But perfection is not like that. It’s inconvenient—difficult. Perfection demands I go back to the garage and retrieve the rhubarb. It requires me to turn on the lights and stand at the sink washing away the lint and the laundry perfume. It will keep me awake on my feet, chopping stringy stalks until my fingertips are stained red.
Heather [9]
This must be the swankiest Italian restaurant in the entire downtown core. It happens to be just a few doors south of the pebbly, brown, hollow block of concrete and misery that serves as the city’s courthouse. That’s the only reason Ewan and I would ever come here.
He’s sitting over a plate of fancy ravioli garnished with flakes of grated black truffle. As the cream in his meal is cooling into something slimy and not at all swanky, I reach across the burgundy table cloth to squeeze his wrist. “Hey, are you okay yet? You’re still not looking at me.”
He nearly smiles. “Sorry. Looking at you is an emotional experience. And I can’t handle feeling anything right now.”
Ewan is sweetest when he’s saddest. It kills me. I tighten my fingers around his wrist—strong and quick—like a pulse.
It’s been a terrible day in court. A drunken nineteen-year-old, who is referred to in the legal system as a fully grown man, ran a stop sign at four in the morning last New Year’s Eve. He killed a sober single mom driving home from her shift as a taxi dispatcher. Today, he’s pleading guilty. Ewan is attending the sentencing hearing as a representative of the police department.
The hearing is a madhouse. The anti-drinking-and-driving movement has been railing on the courthouse stairs for days, waving signs, burning candles, slapping stickers on lampposts, calling out the penitent, despondent driver as if he’s an Anti-Christ. The words on their placards are old, standard slogans, smeared in drippy red paint, like fake stage blood.
“It’s not an accident. It’s murder.”
“But it isn’t murder,” Ewan told me again last night at home, standing in the doorway of our walk-in closet, unthreading his belt through its loops.
I sat on the bed and nodded at him. “Yeah, there’s no real murder without mens rea. There has to be criminal intent for it to be murder. Everybody knows that.” I laced my fingers together, holding them down, purposely breaking my loathsome habit of sniffing the tips of my fingers for signs of the stench of my rubber work gloves.
“Right,” he agreed. “This collision was a tragedy. It was a crime. But it’s a crime of negligence known in the Criminal Code of this country as impaired driving causing death. That’s exactly what we charged him with, and that’s exactly what he’s pleading guilty to. Everyone hates us but we’ve done everything right.”
It’s a discussion we’ve been having daily, like catechism, for weeks.
In court today, the judge sentenced the driver to two-and-a-half years in jail. The prosecutors say they’re going to appeal and ask for a little more time. It sounds like a slow remedy—remote and desperate. No amount of criminal charges or prosecutions would have yielded the public flogging or life sentence or exile to Jupiter the protesters demand.
For now, Ewan’s name is in the city’s yellowest newspaper, under a headline reading, “Brought to Justice?”
He hasn’t seen the headline yet.
On days of big unpopular trials like this one, if there’s no funeral for me to run, I come to the courthouse to sit in the gallery. I sit on the groom’s side near the accused, away from Ewan. He thinks I’ll be safer that way. During breaks, he meets me in the parking lot, in the car, and we talk about the proceedings. It’s not just because I have my own degree in criminology and can follow along in court. Ewan needs to see me when he’s caught up in something like this. It’s as if my perspective is a strong current in the stream of his own consciousness, and he’ll be disoriented if he pretends it’s not there.
We are in the street outside the Italian restaurant now. Ewan is taking my hand and trudging toward my car when I stop on the sidewalk, tugging backward. He stops, our arms stretching out between us. “What is it?”
“Look, there’s a video game store right there, across the street,” I say.
“You want to stop and buy the kids a new video game—right now?”
I don’t answer the question. “Remember video arcades? There used to be one in every shopping mall when we were kids, right beside the food courts. But you never see them anymore. Everyone just plays games at home now. You used to love arcades back in the day, didn’t you?”
