Sistering Read online

  Sistering

  Sistering

  a novel

  JENNIFER QUIST

  Copyright © 2015, Jennifer Quist

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Debbie Geltner

  Author photo: Sara MacKenzie

  Book design: WildElement.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Quist, Jennifer, author Sistering / Jennifer Quist.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927535-70-7 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-927535-71-4 (epub).--

  ISBN 978-1-927535-72-1 (mobi)—ISBN 978-1-927535-73-8 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8633.U588S57 2015 C813›.6 C2015-901857-9 C2015-901858-7

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing programme.

  Linda Leith Publishing

  P.O. Box 322, Victoria Station

  Westmount QC H3Z 2V8 Canada

  www.lindaleith.com

  For Amy, Sara, Mary, and Emily,

  all of whom inspired,

  none of whom is depicted in this story.

  Contents

  Suzanne [1]

  Meaghan [2]

  Tina [3]

  Suzanne [4]

  Ashley [5]

  Meaghan [6]

  Heather [7]

  Suzanne [8]

  Heather [9]

  Suzanne [10]

  Ashley [11]

  Meaghan [12]

  Tina [13]

  Meaghan [14]

  Heather [15]

  Suzanne [16]

  Ashley [17]

  Heather [18]

  Tina [19]

  Meaghan [20]

  Suzanne [21]

  Tina [22]

  Suzanne [23]

  Tina [24]

  Heather [25]

  Ashley [26]

  Suzanne [27]

  All [28]

  Acknowledgements

  Suzanne

  [1]

  She’s something like a monster. That’s what I’m thinking as I watch Heather—my barely-older-than-me sister—standing in a hospital elevator overseeing the lights on the control panel.

  “That smell.” She forces a gag. “You smell that, Suzanne? Maybe you’re used to it by now, but that hospital smell still goes right through all my cell membranes and makes my perineum ache.”

  Everyone knows Heather can handle smells a lot worse than this. I smirk. “You mean you’re glad no one’s come here to see you do your thing this time.”

  “So glad.”

  The dirty metal doors slide open in front of us. Heather exaggerates a hop over the threshold, over the space where a black, empty crack drops four storeys that might as well be an oblivion beneath us.

  We’re in the hallway of this hospital’s labour and delivery unit. I work as a nurse, but this isn’t my hospital, this massive pink box visible from the Whitemud Freeway, marked with a crucifix that lights up and glows at night in honour of the French-Canadian nuns who founded it. The Grey Nuns, the Sisters of Charity—out west, far from home, not at all related by blood.

  Heather and I are related by blood, though we don’t look alike. We have an uncle who’s been joking all our lives that Heather must be adopted. Either we’re too used to the joke to laugh or else it’s never been funny. My genetic connection to Heather only makes sense when we’re seen in a complete set of five, with our three other sisters. Then it’s easy to trace Heather’s wan, almost sickly features darkening, softening, becoming more robust as they shift through Meaghan to Tina to Ashley to me.

  It’s been a while since any of us have been inside the labour and delivery unit of the Grey Nuns Hospital—almost two entire years. The long walls are painted the same pale orange-pink colour, like the skin of most of the white people living in northern countries like this one. And Heather is right about the smell—the carts of disinfected white linens, the musty yellow mop buckets, the dread. Everything is exactly like it was the first time she was wheeled up here.

  “Room number seven.” Heather waves at a closed door. She’s trotting down the hallway a step and a half ahead of me. “I know that room. That’s where I had my first. Remember?”

  I’m nodding. “Lucky seven.”

  Heather is all hair and noise in front of me, calling out landmarks like room seven, Tina’s name jotted on the smeary whiteboard, the yellow vinyl chair that caught our brother-in-law when he passed out on his way to the coffee machine after being kept awake here for thirty hours.

  There are other corridors in the hospital where the landmarks are different. They’re not monuments to firsts but to lasts—not places where people have been born but places where they’ve died. We can’t see them from this hallway, but they’re a part of everything here. Heather and I, we sense it.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not morbid. I’m a nurse. The hospital’s secrets are what they are, and they’re known to me. Heather, on the other hand, doesn’t have much to defend herself with when people accuse her of being morbid. She works as a funeral director—an embalmer, undertaker, a mortician licensed by the government to rinse out, wrap up, and send off the dead.

  “Hey Suze, remember how you came here to see me while I was in labour that first time? And you brought Tina along?” Heather says. “She came into the room and stood right up against the outside of the curtain but wouldn’t come any further. All I saw of her were shoes and socks—like she was that flattened witch sticking out from underneath the crashed house in The Wizard of Oz.”

  Of course I remember. Back then, none of my sisters had a baby yet. Heather was living out her privilege as the oldest of us, her curse of going first—our howling, flailing vanguard. At the time, I was only halfway through nursing school. I’d already attended to other labouring women—strangers. I had a nurse’s face and I wore it for Heather, for me, for everyone when I came to see her.

