Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  I didn’t tell him about Carly. She still hadn’t said yes. I needed to convince her first.

  I asked Carly again, at our mother’s house, over sundaes. She stirred her ice cream, the whole thing a smeary mash of hot fudge and candy bits. That morning, her history teacher informed her that she’d failed another exam and would have to do a make-up assignment just to pass the course. I wished she’d told me before I’d arrived. Bad timing.

  “I’m not fucking moving!” She slammed her spoon down on the table; it bounced, flicking ice cream at me. “And if you move away, I’m never going to speak to you again.” When she got up and stomped off to her bedroom, I sat at the table, watching her sundae melt into soup.

  “What’s your sister so pissed about?” My mother shuffled into the kitchen looking like a potato sack in one of Dick’s faded long-sleeved T-shirts, which hung mid-calf.

  I picked up Carly’s ice cream dish and brought it to the sink. “She doesn’t want me to move.” The hot stream of the faucet sucked the remainders of her dessert down the drain.

  My mom leaned back into the counter. “She’s going to miss you. Richard and I are, too.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Mom pushed up the sleeves of her shirt. “You think you’re too good for this family? Ha! You’re one of us, whether you like it or not. Just wait until you come crawling back.”

  Carly’s threat lasted two and a half days. She knocked on my apartment door, her hair frizzy and damp from the rain, and several inches shorter than when I’d seen her last. “I forgot an umbrella,” she announced, dropping several large shopping bags onto my floor. “Do you think my hair’s too short? The hairdresser told me to get a bob. She was like, They’re so trendy! But I miss my long hair!”

  “What’s all this?” I’d missed her; put my phone on vibrate and at the loudest possible volume when I took showers or blow-dried my hair to be sure I wouldn’t miss one of her calls. Apparently, I’d worried for nothing. But all the shopping bags — what the hell?

  “I decided you needed some new clothes for Calgary. I can’t send my sister out west looking like a Toronto hipster.” She squatted down beside the bags and began rooting. A shiny, colourful blouse with metal buttons; a pair of shimmery animal-skin cowboy boots.

  “How did you pay for all of this?” I asked. She was too young to get a credit card, and no way in hell would our mother or Dick co-sign. Then, I knew. Papi had left us each two thousand dollars in his will, with the instruction that it be used towards college. I’d taken Carly down to the bank and started a savings account. Made her promise not to touch the funds until she was eighteen, until it had some time to accrue interest.

  “I don’t even know if I’m going to college. I’m not smart enough,” she’d insisted.

  “You are smart enough. Papi believed in you. That’s what he said this money is for.”

  “I’ll get a job, I can make lots of money between now and then. I really don’t think Papi would mind if I spent some of it on back-to-school shopping.”

  “Trust me,” I said, sliding open the door to the Royal Bank. “You’re going to want this money when you move out.”

  I wondered how much of the original two thousand was left. If any. If this was the first time she’d dipped into her stash.

  Standing in the entrance to my apartment, Carly grinned at me, dangled the bags. “So? What do you think? Am I the best sister or what?”

  &“I think you should see someone.” Conor had his feet up on my coffee table, and I noticed then the thin layer of dust punctuated by Kipling’s paw prints. When had I last cleaned?

  Conor had with him several containers of Chinese food. I had on one of Patrick’s thin white undershirts, one I’d kept after we broke up. That morning I realized it was the only clean shirt I owned, and I technically didn’t even own it. I pulled a blanket off the couch and wrapped it around my shoulders. I’d spun my hair into a greasy ponytail. It was getting long, my bangs had grown out. I pushed the strands behind my ears.

  I exhaled. “Do I really look like I’m in any condition to date?”

  “Not dating,” he corrected. “A counsellor. I’m worried about you.”

  “I went to a counsellor,” I said. “A couple weeks ago. She told me to start exercising.”

  “So you quit?”

  I looked away. “Well? Wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe. But I wouldn’t write off psychologists altogether. Some of them actually know what they’re doing. Like my brother, for example.” He hopped off the couch and began dishing out the stir-fry onto plates.

  I pulled the blanket closer around myself. My stomach growled, waking up to the smell. “But wouldn’t it be weird if I started seeing your brother?”

