Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “My darling, what are you worried about? I can tell there’s something fretting you.”

  Sadhana looked at me, probably thinking I’d betrayed her, but I shook my head.

  My sister exhaled an emptying sigh as our mother’s slender fingers ran through her hair. Mama was stretched out on my sister’s bed, her tiny feet crossed at the ankles below her wide cotton pants. She was speaking softly, as though there were someone else asleep in the room with us she was afraid of waking. There was a pause so long that I could feel it like a belt starting to tighten around my waist, urging me to break it. But I could sense Mama’s will, too, a force stronger than my own impulses, compelling me to accept the taut silence as part of the tonic for my sister’s disquiet.

  “Sometimes,” said Sadhana, “I want to make sure the door is locked. And I forget if I’ve checked already.” I could tell from her voice that she was very close to tears. “And the same thing with the stove, when I go to make sure it’s off.”

  “Don’t you think you can trust me to take care of all those things?” said Mama. She had her head tilted to the side, the way she always did when she was trying to process new information. “Don’t you think that’s my job?”

  It was a moment between the two of them, and my role was to be invisible. To strive not to undo whatever magic Mama might be working.

  “It’s everybody’s job,” said Sadhana, “to keep us safe.”

  Our mother began to say something else, but Sadhana wept then, with her head pressed to Mama’s chest, and when I tried to share a smile with Mama over my sister’s silliness, my mother gave me a look that might have meant I wasn’t turning into the person she hoped I would be. I always faltered when Mama’s eyes were on me like that, the hungry flame of mild reproach catching in her irises. That she would always love and forgive us was as clear as the fact that we were bound to disappoint her again and again. The weight of her trust that I could be good would come over me like gravity’s spell on a returning astronaut. It burdened my very bones.

  From then on, Mama watched Sadhana the way she watched the balcony basil, the only one of our herbs in perpetual danger from the neighbour’s seemingly Italian cat. Though I rarely caught her looking at it, she always knew when it needed water, when it needed shade, when it had been bitten ragged and needed to come back inside. For all the living things in our house, Mama’s attention was the one and only sufficient condition for flourishing. Under Mama’s watch, Sadhana’s worries seemed to ebb away, as though they were jinxes or wishes that, once spoken, could only lose their power.

  The train is full, almost no empty seats. It seems that I was lucky to get tickets, booking only last night, just after supper. Quinn begged for the train, laying out argument after argument against the bus as he rushed through his meal, finishing two veggie burgers long before I’d even come to the end of my salad.

  “The bus smells,” he said, “for one. The bathroom is disgusting.” He was straddling his chair, his dark denim jeans making a V on the turquoise vinyl. A retro fifties kitchen set Uncle had brought over when he decided to invest in new furniture for our old apartment above the shop. Probably something Mama picked up at a garage sale. Everything in our house tying me to the past.

  “The bus is cheap,” I said. “And we’ll sit near the front, away from the bathroom.”

  “You can read on the train,” he said. “You get motion sickness on the bus.”

  “I’ll probably just sleep on the way there anyway, or look out the window.” Trying not to think about what lay ahead. I speared the last remaining slice of bocconcini, pushed it through the dark, glistening pools of balsamic dressing beaded into discrete droplets by the oil. Letting the smooth slide combat the trembling of my arm.

  “You can buy snacks in case we don’t get up early enough to have breakfast.” Quinn’s eyebrows flickered up in the deliberate expression of somebody who has just turned the corner in a debate. It was a sign of my inability to wake up early that the snacks were actually a valid selling point.

  I parried anyway. “If I want to pay a dollar fifty for bad coffee and an extra two bucks for a dry muffin. Which I can tell you right now, I don’t.”

  Quinn couldn’t offer much in the way of a defence of the food, but he could tell I was cracking. I almost always gave in, and though I tried not to show it, this time I’d been ready to opt for the train even before he started arguing. He was being playful, for the first time in a long time, and I could have let him go on and on. Shrugging over my plate, I hemmed with feigned indecision for another ten minutes, letting him work himself up to his drollest theatricalities, watching as he leapt to his feet to plead his case like an orator.

