Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  I accept his unspoken terms and the mattress. It smells like sawdust and wood smoke from last season’s campfires. It’s just the thing for our purposes.

  The sheet of camping foam is unrolled and spread on the floor at the bottom of the stairs like a crash mat.

  “Okay. Just like at the hospital,” I say to myself, breathing deeply, gathering strength. Those harrowing acts of noble professional compassion, each and every shift, all over the hospital—this isn’t very different from any of those, right?

  I step over May’s body, tip-toeing onto the treads of the stairs through the gaps between her limbs and the banisters. Through her clothes she feels cold as I lay my hands on her and start to rock and slide her down the rest of the stairs, toward the mattress-shroud. Touching her now that she’s dead is strange but not exactly unpleasant—until her head moves on its broken stalk as her weight bears down on it.

  “Aw, May.”

  With some rather gruesome rolling and shoving and with gravity pulling along with me, I get my mother-in-law’s corpse off my shiny hardwood stairs and onto the mattress. Her body hasn’t stiffened yet. There’s time for me to arrange her arms and legs so she won’t be any more unwieldy for us to move than six feet of well-fed human tissue has to be. I roll the foam around her and bind it with the elastic tie-down cords Troy uses to strap camping gear to the top of the van. When I’ve finished, the ends of the yellow foam bundle make it look like a dirty, nasty, oversized cinnamon roll.

  I call into the garage. “We’re ready.”

  Durk is slow to come into the house. He’s a little quicker when he sees the bulging, fake cinnamon roll lying in May’s place. I move to one end of it and he stands at the other.

  “It’s going to be heavy,” I warn. “She’s built like a female Troy.”

  “Which end do I have here?” Durk asks.

  “Uh, the top.”

  “You mean her head?

  “Yes.”

  “Trade me.”

  “Durk, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Then trade me.”

  “Fine.”

  When we lift her, she’s even heavier than I expect. I walk backwards, moving through the door, to the garage, and into the minivan. The rear seats have been removed, and there’s a flat, open space for her. Durk has already packed a gas can, a shovel, a barbecue lighter, and a sturdy, plastic picnic cooler.

  “What’s that for?” I ask.

  “The cooler? It’s to carry back whatever’s—left.” In the years we’ve been family to each other, I haven’t seen much of this practical Durk. He’s useful but I might have liked him better when he was hypnotized, or whatever it was I did to get him to agree to this. “Don’t forget to bring her suitcase,” he adds.

  I was going to forget May’s suitcase. I take it and her purse and set them in the van. Everything is packed and braced so she won’t roll around as we drive. We close the rear door of the van and stand at the bumper.

  “So where to?” Durk asks.

  I know exactly where. “To the sun.”

  I’ve backed my minivan into the deserted mid-morning suburban street and started out of the cul-de-sac. “Now,” I say to Durk, “we drive like we’re going on a normal camping trip.”

  He shakes his head. “This early in the spring, on a Wednesday morning.”

  “Right. So look up an address for a quiet campsite.” I say, handing him my phone. “Like, really, really quiet.”

  He pushes my phone away. He says, “Make a left at the lights.”

  I follow Durk’s directions and we move along the freeway until he tells me to exit left again. The new road gets narrower until it turns steeply west. We travel along a township road I’ve never seen before. Soon its pavement turns to hard-packed, oiled clay strewn with loose brown gravel. In the rear-view mirror, the Edmonton skyline is hazy and faint, like a set painting in a play.

  “Right there,” Durk says, pointing across the windshield to the south.

  We leave the road, steering into the mouth of a rutted track overgrown with quack grass from below and with new, green aspen branches from above. The opening between the foliage is spanned by a rusty metal gate clamped shut over the road. I brake to a stop.

  “It’s a bluff. It’s never locked.”

  That’s what Durk says as he bails out of the van and ducks to run along the road, beneath the trees. For a moment, I’m afraid he’s abandoned me, until he stops and lifts one end of the gate out of its clasp. In a wide arc, he walks it open while I follow in the van. The branches bend and scrape against the roof and windows. It’s too late to worry if they’ll leave marks on the paint for Troy to see.

