Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  She’d forgotten to tell me what she’d really wanted to tell me until we’d taken our seats in the theatre, animated popcorn and pretzels telling us to turn our cell phones off. When a large Junior Mint with eyes said, “Shhhhhhh!” Carly whispered, almost an afterthought, that one of Ryan’s ex-girlfriends had phoned him. She didn’t even really know if you could call it ex-girlfriend, since they’d only been fifteen. Babies, really. I didn’t remind her that she’d met Ryan as a teenager, too.

  “So — ” Carly stopped and put a handful of popcorn in her mouth, wiped her hands on her jeans. The grease made the denim darker. “And so I was like, what is she calling for? And he was like, beats me.” But Carly looked calm as she spoke, jealousy not one of the ingredients. “I just thought it was weird. He didn’t call her back.”

  The lights from the movie screen flashed across her face, all greens and golds. She had gained weight since I’d been gone, I realized. I missed her then, suddenly, despite the fact that she sat right beside me, her arm on the armrest touching mine.

  The weight looked healthy on her. Cheery. Sitting beside me whole and peaceful, some part of me didn’t even recognize her.

  &Near the end of my English degree, I started applying to university Education programs, and Papi surprised me by commenting that he’d enjoyed his own career as a teacher. Hadn’t he always worked at the shelter?

  I’d been feeding the cats while he went on a brief trip to Niagara Falls over a long weekend, and he insisted on paying me. He counted out soft bills from his wallet. Papi paid for everything in cash.

  “You were a teacher?” I asked. “Since when?”

  “I stopped after I turned forty. Tatiana loved animals. She was in the process of applying to veterinary school when she died. We had a bird, an ugly little Cockatiel. Nymph, she called him. . .the scientific name was Nymphicus Hollandicus.”

  I folded the money and tucked it into my back pocket. “Carly loves birds.”

  “Tati did too,” he countered. “But I preferred more traditional pets.”

  He always had four cats in the apartment, though the four he had at that time were less familiar to me than those he’d had when he babysat for Carly and I. He no longer had any of the original howling quartet from when we lived in the same building. Ossington — Carly’s beloved Oz — had died the previous year of diabetes, so happy and fat he’d taken to dragging his bum around when he needed to move closer to his food dish. For two days after he died, Carly tried to get out of going to school, bemoaning the fact that her stomach hurt, insisting I take her to the doctor, hypothesizing that she, too, was a diabetic.

  I’d chastised her, “Diabetes doesn’t make your stomach hurt.”

  “Does too!”

  Our stepfather, who Carly and I had taken to calling “Dick” (short for his actual name, Richard, and, behind his back, of course), told her if he caught her skipping school he’d make sure she had a stomachache.

  One of Papi’s new cats was Oz II, short for Osgoode. In addition to being a subway station, Osgoode happened to be the name of one of Toronto’s law schools, from which Patrick had been rejected. Of the four he’d applied to, he’d been accepted by only one — the University of Calgary. He had yet to accept their offer. I’d applied and been accepted to the teaching program in Calgary, my school applications mapping onto his. I didn’t want to leave Toronto, but I didn’t want a long distance relationship, either. Patrick was deciding my future more than his own. When I’d arrived at Papi’s, Oz II lay sprawled across the kitchen counter beside a discarded whisker. He yawned, exposing a dark birthmark on the roof of his mouth.

  “So what’d you teach?” I asked.

  “Well, a variety of things. But my favourite course was Theatre Arts.”

  “You? No way.” Papi reminded me often of British guards who hold their position and never flinch, even when troublesome tourists try to incite them to break stance: calm, even tempered. Carly’s childhood tantrums had never bothered him. To soothe her, he sang nursery rhymes, even past the age when she should have outgrown them. She especially liked “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” likely because of the sheer number of animals in it. She’d drawn the old lady with all the animals squished inside her massive abdomen. Fly, spider, cat, dog. . .

  Even Papi’s voice sounded calm, monotone. Like Carly, he could barely carry a tune.

