Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  Papi sipped his coffee slowly while I made my proposal. I rambled on and on about how I was totally prepared, how I’d basically taken care of Carly for years already.

  When he finally spoke, he cupped his hands around his mug, as if to keep them warm. “Darcy, that’s very generous of you, and I think you’re a wonderful big sister. But your mother is not going to let Carly move in with you. Carly is her daughter.”

  “My mom doesn’t care about Carly,” I blurted. “She barely pays attention to her. And Richard treats her like crap. They’d probably love it if I took Carly off their hands. Then my mom could stop bitching about all her headaches and stomachaches and stuff. She resents having kids in the first place.”

  “That’s a harsh assessment.”

  I sat back in my chair and took a large sip, scalding the top of my mouth. My tongue felt fuzzy. “I can’t leave her there!”

  “Yes,” he said, “I know it feels like you can’t move out without your sister, and I know you worry about her. But Darcy, I feel — ” he paused. “Please don’t be offended by what I am about to say.”

  My mouth tasted awful.

  “Darcy, I’m worried — I know it’s hard to picture your sister staying where you think she is unhappy while you move forward. But you need to have your own life, too. It is time for you to move out and think about yourself. As an adult, you need to find yourself, discover what kind of career you want, find someone you want to spend your life with. You can’t let your sister hold you back from that. You deserve it, too.”

  “I can do all of that! And raise Carly.”

  He sipped his coffee again. So calm. My fingers danced in my lap, twisted the edge of my shirt into a knot.

  “You’re too young to have an eleven-year-old daughter,” he added.

  “Then you take her!” It sounded desperate. I put my hands flat on the table to steady them. “I can’t just leave her there.”

  “I’m too old to have an eleven-year-old daughter.” He put one of his soft hands over mine. “I know how hard it is for you to watch your sister struggle. And I know you disagree with the way your mother parents. But Carly is your mother’s child, and like it or not, she gets to decide how to parent her. You made it through without the protection of a big sister.”

  “But I’m not Carly!” I insisted. “I made it through, but that doesn’t mean she will.”

  “Right,” he said. “You’re not Carly. And now it is time to be Darcy.”

  &After I was born, I was checked out in the NICU because I arrived prematurely, but the only noticeable symptom was jaundice. Premature, but with a birth-weight of six pounds, and fully developed lungs. Sometimes I wondered whether my mother simply failed to accurately remember my date of conception.

  She’d once wished Carly a happy birthday a full week before the actual date. “My birthday came early?” Carly shrieked. Explaining that it actually hadn’t? Fun.

  One Mother’s Day, Carly woke up early and made a breakfast omelette with a face in it. Mom wandered in, then began picking up all the ingredients: broken eggshells, onion peel, an empty milk carton. She held up the cheese grater. “What’s going on? What’s wrong? You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  Mom missed work shifts, went at the wrong times. She got fired from one job, and went on unemployment insurance. One Saturday, she ran panicked into our bedroom at five o’clock in the morning, screaming at us, “Get up! Get up! You’re going to be late for school.”

  She couldn’t find her keys. She forgot to pay bills and tickets on time. She misplaced Carly’s birth certificate. When prescribed painkillers for the various changing ailments Dr. Martin discovered, Mom forgot to take them, despite complaining about how unbearably she ached. She virtually never remembered to give Carly multivitamins, and could not remember the appropriate dosage for over the counter cough syrups. Instead, I poured the purple liquid into our shallow kitchen spoons, trying to balance it so that it wouldn’t spill while Carly coughed and sneezed and protested.

  In the midst of a common cold that had turned into an ear infection and kidnapped my voice, I thought about Carly, having a hot and humid Toronto summer fling with her new boyfriend, Ryan. Carly, almost the same age as our mother when our mother conceived me. Carly was going to do something stupid. She was already doing something stupid.

