Sister Moon

by Kirsten Miller

  ‘I can’t leave her here,’ I told him. ‘She’s going to die. She’s on so much medication, if they put any more pills in her body, her liver’s going to fail completely—’

  ‘Whoa, girl. Slow down. What’s going on?’

  ‘I have to get her out of here—’

  ‘She’s there to get well, Cat. You can’t take her out now.’

  ‘It’s not working. I’m telling you. Please listen to me. She would hate this!’

  ‘Speak to the doctors. Let them tell you what to do. They’ll take care of her in there.’

  ‘They won’t.’ My voice had lowered. I was afraid of being overheard. I could smell cigarette smoke, people passing by without looking at me.

  ‘How the hell are you going to get her out?’

  ‘I need you, Auster. I need you to help me.’

  ‘She’ll be fine. Leave her for the night, go and see her again tomorrow. Please Cat. Is she that bad?’ There was a pause. A silence that was flat and deep. Then: ‘Cat. You can’t bring her home tonight. Catherine!’

  I pressed the red button to end the call and I dialled again, another number that I knew by heart.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Samuel.’

  ‘Monkey. You should be in bed. How’s your sister?’ His voice was low, gruff, as though he’d smoked a thousand cigarettes, swallowed gallons of whiskey in his life. As though he’d just been dreaming.

  ‘I need you to help me. I’m at the hospital. Please. Please will you come?’

  I could see the lights of the suburbs below, gleaming with a thousand promises. Between them was more than darkness, a black void, containing nothing.

  I heard my father’s car before I saw it. The roar of the engine, the rusted exhaust. I heard him park, the door slam and then his footsteps. I stood up and turned to face him and he held me upright with his eyes.

  We entered the hospital together. The watercolour prints on the walls sped past as I gained pace, my father shuffling behind me. We turned corners and ascended the stairs two at a time, too impatient to wait for the lifts. We flashed past people in white coats with stethoscopes hanging from their necks, men carrying bedpans, nurses changing shift. Devin was still there, still in her bed and my heart skipped in gratitude. Her hair was stringy and lifeless and clung in tendrils to the ashen skin on her dry face.

  ‘Wait here,’ I told my father. ‘Don’t let her go anywhere, don’t let anyone give her anything, or take anything from her. No more blood, medication, needles.’

  He stood beside Devin’s bed, his head bowed. He did not touch her.

  I went to the nurses’ station. A woman sat behind the desk, her hair pulled back into a bun. She was a different woman from the nurse who’d been here before. They’d changed shifts for the night.

  ‘Can I help you?’ She looked up.

  ‘It’s about my sister in Ward 4a. Devin Landsberg.’

  ‘Visiting hours are over. All visitors including family are to be out by nine p.m.’ She glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘I’ve just checked her ward and she seems stable now. She’s heavily medicated, so she’ll sleep through.’

  I focused intently on her face. ‘I’m not here for visiting hours,’ I said. ‘My sister is dying. The medication, the tubes, whatever she’s on … take her off them. I want her discharged. I’m taking her out of here.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ma’am, but that’s not possible. I have no authority to discharge any patient; the doctor will do his rounds in the morning. I can speak to him then, but I don’t think … she’s simply too ill.’

  ‘I’m not waiting until my sister’s in ICU with liver failure. This isn’t who she is!’

  ‘Sorry Ms … Landsberg?’

  ‘Whatever.’ The name was irrelevant to me now.

  ‘Your sister is seriously ill. She is severely psychologically disturbed and she hasn’t eaten for weeks. The medication is keeping her alive. Now please, leave the ward, or I’ll have to call security to help you along.’ She stretched across the counter and touched me on my arm, but her hand didn’t linger there for long. Her tone melted into gentleness, a learnt response to bereavement. I brushed off her concern with a glance and she retreated, hardening again.

  ‘Okay,’ I relented, stepping back. ‘I’ll go. But I want to say goodbye to her. I don’t want to disappear and not let her know what’s happening.’

  ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘I’m sure she can still hear me.’

  ‘We’ll monitor her overnight,’ the nurse said. ‘We’ve inserted a feeding tube and in the morning, depending on what the doctor says, we might have to move her into ICU—’

  She continued to talk but I wasn’t listening. When her mouth stopped moving, I smiled and nodded and saw her smile back at me, and I took it as my cue to back away from the desk. I turned and walked back towards the ward.