  He scratched Oz II’s chin. “I’ve always enjoyed the theatre.” Oz purred audibly. “You don’t have to be dramatic in your personal life to be a good thespian.”

  I tried to picture it, but couldn’t. “So what made you stop? When Tatiana died?”

  “No,” he said. “Actually, it was a great job to have while I was grieving. When you’re acting, you can pretend to be someone else. I enjoyed that escape, and I enjoyed teaching my students about it as well.” He looked over at his smallest cat, Dufferin, who I’d had to wrangle earlier to deliver drops into her infected left eye. “Did Duffy take her drops okay?” He scooped up the white feline with one hand, pulling her to his neck.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, after a while, I wanted to do something more meaningful for Tati. So I quit and went to work at the shelter.”

  “That’s quite a career change.” I folded the money in half, and then in half again. “You know who I always thought would be a good actress?”

  “Your sister?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Carly has a tendency towards melodrama. But I don’t think she’s very capable of portraying an emotion she doesn’t feel. She’s always reminded me of that old adage, wearing your heart on your sleeve.”

  Carly did not wear her heart on her sleeve so much as smear her heart all over your face.

  &When we moved in together in Calgary, Patrick decided we had to spend at least two evenings a week apart in order to maintain a healthy independence. Patrick’s rules left me feeling nauseated; I already knew with Patrick that rules changed. Our relationship came with a guidebook to which I was never exactly privy, full of caveats and stipulations.

  “Time apart is what’s best for us.” He said this looking not at me, but into the mirror while examining his eyebrows. He straightened a flaw I couldn’t see. “For us individually, and as a couple.”

  He had a point, but he’d bonded quickly to his fellow law students, and I had yet to form very many friendships with the other students in my program. Most were born-and-bred Calgarians, with lots of friends already. No one seemed particularly motivated to form friendships within the program.

  The first of these healthy nights apart, Patrick went to meet a fellow law student for drinks, and I perched on the couch, flipping channels. I called Aubrey first, then Carly. On a Saturday night, I had only their voicemails to talk to. Why had I not tried harder, made friends? Why had I moved all the way to Calgary for Patrick?

  After he’d been gone half an hour, I took a novel and climbed into bed. It was not quite 8:30. As a kid, I often read myself to sleep, Sweet Valley Twins and The Baby-Sitters Club, dulled my brain past Carly’s tossing and turning and yawning and chirping in the bunk below mine.

  Over time, I conditioned myself into drowsiness whenever my eyes met text, which proved problematic when it came to cramming for tests and attempting to comprehend iambic pentameter as an undergrad. I drifted off, too apathetic to take my contacts out.

  Kipling leapt up onto the bed, waking me, and began kneading at my yellow blanket. She’d been found without a mother or any siblings. Cats separated from their mothers when they’re too tiny will do this, I’d learned from Papi, mimicking the pressing of paws into their mother’s swollen belly to expel milk. Right paw, left paw, right paw, left paw. She shut her eyes into squints in rhythmic bliss. Stevie Wonder, playing the piano.

  The second night apart, Patrick went to a documentary, by himself. It seemed ridiculous to me; independent movie-theatre viewing was not something someone did when in a happy, committed relationship. We could never agree on mo
vies — on a lot of things, actually. Patrick called mainstream movies cliché, and only ever wanted to go to Calgary’s independent theatres. He felt this way about Starbucks, TV commercials, and major chain bookstores.

  That morning, during a coffee break, I’d asked a classmate if she wanted to get together that night to study, to keep each other motivated. She told me she had plans with her husband, adding, “It sounds like fun though, maybe next week?”

  I borrowed Patrick’s too-big University of Toronto sweatshirt and rolled up the sleeves, laced up my running shoes. If it worked for Aubrey. . .

  I jogged once around the entire campus, breathing heavily in the dark, finally stopping, gasping for air, bent over, my hands on my thighs, wondering how Aubrey ran every day. I walked home under the slanted streetlights. Cars sped past the intersection of Crowchild Trail and 24th Ave, and I stopped at the crosswalk to wait for the lights to change, watching faces blur by. I didn’t want to check my phone for missed calls, sure there would be none. Pathetic. With distance preventing me from taking care of Carly as much as I was used to, my downtime from school gaped in front of me.