The right corner of his mouth twitches. “Yeah.”
“Amusement parks and these stores are all that’s left of arcades. Look.” There’s a gap in the late evening traffic, and I’m pulling him across the street. “Come on. They let you try out new games for free on those TVs hanging from the ceiling. You can stand there and just play and play. No quarters to lose, no line-ups, no emotional experiences, nothing.”
Inside the store, the guy behind the counter barely looks up as I tow Ewan through the jingling front door of the shop.
More parents. That’s probably what he’s thinking. It’s okay. He’s not wrong.
The game loaded in the television is called Mech-something—I don’t care. There is nothing in this shop that either Ewan or I could possibly care about. That’s why we’ve come.
Ewan’s childhood muscle memory for buttons and joysticks means he’s able to play the game as soon as his thumbs hit the controller. I, on the other hand, am terrible. I’m yelling as if it will help the soldier-lady I’ve walked face-first into a corner avoid getting shot in the back. Soldier-lady would look hilarious if she wasn’t so sickening. Her figure is like Meaghan’s, only tall and fatally cinched at the waist.
The store clerk sighs into the counter. He’s starting to move. He’s probably hoping if he asks us if we need any help we’ll stop goofing around and buy something.
Before he finishes his approach, the door bangs open—jingle and clang—and someone stumbles into the store, just outside my field of vision.
The clerk speaks, but not to us. “You’re back.”
“Of course I’m back. We aren’t finished. You can’t be mad at me anymore, Riker,” the newcomer says. “It’s not natural. I need you to like me again.”
“Meaghan?” My sister is here, stomping around acting bossy in a place where she has no business being the boss. I recognize the sound of my own voice in hers. I spin away from the screen without pressing the pause button. The CPU shoots the guts out of the soldier-lady.
Meaghan flinches. “Heather? What are you guys doing here?”
Ewan squawks. “Whoa! Heather, you can’t just—hey, how do I switch it to one-player mode?”
The clerk steps up to make the adjustment for him.
“We came in here so Ewan could unwind a little,” I say. “Bad day in court.”
Meaghan frowns. “Yeah, I heard about it on the radio.”
I’m shaking my head, speaking without moving my lips. “Talk about something else.”
What would be more fun for me than a re-telling of Ewan’s bad day would be an explanation of the connection between my baby sister and this guy she says she wants to like her. He is clearly not Ian, my brother-in-law-to-be. He’s retreated behind the counter where he’s feigning disinterest in us.
It doesn’t matter. I’m talking to him anyway. “Hi there. You’re Meaghan’s friend. Nice to meet you. I’m her big sister, Heather.”
He startles—alarmed but eager, like I just mentioned his favourite fandom. “Yeah? Hi. Nice to meet you too.”
Meaghan is stepping behind the counter as if the whole store belongs to her. She says, “This is Riker.”
I open my mouth and laugh at him. “Cool! Your parents are sci-fi fans?”
He grins. “Yeah.”
“Meaghan loves sci-fi too, right Sweetie? Her boyfriend is a huge fan-boy too. You know Ian, don’t yo
u, Riker?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
They won’t encourage me, but I keep talking anyway. “Well, at least your parents had some nerve, unlike people who choked and named their daughters Heather in the 1970s.”
I laugh at myself until he joins in—painfully, like plaster falling off a ceiling.
It’s beginning to be uncomfortable even for me. I turn and circle my arms around Ewan’s torso. “You ready to go home, honey?”
He sets the game controller back onto the stand below the television. “Yeah, sure. Thanks.” He nods at Riker. “Come on, Meags. We’ll drive you home.”
Obediently, she follows Ewan and me into the street. Ewan has been a part of our family since Meaghan was nine years old. With Dad’s crazy work schedule, she probably saw as much of Ewan as she did of her own father while she was growing up. He’s different from the other brothers-in-law who came into the family later, when Meaghan was no longer a child. He’s more of a brother, more in, more like the law.