  The lights were off now, but the glow from the passage illuminated the silhouettes in the room and my father was a shadow puppet beside her bed. I heard breathing in the room all around me, but I couldn’t tell who was awake and who was not.

  ‘Quick,’ I said to Samuel when I reached the bedside. ‘We need to get her out of here.’

  There was no question from him. He lived above the world with his own way and his own law, and he would never question me. I pulled the bedclothes back from Devin’s body and what I saw made me want to retch. She was emaciated, a hunger victim, her legs nothing more than bones encased in skin. Her knobbed knee joints bent like folded tent poles. Her cotton sleep shirt was pulled above her midriff, exposing her thighs and the concave bowl of her belly, sucked back to meet her spine.

  There was only one name in my mind. Marshall. Marshall should see her now.

  I pulled the plaster from her inside arm and eased the tubes from her vein. Her arm twitched and her head rolled on the pillow. I pushed the cover to the foot of the bed and Samuel got his right arm under those legs, put his left arm beneath her armpits. He scooped her up against his chest, and I thought again how seldom I’d seen my father touch my sister in any way. Had he always known how fragile she was, how easily broken by the clumsy hand of a man?

  I led the way out of the room and my blood family followed. All around us the sick breathed and the air hummed with sleep and the breath of patients who had settled for the night. No one called out or pushed a button or raised an alarm. We passed the nurses’ station, but the woman with the bun was no longer there. A skeleton staff worked nights and their occupation with evening chores kept us unnoticed as they administered medication and did their best to ward off dark discomfort and frightened dreams. Our luck held as we fled along the corridor on soft feet, and into a waiting lift that brought us to the ground. We crept unnoticed through the glass doors, and we were out of the hospital.

  In the car park I pressed the button on the immobiliser of my car and all four doors unlocked. I opened one of the back doors and my father bent down with Devin and pushed her body onto the back seat. I saw the skin on his back as his shirt pulled out of his trousers, his own vulner­ability always cloaked in his thick workman’s clothes. He stood upright and I hugged him.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Auster will help me on that side. I just needed you here. I knew you’d do it.’

  ‘Fool that I am. I don’t know if it’s right, Monkey.’ Samuel’s face furrowed at the thought of what I – what we – had just done. ‘Do you want me to follow you home?’ he asked.

  ‘No, we’ll be fine. Thanks, Samuel, for helping me out.’

  ‘It won’t end here, Monkey,’ he said. ‘The hospital will have something to say about it when they find she’s gone.’

  ‘Well, I’m my sister’s next of kin and I withdraw consent for her to be there. I must get her home, get her warm.’

  ‘Bye Monkey.’

  ‘Bye Samuel.’ And then I whispered, ‘Dad.’

  I watched my father walk away. The world pressed down on his shoulders and made him smaller; no longer the giant who had
once plucked my sister from the sea. His movements were frail; whatever strength was left had drained from him, poured into my sister’s weak body. He’d shown up at last to help her. Now it was too little, and perhaps also too late.

  I turned my back, closed the back door and lowered myself behind the steering wheel. I expected orderlies to rush from the hospital building to apprehend us, but nobody came. Few cars remained in the parking area, and there was nothing to suggest that we were doing anything out of the ordinary. I was breathing fast and the air came cold against my throat. Behind me, between my quick and vigorous breaths, I could hear my sister’s, slow and shallow; faltering. I drove down the sloping road to the traffic lights, where the intersection offered a choice of two roads. I looked right and left. The lights finally changed to green and I turned, but not in the direction I had meant to go. I did not drive us towards my home.

  The road to the beach stretched long and lonely at that hour of night. The stop streets and traffic lights caught us sometimes, and when a car pulled up beside us I kept my head to the front. I wanted to see nobody. I wanted nobody’s eyes on me. Neon lights gleamed from shop doorways in my peripheral vision, but I looked straight ahead. A glance in the rear-view mirror caught Devin’s shoulder where she lay slumped unconscious in the back seat. My heart was in my chest and pumping blood to the rest of my body, forcing the fluid between the veins of my pale fingers. I wanted it to end, and I wanted it now.