  In our still-dark apartment, I stripped down to my underwear and threw Patrick’s sweatshirt into the laundry hamper.

  By November, I could make it all the way around campus and back home without stopping.

  &I’d grown up on streets where people walked and paced and shopped and ate, had conversations in different languages, played drums and handed out free samples on corners, swirled in the smells of sunscreen and Thai food and dank sewers. The humidity lifted the hot scents onto the crowded streets. A perpetual block party, a multicultural family reunion.

  And then in Calgary — nothing. I walked the streets to campus and back, surprised at their emptiness. When the snow began to fall, shockingly early, and a cold crept up behind my sinuses, I skipped my last class and made a pit stop at the Dairy Queen before going back home to finish an assignment. The man behind the counter had sagging eyes, like a basset hound. He lifted my Blizzard and turned it upside down, the mandatory way to prove the thickness of the ice cream. Me and him: the only two people in the store.

  At home, I ate the bits of crushed Oreo cookie from the bottom of the cup, black and gritty in my teeth.

  &Of all the things Carly feared as a child — and there were many — church was not one of them. At St. Peter’s, with its lurid organ music, its giant stained glass depictions of saints and martyrs clutching their hemorrhaging hearts, she sang sanctimoniously, the syllables to gory lyrics she didn’t know blending into gibberish. She shook hands with all the shrivelled raisin ladies and let them kiss her pious little cheeks, telling them, “Peas be with you.”

  I found Church confusing, found its messages bipolar. God was supposed to be unconditionally loving and benevolent, but the Bible said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” The smiling parishioners, singing along with the choir, seemed off-kilter with the actual words coming out of their mouths.

  Unless you eat

  Of the flesh of the Son of Man

  And drink of His blood,

  And drink of His blood,

  You shall not have life within you

  Aubrey attended Catholic school with me because her mother had been baptized as a young girl, and so she had an in. “I’m only here because of the gifted program,” Aubrey informed me. “I have to do religion class because the school says I do, but my parents are atheists. That means they think God is just make-believe.” Aubrey had assimilated her parents’ views about Catholicism, relentlessly questioning religion, questions I had no answers to. “He rose from the dead? Doesn’t that sound a little freaky? Like zombies, Darcy. It’s like Zombie Jesus in his loincloth. Dreenk my blooood. Eeeeat my flesh.” She walked towards me with her arms outstretched sideways, as though nailed to a cross.

  And yet, Aubrey called the church and planned Carly’s funeral.

  A set of automatic doors and a “Do Not Enter” sign separated baggage claim at Pearson International Airport from where family and friends could wait for arrivals, but Aubrey had ignored the warnings and had a luggage trolley already lined up beside the carousel before our bags started making their way down. The plane ride itself was early morning blurry, Patrick having booked our tickets and arranged everything. But when we landed, there was Aubrey in a red blouse. I felt heavy, saturated like a sponge, and Aubrey’s round face and red blouse let something loose inside me, like I was being wrung out. She held me against her. When I pulled away, I’d left wet patches on her blouse, like when Kipling kneaded and suckled on my T-shirt before bed.

  Patrick collected our luggage, dragging it off the lazy carousel. I didn’t remember packing. On the drive to my mother’s, Patrick sat in the back seat with Aubrey and the suitcases.

  Mom and Dick still hadn’t fixed the water damage on the ceiling, yellow stains like urine. What did it matter? The house smelled like tomatoes; two greasy boxes of pizza gaped open on the kitchen island, but no one had eaten any. My mother looked skinnier than I remembered, and she clenched her arms around me, all bones like a bird. They both had puffy, swollen eyes, my mother and Dick, our stepfather, our stupid, Mack truck of a stepfather, a man’s man with a bald potato head, what was he crying for? As though he’d loved Carly. He took a slice of pizza, holding it in his hands without a napkin. Aubrey had a manila folder with her, and she opened it and started reading from it — details for the funeral. My mother excused herself and went upstairs. Dick took the folder from Aubrey. The grease from his fingers left stains on the pages. I’d already turned down the option to go to the funeral home. How many hours had passed since? A day and a night and a day. Not even.