  Now, as we shuffle down the aisle behind brighter-eyed travellers, he is morning Quinn — gruff, not cranky, more high-functioning than I usually am at this hour. Whenever I’m up to see him like this, when I get a call from the law firm to come in early to start proofing briefs or feel motivated to make breakfast before he heads out to school, I always get a kick out of it. He seems like Quinn in a time machine: older, set in his ways, benignly fussy. Shades of Uncle. Slow-moving but unapologetic. Frank.

  “Have a seat, Mother,” he says to me now, rolling his eyes at my intense visual scouting for the best spot — somewhere strategic between bathroom and exit, equidistant between a couple of nervy babies. He ushers me into the window side of the nearest two seats together.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” he says. He settles into his seat with a heavy sigh and clamps on his headphones, folding his arms as his eyes close shut.

  We pull away from the station as the safety instructions and non-smoking announcements are read out in puzzlingly mechanized cadences, both official languages crackling over the loudspeaker. The snack cart is stuttering up the aisle with the light percussion of change clicking as quarters pile into palms, and I’m halfway through a watery coffee even before parting with my ticket. When I’m finished, I lean back my head and look out the window, where the city has disappeared into fields. It used to be a point of familial protocol that Quinn always got the window. Through a new gallantry or an assertion of maturity, he started giving it to me once he turned seventeen. Both our last two trips saw him sitting taut beside the aisle, held straight as a rod whether sleeping or reading, looking ready at any moment to lunge up to use the bathroom, grab some water, or do a head count of the pretty girls sitting alone.

  It was winter the last time we went to Montreal, the city tense in the grip of an unseasonable deep freeze, two weeks of minus thirty-five, the Christmas lights strung everywhere downtown like determined lifelines to a cheerier outlook. Uncle had called with the news about Sadhana. He said, “Your sister has passed away. You need to come.” He said almost nothing else, or nothing else I managed to take in. I hung up the phone with an overriding sense that there had been a mistake. I knew that she had been doing well for months.

  Quinn and I didn’t talk on the train that time, nor did we sleep. It felt strange to head straight to Uncle’s, and Quinn had to correct me when I gave Sadhana’s address to the taxi driver. When I went to pry open the car door to get out, I noticed my train ticket folded to an accordion, still gripped in my right palm. And now, grazing alongside the edge of this memory, I look down to see a wadded napkin tucked tightly into the same place. I reach over to the paper garbage bag hung under the window and open my fist to drop it in.

  The time before that was in the fall. Sadhana had called us to request a visit. Montreal trips to her apartment were almost always by appointment of this kind, though she often popped into Ottawa with no warning. But Quinn and I had seen her only three times that summer, which was well below par, so both of us were excited and pleased. The official pretext, a play being put on by a friend of hers at the Friday Night Café, a tiny theatre at McGill University. Fifty seats, more or less, of folding chairs. It was a play that Sadhana thought was important for Quinn
to see.

  “It’s called Art. It’ll be good for him, no matter what the production’s like. Very provocative dialogue.” Her voice clipped along in the precise way she had of describing artistic events, as informative and promotional as a fringe festival program. She was in good spirits, and she seemed healthy. A turquoise pendant adorned her breastbone, and she was wearing a cap-sleeved top that showed her arms. Her brown eyes were sparkling. “I love one-act plays.”

  “Are you saying this production is going to be bad?”

  “Of course not. This is Alex we’re talking about.”

  Alex could be anyone. I was positive she’d never dropped the name before. Most of Sadhana’s closest friends tended to be professionals in their artistic fields, not amateurs mounting plays with university students. This was an acquaintance upgraded to friendship for the purposes of this conversation only, to get us into town. I was sure of it.