  “Well, yeah.” Conor surveyed the mess of dishes in my sink. “Not to mention that it’s a dual relationship.”

  “What?”

  “Psychologists aren’t supposed to work with people they’re connected to. It’s in their code of ethics. Plus, he’s a child psychologist. But I can ask him to recommend someone good.”

  “Maybe.” I lifted my hair up off my neck, then dropped it. “I’ll think about it.”

  &As a girl, Carly had loved to play the shadow game, copying everything I said until I blew up at her, screamed at her, called her a little brat, a little shit.

  Carly, I’m serious now, stop it.

  Carly, I’m serious now, stop it.

  CARLY! Leave me alone!

  CARLY! Leave me alone!

  &Just before the Halloween after Carly turned seven, our mother said that she felt sick and needed to rest. For a week, she sat in the bathtub, her flesh white and goose-pimpled, until the water had turned cold and scummy.

  Mom banished Carly from the bathroom, Carly’s animated chatter too much for my mother’s listless brain to bear. Papi had left town for a friend’s funeral. When the lasagne he’d stocked in our fridge ran out, I scraped enough peanut butter out of the bottom of the jar to spread a sandwich for Carly, cut a blackening banana lengthwise, and folded the bread around it.

  “Here, kid, a dessert hot dog.”

  She spun in circles on the living room rug. “I love it, I love it, I love it love it love it love it. . .”

  I thrust it at her. “Take it.”

  I knocked on the bathroom door. No response. I turned the knob. Mom hadn’t even bothered to lock it. She had dark hair on her legs, under her armpits. Her breasts hung down, openly miserable.

  “Who’s going to take Carly out for Halloween?”

  I sat on the closed toilet seat, waiting for a response. Nothing.

  When I came back out of bathroom, Carly had fallen asleep in the middle of the rug, fists clenched, face smeared with peanut butter, as though she’d collapsed mid-spin. She had a pattern of falling asleep in unusual places, like Papi’s kitchen table once, while waiting for cookies to finish baking, and another time in the cart at the grocery store while Mom stacked loaves of bread and boxes of crackers and cans of ravioli around her.

  That night, Mom moved from the bathtub to her bedroom, leaving a trail of damp footprints on the carpet. She stopped in our room, hovered in the doorway in her towel. “G’night.” But Carly had fallen asleep again, despite her afternoon nap. I’d carried her there, tucked her in, still in her clothes, all arms and legs, skinny from her endless energy, her constant kinesthesia. At least she’d gone to bed early. I pretended to be asleep, face towards the wall, lips pressed into a line. When my mother left, I flicked the light back on, pulled my battered copy of The Giver off the dresser, and read myself to sleep.

  In the morning, my alarm hadn’t gone off, but Carly was jumping so violently my bed shook with exhilaration.

  “I got a Halloween costume, Darce, look!”

  I rolled over. She had taken her magic markers and drawn stripes of colour on her skin. Red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, violet. The lines extended up her arms and legs and disappeared beneath her nightgown. Her face was a scribbled
mess.

  “Darcy, Darcy, I’m a rainbow!”

  &I remember the ribboned water, her slippery shoulders, how she reeked of magic marker, the scents mixed with soap: black licorice, cinnamon, evergreen. She’d fought me, splashing vigorously.

  “You’re wrecking my costume!” The bath wasn’t working anyway. Some of the marker had come off her skin, but still, rainbow ink stained her blonde hair. I pulled her out, wrapped her in a towel.

  I couldn’t let her go to school like that. People would think. . .

  “I have a surprise for you!” I told her. “We’re going to have a special day, just you and me. But you can’t tell Mom.”

  “I have a parade!” she insisted.

  “I know. But this will be totally better, I promise.”

  “Ten hundred times better?”

  “Ten hundred times better.”

  I took two twenty-dollar bills from our mother’s wallet. A zombie mother, perfect for Halloween. At the Shoppers Drug Mart on the corner, I bought Carly a witch’s mask with a hood. Behind the plastic, you couldn’t see the rainbow chaos or her streaky hair.

  My mother and I had a similar voice, which made it easy to get us both out of school. Two quick phone calls. Two twenty-four-hour flus.

  I bought Carly a real hot dog, let her smother it with mustard. She raised her cackling witchy face and took an overzealous bite.

