Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “Mom,” says Quinn, calling out. “Look at this. It was on the floor.”

  There is an urgent appeal in his voice, and I am at his side in a moment. The fear in my chest tells me he has stumbled upon something related to Ravi. I know I ought to have told him I saw his father on television, but I can hardly bear to face it. Guilt bruises into dread with the slightest touch.

  “What is it?”

  He hands it to me with the printed side up, an ATM withdrawal slip dating from the last week of November. “The other side,” says Quinn.

  On the reverse is scrawled a list in my sister’s handwriting: bread, bananas, tomatoes, penne, garlic, white pepper. Each word has a line through it. A grocery list. The square of paper has a slight sheen, worn grey along the barest crease lines. I rub my thumb over the words before passing it back.

  “I found her planner, too, just now,” I say. “It was under the bookcase.”

  Quinn stands with the corner of the grocery list pressed between his finger and thumb, like a penalty card about to be raised aloft. “Did you see it?” he says. “Did you look at the date?”

  “Yes.” I think for a minute, but it is Quinn’s face that makes me realize, the way the bottom of his mouth is scrunching up as it would when he was little and about to cry.

  “Oh,” I say. The end of November, the last days of my sister’s life. Probably one of the last shopping trips she made, if not the last. In the same instant, I begin to fear the planner I’m clutching, as though it holds an image of Sadhana’s final moments, a series of recordings, like the black box of an airplane. Even just the first blank page will be horrible. If I could throw it out of reach without alarming Quinn, I would.

  “So she was eating,” says Quinn.

  “Maybe.” I sit down on one of the wooden kitchen chairs, put the planner down on the table. I let out my breath. “Maybe not. Remember how she used to cook for us. Even through the bad spells. Maybe even more during the bad spells.”

  “But we weren’t here. This wasn’t for our benefit.”

  “It could have been for somebody else’s benefit.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know. Anyone. Other people who knew enough to be concerned.”

  Quinn turns back to packing the large pots and pans, and I can see he doesn’t believe me. He has persistent doubts about whether or not Sadhana used to hide things from us, and I suspect him of having rewritten things in such a way that it was always me, doing my best not to see or know. He thinks that she talked to me in a way that she didn’t talk to him, that I knew all her secrets.

  “But if she was eating,” Quinn says, turning back to me after wedging a handful of large cooking utensils around the edge of a stockpot. “That’s what this list could mean.”

  “What?” I say. “It’s a list. It’s a piece of paper.”

  But it’s more than that. It means that on November twenty-­seventh, at three thirty-seven in the afternoon, my sister was still alive. When they found her body, it had been too long, they couldn’t narrow it down beyond a stretch of days. In this I had failed her along with all her friends — none of us inclined to worry, or to worry, at any rate, about the right thing. For eleven days I thought she was reading my number on the call display and choosing not to answer. I put my elbow on the table, forehead pressing into my palm. Looking into my lap, I see streaks of dust covering my jeans.

  Quinn says, “It shows that maybe there wasn’t anything we didn’t know.”

  I raise my head and see him looking at me, leaning forward across the box of pots, as earnest as I have ever seen him. He means that this time, maybe, she wasn’t sick. That it wasn’t anything we could have prevented or foreseen. I feel a tingling of hope.

  “Anorexia weakens the heart,” I say. “And she had it for a long time, since even before you were born. It doesn’t mean there was a relapse.” We knew all this before, the medical examiner had said as much, but I had not thought of it with any conviction, and, it seems, neither had Quinn. There was always a relapse. There had always been one.

  “Maybe it just happened,” says Quinn.

  “Maybe.”

  We look at each other as the setting sun spills a reddish pool of light into the darkening kitchen.

  “You know, it does feel different,” he says, looking around. “Smaller.”