  But he turned out to be more of a friend than I’d imagined, though I found it hard to navigate through the effusive warmth of theatre people, one that didn’t necessarily seem false to me, and maybe wasn’t, but which to an outsider’s eye seemed superfluous. When we visited Montreal, Sadhana was constantly running into people who upon interrogation turned out to be the vaguest of contacts. Someone she’d met once at a party. A friend of a dear friend of hers.

  But Alex she greeted warmly; they’d embraced.

  “Sadie,” he called her. Sadie was her pet name among her dance and theatre friends in Montreal. It had surprised me the first time I heard it, but the hardened vowel suited her. They kissed on both cheeks.

  “Al,” she said. “I can’t wait.” She introduced me and Quinn, her hand a light touch on my son’s arm, before leading us away to some seats in the second-last row. Quinn and I pored over our programs as my sister leaned forward and back, chatting with folks she knew, waving to a few others sitting on the other side.

  When the lights dimmed, she spun to face front, leaning over to whisper us a stern warning: “Cellphones off, duckies.”

  That set off an indignant Quinn, who reached into his jacket pocket to prove we’d done it without prompting, but Sadhana shook her head, index finger to her lips in a silent shush.

  After the play we went out for dinner near the university, where I watched Sadhana eat two slices of Blanche, the five-cheese pizza at Amelio’s. She’d picked up a bottle of wine on the way, and she filled both our glasses as she leaned towards Quinn, prompting him for his observations on the play.

  “I thought the guy who played Serge was a bit awkward,” he said.

  “Really? Did you think?”

  I knew she was testing him. The actor in question was the show’s clear weak link, visibly nervous though he’d tried to hide it, even build it into the character, but it didn’t quite work. He’d spent the better part of three scenes inspecting a large ring on his clenched left hand, bringing it up to his face as though breathing in the scent of an invisible plucked blossom.

  “I did,” he said, after a moment. “Yeah.”

  Sadhana nodded, satisfied. “And what about the set? Did you like it?”

  Quinn chewed, considering. “I guess it was . . . minimal? But I thought they used the stage well.”

  “Good direction, yes.” Sadhana sipped her drink, the two sterling silver rings on her right hand clinking against the stem of the glass. One many-petalled rose and one eternal lemniscate, a sideways figure eight flattened to her middle finger, made by an artisan friend of hers. She looked over at me. “Alex worked miracles with those kids. I dropped in on some of their earliest rehearsals.”

  I sat back, watching Sadhana animate the conversation, expounding in her desultory way to Quinn, drawing him out, taking obvious pleasure, as she always did, in his quick mind, his willingness to listen. She had never stopped trying to show him things, never seemed to doubt that there were still plenty of things she had left to teach him.

  Quinn is reading a trashy magazine that he found slipped into the seat pocket in front of him, behind the safety instructions. It looks well thumbed, as though it has made the rounds of the whole line, from Sydney to Prince Rupert, though this train runs only the same short route daily. I’m seized with longing for a book, bewildered that I didn’t pack one.

  “Interested?” asks Quinn, noticing my peering. He is holding out the magazine, nose wrinkling. It is a two-page spread of celebrity photos, of starlets caught out being human: picking their noses, scratching along the tight bands of their underwear. Criminally bad hair days.

  “No thanks,” I say, though if I were alone I would probably flip through. I sometimes have bizarre urges to prove myself to him, never knowing when one wrong move might lose his esteem. I remember Sadhana becoming steeped in judgement before she started high school, calling out Mama for never having gone to university and for believing in animal spirit guides.

  “I don’t believe in them exactly,” Mama had said. She was perched on the sofa, knitting. She never flinched from Sadhana’s attacks. “It’s just nicer to think they exist than that they don’t. Remember that thing with the grey cat last year?”

