Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  My hands grip Martin’s arms. We’re standing in the parking lot face to face, holding onto each other, like we’re caught in the stiffest junior high dance posture ever. “So the lady—that lady who died—all miserable—in the Bentley—dead—”

  “She was my step-mother.” Martin’s face is lit with that rising-sun smile he used to show me all the time. “I didn’t know it until a few weeks ago, but that lady was my step-mother—my wicked step-mother, Tina. Won’t our girls love that?”

  “So the woman—kissing—in the picture—”

  “That woman is the daughter my real mother—the one she had with the man she ended up married to after things ended with my dad. She’s my other sister—half-sister, sister enough. She’s the one who’s not Constance.”

  Beside me, Meaghan is whispering to the bearded guy. I turn my head to see her grab a handful of his sleeve, leading him away. The bomb is not going to blow today. My sister knows it, and she’s standing down.

  Martin watches them leave. He twitches, remembering our surroundings—the steady march of pedestrians on the sidewalk, the busloads of people in the street, the window-walled towers all around us. He grimaces toward the top floor of his building, where anyone from the company could be standing over us, watching.

  “Into the car,” he says.

  We duck into my Bimmer even though Martin hates being here, where so much spilled milk is hardening into a sour crust in the fibres of the floor mats.

  I’m trying to finish Martin’s story as he rolls down his window. “So your sister finally Googled you?”

  “Right.”

  “And she came and found you after your real mother died?”

  “Died? No, my real mother didn’t die,” Martin says, grinning again. When we first met, his white teeth made me think of the frosting layer in the middle of a store-bought cookie. It’s a little dazzling, even now. “Being my mother doesn’t mean she has to be dead, Peaches. No, my real mother is alive. My mom isn’t a Socialite Suicide. She’s a retired school teacher living in Guelph.”

  I slug his arm. “So why did I have to find out this way? Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

  He laughs. “Didn’t I keep hinting I had a surprise in the works for you?”

  Martin is always dropping vague hints about vaguer surprises. They’re usually things like new credit cards to replace ones I’ve maxed-out, or spa gift certificates clients have given him that he’ll never use. Sometimes, his surprises are nothing but stupid games he plays to try to keep me calm and happy and dependent upon his graces. Family life—the poor man has no idea how to live it. After the way he was raised, it’s not entirely his fault.

  “Martin,” I say, “you found our kids a new grandmother.”

  “And another aunt.”

  I snort. “Yeah, that’s all they need.”

  “And I found you a mother-in-law,” Martin says. “Congratulations, Peaches.”

  Don’t start. Don’t say anything. This is my messed-up marriage, and I can do what I want with it. Ashley can keep spraying air freshener over her marriage. Suzanne can keep smiling while she slurps all that fish oil or snake oil for hers. Heather can stand in that barrage of righteous ranting. Meaghan can bore herself to death with that prissy purple stuffed shirt. So everyone better stand aside as I lean across the centre console of my filthy luxury vehicle, here in our parking lot, and kiss my horrible husband on his sunny face as if he’s everything I ever wanted.

  Meaghan

  [14]

  We are retreating from the war zone of Tina’s marriage, with its strange and dangerous public manoeuvres and its stranger and more dangerous private ones. I’ve texted Ashley with the all clear, telling her not to bother rousing Durk to hurry back to Tina’s parking lot. Now, I’m following Riker to his store.

  Tina has been zany for as long as I’ve known her. Zany is fun. It means Tina was my favourite babysitter—the one who fed me choking-hazard candies, and let me write on my arms, and spray her with the garden hose in the backyard until the sump pump backed up and the basement started to flood.

  She went from zany to crazy soon after she took that job as a special event planner at a country club where she met Martin and his high society people. Sometimes, I tell myself, it’s still just zany. It might be true on good days, like this one, when what’s wrong between Martin and Tina turns out to be a charming misunderstanding, a cute caper, like something from the darker end of the rom-com spectrum.

