Sadhana raised her hand to speak. “I’ve been keeping a diary for a long time,” she said. “It helps.”
“Good.” Melinda was encouraging. “It’s a safe place to be honest with yourself, isn’t it?” Sadhana agreed.
I put my hand up.
“Yes, Beena?”
“Well, here’s my sister, who has been pouring her heart out to diaries almost daily for, what, ten years? Eleven?” I looked to Sadhana for confirmation and she nodded. “Okay, eleven years, and she is not one bit better because of them.”
“I’m not suggesting a diary is going to make anyone better — ”
“In fact, eleven years is about how long she has had this disease. What do you make of that? Coincidence?”
Discomfort settled over the group like a wool blanket, and Quinn was fairly writhing.
“I think it would make sense if the events precipitating Sadhana’s illness might also have sparked other changes in her life. Including the need to start keeping a journal.”
Bella, another one of the starving girls, chimed in. “Yeah, maybe she didn’t have anyone she could confide in.”
Until she spoke, and I heard the rest of the group’s murmured agreement, I hadn’t realized how very thoroughly I was disliked.
Another family in the group, the Pearsons, ended up talking about Christmas a lot because their extended family didn’t get along and the holidays always seemed to bring them to a crisis point, like Mrs. Pearson’s binge-drinking of special eggnog, which led to dish smashing or Fiona Pearson’s cutting (wilful but cautious, with a butter knife) or little Angie Pearson’s beheading of all her plastic dolls, in alphabetical order according to first name. How Mr. Pearson escaped this misery and mania was unclear, though he seemed as wretched as the rest of them in his wrinkled polo shirt, the kind of shirt that shouldn’t even be able to wrinkle, as he sat in a red plastic chair alongside them, talking about his feelings and trying to describe his regret about the Christmas Eve argument that led to the destruction of his mother’s heirloom crystal gravy boat without resorting to blaming words. This led Melinda to ask us about our family Christmases, which led me into another session of involuntary eye-rolling.
“I’m sorry,” I said, when Sadhana pointed it out again. “But what makes you assume we even celebrate Christmas?” I was fairly sure my sister saw someone else as part of her regular therapy; Melinda knew her only from these family sessions.
Sadhana broke in as Melinda started to look worried, assuring her we had always celebrated it, in spite of not being Christian. “Our mother had a universalist kind of spirit,” said Sadhana. “We celebrated the solstice, the birth of Christ, the hunt, the harvest, Saturnalia, what have you.”
“We have the best Christmases,” said Quinn. “We still do.”
It was true. When Sadhana and I were little, our main celebration with Mama was something of an amalgam of Indian, pagan, and Christian traditions. We even had a special day picked out for it: December seventh, a kind of midpoint between Christmas and when Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, tended to fall.
The Christmases Quinn was remembering were the ones when we baked frozen tourtière and opened presents stacked beneath a hideous gold-tinselled tree we had sworn to use forever, after Quinn picked it out at the drugstore, calling it the “beautiful fairy tree.” Late on Christmas Eve night, we had a huge meal with three desserts, and at midnight we opened presents before going to bed with full stomachs. In the morning, Sadhana and I had mimosas with breakfast, and then we all went to a movie in the afternoon. Quinn had reported that his grade two classmates found this shocking. His teacher kept prompting him to remember when we went to church.
Quinn shared this memory with the group and Melinda asked him to describe to everyone what his favourite part of Christmas was.
“Umm,” he said, pushing his black hair off his forehead. He looked so strangely adult sitting apart from me on a black folding chair. “Being together. All the time.”
Being together had become less of a fond recollection and more of a hard consequence. Sadhana had come, and with the exception of a few brief excursions to Montreal, she had stayed. Like Deana, she returned every time with more and more belongings. Bags of her clothes flowed out of my closet. Her makeup littered the dresser and the shelf in the bathroom. The weather had turned cold, though there was no snow yet. She had been sleeping in my bed with me for more than five months.
Those days she used to get out of bed with the greatest reluctance, as if sleeping were her only pleasure in life. She’d stretch up first one long arm and then the other, like a zombie hearkening to its master, and then, after this showy concession to her alarm clock, she’d let them drop one by one before turning on her side, nuzzling and shrugging her shoulder against the sheet as though tucking herself back in under sleep itself. I took it as a good sign, that she had at least reached a point where she could sleep comfortably, that her body could still give her some satisfaction.
“I need to know you’re up before I go in to work,” I said. It was another Saturday shift at the law office, a month after Andrew and I had broken up. We had mutually given up on each other after he acknowledged he was sick of the situation with my sister and I admitted it had no foreseeable end date. But a partner at the firm had taken a particular liking to my style of drafting correspondence, and I had reacted by taking every opportunity to work weekends with him, showing up in the nicest outfits I could manage. It was probably nothing, yet still nice to have something to think about other than the two people who depended on me for every little thing.
“I’m up.” She spoke these words into the pillow.
“I don’t want Quinn to get his own breakfast.”
“So you feed him.”
“I’m late.”
