Fresh Kills

Any of the faces waiting in the St. George Ferry Terminal could have been Mimi; Robin had no photos for reference. They’d discovered each other’s existence only months before and had only corresponded by e-mail. She could narrow it down to what she knew about her cousin, which was basically that they were both forty-six, Ojibwe, had careers where they sat in front of computers all day long and children off at college. Robin was looking for a familiar face—round, a squat nose, dark or silver hair—but she hadn’t quite expected to see her honest-to-god doppelgänger waving with both hands, accompanied by her 300-pound husband, both wearing satin Jets jackets and sweatpants. Vic, the husband, had a shaved head and a pencil-thin goatee encircling a jolly smile. He enveloped Robin in a bear hug, and when he let go he grabbed her roller bag and said, “What’d I say, Mimi? It’s your freakin’ twin!”

“She is,” Mimi said, studying Robin’s face for a long moment. “I just got a chill!” They held onto one another while the commuters flowed past them, then followed Vic outside. Robin fished a cigarette out of her tote bag; the last time she’d had a chance to smoke was in the lounge at the airport where she caught her connection.

“Don’t tell me,” Mimi said with mock horror. “A smoker.”

“A pretty one like you?” Vic asked.

“Don’t you two start in on me,” Robin said.

In the parking lot, leaning against their white Cadillac, Vic and Mimi waited for Robin to finish her cigarette, both shaking their heads at the sight. They were joking but still accusing, so Robin took a long, last drag and tossed the rest.

That night, at Vic and Mimi’s townhouse, the three of them stayed up late drinking Sambuca and talking. Robin had initially declined the drink. “Come on, hon, it’ll help you sleep,” Vic said, and filled her tumbler to the brim. She accepted it just to be polite, and tried not to spill it on the shag rug. Everything in their living room was too big—the drinks, the overstuffed and mismatched furniture, the TV. There were mirrors on one wall to give the illusion of space, but all they reflected was stuff.

The Sambuca wasn’t to help her sleep—it was to get her talking. Mimi was eager to finally satisfy a lifelong curiosity; except for her mother, she had never met another Anishinaabe. “Do you speak the language?” Mimi asked. “I’ll go up to the home to see Ma and there are some days when that’s all she wants to speak.”

“Just a tiny bit,” Robin said. Although she audited and evaluated language classes in Minneapolis for the state, she’d never truly studied Anishinaabemowin, the language beaten out of Robin’s parents in the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. “Say, boozhoo.”

Mimi tried it: “Boozhoo.”

“Gesundheit,” Vic said, and the two of them giggled.

“Robin, dear, was that right? See, to me, it sounds almost like bonjour.”

“Hey, I don’t know if that’s right, but you sound like a freakin’ Indian!” Vic said.

“Yeah, there’s probably a little French in there,” Robin said. She was the authority among them, though she was already a quarter of the way through all the words she knew. For the sake of the weekend, though, she would let them believe whatever they wanted about her.

Victor leaned forward to tell a grim secret: “See, hon, we always knew there was something, you know, different about Mimi.”

“Don’t make it sound like I’m retarded or something,” Mimi said. “I knew I was Indian.”

“We knew that,” he continued slowly. Robin was feeling the first warmth from her drink blossom in her chest. “But there was something else, you know, how do you call it? Inexplicable. Something we couldn’t quite put our fingers on.”

“I get these feelings sometimes,” Mimi said. “All...