Excerpt of the hole

Before my sister started digging the hole in my backyard, the hole she dug was her life. She’s my sister, but we aren’t close. Nikki’s fair, like our mother was, but she has other characteristics that make me think we may only be half-related. Like how she lacks any real sense of responsibility and thinks of life as a party. When I try to bring this up to her constructively, she bites my head off. She’s too sensitive. She’ll cry at any dumb plot on TV, and believes some things are immoral to joke about — dead babies, rape, women in the kitchen, that kind of thing. 

We don’t talk about why she’s come to live with me, or why she’s no longer drinking. We don’t talk about what happened to my husband, or why my daughter won’t speak to me anymore. When I leave for work in the mornings at the secondary school, she’s still asleep in my daughter’s old bedroom. When I come home at four o’'clock, she’s lounging on my husband’s armchair in sweats watching television, with a spread of leftovers in Tupperwares on the coffee table. There isn’t any point in asking her if she’s made her bed, done the laundry, or prepped supper, looked for a job, weeded the garden or taken out the garbage, called the plumber about the rattle in the second-floor bathroom, superglued the cracked planter, vacuumed or mopped the floors, called the City to complain about the neighbour’s constant loud partying, or any of the other tasks that need completing to keep a household functioning. Still, I ask because I know facts, and the fact is that I always say what’s on my mind. But when I do, she just laughs at me, the way my daughter used to.

The house Nikki and I live in together, near Chinatown and the Uuniversity, is the same house we grew up in, a one-hundred-year-old red-brick mansion with black trim, a backyard, and stained- glass windows in the front room. My husband bought it outright from my parents in the early ’90s after his Russian grandmother died and left him a huge sum of money, the rest of which he ended up blowing on a boat, expensive fishing gear he never used, and an RV we only drove once up to Tobermory the summer before Lila turned four. Since then, the surrounding houses have all been converted into rental units because young people don’t want to work to own their own homes anymore. They’d rather pretend the city’s a playground, and why shouldn’t they? New clubs and bars spring up on every corner, and since the passing of the new law, marijuana shops are as pervasive as convenience stores. So maybe I am to blame for Lila turning out mean and ungrateful. I should have raised her elsewhere, somewhere remote, near a still lake, and a cluster of birch trees.

They’ve even got the CN Tower decorated with ridiculous, multi-coloured lights now, and every night, they shine as a beacon for the degenerates and dead-beats. It’s probably why, after my sister returned to the city, sober for the first time in thirty years, and I agreed to let her move back in with me, she’d wrap herself in a dingy, fleece blanket like some kind of homeless person, and walk down Spadina Street to watch those ugly lights sputter off the tower’s tip. She said it excited her to see what mankind was capable of. 

“Well, not your kind,” I clarified. I didn’t say it to be mean, but to motivate her. Even sober, she’d barely developed the skills it took to take care of one’s self. I still cooked every meal, without onions, mushrooms, or garlic, so she liked it, and did her laundry, careful to pre-treat the scores of stains she managed to make on the fronts of her shirts. I drove her to her doctor’s appointments, and reminded her to wash her hair and take her vitamins in the morning. 

I overslept the morning the digging started. When I came downstairs, the patio door was wide open again, and Nikki was in the backyard, wearing the absurd wide-brimmed sun hat she’d arrived in. Watching her dig in it was a ridiculous sight. She’s tiny, less than 5’2”, and unlike me weighs nothing. To dig, she had both feet planted on the blade and was hurling down her weight for the shovel to break the earth, jumping several times before finally wrenching out the blade, flecks of dirt flying into the air as she craned her head back to avoid getting any in her eyes. She then scooped the greater lump into a crumbling pile nearby. 

When Nikki heard the patio door slam shut behind me, she glanced up. I asked her what exactly she was doing and she swayed, leaning against the handle of the shovel. 

“You know, it probably doesn’t take a detective to figure that out,” she said.

“Fine, but why are you doing it?”

She looked at the cherry tree’s budding branches, then back at me, and shrugged. “Exercise?” Everything was a joke to her. She went right back to digging, and I went back inside, and got her a bottle of water. 

“Drink something, or you’ll get dehydrated,” I said.

“I’m fine, really.”

“The sun’s hot. Before you know it you’ll be heat-stricken.”

She jumped onto the blade, laughing. “Heat-stricken… Sounds fancy.”

I uncapped the water bottle to hand it to her, but when I opened my mouth to try and convince her to drink, I saw my daughter, fifteen years old, at the top of the stairs, luminescent despite the pounds of makeup and hair products, screaming, “Why must you always fucking patronize me?”

I could no longer hear what Nikki was saying to me.

“Alright,” I told her, setting the bottle on the flimsy glass table between the two sunken lawn chairs.

“Alright,” she said, still laughing.  ∞