Swallow
a novel by
THEANNA BISCHOFF
NEWEST PRESS
Copyright © Theanna Bischoff 2012
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bischoff, Theanna, 1984–
Swallow / Theanna Bischoff.
ISBN 978-1-927063-19-4
I. Title.
PS8603.I83S93 2012 C813’.6 C2012-902344-2
Editor for the Board: Nicole Markoti
Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design
Cover photography: (portrait) gedankenstrichfabrik/Photocase
(fly) irin-k/Shutterstock.com
Author photo: Katie Hyde
NeWest Press acknowledges the financial support of the Alberta Multimedia Development Fund and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We further acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
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No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 13 12
For two sisters
For Elena, my sister of dolls and bunk beds and matching dresses
And for Nicole, my sister of sushi and step class and stats assignments
I am better for you both
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly
Perhaps she’ll die
There was a Chinook the day my sister died.
The unexpected warm winds drifted across from the mountains, trailing the scent of spring. Having grown up in Toronto, I had not yet grown accustomed to these bursts of warmth in the middle of winter. In Calgary, I had to plug my car in overnight and the motor still coughed phlegm from its frozen lungs in the morning — from October until nearly May. That morning, I’d opened the windows in my classroom and let the warmth breeze its way inside, taunting me, taunting the kids, making us wonder how long the reprieve would last.
During recess supervision duty, I took off my parka and hung it over the fat base of a tire swing circling slowly in the wind. The snow banks huddled together to keep from melting, massive solid chunks of ice, dissolving from the outside in. The kids shrieked with bewildered joy, unsure of what to do with themselves, with their mittens and toques. When the sun cast its smirking face downwards, the snow glared back, fierce enough that I had to shield my eyes. High-gloss white.
&I remember smudges from Carly’s infancy. My father spent his days — and often nights — at the University of Toronto School of Business.
“You want to take ballet?” My mom yelled. “Then maybe your dad should get a job and stop spending all our money on textbooks!”
The floor directly above our apartment housed a slimy pool. Our apartment always smelled dizzy, like chlorine. I remember trying to see over the canopy of Carly’s stroller, driving a treacherous path down Bloor Street. I remember having to push the Jolly Jumper, hung in the entry between the living room and the kitchen, out of the way in the mornings, blurry with sleep and hungry for Cheerios. Stupid baby stuff in my way.
I remember naps in piles of laundry, emptied onto the living room carpet, still warm from the dryer. Mom told us to be careful of the bits of metal hiding in the clothes: the buttons and clasps, the hooks of her bras. We could get scalded; a bare knee, a thigh, the underside of a foot.
I held Carly safe on top of me, her scrawny six-year-old sister’s stomach — away from both the warmth and the burn.
Sometimes Carly blurs into my other memories. On my first day of kindergarten, before Carly was even alive. Yet there she is, in my mother’s arms, wearing a cloth diaper and waving goodbye, her new trick. Or, decades later, when I moved to Calgary and she stayed behind in Toronto. My synapses fire, a recollection of tasting salsa during a Calgary street festival, Carly joking, “That’s nacho cheese, that’s mine!”
Even now. I get out of the shower, naked and cold, and reach for a towel, only to remember I left them folded in the laundry basket in the living room. Then, she’s there, in the fog.
“It’s okay, Darcy; I’ll grab one for you.”
The moisture prickles on my skin.
&My sister embodied primary colours, like magic markers — not blonde, but yellow-haired. Yellow-haired, true blue-eyed. She wore red lipstick in the daytime, like a ’50s pin-up girl. When I moved from Toronto to Calgary to get my teaching degree, she sent me sequin sweaters and T-shirts in rainbow hues, leprechaun greens and valentine pinks, bubble wrapped. In high school she wrote her lecture notes in purple pen that got smudged on her knuckles. She carved purple reminders into her wrists in inky swirls: pay visa!!! call d. She had permanent ink marked onto her ankle to celebrate graduation: a tattoo of a fuchsia balloon.
