People Watching

People Watching

One

Milo

“Please, Bertha, baby, I am begging you,” I say, tightening my hands around the shuddering steering wheel. There’s not another living soul in sight. No one to witness our inevitable crash and burn if Bertha decides to call it quits and send us rolling backward down the hill. On this Muskoka backroad it’s just me, Bertha, the black tar pavement under us, the gray storm clouds above us, the granite outcropping bordering either side of the road, and, as always, the bobblehead Jesus on my dash.

“I swear to everything good and holy that if you make it over this hill, I’ll never ask you for anything ever again.” She sputters, and I grit my teeth waiting for the backward roll. “If we make it to town,” I plead, each syllable equal parts pathetic and desperate, “I’ll fill you up with premium fuel and let you rest for a week.” The tires jolt, forcing my hands on the wheel to fight for control. “Okay, okay! Two weeks. I promise.”

My beloved van’s speedometer is broken, as is most of her, but the temperature gauge isn’t, unfortunately. The needle is fluctuating between you’re beyond f***ed and are you on fire yet?

“C’mon, old girl, don’t quit on me now. Not yet. Don’t you want to go home again?” Though I cannot help but think that my death would probably save me from this familial obligation. Maybe Bertha is taking care of me, just as she has for the past decade, and death is the lesser of these two evils.

The sound of metal grinding against metal, an irritating high-­pitched squealing, is her answer. Then, the choking of an engine, like the mechanical equivalent of a smoker’s cough, which is never a good sign. I prepare my final words, taking a deep breath as the car slows to a stop a few feet shy of the top of the hill.

Well, this is it, I think to myself. I wonder what my obituary will read, if anyone bothers to write one. If it was up to me it would say: Milo Kablukov, 28, was a nomadic slut, childhood sheep farmer, and wannabe artist with a heart of gold and a penis that launched a thousand ships.

Just as I’m about to say my final goodbyes to this mortal plane, Bertha kicks back to life, taking us over the edge of the hilltop and onto flattened road. I open my eyes, having closed them while bracing for disaster.

“Whew, baby!” I shake my limbs free of tension as I adjust position in my seat and toss back my hair. “You little tease,” I say, petting the dashboard. I make a turn onto a backroad toward the train station with a flat palm on the wheel and slow my speed to give Bertha a rest. “You really had my heart racing that time, gorgeous,” I tell her, releasing the last of my tension in a languid breath.

Other than my younger sister, Nadia, Bertha has been the only consistent woman in my life since I got the f*** out of my hometown of Dorset, Ontario, the day after my eighteenth birthday. The town slogan, if it were up to me, would be: Dorset: Where the sheep outnumber the people.

I won’t be returning there any time soon. My brother, my summoner, has set up home a few towns over. Somewhere just as boring, no doubt, but far enough away from Sonia and Andrei Kablukov—­good old Mom and Pop—­that my brother would even dare to ask Nadia and me to come to his rescue.

I pull up in front of the small white building that is technically a train station but looks more like an old cottage. “There she is!” I shout as I wheel the passenger window all the way down. “Nadia motherf***in’ Kablukov in the flesh!”

My sister, who perpetually chews gum on one side of her mouth, smirks as she rolls her eyes. “You’re late.” She leans into the window, tapping the inside of the passenger door. “Hi, Bertha baby, you’re looking as shitty as ever.”

“You look older again,” I point out, scowling at her. “You should really stop doing that.”

“Aging?” she clarifies.

I nod.

“Charming . . .” She assesses me, or at least what she can see of me from the window, with a curious, wry grin.

I look her over too, in the habitual, almost subconscious way I always have. Searching for the scrapes, burns, and bruises, and hoping to find none. Nadia has always been equal parts stubborn and prideful, discontent to be the youngest of us three siblings. Which meant she got hurt trying to do things above her paygrade a lot.

At four, she tried to make her own breakfast, and I helped ice the burn from her run-­in with the frying pan. At nine, she climbed up to the roof to fix the TV antenna, and I fixed the eaves trough she broke on her way down and bandaged up her ankle. At twelve, she tried to teach herself to drive Dad’s tractor, and I mended the broken fence and her hand from the splinter she’d gotten trying to repair it herself. Then, there were all the many nights that she’d sneak into my room when Mom and Dad were screaming at each other, and I’d let her pretend it was for my sake, not hers.

Now, instead of looking for scraped-­up limbs, I look at her eyes. I try and judge how much weight they’re holding. I attempt to measure the dark circles underneath as if they were rings on a tree stump, as if age and sleepless nights could be measured in the same way.

