In Case I Go

by Angie Abdou

  What can I do? I sit motionless where I’ve fallen in my attempt to tackle Mary, and I watch the flame spread across the yard. It catches the house before I find an answer to either of my questions.

  But the fire spreads my way too. I feel its heat and know we will die. It catches the grass at my feet, the branches above me. Red flames run and grow, reaching everywhere. I close my eyes and surrender to the suffocating heat. I think of my mama. I’m not a fighter, Lucy. Standing tall won’t help me here. I’m sorry. I don’t have that kind of strength.

  And then the fire disappears. The air feels cool against my skin, cold where my wet pyjamas rest against my inner leg. I open my eyes, which I thought I had closed for good.

  I’m back in the bathroom. I look around slowly, scared of the pink water, of the blood on the walls, the red seeping into Lucy’s bathrobe. But this time, the bathroom looks clean, the metallic scent of Mary’s blood gone. I smell the crisp scent of snow and gather my arms around my body, hugging away the new chill. Mary’s in the tub, her head resting against the rim, as if she’s nearly asleep, but the water has frozen hard around her. The walls shine white with frost. Something pulls me toward Mary. Something tells me that if I could just lie down in Mary’s cold embrace on top of the hard bathtub of ice, I could slip away from this fear into a long and comfortable sleep. I know that’s what Mary wants. I understand. I want the same.

  I don’t know what is real. Oddly, that’s the worst part. I imagine Lucy saying, “Pick one thing, Eli. Focus your energy on fixing that one thing. We don’t need to take on everything at once. We can’t.”

  My body moves toward Mary against my will. I touch her face, almost white against the frozen bathwater. The back of Mary’s head rolls along the rim of the tub until her face falls toward me.

  “You promised,” Mary says. The frost on her face doesn’t worry me as much as the emptiness in her eyes. “You promised, Elijah.” With those words, the whole weight of this scene falls on me. Whatever she has done, she has done it because of me. There’s nothing I can say to make this better. She’s right. I did promise.

  I feel her rigid arm clasping me around the back of my neck. We are falling, falling, falling, and I’ve never been so cold.

  And then I wake, sweating in Lucy’s arms. My mama strokes my wet hair. The skin of my face and neck and back feels sticky and damp too, but cool. I wrap my arms around Lucy’s waist, my body moving with the shallow rise and fall of her breath, the thud-thud-thud of her heart against her ribs. Even with this thud of blood and heat of breath, Lucy is somehow not real. Not to me. Not as real as Mary.

  I wonder how Lucy knew to come to me. I didn’t call her, I didn’t scream. This kind of fear has no voice.

  “Don’t worry, Elly Belly. I’m with you now. I won’t leave you alone.”

  But mama doesn’t know. It’s not being alone that frightens me. I’ve never been scared to be alone. How can I tell her that I may never be alone again?

  Stay, mama, I want to say. Please stay.

  With Lucy holding me, I can still believe I might be Eli. I want to tell her aloud: Stay with me. But I keep quiet. I cannot speak.

  I’m too afraid of whose voice I will hear.

  Dear Future Eli,

  Another letter I will never send. I talk to you the way I would talk to myself. I still see you that way, I guess, as an extension of me. But you are your father too, in so many ways. I easily forget that we’re all forever haunted by our genes. Today, when you sat at the table, scrap paper before you, and said, “Here’s my theory,” the similarity startled me, as if you’d summoned Nicholas himself. You brought a very specific Nicholas to my mind in that moment. I surprised myself by enjoying this visitation. It scares me less than the glimpses I get of myself in your recent dark moods, your small frame weighed by some worry you cannot name. If I could have you escape one thing in your genetic makeup, it would be that, the moods.

  But when you tapped your forefingers together, I pictured Nicholas, not me. I saw him late at night in the Coalton pub, back in the days when we didn’t have to explain which pub. There was only one.

  “Here’s my theory,” Nicholas said, pushing the tips of his forefingers together and resting them against his chin. I wanted to take those fingers and put them in my mouth, suck until they were wet and then guide them down my body. (No, this letter will not go to you, Eli.) In those years, everything he did spoke of sex. No matter what we pretended to talk about, we were really talking about one thing, and it had nothing to do with words. We used words only to pass the time until we could act.

