Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  The more I think about this, what Ravi has coming to him, the truer it seems to be, until it is like a sudden doctrine animating me, and I know from the force and simplicity of it that it has to be a kind of lie. And just as clearly I feel as though I know what must have passed between him and Sadhana. The offer she would have made him, given his involvement in politics, to either acknowledge his son willingly or face public exposure.

  Uncle goes to bed, then Quinn, and I bring the computer to the table and turn it on. I navigate to the website for Quebec First, then to Ravi’s profile, and scroll down to the contact information. I am signing into my email account when my cellphone buzzes.

  Evan’s voice sounds warm with whisky. “What’s up, buttercup?”

  I talk to him about the work I’ve done in Sadhana’s apartment, about Libby and her revelation. “So my sister had a secret relationship, too,” I tell him. “Or she didn’t get around to telling me. I think you’d like Libby.” Especially if he has a thing for damsels in distress. News about Ravi doesn’t make the cut, in case Quinn is awake and listening. And because of what I’m thinking of doing.

  “What about coming home?”

  “Soon enough,” I say. We both say goodnight before hanging up.

  Ravi, I write. This is Beena. We need to talk about some things. Tell me when we can meet. I have a reporter asking me a lot of questions and I’m not sure what to tell her. Does your wife know you have a son? Then, before I can change my mind, I hit Send.

  The response is almost immediate. Ten minutes later his message pops up: Don’t say anything. I can meet you six days from now, next Thursday night. Do you know a restaurant called Bombay Palace? 8 p.m.

  And just like that, the real Ravi, the one who is more than a poster or a memory, is back.

  Sadhana threw a party when she moved into her new place. She’d stayed on alone for another year and a half at the St. Marc Street apartment we shared after high school, putting out the call to anyone and everyone that she wanted a place in Mile End. She missed the neighbourhood, the comforting grid of the streets where we grew up, the routes she used to jog every morning before we moved downtown. In her mind was the idea of digging in her heels, making over an empty space into a home. Finally, an acquaintance from a dance class turned his lease over to her when he decided to move to New York City. At that point, according to Sadhana, she’d already looked at more than twenty-five different apartments.

  She was excited. When we spoke on the phone, I could hear anticipation as well as relief in her voice, the veiled elation that she finally had a place all her own. Somewhere new. The place we’d shared had never really lost its flophouse feel, the haphazard aesthetic of two young women and a little boy sharing three small rooms. The rock posters and gritty floors, curtains slung for walls, a musty smell that never dissipated.

  She sent us an invitation in the mail, on stiff, cream-coloured cardstock, neatly handwritten in the feathery script she could only produce with her fountain pen. Turquoise ink. The envelope was addressed to Quinn. Sadhana liked the idea of sending mail to kids. It read, Your presence is requested in the warming of my new home. Bring someone or something you love.

  She’d waited until she was settled, until she’d spent four weekends in a row painting and a good chunk of two paycheques on bar glasses and a set of large platters. She was still low on furniture, but in a way that was better for a party with a lot of traffic. When I arrived from the bus station with Quinn in tow, hauling backpacks stuffed with sleeping bags, Sadhana was making hors d’oeuvres. There was Bebel Gilberto on the CD player, mulled wine on the stove. A huge impressionistic canvas of a nude woman, painted in hues of green and yellow and reminiscent of Modigliani, hung on the wall in the living room. I recognized almost nothing from when we’d lived together.

  She threw our coats on her bed, showed me a spot in her closet where we could stash our things, then set us to work on a food-assembly line at the small kitchen table. A rectangular table that could comfortably seat ten was draped with a white cloth and pushed up against the wall of the dining room, edged with a string of tiny white Christmas lights. I skewered morsels of cantaloupe and prosciutto while Sadhana spread toasted slices of baguette with an artichoke purée. She pushed them across the table to Quinn, who crumbled goat cheese over them like clumping snow. Sadhana praised the way he added the garnish of chopped parsley.