&My first year student teaching, the staff took the kids to the Calgary Zoo on a field trip. As a child in Toronto, field trips involved riding the subway; our chaperones counted our heads to make sure they hadn’t lost any of us and tried to find places where we could sit. They doubled us up, two bums per seat, and hoarded the skinniest of us on their laps.
In the dark tunnel of the subway existed a fantasy population, like trolls that lived underground, whooshing back and forth between Etobicoke and Scarborough, North York and Front Street; people with stained coats, from whom garbled words burst like hiccups and farts. These people clipped their fingernails, slept with their heads tucked onto the strangers beside them, and laughed so loudly and unabashedly they shook along with the rumble of the train on its tracks.
As a child, on the subway, when strangers dominated all available seats, I would put my hand out to hold onto a post, the metal smooth and cool to the touch. But, rare times, the metal felt warm, the heat left by someone’s hand, someone who’d held the pole only moments before me.
Teachers took us to the Royal Ontario Museum for yearly field trips, ignoring the fact that almost all of us had already visited the ROM, and more than once. Afterwards, they let us eat in Queen’s Park, picnic style, and warned us not to climb the giant statue of King Edward VII and his feisty stallion, yanking down those of us who still tried.
The zoo was Calgary’s field-trip equivalent of the ROM. The children, paired with buddies, clamored for seats at the back of the yellow school bus we took to get there, despite the fact that the C-train actually stopped right near the zoo’s entrance.
“Every year, I swear,” my supervisor muttered, her eyes darting from child to child, keeping track. That September, she’d announced she was going vegan. “You have a zoo in Toronto, right?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s sick. Caged animals on display.”
“My grandpa worked for an animal shelter when I was a kid,” I offered.
“Good for him.” She picked at her nailpolish. “It’s sad. The kids don’t even really pay attention to the animals. They only like the dinosaur statues.”
“Dinosaur statues?”
“I know, it’s ridiculous. Prehistoric Park. Haven’t you seen the giant Brontosaurus head when you drive down Memorial? HAYLEY BETH! Bum on your seat!”
“No.”
“There’s a Brontosaurus, and a raptor. . .thing. There’s supposedly an Albertosaurus, too, which sounds made up, but it’s not. Tell you what, I’ll take your picture with the Albertosaurus. Make you a true Calgarian.”
Rain began to speckle the asphalt. Kids dangled their fingers out the windows to catch the drops.
“Arms stay inside the bus!” my supervisor warned.
We sat in the cafeteria, waiting out the storm, the kids still paired-up with their buddies, eating rubbery, dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. We followed them with wet-naps, wiping their grimy hands. The rain made the cafeteria smell dank, of animals and manure. The tabletops looked slimy — grease, perhaps, or condensation. The kids poked each other, fought over who got to sit next to who.
I let Tia McConaughey-Morales sit beside me. According to her Ontario Student Record, Tia had been Tia Morales, until her parents divorced midway through her first grade year. Back then, Tia had also been communicative. When she acquired the McConaughey, she stopped talking.
Tia picked up a French fry and held it out towards me, an offering. Since Tia started second grade, I had tried unsuccessfully to get her to talk, enticing her by singing songs from Dora the Explorer, handing her warm Hershey’s Kisses from my winter coat pocket. She’d flashed me dimpled smiles and waves and carefully printed rows of alphabet letters and spelling words. She mouthed all the songs in Music class. But the volume stayed on mute.
Tia tugged on my coat, then tapped her nose with two fingers — the code we’d developed to signal that she needed to go to the bathroom. The other code was two arms straight up in the air, fingers waving. This signaled emergency; I’d never seen her do it. School protocol dictated that I should ask her to use words when she gave signals or pantomimed what she wanted. She squirmed in her chair, her black hair woven into two stubby braids, one resting on each shoulder.
