Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  Libby says, “You never know.” She sounds subdued, but she has a rueful smile. “Maybe not.”

  “Can I ask how it happened?” I ask. The Essaids in person are an even unlikelier group of fugitives than I could have imagined.

  “Like a dream that became strange,” says Bassam. “Like papers that turned into daggers.”

  The story of his threatened deportation is surprisingly banal once he explains it, having more to do with changing addresses and technical negligence than anything that seems to merit the punishment. “I failed to present myself at the correct time,” says Bassam. “I moved and didn’t get the letter until too late.”

  Marwo takes up her tea now that her hands are free. “But it is more complicated, too. They want to get rid of him especially. He organizes for the other Algerians trying to stay. He helps them how he can, and he does a good job with the forms and money and times and places. But for himself, it has not been so easy, even though he always does everything right. And now we wait. Wait for an appeal.”

  I can do nothing but nod. My contact with Sadhana’s friends has pushed me well beyond the bounds of my own introversion. Before carrying on with their story, Marwo offers her husband some of the tea, which he declines with a shake of his head.

  “How did you meet my sister?” I ask.

  “No Borders,” says Bassam.

  Marwo says, “It is a group she belonged to. They wanted to help us.”

  “I’m part of it now,” says Libby. “I joined after she died.”

  Marwo takes Libby into the warmth of her expression. “All of them helped us, but Sadhana especially. She said there was a man who helped bring us trouble. It was a man she didn’t like.”

  “Ravi,” I say. It is still almost unbelievable to me that Ravi had simply turned up on the wrong side of what my sister was working towards, and yet, I am hardly surprised.

  “Yes, Ravi Patel. The man who made speeches before we had to come to this church. The man who is still making speeches to turn the people against us and Father Cavanagh. A man who had hurt her family, too, she said.”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s right.”

  “But you’re safe now,” says Libby.

  Baby Léo pounds the table with his two soft, crooked fists. “We hope so,” says Bassam.

  “We pray to God,” says Marwo.

  On our way out, we pull the door shut behind us. Father Cavanagh meets us upstairs. A man and a woman have come in and kneel in separate pews. I see the glint of a rosary hanging down from the woman’s fingers. Libby and I follow the priest back to the front entrance, where we speak in a low whisper.

  “I think this is the most important thing I’ve done in my ministry,” says Father Cavanagh. “In my forty years of serving the Church.” Outside, the sun is sinking behind the mountain, and the colours from the stained glass pool at our feet. In the failing light I see that his eyes are shining. “They are truly children of God.”

  “But what if they didn’t believe?” I say. “In any religion?”

  Father Cavanagh just smiles. “My brethren have rarely been discouraged by the absence of faith in the practice of good works. It’s usually quite the opposite.”

  “You mean missionaries.”

  He spreads his hands with an apologetic air. “And so forth.”

  Libby reaches out and touches his elbow. “It is good work,” she says. “It’s wonderful. It’s good and brave and righteous.”

  “And so are you, my child.”

  She shakes her head, and the priest seems less startled than I am to see tears spilling out. “I’m not, Father,” she says. “I wish I was.”

  By the time we reach her car, Libby is back to normal. She jangles her keys, asking how she can help with Sadhana’s apartment.

  “I need more boxes before anything.” I want to keep her at my side, to coax her to explain her tears, to return to whatever it is she wants to tell me. “Do you think — would you have time to drive me?”

  Libby holds open the passenger door with easy gallantry. “Let’s go then,” she says.

  In the car, it takes only a question or two to throw wide the floodgates.

  “So how did you and Sadhana start spending time together? You said you met at the theatre.”

  Libby lets the fingers of her left hand curl out the rolled-down window, cupping the breeze. Though the back of the car is immaculate, the front seat is littered with newspapers, chocolate bar wrappers, and empty bottles of iced tea. There are even a few paperback books soiling between my feet and the rubber floor mat.

  “She was my first real friend in Montreal,” she says. “For a while I was raving about her to anyone who would listen. Well, mostly to my mum, back in Hearst.”