Nadia’s hair is back to its original black color and rests just above her jaw in a straight, sharp line. She’s gained some weight back, which I’m relieved to notice, but not enough. She was way, way too thin for a while there. She joked that she was too busy to eat all the while finding the time to smoke her way through a pack of cigarettes a day.

I’m not judging—­all three of us siblings have our vices, our own unhealthy way of surviving our f***ed-­up childhood—­I just hated seeing her look weak when she is far, far from it.

So maybe it’s her hair, or the extra few pounds she’s gained back, or the fewer rings under her eyes, or the less jittery way that she stands on the curb allowing me the chance to look her over—­but she does look older. It settles me and somehow makes me uneasy at the same time. She’s doing better, but I didn’t know that until now. And when was the last time I had asked my little sister how life was treating her?

I need to be better at asking.

“You look great, зайка.” Зайка, or bunny in Russian, is what Nik, our older brother, started calling Nadia from birth. She had these huge, chubby cheeks as a baby that reminded him of his favorite animal at the time; the ones he’d sneak food to that lived under my parents’ barn. “You just look different, that’s all.”

“Well . . . You were gone a long time. Again,” she replies, quirking an arched brow.

I unbuckle the seatbelt, but don’t turn off the engine before getting out of the driver’s seat. Truthfully, I don’t know if I could get Bertha to start back up again and there’s no way I could afford to get a tow truck.

“Get over here,” I request, opening my arms wide for her as I approach. Nadia, stiff as a board, welcomes my hug in a literal sense by stepping toward me, but keeps her arms firmly at her sides. “I missed you,” I say over the top of her head. She mumbles something that sounds like uh-­huh into my chest. I squeeze tighter before releasing her.

I reach toward the ground for one of her oversized khaki duffel bags. “What’s in here?” I say, throwing it over my shoulder before reaching for the other one. “This has to be at least fifty pounds.” I pick up the second bag. “Each!”

“That, dear brother, is everything I own. Minus the lamp that came with my apartment, which is somehow controlled by the upstairs tenant. Or, at least, I hope that’s who is turning it on and off all day.”

I walk toward the back of the van, and she follows closely. “Toronto sounds . . . fun.”

“For sure.” I catch her smiling softly at the back doors of the van as I struggle to open the right rear door. Much like my own skin, Bertha’s outer shell is covered in memories, mistakes, and inspirational scribblings. “I see you’re still collecting these . . .” She taps on a bumper sticker, one of many, then underlines the words with her finger. “My other ride is your mother,” she reads, firing an entirely unconvincing disapproving stare my way. “Real classy.”

I smile widely at her in response, flashing all my teeth as I manage to pry open the door with a grunt of effort. “I have the father version of that one too,” I say, gesturing to the hundreds of other stickers decorating the entire surface of the doors. I toss her bags into the hollow back of the van, alongside my own luggage. “I believe in equality, after all.”

“Do you? Or are you simply an equal opportunist?” she asks, smirking.

My bisexuality is no secret to either of my siblings and, as much as they like to tease me about it, they’ve been nothing but supportive. Not that they’d have a choice to be anything but. I have no place in my life for bullshit from anyone, family or not, and they know that. “Can’t it be both?” I ask, shutting the door by throwing my shoulder against it.

She nods, grinning mischievously as she pulls out her phone from her pocket and snaps a photo of Bertha’s rear. “So . . .” I lean my shoulder against the door and run one hand through my hair, pushing it to one side as a gust of wind tries to blow it back. “What do you make of all this?” I gesture broadly in what may or may not be the direction of Baysville, my brother’s new home. “A bit dramatic, don’t ya think?”

Nadia’s lips pout as she considers my question, then she looks up at me with those deep brown eyes that all of us siblings have. “You mean Nik using his one-­one-­nine?”

We coined the term one-­one-­nine over twenty years ago. Whereas a code nine-­one-­one meant an emergency that we, unfortunately, had no choice but to involve our parents in, a one-­one-nine could and should remain between us siblings.

Nik graciously granted us all two one-­one-­nine uses per year in childhood. But the rule was that we’d only have one after the age of eighteen to use in perpetuity. That goes for all of us. We have one Get Out of Jail Free card. One Hail Mary. One help-­me-­bury-­the-­body-­and-­don’t-­ask-questions. Then, you’re on your own.

“Yeah,” I answer. “It feels a bit extreme; don’t you think? He’s dreamed of opening his brewery for years and we’ve never been a part of that plan. What could possibly constitute an emergency?”

“He never specified it had to be used in an emergency. . . . And, if I recall correctly, you used yours to make me catch a mouse for you when we were backpacking in Costa Rica.” She leans her hip up against the van and digs around in her oversized tote for what I hope is not a cigarette. “So, maybe let’s not be so quick to judge.”