  I’d finished the first year of my Education degree several months earlier, and worked full-time that summer as a receptionist at a doctor’s office to supplement my income and student loans. Probably a bad idea, in retrospect: exposing myself to all those germs with my crappy immune system. I’d started feeling sick the previous Thursday, and the office was closed Friday for the Canada Day long weekend. Patrick had accepted a summer job at a law firm and worked sixty-plus hours a week. Despite the summer heat, the apartment felt unpleasantly cold. I peeled the sheets away from myself and stood in the shower, shivering under the hot stream, chilled to the core. My nipples stood at attention, my body refusing to warm. After a nap, I thought, I would go to a walk-in clinic and get a prescription for some antibiotics. The university clinic wasn’t open on weekends.

  I settled myself on the couch but couldn’t fall asleep, even with two Tylenol and bits of Kleenex shoved in my ears and a towel wrapped around my wet hair. Carly had met Ryan just over a week before, a new hire at The Upstairs Basement, the restaurant where she bused tables, still too young to actually waitress. I wanted her to focus on school, but Dick had told her that he wasn’t going to pay for her to go to the movies or buy clothes anymore. He hadn’t gone to college, and didn’t care if Carly did either.

  Carly told me she thought Ryan looked gorgeous — but I couldn’t form a mental picture of him, what with all her conflicting adjectives. His hair was both “muddy” and “goldy,” he was “short” and “muscly” and “athletic” and “fragile.” He had facial hair, she said, and the first time they’d made out it had chafed her skin, leaving her nose and chin red. “I think everybody at work could tell something was going on,” she said, clearly thrilled to be the centre of gossip. “My new nickname is Rudolph. Like, the red-nosed reindeer?”

  By the end of that first week she told me a story about them passing a jewellery store on Bay Street and how she couldn’t stop ogling the engagement rings.

  She hadn’t called me that day, or the day before, but I couldn’t stay awake to phone her, couldn’t make my vocal chords work. I drifted off into a tipsy, uneven sleep, dreaming of Carly: pregnant, sweaty, screaming, and in labour. When her baby came out, it looked exactly like she had as an infant, with fluffs of blond hair. But then, the baby writhed in my hands, and I looked down, looked at my infant in my arms. I’d just given birth, to my own sister. Baby Carly screamed, squeezing her eyes together and balling her tiny fists in fury. Love me! Pay attention to me! You’re not doing a good enough job!

  I woke up to Patrick, arriving home. He dropped his knapsack down on the floor, which startled me out of my mucousy sleep.

  “What time is it?” I croaked, disoriented.

  “Nine,” he said. “How long did you sleep?”

  My throat ached. “I don’t remember.”

  He heated some soup up on the stove, and then, while it cooled, drove to the drug store to find something over the counter and stronger than what we had at home. “I don’t want to sit with you at the walk-in all night,” he’d said. “This time of night, we’d wait for hours. Hospitals have so many germs. . .”

  “It’s going to get worse,” I argued.

  “Antibiotics just build our resistance and make infectious diseases stronger.”

  By Monday, whatever I’d managed to contract seemed to be clearing up by itself, but my boss told me not to come to work, to take an extra day and make sure I was 100 percent. When Patrick went to leave for work around six AM, and I dragged myself to the door with a blanket around my shoulders, stood on my tiptoes to kiss him goodbye.

  He turned his face away. “You’re still not well enough.”

>   He’d slept on the couch since I’d started sniffling. After my nap, he’d sprayed the couch with disinfectant and quarantined me to the bedroom, hauling in the TV and balancing it on the dresser for me to watch.

  “I can’t be sick with my job right now,” he reasoned. The house stank so strongly of lemon cleanser that I could smell it even with my blocked nasal passages.

  Back in bed, I finally gave Carly a call. Four days had elapsed, probably the longest we’d ever gone without speaking. I sensed anger in her avoidance. She’d once gone on a talking strike after our mother yelled at her, refusing to speak, hoping, perhaps, that Mom would apologize. It didn’t work, both because our mother simply went on cleaning, and because Carly barely held out half an hour. After pouting around with her arms crossed dramatically, huffing loudly, she finally gave up, exclaiming, “I hate you!” and then came to find me.