  She wouldn’t have it. “What is with you, Suzanne?” she asked through the morphine cobwebs she swiped at but couldn’t clear away from her cheeks and chin. “What’s with your face? And your voice? They’re all plastic and clean.”

  Our younger sister, Tina, was here that day without any face but her own. She was just out of high school. It was all too much for her.

  And now, from behind a closed door, someone cries out in that Tarzan voice of the transition phase of childbirth. I glance around the hallway’s fleshy walls. Maybe it’s still too much, for all of us. Maybe it’s worse and worse every time.

  At the sound of the voice, there’s a flinch in Heather’s shoulders. “There goes all the cortisol squirting out of my adrenal glands. You feel that, Suze?”

  Heather, me, Tina, our younger sister Ashley—we’ve each given birth to at least one baby in this hospital. Ashley laboured here, but her babies weren’t actually born in any of the rooms branching off this hallway. She was taken downstairs to an operating suite instead.

  “They strapped me down and gutted me like a fish,” she told us when they finally let us see her and her enormous baby girl. I worried Ashley would’ve been sad or ashamed about not having a “natural” delivery. But that kin
d of fuss looked like nonsense to her after a day and a half of labour.

  She came back from the operating room glorying in it, proud to be the first one of us to have a Caesarean section. Ashley is the fourth-born of our five member sister group, and she hardly ever gets the honour of being the first one of us to do anything. Someone had forgotten to take the green operating room hairnet off her head before they sent her back to the maternity floor. When we saw her, she was still wearing it, like laurel leaves.

  There won’t be anything as radical as Ashley’s surgical births happening when we find Tina here today. Babies come to Tina with all the gore and horror they’re supposed to and no more. That’s how it is for me too. I’d say more about my childbirth career, but no one wants to hear it. I know that. If they do, the Internet is full of blog after pink-ity blog of birth stories complete with every bit of mucus and vomit and meconium and whatever else we never find out until it’s too late.

  Meaghan is the only one of us never to have had a baby here. She’s the youngest sister, number five, and she hasn’t had a baby anywhere yet, not really.

  “There’s got to be a reason why I get that weird, traumatized post-abortion vibe wafting off Meaghan every once in a while. Don’t you ever sense that, Suzanne?” Heather has asked me about it at least a dozen times. I don’t know anything for certain. And I won’t settle it by asking Meaghan. Neither will Heather. Still, the theory rings a little truer every time I hear it. Maybe this is what makes Heather so monstrous—the way her sick little hunches are usually right, terribly right.

  Meaghan won’t be coming to the hospital until later —until after. Ashley is already in Tina’s room when we arrive, looking like a younger, prettier, slightly shrunken version of me—high, clean brows and long, dark hair.

  Heather says her kids are too lazy to learn to tell me and Ashley apart without looking at which of their uncles we’re married to. They’re just kids, so it’s hard to be snippy about it. My husband is Uncle Troy, a tall, splendid man, a dentist who likes golf and essential oils. The only thing he has in common with Ashley’s husband, Uncle Durk, is his taste in female beauty.

  Durk is an old teenager who likes cannabis and chakras. Today, he’s been left alone to manage the fireplace store he and Ashley own.

  We find my younger sisters in a birthing room near the end of the hall. Ashley is sitting in a chair pulled to the foot of the bed, texting Durk, a bit frantic from the waist up. Below her waist, her shoes are off, her legs folded into a lotus pose. On the bed, Tina is propped up by the mattress cranked and bent into a steep angle behind her. The little footstool that’s supposed to be kept on the floor is set right on top of the bed, across Tina’s thighs like she’s about to be served breakfast. She’s leaning forward, onto the rubberized black stepping surface of the footstool, resting her weight on the points of both of her elbows. I’ve seen it before.

  “Where is Martin?” It’s the first thing Heather says as we step into the room.

  Martin is Tina’s husband, the man known in the hospital today as a “new father” even though he has been a father for ages. I have secret theories sometimes too, and one of mine is that Martin has an attention deficit disorder, the kind no one diagnosed back in the seventies when he was the silliest, most jittery kid in his swanky school with the crested blazer uniforms. I think his disorder is what makes Tina have all these babies. She’s flagging down Martin’s attention by adding interest to their family. Believe it or not, this not-quite-born baby is their sixth child.

  Tina doesn’t answer Heather’s question herself. Instead, Ashley uncoils and stands up to speak for Tina. “Martin’s at the nursing station,” Ashley says. “One of the ladies out there went to school with him back in the day.”

  Heather grits her teeth. “How heartwarming.”

  “Should I get him?” I offer.

  Tina moans. Her verbal answer is spoken through Ashley’s mouth. “Not yet,” Ashley says.

  “How’re you progressing? What was your cervix at the last time they checked you?” I’m speaking through my hospital face, the warm clean plastic.

  Again, it’s Ashley who answers. “They say she’s dilated to seven centimetres.”

  Heather throws her purse into Ashley’s empty chair. “Seven? Her last three centimetres go from seven to a full ten in about twenty minutes—every time. Do they know that?”

  Ashley turns up both her hands, empty. “That’s what I told them. They acted like they understood me.”