  She shares remembrances of my sister as we drive across the city, but though Libby is forthcoming, her stories have a narrative quality that casts Sadhana as a character I no longer recognize. There is Sadhana the gourmet, who had Libby over first for drinks, then sushi, then cassoulet, and later for dinners lasting late into the evening. There is Sadhana as comedienne, launching into a bumbling bit of comedy at the playground when Libby asked her as a favour to pick up Mouse — Sadhana pretending Libby’s daughter was too short to see until Mouse was jumping up and down and shrieking with a giggle fit that took hours to subside. And diva Sadhana, pleading for red licorice and a can of San Pellegrino when Libby visited her backstage during the intermission of one of her performances. The incidents themselves are plausible to a fault; I could have invented them or supplied my own, identical in nearly every respect. But the thing I realize as she goes on is that, for Libby, Sadhana is one and the same as the woman in the stories. Whereas I’ve always known that my sister existed apart from all her charming and destructive behaviours. All of that, the stuff people would remember, was just embellishment or disguise.

  Libby says, “We were friends. New friends, just a year or so, but very close in the last six months. Do you know what I mean?” She pushes up the sleeves of her loose cotton blouse. She seems to relish driving. “When you have a new friend, they’re almost dearer to you than an old one. There’s so much possibility in the air. No flaws.”

  I glance over, but she does not appear to be talking about me. Her eyes are on the road.

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  We pull into an alleyway behind a lamp store, where we find a heap of pristine cardboard boxes. Libby helps me pack the trunk with about a dozen, but when she pulls up to the curb in front of Sadhana’s apartment, she shrinks from getting out of the car.

  “Maybe I won’t come in,” she says, craning her neck to peer up at Sadhana’s windows. “Mouse will be finishing school soon, and I should go pick her up. I’ll swing by later and we can both help.” Popping the trunk, she waits in the car while I unload the boxes. Then her pale hand darts twice out the window in a fluttering wave as she drives away.

  While Libby is fetching her daughter, I make another pass at the apartment, filling up the new boxes and searching for the diary. The air is stale, so I prop open the kitchen window. I check my watch every few minutes, anticipating Libby’s return, but the afternoon is dragging. There is almost nowhere left to look, though there are still piles here and there of miscellaneous items or things to give away.

  On a hunch, aided in no small measure by the fact that they are the last untouched items in the apartment, I check the boxes in the closet marked Photos, and in the third, I find a pile of old journals. None of them, however, proves to be recent, and with an uneasy forbearance I can hardly believe, I seal them all into a new box without reading anything more than the dates at the top of the pages. Besides wanting to discover the truth of what happened in those last weeks — if she was sick or angry or both — I have no desire to relive the fights with Sadhana. I remember all too well the way that a single exchange could never be isolated but hearkened back i
rrevocably to other fights, old resentments spoken and unspoken. The deep trenches of our relationship that other people recognized only once they’d fallen in. It’s impossible to count how many friends and lovers we cost each other over the years, though I never stopped being sure that I had lost more.

  Moving into the kitchen with two of the boxes, I do a final inspection of the cupboards and find only a cast-iron skillet and a cheese grater. Although Quinn left his boxes untaped, he seems to have done a thorough job. There is a box waiting to be sealed shut that is full of cooking oils and spices and four Mason jars of rice and grains. With staples and dry goods that could last for months in her cupboard, it was always hard to take stock of how Sadhana was coping. But Uncle’s assurance that there was food in her fridge is a comfort to rely on, even if I still can’t find her diary.

  The buzzer startles me from my kitchen reverie, and though I press the button to let them up, the persistent silence from the stairs leads me down to the street, where Libby and a child who can only be Mouse are waiting by the car.

  Libby rests her hand on her fidgeting daughter’s shoulder. “Mouse, this is my friend Beena. Sadie’s sister.”