  “You don’t want to get unmarried,” he said. “That’s my theory. You think that if you do get divorced, you’ll finally have to do something official about us. And you’re afraid that once we’re official, we’ll turn into what you already have.” Nicholas shifted in his seat and pressed his calf into mine. “You worry that what keeps us good and fresh and fun is our illicitness.” I felt the heat of his leg rise in me. I didn’t want to talk about my marriage. I wanted to take this man to bed. Even a dark corner in the alley would do. I pressed my leg harder into his, but he surprised me by pulling away. “You’re scared,” he said into the new coolness, “to find out if what we have will survive your marriage.”

  This memory filled me with an unexpected surge of affection. Why am I telling you about such things, Eli? Why bother my young son with embarrassing talk of bodies and desire and physical affection? That’s why—because of the affection. Even because of that thing that is more than affection. Considerably more. I want you to know Nicholas and I once had something alive.

  That living thing has morphed, as living things do. But what Nicholas and I have now, it still lives. I’ve belonged to a dead marriage, and ours is not that. My first husband (how did you ever find out about him?) and I went to marriage counselling near the end, and at the conclusion of that single appointment, the counsellor said: “You have no life here in this marriage. Even when you fight, there’s no energy. You have no kids, no mortgage. Nothing forcing you to stay together—why not get divorced?”

  We heard the question as advice. It came as a relief. (“Okay, great, in that case I’ve gotta run. I have a date.”) We never saw the counsellor again.

  You’ve seen the “energy” that Nicholas and I have. We fight, but we can change. We can reach for that other kind of energy and pull it back. If for nothing else, for you. Nicholas and I promised we’d always talk to you like an adult. We wanted to make the most of your time here because ... we feared it would be short. But on your good days, those moments that you’re happily immersed in your comic books, filling stacks of paper with your colourful squares, I cannot reconcile my smart, imaginative son with the (sorry!) skinned rat I gave birth to a decade ago. I do not like to think of the months after your birth, though that time—its sickness and worry and fear of the unknown—haunts each of my interactions with you. The seizures were the worst of all—storms of pain nobody could explain. Three times a day, my little baby’s body, your little body, would convulse and spasm, a squeal emanating from your tiny being. Sometimes five times a day, seven times, ten times. I could hardly watch—a tiny infant wracked with adult-sized pain—but how could I not watch? Watching was the only thing I could do for you.

  Afterward, you stared up at me, your eyes unnaturally wide open, as if it were your job to reassure your own mother. I stroked your tiny brow, not knowing what to hope for. How could this kind of a baby have a happy life? But how could I—its mother, your mother—hope for anything but life? So tired my face hurt, I imagined our lives from that point forward, an exercise in misery and exhaustion. What quality of life could be in store for this tiny, weak baby? I admit I despaired at the thought that we’d be burdened forever with a sick child. I grieved for the life of parenting I’d allowed myself to imagine: the swimming lessons, the ski holidays, the hike-in camping expeditions. But before I could even whisper that sorrow to Nicholas, I felt sickened with guilt.

  I a
m weak. I am selfish. I deserve to suffer. But nobody deserves this. Not my baby and not me. Nicholas left during the worst episodes. He returned after each seizure, slumped in shame, putting his hand on my shoulder where I stood above your crib tracing small circles across your brow.

  “He’s such a fighter, Nicholas. Look at him. We can’t give up on him.” I rested my palm across your tiny forehead. “Let’s hope for life.”

  I remembered these words again tonight, stroking your damp hair, as you shivered in the wake of your bad dream. But this time I wanted to say, Don’t give up on us, Eli. I see your wariness. I felt you brace yourself against the fight you expected tonight, your shoulders tense, your breath shallow, your gaze wary. I’m afraid that anxiety led to your nightmare tonight. You’re a sensitive boy. Our cruel words wear on you. Words do things, I tell you, but I never let myself think too long about what our words could be doing to you.

  That memory of Nicholas today, the one that came to me when I saw you make his faces and gestures, when I heard you say his sentences, it reminded me of what is good in the man. It reminded me of the past we carry with us. This marriage can slog its way back into the light.

