Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  Twinkle, twinkle,

  Little star

  How I wonder

  — Today is February 5th.

  Seven hundred and twenty-one days.

  &The epidural numbs me, and I’m alone.

  My mother says she needs to go for a walk, to get some fresh air.

  “It’s the smell,” she tells me, and I don’t know what she means, and then I do — the smell of hospitals.

  After the anesthesiologist put my epidural in, Conor fell asleep. The sky has blossomed pink with morning, Carly’s favourite colour. When he woke, Conor went to see if he could find some semi-decent cafeteria food. I think of having Italian wedding soup with his brother. Waking up, they look exactly the same.

  I sleep. Carly and I walk together in the sun. One long shadow, one little shadow. I don’t know how long I sleep for. Maybe only minutes.

  A faint line runs along the side of my hip, about an inch long. It’s the scar from when I was a child, when I tried to wrangle one of Papi’s still feral cats. But when my body started to change, and my skin started to shift, the scar opened up and stretched out. It’s no longer the only scar on my body. There’s the slight discolouration on my lip left from my first date with Patrick, and now the dappled stretch marks of pregnancy.

  When Conor returns, I say, “I want to show you something.”

  “Everything okay?” he says.

  “Yeah. But look, do you see this line?” I lean to the right, shifting my weight, hospital gown bunched around my middle, blanket pulled up to my waist.

  He rubs his eyes. “I shouldn’t sleep with my contacts in. Everything’s kind of a blur.”

  I swallow. “What?”

  “I said everything’s a blur.”

  It’s cold in here; I can feel the air slip under the gaps in my gown to the bare skin underneath, run up the back of my neck.

  Conor says, “What? Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “you just reminded me — the morning Carly died, she sent me this text message. I didn’t get it because I wasn’t awake yet. I never figured out what it meant.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Always blur.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I know. I never figured it out. It kills me.” The monitors spike, the rumblings of a contraction I can’t feel. I’m getting closer, now. She’s getting closer.

  Conor sits down on the chair beside the bed.

  “Always blur?”

  “Yeah. It makes no sense.” The monitor spikes, indicating pain and contraction I can’t feel.

  “Maybe that’s not what she meant to type.”

  My mouth feels dry. “What do you mean?”

  “I never send text messages, because when I try to, I always type the wrong thing. I either spell something wrong or my phone corrects me. One time I typed an email on my BlackBerry to a parent, and I typed the word hat, except the phone picked it up and changed it to ‘gay.’ Same keystrokes, apparently.” He slips his phone out of his back pocket, fiddles with the keys. “Okay, the word always is probably right, but blur doesn’t make sense to me, so let’s see what else she meant.” He types for a few seconds, muttering to himself. “Blue? Always blue? No, that doesn’t make sense either.”

  I stiffen. “Oh my god.”

  “What?”

  “Always blue. . .that’s — she used to say that, sometimes. It was her way of asking if — it was like saying, do you love me? The answer was, I always love you, just like the sky is always blue.” I’m crying and trying to sit up, trying to get out of here.

  “Hey, hey — just breathe,” Conor says. “Just breathe, just relax.”

  “She wanted to know if I still loved her,” I say. “And she died because of me, it’s my fault.” My hands form fists. I try to breathe. “She jumped — she jumped because Ryan didn’t call her back, she thought for sure he would call back on Valentine’s Day, but I told him not to, I told him he had to stop calling her — ”

  “Who’s Ryan?”

  “Her boyfriend, her ex-boyfriend. He broke up with her! She couldn’t stop crying, she got so depressed, I didn’t think she would ever get over him, ever move forward. I told him. . .I told him to stop calling her, and he did. And then she killed herself. She died. Because of me, because of. . .because of what I did!”

  “Darcy!” Conor puts his face close to mine, puts his hands on my shoulders. “Calm down. Listen to me, okay? You told Ryan to stop calling her because you wanted her to feel better. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t know. You couldn’t have predicted what would happen. When my college boyfriend broke up with me, Joel told me I was an idiot for staying in touch with him — he said it was like picking a scab open.”

  “But you’re not Carly!” I can’t explain.

  “People don’t jump in front of a subway because of one thing. People who commit suicide. . .usually there’s a history of other issues, like depression. Your mom attempted suicide, too — that kind of thing, that kind of depression runs in families.”

  “I didn’t know what else I could do. I went out there, I stayed with her, I tried to cheer her up, I tried to — but she just — she wouldn’t. . .” The monitor surges. She’s too close. Too close.