  “Will you play Candy Land with me?”

  “No, I’m doing homework.”

  “How about Operation?”

  “Carly! Leave me alone!”

  When she answered my phone call, she said, “Shhh! Ryan’s sleeping!”

  “Where are you?” I blew my nose.

  “Just a sec, I’m going into the living room. You sound like shit! Bad cold?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, that’s why I haven’t called. You mad at me?”

  “What?” She sounded baffled, her voice still thick with sleep. “Sorry, we went out last night with Gemma and her boyfriend and then we were up all night talking. Ryan’s grandparents went out of town for the weekend. Mom thinks I’m staying at Kelsey’s. Did you know Ryan is double-jointed and he can make tiramisu? And he’s thinking of getting his own place! On Saturday, I had this terrible headache, I think it was a migraine like Mom gets. It was kinda like my head was being pounded with hammers. Or squeezed in one of those things, one of those things that kinda like, pinches — ”

  “A vise.”

  “And before that, I’d had a terrible day at work, where a customer spilled wine all over my favourite sweater and then I cried in front of everyone! I think that’s why the migraine came on. Anyway, Ryan stayed in bed with me all night, and held a wet cloth to my forehead, and then when my headache had finally got better, he was like, Babe — that’s what he calls me, Babe — he was like, Babe, you need some dessert. So — ”

  “So he made you tiramisu.”

  She laughed. “No. He didn’t have all the ingredients, but he did have these chocolate pudding cups. So we ate these pudding cups, and they tasted awful — they’d expired like, six months ago! We were just in bed, sitting there, eating rotten pudding! So funny. Totally cheered me up. I love him so much.”

  &I heard the noise above my bedroom — yelling, name-calling, swearing. Fuck sounded the same through floorboards as it did directly coming out of my mother’s mouth. When we first moved into Dick’s house, the noises through the floorboards were often directed at Carly: yelling, reprimanding, sometimes a spank or a smack. And always, Carly’s cries.

  But that night, Carly had already gone to bed, and I was in my pyjamas, studying for a final exam.

  Maybe, I thought, if they fight with each other enough, she’ll leave him. She’ll leave him, and we can go back to —

  My mom leaned in the doorway to my bedroom, a jittery shadow. “We’re going out.”

  “You and Richard?”

  “Fuck Richard.” Her eyes darted away. “Get dressed. I’ll get your sister.”

  Carly slid her flip-flops on in the doorway, pulled back her tangled hair in an elastic band. “Where are we going?”

  The sun had started to dangle longer in the sky before descending into night as spring slithered into summer. Carly and I both had major exams coming up before summer could really start; my Grade Twelve final exams and Carly’s Grade Six EQAOs. I tutored her in math while struggling to stay on top of my own math curriculum. I’d already decided to major in English. Our father had gone to business school, which I imagined involved lots of math; apparently, neither Carly nor I had inherited his genes. Maybe for the better.

  We rode the subway south to King Street, got off, and started walking.

  Mom strode quickly on a pair of old high heels I vaguely remembered, almost tripping in a sewer grate. “Three girls going out for a nice meal. Well, look at us!”

  Carly trotted behind her, trying to keep up.

  I’d eaten at the restaurant where we finally stopped once before, for Aubrey’s sweet sixteen. Her mother had ordered sparkling lemon sodas for me, Aubrey, and Aubrey’s cousins, and an appetizer platter of prosciutto and brie. All the desserts had Italian names: Frutti, Nocciola, Tiramisu.

  Way out of our price range.

  “I can’t read this menu,” Carly complained, as the waiter carried a tray of savoury pizzas past our table. “Ooh, pizza! Do you think they have pepperoni?”

  The pizza made its way to a table where a young woman with long, dark waves of hair sat breastfeeding a small infant obscured by a pink and white appliqué blanket.

  My mother scoffed.

  Carly looked up from her menu. “What?”

  “Breastfeeding in public!” My mother tore apart a piece of bread from the basket in the middle of our table. “I mean, have some decency.”

