In the backseat, I cringed, hoping Patrick wouldn’t comment. I’d taught her how to drive, for Christ’s sake! I’d taught her never to answer her phone while driving or pack more people into a car than the number of seatbelts. My sister, and the rest of the planet, were safer if Carly took public transit.
What was Patrick thinking as she drove? As she sang off-key and dominated the conversation?
“The yam fries at work are better than the regular fries, but they cost a dollar more. But Ryan and I get a 50-percent-off employee discount. Remember how Mom would always bring home fries, Darce?”
I smelled deep fry. “That pedestrian had the right of way.”
“I wish Mom had brought home yam fries, back in the day. They’re better for you, too, less, um, you know. . .”
“Starch,” Ryan supplemented.
Patrick sat fussy and tight-lipped in the backseat, flinching whenever Carly slid through a stop sign, answering questions with single words, squirming because of a discarded, grease-spotted cardboard fast food container at his feet.
“Sorry, we’re out of sorts,” I explained, trying to make amends for me and Patrick, even though technically, Patrick had slept the entire plane ride, and I wasn’t being difficult. When we arrived at Ryan and Carly’s apartment — Ryan smiling and unperturbed, and me, thankful that we’d all escaped with our lives — Carly lifted our bags out of the trunk. She shifted her eyes first towards Patrick and then towards me as if to say, “What’s his problem?”
I missed the easygoing Patrick I’d dated back in Toronto. The stress of law school, of living in a new city, of the two of us living together and adjusting to each other’s idiosyncrasies would all be over soon. I hoped.
I loved them both. But seeing each through the other’s eyes, their flaws magnified. The hot sun beamed too bright against my face.
In all honesty, when I look back on that trip, I don’t remember much of Ryan at all.
&Prior to Anderson’s wedding, the only wedding I’d ever attended was my mother and Dick’s. During the reception, Carly and the ring bearer chased each other around in the basement of the hall with their hands smeared with liquid soap residue, threatening to ruin each others’ formal attire. I sat sulking in the corner picking at my plate of smelly hors d’oeuvres, strange hairy vegetables wrapped in shaved meat. I scratched my itchy nylons.
My own parents had tied the knot because my mother had found out she was pregnant with me. Nothing like a shotgun wedding because someone got knocked up. How stupid, I wondered, did one have to be to get pregnant by accident? All kinds of people, like Aubrey’s parents, tried and tried for a baby for years. We went to Catholic school, which prohibited education about any kind of prophylactics, but, when we were twelve, Aubrey bought some condoms at the shifty little variety store on the corner where the man behind the counter didn’t ask questions. We’d stretched them over a few bananas, then got bored and decided to see whether they would fit over different kinds of fruit. We succeeded with kiwi and apple, but failed with a fairly large mango, our hands slimy with lubricant.
By the time I lost my virginity, Aubrey had already slept with five “boys” whom she often spoke of as packages of ham or containers of yogurt — with expiry dates. “Things are just going sour,” she would announce, seemingly out of nowhere, while I worried about whether I would know how to have sex or not. Aubrey took to calling me “Leo,” in reference to a children’s book about a tiger we’d once read to Carly, Leo the Late Bloomer.
“Better late than never, Leo,” Aubrey had taken to teasing. The Catholic in me wanted to call her out on her promiscuity. But, in university together, over coffee or during breaks between classes, she’d talk about her latest assignment and then I’d ask how things were going with her latest guy.
“Oh, did I not tell you?” She’d bite down on her flax/protein/ whole grain granola bar. “Jason’s out. What kind of guy wears socks with sandals?”
The day before I had to go back to work for the first time since Carly died, when I was at home in bed having a panic attack about the responsibility of twenty-nine innocent eleven- and twelve-year-olds, Aubrey phoned. She opened the conversation with, “I have something to tell you. I’m engaged.”
I hadn’t even known she had a boyfriend. She hadn’t brought anyone to the funeral.
When I asked, she said, “Well, I didn’t tell you about it.”
“How — how long?”
“Since February.”
The date made things fall together. “You didn’t tell me because of — ”
“It wasn’t the greatest timing.”
“It’s been. . .six months!”
My sister — dead for six months.