  A shrill sound startled from the bottom of my loose-woven bag. I scrabbled through old tubes of lipstick, scraps of papers and redundant parking tickets. By the time I’d dug to the bottom of the bag, under the purse and notebook, the phone went quiet. I pulled it out and checked it, my eyes flicking between the screen and the road. One missed call, Auster, my patient husband with my baby at home. I waited for a message to come through, for the phone to bleat an alert, but it stayed silent. I turned it off with my thumb and tossed it back into the bag.

  We were nearing the sea. I drove up along the road that clung to the side of the hill and looked down. In my childhood, the valley had stood isolated and alone. Now a string of lights connected the small fishing villages to the city and they were nothing but an extension of the whole. Like a creature, the city was constantly moving and crawling, consuming the countryside, extending its arms as it slowly enveloped what was in its wake. But even the city had to stop at the sea. Beyond the lights was black. I could not make out the horizon that separated the ocean from the sky, but it was there. It had always been there, distant and unreachable. No matter what else changed, the bowed divide between the world and the ocean remained in place.

  ‘Devin,’ I said. ‘Please wake up. Devin. I’m taking you to the sea. You don’t have to lie in that bed any more.’ I heard a sound, something like a sigh or a rasp. I tried to make her out in the rear-view mirror, but she’d shifted somehow and it was too dark.

  I began the descent towards the sea. I put my foot down harder on the petrol and sped towards the end of the road. I turned left at the corner and at the entrance to the beach the boom was up and the cold stone guardhouse deserted.

  The parking lot lay like a wasteland of wind and empty space. I steered the car in and parked close to the low wall. Just beyond it the sand began.

  I pulled softly at Devin’s legs and they were so thin I was afraid they would snap under the pressure of my fingers. She woke then and her eyes fluttered open, closed, and open again. ‘You’re out of that place, Dev,’ I told her. ‘That bed. We’re here, we’re at the sea.’

  Something in her gained strength, her torso lifted and she shifted. Somehow I gathered her wasted body up and out of the car. I tried to carry her but she resisted. ‘No, Cat,’ she said softly. Faintly. ‘Let me walk.’ She slid her feet to the ground.

  I held onto her, my arm across her back, my hand in her armpit to keep her upright. The strong breeze dragged in the cold and I pulled the hospital blanket around her. Her legs scraped up and over the rough surface of the low wall but she did not cry out – moving forward she said nothing at all, but her breath was in my ear from the effort of it and I didn’t know if I was killing her or helping her to die.

  The stretch of beach lay grey and flat as a desert in the night, devoid of all colour, with the kelp strewn in dark stripes across the sand like a zebra’s skin. The sand was damp from a recent tide and I remembered again what the beach became in the night.

  ‘Sit,’ Devin breathed. She was falling. Without my arms she would collapse.

  ‘Not here, the sand’s wet. Let’s go back to the wall, or further down where it’s dry.’

  ‘Please—’ She drifted down like a paper cut-out falling from a child’s hand. I slumped beside her in the wet, in the cold, with the stinking kelp all around us. Her hair fell on my skin and she leaned against me and her trembling pushed through me, beating me down and into the shape of her. Her breath was a laboured rattle from her throat into my ear and deeper into the being of me.

  ‘Don’t die,’ I whispered, and it might have been aloud. ‘Stay with me, Devin, stay with me.’ She was a wax doll beside me now, her lips barely parted, her eyes softly surrendered with hollows like deep smudges below. There’d been no one to protect her for too long. My mother was dead and my father no longer altogether lucid. Now there was no one else to accept the responsibility, the weight of her life, but me. How would I measure it, that life, against my own? I could make it right between us. It was time to come clean to my sister.

  We sat and did not speak, caught in a fold of time, delivered into the heart of the world and for now, the future was hers alone.

  Retreating footsteps, evenings fade/in darkest waters dreamers wade. The words returned and with them images of a full-cheeked and spirited child whose words and beauty waited to be sucked from her too soon.

  ‘Oh, Devin,’ I whispered, tightening my grip on her bony shoulder. I could put it to rest here. I could walk with her into the sea. We could be together again in the place that first formed us, alone in the dark liquid of the ocean’s night. I could watch the white waves cover her, a veil for the wedding she would never have, repent for what I might have put a stop to years ago if only I had found a voice. I gathered in the little that was left of her.

