“There’s something to be said,” Elizabeth begins, at which point I stop listening. She holds a glass of white wine at the stem and her chin points in her usual degree of superiority. I glance over at Nana, who mirrors the expression with white wine to match. I sip my diet coke. My sister makes me a little mad. Her mouth is overdrawn in caramel lipstick. Her highlights golden and fresh. She is beautiful and such a snob. These two will kill me this weekend. But she’s here now and I’m glad, or maybe relieved. I’m not going to overthink it. Herding us to the Chinese buffet for dinner was her idea, All-you-can-eat puts Nana in a good mood. Nana, however, smiles easy enough and her saggy face seems small under the white cap of feathery hair, but I know better. The room bustles around us like a train station with winding red silk lanterns dangling off the ceiling. People roam the buffet, eating long past stopping, until they almost explode, and the yellow fish in the tank are barely swimming, staring blandly at me. I haven’t spoken a word, and won’t, unless they make me.
“A proper cleaning will keep things a little more tidy,” Elizabeth says, pouring soy sauce into a tiny black dish. “You won’t believe how much time and effort you save. You’ll never go back to the way you were before.”
“That sounds nice,” says Papa. He’s sitting across from me. His eyes shift from Elizabeth to Nana.
Nana stops eating and looks up at Papa. “I’ve been tidying up my entire life.”
Elizabeth nods, gracefully handling a sushi roll into her mouth.
“Being married to you for sixty years, raising both of you from babies, cleaning up after your mother, that nightmare. I could write a book.” Nana pats her mouth with her napkin.
Elizabeth stares straight ahead after the comment about our mother. Nana is big on the idea of sacrifice. We’re supposed to feel grateful.
Over in the tank, the fish make frowning faces with their skinny little mouths.
“It turns out there’s a wrong way to tidying,” I say. “Lucky thing we have an expert among us.”
Nana shrugs her shoulders. “I was already going to, for my spring cleaning.”
Nana is eighty-three and can’t sit in a chair without falling. Papa, who is a couple years her junior, ambles around the house, and the yard, the Yang to her Yin. What Nana doesn’t realize is that the point of all this is to convince her she’d be better off in a nursing home. Elizabeth isn’t here this weekend to organize and declutter, she’s here to change the way we live our life. There’s no better person for the task. My sister, who is only two years older than me, couldn’t be more different. We don’t look anything like our mother, we might look like our fathers—it’s anyone’s guess. But right from the start, basically when Nana took us in at three and five, Elizabeth got the hang of things. Reading and doing well in school. She made lots of friends, went to college and became an interior designer. She wants to run her own business, be successful.
She turned out well considering our mother is addicted to drugs. Nana adopted us so we wouldn’t end up in foster care. I guess it started with pain medication, I don’t really know, eventually heroin, and now it’s probably fentanyl. Anyway, when Nana used to get calls asking for money, she’d sound concerned and friendly, but we’d been fooled before. Cancer, Nana had said and permitted one visit. Papa drove us to another world, downtown Toronto, and we met at a Wendy’s where we had Frosty’s and fries and it was over faster than you could blink. At the time, it felt like we were the only ones there, at ten and twelve, with Dylane, our mother. She was tall and energetic, bouncing to music no one could hear. I’ve always wondered if that was her usual way of being, but Nana’s indifferent to curiosity so I’ve never asked. She wore grey track-pants and a crop-top, a red ponytail high on the top of her head. Peaking through thin greasy bangs and heavy black eyeliner, she took us in, her eyes bright. Thing was, she wasn’t sick she just needed money. We haven’t seen her in years.
I reach under the table into my bag, searching for what I know I haven’t brought, pressing my palm down until I feel the pinch of carpet. I wish Annie were here.
“Hey,” Elizabeth says, leaning over and tugging my arm. “What’s going on?”
I let out a sigh.
“Another round? Seconds, thirds?”