  It’s not the same as acting like they believed her.

  On the bed, Tina surges into a sob.

  “Where are her drugs?” Heather wants to know.

  Ashley shakes her head. “They say they ordered them half an hour ago. But someone’s got appendicitis downstairs, and they can’t do an epidural for Tina until the on-call anaesthesiologist gets out of surgery.”

  “Well, there isn’t going to be time for that.”

  “Honey?” I’m saying to Tina. “Honey, can you still talk?”

  We hear Tina’s voice, but there are no words. It’s the sign. We all know it. It’s the end.

  “I’ll get the doctor.” Ashley is on her feet and out the door.

  “Quick and shallow,” I’m saying to Tina, panting, nodding. “Hee-hee-hee.”

  In other moments we’ve agreed fancy breathing techniques during labour are vain conceits left over from another, sillier generation. But right now we need something.

  “He-haaa,” Tina bellows back at me.

  Ashley has returned with a man and a woman in green medical scrubs topped with white coats like smoking jackets at a sleazy adult pyjama party. The man’s neck is long and skinny and spotty, the look of a smart kid in an accelerated high school math class. The woman is fully grown but young and quite short.

  “These are Tina’s doctors?” I ask.

  “Yeah. She’s a resident. She’s brand new at it but she’s still pretty much a real doctor. Right?” Ashley is moving behind them to close the door they’ve left open. “And he’s Byron. He’s a medical student.”

  We all gape at each other.

  “So what can we do for you?” the resident asks.

  “You need to check her,” I tell the doctors. “She’s close.”

  “She’s only at seven,” the resident insists. “We just checked her. And the attending doctor’s not ready. He’s not even here.”

  “Look, sorry, I’m a nurse,” I say. “I hate to be pushy but this is my sister’s sixth baby. She’s not like other patients you’ve seen today. She’s a multiparous woman with a history of precipitous labour. So, I’m sorry, but—”

  The resident is nodding and nodding.

  It’s Martin himself opening the door just as Ashley gets it shut. He slides into the room right before Byron moves the footstool off the bed and the resident draws back the sheets.

  The resident is the only one of us who gasps at the sight of a black-haired pate crowning between Tina’s quaking white thighs. “Don’t push,” she calls toward the head of the bed.

  In a corner, Martin is asking Byron how he’s enjoying medical school.

  On the bed, Tina pinches her eyelids closed and a tear falls from the outside corner of each of her eyes, moving in tandem over the pale, pink skin of her temples. More than any of us, Tina looks like our mother. I knew our mother when she was the age Tina is right now. Not all my sisters can remember back that far. Tina’s face, my mother’s—the familiarity makes everything strange. Am I still in the Grey Nuns Hospital with my sisters? Maybe I’ve gone. Maybe I’m somewhere else—sometime else, watching as one of us is born.

  “Don’t—don’t push,” the resident says again, desperate and undoctor-ly. The sliver of the baby’s head is getting wider and rounder. Tina’s flesh is opening like a terrible red eye. “Don’t!”

  We’re all talking at once.

 
“She isn’t pushing.”

  “It’s not like she can help it.”

  “It’s too late. She can’t hold it back.”

  Even Byron and Martin know it’s true. The baby is being born without any consent or assistance from the rest of us. We can’t let that happen, so we reach for our repertoire of hollow medical and maternal rituals.

  Martin has come to the place in his typical birth script where he accepts his Platinum Card and his old-money family name have no power here. For a moment, he will be just like the rest of us. He has tucked his silk necktie into his monogrammed dress shirt. He’s holding one of Tina’s legs, bending it at the knee the way we’ve always told him to do it. Next to her flesh, a diamond-crusted cufflink glitters at Martin’s wrist—cheap and obscene in this place.

  Ashley is holding Tina’s other leg. I am standing between the resident and the stainless steel tray of instruments Byron managed to uncover. I am here—not only a sister but a medical automaton ready to pass the resident whatever she thinks she needs and maybe a few things she won’t think of at all. I don’t always like Nurse Suzanne. She stands in for me—my face, my voice, my dead steady hands—when things are hard and harrowing. She shoulders past my real soul, the one that falters and suffers and loves, and takes its place.

  Someday, I worry, there may be consequences. For now, Nurse Suzanne snaps sterile gloves over the resident’s outstretched hands.

  Tina’s baby is coming so fast Heather misses one of her classic lines—the one where she crows at the squeamish males in the room to, “Get up there. Trust me: it feels way worse than it looks. Really, it just looks a lot like a slick, red sock turning itself inside out.”

  Instead of upbraiding anyone, Heather is bent low, her face close to Tina’s ear, talking. “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re never stronger than right now.”

  Tina’s voice is mounting again.

  At the sound, the glass over my medical automaton eyes cracks. Nurse Suzanne is giving way, forced aside. I can almost see him—Tina’s baby—a tiny bird wheeling and wheeling through the air over my sister’s body, coming close and then veering away, moving on a current none of us can sense, making himself ready to fold up his wings and alight on the earth.