happily, she discovered that Nur had beaten her to the punch.
Now having something to do (“find my way back to that café”), Deirdre took a leisurely but purposeful stroll through a hushed late-autumn weeknight in Boston, all on her lonesome. It was revivifying in
its simplicity: alone time, real alone time, for the first time in months. Humans are sociable creatures, and despite her trendy, pouty poses, Deirdre was no exception. But she also came by her desire for privacy honestly, and found the odd night alone to be essential for her mental health.
So she sat on the stoop next to Nur feeling completely refreshed, and that feeling carried her all the way back to Uncle Bernard’s. The two sisters spoke easily and amicably, whispering and giggling in the silence more commonly filled by the thunderous cracks and snaps of thin ice and eggshells.
Nur was genuinely glad to hear that Deirdre had a good night, and let her know. Privately, she could only be disappointed to know that morning would almost certainly burn the goodwill off like the mists over a dead bog. But until then, she could admire the way the will-o-the-wisps looked through the happy haze.
And then she felt like the biggest asshole on the planet, because the next morning Deirdre was still in a highly agreeable mood, and Nur had just a few hours ago compared her to a dead bog.
CHAPTER 17
There’s a scene that pops up in most modern crime fiction, where character A needs to earn the trust of character B. Both characters are hardened criminals (naturally), tough customers who shave with dull razors (invariably male, are the characters in these sorts of scenes) and take their coffee black. Character B says something to the effect of ‘give me one reason why I should trust you’, to which Character A pulls out their gun, turns it around, and hands it to Character B grip-first. ‘Because I could have just shot you in the dingus there, yet now I am giving you the opportunity to shoot me in the dingus’, comes the unstated reply. The moment when each could have killed the other passes, ferrying the miasmic paranoia off with it.
Chest-pounding machismo of this sort always rang hollow to Nur – as if eliminating the most dramatic forms of betrayal left no room for the less grisly offenses – and yet, something of this sort had passed between Deirdre and her…and taken a large portion of their reciprocal suspicions with it.