  “You breastfed Carly,” I pointed out.

  My mother put the bread in her mouth. “I breastfed you both,” she corrected, while chewing. “But not in public. And not a day longer than I had to. If we’d had money back then, I would have bottle fed from the start.”

  Her voice carried, too loud for the ambiance of the restaurant. I watched the mother with the pizza to see if she’d noticed. She lifted her long hair and draped it over the shoulder opposite her infant.

  “Why?” Carly wanted to know.

  My mother raised her eyebrows. “You want a kid chewing on your nipples?” She’d eaten her way through three slices of bread. When our waitress returned, Mom ordered lamb ragout. I cringed. I’d planned to order the same thing. Instead, I ordered what Carly was having.

  When the bill came, Carly said she needed to pee — also, too loudly — and sauntered off to the bathroom. My mother rooted through her purse. “You got any change on you?” she asked me.

  I had a couple twenties that I hadn’t deposited yet from babysitting for a few families Aubrey had outgrown. Aubrey was about to start a summer internship with her father’s company; until then, she’d abandoned all part-time jobs to study for finals. Aubrey had consistently trounced me in the grades department since we were kids; all As to my Bs. But I didn’t have a father whose company would pay my way through university. After being accepted to the University of Toronto’s English program, I’d filled out paperwork for as much money in student loans as I could get approved for.

  My mother slid the bill my way. “I think you should pay for your own meal. It’s about time you started contributing. You take advantage of Richard’s generosity, you know, supporting two kids that aren’t even his. I don’t think you should feel entitled to a free ride.”

  I pulled a twenty from my wallet.

  “I’m moving out,” I said. I hadn’t told her yet. “In the fall. For university.”

  She shoved another piece of bread in her mouth.

  Ran her tongue over her teeth.

  Swallowed.

  “Good,” she said.

  Until then, I hadn’t completely made up my mind.

  But then, I’d said it out loud.

  &I expected Carly to freak out at the idea of me moving out. Instead, she ran around my empty 500-square-foot bachelor pad. “You should put your desk over here. . .no, the bed over here, and the bookshelf in that corner.” Spatially, my furniture really only fit one possible configuration.

  Carly helped me assemble my single bed and desk, taped my posters up crookedly, and surprised me by spending her allowance on a tiny potted plant, so I wouldn’t be so lonely.

  “You can come over whenever you want,” I told her.

&
nbsp; “I know,” she chirped. She flopped down on my bed, starfish style, with her head hanging upside down. “I wish I had my own apartment. You’re so lucky.”

  &Ryan was on the short side for a guy — short and broad, with the kind of brown hair that had faded from childhood blond, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow.

  I flew back for a visit the summer they started dating, and part of me assumed they would break up by the time I got there.

  Patrick’s cousin Anderson had invited us to his wedding, and the bride insisted I come to her bachelorette party, which was on the Friday before the ceremony. Patrick and I booked the Friday and Monday off work and flew out at the ungodly hour of four AM. Friday morning. Patrick hated flying because it meant being confined in a small space with so many people. He claimed that fewer people flew the red eye. I let him sit by the window, because he whispered that the person on the aisle looked contagious. He’d gotten a new prescription for sleeping pills just before the flight, and he popped twice the recommended dosage as soon as we boarded. Before we even ascended, he dozed off, his neck cradled in a semicircular airline pillow. I wondered if the new pills would work once we got back home.

  I stayed wide awake.

  Carly and Ryan met us at the airport, Carly hugging me while jingling the keys to Ryan’s car. Her hair looked tousled, as though she’d ran from the parking lot, and she danced around us, talking loudly, gesticulating with her hands.

  Carly didn’t drink, but behind the wheel, one would have imagined her to be intoxicated.

  “Where’s the turn? Did I miss it?” She impulsively pulled a U-turn while Patrick and I tensed our bodies in automatic anticipation of a crash. She sang along with the radio and began to move the wheel in time to the beat without realizing it, causing the car to fishtail.