Sister Moon

by Kirsten Miller

  Later I slept with my husband in the warmth of our bed while my sister lay on the couch and stared through the open curtains into the night. I’d long ago learnt that people don’t sleep much on empty stomachs, and people born of the moon barely sleep at all. There was nothing more that I could do.

  Early the following morning I left Hayley with Auster and Devin and I drove to the beach and swam in the shallow waves. The sun painted the sea a pale and shining yellow where the light fell, and it took the colour from the sky, consumed everything for its own energy. There were a few people on the beach already, the sand was patterned with footprints where the early risers had walked and the waves lapped slowly inwards, intent on erasing any mark that human beings had made. Devin wore a green full-length swimsuit and she looked like a dancer as she tiptoed through the waves before her skin became accustomed to the biting cold. Her hair hung in tumbling coils that touched her elbows. From where I stood, I thought that if I didn’t know her and all that her mixed-up head contained, from the outside her skin was fragile, her protruding bones too real. We played an old game and baptised ourselves in the water of the new day and came out shivering, giggling, our bodies gleaming and speckled with goose flesh.

  ‘I love you, Cat, my sister,’ she said.

  ‘I love you too, Dev.’ We sat together on the sand, our thighs touching, huddled beneath a single extra-large green bath towel.

  ‘Do you know what Auster’s name means?’ she asked. As she said it, it struck me how seldom I’d heard her speak my husband’s name.

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘The south wind.’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?’

  ‘It comes to blow the heat of the sun away.’ Her eyes dropped to her empty hands. ‘I once looked it up.’

  I nodded and moved out from under the towel. I was warm enough already.

  ‘And what does Catherine mean?’

  ‘Pure. You’re an innocent, Cat. You’re one of the lucky ones.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘That’s the nature of the sun. It shines no matter what. It’s like a dolphin that can’t help grinning, because that’s the way its face was made.’

  ‘And what are you then?’

  ‘Devin means poet.’

  ‘Jeez, Dev, where do you get all this stuff?’

  ‘And all poets belong to the moon.’

  I looked out upon the world at the rising day. The land looked dark set against the brightening morning. A couple of gulls squalled above us, then dived down to skim the surface of the water on their separate paths of flight. ‘Let’s go and get a cup of coffee,’ I said.

  We sat beside the window, the first customers in the shop, and looked across the bay. I wanted to be out there again, with the taste of salt drying on my skin and the feel of the sun’s warmth working with the salt to bleach us golden again. Devin took milk and sugar in her coffee. I watched her load the spoons and I saw her fingers shaking. She took a tentative sip, as though to convince me that she’d really drink it.

  ‘What do you want from me, Dev? How can I help you?’

  ‘I want to leave the world,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be here any more.’

  ‘There’s not too much choice in that,’ I told her. Saying the same words again, trying to deflect her from her purpose. Too often, I felt like the older sister, speaking the predictable, the common sense. ‘Unless you step in front of a bus or something.’

  ‘I’m a bit lost, Cat. I always have been.’

  ‘You’re choosing it, Devin. You’ve been stuck in a pattern for so long, you’ve forgotten how to think any differently.’

  She flicked her teaspoon hard at me and I thought that she might let it go to hurtle at my face, but she held tight to the handle and only a few tiny drops of coffee hit my eyelids and the side of my cheeks.

  ‘Don’t even think you know what it’s like to be me. Just because your own world has been one of sunlit love doesn’t mean that everyone else’s experience has to be just the same. I’m not like you, Cat. I could never be like you. I didn’t have the chance.’

  ‘And I’m not like you either. I’ll never be beautiful like you, or clever; I’ll never have everyone looking at me when I walk into a room. You see? You see you have everything and still you’re not happy. It’s all perspective. It’s all what’s inside your head.’

  Her voice lowered along with her head. ‘Of course it is. It’s in my head.’ She ran a long finger around the rim of her cup. ‘I’m not asking you for help. I’m just telling you not to be surprised.’

  ‘Surprised. Surprised? Come on, Devin. What are you getting at now?’

  She put her elbow on the table and scratched her scalp with her long fingernails. She was all woman. The protruding bones only emphasised the elegant structure of her face. She was everything I could have been, all the beauty that her own self-destruction couldn’t soften. She was the outward serenity, the aesthetic miracle that I was not. ‘I’m just tired,’ she said.

  ‘What, then? What on earth are you on about, Devin? What are you trying to say?’

  But she wouldn’t say it, and I didn’t ask her again. Instead I led her back into the endless dance of words between us that always concealed the same truth. I couldn’t hold her close. I couldn’t protect her from her underworld with its entrance at that door at the bottom of the stairs. It was too late for either of us to go back.

  She looked away, out of the window to a place far beyond the sea. The sea was where my soul resided, locked into the blue beneath the waves from before I could walk. This was my haven and I entered it alone, diving under benevolent waves, protected by the cool blue water.

  Devin belonged somewhere else. I followed the gaze from her eyes and I saw them alight on the sky.

  ‘My life won’t turn out like everyone else’s.’ She leaned forward. ‘Do you know what Samuel means?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I have no idea.’

