by Dani Couture
He made his way across the sidewalk and stepped into one of the restaurants, taking his place at the end of a short lineup of people who were waiting for tables. He watched as waiters expertly manoeuvred silver carts of food through the restaurant, dropping something off at every table they passed. Within minutes, he was ushered to a seat by a crisply uniformed waiter who had a sheen of sweat coating his face; a laminated menu was put into Gaetan’s hands.
“I’ll have the whole deep-fried soft-shelled crab,” he said when the waiter came around again.
The waiter wrote down Gaetan’s order on his yellow notepad. “And…?”
“That’s it. One whole deep-fried soft-shelled crab. And hot sauce if you have it.”
The waiter shrugged his shoulders and left.
The restaurant—Gaetan hadn’t caught the name on the way in—was packed, patrons sitting elbow to elbow. It was hard to see where one table ended and the next began with the exception of those seated at the planet-sized tables in the middle of the restaurant. Family tables. Gaetan was the only person who sat alone, his extra chair immediately scavenged.
“Can I take this for my boyfriend? He’s just over there. At the back, see?” The girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old at the most, already had her hands on the arms of the empty chair. She had a sprinkling of acne at her temples and her eyebrows were drawn in too darkly. She was wearing cowboy boots and a floral wrap dress. Her right forearm was covered in a large tattoo of a dancing bear. Gaetan looked at the tattoo and then over her shoulder at the boyfriend, a wiry man in a three-piece dark-blue suit who was leaning up against the back wall. He was looking at his watch, which, even from a distance, looked expensive. He looked too old for the girl and Gaetan almost said as much.
“So, can I?” the girl asked again, her fingers tapped rhythmically against the chair.
“Go on, take it,” Gaetan said, “but can I ask you about your tat—” he started, but she squealed a thanks and hoisted the chair up and walked off before he could finish.
Gaetan watched the girl set the chair down beside a small table where her things were. She motioned to her companion to sit down, but he looked at his watch and shook his head. The girl kicked him in the shin.
The waiter arrived in that moment and interrupted Gaetan’s view of the squabble. A large plate of crab, huge and radiating heat, was set in front of him. “Thank you,” he said. “Maybe a glass of beer?”
The waiter nodded and disappeared.
When Gaetan looked over again the girl and her companion were gone, their table already occupied by a middle-aged couple. Out-of-towners, he guessed by the nervous way they kept looking around the room, the woman holding her oversized purse protectively on her lap.
Gaetan wondered about the girl and her bear tattoo, its significance. Since Leo’s death he made note of any bear reference he came across and there were many. He didn’t understand everyone’s fascination with the animal, their reverence. It was made out of meat and bone like any other. He’d hunted them with his father when he was younger, and they’d ended up in the stew pot like anything else. No special meaning or divinity—just dinner. And to the bear, maybe that’s what Leo had looked like: just dinner. An easy meal.
Gaetan wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve. The restaurant was as humid as a rainforest. Even the walls were beaded with pearly drops of condensation. Only the ghostly shadows of passersby were visible through the fogged glass. The neon lobster that hung in the window blinked on and off like a broken streetlight. He reached into his back pocket for his weather journal, frowning when he realized it was not there. He longed for a barometer.
Three waiters simultaneously descended upon the table beside him with fresh plates of fried rice, chop suey, and a large, steamed fish. Chopsticks darted through the air as the family snapped up the food, chatting back and forth as they ate. Seven people sat at the table. They seemed inseparable, all part of the same effortless machine. Gaetan wondered what it would take to break up the group. A divorce? Infidelity? A car accident? A missing child? It wouldn’t take much, it never did.
Belly full of crab and beer, Gaetan pulled out his wallet to pay the bill. He took out a twenty and a ten and set them on the table. Thirty bucks. Algoma could do a lot with thirty dollars, he thought. She could feed a family for a week with that amount, and well. In that moment, he knew what he was going to do. He looked around. His waiter was taking an order on the other side of the restaurant. Gaetan stood up slowly and put on his jacket, willing himself to look normal, relaxed even. He picked up the money from the table and stuffed it into his coat pocket. His blood thumped a nervous beat against his temples. A woman at the table next to him looked over. Gaetan smiled, sweatily clutching the bills in his pocket.
“Another beer, sir?” the waiter asked.
Gaetan jumped, surprised to find the waiter beside him. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Just going to the washroom.”
The waiter arched his eyebrow and stared at his jacket.
“I’m cold.”
“One beer,” the waiter said, looking at him sternly.
Gaetan nodded. “Where’s the washroom?”
The waiter pointed to the back of the restaurant, the furthest possible place from the exit. Gaetan said thank you and walked over.
Inside one of the stalls, he leaned up against the walls and shut his eyes. When someone walked in, he walked over to the sink and washed his hands. “Thirty bucks,” he whispered to his reflection in the mirror. “Thirty bucks.” When he exited the washroom, he took a deep breath and looked around. His waiter was at the bar, his back partially turned to him. Gaetan sped toward the door, opening it just in time to hear his waiter call out, “Mister!”