  “Nimble hands you’ve got there, Q,” she said. She began plucking the hors d’oeuvres off the cutting boards, sliding them into symmetrical formations on a couple of white platters. “Child labour is where it’s at, Bee.”

  “Why do you think I had one?” I said. Quinn tried to shoot me a dirty look but couldn’t quite pull it off. His dark eyebrows dipped and knitted behind his glasses, his expression more puzzled than annoyed. He was ten, skinny as a rake, obsessed with spiders and comic books. I grabbed his wrists, then pulled back until I was tugging on the ends of his small fingers. “I had some very delicate needlepoint projects I needed to get done.”

  “Mom,” said Quinn. He snatched his hands away.

  People began showing up at dusk, which came early as it was the tail end of winter, the kind of season that unfurls along a slow spool, every thaw hiding yet another snowfall behind it. Through the closed windows came the sounds of dripping and thumps, ice sludging itself off a roof or balcony and crashing to the ground below. Inside, Sadhana turned up the heat as the windows beaded with condensation. As the apartment filled up, people began shedding layers of clothing. Quinn and I had been living in Ottawa for only eighteen months, but Sadhana’s world had expanded like a budding universe.

  I went to add my sweater to the pile in Sadhana’s bedroom. Standing by her dresser was a man slipping out of a dark blue pea coat, peering at the framed photographs propped in front of the mirror. Observing me, he said, “You’re the sister.”

  “I am.”

  “Younger or older?” His head was cocked to the side, his dark curls long enough to flop loosely off his forehead. He was wearing a peach-coloured shirt with a collar, a brown cardigan, wire-rimmed glasses. A stubbly beard over a weak chin. He looked to be in his early thirties. I tossed my sweater into a corner.

  “Older.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  “Thanks.” At twenty-six, it was hard to say whether being judged younger was a compliment. It was Sadhana’s confidence and polish, her Montreal stylishness, that gave her an edge. I had the scrubbed face and comfort clothes I’d favoured since pregnancy, round cheeks that looked almost plump next to Sadhana’s leanness. We had some features in common — our mother’s strong nose, something about our eyes when we smiled — but overall we did not look much alike. I looked past the man into the mirror, wondering if I looked as childish as I felt. My straight dark hair was parted in the middle, as it had been since I was a little girl. I pushed it behind my ears and felt a trace of sweat there with my fingertips.

  “Sorry. I suppose it’s considered indelicate to comment upon a woman’s age.”

  “It’s fine.”

  There was a click and we both turned and saw Sadhana leaning her back to the closed door. Next to her was a blonde woman with dark eye makeup wearing a flapper-style dress. Each had her arm clinging around the other’s waist.

  “Someone in here,” said the man. He looked amused.

  Sadhana saw us, and her right hand travelled up to her loose chignon. She tugged at it until her hair fell free, past her shoulders. The blonde woman leaned her chin into the dip of Sadhana’s collarbone.

  “Pete,” said Sadhana., “Are you hitting on my sister?”

  “Trying,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Not coming along very well.”

  I stared at him.

  “We’re taking a break,” said Sadhana. She sighed and sank onto the bed, shoving the coats up and pulling her friend down in front of her. “It’s get
ting pretty hectic out there.” Leaning forward, she reached in a ballet stretch towards each of her toes in turn, her legs parted in a wide V with the blonde woman in the middle. “Why don’t you guys finish off the gin? I hid it under the sink.”

  I felt dismissed. Lingering with my hand on the dresser, my reflection inclining away from the scene, I waited for a minute to be introduced, but when Sadhana didn’t or wouldn’t look at me, I left. Pete closed the door behind us and followed me into the kitchen.

  “Your sister is rooting for me to get a girlfriend, I think.” He was crouching beside me to keep his voice at my ear as I opened the cupboard. I found the gin, stored between the dishwashing soap and the garbage bags, and straightened up.

