Free My Ghosts by Mary Swan

were alone on the rainy day she came back. “I was thinking of you,” Nan said, as they settled to sleep that night, and what could Kez do but believe her. Choose to believe her, though she has always known how her sister, with her round, kind face, can say anything at all and not be doubted. If Lisbet’s mother had sent a policeman to their door, that long-ago day, it’s Kez he would have come for, not Nan, who always looked like butter wouldn’t melt. The same way it was Kez that Aunt Peach pointed out with her crooked finger when someone kicked her shin hard, beneath the kitchen table.
    Over the years she’s come to believe that it was an accomplice Tam was looking for, not a wife, and at times she’s been close to saying it. She’s not used to holding her tongue, but she knows that would be a step too far, that it would undo all the careful mending between them. Nan has told her someof it, but even Kez doesn’t know everything she got up to, those months she was gone. “I would have followed him anywhere,” she said. “Done anything. I did.” Travelling from town to town, following the fairs, any spectacle. Jostling through each crowd, leaving empty pockets in their wake, and spending every cent on meals in fancy dining rooms, dressed up like dandies. “Such laughs,” Nan said. Until the day she got careless and stopped to watch the rope walker dancing his little jig in the sky. A hard hand coming down on her shoulder, her panicked eyes catching the back of Tam’s new brown jacket as he walked quickly away.
    Exactly what came after is a thing Nan has kept to herself. At some point it involved their parents, and a fine they could ill afford, but the apologies and forgiveness stayed between the three of them. “They were softer than I thought,” is all she’s ever said. Kez planned a frosty silence, but it didn’t last beyond the first meal, everyone else carrying on as if there’d never been an empty space at the table. She was still determined not to ask a thing, but before they slept she found herself telling Nan about the ribbon she won at the picnic on the Island, and the time just that week she saw Ross walking arm in arm with a woman, her hips sashaying like anything.
    When she said that, Nan told her they’d had it all wrong, the things they’d wondered about men and women. “There’s all kinds of ways,” she said. “Like that,” Nan whispered once in a shop, nodding toward the grocer’s wife who was bent over, scooping apples from the bottom of a barrel. “Like a dog?” Kez whispered back, the strangest picture forming in her mind of the fat grocer with a spaniel’s head. Sometimes Nan just raised an eyebrow when they walked past a kneeling housewife rubbing hard at her brass doorknob, or a man with a hosepipespraying the dusty street. At moments like that, when their shaking shoulders bumped and they tried so hard not to look at each other, when their laughter finally spurted out—at moments like that they were as close as they ever had been.
    Things work themselves out if you leave them alone
; that’s what their father always said. A thing that drove their mother mad, and madder still when he was proved right. A man settling a forgotten bill just before the rent was due, a neighbour gifting them with a pair of shoes her daughter had outgrown. She and Nan have found a way to go on, without ever saying, and it’s been so long now that Kez wonders sometimes if she only imagines the difference, though she has no idea why she’d do that. Surely it’s real, what you think and what you remember. Otherwise you’d be as scrambled as Aunt Peach was at the end, as loony as that professor of Clare’s, who told them in the first class to imagine a world where nothing that they thought they knew was true.
    Her prize ribbon turned up when they were going through the little room off the kitchen. Kez poked it deep into the fire, watched it twitch and shrivel. Such a silly thing to have been