  “You need to calm down,” Conor says. “You’re getting too worked up, this is going to put stress on the baby.” He climbs into the bed beside me, on the very edge, puts one arm around my shoulders. Squeezes. “Did you ever tell you anyone what you just told me?”

  I shake my head.

  “I know it feels like it’s your fault, but there are so many factors. Maybe what you said or did had something to do with it, or maybe it didn’t. Probably she would have tried to hurt herself anyway. Maybe something else happened in-between when you told Ryan not to call her and when she actually did what she did. But you were trying to help her. You know how much you loved her.”

  I turn my face away from him. We lie there, breathing together. Inside me, Ava shifts, breaking the stillness. She’s too big now; there’s nowhere for her to move. Each contraction pushes her down more and more. The only way is out.

  “Hey,” Conor says, after a moment. “How do you know she was asking if you still loved her? Maybe. . .maybe she was trying to say she would always love you.”

  There was an old lady who swallowed a horse—

  She’s dead, of course.

  &When the dishwasher buzzes, I leave Ava on her back on the living room floor, spread out on one of the towels I haven’t had a chance to fold yet. Three generations of laundry; Ava’s, mine, and my mother’s. Someday, Ava and I will get our own place. Someday.

  Ava stares straight at the ceiling, beyond me. Kipling trots in and butts her furry head up against my daughter’s downy one. Still, Ava gazes up at the ceiling, her O of a mouth hanging open.

  Above us, a fly strikes against the spherical overhead light, then dizzily spins away, only to turn and slant back towards the light, crashing into it again, and then again.

  Once, during a cleaning frenzy, my mother unscrewed the light fixture in the bathroom of the apartment she and Carly and I shared. She’d held out the frosted glass dome for us to inspect. Inside huddled half a dozen fly carcasses, their legs and arms gnarled into the fetal position; their still wings surprisingly intricate.

  “How’d they get in there?” Carly asked. I wanted to know, too.

  Mom shook the dead flies into the trashcan. “They’re stupid.”

  The fly above my head buzzes instinctively towards the brightness, slamming up against it once more, unaware of its repeated mortal mistake. Just trying to navigate.

  Ava turns her head. Kipling steps delicately through my piles of folded clothes.

  I get up and flick the light switch off. Give the fly a little peace.

  &It’s overcast the morning of the celebration for the Papiczaw Abraham Animal Rescue Clinic. I’m running late, and I’ve forgotten to call a cab. We bought a car a
fter Ava arrived — a real junkjob — but Mom took it to book club, having decided to join one for real.

  “It’s my week to bring dessert,” she insisted. “I’m bringing Sex in a Pan.”

  This is my first formal outing with my daughter. My first formal outing since Carly died, really. By the front door, I strap Ava into her car seat, her pale hair swirled damp and sweaty on top of her head. Ava resembles Joel in colouring: eggshell skin, flaxen hair, navy blue eyes that have yet to darken into brown, like mine, like my mother’s. I hope her eyes stay blue like Carly’s.

  She falls asleep with all her fingers in her mouth, not just her thumb. Sometimes she cocks her head a little, asking me questions I don’t know the answers to. At birth, she had a pale red birthmark on her forehead — a stork-bite, the doctor called it. It’s faded over the last couple of months. But when she’s thinking something, deep and intense, it flares up a little, all strawberry pink.

  Right after birth, she had some trouble controlling her suck/ swallow reflex. I tried to breastfeed, but it didn’t work. Her pediatrician said even though breast is best, bottle-fed babies turn out just fine. My mother begs to feed her all the time.

  “Soy formula?” she chirps at my daughter, rocking her in the crook of one arm and making me nervous. “You’re going to grow up to be a hoity-toity snob, are you?” She tickles the round dome of Ava’s belly. Ava beams. “That’s a real smile,” Mom tells me. “Not just gas. Carly smiled on day one. She came out smiling.”

  I slept through one six AM feeding, and when I woke up at seven, panicked, found my mother in the rocking chair in the living room, Ava’s bottle empty, sleeping in my mother’s arms, her little fontanel moving up and down with each breath. At the hospital, the nurses demonstrated how to properly swaddle her, telling me that the enclosed feeling of a good swaddle would make my newborn feel safe. “That looks like a straitjacket,” my mother said. “I never tied you or your sister up like prisoners.” Across my mother’s lap, my three-week-old daughter lay draped and peaceful, her arms and legs free, one foot exposed. In her sleep, her fingers stretched, then closed into a lazy fist.

