Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  In the end, what we thought would take two trips can be managed in only one. My sister’s whole life in fifteen cubic feet. I scoop up the mail and drop it into my purse along with the keys.

  “One final cleaning and I’m done,” I say. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Is all this going to fit in your house?” says Uncle.

  “Uncle, I’m sorry. Did you want anything? I didn’t even think of it.”

  He shakes his head no, then mentions the larger left­over furniture. “Whatever we can’t sell, I’ll give away to my employees.”

  Evan calls to me from the driver’s seat, already buckled in. “Let’s go before I pass out.”

  “Why not let Quinn drive? He passed his test. He has his licence now.”

  Evan shakes his head no. The rattle seems to pass down his body and I see the muscles of his right leg jumping.

  “I wish I could offer,” I say. Neither Mama nor I ever learned how to drive.

  “It’s okay. Let’s just go.”

  Uncle seems ashamed of us both for letting a sick man drive, but he looks on with approval as Evan holds one hand up in a wave before driving away.

  The drive is uneventful. I sit squeezed in the middle as Quinn listens to his iPod and Evan drives one-handed with desperate concentration. When we arrive in Ottawa, Evan’s roommates meet us at my house and make short work of the unloading, while I go down to Ned’s Diner to pick up an order of six Quinn sandwich specials.

  When everything has been unloaded and his roommates have left, Evan accompanies me down to the basement to point out which boxes have gone where. He motions from the far corner near the water heater to the space below the stairs.

  “We started piling it there, and we tried to keep it in the back third of the room, but it didn’t quite work out. The last of it stops here.” He points to the area near the skates and toboggans.

  The place is a reliquary now, a storehouse filled nearly to the brim. If clutter really reflects a scattered mind, mine is beyond saving. Haphazard, clogged. Disturbingly fixated on the past.

  “There’s too much,” I say, sinking into one of Sadhana’s armchairs. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all this.”

  Evan leans onto a sturdy tower of boxes just higher than his waist. His fever seems to have broken, though I noticed him popping a couple of Tylenol mid-morning. He puts up his elbows. “Leave it here probably.” His tone is light.

  “Thank you again, by the way. And thank your roommates for me.”

  “Sure. It was no problem. It took less than an hour to unload it.”

  Evan cocks his head as we hear a footfall upstairs. Quinn out of his room, likely prowling for a snack while I’m still feeling full from lunch. “So is that it?” says Evan. “Are you finished?”

  “Finished?”

  “Yes, as in done. Packed up. Finished.”

  “Not quite. I have to make one more trip to the city to clean the apartment.”

  He drops one hand into his pocket. “And what was her girlfriend like?”

  “Nice. Interesting.”

  “Interesting how?”

  “Good question.” I feel exhausted rather than evasive at the prospect of describing Libby, her impetuousness and strange sensitivities, but there’s no way to convey this to Evan. And even in the midst of my odd interactions with her, there is something intangibly familiar about Libby. “I’m not sure how to explain.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe it just hurts that Sadhana thought she needed to keep her a secret.”

  Evan nods. “So I want to help you finish.” He stands straight and stretches his legs. I grab his arm to pull myself up. I feel in the back pocket of his jeans until he starts to laugh, and I fish out his car keys.

  “In that case, come and watch me scrub the floor. You can help me fill the bucket.”

  It’s more of a joke than an invitation, but I see him weighing it. Moving Sadhana’s things was a task where Evan’s help was essential. He might be checking to see if I can lean on him when things are less dire.

  “I’ll come if you really want me there.” He cups my face and kisses me once on the cheek, as if to show his restraint. “If you really need me, I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Having Evan in Uncle’s apartment throws off the scale of everything. I look at him and bump my shin on a coffee table that has been in the same spot for more than thirty years. I see his shoulder next to my ear and catch my hip against the side of the fridge.

  “It’s cozy,” he says, his fingers on the door frame of my old bedroom. He ducks his head a little to come in.

  He is here now in the place where I grew up, where all the best and the worst things in my life happened, and he is handsome and he is my boyfriend and he is saying it is cozy. I sit down on my bed as lightly as I can, as noncommittal as a sit-down can be, with my fingertips gripping the covers, the balls of my feet pressing into the rug. How to countenance such a word. Cozy.

  “Less now than before,” I say. “We took a lot of stuff away when we moved out.”

  He sits down on the edge of Sadhana’s bed. He can sit down only one kind of way, comfortably and definitely and with his legs spread out in a V that manages through the pitch of the angle to be at once masculine but still polite. The angle is about thirty-five degrees. I love that he cannot equivocate with his rear end. If he told a lie, his whole body would become the polygraph, all blinks and jerks and quivers.

  “You can’t stay here, you know.”

  “I know. Quinn’s here.”

  “Even if he wasn’t.”

  “Okay.” He has arrived almost without warning, after first saying he couldn’t make it. Quinn and I caught an afternoon bus, then Evan called from the road to tell me he’d changed his mind: he missed me and was coming to visit, whether I liked it or not. So far I’m not sure. I’m not used to someone looking out for me. Looking so closely.