  I had enough money left over to take her to the ball pit. Our mother had never taken us to one. I tried to explain. “You know, it’s like a swimming pool, except instead of water, it’s filled with coloured balls.” I couldn’t see her expression behind her mask, but I knew she would love it.

  “This is ten hundred times better!” she bellowed, drawing a few stares from fellow subway riders.

  She stayed in there for four hours, bouncing around, while I read my science textbook to make sure I wasn’t missing anything important before my test on Monday.

  “Darcy! Darcy! Look at me! Look at me!”

  Carly, behind the glass, a blur of colour. I held her mask on my lap, a plastic shell. Inside the ball pit, her messiness didn’t matter.

  We stayed there until it was time for dinner. I used the last of the money and a few dollars from my own wallet to buy her a Happy Meal.

  “Can we go trick-or-treating now?” she begged, her mouth full of fries.

  “Yup.” I stole a sip of her 7UP. My hunger coiled around the sugary tease.

  I hoisted Carly’s heavy loot bag. I’d told her she wasn’t allowed to eat any candy until I got home and checked it out for her, but I’d caved and allowed her to eat a few, sneaking chocolate bars out of the wrappers as she ran up to each house. Candy for dinner. Great.

  “I’m cold,” she whined. Her mask started to slip. I’d forgotten to grab mittens that morning. She slipped her cold little hand into mine.

  On the street in front of us lay the broken, pulpy remains of a Jack-o’-lantern, his skull bashed in.

  “Okay,” I said, “time to go home, little witch.”

  She cackled at me behind her mask. “Mwahahaha! I’ll boil your brains in my cauldron!”

  &I didn’t have a GP in Calgary. While doing my Ed degree, I’d gone to the on-campus clinic for two bad sinus colds and a yeast infection. But getting a family doc meant suffering through lengthy waitlists, and I’d used walk-in clinics since graduation.

  Back in Toronto, I had Dr. Martin, my mother’s doctor. Her husband, also Dr. Martin, had been our pediatrician. Our mother saw Dr. Martin frequently at her office, which happened to be walking distance from our apartment. First, she took us both with her. Then, for a while, just Carly. Then neither of us.

  Dr. Martin says I pulled a muscle in my neck. I’m supposed to rest, so keep quiet and don’t bother me. Stay out of trouble. No running around in here!

  Dr. Martin ran some tests. She thinks I have fibromyalgia. That’s what happens to moms when they’re worn out. Christ!

  Dr. Martin says those headaches that I’ve been getting are actually migraines. That’s why I feel like I’m going to puke all the time, too. She said I should stop eating MSG and take more naps. So, if either of you bother me, you’re going to get it. Keep the TV off!

  I have irritable bowel syndrome! Gives me the runs! I’m not supposed to get stressed. Keep your sister out of my hair. I mean it.

  Irritable. Was that all?

  I wondered what kind of random diagnosis Dr. Martin would have slapped me with.

  The school board referred me to an employment physician, who I met with to gauge my readiness to return to full-time work. I told him that I’d slept two hours in the past three days.

  “Ativan should do the trick,” he said, scrawling his dark signature onto a requisition. “I’m very sorry about your sister’s accident.” Motor vehicle accident. Still not a lie.

  &That Halloween was not the only time I took off with Carly to get a break, even after our mother remarried. Once, Carly climbed onto the countertop, trying to reach the sugary cereal mom hid in the cabinet on top of the fridge behind Dick’s extensive stash of cheap liquor. From my bedroom, I heard the smash at the same time as my mom did. Red wine slithered along the linoleum, soaked into the carpet.

  “Why did you do that?” our mother sobbed. “Richard’s going to kill you! Why do you have to be like this?” Dickhead was working late on a jobsite; he wouldn’t be home for another day.

  “It was an accident,” I said. Shards of glass mingled with the ruby liquid. Our mother covered her face with her hands.

  “I’m sorry! Don’t be mad!” Carly cowered like a baby rhesus monkey on top of the fridge.

  “Get down!” I instructed her. “Come here.”

  My mother surveyed the mess, not moving. “Clean it the fuck up!” she screamed, and stalked off. I heard the slam of her bedroom door.

