Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “I sort of know the people at this place where we’re going,” Caro says now. She doesn’t seem dismayed by the arrival of the police, and I wonder if that has anything to do with the footage in the camera she’s clutching. “It’ll be fun.”

  The three of us get caught up in the remains of the group of protesters as it straggles north to a house run by a sympathetic collective. We are a jumbled and roving assemblage, clusters now dawdling, now shooting ahead like sprung elastics. We’re in the rear of the procession, where the general attitude is one of defeat. Not that anyone is yet aware of the tribunal’s decision, but it looks bad, the peaceful protest marred by a brawl, or the start of one.

  Two people walking just behind us are discussing whether they’ll still have the heart to continue organizing in support of refugees if they have to keep contending with counter-protests. But as we quicken our pace, we move into the ranks of those who are spinning the day’s events into a patchy heroism.

  “We gave the fascists what they came for,” says a guy with a line of blood on his cheek. His listener slaps him on the back.

  “I think more of them got arrested, too.” The same guy high-fives Quinn. Just for turning up, we are allowed to belong.

  Were it not for Quinn and Caro, I’d walk straight past the party, straight down to the train tracks, and follow them all the way to Ottawa. Yet I’d rather not be alone.

  “That was interesting,” I say with effort. Quinn nods. His long strides have a bounce at the knees. “Fascinating speeches, especially the last one.” Quinn cracks a half-smile but it turns dour.

  Caro is more upbeat. “I think the whole thing is so inspiring, people banding together for a cause.” She checks her camera bag. “Do you think everyone is going to be okay? I might have caught something that can help anyone who was arrested if it goes to trial.”

  From our first steps over the threshold, I can sense the gathering has a frenzied edge, fuelled by outrage and exhilaration. It is still early on a Monday evening, but both the kitchen counter and the freezer top are being used to mix drinks and hold opened bottles of wine. At the front of the house, in the living room, a DJ named Spangler is spinning real records on a row of silver turntables. I blink at the records as we go in. Spangler does not look old enough to have even had to contend with cassette tapes. Much of the group is already dancing. Quinn, Caro, and I move past the most boisterous of these festivities and tuck ourselves into the breakfast nook by the back door, well out of the bar and fridge traffic, where we can be ignored.

  “This reminds me of that party,” says Quinn. “Remember? When I had to sleep in that broom closet?”

  “What on earth,” says Caro, laughing.

  “Pantry,” I correct him. I say to Caro, “It was at my sister’s place.”

  Quinn has to raise his voice as the music flares. “It would be hard to fall asleep at this one.”

  “Not for you,” I say, making the usual family joke. He smiles.

  Then Caro broaches the subject of Ravi with no hesitation, and I remember that Quinn asked her along to their meeting. “You could still get to know him,” she says. “Lots of people have dads who are jerks.”

  Quinn tenses as though he’s afraid of my reaction, but I sit back, well out of it.

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “And I don’t care what I promised him.” He looks at me. “About not telling, I mean.”

  “Neither do I,” I say, getting up to use the bathroom. There is no need to sort out our separate deals and agreements. Revenge seems like it will take too much energy, too much care. But when I return to the kitchen, I hear Quinn and Caro scheming. They have their backs to me where I hover near an open cooler of beer.

  “I can get into the website, no problem,” says Quinn. “How much footage did you get when we met?”

  “The hidden-camera stuff? Enough,” she says. “No need to credit me.”

  “Don’t worry,” says Quinn. “Maybe I’ll tip off the papers, too.”

  My fingers tighten around a beer. Sometimes Quinn hacks into websites, pulling pranks. In January, he pulled a stunt with his school’s home page that nearly got him suspended. Whatever they are planning now would be a crime, and an obvious one, and Evan’s horror at what I tried to do to Ravi is still fresh in my mind. I tell myself that I am going to intervene and repeat it until I am convinced enough to let it go for now.

  “Calm down, everyone,” I say, coming back to the table. The two of them at least look nervous.

  “What’s going to happen to the Essaid family?” says Caro. “Have you heard?”

  “They’re staying.” The news is rippling through the house on a wave of elation, and I can make out shouting and toasting from the hall before the music is turned up.

  “That’s wonderful,” says Caro. “A happy ending.” She might mean for them or for the movie she’s planning, or both. She hops to her feet. “I’m going to go get some interviews.”

  In the kitchen, as in life, Quinn and I are stuck with one another. I’m not in a mood to make conversation with strangers, and though Quinn has a restlessness in his twitching legs, he’s staying put. There is something of a kettle hum about him, the way his mouth keeps moving as if he is about to let loose a speech.