We’re on the sidewalk when I thread my arm through Meaghan’s, laughing with enough force to bend my body at the waist. “Riker? Riker? Come on, that is not that guy’s real name.”
Meaghan’s shoulder collides with mine, knocking me sideways as we walk. “Shh! It is so.”
“What? I missed it. What does he say his name is?” Ewan asks.
“It’s Riker,” Meaghan says. “R-I-K-E-R. And it’s totally believable. He was born in 1987, the same year Jonathan Frakes got his big break on television. And Riker’s mom loved Star Trek way back in the sixties, so—”
It is utterly scoff-worthy. “He says his mom is a Trekkie?”
Meaghan knocks me sideways again. “Don’t you start on his mom. She’s dead.”
In full monster mode, I laugh louder than I have yet. “No. His mother is not dead.”
Meaghan stops walking and pries her arm out of mine. “Of course she’s dead. Don’t act like you don’t know people die, Heather. You, of all people.”
I’m still laughing. “I know—”
“Martin’s mom is dead. Ewan’s mom is dead too and you don’t think that’s funny, do you? Honestly, Heather, what is the matter with you?”
I stand up straight and push my hair out of my face. “That boy is not bereaved. I can sense bereavement like it’s a tiny pea left under a big stack of mattresses. I bet Riker’s mom is at home bleaching his whites right now.”
“What a thing to say. You are depraved. Ewan, tell her she’s nuts.”
It’s a foolish move. Ewan makes his career in a field where all kinds of people stand up on their hind legs and tell him lies, day in and day out. He’s primed to hear lies everywhere. He hums. “I don’t know, Meags. You seen any proof of it? And what’s his excuse for working in a store at his age?”
“Oh. He’s on hiatus from school. But he’s earned most of a creative writing degree already.”
As she says it, Meaghan hears herself—hears herself as if she’s one of us, one of her own sisters, cringing at the sound.
Suzanne
[10]
My mother-in-law’s last batch of rhubarb muffins is in the oven when I step into the kitchen the final morning of her visit. May herself is upstairs, packing her suitcase, getting ready to leave for another epic Central American odyssey. I’ll drive her to the airport after the kids leave for school. People with perfect daughters-in-law have no need to ride in taxis.
I sniff at the fruity, cinnamon smell. I still hate rhubarb. Being a picky eater is a secret shame of mine. It isn’t easy to hide. I wish I could cheerfully eat anything, the way Troy can. Cantaloupe, raisins, hotdogs—my life would be better if I liked these things. It’s a good thing May doesn’t mean for this batch of muffins to be eaten but frozen, stored in the deep freeze with the homemade elk sausage a patient gave Troy as a gift and the bags of shredded zucchini from my organic gardening phase. That suits me fine.
In the living room, I turn off the cartoons my kids abandoned when I sent them upstairs to get dressed for school. That’s when I find Durk. He’s passed out on the sofa still wearing a jacket and shoes. I can’t see his face, just a mass of stringy brown hair and a scar. His right hand lies palm-down beside his head.
He’s done it again.
I slide the heavy curtain aside to check the patio door and, as it always is when I find Durk like this, the pane of sliding glass is out of its track and leaning against the wall outside.
I text Ashley to let her know Durk is here. She doesn’t reply. It’s easier this way.
I toss an afghan over him—the pink and blue one May crocheted for us when we got married. I hope she hasn’t noticed my brother-in-law lying here face down on the furniture, breathing nosefuls of our dust-mites.
Durk is fathoms below sleep. I step closer to the couch, near enough to brave a long, unembarrassed look at the smooth, pale scar on his hand.
Alcohol vapour putrefies the air around his body. I sway away from him, as if it’s insect repellent and I’m a big bug. On sunny afternoons when we find him dozing in the grass at family picnics, we can tell ourselves Durk’s habits are benign trappings of an alternative lifestyle—that he’s a mystic who’s transcended nuisances like dependence and domestic turmoil. We ignore this dark side as long as we can—right up until it forces its way through our backdoor and collapses in a noxious cloud on the couch.