  “Hi,” I say. Mouse is huddled at her mother’s side and slinking behind her so that I can barely make out the little girl’s face beyond two pink patches of flushed cheeks popping in and out behind Libby’s hip.

  “Ice cream, we thought,” says Libby. “Do you mind?” Over her daughter’s head she adds in an undertone, “Mouse wouldn’t be much help in packing anyway.”

  So we walk to the other side of the park, listening to Mouse chatter on about some new kind of skipping game, suddenly voluble at the promise of a treat. Then, with two scoops of chocolate ice cream in an outsize waffle cone in hand, I reintroduce the subject of Sadhana.

  But this time, Libby balks at the idea of talking about my sister. “It’s still painful for me,” she says, her face getting tight. She is picking at her own cup of butterscotch ripple with a miniature spoon. “You don’t understand.”

  I press. “You seemed fine earlier, all those stories you were telling me.”

  Libby has another morsel of ice cream, turning over her pink plastic spoon to scrape the treat against her tongue. She blinks, and a lone tear runs down her cheek. She swallows and says, “Please. Don’t interrogate me.”

  But I am determined to pull it out of her, even as I dread what she has to tell me.

  “She wasn’t eating, is that it?” I grow cold, remembering what Libby said earlier about all the food Sadhana had prepared and taken over to the Essaids. The food in her fridge that Uncle mentioned might never have been for her at all.

  Libby doesn’t appear to hear me. She has her face turned away, brushing at her eyes with the cuff of one sleeve. Oblivious, Mouse puts down her emptied cone and announces she’s going to go play with a doggie. She stands up and points to a spot within our sightline where some other parents and kids are petting a leashed black lab puppy in the sand near the small children’s play structure.

  “Okay, honey,” says Libby.

  When her daughter is out of earshot, she says, crying openly now, “I loved Sadie. We loved each other.”

  My face crinkles in surprise. “You mentioned you were close.”

  “We were. We were together.”

  I take this in and find it is not unexpected. I only wonder that it did not occur to me earlier. In the ten years we’d lived apart, Sadhana had cultivated discretion nearly to a religion. I suppose we both had. There had been other women, I knew that much. Once my sister told me about a girl, a crush, and I said to her, “You’re just like Greta Garbo, aren’t you,” and she was mad at me, even though in my head it was a compliment. I knew she loved Garbo. She had a Ninotchka poster up in her living room, and Garbo had had affairs with both men and women. But Sadhana thought I meant she was just acting out. “This is my life, Bee,” she said. “I’m not playing.”

  “We’re all playing,” I remember answering. And again she was mad. But I didn’t mean play-acting, and I didn’t mean she didn’t love whom she loved. I just meant there was no way to tell the difference between what we were doing and what we should be doing. We all had an idea of who we were or wanted to be, and we could only be in the world in such a way that was an approximation of that ideal — in that sense, it was a game, and some of us were better at it than others. It was an attitude I was trying to adopt in order to stop taking life so seriously. But I thought it might be embarrassing to explain. Instead I said, “So tell me about her.”

  But the moment had sped by. Sadhana had decided I was squeamish or prejudiced, or she was punishing me for my breeziness by pretending she thought I was. And now it was just another thing I had done wrong.

  “Do you believe in heaven?” says Libby, abrupt.

  “I don’t know. Not really, I guess. Do you?”

  She shakes her head. “I have to. I don’t know what else to believe in instead.”

  Before I can think of how to respond, Mouse is back with us and anxious to leave. As we start walking south, Libby starts talking about the weather. “I was sure it was going to rain,” she says, wiping her eyes and looking around at the sky in all directions. Then, like Mouse, Libby has her eyes on the sidewalk, seemingly taking care not to step on the cracks. I want to ask her if that was it — if the fact she has just shared is what she has wanted to tell me this whole time. But I am afraid of pushing. Or of saying the wrong thing, the way I did with Sadhana.