He ran down the street until he tasted blood at the back of his throat and he was sure there was no one following him. He felt exhilarated. Not only had someone noticed his absence, but he had thirty dollars to show for it. He pulled the bills out of his pocket and stared at them. He shook and smiled. He felt alive.
Several blocks south of the restaurant, Gaetan stepped into a shop that sold everything from pesticides to nylons. Still buzzing from his run, he spun the carousel of postcards around until one caught his eye. Mixed in with the new postcards was a throwback, something from the ’80s. Maybe someone had found an old box in the basement and was trying to sell them. The postcard had the Ontario parliament building on the front, sober brick set against an oversaturated neon blue sky.
“Pretty dry,” he said, trying to joke with the woman standing next to him, her arms rifling through a bin of discounted underwear. She rolled her eyes and walked away. He took the postcard to the cashier. “Wait a minute,” he said, and grabbed a birthday card from a display on the counter, “this, too.” When he asked for stamps, the woman sold him a half-used book of stamps out of her own purse.
Outside the store, leaned up against the building, Gaetan wrote on the back of the postcard and pasted a stamp onto it. He put the postcard in his back pocket and grabbed the birthday card. He put thirty dollars into the card and addressed the envelope to Algoma.
The closest mailbox he found was covered in a collage of local band and fruit stickers, Sharpie tags, and posters for events that had already happened. Even the door had been ripped out, so that letters and bill payments were readily available to anyone with a good reach. He looked in the box and saw a pop can and some trash mixed in with the envelopes and wondered if anyone actually came by to pick up the mail anymore, but dropped the postcard and birthday card in anyway.
______________
8:11 a.m. -3°C. Calm.
Tangle of hair caught in the drain.
The pressure from the shower head blew the plastic liner inward where it wrapped around her legs. Algoma reached down to peel the plastic from her calves and re-affix the magnets to the inside of the tub. She stood up and rub
bed her pregnant belly, which was now hard like a gourd, but smoother.
With Ferd spending a significant amount of time out of the house, staying with his aunts, Algoma had less and less to do and no one to take care of, except herself and whatever child was adrift in her womb. She was out of work, both at The Shop and as a mother and wife. She felt like an incubator.
While The Shop was under construction in a new location, it was a slow process that was compromised by the delays that came with inclement weather and a lack of finances. Josie spent her days trying to barter for what she needed—the walls, windows, and doors—hoping for the deal that would salvage her livelihood. Algoma hoped the rebuilding wouldn’t take long. She was lonely and desperately missed the feel of fabric in her hands. The ka-chunk of the price gun she used to tag every shirt and shoe. She missed seeing Josie every day, her one constant in the past year. She wanted her life back, even if it was missing parts.
Still, there were times when she allowed herself to imagine a knock at the door, Gaetan arriving with Leo’s hand in his.
“I went looking for him,” Gaetan would say.
Leo’s head would poke out from beneath his father’s arm. He would say, “Hi, Mom.”
During her daydreams, Algoma felt her body’s chemistry respond to her imaginings, a soft electricity that ignited her fingers and tingled along her scalp. As soon as she opened her eyes, the feeling was gone.
The police had ceased any efforts to find Gaetan after Algoma received his letter. He’d written very little, saying only that he remained in the country and needed some time away from everything. He’d ended with a promise that he’d be in touch again, but not when. No return address had been included. The letter had left Algoma devastated, but she carried on with the hope that he’d return. She stored his letter with Ferd’s notes and washed Gaetan’s bedsheets every week, so they’d be fresh for when he came home.
Home.
Algoma now slept at the centre, on the couch, so she could see everything that came, everything that went. Nothing would escape her watch.
Her sisters had not been so agreeable about the idea of her husband’s return.
“You should have your locks changed,” said Cen. The constant protector.
“Your last name, too. Be a Belanger with us again,” said Lake.
Gaetan was no longer welcome in Algoma’s sisters’ lives. They’d cut him out as instantly and severely as he had himself.
After receiving the letter, Algoma had focused on Gaetan’s handwriting and what it might reveal. The deep ditch his pen exacted in the paper. The slant of his letters. How much space left at the top and bottom. She should have been paying attention earlier, before all this. There must have been signs.
Tired, Algoma sheltered her growing belly against the hard spray of the shower and hoped for a girl.
“You’re going to boil the baby,” Ferd said. He bit into an unripe pear and spit out the chunk into his hand.
Algoma had come out of the bathroom wrapped in an oversized robe, her face, hands, and feet bright red coals. As she walked into the kitchen, she tripped on the terrycloth hem.
“Be careful,” he said, pointing at her belly.
In Gaetan’s absence, Algoma had appropriated most of his wardrobe. At first it was just his robes (three of them) each floor-length and made of heavy, durable terrycloth. Gaetan had insisted on variety in colour and style for his morning wear. At the time, Algoma told him he was being extravagant, even if it was one of the few purchases he’d made during their marriage; however, when she’d pulled on one of his robes for the first time, she’d understood. It had felt heavy on her shoulders, like someone was standing behind her, a familiar weight on her shoulders and hips.