  Sometimes, when I’m holding my daughter, alone in the mornings, her skin on my skin, and her microscopic little heart beating double-time to mine, I think of Ryan, and the first time he would have seen his daughter. He missed out on this time, Autumn’s first months and years. Sometimes I want to call him, but I don’t. When go for walks with Ava in her stroller, I still look for them, their little family.

  Blankets, burping cloth, extra diapers. . .I rummage in the diaper bag for a soother. The one I recover looks a bit shifty. I turn the tap on hot to sterilize it and the water scalds my fingers.

  Kipling sleeps in my laundry basket, curled up peacefully amongst our dirty clothes.

  I hoist the car seat into the crook of my elbow and carry Ava down the hallway to the elevator, lean against the elevator wall for support as we make our way down. Out the front door. The street rests, absent of cabs. It’s hard to balance everything — my daughter, my belongings. I walk to the corner. No cabs. I put Ava’s car seat on the sidewalk and squat down beside her. Garbage — food wrappers and cigarettes tossed from a car — is crushed into the curb. My cell phone blinks, the battery dying. Maybe I can find a cab if I cross the street. I hobble across the bare intersection. I haven’t worn heels in so long.

  I don’t have a choice. There is no other way to make it on time, and I want to do this for Papi. I want to see the people who cared about him, not just the people he cared about.

  I cross back to the other side, to the gaping mouth that leads underground into the subway tunnels.

  I take the steps one at a time, getting farther and farther in, deep into the subversive belly of Toronto. My centre of gravity is off, with the diaper bag thrown over one shoulder and the handle of Ava’s car seat gripped in my other fist. At the bottom, I put my baby girl down on one of the benches, the farthest from the yellow line that splits platform from track. She has all her fingers in her mouth.

  The subway is coming — there’s that familiar rumbling, the scream of metal on metal. I’m breathing, I’m breathing.

  And then, we’re on. I take a seat at the back, and rest Ava’s car seat in the empty space to my right. We’re pulled away, sucked down the tunnel. We’ve done it now. No turning back.

  Acknowledgements I wish to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to everyone who helped this novel grow from idea to story (in no particular order):

  My editor, Nicole Markoti, for circling many “excellent” examples of the verb “to be,” for pointing me in the true direction of my story, for making me rewrite the ending (thanks!) and buying me coffee to soften the blow.

  My mother, Carol Adair, for teaching me to read by giving me butterscotch chips for correctly identifying the sounds letters made (S is for Swallow!); and for reading and critiquing early drafts of this novel, my previous novel, and lots of my childhood chicken scratch.

  My father, Francis Bischoff, for passing down a musician’s soul and an artist’s imagination; though you probably would have preferred I became a violinist, I managed to use the family creativity genes somehow.

  Those who brought Toronto, the setting of this book, to life for me during the years we shared together there: Ashley Sperling, Alyssa Adair, Nicole Petrowski, Maddy Cooper, Jennifer Lau, Sera De Rubeis, Katie Lok, Melody Ashworth, Heidi Kiefer, Ravi Thiruchselvam, Topher MacFarlane, Devita Singh, Amelia Hsu, and Aarti Kumar.

  My writing instructors, Nicole Markoti, Suzette Mayr, and Helen Humphreys, and the students in my creative writing classes, who provided invaluable critique and shaped me as a writer; and those in my current writing community, especially Naomi Lewis, Meghan Doraty, Kari Strutt, Robin van Eck, Samantha Warwick, Sarah Ivany, and the many students I’ve had the privilege of teaching.

  Those who may have had nothing directly to do with the writing of Swallow, but nevertheless infused my life with colour and support and love (sometimes of the tough variety), especially David Gishler, Eisha Alemao, Alyssa Adair, the Taylor family, Jennifer King, John Siddons, Kim Dunlop, Cherinne Kilroe, Nicole Blaszczak, Nicole Ko, Joan Peskin, Sandy Fleming, Perry McScott, and the members of my immediate and extended family who supported me during this time.

  Katie Hyde, for years of shared adolescent — and then young adult — and still, often, current-adult angst, and for sharing your talent via the wonderful photograph that graces the back of this book and my amazing website.

  And finally, the talented crew at NeWest Press, especially Paul Matwychuk, Andrew Wilmot, and Natalie Olsen.

  Quite simply — thank you all.

  Theanna Bischoff is a novelist and creative writing instructor in Calgary, Alberta. Her first novel, Cleavage, was shortlisted for both the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada/the Caribbean), and the 2009 Re-Lit Awards. Theanna holds a Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary (2006) and a Master’s Degree in Educational Psychology (2007).