“You should wake up earlier. This always happens, and you always get mad.”
By the time I left, Quinn was eating cereal in the kitchen alone, asking me in a stage whisper what Sadhana should eat when she got up.
And then she was better. One week, we weighed her, and she was only a little light, and she was still eating. The next week, she was heavier and cheerier. She packed up her clothes, and before we even realized what was happening, she left. Quinn missed her, but it was manageable. It was calm.
We didn’t know how, or why, but mostly it went away. Her illness, or her sadness, if they were in fact different, seemed to dissolve into the other elements of her life, where they were absorbed or transformed.
Quinn and I visited her often in Montreal. She was acting and teaching workshops and helping run the box office of one of the larger theatre companies. When she was low on cash, she waitressed at a couple of upscale restaurants on the Plateau. We went to see all her shows, sometimes more than once.
I made a life, friends. Nothing that could approach the all-consuming intimacy of what I had had with Sadhana, but it was better that way. Quinn kept up in school, almost without trying, it seemed. I had to work to find out what he needed, and it was a challenge to challenge him. Finally, an offhand remark about hockey fuelled an idea about what he might be missing, and with Sadhana’s help I encouraged him to join a league geared towards kids who hadn’t started playing the country’s favourite pastime as wobbly-kneed toddlers. He had always been good on skates, right from our first winter in Ottawa when I took him down to the frozen canal. I walked him over to hockey practice and watched him learn to skate backwards faster than anyone else. It took longer, though, for the stick in his hands to look like it might belong there.
One night not long after he started playing, I came home and found him calmly going through my papers. He was twelve years old.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Looking for stuff about my dad.” He said this carelessly and without bitterness, as though his father was only a chum he hadn’t met yet.
“He’s not
your dad. Don’t even use the word.”
He didn’t turn from his task, but pushing one desk drawer closed, he moved on to the next. “You sound like Auntie S.”
“Well, maybe she’s right about this.”
He took all the file folders, the bills and the half-written stories and the newspaper clippings, and dumped them on the desk, spreading them with his hands like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
“Stop it.”
“No.”
I came up behind him and grabbed both his wrists, then held them together in my right fist. I pulled him away from the desk.
“Ow.”
“I don’t go through your stuff, do I?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” He sounded so angry. I had never seen this anger in him before.
“No, I don’t. And there’s nothing here.” I let go. “Everything I know, you know.”
“I don’t believe you.” He shook his wrists free. “You never talk about him.”
“That’s because there’s nothing to say.”
Whether or not he believed me, something in my manner made him let it go. It was three years before he mentioned his father to me again.
Quinn’s birthdays, our own birthdays — these were the markers of how far we had all come, how long it had been. There was a wave-pool birthday party, a bowling-alley birthday party, and a laser-tag birthday party, and then Quinn was in high school and parties were verboten, and I was allowed to bake a cake but nothing else. Every one of his birthdays brought a visit from Sadhana, and every year she was still fine. I didn’t know what Quinn wished for every year, but I was superstitious enough to start baking my own birthday cakes. We were not the kind of family that could squander wishes.
For his fifteenth birthday, Sadhana and I woke up before the sun and baked chocolate layers cut into the shape of a lightning bolt. While Sadhana finished putting on the yellow icing, I went upstairs with a glass of orange juice and shook Quinn awake. Between the floor and the desk I counted three empty cereal bowls.
“Mom,” said Quinn. “It’s Saturday.”
“So? You used to love getting up early on Saturday.”
Quinn rolled onto his stomach and pulled the sheet over his head. His voice was muffled. “That was for cartoons. I haven’t wanted to get up early on the weekend since I was ten years old.”
“We’re going to celebrate your birthday at the actual time you were born.” There had been that whole, long night of labouring alone before the morning came, with Quinn.
After thin slices of cake, we went around the corner to Ned’s, the diner we visited so often that Ned had added “The Quinn” to the menu: an all-dressed sandwich on rye with pickles and spicy Hungarian salami. Of all meals, breakfast the way it was served in a diner bore the least connection to anything we had grown up eating. It was nourishment without attachment, merciful food. Every piece of bacon was like starting over as someone else. We ordered our eggs soft-boiled, and it was not hard to imagine that we were like any ordinary family eating together in a restaurant, dipping toast triangles into yolks with calm enjoyment instead of pretending not to watch each other with the strained truce of animals around a watering hole.
We all held out our mugs for coffee refills as Ned passed by. Quinn paused in his routine of pouring in six packages of sugar. “Do you suppose,” he said, “my father thinks about me on my birthday?”
Sadhana looked to me to respond, and for all her misery, I had rarely seen her appear so openly sorrowful.
“He doesn’t know when your birthday is, Quinn,” I said. “Unless he made some special, secret effort to find out from somebody.”
Sadhana said, “He probably thinks about you a lot, all the time.” Then she caught my warning look, which must have been mixed with surprise. This was a new tack for my sister when talking about Ravi. She amended. “Maybe even when he doesn’t realize he is.”