  We end up walking down my old street, my feet leading me homewards, back in the direction of the bagel shop. Libby is weeping again, silently but intermittently now, pausing every once in a while to make a commonplace remark upon brickwork or graffiti, to which I respond with equal nonchalance. Mouse looks on, frightened but determined to carry on as if everything is normal, which perhaps it is. She has very pale skin, as white and translucent as a layer of onion, which looks even paler below her dark curls. With one hand she grips the side of Libby’s jacket, and with the other she worries the buttons on the smocking of her dress. When we reach the bagel shop, Quinn is just unlocking the door to the upstairs apartment.

  “Mom,” he says, with what seems like inordinate surprise. He pops the last bite of a bagel into his mouth.

  “This is my son,” I say, pulling him in step with us. Libby nods at him. “And this is Mouse.” He gives her a little wave.

  “Walk with us a while,” I say to him. “It’s too nice an evening to go in just yet.” The desperation I might have communicated with my eyes is thwarted when he won’t meet them with his own, but he seems to detect something in my voice. He hesitates just a moment before pocketing his key and falling in with us.

  “What’s up?”

  “Mummy gets sad,” says Mouse, with the air of someone repeating a familiar refrain.

  “Oh,” I say, alarmed, looking at Libby, but she appears not to have heard, ambling ahead to a bench to tie her shoelace. “Oh, I see.”

  “She gets jealous, too. But people don’t belong to each other,” Mouse says, chattering now. “People are always free. That’s why slavery is wrong.”

  “Did you ever hear about the Underground Railroad?” Quinn asks her.

  Mouse nods like a jack-in-the-box. “Yes. Our teacher read us Underground to Canada in my class at school, and we heard about all these slaves and what it was like for them and how much it cost to buy a slave and all about how to find the North Star.”

  “When I first heard about the Underground Railroad,” says Quinn, “I thought it meant a subway.”

  Mouse’s laugh is like her mother’s, long and loud.

  After we say goodnight to Mouse and Libby, Quinn accompanies me back to the apartment. He is still carrying a crumpled paper bag from the bagel shop, sesame seeds caught here and there on the front of his T-shirt. When I was growing up, the seeds got everywhere, the sesame bagel bein
g our shop’s foremost commodity. Seeds in the treads of our shoes, mashed into the rug, mixed up in a batch of laundry fresh out of the dryer. Sadhana once even claimed to find one up her nose.

  “Where were you before we ran into each other?”

  “Nowhere. Here. I went down for a snack after I got back from the library.” But his boots on the mat are encrusted with mud and the apartment is dark until I switch on the light. Before I reply I make sure there is enough of a pause to convey my dubiousness.

  “Thank you,” I say, “for the stroll.” With Quinn along, the walk had taken on a feeling of normality, a family outing rather than a dissipating crisis.

  “She seems like a sweet kid.” His way of telling me it wasn’t a personal favour. He turns his back on me and heads straight for the bathroom — another sign he’s just getting home. I sag onto the couch and reflect that wherever we are now, it isn’t better than where we were before. That new ease between us I’d thought I’d started noticing was either imagined or cancelled outright by asking him to meet Evan. The subject of his father is still a sore spot for Quinn. And a man around, any man it would seem, is enough to aggravate that wound.

  That Quinn’s fixation on his father was turning into a real problem was something that only Sadhana, in her typical, fearless way, had been willing to address. I would have put him off with more evasions, more refusals, and shameless, blubbering guilt if I had to. Indefinitely. But Sadhana seems to have been prepared to find a way to put all his questions to rest.

  Later, Uncle and Quinn drink tea in the kitchen. Quinn, studying for an exam, holds firm at the table, even when I come and join them. I try to enjoy the close quiet, but whenever I look up to see him biting his lip over his notes, I can think only of his father.

  Sadhana and I had our secrets, but they told on the body. Ravi escaped his past without a trace. Though he is a poorer man for his choices, I know that. He lost Quinn, years of Quinn that would have made him better, as they have made me. And I do not think he deserves Quinn’s forgiveness. He will never have mine. All he has coming to him is some bad luck. That would only be fair.