  And I hope Martin’s new half-sister is real. Now that I know who she is, the lady in the picture does look a lot like him. But then again, Troy and Suzanne look like brother and sister too. I’m just starting to wonder about what happened to Martin’s real mother—the mistress who was sent away to live out the rest of her life without him. Martin’s parents would be pretty old if they hadn’t died already, so there’s no way the mistress could still be alive, right?

  I’m saying all of this out loud to Riker as we walk. I’m saying it as my teeth chatter. The crisis is over, the afternoon is turning into evening, and I’m feeling the cold of the downtown shadow. I pull my hoodie closed as the wind blows through it. I jerk my head toward my clones’ café where Riker and I usually have coffee.

  “I need to warm up,” I say.

  Riker keeps walking. “The owners won’t like me leaving my post during business hours. Trust me. I’ll get you a coffee at the store.”

  “Ew, that instant stuff?”

  Coffee quality isn’t the point. I don’t just need to warm up. I need to sit down and think through Tina’s situation—use Riker to do the debriefing I should be doing with Ashley, or any of the girls. By refusing, he’s let me down. It won’t go unpunished. I poke his arm and say, “Look at you, Riker. You’re not one of those gentleman types who has a jacket you could offer to lend me out here.”

  Riker stops walking—stops right in the middle of the sidewalk. “Are you really that cold, Meaghan, or are you just trying to get me to stand closer to you?”

  I stop with a stomp.

  “What?” he says. He takes my hand and pulls me to the inner edge of sidewalk, beneath an awning, against the brick wall of a bookstore. He arranges his long, thin arms around my shoulders, pressing my back into his chest as we face the traffic.

  These moments—the ones where a guy breaks and shows he feels something for me—they never fail to feel surreal. No matter what’s come before to warn and prepare me, I was awkward enough at age thirteen for them to always strike me as shocking. I twist in his hold, but I don’t push myself away.

  “I’m not trying to make you mad,” he says. “I just think it’s time we started saying what we actually mean when we talk to each other.”

  “Riker—”

  “It’s not easy to say what we mean,” he goes on, “I get it. You’re engaged to just-fine-Ian and you can’t speak freely. You shouldn’t speak freely. It’d be wrong. But I’m not engaged to anybody. I’ll say what we mean. Let me tell you your story. I’m good at this.”

  I laugh and sway against him. The inevitable is happening, here in the same street where I share an apartment with Ian. I want to stay limp and quiet and watch this scene like someone seated high above it—on a balcony, maybe—looking down on herself, letting inertia drift her destiny around.

  “You aren’t into Ian anymore,” Riker says. “He’s a good guy but he’s not for you, not anymore.”

  I hum.

  “And it’s not some lame issue you have with commitment or emotional maturity or readiness. It’s just that you don’t like him enough to stay with him your whole life. You’re mismatched. And a mismatch is intolerable for a quintuplet. For you, everything has to fit together in perfect pentagonal harmony.”

  The Dionne quintuplets again—my body isn’t limp anymore. I stiffen and pull Riker’s arms apart, like a gate opening in front of me. “No.” I’m shaking m
y head, my ponytail wagging. “No. I am single-born. And I’m mismatched everywhere, with my sisters, with everybody. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get inside anything.”

  Riker waves one hand. “Okay, so I exaggerate about the quintuplet thing. Obviously. Fine. But look at you and your sisters. You start visiting my store and within a few weeks all these other women I would have never otherwise met are suddenly barging through my life. Tina, Heather, Susan—”

  “Suzanne.”

  “Right.”

  “What about Ashley? You’ve never met Ashley.”

  Riker looks out at the street. “I just missed her though. And she’ll be back here sooner or later. Believe me. She belongs where you are. They all do.”

  I scoff. “Add it up, Riker. Heather was born twelve years before me. There’s a four year gap between me and Ashley.”

  “So?”

  “So? I’m not exactly in a sister group. I’m dangling far enough off the end of the family that I might as well be an only child—an only child raised with four superfluous, terrible teenaged mothers, but with no sisters at all.”

  “The demographic details don’t matter.”