  We can be fighters too, Eli. We have learned that from you. Don’t give up on us.

  Love,

  Your Mama

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sometimes, if I try, I can hold onto a dream for a long time after the sun rises. One time I dreamt of Lucy and Nicholas and me planning a road trip, but we couldn’t actually decide what way to go.

  “Kiboshed by our own indecision before we even get out of the driveway,” Nicholas said. I remembered that—kiboshed. I liked that word. Lucy must have liked it too because she laughed and laughed, her hand on Nicholas’s bare thigh in a way that made me a bit embarrassed, even in the dream.

  “Well,” the dream-me said, trying not to show how bad I wanted this road trip. “We’ve come this far west. We might as well keep going that way.”

  I held onto that dream for days. I told Lucy if we could somehow dial up dreams on Netflix, I would like to watch my Road Trip Dream forever to see where we ended up and if we stayed that happy. But it slid away, like almost all dreams do.

  The dream about Mary, though—its blood-soaked bathtub and dry-as-tinder forest, our bathroom morphed into an icy morgue—I wish this dream would disappear. Why can’t it slide away as easily as the happy one? But Mary with her frozen “You promised” stays with me this morning, a lump in my stomach. What did I promise? I barely know her—I say so over and over to myself—I barely know you. But I feel her inside my mood.

  Nicholas left for the mine partway through breakfast this morning, even though it’s Saturday. He got called in on an “emergency.” The air quotes are Lucy’s. In the city, she kept a running tally of the number of times work “emergencies” took him away from us.

  “We should know how often. Exactly. I suspect we under-estimate.”

  “Do I want to go to work, Lucy? Am I absolutely dying to go to work? Is that my idea of fun? Don’t keep tallies on me. Please.” Nicholas’s skin turns grey when he’s tired, especially when he talks about work.

  “Knowledge. That’s all it is. Are you afraid to know? I’m recording facts. Data. You like data.”

  “Maybe you could have a punch-clock at the door, and I could sign out every time I leave. You could give me a shock collar so I don’t forget.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Lucy doesn’t count anymore. She says she broke up with her iPhone when we left the city. But she doesn’t need an electronic tally to know there’s an “emergency” nearly every weekend.

  “I work at a mine in full view of a town,” Nicholas says. “If everyone can see, of course it’s an emergency. If nobody could see, most of those emergencies would wait until Monday. Out of sight, out of my weekend.”

  Last weekend, Nicholas got an early-morning text from an electrician at his mine: “Tower 5. Mountain sheep acting weird. Hacking noise.” And then, a few minutes later: “Do sheep cough?”

  Those texts came before Nicholas and Lucy made up or whatever weird thing happened between them. Neither of them laughed then about the coughing sheep. Nicholas rolled his eyes and forwarded the query to his tech guy, adding: “I don’t know. Do sheep fucking cough?”

  This morning, though, he and Lucy giggle as they remember the exchange. “Do sheep fucking cough?” I guess I see why it’s funny, maybe, but my mood won’t let me join the laugh. I mean, do sheep cough? If not, what’s the hacking noise and why’s it coming from Nicholas’s sheep? Shouldn’t Nicholas be worried about the sheep? What if the sheep are sick or something? Isn’t that his job? After a few texts back and forth and a call to a wildlife veterinarian, Nicholas decided the coughing could be from pneumonia or it could be from lungworm. “Either way, we’ve got an issue on our hands. I’d better make a show of checking it out.”

  This morning’s “emergency” involves a robin.

  “One fucking robin,” Nicholas says, throwing his cell phone on the couch and making sorry eyes at Lucy.

  The bird has built its nest in the path of a major dig. At first, Nicholas looks like he plans to ignore this “emergency.” He turns his back on his phone and pours himself another coffee. He sits down at the table with Lucy, where she’s working through her morning battle with The Coalton Free Press.

  “Two-for-one pho downtown tonight,” she says, but there’s a tease in her eyes. She knows Nicholas doesn’t care about The Coalton Free Press. She knows he won’t stay home. “And the swim team made a big splash at the weekend meet.” She flips the page. I don’t have to look at the headlines to know she made this one up. She could say anything. “The museum is digging deep into Coalton’s coal-mining past.”

