Nini

By Veronique Darwin

She climbs into the cedar tree's elbow and poses: eyes scrunched shut, a checkerboard grin. She's seven. I broke my arm at this age. I have a picture of me with my cast outstretched, my head zombied toward it, like the arm is possessing me. I chose a bright green cast even though blue was my favourite colour. I remember noticing my strange choice as I made it, as though I had lost control of more than just my arm. I want her to have a moment of peace in the tree, but I realize she's waiting for me to take a picture. I take it, and I send it to my sister. One day my niece will see it for the moment it was to her, not the moment I wanted it to be.

“What's next,” she demands, peering into my backpack for the mythical list from which I'm reading. I pull out her pink water bottle. Her cheeks suck in as she drinks from the little spout. I tell her next is a wishing tree. She runs ahead and shouts at me “This? This?” and when I look she points vaguely toward a Saskatoon bush, then a whitebark pine. I zip up the bag and say, “You're close”. She smirks at me. She's smart. There's no list.

I meet her in the rock labyrinth. She steps over the paths to get to the centre. “Try again,” I say, playfully demonstrating wedding steps, but she's off, on her way up the trail to the clearing that overlooks the mountain town I've lived in for five years.

I cozy up next to her on the bench at the lookout. She has the same proportions as when she was born: she's long. She was a bald, beautiful baby, without hair until she was one. I grew up on fixed ideas of my body (my broad shoulders, my big bones) and I'm afraid I'm doing that to her now: thinking of her as one unchanging person, when she could be so many. Her hair is so long now.

I'm hungry but I only brought snacks for her. She tells me about dunking her head and double bounces and a lending library that's a giant candy dispenser. I sneak some of her cheesies. She feeds them to me like I'm a dog. I bark.

I've found notes in my old journals educating me on how to one day be a good aunt. “Don't tell her what to do,” one note reads. “Be good, but not so good. You want her to brag about you to her friends.” My aunts growing up were distant in place or circumstance. Though I'm far away, I want to be someone she can reach for.

Her little hands pat my knees. “There's a bike!” She pushes her face up toward me, exaggerating her already-wide, blue eyes. “Riding on the rocks!” He snakes up the trail, the flashy colours and high-tech gear sticking out against the red soil and green-washed canopy. The cyclist is young and seems to think he doesn't need a helmet yet, or anymore. She's been learning to ride a bike for years. I spent my twenties trying all the sports and landed now on the one or two I still want to do. She'll get that too: a whittling of the self that still feels, somehow, like building. The town sits below, like the cupped palm of the mountain's hand. The cyclist crests the last boulder and we cheer.

“Do you want to try that?” I ask her, and she grips me, shaking, terrified. “Me neither.”

My sister is at our place taking a nap. They're here for only a few days, but it's a few big, tiring days. When they leave, I'm still an aunt, but my sister's always a mother.

When we get home she pours out the contents of her backpack on my bed. I have pasta to make from scratch, a sister I've poured wine for, but here it all is: her beady bracelets, her shiny notebook, her favourite French comic book, a bag of broken cookies, and two dolls with huge heads. “Can you play with me?” she asks. “Nini, can you play?”

Even before I became an aunt, I understood my role instinctively: “Be the person she can run away to. Don't grow up; grow down, toward her, so you meet her where she needs you.” While some find their roles as mothers, I know mine is to be an aunt.

Véronique Darwin is a fiction candidate in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Guelph. You can find her stories in The Quarantine Review, Existere, and the Black Bear Review, and humour pieces published and forthcoming in Geist. She made the longlist for The Fiddlehead’s 2018 short fiction contest and the shortlist for Split/Lip Press’s 2020 Fiction Chapbook Contest. Though she currently lives in Toronto, her home is in the mountains of British Columbia, where she accidentally wrote and directed a musical. She is now working on a novel and a screenplay.