“Seven,” Aubrey corrected. “And I was going to tell you, but at first it just felt inappropriate to talk about my love life, and then you got kind of stuck. When I called, you barely talked. I could only get one-word answers out of you. And, you never asked how I was, or if anything was new with me.”
I bit my lip, hard. “Stuck? Aubrey, my sister killed herself. ”
“Hey,” she said. “when Carly died. . .you’re not the only one who was affected. I still get nauseous every time think about her, like all the stupid songs she would sing. They get stuck in my head. But there are other things going on in the world, too. I’m getting married.”
I pulled my blanket up over my head.
“Say something,” Aubrey insisted.
“I didn’t think you wanted to get married. When we were kids, we always said we were going to boycott marriage.”
“When we were kids,” she repeated. “People change.”
I could not fathom feeling any sort of excitement or pleasure. The ingredients with which to make such emotions did not exist inside me anymore.
“Thanks,” Aubrey said, after a moment of silence. “You know, you could have at least been happy for me. You could have at least tried.”
&To try to keep Patrick sane during law school, I started making his lunch every day: bagels with cream cheese, mini Tupperware containers filled with cherry tomatoes and celery, a Ziploc baggie of pretzels. In elementary school, Aubrey’s mom scrawled notes on napkins and tucked them into Aubrey’s paper lunch bags. Aubrey scrapped them into the garbage can, rolling her eyes. “My mom — the cheeseball.”
After work, Patrick spent a good hour cleaning per a daily schedule. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he’d vacuum and clean the kitchen; Tuesdays and Thursdays he’d clean the bathroom. After cleaning, regardless of the task, he’d take a shower. I tried to sneak in with him, surprise him. He was surprised, but not in a good way.
“Can I have some privacy, please?” He blocked the entrance to the shower with his arm. Water streamed into his hair and ran into his eyes. He shook his head. The soft droplets tingled cold against my naked skin. I went and lay down in our bed with a book, but not before getting dressed.
I started cleaning the house before he’d get home, according to his chore schedule. Carly called twice while I vacuumed; I didn’t hear it the first time, and then only caught the last ring of the second call.
“Why didn’t you pick up?” she whined, when I called her back.
“I was vacuuming.” I wound the vacuum cord around its base, then wondered if I should have emptied it first. Dust filled only half the canister, but I imagined the dirt still driving Patrick nuts.
“What a waste of time. You should just relax. Vacuuming sucks.” She laughed at her own joke.
I opened the fridge, surveying the contents to see what I could put in Patrick’s lunch the next day.
“I’m bored,” Carly whined. “Entertain me.”
Cheese. Bread. Slightly wilted lettuce. “I’m making Patrick’s lunch,” I told her.
“Boring. You clean for him, you make his lunch. You make a good mom.”
Had the ham Patrick carefully sealed in a Ziploc baggie expired? I tried to recall when we’d purchased it. “I like taking care of him,” I told Carly, balancing my pho
ne between my ear and shoulder.
Carly laughed. “We’re so different.”
“How so?”
“I’d just so much rather be the one being taken care of. ”
&Aubrey had said, There are other things going on in the world, too. I turned off the TV when the news came on, tore up Aubrey’s save-the-date card when it arrived. Walked past last year’s lesson plans — boxed in my closet — but refused to take them out, to look at them.
Carly thought the whole world revolved around her. My whole world did. So why hadn’t the world stopped?
I couldn’t sleep the night before school started. I’d forced myself to go back through the curriculum in August, but teaching sixth grade again meant my lesson plans from the previous year would suffice. “We have a couple weeks before school starts,” Conor had reminded me. “Use this time to relax. You’re going to need it.”
I poured myself a bath, but the water almost scalded my fingers. Distracted by a series of photos of Carly on my computer, by the time I went back to check the temperature, the bubbles had flattened and the water felt tepid to the touch.
On the first day of school, I arrived bleary-eyed, but insomnia had made me get up early, straighten my hair, iron a blouse, and put on makeup. I looked like a human being.
At lunch, I found a seat beside Conor at the staff meeting. He scribbled an illegible note to himself on a notepad in front of him, then elbowed me. “I have to talk to you.” Somehow, coming from Conor, it didn’t carry the same valence as when Aubrey had said exactly the same thing.