  ‘God heard.’

  ‘God heard?’

  ‘Or God’s heart.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded, put the spoon to her mouth. ‘That’s why I could only ever call him Dad,’ she said, the words distorted with the flat curve of the metal on her tongue. ‘Because he friggin’ heard nothing. And his heart was all for you.’

  Later, when I was alone, I looked it up in a book of names and I saw that she was right, but also that she’d left out a third meaning to my father’s name, perhaps the most important of all. His name, Samuel, had a third interpretation that loosely translated means asked of God.

  Thirty-Three

  The dreams come.

  Daydreams and memories are one thing; they know what they are and on which side of the night they belong. Nocturnal dreaming is something else. It comes with the moon and rides the tides of sleep, and when my eyes are closed and I’m in the waves I never know that she is gone. She comes to that dreaming world as though it is the real one; she links hands with me and the tide of dreams pulls us with it. Our hair is like mist in the water, makes halos around our heads as the filtered light streams through. The real world falls away and we are together, linked by time and blood and our childhood of water. Devin is with me always in my dreams, but she persists more strongly in my waking hours, only because every lucid hour is a brutal reminder that she is really gone.

  I wake this morning and my pillow is wet. I sit at the edge of the bed and blink the dream’s memory away. After breakfast I look into Hayley’s room and she’s on the floor, a pencil in her hand, her tongue curled over her bottom lip. I watch her from the doorway and she’s oblivious to anything but the page, and the way her hand moves over it.

  ‘Do you want to go out today?’

  ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The telephone rings, a hornet-sharp sound that pierces the air in our small house. I move into the hallway, and answer it. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Is that Mrs Garret?’

  ‘Yes.�
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  ‘It’s Sister Avalon here’

  ‘There’s something wrong?’

  ‘Your father is wetting the bed most nights now. We’re not sure if he’s not getting up at all, or if he’s just not waking up. He usually doesn’t make it to the bathroom. I think his confusion is more pronounced than we realised.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘I’d like you to consider adult diapers for him. It’ll put the cost of his care up, but not too much. It’s just the nights that are becoming a problem.’

  ‘Don’t you have a night nurse? Isn’t that somebody’s job?’

  ‘We don’t exactly have the staff quota ideal for the number of residents.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the medication.’

  ‘I don’t think we can play with that. It’s essential for him at this stage.’

  ‘Essential for him? Or for you?’

  If her voice across the line was permeable before, it now becomes a plank. Smooth, hard. A voice to knock your head against. ‘If he’s wearing something at night, it’ll help us with the laundry load,’ she says. ‘If you’re against it that’s fine, but it would be easier on the staff.’

  I lean against the wall and it feels cool, flat, like the surface of a marble sea. I close my eyes and the pattern there is orange, shifting, confined only to the blackness that I can see. I open them and Hayley is in front of me, both hands on her hips and a piece of paper dangling from her fingers. ‘M-O-M’ she mouths at me, no voice attached. I smile at her, and I know my smile is weak. The voice at the end of the phone persists, and I think of a digger dumping sand like guilt onto a building site. ‘Think of how your father feels too, when he realises what he has done. But of course if you can’t manage—’

  ‘Yes, okay,’ I say. ‘Let him wear diapers. But please, not in the daytime. Please let somebody take him to the toilet—’

  Hayley is still standing there, looking at me.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll see you soon, when you can make the time. Take care now.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Hayley’s eyes are too wide for her face, ogling me, as though I have done something wrong. ‘What?’ I say as I put down the phone.

  ‘Who’s wearing nappies?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Mom, tell me!’

  I move from the wall and through the door into the sitting room and beyond that the kitchen and she follows me, waving the piece of paper through the air, all the way through the house. Her hair touches her elbows. Her eyes touch my back; I feel them there, but I don’t turn around. She follows me still, insistent.

  I open the cupboard and get out the tea box and a cup, and flick the switch on the kettle. I sit down on a chair and lean my elbows on the table and Hayley sits down too, on the other side, facing me. ‘I wrote a poem,’ she says. ‘It’s for Grandpa.’

  I take the paper from her hands and stare at the words scratched in graphite pencil and they blur before my eyes, but my head is down so that she can’t see and I pray that the tears don’t fall on her carefully crafted letters. I slide the piece of paper back to her across the table. ‘That’s great, honey.’

  ‘You didn’t read it.’

  ‘I did.’ I have no idea why adults must continually lie to children, as though the smaller beings are less intelligent. ‘You can give it to him next time we visit.’

  ‘I can come with you now, if you still want to go out,’ Hayley says.

  ‘Go put your shoes on,’ I tell her, and she does.

  The houses breathe and squeeze the cars where they pass in narrow streets and all around the air rises in the warm day. Today we’re not going to see my father, or to the beach. We find an open road that leaves the city and I take it, Hayley watching the sky and the mountain and my eyes only on the road ahead. I have no idea where it will take me.