“Ah, no.” Not if she paid me—it’s not like I enjoy her visits. All I want is for her to go back to her plushy condo in Toronto and leave us alone.
Papa and Elizabeth are getting ready to leave. “Come on,” Nana says, “is someone going to help me up?” She looks at me, her eyes full of disappointment and disgust. Elizabeth’s an idiot if she thinks Nana will fold.
***
At nine o’clock I’m already in bed, but I’m hardly sleeping. There’s a gusty wind knocking at my window. The morose sound of waves sneaking in. When we were little, Papa used have his morning coffee on the front porch and take in the views of Georgian Bay. Our house is on a network of short streets that meet at Shore Lane—a tiny strawberry box just steps from the beach—one of a few that isn’t an Airbnb. It’s a charming little house, but it wasn’t to Elizabeth. She’d always been planning an exit.
All I can think about is when Elizabeth first brought the walker, how Nana balked at the sight of it.
“Lord no,” she said to Elizabeth who brought it through the front door—yelled, actually.
“I’m just—,” but Nana cut her off.
“Nothing,” she said. “You are going to do nothing. Walk it right out of here.”
Elizabeth didn’t even hesitate. She hardly said two words. Only the sound of her backing out and her car’s engine filtering through the house as she drove away. The walker remained at the front door, so I went to move it.
“What is it you think you’re doing?” Immediately her bird claw grip was on the walker, as if I was about to steal it from her.
I said something about moving it out of the way.
“Why, look who’s in charge.” She glared at me with her glassy eagle eyes. “You’re not nearly as smart as your sister.” Drawing the walker with her she said, “At least she knows when to run away.”
Annie, on the other hand, will never run away. No one is as close to me like she is. It’s like she’s inside me. I started playing with Annie when I was little, her mildly vanilla scent was absorbing and I inhaled huge breaths. We played tea, I fixed her chestnut braid into a bun, caressed her perfect ceramic skin. She isn’t a real person, but that’s not the point. No matter how sad I feel, her scent always makes me happy.
A young pioneer with lace-up boots and a brown hand-knit scarf over her white cotton dress, reminding me of much simpler times. Pretending, for a moment, that I had a normal childhood: a mother, a father, a sister who wasn’t always thinking of escape. She has a hand-painted face and whether I was angry or afraid, I could look at her, the calm blue eyes taking hold and waves of comfort spreading deep inside, towards the part of me that’s hidden, protected.
Just this morning sitting next to her reading I felt anxious, my stomach started acting up, at one point she said, Everything’s going to work out just fine.
“You mean somehow it’s a good thing. How can you know that?”
I just know, she said.
“I’m worried that’s all.”
Of course, of course. We all are.
“Then, what will I do?”
Nana wanted us to shut the door. She was or wasn’t eavesdropping.
In bed I close my eyes and tuck Annie’s porcelain head under my chin, wrap my arm around her cloth body. I imagine we’re dancing in a small, cozy cottage with four walls and a window. I whirl her around and it’s lovely. I haven’t noticed the mice at my feet until just now. Five female mice wearing yellow dresses and light yellow aprons playing instruments, two trumpets, a trombone, a French horn and a little mouse tubist sitting on a stool. There are many other mice and the music is warm and wishful like a sweet embrace. On and on they play and we keep dancing…
***
In the morning it’s Elizabeth’s collapsing weight on my bed that wakes me. I’d gotten lucky because we didn’t talk much the night before, but she wasn’t going to let me slip away this morning without a heart-to-heart. She leans over my right shoulder to take Annie.
“Just like I remember her,” she says.
I keep my back turned, fool her into thinking I’m still sleeping.
“Annie.”
I’ve gotten used to it, everyone’s mocking. I can’t hear it, I’m not even in the same room.
Then she elbows me hard in the spine. When I’m finished moaning, she asks, “Do you ever think about Dylane—ever—at all?” She’d been thinking about her. “If she’s well or alive?”