Before Conor could tell me what he wanted to talk about, though, our principal launched into a welcome-back speech, during which he glanced in my direction and commented, “And we welcome back Ms. Nolan, who took leave for the latter part of last year for personal reasons.” The one or two teachers new to St. Sebastian glanced up from their coffees. As a new teacher, talk of “leaves” always elicited a strange mixture of curiosity, feelings of superiority, and anxious dread. None of us wanted to believe that we would collapse under the pressure.
Once, when I was in the sixth grade, my entire class had colluded to drive a substitute teacher to her breaking point. The class ringleader, a girl whose glossy chocolate hair I envied, masterminded a plot of pen-clicking, desk-doodling, name changes, seat changes, incessant requests to go to the bathroom, homework refusal, and faking sick. The substitute tried effecting a week of lunch-hour detentions, though that just trapped her with us longer. After a solid week of hoping our regular teacher would recover from whatever ailment had rendered us with this incompetent, overweight twentysomething, Alicia Penner randomly began a chorus of “The Song That Doesn’t End,” and we all chimed in. Our substitute stood at the front of the room holding a math text to her chest for a good three rounds of the song before slamming the textbook on her desk and darting out of the room. I balled my left hand into a fist, pressed all the nails into my palm until it hurt. What had the substitute ever done to Alicia? Why was I still singing? Somebody started singing it, not knowing what it was, and they’ll continue singing it, forever, just because —
Conor followed me out of the staff meeting into the hallway, jovially putting his giant basketball dribbling hands on my shoulders, almost pushing me forward into a scrappy fourth-grader with his head down, digging a king-sized Snickers bar out of his lunch bag. “What good are all my lectures on healthy food groups when parents keep packing their lunches with C-R-A-P?” Conor asked.
“You know,” I said, “some of these kids can actually spell. At least, I hope so. If I’m doing my job properly.”
He released his grip on me. “Sorry.”
“What did you want to tell me?” I yawned, lifted my hair off my neck for a moment. It had grown long and unruly over the summer; straightened, it looked even longer. I wished I’d brought a hair elastic.
“Right!” Conor scratched a spot in his ear, “Yeah, that. So, I was talking to my brother yesterday, and he said you guys had lunch?”
I’d run into Joel again, after a follow-up doctor’s appointment. After my embarrassing behaviour when we’d first met, I couldn’t turn down his second invitation, though I sensed pity behind it. We sat in a corner table, next to a window, and under a surprisingly chilly air conditioner that mocked the summer scene outside. Joel apologized to me on behalf of the Italian wedding soup I’d purchased. He continued to purchase his lunch at the café despite the remarkably pitiful cuisine, he said, because he barely had time to eat in-between clients. He had one client who had an annoying habit of trashing his play room, which forced him to spend his lunch hour tidying for the next client, a little girl with an anxiety disorder who got upset if the toys weren’t in the correct places.
“I really have to stop scheduling them back to back,” he confessed. Why was he taking an hour-long lunch to eat crappy soup with me?
“So,” Conor said, “was it a date?”
“No.” A headache had started to build behind my eyes. “He and my doctor work in the same office building.”
When Joel had made a joke about the soup, his smile revealing a slight dimple in his left cheek, a tiny physical trait he did not share with his brother, Carly’s voice popped into my head.
“He is hot! You should ask him out.”
Conor absently scratched his ear. “Shame. Don’t tell my brother that. You’ll bum him out.”
“Why?”
“He brought your name up five times yesterday, out of nowhere. So, how long have you known her? She’s teaching Grade Six again this year? Does she have a boyfriend? I think Patrick should be jealous, don’t you?”
&A month after going back to teaching, the school psychologist at St. Sebastian knocked on my door and poked her head in, just as I started packing up my belongings for the day. I slid a stack of ungraded tests into my backpack. Why had she come? Someone on the staff must have mentioned something. Could she tell I’d been white-knuckling my job for the last twenty-two days? I pressed the thumbnail of my left hand into the palm of my right, under the desk.
“Got a sec?” She didn’t wait for my answer.