  Troy—he’ll be okay. His mother is not really dead until someone openly acknowledges it. I’m not concealing. I’m just postponing. I’m like the life support equipment in the Intensive Care Unit, managing appearances and formalities, technicalities, while the family of the body arranges to end everything on their own terms.

  The trees clawing at my van are just a rim of vegetation growing around a vast open space where the soil has been scraped away, down to the rock beneath. The rough road leads out of the trees and becomes a rougher trail, dipping into the lowest point in the landscape. The trail is meant for motor bikes and all-terrain vehicles, not minivans. But I’m all trust and desperation and I follow Durk. He’s descending a slope into a ragged, grey-brown bowl. In its centre is a scorched black smudge, like the crash site of a space ship.

  I park and step onto the hard ground, scanning the low cliffs cut into the earth around us. “What is this?”

  “You are in the gravel pit.” Durk answers, as if I’ll say, “Oh yes—the gravel pit. At last.”

  The scorched spot is the remains of hundreds of bonfires. In the soot, there are crushed beer cans and the shards of broken liquor bottles that will never burn away. This place isn’t a working excavation, not anymore. It’s an illicit party hideout. Durk shouldn’t know it, but he does. There’s too much sunlight for a party right now. There’s just us.

  Durk strides to a pile of old wooden shipping pallets dumped here, jumbled to one side of the fire site. It seems party people are not without foresight, not in ultra-practical Alberta, anyways. The wood is light and dry. He grabs two pallets, one in each hand, and tosses them into the dusty black centre. He stomps the thin boards with the sole of his foot and they splinter and snap.

  I douse the pile of broken wood, trying hard but not successfully to keep from splashing gasoline on my clothes. When I’m done, Durk touches the fuel with the barbecue lighter and leaps out of the way. There’s a roar as everything ignites, hot and yellow. I toss May’s vinyl suitcase and her purse into it. In the heat, they’re instantly melting and toxic. Her passport, cell phone, health care card, the dollars and pesos in her wallet—they’re gone for good.

  This is no Boy Scout fire. It’s more like fire I’ve only seen on television, on the news, burning in the streets of some faraway place where people are trying to kill their neighbours.

  “Let’s get it,” Durk says.

  But I can’t move. “Are you sure the fire’s hot enough? She’s my mother-in-law. I—I don’t want her to smell like a cook-out.”

  Durk’s shoulders fall. “Hot enough? Suzanne, how should I know? The fire’s as hot as we know how to make it.”

  I move. I open the rear hatch of the minivan and tug at the cinnamon roll. A piece of musty yellow foam tears in my hand, and I flick it away. Durk is beside me now, and together we drag May’s bundle onto the ground.

  “Juice it up,” he says.

  I pour gas over the thirsty foam until the mattress is soaked. “Take your end,” I tell him.

  The foam is a fuel-filled sponge. When I lift it my grip wrings gasoline out of it, onto my clothes and skin, beneath my fingernails. We move closer to the pyre anyway. I count to three, and we heave May ont
o the stack of burning pallets. The fire roars again as it swallows the mattress whole. We are falling back and away from the flash of heat and the light. I stumble, landing hard on my tailbone on the floor of the gravel pit. Durk is sprawled on the ground next to me, on his back, pushing himself to sitting with the palms of his hands.

  In the fire, the foam shroud melts away as if it was never there. May’s outline is exposed. Durk throws another pallet on the flaming heap. It helps her to burn, and it nearly hides her from view. But it’s not good enough. Her head—the bobbed, white hair already seared away—I can see the shape of her head.

  “No,” I say. I’m reaching for the gas can. More fuel will make it all burn faster and hotter—get it closer to the point where everything will vanish. The red plastic handle is in my grip but I’m held back, kept away from the fire.

  “Stay back,” Durk is yelling into my ear as he pulls me to sit beside him in the dirt.

  I yelp and punch at him as my tailbone hits the ground again.