  I heard the toilet flush. My mother came back down, her skin jaundiced under the light. She held up her car keys as though she didn’t exactly know what they could be.

  “Okay, I think we should go,” Aubrey said, encouragingly. I felt my hand constrict and looked down. Patrick was squeezing it.

  When the garage door began to close behind them, Patrick said, “I think you should eat something.”

  “I can’t,” I said. Carly liked her pizza with pineapples and hot peppers, which made her sneeze.

  I went downstairs to my old basement room and lay there, on the bed, a spinny, seasick feeling. I took out my phone and dialled Ryan. When he answered, I heard a little girl in the background. A little girl laughing.

  &Carly learned to read late. She struggled through picture book after picture book, labouriously sounding out the words. My teenaged attempts to help her seemed to only frustrate her further. Cross-legged on her bed with a hard-backed Dr. Seuss, she ran her finger limply across the title, “If . . . I . . . r . . . r-an the. . .”

  “Circus,” I supplied, “S-er-k-uh-s.”

  “But — ” she scrunched up her face, “but S says sss!”

  “Right,” I said, “But sometimes C says sss, too.”

  “C says -k-k-k! Like cat.”

  “Well, yeah, but — ” I didn’t know how to explain. “Letters sometimes, like — different sounds can — different letters can sometimes make different sounds.” I took her hand in mine and ran her finger along the underside of the title, “See, this C says sss and then this one says -k. And then the S here — ” I pointed to the word’s terminal letter, “this says sss, like the first C. See?”

  “But how do you know?”

  “How do I know what?”

  “When C says sss and when S says -k?”

  “Well, S doesn’t say -k.”

  She flipped the book over in her lap. “Too hard!”

  Shortly after her tenth birthday, I found Dick in the kitchen, the phone cord strung hazardously across the kitchen to where he sloppily scooped leftover mashed potatoes out of a Tupperware container for our dinner, prattling off a voicemail.

  “ — just letting you know that we’re not interested in having Carly do any, you know, learn
ing tests or whatever. We think she’s fine. So, um, have a good day.”

  Usually, I stayed in my room when Dick was home, under the radar, whereas Carly somehow found a way to always be in Dick’s way. She turned the volume on the stereo too loud. She spilled juice when she tried to pour it. She needed to show them something — the dance she’d created, the painting she’d done at school.

  Dick would swat at her, tell her to “scat.” When she cried, he’d say, “Nobody loves a pussy.”

  “Why do you care what he thinks?” I’d ask, having been enticed by her crocodile tears into braiding her hair or painting her nails.

  “He’s our dad,” she argued, incorrectly.

  His voicemail completed, Dick hung up the phone.

  I needed to know. “Tests for what?”

  “Oh,” he said, casually, untangling his massive chest and stomach from the coils. “The stupid teacher thinks Carly’s a retard.”

  “What?”

  “You know, the teacher thinks Carly has some sort of learning problem. Wants her to do a bunch of tests. IQ tests and that kind of shit. I mean, Jesus, if she can’t figure it out, they should just make her repeat Grade Five, then she’ll wise up. Nothin’ gets fixed by giving kids more attention. They’re all dipshits at that school.” He pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger and then wiped the snot on the hem of his grey T-shirt.

  “Maybe she actually needs help,” I argued.

  He turned away from me, towards the microwave, its dull drone. “Stay out of it. What are you, her mom?”

  &I need you to stop talking to her.

  It’s hurting her too much.

  Well, then you have to let her go.

  You’re killing her.

  &Ryan did not go to the funeral. The day before, I threw up violently, once, and then an hour later, again, and then I couldn’t stop. Patrick, who’d taken up his old bedroom at his parents’ for the week, drove back to my mother’s and took me to my old GP, Dr. Martin, who diagnosed me with food poisoning and took some blood, sliding a needle into the fragile skin on the back of my hand when she couldn’t find a vein in the crook of my elbow.