We’d met once the previous school year. Stephanie. Stephanie something. When she’d shaken my hand the first time, I’d thought about Stefany Beale, who adored the colour orange, who loved rollerblading, who had a small strawberry birthmark on her left side, only visible when she raised her arm. Carly had sported a birthmark, too, a pale, watery blotch barely visible, a sun spot on her right inner forearm. Stefany’s mom called her Peanut. Stefany Beale: obviously dead. She’d probably been killed within the first day or so. Strangled, maybe. Or stabbed. What was left her after so long? Somebody’s Peanut, dead somewhere, probably buried. Maybe people walked over her remains all the time.
Stephanie, psychologist Stephanie, dragged a chair up in front of my desk. “So, I just wanted to drop by and have a quick chat about one of your students. Celina. . .uh, Janik?”
She pronounced it wrong — Yan-eek, not Jan-ick. I didn’t bother correcting her, as Celina often didn’t. I’d pronounced it wrong the first three days when doing roll call until one of Celina’s friends finally pointed it out to me after class. Celina was one of my quieter students, tiny and dark-haired with rainbow elastics around her braces. She rarely raised her hand, but when she did, she always knew the answers. When I’d asked the class on the first day to hand in a paragraph or two telling me about themselves, Celina had written a list of facts about everyone else in her life. Her parents, her sisters, her pet parakeets, Topsy and Turvy.
“Anyway, I got a call from Mrs. Janik — apparently Celina’s dad walked out about a week ago. Just up and left, no contact information, nothing. She hasn’t been able to reach him, and he disconnected his cell phone. She’s pretty worried about Celina, and the younger siblings. Three other kids, I think.”
“Two,” I said. “Two more girls.”
“Right. Anyway, I just thought I’d mention it, so you could keep an eye out for Celina over the next l
ittle while, let me know if you notice any unusual behaviour. Sounds like Mrs. Janik has her hands full — three girls! Yikes. Apparently the youngest one has asthma and ends up in the hospital quite a bit. I don’t get that. How someone could just walk out on his kids, especially a sick one? How would he know if anything bad happened to her?”
&Not too long after he and my mother got remarried, Dick got pissed off at Carly because she kept getting up out of bed to use the bathroom and then couldn’t fall asleep. After the third time, he took one of his leather belts and laid it across the threshold of her bedroom door.
“The next time you get up, you’re gonna get the strap.”
In the morning, Carly had a fever and started urinating blood; turns out, she had a urinary tract infection. Dickhead bought her a popsicle and a litre of cranberry cocktail, let her lie on the couch all day watching cartoons. But two days later, he lost it on her again for putting an empty cracker box back into the cupboard.
A month later, he brought home an audio recorder from work and threatened to record Carly during one of her meltdowns, told her he would go play it for Child and Family Services so they could go find someone else to deal with her, and she’d never get to see me or Mom again.
Later, I snuck into her bedroom and told her that if he ever did something like that, Child and Family Services wouldn’t take her away, they would arrest him. She cried into her raccoon. “Maybe not. Maybe I’m just a stupid pussy nobody loves.”
“I love you,” I insisted. I should tell her more often, I thought. Poor kid didn’t hear it enough.
“No you don’t,” she snuffled. “You would leave me, too, if you could.”
&I hadn’t slept before Meet the Parents night at St. Sebastian. Under the fluorescent lights of the staff bathroom, I tried to apply makeup to the dark circles under my eyes, but couldn’t cover the blotches entirely. I’d worn torn nylons all day without noticing. I peeled them off, running a hand over my shins to see how long it had been since I’d last shaved my legs. One felt smooth, the other, bristly. Good job, Darce.
Someone had left glazed donuts in the staff lounge, which would have to do for dinner. I’d booked my appointments starting right after dismissal so that I could get them over with. The whole parent-teacher thing took up three after-school evenings in a row. I had twenty-seven students in my class, nine of whom had parents in contentious divorces and who’d booked separate appointments. Fifteen minutes each meant an almost seven-hour commitment — and experience had taught me that parents always blabbered over their allotted time. In the past, I’d aimed to have at least one parent show up for each child in the class. This year, the parents who didn’t bother put me one step closer to sleep.
Swallow Page 15