  ‘Devin,’ I told her through my tears. ‘I saw what happened. I knew it, Devin. I saw Marshall destroy you, piece by piece. I know what he did to you. I was just a child and I couldn’t understand completely, but I knew it was wrong. When I was older—’ My throat closed, I choked on the words, ‘… I understood it for exactly what it was.’ The sound of the waves was amplified on the thin night air, close to the shore and crashing again and again onto the strip of sand that had once made up my whole world. I held her close. ‘Do you remember the tree, Dev? Where we used to go after school?’ I waited to hear her voice, as though I believed that she might still want to live. She shifted beside me, and I heard her breath catch on some invisible branch or snare. ‘I wish we could go back there, start again. Maybe that’s when we were all still good people.’ I shifted my head away from hers just for a second. There was a smell about her that I couldn’t fathom, but it wafted and waned in strength like the wind about us, and her own breath. ‘That’s when we still had everything in front of us. If we could go back there, maybe you’d be safe.’

  But even as I spoke I knew that I was wrong. Even then, Samuel’s heart was not wholly for his family. Even then it was mostly for himself. And for me. But I was an easy child for him. With Devin they both had to try too hard, and ultimately they chose to turn away from the darkness that would take us all too far down.

  ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never find forgiveness for what they allowed, for what happened to you. And sometimes I think – I know – that they did only what they knew how to do. They couldn’t look too closely because they thought it would destroy them, and us also.’ I heard my father’s voice in my head, a night on this beach, and so long ago: Humans are not nice. We’ll do anything to stay alive. To stay
on top. Survival, my Monkey. It’s all that counts, and don’t you forget it.

  All of us. All this time. Survival was everything. In the end it killed something in us all.

  Her head moved further sideways, her hair on my neck. ‘I’m so sorry, Devin. I took what was yours and I never gave it back to you. I never did what I could and I left you alone, all those years. I left you all alone at his mercy.’ I drew a breath inwards, deep and salty. ‘I don’t know … I don’t know how I can make it up to you.’

  My sister’s hand fell onto my arm. She moved her head slowly and I thought she would speak, forgive me then and there, that in the cool wind of night on the back of my confession she would stand and the world would change and she would find the strength to live again, to forgive us all and finally allow me to be the kind of sister she deserved. I imagined that she would sit upright and enfold me in her arms, comfort the child that I was for the silence that traversed the sanctity of years gone. She was the priest on the church of my beach and I wanted her benediction, her forgiveness and ritual of sanctity. Instead she breathed, and I felt more of the life that was left in her leave her frail body, her uncompromised mind. She gave me nothing in return for my confession. I begged her to hear me, but my words battled useless against the wind. Once again I was thinking only of myself and my role in her life. How I could set myself apart, and be someone that I could like, or trust even, into my future.

  I panicked. I had done wrong to bring her here. She had given enough. She had laboured enough to provide me with the future I now inhabited. ‘I’m sorry Devin. If I could, I would give you my life. But it’s too late, isn’t it? It’s all too late.’

  Her eyes opened. A hand rose weakly, and plucked at the loose cotton of my shirt.

  ‘What is it, Dev?’ I raised my hand to her face and felt the jut of bone, the small breath that still hovered above her nose. Her eyes widened, fixed on mine, pleading. I looked out at the dark ocean, but whatever response was required I knew rested only with me. ‘No, Devin—’ She moved her head and I felt her lips on the palm of my hand. My thumb lingered on her cheekbone and the cup of my hand was on her mouth. Perhaps the spread of my fingers blocked her nostrils or the pressure of my palm was too much. I still don’t know if the sound I heard was the rattle of her life as it left her throat or the sound of the waves drumming, summoning the soul of my sister. The convulsions that rocked us may have been her last movements or the motions of horror and sadness that racked my own being as I begged her not to go, but as she closed her lips on my palm like a kiss, there was nothing more between us but one moment, her final breath. The strong breeze stilled. The sea settled. Above the water the black sky arced but there were no stars out. I sat and watched the small waves drop, endlessly repeating the same useless movements onto the sand.