  “They do.” I step further away from him. “Every time I start a relationship with a man, what I’m really looking for is someone to make me into one of my sisters—marriage, babies, lawn mowers. It’s trite enough for me to have figured it about myself. I go through my days trying on my sisters—their voices and personalities—like I’m some kind of psychiatric case. I’ll storm in as pushy Heather. Or if you’re lucky, I’m Ashley. Look out, I might lose my mind and become Tina. And sometimes I’ll even be sweet, stodgy, sorry Suzanne. But it never works.”

  Riker runs his hands through his hair. “Meaghan, how close do you think people can get to each other? How ‘one’ do you think real living humans can become? Maybe you should enjoy what you have. It’s a lot more family than most people get these days so—”

  “I should go home—”

  “Because going home to Ian will make you into your sisters?”

  My shoulders fall. “Okay, this is how lunatic I am. This is proof of how desperate I am to achieve sister-Nirvana. When I met you, the very first thing I liked was how your nose is perfectly formed.” I tap the tip of his nose. “And second, I liked the fact that—that your mother is dead.”

  Riker swallows so hard I can see it. “What? Why?”

  “I’m sorry,” I hurry. “It’s weird. It’s sick. I’m shallow and morbid. But none of my sisters has a mother-in-law. Well, except for Suzanne, but she’s the exception that proves the rule, right?”

  Riker is pacing down the sidewalk as if he’s barely able to keep from running away from me. “My mother?” he says. “That’s why you always wanted to hear gruesome details about what happened to my mother? You liked her dead?”

  “I’m sorry. Don’t be mad,” I say. I’m snatching at his hand as he reaches for the key to unlock the shop door. “I told you, Riker. I’m messed up. I’m obsessed. I’m sorry.”

  He won’t let me catch hold of him. He’s tugging on the door handle, fumbling with the key.

  Then it opens, smoothly, from the inside. Someone is standing in the doorway of the video game shop—someone with a perfectly formed nose. She’s talking to Riker.

  “Don’t know that I like the new sales concept,” the lady says, “locking up the store at rush hour, when foot traffic is heaviest.”

  Riker doesn’t answer. He looks like he might be sick.

  The woman sighs the way my dad sighed when I dropped out of university after one semester. “Go on, home, Riker. I’ll cash out for you tonight,” she tells him. “And I need you to run a prescription home for your father right away. His feet are acting up again, and he needs more of that antifungal ointment.”

  It’s like I’ve been struck stupid. I’m standing on the sidewalk, stunned, oscillating my gaze like my head is an electric fan moving between Riker and the lady who must be the owner of the video game store. The lady doesn’t look like she’s particularly old or particularly dead. And she doesn’t look cremated at all.

  Heather

  [15]

  At this stage in our process, the dead old lady on the stainless steel table looks like she’s made out of phyllo pastry.

  Today, it’s busy and crowded in the downstairs work area so I’ve brought her to one of our velour and brocade upper rooms to do the final touches—the dressing and powdering and painting.

  There will be one more interruption.

  “Hey, your sister is here.” It’s the new guy, the fresh young mortuary apprentice, sticking his head into the private visitation room where I’m working.

  “Great. Send her in.”

  He pauses. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, no need to worry.” I wave at the body draped with a clean white modesty sheet. “My sister is a professional.”

  Yes, I know right away my visitor must be Suzanne. Of the four of them, there’s only one who would appear spontaneously at my workplace. It won’t be Meaghan. She deplores my work—thinks it’s sick and tragic, thinks it betrays me as sick and tragic. Tina is bold with births, and she did go sit in that death-car at the auto show back when she thought the woman who died in it was her mother-in-law. And I’ll hand it to Ashley: not everyone can cheerfully eat lunch sitting on top of a stranger’s grave waiting for quickset concrete to dry. But in a place like this, there’s no earth or stone, no auto show velvet ropes or long passages of time to hide the deathliness of my work. It’s here on the table.