  When I get back, Uncle is still awake, sitting at the kitchen table over a crossword puzzle, an activity I find oddly benign for the time of night. Even the silver mechanical pencil he is holding strikes me as strange. Delicate.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Ah,” he says. “You’re back.” He pushes back his chair, picks up a mug from the table, and carries it to the sink. He has a slow, tired look. A thought occurs to me.

  “You weren’t waiting up?” It is almost one thirty in the morning. I sent Quinn home soon after dark, while I kept working, wrapping up the dishes and other breakables I didn’t quite trust him to pack. Working while I could, while it felt bearable. The planner I’d placed in my bag, shrinking from the moment I’d have to look at it. When I left, the bedroom was almost completely emptied. I’d only stopped because I’d run out of boxes. Then I walked, stepping out of line from the direct route between Sadhana’s and Uncle’s, veering first to St. Laurent, quiet on a Sunday night, and then over to the park, where I skirted the edges of a block before getting scared back to my senses by failing to notice a group of young men at a picnic table. I was nearly on top of them when first their eyes and then their faces emerged suddenly out of the darkness. Except for the tennis courts, the park was not lit up at night. I could not imagine why they were sitting there in silence, four or five of them together. One of them called out to me as I spun on my heel and walked away. “You just got here,” he said. “We won’t bite.”

  Now Uncle rubs his chin with the back of his wrist. He is wearing light green cotton pyjamas and his wool slippers. “No,” he says. “Not waiting. Not at first.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle. I should have called.”

  He just shakes his head, fingers smoothing down his moustache where it meets his beard. He doesn’t seem at all angry.

  “Since you’re up, may I ask you a question?” I lower my voice as I realize I have been getting louder. Everything can be heard, I remember, across the breadth of this apartment.

  “Yes, you may ask.”

  “Did you water the plants at Sadhana’s apartment? Have you been taking care of them?”

  Uncle nods. “Yes, I watered them from time to time.”

  “And the fridge. Did you empty it?”

  “I did.”

  “There was food in it?”

  “There was a great deal of food.” There is a deliberate patience in Uncle’s voice, whether because he is anxious to go to bed or because he expected me to ask this long ago, I can’t tell.

  There is no sign of Uncle when I get up in the morning, which likely means he is down in the shop. Quinn is still asleep as I make myself coffee, having developed a fondness for the squat red espresso maker in the spot that used to house a tiny filter machine. I am discovering that the apartment holds a number of these unexpected instances of luxury, fixtures geared mostly towards refining the everyday: microfibre towels, organic milk, a Waterpik toothbrush. I have Sadhana’s agenda with me and a resolve fuelled by a restless, anxious sleep. I dreamed mostly of Sadhana, and every time I awoke and turned over I saw Quinn snoring on his back, his allergies making him wheeze like an old man.

  Unzipping the planner, I hold it by its spine and shake it a few times above the table until some papers start drifting out. These I separate into piles: business cards, receipts, other miscellaneous scraps of paper, then add to these piles the neatly stacked items tucked into the pocket at the back. I begin to see how many of the receipts are of the most mundane variety — groceries, toiletries, bus tickets. It
dawns on me that Sadhana kept all her receipts, possibly for sorting later. As a self-employed artist, some of them might have been important for her taxes. And perhaps for her the groceries were not so mundane.

  The datebook itself is no less meticulous. Flipping to April, I see that every day has a list of appointments and things to do, catalogued in two adjacent columns. On the far side of every weekly two-page spread is a list of names, some of them crossed out with a single line. Maybe people she planned on calling. And periodically, in the upper right-hand corner of the box for each day, a number, gone over with a yellow highlighter, figures like 1560, 900, 1290, 2400.

  A truck starts backing up in the alley, its beeping like a horror alarm clock, and within a few minutes I hear the sounds of Quinn getting out of bed and moving around. Before I lose my nerve, I turn to the end of November. The last day with any amount of writing has only a partial to-do list and nothing crossed out, no number in the top corner. And so there is a date. November twenty-ninth, two days after the bank withdrawal slip with the grocery list. That would make it seven days before she was found, and only three days of unreturned calls. The remainder of our last fight calculated from the balance of my neglect.