“Okay, Tia,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I stood in front of the stall, waiting. Spills from the taps lay in puddles across the countertops. Damp paper towels bulged from the garbage opening. Tia slipped out of the stall, smiling. She bent down then, reaching for something on the bathroom floor; a small, plastic monkey — a Capuchin with its arms outstretched, a gift store trinket left behind.
“What’s that?” I asked. “What’d you find?”
She paused, held the monkey out, her mouth open.
I felt hot. “Tia,” I said, “What’d you find? Tell me? Use your words. Be a big girl, okay?”
Her mouth hung open for another second. Her fingers closed around the monkey.
&Stefany Beale, a nine-year-old girl from my neighbourhood, only two years younger than me, went missing. Before this, it was my responsibility to walk Carly the six blocks from school to our apartment and watch her until Mom came home after work. Born at the beginning of September, Carly turned five just before starting kindergarten, younger than a good half of the kids in her class.
Our mother cleaned other people’s houses, often taking Carly with her. After Carly turned four, our mother put her in daycare and picked up a job as a waitress at a nearby diner where she could work the breakfast shift. When school started in the fall, Mom dropped Carly off at daycare in the morning, and a bus dropped her off at school in the afternoon. At three o’clock, I had to wrangle Carly home, annoyed by her incessant need to stop and pet dogs, stomp in puddles, crunch leaves, and kick the same rock all the way home. I once kicked one of her beloved rocks away from her and into a gutter. She shocked me by sobbing and wailing for the remaining five-block walk, repeating, “You hate me, you hate me.” She pushed me away in the apartment, soothing herself in a way I thought she’d outgrown, simultaneously sucking her thumb and the ringed tail of her ragged raccoon. That damned raccoon! So dirty from being handled all day, dragged around the germy daycare. Shoved in her backpack all afternoon, it smelled like the lunch mom packed her that day, peanut butter, or pickles, or Cheez Whiz.
The missing girl, Stefany, did not attend my school, but the public school closest to it. She was also being raised by a single mother. We had the same middle name: Erin. Stefany had an older sister, Kristen, two years older, the same age as me. I heard these details on the news, which Mom left on while she microwaved dinner. I often checked and then double-checked the locks before finally being able to fall into a twitchy, agitated sleep.
During that first week after Stefany went missing, Mom took Carly and me to the basement to do laundry with her, rather than leaving me upstairs to try to make sure Carly didn’t wreck the TV or sneak jujubes out of the pantry. Another tenant, an old man, took his clothes out of the dryer and smiled at us. I looked away, towards the cat he’d brought down to the basement with him, draped lazily on top of one of the dryers while he folded his monochromatic clothes into perfect squares like the ones on display at the mall.
Carly blurted, “Can I pet him?” She always needed to touch things. The cat turned its languid ears in her direction but did not lift its head.
The man introduced himself as Elliot Papisczaw, and said he worked at a no-kill animal shelter that relied on families to foster cats while they waited to be adopted. He had three other cats in his two-bedroom apartment, all named after Toronto subway stations. Wellesley had joined him in the basement to sort laundry. Carly, who still talked like a baby, called the cat Willy. Luckily, fat and docile Willy had no problems letting her maul and prod him.
After dropping by Elliot’s apartment a few times to visit “the cats,” knocking shyly with Carly riding on her shoulders, Mom asked Elliot if perhaps he would be willing to walk us home from school and keep an eye on us while she worked, “Just for a couple hours a day. And I would pay you, of course.” How quickly she had found a way to unload the two of us.
I liked the way Elliot’s cats followed him around, they way they hung comfortably over his shoulder or butted their bony skulls against his bony legs. He told Mom he would think about it, but I knew he would say no. Cats did not make perpetual noise the way Carly did. A couple of days after Mom asked, I entered the elevator at the same time that as Elliot exited. He carried a grocery bag that smelled like warm bread.
“Hello!” He moved his bag to the other arm. “Coming home from school?”