I turn to face her. “Sometimes,” I say, “in May on Mother’s day.” I keep my thoughts to myself, look at Annie instead.
She says, “I hate Mother’s Day. Last year, this sounds crazy, but I walked through an encampment looking for her,” she’s talking as if I actually care. “Pitched tents, tarps and blankets all dirty and pinned up purposefully, but obviously haphazardly. Hardly any people. Two big dogs, that looked tamed, watching a squirrel squat on their owners things. No one asking for money. Just some dude who waved at me like we were old friends and said something about time. Take time? Make time? I was scared. It was like I needed proof. My whole existence depended on it.”
“She’s probably,” I say, “unrecognizable.”
Elizabeth closes her eyes. She isn’t dressed yet and is wearing oversized pyjamas with sleeves that hide her hands. Her champagne hair in disarray. When she opens her eyes, she says, “It doesn’t matter.” Putting Annie in my arms again she tells me the situation.
I don’t know how she’ll say it, she doesn’t explain everything. No one can force Nana to do what she doesn’t want to. “But there has to be some way to make Nana think it’s her own idea, that she’s a danger to herself—“
“But not too much,” I say. “You don’t want to insult her.”
As I get ready for work, Elizabeth and Nana start cleaning and organizing, and eventually she’ll bring up the topic. I have two shit jobs, I’m working my last month at the Stayner Curling Club before switching to the Stayner Golf course for the summer. I leave the two of them in the hallway, Nana battling the back of the linen closet for old beach towels and tablecloths. “Everything has its own proper place,” she’s telling Elizabeth over her shoulder, who’s shuffling nervously behind her. For a second, I feel Elizabeth’s anticipation, for the fall that won’t come, and her delusional thinking of wanting to help.
***
Saturday shifts are such a pain, but six hours fly by like never before. I spend the afternoon remembering Elizabeth’s relentless attempts at running away, on foot and bike. Repeated escapes that had gotten really embarrassing by thirteen. She came up with her brilliant plan after secretly speaking to our sad liar of a mother. She took the bus to the city. She called Papa from a pay phone, I’m sure she was crying. She was lost—must have taken the wrong bus—ending up at a dingy-looking strip mall, five short miles from our house. It was then that she gave up on her futile little plots and made a resolute promise: to make something of herself.
When I pull into the empty driveway, I can’t say I’m surprised. It seems everyone has seized their predictable roles, Nana mean and unreasonable, Elizabeth excessive and flighty. Papa sits on the porch, a complicit traitor in exile. His head is hanging so heavy in the cedar Muskoka chair he must be sleeping. Crouching, listening to his breathing, I reach for his hand. “It looks like summer is early this year,” he says, “so many out-of-towners already.”
His thin wrinkled face looks at me with such tenderness. His mind nothing like Nana’s. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“Don’t bother, dear.”
I stand there for a minute or two adjusting to his silence. A familiar sinking feeling beginning to prick at my conscience. I leave Papa on the porch to watch the sunset.
Inside the living room is empty, just the white shabby sofa looking faintly blue in the dark. I see Annie thrown on the armchair and I freeze.
Nana is in the kitchen. She’s chopping vegetables for broth. Among the carrots, celery, and head of garlic, the bottle of rum out next to the Crock-Pot. Her leathery features—from years of sun and too much alcohol—becoming harsh and ugly. Blooming with bitterness.
We sit at the table, Annie and me. “Hi Nan,” I say, it’s almost automatic.
She pauses chopping, putting her hand to her chest, “Here to say goodbye? Not today.”
It’s profoundly clear that everything will remain the same. I’m alone, even the rattling windows and walls seem soul-crushing shut. There isn’t an after to worry about, a foolish fantasy believing there ever was. Elizabeth is gone, maybe for good. It’s over, as briefly as it began.