  He says, “I like picturing you here as a little girl. Hair in pigtails.”

  “Braids.”

  “Okay, braids. Either way, cute, I bet.” He gets up. “Are there pictures up anywhere?”

  I pull him back by his sleeve. “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I told you we took everything.”

  He shakes his head as though still convinced I’m not telling the truth and gets up to take the measure of the room, crossing it in two steps. Two beds, two nightstands, two desks. One formerly hotly contested and overstuffed closet.

  “I knew it,” he says, spotting a shelf with high school yearbooks. “The goods.” He reaches out for one with a wicked flourish, ignoring me as I try to bat his hand away.

  The shelf houses a motley and incomplete collection, one that neither Sadhana nor I cared to take away with us when we left. There is my own shortfall of yearbooks from when I dropped out at sixteen next to Sadhana’s staggered volumes, each missing year a reminder of months of struggle with her illness. Anything from that time after Mama died is like an evil talisman. I haven’t opened one since we moved away. Some of the books, I remember, have mean epithets or sly digs scrawled in them by classmates who knew us mainly by reputation. A yearbook being passed around was like a spinning bottle, in that there was no telling where it might end up. The comments in mine were for the most part unremarkable apart from some fat jokes, but I recall a number of block-­lettered exhortations to EAT! across Sadhana’s pages, and some stick-figure drawings that were supposed to be likenesses. It is possible there were not that many unkind students at our school, but those few have had a long and upsetting reach through their offhand graffiti.

  “Give it.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Evan. “But come on. I bet you look cute. A little peek? I’m still trying to figure you out.”

  “I’m not a puzzle,” I say, grabbing the yearbook from him. Un
expected tears spring to my eyes. “There’s nothing to figure out.”

  He sits down next to me on the end of my sister’s old bed. He touches my shoulder and pulls the yearbook out of my grasp, tossing it back onto the pillows.

  “I’m sorry. Really. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  He’s watching for a sign that the crisis has passed. That attentive, forbearing look that never fails to prompt my own guilt and unease.

  “You’re waiting for me to get over it,” I say with a slow carefulness, “but I might never get over it.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you’re fine with that.”

  He puts his hand on my knee. “Yes. But I think you will.”

  “I thought she was mad at me. I was mad at her.” I have both hands on my face, to the sides of my cheeks and temples. Blinders.

  “You had a fight,” he says. “That’s normal.”

  “Is it? She was dead for a week, and I didn’t know.”

  Later he says he wants me to show him Montreal, my Montreal. He doesn’t realize how tiny it is. There is a lack to my life: it has been small and concentric. I had ascribed this in part to my son and my sister, but when I try to imagine my life without them, it is an invention that feels feeble, like the flap of an atrophied muscle. It is not clear what will be left for me once they have both passed out of my care. But I say nothing about this to Evan.

  I take him to a dépanneur, where we buy a bottle of white wine from the fridge and take it to a tiny Thai restaurant down the street. We steer clear of the subject of Quinn and his father, Sadhana and her long illness. The waiter brings us an ice bucket, which he places right on the tablecloth.

  I mention the Essaid family and their struggle to stay in Canada. Their evasion of Bassam’s removal order, the police raid on the church, their flight to a mystery location under the protection of my sister’s friends. The tribunal scheduled to revisit Bassam’s appeal. I leave Ravi out of the story.

  “What’s going to happen to them?” says Evan.

  “I don’t know. They hope his appeal will be granted. I’m not sure there’s much point in claiming sanctuary in another church. I might go to the demonstration.”

  “You could get arrested.” He looks strained, almost embarrassed. “Oh, Beena.”

  “Don’t worry.” I am alternately touched and irked by his concern. “Not all protests involve burning cop cars.”

  Evan puts his elbows up on the table and leans his chin against his linked knuckles. “Well, I hope things work out for them, then.”

  “I do, too.”

  Then Evan talks about the time his family thought they were going to lose their farm. His parents were in debt to a neighbour. They’d bought his land just before a spell of drought sank them into the red for nearly five years.

  “And I know why they call it ‘in the red,’” says Evan. “My brother David got a stress rash on his chest,” he says, touching to each side of his collarbones, “from here to here. The two of us would get up early, even before my dad, and try to start the chores. We were dead set on saving us all from having to move to the city.” Evan waves his hand towards the traffic speeding by outside. “That was our worst fear. We thought everyone in the city was homeless. Or that if we went, we would be. We thought we’d be begging in the street. It isn’t intuitive, what you do if you lose a farm.”

  “Your family would have figured something out. Your parents would have.”

  “I know that now. But we were just terrified. Then David got cuts all up and down his arm trying to hook up the combine by himself. We’d gotten ourselves up at four in the morning thinking we could help out our dad by starting even before he did.”