  It isn’t easy to figure out what to say. All I can comprehend is relief at what Libby claims to have read in the diary — Sadhana’s happiness in those last weeks. Her forgiveness. There is still time to decide whether to tell Quinn what I’ve done with the diary. But steering clear of that dilemma, all that’s left for us to talk about are other topics we’d rather avoid.

  “Are you sorry you met him?” I say.

  “There isn’t any point to being sorry,” he says. He’s having trouble looking at me, but I wait. He’s holding a beer in a grip fierce enough to imply his skepticism about my permission. So far he’s only had the one sip.

  “What?” I say. “It’s okay.”

  “You really don’t mind?” he says, looking now, tapping the bottle.

  “It’s legal, or almost. You’re nearly eighteen.”

  “Not the question.”

  “It’s fine. Really.” In emphasis, I take a drink from my own beer, and Quinn looks dubious.

  “It’s too weird.”

  “Why? Auntie S always gave you sips of her wine.”

  Her name between us in any form is still a blow, but it doesn’t sting or spin the room the way it used to, given everything that has been happening over the past week.

  Quinn nods and shrugs. “It’s different with you,” he says. “You were always the one in charge.”

  There is something in Quinn’s face that makes me realize he thinks he can get to the bottom of everything if we just keep talking — even Sadhana’s death. I’ve no idea where he might have obtained this trait, certainly not through inheritance. Even after hearing Libby’s account of what happened, I feel a long way from understanding how or why accident and illness should have intersected the way they did.

  “I never felt like I was in charge,” I say. “I’m not sure that I was.” I always sensed I was only reacting, making way for Sadhana’s condition or pushing back against it, as the situation required. “Anyway, it’s hard to say much of anything about the way things really were.”

  “Why?” says Quinn, as if there is no such thing as an unanswerable question. He scrutinizes me through glasses that have slid half an inch down his nose.

  “There are some things we won’t ever know,” I say. All the times I might have behaved differently, and the hundreds of ways I might have changed what happened. “I mean, definitively.”

  “Like what? There are things people said that about fifty years ago, and look how far science has come. Look at all the genetic research going on. Look at particle physics.”

  Even when he’s being annoying, I love to hear him debate. “I mean historical m
ysteries,” I say. “Where the facts are gone and there’s no way of getting them back.”

  “You can put the facts back.”

  “What?”

  “You can tell the truth.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Quinn holds me in a level gaze. “I found the website for Quebec First. It’s kids’ stuff.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “They might actually win the election.”

  “They could press charges. You could go to jail.”

  “Okay, I won’t.” But he has a familiar defiant look on his face. My sister’s face. The smart-aleck look of no regrets. And though we have not said her name again, our thoughts are still running along the same lines.

  “I wish we had taken better care of her,” he says.

  “Quinn, all I’ve done my whole life was try to help her.”

  “It didn’t seem like it, the way you were at therapy. You hated it.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. You were always so mean. So different from what you’re normally like. I could never understand it.”

  “She was better than those people.” I’m just as surprised as Quinn when this comes out.

  “Mom.”

  “Well, she was. And she had real problems. Some of those girls —” I break off, remembering some of the faces from Sadhana’s first hospital stay. Tender-hearted Cynthia, who wanted to be Sadhana’s friend. Laurel of the infinite sarcasm. Their helpless inability to understand or communicate their own pain. Of the family therapy sessions that came later, with Quinn, I remember very little of the other young women. Only their parents, wondering what they had done wrong. The way they cried in those plastic chairs in front of everyone, the sniffling that made shivers of disgust creep up my spine. I remember thinking that I would never let myself feel so guilty. Though I judged them, too, even more harshly than they judged themselves.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Ignore me.”

  Quinn leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. “Are you going to marry him?”

  “Evan?” I am surprised. “That’s not even on the table.”

  “But would you?”

  “I don’t know.” I am not even sure how to repair the day’s damage. My carelessness with his feelings and everything I’ve failed to explain.

  But tonight Quinn will not be put off. The alcohol and the excitement have made him tenacious. “Do you think she was still angry with us?”

  “No.” It gives me some peace to say this. But pain, too, now, knowing it was mostly my anger holding us apart. That, and, if what Libby said is true, Sadhana’s wish to mediate things between Quinn and Ravi. To put that inquiry to rest.

  “I wish we could know for sure.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  “Mom?” He leans forward across the table. I shake my head.

  “What about the last time you talked?” he presses. “Before the fight, I mean.”

  I’ve been dwelling on those final exchanges for so long that the months before them have slipped out of focus. “No,” I say, a little harsher than I intended, and he draws back.

  “Fine. I’ll go first.” Quinn tips back his bottle, wipes his mouth with the side of his thumb. “She told me things were going well.” He sounds defiant. “We talked about where I was going to go to school, and if I got all my applications in on time.” He takes another sip of his beer and starts talking in a rush. “She asked me if I liked anyone. She said she thought she might be at the start of something new, but it was complicated.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “Now you know what it feels like.”