I watch her hands, the knife slicing and the mad gleam look in her face. A picture of Elizabeth at the table, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The dried spit on her chin. My blood turns and stomach tilts. Nana always made soup in summer. It made Elizabeth moody and mad. Seriously, she’d blow up over hot soup in the summer. Sometimes, when she’d have to sit there until her bowl was empty—after we all had left the table—I’d come into the kitchen the next morning to find her asleep by her bowl of untouched soup.
I never cared that much about soup.
“What’s the matter? Oh, you really thought Elizabeth was strong enough?”
“No, Nana,” I say.
“They’d lock you up in some fucking place—“
But she isn’t talking about me.
“And that doll of yours.”
That last time at thirteen, the eve before her final escape—except she hadn’t said anything—we’d taken the joy rider, a blow-up surfboard, to the beach. We normally spent long days at the beach, castle building and swimming, playing volleyball or frisbee. But we were already bathed and scrubbed clean. The faint smell of Ivory soap on our skin. One thing led to another, the freedom of summer dresses, the wind and water. When we came home, I was covered in sand.
“Fucking unbelievable! Not in the house!”
Nana made me undress outside—in the yard. I see her standing there, the smile that still scares the shit out of me. Elizabeth having to hose me down, the glacial water turning my bladder loose until uncontrollably hot piss starts running down my little legs.
When I’m almost asleep, she had come into my room. She said I should leave with her, that I didn’t need to stay with Nana. Nana can’t be our mother, she said. But Elizabeth had left so many times before that I had gotten used to the idea of being left behind.
I don’t say anything to Nana, who leans back from the counter, staring at me like I’m stupid. Even in her frailty she has power. The way she holds the knife, her neat button-up dress. Everything about her seems permanent.
She gives Annie and me a long dead look. And I want to hurt her. Violently. To teach her a lesson. I want her to feel trapped and imprisoned. To suffocate. To be cruel, the way she was to Elizabeth and me over the years. I feel bewitched, glued to my chair, because all I want to do is lunge at her.
Slamming the knife through stalks of celery, something in her face changes, slips away like she’s on the verge of falling asleep but her hands don’t stop moving. Something between her and Annie is happening. As if Annie is controlling her. Waves of hatred and anger, waves of something I can’t describe exactly.
She begins slicing with a frenzy. I think her eyes fill with fear, but I can’t watch. The knife going up and down. The pummeling rhythm never stopping. But it does and it happens. Thumb and pointer sliced clean off. The blood red and thick.
***
Elizabeth is so pretty, but she’s prettiest when she’s scared. Oversteering, coasting round the corner, the back end of the car drifting like we’re hurling off a cliff. Nana calls out, Faster, faster, I need a doctor or Get out of the bloody way! She’s in the passenger seat, Papa’s in the back and I’m holding the bag of ice—her butchered, arthritic digits. I’ve left Annie at home again. She looked into my face, the slight curve of a smile, but had said nothing. She seemed to know we’d all return home—except for Nana. I have a feeling she’ll never put her two feet in that house again. Elizabeth runs the light at Sunnidale Road, and the air spilling in from the window is surprisingly warm. Papa was right, summer has arrived. Somehow Annie made it possible.
I don’t take my eyes off Elizabeth. Peering into the rearview mirror, I see the complexity in her stare, facing forward, as we drive away. What is she thinking? She wasn’t doing Nana any favours, and it’s not about her hand. I see the girl wanting to run away, but never making it further than a five mile block—I see the worry. I want to reach across the seat and touch her shoulder as if I’m following a chain, distant and delicate, back to her. She catches my stare, brief yet soft. And I realize how much I care about her. She’ll always be more beautiful, smarter and wise, but she’ll never be someone who fades away. We’d been assigned our places at birth, and though we had no control over our circumstance, she was my sister. We would always be sisters. I should have known she’d come back.
*****
Gilda Scatozza is an architect based just north of Toronto, Ontario and has completed her Creative Writing Graduate Certificate from the Humber School for Writers last year.