It came as a complete shock to me when I heard that my eldest sister Marie had died in a kite flying accident. Even more so because I didn’t know I had a sister in the first place. But there she is, in old family photos –trips to Yosemite, backyard barbeques, a strange shot of my dad pissing on Gene Kelly’s gravestone as we all looked on in embarrassment, et cetera. My mother is pointing at a frizzy-haired girl who’s beaming with a hearty, gap-toothed smile. “That’s Marie, right there,” my mom says longingly. In one photo Marie has an arm draped around my shoulders in a gamely way, and I am shrinking into myself, as if I thought she was a leper. I must have been only six or seven in all the photos featuring Marie.

I had thought myself to be an only child up until this point. I can vaguely remember Marie’s presence, like a dream you can only recall in fleeting details. Perhaps I had thought of her as a close cousin, or some stray my parents had picked up and decided to feed on regular intervals (they were big hippies, and they adopted random animals that would crawl into our yard, even sloths). Whatever it was, I had never given myself reason to think of Marie; who she was, where she went, et cetera.

Apparently, Marie was shipped off to Canada because, you see, se wasn’t actually my sister. She was the illegitimate child spawned from a one-time tryst my mother had with a Canadian secret agent. He later turned out to be an actor playing a secret agent in several episodes of Degrassi. And, years later, he sent a letter confessing that he was a Russian secret agent who was infiltrating Canadian soil by disguising as a Canadian actor portraying a Canadian spy on Degrassi. Whatever the case is, my father found out and could not bear to be around Marie; who had become a constant reminder of how he, the only door-to-door Nutella salesman in America, had lost out to an international agent.

Off to Canada Marie went, and now she is back in our lives. Or more accurately, my life; her only son, Newton, is now under my custody. Initially, I said Wait a minute, how in the hell is this legal? My mother’s reply: well, they’re Canadians. In retrospect, this was a pretty shitty, non-sense answer. But I ate it up, and there I was at the airport, waving a sign that read “NEWTON” in big, red, chicken-scratch letters. To make my sign seem more enticing, I also added “I have candy” and “just get in the damn car, you crybaby.”

It only kinda worked, because it attracted this pudgy little boy who looked about 6 or 7. The bad part was, he didn’t really approach me, instead, he was droning around- back and forth- looking at me from the corner of his eye. Finally, I accosted him and said, “Are you Newton?” He looked up cautiously and offered a wavering “yes,” as if I had he had committed an offense, and I was here to dole out punishment.

With little knowledge of what we’d do next, I decided we would catch some dinner at the terminal’s McDonald’s. I was in a subdued state of mind, so I figured I’d grab a Manhattan from the nearby bar to accompany my Quarter Pounder. Newton ate his chicken nuggets glumly, as if the act of eating was a remedial task—like filing papers, or getting the mail. To brighten things up, I picked him off his seat and, amid his objections, I tossed him head-first into the ballpen. His emerged from the sea of colorful balls, like the telescope on a submarine rising from the waters. He shot a glance of quiet consternation at me. I felt uncomfortable all of a sudden, and I went back to my seat and continued on my meal of liquor and hamburgers.