  “You can’t go near it,” he calls over my voice. He sits beside me, holding me in place, his hands closed on each of my arms. “Your shirt is soaked in gas. Feel it. Smell it, Suzanne. You’ll set yourself on fire if you get any closer, tossing gas around.”

  My head sags toward my chest as I wail, “It’s May. I can see her. God—May.”

  “Close your eyes,” Durk says. “We can both close our eyes.”

  His hand palms the back of my skull, and he’s turning my head, pushing my face into his shoulder. “There’s nothing else you can do, and we can’t take it back. Just—don’t look.”

  We sit there for—I don’t know how long. We sit on the rocky ground while my mother-in-law’s body burns and burns. With my eyes closed, I don’t see her. I hear crackling, like the burning of wood that’s too wet for a campfire.

  Durk’s head droops and he rests his cheek against my hair. He says, “I still don’t get it.”

  I open my eyes, looking no further than the grey dome of Durk’s shoulder in his T-shirt, still pressed to my face. I’m tired and dizzy with gasoline. I answer slowly. “If no one knows what happened to her, then she’s not fully dead—not really, not completely. Other people’s minds are what finish us off. Right? We saved her—for Troy, and for my kids, and for my sisters. To them, May is alive somewhere. And I’m still a daughter-in-law. I still know exactly who I am. We saved all of that for a little bit longer.”

  “What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve.” Durk says it in a low monotone, distantly, as if these are not his words.

  “What is that? Where’d you hear that?” I ask.

  Durk’s grip slackens enough for me to turn away from him. I tug against his hold and his arms fall away. He says, “It comes from a fake fiend quoting a fake saint, I’m pretty sure.”

  I’ve never heard Durk use the word “fiend” before.

  He sits back, arms straight, palms against the ground. “Troy and the girls haven’t seen anything. But you’ve seen May dead. How are you going to stop seeing it, Suzanne? How am I going to stop seeing it?”

  We tend the fire, building it up over and over again with junked wooden pallets. The sun is low when we let the flames sink into slow, woody smoke. The bonfire is now a bed of red embers, grey dust, and sooty sticks.

  It’s time to gather May’s remains. I move to stand. Maybe it’s the effects of the gasoline fumes, or maybe it’s the weight of grief and guilt that presses me into the dirt when I try to rise. I fight against it, lurching to my feet. If I keep this confused, heartsick daughter-in-law persona, we will never conclude what we’ve started here. A perfect daughter-in-law is not equipped for this. It violates her. I need to dismiss Daughter-in-Law Suzanne, just for a little while, and be someone else.

  Nurse Suzanne—that’s who I need. I need my professional nurse’s detachment, compassionate and capable but so far away. I close my eyes and remember that man they brought in—the one with third degree burns over eighty-five percent of his body. He was a twenty-year-old cook lighting the broiler at a steakhouse, right before lunch. The unburnt fifteen percent of him was his head. His face was unmarred—a tiny gold hoop in his earlobe, freshly trimmed goatee, a trace of lingering acne, his hair shorn close enough to bare his scalp between his follicles. He slept, eerily serene in a therapeutic coma, his consciousness stashed somewhere to stop his eyes from seeing what had happened to the rest of him. Another nurse came out of his room, shaken, too sad to inject his medication. So I did it. Nurse Suzanne saw to the living charcoal and did it.

  “Intravenous cannulation—0.09% sodium chloride in water—NaCl—normal saline.” In the gravel pit, away from Nurse Suzanne’s hospital, I recite her reassurances, remembering familiar letters and numbers and signs printed on bags of IV fluids, comforting technical checks, clinical mutterings. I’m summoning Nurse Suzanne like I’m a medium at a séance. I don’t always like her. But I need her, like my own Mephistopheles. I mouth the words until I sense her presence.

  “Hand me the shovel,” Nurse Suzanne tells Durk.

  We scrape heaps of sandy dirt onto the embers of May’s pyre, smothering the last of the dull red firelight into nothing. When the burning is over, we sift through the sand and ash. The long, inelegant shaft of the shovel is not a good conductor for the gentleness we intend, and sooty sticks and stones break against the metal tip of the blade—fragments of desiccated, desecrated bone.