  Suzanne knows it, and she’s making her way toward me anyway, silent feet in the carpeted funeral home corridor. She’s outside the door, moving through the cool disinfectant-rich air. It’s a lot like hospital air, actually. Only it’s scented with more flowers and fewer tuna sandwiches.

  “Heather?”

  “Yes, come in, please,” I say in my funeral voice. It’s like my normal voice only spun into a single glassy thread—light and clear and strong. Its language is slightly modified too. It uses long Latin derived words when shorter, simpler ones would suffice. And it never speaks in contractions or slang, though it will slip into old fashioned idioms about brass tacks and bygones.

  The door cracks open until I see Suzanne’s face and she sees mine. “They said you’re dressing a body.”

  “They are correct,” I answer. “Come inside, please.”

  I am not trying to bully her into something terribly new and shocking. Suzanne has seen plenty of dead people. She has seen people in states that might be worse than death, for all anyone knows—wasted bodies grinding away in Intensive Care Units. After all of that, there is nothing here that should frighten Suzanne. Still, she is caught in the doorway, using the oak slab to shield her view of the body.

  “Suzanne, come in,” I say again. “Everything is fine. The wet-work is completed. We are just getting ready for the close-up now.”

  When she comes inside, Suzanne moves with panicky quickness, as if she is trying to keep a bad cat from escaping the room. She is wearing a hoodie as an overcoat and formless pastel-coloured pants with pockets sewn all over them. It means, of course, that she is going to work, about to start an evening shift at the hospital.

  Suzanne clears her throat. “So who’s this?”

  “Someone’s beloved grandmother,” I say. “We acquired the remains yesterday from the Emerald Vale Retirement Community.”

  Suzanne nods. “Poor thing.”

  I cluck my tongue. “She died most auspiciously, in a nursing home dining room over cube-cut Salisbury steak.”

  “Uh-oh. Did she aspirate it?”

  “Maybe a bit, once the heart attack was underway.”

  Suzanne has come to stand beside the stainless steel bier, on the opposite side from where I’m working. During other visits, she has seen me do this kind of light-duty groomi
ng of bodies before. She has watched with elegant nurse’s detachment, asking questions about the failed medical interventions comprising the first act of each final drama, aware I am a set-dresser, a stage hand, and our talk is happening behind a curtain, in the dark. We usually carry on as if we do nothing to affect the script.

  Today is not the same. Suzanne’s detachment is incomplete. There is tension, a drama of her own—something barely quivering in Suzanne’s hands and shoulders, in her voice as she looks at the body and says, “She’s beautiful.”

  I smile. “She is. The heart attacks clean up so nicely, do they not? I am about to slip her into this dress.” The old lady’s family are practical people. Instead of producing the tiny wedding dress worn when this lady was nineteen, they are content to have her buried in an enormous white mu-mu that zips closed in the front.

  Dressing the body will be easier if I ask Suzanne to help—have her lift and tip the bulk away from the tabletop as I slide the fabric beneath it. She knows the mechanics, shifting deadweight at the hospital every day.

  “Suze, would you mind—”

  I stop, letting the body settle onto the flat of its back. There is a rustle of white fabric and a pause as I try to get my sister to look at me.

  “Suzanne, what’re you doing here?” My funeral voice is gone.

  She startles.

  “And what’s wrong with you?” I continue. “You seem weird. You seem—bereaved.”

  Suzanne blinks, her entire head bobbing. She laughs. “Sorry, Heather. Bereaved—no, I’m fine. I just—I came to see how this is done.”

  This isn’t true. I’m not at all modest about how this is done. I’m like a zealot, an evangelist out to spread the good word about what invisible Western death rites truly entail. Everyone in our family has heard far more about how this is done than they ever wanted to know.

  I act my part in Suzanne’s drama anyway. “Okay. I guess that’s pretty cool of you.”

  Suzanne shakes her head. “Yeah, I know I’ve seen you do this before. Sure. But I’ve never paid enough attention, not the right kind of attention anyways. I’ve got questions now, better questions. And lately, I have been thinking more about the future.”