I tried to get us out of the house when Sadhana visited. Quinn spent so much time inside on his computer or doing homework. After breakfast we rambled downtown to the Parliament Buildings. We stopped at the Centennial Flame, flicking in pennies for wishes, and watched as a small group of protestors mustered on the lawn, their signs demanding BETTER PENSIONS FOR VETERANS! Leaving them, we strolled around the back of the imposing buildings, taking in the cat sanctuary and the statues of queens and former prime ministers. We were surprised to find a gazebo behind the Centre Block, and Sadhana got up and danced for us before pulling Quinn up alongside her to try teaching him how to pirouette.
When Quinn had resisted long enough that Sadhana finally gave up, we walked down to the fence and looked out over the escarpment to the Ottawa River.
“It’s beautiful here,” said Sadhana.
“Montreal is beautiful,” said Quinn. He was always loyal.
Once we had finished our circuit and had come out on the other side of the Parliament Buildings, Quinn begged to be allowed to run ahead to the mall, where we had told him he could pick out a new video game. “I’ll meet you there, and you guys can keep strolling.”
“Sure,” I said, and he hurried off. Sadhana smiled at me as the sun came out, and we let it warm our hands and faces as we passed the War Memorial and the Rideau locks and the great clean, landscaped centre of the city. It was early November, but the little snow that there was hadn’t stayed, and downtown was filling up. Everyone we noticed seemed to have the same grateful, reckless look of wonder at a beautiful Canadian Saturday as we headed into the winter.
On the streets of Montreal, people stared at each other. In Ottawa, they looked away. My sister liked this. “Except that when people look at you in Montreal, it makes it okay to look at them.”
“True.” We had already been staring a little too much for other people’s comfort.
As we approached the mall, Sadhana said, “He’s not going to let it go, you know. Asking about his father.”
I said nothing.
“Maybe we should all go back to therapy together so you can figure out how to talk to him about it.”
“You’re kidding.” I looked up at her. “I thought we decided therapy was a disaster.”
“No, you did, Beena. You did. That’s so typical.” She sounded peeved. “But you know, I’ve been back to see a therapist once or twice,” she said. “Alone, I mean. The first time, when it started happening again.”
I didn’t need to ask what she meant. In spite of the sun, I felt cold. “When?”
“A couple of years ago now. When I was training for the marathon. But it’s fine.”
I remembered now that she had not run in the race, citing some kind of minor ankle injury. I could not focus on what she was saying about Quinn, for I was panicked that her illness had resurfaced and I had not known.
“Fine?” I said.
Sadhana touched my arm. “This is a good thing. It started, and I stopped it, and you didn’t even have to know.”
Sadhana was right — he didn’t let it go. It came up again during a hockey game. I was sitting in the stands and enjoying the crispness of cold air inside and the makings of a hundred Slush Puppies scraped up by hockey skates. I had a hot dog from the canteen. Quinn had played all through his gangly phase, and though he still spent hours learning programming languages on his computer, he was showing an interest in getting stronger and being competitive. He said I ought to come see.
“The games are getting a lot more interesting,” he had said, shouldering the huge hockey bag it had taken me both hands to shove out of the middle of the kitchen where he’d left it. “I think you’ll enjoy it if you come.” I promised I would. I thought that this was sometimes why people had children, to send a little part of themselves out into places they wouldn’t ordinarily go. Like casting a line. A new trajectory.
Quinn scored a goal with two minutes to go, and I jumped to my feet with the other home-team fans, spill
ing crumbs down to the cement floor. The feeling of being one with the crowd was electric, something I hadn’t felt in years. I hoped someone would start the wave.
I sat back down. A man next to me said, “That your boy?” Quinn was the only brown kid on the team.
“That’s him.”
“He’s coming along well,” he said. “A real sniper.”
I hoped that was a good thing. “I’m glad,” I said. “He practices a lot. I’d hate for it to be for nothing.”
The man had a close-cropped beard and a navy wool coat. He said, “If you keep coming, you’ll find you get into it.” He looked down at the space between us on the bench, where I had laid my gloves as I ate my hot dog. I wondered if he spoke that way because I was a woman, until I realized that he must come to all the games and knew I didn’t. Although I had, at the beginning. I wasn’t sure when it had gotten away from me.
“I’m going to try,” I said.
On the ice we heard a pounding and a slamming of boards. Shouts and a whistle. People were booing before I realized it was Quinn.
“That’s a penalty!” called out the man next to me. Other people were yelling. To me he said, “Go. It’s all right.”
I ran down the steps. Quinn had already skated off to the bench. He’d taken a hard hit into the glass. With one hand, he held an ice pack up to the side of his jaw.
“Quinn,” I said. In case moms didn’t do this, I tried for discretion. But everyone was watching the game. Thirty seconds left on the clock. Our team winning but out for revenge.
Shifting in his seat, Quinn turned to me. There would be a black eye, some swelling. His nose was fine, thank god. Through a mouthful of blood, he said, “I want to meet my father.” Then he leaned over and spat on the ground.
The last time I saw my sister alive, she was standing in my front hallway in her grey wool coat, calling me an idiot.
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