  The pieces lie in a small cairn. With the end of his shoe, Durk is rolling something toward the bone-pile. He stops to retch and swear when the object splits.

  “There goes the skull,” he announces.

  “What? You’ve got it? It’s broken?”

  “Yeah, it looked fine but when I touched it the whole thing fell to pieces right along those little cracks you see in X-rays.”

  “They’re called sutures,” Nurse Suzanne says, ever informative. “They’re open when we’re babies and they fill in and firm up as we get older.”

  The skull looks like shards of shattered cereal bowls on those Saturday mornings when my kids get their own breakfasts. My kids—Mother Suzanne breaks through for an instant, moaning out a little sorrow.

  There are more than bones and ashes on the ground. Durk has collected the buckle and the wheels from May’s suitcase and the long toothy snake of its zipper. As planned, her ID and cell phone didn’t survive the fire. The metal notions from her purse and suitcase could have come from anyone’s incinerated garbage. They aren’t out of place in this party-hideout-dump-site. We will cover them in sand and leave them here.

  The remains of my mother-in-law’s body are chips and twigs, small and dry, as if May is not only dead and burnt but shrunken.

  I let out a long breath. “I was thinking there’d be less of her left behind. I thought it’d be—you know—powdery.”

  Durk shakes his head. “Nope. I’ve heard Heather say they have to take the bones out of real crematorium ovens and use special machines to grind them up. Didn’t she ever tell you that, back when she was new at work and couldn’t shut up about it?”

  I groan into the shovel’s handle. “So when funeral homes hand out urns full of ashes it’s not exactly ashes? It’s more like—”

  “Bone meal. And this is the end of it, Suzanne,” he calls over his shoulder. “I’ll bring you the cooler to stow them in but don’t think I’m going to help you grind up the bones.”

  I prod the heap with the shovel’s tip. “What am I going to do with all of this?”

  Durk shrugs. “I don’t know, but I’m done here. I need to go back to work. I need to go back to Ashley.”

  “Work,” I say. Durk’s work with brick and cement—it’s the next step. The idea comes as a revelation from Nurse Suzanne, cold but true and inevitable. “Yes, Durk. You can come work for me.”

  “Suzanne—”

  “No, it’s real work. It’s
a contract. It’s the last piece in this and it’s ideal for both of us—for all of us.”

  “I am done.”

  “No, listen. You can start building that outdoor brick barbecue Troy’s been talking about ever since you guys bought the fireplace store.”

  Durk stares. “You want to make this up to me with a fancy barbecue contract?”

  “Just listen,” I’m hurrying. “It’ll be Fathers’ Day in a few weeks, and I can tell Troy the barbecue is his present. I’ll pay full price for the materials and the work and everything. And while we’re building it, we can brick these bones inside, forever.”

  Durk takes the shovel from me and leans against it himself, resting his forehead on the end of the handle, rolling his head back and forth. It’s vague but it’s his answer. And it isn’t “No.”

  Ashley

  [11]

  I should probably be embarrassed to be out shopping covered in dirt and concrete dust. But I’m just as short on vanity as I am short on free time. There’s no chance of sneaking home for a quick shower in the middle of the day. I’m walking through a store after repairing a little old headstone by myself, without Durk, which is actually pretty cool. Something about hoisting granite all alone in a graveyard makes me mad with power, like I’m queen of the Underworld.

  I am nothing like embarrassed as I call Meaghan’s name through the busy drugstore. This is one of those huge, big-box pharmacies that are more like department stores. I walk through it for miles before I can see Meaghan standing next to the real pharmacist on a high platform.

  Meaghan knows without looking that the voice calling her name belongs to one of her sisters, though she’s not sure which one. She won’t be expecting to see me here in the middle of a work day. After this morning’s cemetery job I’ve shut down the shop for the afternoon. I figured I might as well. Nothing more was going to get done today. I sent Durk home in one of his funks again. He’s been useless this week, ever since the last time he crashed for the night at Suzanne and Troy’s place. He says he’s still sick but—the flu my butt.