Sisters never quite forgive each other for what happened when
they were five.
PAM BROWN
No, I hadn't heard.” Sydney sat in her orange beanbag chair on the floor, yoga-style, stirring her chamomile tea. “Should I have?”
“Not necessarily,” replied Merit. “I just thought, you know, word gets around in a small town like Kokanee Cove. Will and I are still getting used to it ourselves.”
“And you mention this because…”
“Because I didn't want you to hear it from someone else.”
Merit shivered despite the late morning sun heating up her sister's trailer. What was it about this place that gave her the creeps? It could have been the smell of incense, the crystals, or the seasick feeling she got twirling around in the hanging wicker chair that looked like a New Age parakeet cage.
Making her the parakeet.
“I see.” Sydney took another sip of her tea. “Of course, I don't know much about rumors. I suppose it depends on who you tell.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, Foster Mooney at the Mercantile. He knows everybody's business, more than a man has a right to. If you want a rumor started, I suggest you talk to him. As for me…”
“I think he is a nice man. He and Stephanie seem to get along, with the birds and all.”
Sydney sniffed and Merit leaned forward to hear better.
“I haven't bought anything at the Mercantile in years,” Sydney said. “I just drop off my dreamcatchers there for the UPS man to pick up.”
“That's right. I forgot you sell those. Do you place an ad in a magazine?”
Sydney nodded. “Mother Earth News. I've run a classified ad in the back for ten years. I get orders.”
“But the Mercantile—why don't you shop there?”
“I've asked Foster to carry more organic foods, but he always laughs and tells me they're too expensive. He has no idea what kind of pesticides and hormones his produce has.”
“Organic foods are good,” Merit said, trying to agree with her sister on something.
“How expensive can poor health be, I ask you? All these things the government slips into the food chain to quiet the masses—next they'll be fluoridating the water. Anyone with eyes can see that.”
Not again. Merit hadn't stopped by for a diatribe on global warming and the latest conspiracy theory.
“Oh dear, Sydney.” She tried to extricate herself from the wicker chair as well as the direction the conversation had taken. “You seem to know a lot more about these things than I do.”
“You got that right, Sister.” Sydney took a deep breath. “I just don't know when we're going to stop depleting the planet's resources and overloading our population.”
Merit gave up trying to escape the chair and faced her older sister squarely. “Is that what you think Will and I are doing by having another child? overpopulating the planet?”
Sydney's face flushed. “No, I didn't mean—”
Merit wasn't through. “Well, that's pretty ironic, coming from a woman who lives in a town of five hundred people, out in the middle of nowhere. Overpopulating, huh?”
“That's exactly the kind of attitude we need to change,” Sydney fired back. “Just because it's not a problem in northern Idaho doesn't mean we don't need to meet our global responsibilities.”
Merit snorted. “So you don't eat red meat, you recycle, and you meditate on world peace, just the way Mom and Dad taught you, and that makes everything right.”
“You don't need to bring Mom and Dad into this, Merit. Just because you never saw things their way—”
“You got that right. The original hippies. Beatniks, or whatever they called themselves.”
“You've got to deal with that negative energy, dear. Otherwise—”
“Like they did? I guess they were dealing with their own negative energy when they dragged us to that awful commune in Mendocino. I don't know how I survived.”
Sydney blanched.
“What?” Merit asked.
“You remember that place?” Sydney whispered.
“Barely. I was only six, so you must have been sixteen. Not a very good memory for you, either?”
“Ha.” Sydney looked away. “You have no idea.”
Merit studied her older sister for a moment, trying to decipher the comment. “Care to enlighten me?”
“No.” Sydney shook her head. “It was a long time ago. Let's just say I learned early that men can be pigs.”
That didn't sound good. “I'm sorry, Sydney,” Merit said. “I didn't—”
“Forget I said anything. You wouldn't understand, and I don't want to talk about it.” She gave Merit a long look and her shoulders drooped in surrender. “I suppose I should congratulate you. Maybe it's your karma to help overpopulate the world.”
“Overpopulate? This is your nephew we're talking about.” Merit swallowed her anger. Arguing with Sydney about this wouldn't accomplish anything.
“Oh, so you know already.”
“Not officially” Merit stifled a yawn. “Will's just convinced it's going to be a boy, so I've gotten used to calling him a he.”
“Hmm.” Her sister leaned over and checked Merit's eyes. “You're anemic. I have some organic soybeans and spinach extracts you need to take.”
“Anemic?” Merit asked, slightly off balance at her sister's sudden change in topic. “My doctor didn't say anything about that.” Of course, she'd said plenty of other things.
“I'm not joking, Merit. Let me get you some dong quai pills, and I'll make you some gentian tea.”
Merit felt a familiar queasiness and held up her hands. “No. I mean, I appreciate your concern and everything, but if you don't mind, I'll just handle it like I did with the other kids.”
“You mean by continuing to eat processed poisons, junk food, and animal products?”
“I'll cut out coffee and eat plenty of fruits and veggies. How's that? And meat has iron in it, right? I always eat pretty well.”
“Meat?” Sydney made a face. “Don't make me ill. And if that's true, then why do you look so bad?”
They were skating a little too close to the line, and Merit resumed her efforts to get out of the wicker basket. How did she explain this?