  “Oh, yeah?” I was irritated by his easy familiarity with Sadhana, by her familiarity with all these strangers, most of whom had barely glanced at me. I edged my way to the fridge through a pack of young men dressed in white shirts and black ties. One of them, taller than the others, had long blond dreadlocks that fell below his waist. Elbowing one of his friends, he prodded him away from the swing of the fridge door and gave me a nod. I nodded back. A single magnet, for what looked like a video rental place, clung to the outside of the door. The inside was crammed with beer and other booze, a handful of lemons and limes, and an opened box of baking soda. I couldn’t help but notice there was no trace of food besides the leftovers from the hors d’oeuvres. I took a lime and a can of tonic water from the fridge door and moved out of the way. Over at the counter, I pushed aside a family of emptied beer bottles that chimed as they rattled against one another, their labels worried and peeled, hanging in strips. I mixed two generous drinks into coffee mugs, but Pete stiffened his before picking it up.

  “She keeps inviting me out. Sweet of her, really.”

  “How do you guys know each other?”

  “She took a philosophy class with me, a long time ago. Then I saw her in a play last year and hit on her shamelessly afterwards.”

  “She didn’t go for it?”

  “No. Professorial cachet is not what I was led to believe it was in grad school.”

  We hovered in the kitchen, where I was conscious of Sadhana’s absence from the party, listening with one ear in the hopes of hearing her call out to someone across the din of music and conversation. To our left, out on the balcony, smokers were huddled close to the doorway, stamping their feet and clutching drinks in gloved hands, their faces obscured by clouded exhalations of smoke and freezing breath. I wondered what time it was and whether Sadhana was worried about her neighbours complaining about the noise.

  “You’re distracted,” said Pete. He was looking glazed, emptying the remaining gin into his glass with a motion usually reserved for stubborn ketchup bottles.

  “A little. I just want to talk to my sister.” As I said it out loud, I realized how much I had missed her. And how little it appeared she had missed me.

  We leaned against the counter, and I kept my eyes on the men with the white shirts, who were still with us in the kitchen. I had come up with the idea that they were in a band together as the reason for their outfits. The blond man with the dreadlocks had rolled up his shirtsleeves, and I could see prominent veins in his forearms, longish fingernails on his right hand. A guitarist, maybe. I gave in to the swim of the alcohol in my head and pictured his tie slipping to the floor, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist. It was like trying to shake off a deep sleep, the effort to sidestep that longing. The same heavy pull on body and mind. And there was another, halting feeling there, like what I thought might be a lingering dread of bad dreams. I was drunk, obviously. When my eyes flew open, he was looking at me, chin raised, drink held steady at chest level. A friendly look.

  I turned around and put my mug down, nudging Pete, who was getting into Heidegger. “Back in a sec,” I said.

  As I passed through the hallway, I felt a hand on my arm.

  “Is that your kid?” A young woman with magenta hair pointed to the living room, where Quinn was wandering through the partygoers with a set of smelly markers and scraps of paper. She flashed me her forearm, which was streaked with purple. “Maybe you should take him home now.”

  Quinn was wary as I approached. He capped the marker he was holding out for someone to smell and thrust it behind his back.

  “That lady,” he said. He was blinking slowly, and I could tell he was both excited and overtired. “It was an accident. She fell on the marker herself.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” said Sadhana, appearing behind us. She was wearing a different outfit from before, a green linen dress and black ballet flats. Her bedroom door was closed, and I didn’t see her flapper friend around. “She’s at that stumbling stage where objects may be closer than they appear.”

  Sadhana put her hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “Come on, kid. Let’s get you somewhere where the adults will stop bothering you.” She steered him towards a door off the dining room that I had taken to be a closet, which opened to reveal a small area lined with empty shelves, just wide and deep enough for the air mattress she’d slipped inside. There was a small stack of blankets and a pillow just inside the door, as well as a flashlight and two Encyclopedia Brown books.

  Quinn flopped down on the mattress and bounced a bit. Over the music, I was sure I could hear the hiss of air escaping.

  “It’s a pantry,” Sadhana told me. “At least I think so. But I haven’t started using it yet. He’s not claustrophobic?”