The kids are leaving for school, bleating about mate-less shoes and overdue library books. I remind them to run upstairs to hug Grandma May goodbye. She won’t be here when they get back.
The house falls into its strange, sudden, childless stillness as I close the front door behind them. It’s quiet enough for me to hear May’s footsteps on the floor above my head, as if she’s invisible and walking upside down on the kitchen ceiling. Actually, her feet are pacing triangles between our spare bed, the closet, the bathroom. She moves quickly. Spry, is what our dad would call her.
May is about to come down the stairs. There’s the sound of her suitcase castors rolling across the rug laid over the hardwood planks at the top of the stairwell. In a moment I’ll see her feet and legs through the metal rails of the banister. I’m already starting to compose a smile and some sort of explanation for the man passed out in the living room.
And then everything—everything—breaks apart.
It begins with noise in the stairwell—spinning suitcase wheels, thuds and cracks against varnished hardwood and metal spindles, and May’s voice, not loud but wordless and terrified, like a sound she might have made in childbirth, only clipped short.
I run, skidding into the entryway. At the bottom of the stairs, I find my mother-in-law. She is lying on her front, her neck twisted far enough to her left for me to expect her to be lying on her side. Her legs extend up the stairs; her head is on the floor at my feet, eyes open—shocked but desolate. One hand is still cupped around the handle of her suitcase.
“May!” I gasp.
I call after her even though she can’t be here anymore. I am a nurse but there’s no one who could fail to recognize her current medical condition. May is dead. She broke her neck falling down our stairs. The impact has ruined not just the bones that hold up her head but the cord of nerves that tells her to breathe and live. She has died, in a flash, in an instant, here on the same stairs my bouncy, supple little kids fall down several times a year without any injuries worse than bruises. It shouldn’t be possible. It can’t be denied.
“Aw, no. No. May—”
I kneel to examine her, but I don’t touch anything. It’s not that I’m squeamish. It’s still May lying here. And after all my hospital shifts, it’s not like I go through life without touching dead people—newly dead people just like May is newly dead. She’s exactly like a hospital body, only out of pyjamas, out of bed, upside down.
I don’t touch her because I can’t fix this. I won’t try—won’t un
wind her and press my mouth to hers and beat against her sternum until someone drags me away. There is nothing to be done.
Calling 911 is the next step in the death rites prescribed by my faint-hearted culture—the culture wailing at me to hide at the sight of my own dead. As it requires, I will call for strangers—uniformed, registered strangers in ambulances and police cars. I will call even though there is nothing anyone can do for May except pack her up and take her where we can’t see her.
On my knees, I crawl to the kitchen, groping the countertop for the cordless phone. My grasp is weak and shaken with a tremor. And while I tremble, looking at the keypad, trying to remember the number for 911, the phone lights up and rings.
“Hello?”
“Tell him not to bother coming in to the shop today.” It’s Ashley, calling to frighten Durk.
Normally, I’d keep her on the phone, try to cheer her up, tug her forward, past her frustration. “Sure,” is all I say to Ashley the morning my mother-in-law is lying in my stairwell.
“Sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell him. Oh, and Durk is really sorry he forgot to call home when he decided to stay here last night.”
Ashley scoffs. “He broke in through your patio doors while you were sleeping, Suzanne. And he’s not even awake yet.”
There’s a beep on the line. Another call is coming in. “Hang on a minute,” I say.
The other call is from Heather. “How come I was the last one to find out you had a picture of Martin with his girlfriend?”
“What? You were not.”
“Yes, I was. Even Meaghan knew about it before me.”
I can’t think. “Look, Heather, I’m busy right at this second.” I glance at the stairs. “May is—she’s still here.”
Sistering Page 8