  Hearing him talk, I wonder how much of me is in love with this part of him that he’s trying to leave behind. The farm boy just as modest as he is hard-working. The part of him that knows his virtues, the ego or pride that might measure itself against other men and rank itself higher, is buried so deep I’ve rarely seen its traces. Only one night, out on my porch, he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder and whispered, “I bet I’m the strongest man you’ve ever known, aren’t I?”

  I feel flushed just sitting across from him. Then I notice the restaurant is so warm that condensation from the metal ice bucket is dripping to form a wet spot seeping steadily towards our plates. Before we finish eating, one whole side of the clean white tablecloth has leached into a soggy grey.

  “I have to tell you something,” I say. “I saw Quinn’s father.”

  While I explain about Quebec First and the connection to the Essaids and Ravi’s meetings with Sadhana, Evan leans back. When I tell him about Bombay Palace and how I threatened Ravi, he starts to push back his chair.

  “You’ve been hiding this.”

  “I’m sorry. But I’m telling you now.”

  “I’m a police officer, Beena, and you’re telling me about extortion.” With his right hand, he tugs at his hair by the roots. “You know the kind of background check they put me through?” He grabs the arms of his chair, and his wide eyes are frustrated and a gorgeous blue. “I’m not supposed to be in a relationship with someone who breaks the law.”

  “It’s not extortion,” I say, swallowing. I can feel the encroaching water reach my wrist on the table, but I keep still. “It has nothing to do with money.”

  “It doesn’t have to,” says Evan. “It’s about coercion. Jesus, Bee.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was illegal.” The truth is I hadn’t bothered to think about it. But I feel horrible. “I wish I hadn’t put you in this position.”

  Even seems mollified by my apology, if skeptical. He crosses his arms. “So are you going to call him to straighten things out?”

  “No,” I say, too fast. Evan looks unimpressed. I add, “I want to see how he reacts. I mean, the damage is already done now, isn’t it?”

  Evan heaves a sigh, as though defending the rule of law is his responsibility to bear alone. “Fuck,” he says. “I guess so. Let’s just go.”

  On our walk to the Metro, Evan is surprised by the housing in the neighbourhood, the blocks and blocks of triplexes. Families packed three-deep in rows of walk-ups.

  “A lot more room where I’m from,” he says, forging a truce by breaking the silence. “There’s a whole field between the road and the houses. Fields in every direction.”

  “And I bet you knew more of your neighbours.”

  “Every one.”

  “Maybe too much closeness keeps people apart.”

  “Like in New York City.”

  “Self-preservation.”

  “I wonder.”

  An hour later, at the coffee shop where I warned my son I was going to meet him, I stand outside looking in the window. Quinn and Caro are sitting in the corner, and Quinn is telling a story, it looks like, with his feet planted, hands wide and waving, his whole bright face matching his body in animation. Caro is laughing, arms hugging her chest. Her straight brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail, revealing red earrings shaped like telephone receivers hanging from her earlobes.

  I rap on the window and wait for the moment when Quinn sees me and his face falls. There. After a moment, he and Caro come out to meet me.

  “Good time?” I ask.

  “Not bad,” says Caro. This is a kind of teasing for my son, I can tell. She dons a bicycle helmet and bids us goodnight as she unlocks her bike from a pole. “See you tomorrow, Quinn.”

  “Bye,” says Quinn. We watch her pedal off in the direction of her grandmother’s house. I notice it is not the direction in which I saw Quinn taking the bus the other day.

  Quinn is more forthcoming than he was in the morning, when he heard Evan was coming to town. “Caro speaks three languages, you know. English, French, and Spanish.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Sh
e’s working on a zillion projects at once, too. The thing with her grandmother. And another thing, about political refugees.”

  “Oh?” I am not sure whether there is a hidden prompt here to ask about the Essaid family, if that is indeed the story Caro is following. If Quinn is trying to get me to say something, to see if I know anything about his father, he is hiding it well.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s terrific,” I say. “She seems very engaged with what she wants to do.”

  The air is so warm that even our slow stroll is making me perspire. The aromas of different menus cling to all the restaurants we pass.

  “So where’s your boyfriend tonight?”

  I hope he still is my boyfriend. We parted at the Metro without further conversation, Evan turning away from my kiss. “Don’t ask unless you really want to know,” I tell Quinn.

  “I’m not opposed to knowing.”

  “At a hotel.”

  “Good.”

  As we walk home under a sky too overcast for stars, our secrets start to weigh on me while we wind our way along the path through the park. I slow down when we get to the picnic table near the trees, where the other night men called out to me in the dark.

  “Are we stopping?”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  He waits, expectant, not looking at me. With his sneaker he traces a soft, grinding circle into the sand and gravel of the path.

  “Did Sadhana tell you she was looking for your father? After that time she came to visit?”

  “No.” There is anguish there. “We didn’t talk after she left. I meant to call her. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  So there is to be no late-breaking forgiveness for me, after all. Only the same guilt I’ve been carrying all along, but for the two of us, and nothing to offer him instead.

  “It’s not your fault,” I say. “You know that, right? It was just a fight. We’d had them before.”