  Soon there is a sign and a turn-off and on impulse I am drawn to it. We travel a narrow path that is pulled together overhead by bending trees and lower-down bushes and at the end of it is a building with a wide veranda and tables with bright chequered cloths. We leave the car and find a small table at the edge of the cast concrete and we both sit on the same side, facing outwards, facing the fields. Five horses, two Arabians and three thoroughbreds, graze in the paddock near us. ‘Mom, please can I go there, please?’ She looks at me, but all she really sees are the animals and I am the fence between them.

  ‘Of course. Be careful.’ I’m hiding behind sunglasses. ‘What can I order for you?’ I ask.

  ‘Nothing. Just some water. I want to go to the horses.’

  She gets up and as she passes me she drags her hand across the width of my back and I think that it’s to say thank you, or something.

  As she moves I can see her already reining her own body in, holding herself back so as not to frighten the animals when she gets near to them. She’s walking pigeon-toed for extra stealth. She stands at the fence with her hands on the wire and her fingers spread and I know that she can smell them. The freshness of horses. The longing for that kind of freedom. Once she turns back to look at me. Her eyes gleam, and I see the white of her teeth.

  The waiter is at my elbow, dressed in black pants, a white shirt and waistcoat, inappropriate for the heat of the day. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘I’ll have a coffee, please.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘And for the little lady?’

  ‘A glass of water.’

  He returns with a tray and places a cup of hot black coffee in front of me. Beside it he puts a small silver jug and a bowl with sugar and a teaspoon. Last, the water, condensation already beading the clear glass.

  ‘She likes horses?’

  ‘She likes animals. As long as they’re warm-blooded.’

  ‘There’ll be a trainer out soon. Maybe you’d like to stick around. She could pick up a few tips.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He leaves me at the table and I pour milk into my coffee.

  When the coffee is cold and only half-finished, I leave a twenty rand note on the table and follow the path down to the fence where Hayley is staring at the horses.

  ‘I’m calling that one Snowy and that one Carrot and that one Nag,’ she says.

  ‘Nag? That’s a funny name for such a good-looking horse.’

  She looks at me, grins, assessing me before she speaks again: ‘You’re good-looking too,’ she says, ‘and I call you that sometimes.’ She looks back out at the horses, smug in her ability to leave me speechless sometimes.

  Thirty-Four

  Devin’s will to be in the world diminished further. When she’d given up on eating altogether, she allowed Auster and me to pay for her respite in a hospital. For weeks my father and I gazed at her unwilling body during visiting hours, bunches of flowers flopping weakly in our hands as we murmured at her bedside, as we tried to persuade her to live. A fine down developed across the surface of her skin. Then her organs faltered and threatened to fail. Machines brought her back across the line again and she’d lie in her bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting only for the chance to slip away again.

  It was cold the night I entered that hospital for the last time. The wind grabbed at my hair and tried to pull me backwards, away from the bleak light inside, but I fought it. The shop opposite reception was filled with flowers – flowers for new mothers, flowers for dead babies, bouquets and posies for operations and appendicitis. I no longer liked bringing flowers to my sister. I looked around and took a bar of mint chocolate and a TV magazine filled with gossip about the lives of celebrities. At the counter a woman with a smoker’s cough reached for the items and placed them in a packet, and she held out an open palm for the money. I hesitated, then changed my mind and closed my purse. The chocolate would get old and mottled at her bedside. She’d never open the magazine anyway.

  When I saw my sister’s form barely raised in the bed, I thought she was dead. Her face pointed to the wall, tinged with discolouration, grey an
d yellow in blotches like she’d been in a long fight and the bruises were starting to fade. Her once-beautiful hair stretched like a dry and brittle forest across the pillow. When I spoke her name, she didn’t turn her head. ‘Devin,’ I said. ‘Devin!’ I touched her gently and her arm flopped free, her hand a curved claw. Groups of visitors huddled around the beds of other patients, the hum of quiet conversation hung in the disinfected air. ‘Somebody, help me, please! Somebody, call a nurse!’ I looked around but nobody responded. A few eyes turned towards me, but when they met with mine, they shifted away. Back to their own beloveds and their own beds. I pressed the red button that rang the bell above Devin’s head to alert the nurses who sat at their station drinking coffee, bent over useless magazines left over from patients who had been discharged and were no longer in need of distraction from their pain.

  A woman who looked no older than Devin hurried towards us in a white uniform. She patted my sister’s face with the flat palm of her hand and when it brought no response, she pressed that red nurse’s button again, urgently.

  I stepped back as they took over my sister’s body with needles and tubes and the machines beside her. Any influence I might have had over keeping her alive was long gone; but I couldn’t accept that her only hope lay in the hands of these strangers. I ran through the cold and shiny corridors, I stood in the lift and watched the numbers fall as it took me to the ground. Outside the sky was dark and the full moon gleamed too brightly.

  I took my phone from my pocket. I knew his number by heart but I hesitated, my fingers fumbled before they could find the right name. The world was moving slowly now. I didn’t know what choice I had, if any, but I couldn’t leave my sister’s fate to others any more. People who had seen death and fought against it as their duty, but beyond a number, another file in a ward, they had no idea who Devin was. It rested with me. This was my call. I dialled a number and a man answered.