  Flipping back to the beginning to get away from the date, I start to notice other patterns: people to call written in blue ink instead of black, appointments almost always checked off in red. Running my own life as I do, I am incapable of judging whether these are signs of a well-ordered mind and system or of a bare, stripped-down obsessiveness.

  Quinn shuffles into the kitchen with bare feet and mussed hair. “I smell coffee.” His cheeks look flushed, and fuller somehow, first thing in the morning. It’s as though a sweetness comes to him when he sleeps and clings to him after he gets up. I love him so much in these little-boy/old-man tired moments.

  I grab his arm and tug him over to me. “What do you think about these?” I ask him, tapping the daily numbers. He takes a look.

  “Calories.”

  I blink. He’s right. Boy genius. I close the agenda and zip it shut.

  “I’m having a shower,” I say.

  “Mmm.” Quinn stares at the agenda but doesn’t touch it. I see him moving in the direction of the fridge before I close the bathroom door.

  Under the jet of hot water, the three walls of the shower and its curtain fluttering in the steam feel like a pink-tiled time machine. So many times I’ve stood in this same spot, letting myself think the same things over and over until the thoughts themselves are no longer ideas but only a kind of mantra. When I was younger, I used to instruct myself to keep my eyes closed so the shampoo couldn’t trickle in. Later, after Mama’s accident, I brooded about how she used to stand in this shower, how she used to scrub it, how even Papa must have stood here, even though I could barely remember him. And even later, a kind of squeamish disgust, thinking of Uncle washing himself, the bodily journey of the green bar of soap. He always bought Irish Spring. Sadhana and I had a separate liquid soap we shared. Sadhana once told me, jokingly I think, that when she was trying to make herself vomit she just thought of Uncle naked. And then that, too, got added to the shower litany.

  When I get out of the bathroom, Quinn is gone. There is a note on the table: Be back later.

  At the beginning, it was like a curtain being pulled back. The heaviness we’d taken on under Deana’s supervision started to drop away from Sadhana’s hips like a melting candle. Sadhana ran and ran, and every day a little bit of her disappeared. As she lost the roundness of her face, her cheekbones came into view, and they were high and regal. Her arms became delicate and birdlike. She was coming out from under the cloak of her body, and I was jealous, so jealous I could barely look at her and her new, perfect self. I wanted her to show me how.

  “It takes discipline,” she said. “You probably don’t have it in you.”

  Sadhana could wear anything and be anything, the way she started looking. She plucked her eyebrows and painted her nails and on the outside started looking just like any other pretty girl. Wherever the rest of her had gone, the sad part, I didn’t care. I wanted to be like her and leave everything behind.

  “I guess now’s not the time, anyway,” she said, deliberating in front of the closet. She held up a shiny silver top and pressed her lips together. “Soon you’ll be as big as a house.”

  Sadhana’s prediction came true. My belly swelled and my hips widened. My breasts, which had always been big, became enormous. I wore looser clothes, but even my face seemed fatter. At night, I felt for my chin to make sure it was still there. And as I grew with the baby, my sister kept shrinking. Not just the flesh on her bones, which seemed to melt away, but the girl who used to laugh at my jokes, who would have fought for me, who still knew what it meant to be a friend.

  I had to stop going to school because I was starting to show. That was the unofficial rule at our school, so I wasn’t surprised when I was called to the principal’s office, where he kept his eyes glued to my opened file and suggested I’d be happier at home, where nobody could tease me. The administration actually seemed to fear that the very sight of a pregnant girl was enough to make other girls go and get themselves into trouble. Reproduction spreading faster than meningitis. As I stood in the basement hallway disgorging the contents of my locker into a plastic bag, I told people I was switching to the arts high school. But the truth emerged before the week was out, probably through the guidance counsellor’s daughter, who was in my homeroom. Sadhana said people had asked her if it was true and she had told them to screw off, which was more or less a confirmation.