  “Sorry, Babe. God, I’d love to ignore this, but that’s not what they pay me for.” Nicholas kisses the top of her head. “If a crew stands down at ten thousand dollars a day for one robin, I won’t be popular with the general manager.” Lucy doesn’t even look up from the paper as he digs into the couch for his phone and starts pushing numbers. “People who aren’t popular with the general manager don’t keep their jobs,” he says. “And people who don’t keep their jobs can’t afford to live in Coalton. Not the new Coalton.”

  I stir my spoon around and around in my cold oatmeal and listen to his phone conversation.

  “So, we’re going have to shut ’er down. Until we figure out what to do about the bird.” Nicholas’s words come out heavy.

  “Tell me you’re kidding, please.” The manager must be yelling because I can hear his voice—full of static, distorted, and crackling—all the way from the kitchen table.

  “I’m not kidding, Gordon. It’s the law. Two laws. Federal: Migratory Bird Act. Provincial: Wildlife Act. We can’t break the law, Gordon.”

  “Fuck, Nicholas! It’s not a bald eagle. It’s not a Dodo.” The manager’s voice crackles. “It’s one shitty little robin. A robin.”

  Nicholas says nothing into the pause, but he won’t look our way either. I wish he would. I want him to roll his eyes or even point his middle finger at the phone like he did with the coughing sheep. Not at the bird, but at Gordon. “A bird is a bird, Gordon. It’s the law.”

  Nicholas uses this same strategy when he argues with Lucy. He says her name over and over, as if that will calm her. From the way Nicholas rubs his hand against his jaw while he speaks, I can tell that even though he sticks up for the robin, for the law, he only does so because it’s his job. If he could make the robin go away, he would. He doesn’t believe the crews should stand down for “one fucking robin” either. I know it.

  “You want to hear my suggestion, Nicholas?”

  Nicholas holds the phone away from his ear, waits.

  “I suggest cats and a slingshot,” Gordon says in his near-yell. “I’ve got a slingshot in my garage. You bring the bag of cats. Grab a dozen from the humane society. We’ll take care of this robin for a lot less than ten thousand dollars a day.�
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  “Great idea,” Nicholas says. “I’ll bring my catapult.” He winks our way.

  It’s not funny, but I know I would laugh a little bit, except my mad is bigger than their silly. I’m not in the mood.

  “It’s a life,” I say to Nicholas when he gets off the phone. I kind of mutter it into my cold oatmeal, but still, I do say it. Aloud. I am proud of myself for that.

  Nicholas and Lucy look at each other in that way that leaves me out.

  I drop my spoon. “Maybe one bird’s life is worth ten thousand dollars a day,” I say, squinting my eyes at him in my meanest way. “Are some lives worth more than others?” What was my life worth? That’s what I want to ask them. The skinned-rat baby, tell me its worth. The clanging of the spoon rings in my ears, my anger growing into a deep purple rage. “Would you stop the machines for a human life? A human life is worth more than a bird life? Says who?” I know my face is getting sweaty. I feel the itch. I picture Mrs Evanhart. She would tell me to count to ten. She would tell me to step back from the situation. Is it a big deal, Eli, or a small deal?

  It is a big fucking deal, Mrs Evanhart. That’s what I would say.

  The way Lucy and Nicholas look at each other—something soft and wet in their eyes, something not at all about me—reminds me of the sounds I heard when I passed their room on the way back from Mary last night, like they were having a conversation but a nonsensical one. Oh man, oh no, oh man, oh no, oh ... oh ... oh ... OH.

  I don’t know why, but this memory makes my anger bigger. The twisting in my stomach tightens. My insides fill with boiling rage. It forces its way out of my mouth in a whining, incoherent screech. Even I don’t know what I mean to say. I throw my hands over my ears.

  A memory flashes to me—restraints on my arms and legs, a wet cloth filling my mouth, the muffled scream. Anger like this hasn’t happened to me in a long, long time.

  Lucy reaches for me. “Eli—” she says in that soft way that means Eli, I love you. Eli, come on.