  “No. Is it hereditary?” A shudder ran through me. But I was too big to be relegated to that narrow place. “Thanks.”

  “You hadn’t thought about what we were going to do with him once it was four in the morning and there were still people here?”

  I shook my head. The party rang around us, as though we were in a bell with Sadhana as the clapper, and whether it was the alcohol or just shyness, I felt pressed in and shaken, out of step. Compared to the monotony of my Ottawa apartment, the brightness of her world was jarring, and I felt like a swallow in the wrong sphere, blown off course from my usual haunts. Or like parties themselves were something that had flown south in a season too long ago to be recalled.

  With Quinn settled, Sadhana pulled me by the arm to the kitchen, where she searched the cupboards and eventually poured a glass of wine into a plastic cup. “A few more people than I thought,” she said, handing it to me. She bumped her hip up against mine. “Who do you want to meet?”

  I couldn’t help but look over at the band members, who were intent on a loud discussion I couldn’t follow about the drummer from the Grateful Dead and the one from Sly and the Family Stone. “It was the Black Panthers, dude,” said one. He had red high-top sneakers and a studied-seeming drawl.

  Sadhana tugged me out with her to the balcony. There was a manic verve to her as she introduced me to friend after friend. I stood dumbly at her side, a poor magician’s assistant, watching the eyes of her audience flicker over to me at the intro, then, after a moment, flicker back. There was no keeping the attention from Sadhana. And I was no better that night, for I wanted to talk to her and no one else.

  “I’m cold,” I said.

  She pulled on the sleeve of my cotton shirt, as though about to suggest that I put on a coat, but a girl popped out her head to coax Sadhana back inside, to help resolve a burning question on the chronology of abstract expressionist painters.

  “Pollock calls,” said my sister. “Be right back.”

  I felt awkward on the balcony, so I went inside and sat on one of several chairs set up along the wall near the bathroom. I hoped to catch sight of her friends in the knitting group whom I’d met before, as Sadhana had mentioned they were coming.

  Then Pete appeared and gestured with his drink towards the bathroom door. “It’s unoccupied at the moment,” he said. “Hope you haven’t been waiting this whole time.”

  I shook my head, and he sat down. I wa
s glad of the company. I was susceptible to the kind of mild solitude that deepened into its own dread entity, a psychic blot keeping others at bay.

  “You’re watching her,” he said. He was looking through the crowd, as I was, as Sadhana filled glasses and laughed and stopped to cast the deciding vote on what would go next in the CD player. Then she was in conversation with the flapper girl again, raising and lowering herself on her tiptoes as she spoke and listened in turn.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You worry.”

  “Yes.” I looked over at him, wondering how much he knew about Sadhana, of the myriad reasons for worry, or if the remark was just intuition or even small talk.

  He slid his hips forward in the chair until his head was level with my own, his legs sprawling out before us. “Hey, is that your son in the closet?” He was laughing now.

  “Yes. So?” I felt my cheeks flush and stepped across the room to the pantry door, which was an inch or two ajar. Peering in, I could see Quinn, fast asleep on his stomach in his usual pose: one leg drawn partway up, as though drowsiness had overcome some other sudden venture. His mouth was open as he slept, his hand still resting on the flashlight.

  “He’s fine,” I said, returning. “Asleep.”

  “Sure. Kids can sleep through anything.” He shook his head, patting the seat of the chair I’d been sitting on. “I didn’t mean anything. I like that you brought him along. He gave me the opportunity of proving I could tell the difference between the smell of artificial apple and artificial grape. He’s a cute kid.” Pete looked at me in a sidelong way, as though with intentions just as oblique of offering some inept praise for my genes.

  “He is, yeah.” When comments about Quinn came to me dressed as compliments, I felt a moral urge to deflect them. It was one thing when he was a toddler, busy and clever and calm, when I was worn out and liked to think I ought to be praised. But the bigger he got, the more convinced I became that I was merely lucky. If people wanted to congratulate me on my luck, then I could only agree with them.