  Carly bawled. I helped her down off the fridge, but left her perched on the counter. I didn’t want her bare feet anywhere near the glass.

  In high school science class, my teacher had shown us how pouring white wine on red neutralized the stain. But I wasn’t about to open another bottle of Dick’s booze. Most of the spill had stayed on the lino. The carpet was dark enough, the stain fresh enough, that a few paper towels soaked it to the point where I could barely see it. Carly cried. I used the whole roll soaking up the fluid from the kitchen floor. Carly cried. I swept the glass up and dumped it in the kitchen garbage.

  I grabbed both our coats and then Carly’s scrawny wrist and got us the hell out of there. I tossed the garbage out back. We rode the subway as far east as it went, and then back, as far west. Eventually Carly’s hiccupping sobs subsided, and she fell asleep, her little body hot against my lap. Our fucking mother. “Fuck you,” I said under my breath. In our subway car, a teenager rolled a sleeping infant back and forth in a worn stroller.

  Next stop Spadina Station.

  Arriving at Spadina Station.

  When Carly sat up, my zipper had pressed its zigzag imprint into her flushed cheek. It looked like a scratch.

  &Supposedly the Ativan would help me sleep. There’d been a small bottle of Ativan in the bathroom cabinet when I lived with Patrick. In law school he’d begun to have difficulty falling asleep. Sometimes I would get up in the night to pee and he would be lying awake, staring at the ceiling. I’d come back from the bathroom, my toes cold from the linoleum, and he would roll over, irritable.

  “I have to be up in four hours and sixteen minutes,” he’d mutter.

  The Ativan, when Patrick finally caved and got a prescription, did not seem to work. It was supposed to calm him, supposed to make him drowsy enough to sleep. He moved from our bed to the living room and began to read his textbooks there, by the light of a single bulb.

  “You’re going to ruin your eyes,” I said, the first time I woke up alone and wandered out to find him. He had his back to me, his hair askew. I stood behind him for a moment, at the desk, wanting to hug him. Then I changed my mind.

  &On
our first date, I got stitches. As Patrick pulled up to a red light at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, he said, “So I found a spider in the shower last week. I turned the tap on and flushed it down the drain, but every morning now I’m lathering up, and I can’t stop thinking it’s going to crawl out of some crevice.” He had the radio on, the window partially unrolled. He drummed his fingers repetitively against the steering wheel, onetwothreefour, onetwothreefour.

  I put my palm down on his thigh. “You’re afraid of spiders?”

  Then the car leapt forward, on impact, thrust into the intersection. I put my arms out, slammed my elbow and my chin into the dash. I touched my hand to my lip. Blood in my palm made all the lines and grooves of my hand stand out.

  “You okay?” Patrick tried unsuccessfully to push away the airbag. I couldn’t see him.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Let’s get you out,” he said. “Can you open your door?”

  When we met on the street, he said, “Shit, you’re bleeding!” He pulled his T-shirt off and told me to hold it to my face. It smelled of spring and sweat and exhaust. His skin had goose pimples.

  At the hospital, I clenched my fists around his bloody T-shirt while they stitched invisible threads into my lip. He sat beside me on the exam table, his arm around my waist, protectively, which I felt more than I felt the needle inside my lip. The doctor taped the X-ray of my wrist up to the wall and flicked a light on behind it. “We’ll have to put a cast on.”

  I nodded, my lip puffy, my jaw tingling with painkillers.

  When the stitches dissolved, a small purpleblue scar lingered in their place. Carly thought the whole thing was unbelievably romantic.

  “I’m jealous,” she bemoaned.

  “You want a broken wrist?” I asked. I knocked my cast gently against her head. “I have to wear this stupid thing for three weeks, numbskull.”

  “Still jealous,” she repeated. “I want to be rescued, too.”

  &I memorized Patrick. His disdain for receipts (“such a waste of paper”), his regret over an upper back tattoo he got in high school (the Celtic knot for strength and protection). How he liked the window open to cool down the bedroom before falling asleep. How he touched the ceiling of his car every time he drove through a yellow light. How he kept the volume dial of his car only on even numbers. How he drank red wine — dry reds, so bitter they made me shudder. Red wine; good for the heart.