Soon, she found herself wearing pieces of Gaetan’s clothing to do errands, to drop Ferd off at school. Large and loose, his clothing became her pregnancy wardrobe. She wore his oversized plaid shirts unbuttoned over her own tank tops and T-shirts and completed most of her outfits with an ankle-length denim skirt, so that no part of her was exposed or vulnerable.
“Breakfast for two?” Algoma asked, patting her modestly distended belly. “Well, two and a half.” She tried to look capable around Ferd, even happy, but he eyed her with suspicion. “Just give me a second to get changed, okay?” Within several minutes, she returned wearing a new assortment of odds and ends.
Even though his mother now dressed in more clothing than she ever had, Ferd thought she looked smaller. Her belly was the only place that he could hold on to and she held it every moment her hands were free, as if she was afraid she might lose it. The rest of her seemed as fragile as a bird skeleton, hollow bones ready to blow apart under a hard wooden wheel no one could see coming.
Algoma took a carton of brown eggs out of the fridge. “Eggs?”
Everything had become a question. She didn’t trust herself anymore.
Ferd nodded and Algoma cooked.
At the table Algoma leaned over her plate of heavily peppered scrambled eggs and buttered toast. “This was a good idea. Don’t you think, Ferd?”
Ferd mashed his eggs with his fork and took a sip of his orange juice. “Sure,” he said. He sounded unconvinced. Eggs were all they ate anymore. Easy, inexpensive, familiar. And boring. He wanted to tell her that they weren’t dead. Instead, he put down his fork and watched his mother eat. He was confused by her new habits: how she carefully piled a forkful of egg onto her toast and ate an equal portion of bread and egg with each bite. She was so consumed with her rituals, she didn’t notice him staring. If she finished her toast before she finished all her eggs, she would put another slice of bread in the toaster before taking another bite. She sought balance, equal input on every front.
“Festival of the Nations 1994,” he read off her T-shirt. “Come taste the world.” The world map on her T-shirt stretched tautly across her stomach, most of the borders disfigured.
Algoma finally realized Ferd was staring at her.
“Are you thinking of a name?” she asked.
He shoved another piece of toast into this mouth. “No.”
“Well think of one. Without your father around, I need your help.” There was no skirting Gaetan’s absence. He had been there one day, gone the next. Even Ferd’s notes to Leo had begun to chronicle the details of his father’s absence: Have you seen him?
Ferd poured another glass of orange juice. “Leo,” he blurted out.
Algoma breathed a deep and heavy sigh. “I think it’s a girl.”
Ferd slammed his fork down onto the table. “It’s not,” he yelled.
Startled, Algoma dropped her fork. “We can talk about this another time—”
But Ferd ran down to the basement and slammed the door behind him. Pictures rattled against the wall, a puff of plaster dropped from the ceiling. He’d grown.
Ever since Algoma had announced her pregnancy to him, he’d seemed unhinged, and the frequency of his note-writing had increased ten-fold. It took a great deal of work for her to ensure she’d collected them all, at least the ones that were in the house; there was nothing she could do about the others. When the school had called to discuss the matter, she’d simply hung up the phone. Algoma had hoped that word of a new baby would have put an end to it, but it had only been the beginning of something else.
“Will Dad come back now?” he’d asked, hopeful. “I mean, to see the baby and all.” His dark brown, almost black, eyes had bored holes into her trying to extract the answer he wanted.
Algoma had turned away guiltily. She had no answer.
From that day forward, Ferd was fascinated by her growing belly and her well being, constantly asking her if she needed anything, if he could do anything for her. He started making his bed in the morning and doing the dishes before she asked him to. Even his nails were trim and clean.
“What does
it feel like for the baby inside,” he asked her one night. He poked her belly with his finger half expecting it to pop like a balloon.
“Like a pool of warm water.”
“Like at the Community Centre?”
“Yes, but with less chlorine.”
Her joke missed its mark. Ferd mouthed the words, mentally taking a note: Less chlorine.
She would later realize that water had been the wrong answer.
He was sure the baby was a boy. He was sure it was his brother.
After a months-long campaign of notes and letters, Ferd believed that Leo was finally coming back to him. He had no doubt and began to plan for his brother’s return. Leo would have to grow up and learn everything all over again before he could tell him what had happened in the year after he had gone through the ice. Ferd promised himself that he would be a better brother this time, or try to be. At least he had a chance of being a better shot.
Ferd read Algoma’s baby books like they were user manuals. Before bed, instead of allowing his mother to read to him as he sometimes allowed in his weaker moments, Ferd read chapters of the baby books to her.
“You need more folic acid. You shouldn’t let it sleep on its back. You could use cotton diapers.”
After the initial outburst, Algoma rarely had the heart or energy to correct Ferd, to tell him the baby was not Leo, that it couldn’t be, that it was a girl. With the exception of her sons, girls were all her extended family produced. So many girls, her mother had joked that they might run out of girls’ names and would have to start dipping into the boys’. Or at least another shipping company.
Algoma got out of her chair and put another piece of bread in the toaster. She was not going to let Ferd’s unfinished eggs go to waste. She glanced at the clock on the stove. It was almost time to go to Josie’s.