  The third day at home by myself, I flopped onto the couch with my science textbook and longed for a television. I slapped my belly like a drum in time to a tune in my head. “Dum de dum de dum,” I sang aloud. There was nobody to hear me. I listened to the refrigerator humming and the muffled roar of buses two blocks away, and I let the textbook slip off the couch with a thud. Boredom mingled with relief.

  When the phone rang, I lunged at it, even though I could almost hear my sister’s voice in my head. It isn’t him.

  It was the school. Sadhana had fainted in math class.

  “Fainted? Is she on her way home now?” I asked. Once I’d had a terrible stomachache, and one of the secretaries had called me a taxi.

  “No.” The secretary hesitated, and in the pause I realized she knew who I was and why I wasn’t at school. I wondered how much our files might say about what we had been through. “We called an ambulance.”

  At the hospital, Uncle and I sat in a crowded hallway while an ER doctor explained anorexia.

  “She’s not eating?” said Uncle. He had driven us over in a state of apprehension that seemed to be giving way to anger. He had seemed reluctant to let me come along, as though he agreed with the school that I ought to be kept out of sight. “On purpose?”

  “She has been fasting, and possibly purging as well.”

  “She said that?” I asked. I tried to remember the last time I had actually seen her eat much of anything. “She’s been running a lot.” I felt an urge to defend her, though I wasn’t sure from what.

  “She was evasive,” said the doctor. He looked young, but no less authoritative for it. Uncle’s indignation had driven him to his feet, but the doctor made no move to get up. “However, her body is showing clear signs of starvation.”

  “This is crazy,” said Uncle. “She made herself sick. That’s what you’re telling me.”

  “Essentially, yes. I’m telling you she is a very sick little girl. This is a serious disease, Mr. Singh, and Sadhana has dangerously low vital signs. We’re going to treat her, but your niece is not going home with you today.”

  As the doctor kept talking, I could see it all happening. Sadhana going up to the blackboard, her head swimming even as her legs carried her to the front of the room. The horrible chalk in her hand. The pockets of dust in the guttered shelf of the blackboard
. Vision blurring, she would have stared at the quadratic equation and understood the blip of the line and how it would taper down to zero. And her collapse, her sudden crumpling, would have been so quick and silent as to seem almost like an apology.

  Nobody from our high school came to visit her. In a not very inventive piece of fiction, I told anyone who called that she was in the hospital being treated for headaches. A problem in her head — the barest kind of euphemism for mental illness. I only realized this after I had told the lie to four or five people, when it was too late to take it back.

  “She’s become very sensitive to sound and light,” I said into the phone. “She can’t have any visitors.”

  “Don’t you visit her?” That was her friend Priya.

  “Yes, but I don’t say anything.”

  Sadhana had not given approval for the story I was putting out, but she didn’t seem to object either. She lay scowling in her hospital bed, when she bothered to have an expression at all, refusing to acknowledge she was even sick. She made no comment on the feeding tube that went in her nose and snaked down to her stomach. Registering displeasure seemed to require too much energy, so she had begun resorting to a kind of shorthand — a dismissive wave administered in my direction whenever I said something to annoy her — while her face carried on as placid and remote as ever.

  I found I had little to say. The words that did come got choked in my throat. Blind. Negligent. Her beauty had become deathly, and I had not seen it until it was shown up by the tube taped to her cheek. It was as if my sister and I had both been playing the same game of pretend, caught up in the same skewed vision. I’m a fairy princess. As for Uncle and his failure, I felt rage. But then he could never be expected to really see either one of us.

  “I suppose it would be stupid to expect people to come visit when there isn’t anything wrong,” said Sadhana. “Wasting money on flowers.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was angry at Priya and Jennica, her supposed friends who had failed her in the same way I had. I hugged my round stomach in a doting way, happy I had something else to look at. To look forward to.