“Mm hmm.” I pretended to dig in my backpack for something so as not to look at him. On the ride up, I listened to the distorted sounds of the people who lived on each floor coming and going.
Back in the apartment, Carly lay sprawled in front of the TV watching Sesame Street and eating a plate of peanut-butter crackers.
“Eat at the table,” I told her. “Do you want to get spanked for getting crumbs all over the carpet?”
She opened her mouth wide, revealing a mash of chewed food.
I found Mom in her bedroom doing up the buttons on her work blouse. She scowled when I entered. “You’re supposed to knock.”
“You’re going to work?”
“Sandra asked me to cover her shift.”
I scratched an itch at the back of my neck. “I’m not babysitting. I have three pages of division due tomorrow. With remainders.” Mom had worked only one night shift since starting at the diner, and that night Carly made me sleep in her bed with her, saying she heard scratchy fingers at the window. That was before some creep snatched Stefany Beale right off the street. They hadn’t caught him yet. The creep probably went in windows, too, snatched little girls right out of their beds.
“That old man from downstairs is coming over. Elliot. He’s going to be picking you girls up after school sometimes.”
Papi, we began calling him, because Carly’s childish tongue could not pronounce his last name. He never had children of his own. Tall and gangly, all elbows and knees, he folded himself into the space between my upper bunk and Carly’s lower and read her Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree over and over.
“Again, Papi!” Carly squealed, each time he closed the hard cover. “Again!”
“But as th
e boy grew older he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave.”
We filled the time making exotic desserts, folded pastries that grew stiff and crusty in the oven, dusted with icing sugar, which Carly called Elephant Ears. Carly loved when Papi held her upside down and let her walk across the ceiling, Papi’s height making this possible. His skinny arms were surprisingly strong.
And the tree was happy.
&Still, my thoughts skipped like a scratched record. Stefany Beale, Stefany Beale. What did it feel like, getting kidnapped? Aubrey Sato, my seat partner in class, and partner in the three-legged-recess-races, told me, “If anyone tries to kidnap me I’m gonna scratch their face.” She showed me how to slip a key between my middle and ring fingers when walking around by myself. “It’s easier for grown-ups,” she explained. “They have a whole bunch of keys.” Car keys, office keys, keys to their gym lockers and storage sheds — “They could really do damage.”
I had two keys, because I lived in an apartment. Double the weaponry. This gave me a slight advantage over Aubrey. Except that I lost my keys. Weekly, it seemed, Papi and I stopped at the corner store to have a new set cut before Mom noticed. Papi bought Carly ice cream bars, even in the winter, and she sat on the counter licking chocolate, listening as Papi told stories about his wife Tatiana, who, at only twenty-five, died of a blood clot in her brain during an afternoon nap. Papi kept only one picture of Tatiana in his apartment, beside his bed, and I tried to catch glimpses of it the few times we went into Papi’s room. In the black-and-white photo, Tati’s dark hair lay meticulously curled and pinned back away from her forehead. When I tried to remember what she looked like, her features swirled together with those of Stefany Beale. I couldn’t tell what colour her eyes were. Maybe green, like Stefany’s.
Papi pointed out Moscow on the globe in his apartment, the birthplace of Tati’s mother. Carly spun the globe around with two palms to see how fast it could go, while Papi spun me stories of Tati’s mother, a rich little girl in Russia who received a doll for every one of her birthdays. Matryoshka dolls, Papi called them. Nesting dolls. Lined up on his shelf, they looked like bowling pins. Tati’s mother had given them to Tati to keep, so Tati could pass them down to her daughter some day: the daughter they didn’t have. Aubrey received a similar set of nesting dolls from her grandparents in Japan, but whoever had crafted Aubrey’s dolls painted smiles instead of the serious expressions worn by Tati’s Matryoshkas. Aubrey’s parents hid tooth fairy money inside Aubrey’s dolls. At the core of Tati’s ladies, I found a tiny baby, painted in the same style as each one that had come before it. No Russian secrets for me.
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