  There had been a cat that followed her home, nestling itself into our recycling bin to sleep, its nose bunged into an empty tin of tuna. There was a lightning storm that night, the whole courtyard lit up and booming with it. In the morning, we found the green bin melted, all the cardboard cartons burned to soot, and the cat circling the perimeter, yowling. Its tail fell off a few days later. When it stopped coming around, Mama said it had come to bring us a message and gone back to its own people. What message, though, was anybody’s guess. As Sadhana grew into her long legs and out of the fancy of Mama’s worldviews, this was the kind of vague claim she began to despise. And though Quinn lacks my sister’s sharp tongue, I can see his eye-rolling divisions between things, the implacable teenage discrimination between cool and uncool. I’m still hoping to make the cut.

  Quinn is shoving the magazine back where it came from, out of sight. “Maybe I can buy you a newspaper,” he says. “Would you like that?”

  “Sure, if you can find one.”

  When he bounds away, I find my eyes closing. I think about what Evan said about me needing a rest, wondering how many times we’ve sat in a mutual silence I’ve found comfortable or a lull of my own creation he’s merely endured. I wonder if I’ve been spooking him all along. Now and again it becomes clear that I’ve been relying on a mimicked peace of denial, letting my subconscious do the heavy lifting. The anxiety dreams I wake from daily, that I shake off with coffee and a paper run, a fast change of scenery: my sister always, turning away from me in blame. Her hand letting fall a piece of bread, her glare taking in a ringing phone, her black hair swinging loose to graze the stark rails of her collarbone. At first consciousness, I’m gripped with a sense of personal doom. Something that wants to linger, something gnawing. Whatever denial might be staving off, its ultimate gift seems to me to be mercy. Reprieve.

  We were strange little girls in our way. We had a hard time knowing where one of us left off and the other began. Mama said it was because of our shared birthday; we were almost like a special kind of twins. Sometimes Sadhana pointed to her cheek where she boasted of a brown freckle, but that was where mine lurked when it wasn’t swallowed by my dimple. And every summer we forgot who loved strawberries and who was allergic. Once, after watching Sadhana finish an intricate drawing of a horse, I called Mama over to show her what I could do, only to be surprised by the awkward, rolling sensation of the pencil between my fingers. Other times, we would try to play hide-and-seek, but one of us would forget to look and instead we would both hide. When we realized our mistake, we would call out for Mama to find us.

  “Why would I do that?” came her reply in her strong, clear voice. “I always know where both of you are, and you’re always right here in my heart.”

  Separately but together, we groaned and
pleaded, and within a minute Mama’s hands would be on us, one after the other, as if she really had known where we were the whole time.

  There wasn’t much room for hiding to begin with. Our apartment was tiny, a second-floor walk-up over the store. There was a kitchen, two bedrooms, a windowless bathroom, and a long narrow room that tended to be given over to the game of the moment. There were two balconies: one larger, back balcony facing onto a quiet stone courtyard, and a smaller one on the side, overlooking the alleyway. For hide-and-seek, we usually tried squeezing ourselves into a closet or scrambling under a bed, or, in one hilarious instance that we almost always tried to repeat, rolling ourselves into Mama’s yoga mats, with our heads and feet sticking out at either end.

  The bedroom I shared with my sister, first in one bed, then later in two, was painted cream with green trim. In the high heat of the summer, with the perpetual fire of the wood ovens in the shop below, the paint on the walls would start to bubble. But our room was our headquarters. We called it that. Headquarters, or HQ. I was two years older than Sadhana, but it never seemed that way. We liked the same games and amusements. We read detective stories and spied on people and met there to take stock of our findings. There was never anything interesting to report, though we still made note of four of the five Ws in pink scribblers: who, what, where, when. Why was the one usually left blank. We sought out murderers — or kidnappers, at the very least — with the cheerful bloodthirstiness peculiar to children. We ached to free someone from a cruel captor or summon the police to a crime in progress, one where we had already trapped the thief inside, face sweating beneath his ski mask with embarrassment at being shown up by a couple of plucky kids.