  “She always told you more than she told me,” I say, thinking over what Quinn has reported. “We were never as close as you thought. Not in the way you imagine, anyway.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Every lacuna he considers a lie.

  I wonder whether there will ever be an understanding between us, and how heavy this question is as it comes to me, as heavy almost as the guilt I have been trying to shed, this notion that even between the two of us, close as we are, there may be no simplicity. Nor was there always understanding between me and Sadhana. And with such a gap to bridge even between the people you ought to be nearest to in the world, people who share your whole history and language, or even blood, anything as simple as friendship begins to seem miraculous. Let alone love. Let alone forgiveness. The people gathered around us, the great goodwill directed to the cause of the Essaids, all that might even be easier. Caring about the well-being of strangers. Tending to principles instead of to people with all of their flaws.

  “At a certain point, you’re going to have to take my word for it, kid.”

  Quinn makes the slightest of motions, a movement of his shoulder towards his ear, that hints at concession. It is no wonder he is skeptical. He is my son, mine and Sadhana’s, and I am glad that he is clever and full of doubt and sees me more clearly for who I am than as simply the woman who is his mother.

  He pushes his chair back from the table. “I guess we’ve never been a normal family,” he says, getting up to move to the fridge. He is looking inside for something, and though I wonder at the propriety of this, people are coming in and out of the kitchen for drinks and nobody else gives him a second glance as he roots around.

  “I wish you could have known your grandmother,” I say. “She was truly an unusual woman. And she would have liked this party.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes, she had some remarkable friends. And she never missed an opportunity to celebrate.” These are things I’ve said before, but Quinn always listens as if it were the first time. He turns to look at me as he moves through the kitchen. “If she were here,” I go on, “she probably would have baked a cake in the shape of a courthouse or filled the whole house with balloons. She was never afraid of throwing herself into things.”

  Mama’s courage was where our inheritance went astray. The trust she had in her own choices, to follow without doubt the call of her heart, wherever it might lead. Instead of doing whatever else might have been expected. Choosing to be free, choosing to always be choosing, never following. Choosing everything instead of being or seeing only one thing or the other.

  Quinn comes back to the table with a loaf of bread and some peanut butter. Before he sits down, he hunts around in the drawers and cupboards, but all he can find is a single plate and a spoon.

  “I’m not sure people actually live here,” he says. There is no blind on the kitchen window, and though the sun is still up, we can see the gibbous waning moon rising in the east.

  We tear off pieces of bread with our hands and scoop the peanut butter on top. The first bite reveals to me my own hunger, and the second tells me something else, that I am alive. That I am here in a kitchen with my son, and we are eating together and we are alive. And the work of getting closer, of loving harder, is the work of a whole life.

  I gratefully acknowledge the support of this project by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. I would also like to thank the Banff Centre, where I started writing this novel, and Yaddo, where I began to revise it, as well as the Quebec Writers’ Federation mentorship program. I am infinitely grateful for the friendships and pages that emerged from these opportunities.

  Thanks again to The New Quarterly for first publishing the story from which this novel evolved and to the Blue Metropolis literary festival where the issue was launched. Thank you to my agent, Martha Magor Webb, for her insightful reading and belief in these characters.

  Profound thanks to my brilliant editor, Melanie Little, for her faith, respect, precision and encouragement, and for understanding everything. Much gratitude also to Sarah MacLachlan, Jared Bland, Kate McQuaid, and all the kind and capable souls at House of Anansi Press who lent their time and expertise to this novel in many diff
erent capacities. Thank you to Alysia Shewchuk for the remarkable cover design.

  Thanks to Alice Zorn above all for her friendship, as well as for her astute reading of this manuscript, and to Ian McGillis for valuable comments on early pages. Ongoing gratitude to those writerly friends who have been kind enough to read, listen, or commiserate: Matthew Anderson, Jonathan Ball, Linda Besner, Erin Bockstael, Lina Gordaneer, Leigh Kotsilidis, Bob Kotyk, Erin Laing, and Kathleen Winter. Thank you to Atika Mirza for sparking Beena’s name. Thank you to all the kind, brilliant, beautiful people I am privileged to spend time with — I don’t know what I would do without you. Thank you, too, to friends at a distance for warmth in correspondence. For endless friendship and support, thank you to Mylissa Falkner, Kat Kitching, Jessica Lim, Vivienne Macy, and Rajam Raghunathan.

  Love and thanks to my mother, my grandmother, and all of my Ainsworth family. Love and thanks to Vivi and the Webster family. Love and all to Derek.

  SALEEMA NAWAZ is the author of the short story collection Mother Superior and winner of the prestigious Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, she currently lives in Montreal, Quebec.

  House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”