“Listen to me, Sydney.” She ran a hand through her hair and willed the tears not to appear. “There's something else I need to tell you.”
Before her sister could interrupt, Merit gave the condensed version about the cancer and what the doctors had told her. As she talked, her sister's face clouded over more and more.
“So your religion…” Sydney barely forced out the word. “Your religion forces you to take this insane position?”
Merit gulped. What else had she expected from Sydney?
“No, I wouldn't put it that way. But it's true my faith and what the Bible teaches does color my thinking.”
“Colorì Sounds more like it spray paints the sense out of you.” The tint of Sydney's cheeks matched the doctor's when Merit had refused the abortion. “In fact, this is more like some crazy, right-wing brainwashing we have to deprogram out of you. Is this what the Pope told you to do? Listen to what you're saying, Merit!”
“You know I'm not Catholic. But I don't disagree with the Catholic position on life, if that's what you're getting at. In fact, they're right on the mark, as far as I'm concerned.”
“So you're going to sacrifice your life for a fetus, leave your children without a mother, and the Pope is just going to sit back in his robes and applaud, is that it?”
“I don't know why you keep bringing the Pope into this, Sydney. I told you—
“I know, I know, you're not Catholic.” Sydney jumped to her feet and paced around Merit's chair, wagging her finger at the air.
“It just kills me,” she went on, “to see someone like you throw her life away—and for what? Keep in mind the gender of the people pulling the strings here.”
“I don't see it like that.” Merit was surprised how calm her words sounded. How, for the first time, she felt a measure of peace. “And gender has nothing to do with it, unless you consider my gender and what someone of my gender would do to protect her own children.”
“Well, who runs your church then? Men. And they sure as yourhdl have never had to carry any unwanted pregnancies. Ever thought of it thatwzyi”
“First of all he—our baby—is not unwanted. He's a gift from God. And second of all, you don't have to curse.”
“I thought you were the religious one.” Sydney's smile twisted into something unpleasant. “Don't you believe in a hell where your God sends people who don't believe exactly the way your men have told them to believe?”
Merit sighed. Wrong battle, wrong time. She let it go.
“It's all about power, and it's all about men.” Sydney launched into one of her rants. “Men write your Bible. Men tell you what it says. Men tell you what to think and what to do. And men tell you to die when they're done with you or when they want you to make a point for them.”
Merit remembered the “men are pigs” comment from earlier and thought about bringing it up again but decided against it.
“The only point I'm making is—”
“The only point worth making,” Sydney interrupted, “is that we don't need them. Me? I don't buy into the men's-only club, and I don't understand why you do.”
“This is not—”
“Would you let me finish? This is suicide, Sister. Don't you see that? And your man-God is—”
“That's enough.” Merit managed to push herself out of the wicker cage and face her sister head-on. Whatever peace she'd felt had heated to the boiling point.
“Finally we agree.” Sydney stood her ground, balanced like a boxer. “Are you really going to let yourself be oppressed like this?”
“First of all, I am not being oppressed. You don't understand anything about my decision, even after I explained it to you.”
“It's what I do understand that scares me, Merit.”
“Maybe. But I didn't expect this from you.”
“If you didn't want my opinion, you shouldn't have come here.”
Something else Merit could agree with—she shouldn't have come.
“Okay, but I don't appreciate the way you talk about the Lord. He's the One who died…”
Sydney rolled her eyes. “Here we go again with the ‘Jesus died on the cross and you're going to hell if you don't believe’ thing. You don't think I've heard that on late-night TV? Some of those clowns are funnier than Letter-man reruns.” She pointed at the tiny black-and-white set in the corner of the room, a rabbit ears antenna balanced on the top. “Those hypocrites are just another part of the system that keeps you oppressed. Or didn't you notice them always asking for your money? Come on, Merit, you're not that dumb. Or maybe you are.”
“I have a book back at the store I'd like you to read, Sydney. It's really good, by—”
“By a man with ‘Reverend’ in front of his name, right? That's even worse. No thanks.”
Merit broke her promise to herself about those tears. She couldn't keep them from rolling down her cheeks. Sydney was just so…hard.
“You were right about my coming here, Sydney,” she said. “Will said I shouldn't, that I should wait a few more days. I should have listened to him.”
“A few more days? What would have been different then? Aside from the fact that you'd be that much closer to dying, I mean.”
Merit took a step back in shock. Sydney didn't have to say it that way.
“And that's another thing!” Still her sister railed at her. “Does your Will really think this suicide is a good idea? Then he's as bad as the Pope and all the other religious male medievals who want to keep women in bondage. In fact, these religious fascists—”
“Don't you ever talk about Will that way!” Merit would have slapped her if she'd had a clear shot. She headed for the door.
A hand grabbed hers, holding her for just a moment.
“Sister.” Sydney's voice had softened, even after all this. Merit didn't turn, didn't look. “I hate what you're doing. I don't want to lose you now. Not after you've just come back.”
But Merit was done with this, done with the conspiracy garbage and the goddess nonsense. She'd fulfilled her family duty by coming here, and now she wanted to go home.
She pulled her hand away, stepped out into the sunshine, and slammed the trailer door behind her.