The Sweetest One

by Melanie Mah

*

  THE FIRST FEW days with Conrad are easy in some ways and hard in others. Things begin to slide. We get less ambitious with meals, we’re not as nice, we start farting in front of each other like we’re my parents or like we’re friends trying to gross each other out.

  One time he says to me, “I’m running out of frozen pizzas,” like I hadn’t bought us groceries already. He still hasn’t thanked me for that. Still, it gets tiring eating crackers, frozen food, canned food, so I buy groceries again, a bag of spaghetti, jar sauce, a head of lettuce, a carton of juice, and two packs of veggie ground round with a mantra — he doesn’t appreciate you, you need him, he doesn’t appreciate you, you need him — playing through my head the whole time.

  We do some fun things, though — go for walks and bike rides in the sun, plant the garden, sit around reading in the yard. Times when he’s asleep and I’m awake, I imagine him as a sensitive, curious, lonely little boy who loves his dog and wants to protect his mom. But he isn’t that person anymore, is he?

  He buys me gifts, mostly books, some highbrow stuff, including love poems by this guy Pablo Neruda. “We could read them together,” he says.

  “I could pretend you wrote them.”

  “Unlikely,” he says. “They’re Neruda. Only Neruda writes like Neruda.”

  IN THE SLOW snow-globe tumble of our life together, something else happens: we have sex for the first time. What I mean is, I do.

  We’re sitting on the couch watching Jeopardy!, and out of the blue, he starts kissing my cheek, like full-on making out with it. My first kiss from him in two days. Alex Trebek says, “This physicist was instrumental in developing atomic models and the ‘exciting’ field of quantum theory. He won the Nobel in 1922.”

  Who is Niels Bohr? “What’s this about?” I say, edging away.

  Matt, the guy on the left, rings in and says, “Who is Niels Bohr.”

  “Correct,” Alex says.

  “I want you,” Conrad says. “Did you know that? We fart in front of each other and I still want you.”

  “That’s romantic,” I say. But does he love me?

  “Great Danes (and Swedes) for 600,” Matt on tv says.

  “This Danish filmmaker, best known for Breaking the Waves, is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective.”

  “Lars von Trier,” Conrad says into my neck. He’s right.

  “Mind if I change the channel?” I say.

  “Come on. Aren’t you even a little bit, umm … interested?”

  “In what?”

  “Sex.”

  Oh, that’s what’s happening. “Fine. Yeah. Sure,” I say.

  “You can be on top, if you want.”

  I shrug, get up. He’s sitting down. I don’t know what to do, so I straddle him.

  “Well, you’ll have to take your pants off,” he says.

  Taking your pants off doesn’t mean you’ll have sex for sure. I do it nervously — my pants and underwear. He does it, too.

  “Dogs for 200.”

  I get back on him.

  Alex says, “Famous one in a movie named after a composer.”

  “Who is Beethoven?”

  I can do this. Remember he was weird when he was young — into science, talked a little too much, too smart, and like an adult, spent recesses alone. He may have never thought he could get a girl to be with him. I’m doing him a favour. Plus, he’s handsome. His eyes, you like his eyes. And it’s nice of him to let me stay at his house. And look how weird he’s acting. He’s nervous, too. Isn’t that sweet?

  “Do only as much as you want,” he says.

  I nod. What I want mostly is to kiss him. I kiss his mouth, it’s soft. He’s a good person. I think of how rich the lips are with neurons, it starts feeling good. We kiss some more, he puts his hands on me under my shirt, it feels good, I can’t stand it. There’s a noise. Where’d the noise come from? The answer on Jeopardy! is, is, is … Rottweiler. I didn’t know. The sound must have come from me. I can make a sound like that? I kiss him on the neck, really burrow in there, he’s making little movements like he likes it, then he bucks up, it goes in a bit, and I’m split with pain, the first time I’ve ever felt anything there. He sees it in my face and goes soft, it’s sweet, I keep kissing his neck, move up to his ears, his hands on me and it feels good.

  “You’re lovely,” he says.

  It makes me want him, but I’m shy, I’ll always be shy. Still, instinct knows the way. We’re all hands and mouths and other parts, and I’m thinking, Stop thinking, and then I think about how I feel, whether or not I love him, and it makes me queasy. He goes back inside me and I’m split with pain again, but this time he doesn’t see or I hide it well. I don’t want him to leave me, and he will if I don’t satisfy. Somehow, I’m not sure how, he winds up on top, thrusting hard and fast, making sounds I’ve never heard him make before, he’s making faces like we’re in a tribe and it’s his job to scare away the monsters. Fast and hard and fast and hard, then he takes it out of me, it spurts on me, my shirt.

  He kisses me on the cheek then stays there, lying on top of me, constricting my breathing. What’s he thinking? Maybe that I’m satisfied, too, or that sex makes up for the things I lack as a girlfriend, or that he’s glad we finally did it. I look down. He’s not thinking anything. He’s asleep. Did he think I’d like that?

  I wonder if I love him. I thought it’d be different. I think I’ll probably regret it.

  The room is cold. A blanket on the floor. I try to reach it. My one arm squished into the L of the couch, my other arm free. Something wet. My chest. He’s drooling. I get out from under him, stand and take a bite from a half-finished piece of toast on the coffee table. No pants on, I feel exposed. I was not his first. Carla Kilpatrick was. Does he love me? My underwear stuffed in the couch cushions.

  I put on my jeans and bra and go for a walk. The whole time I can feel him there, like when you ride your bike for hours, your shitty, heavy one-speed, through rutted grassy fields and up and down hills, down alleyways and the bike trail past Mac’s house, everywhere you can in town without actually leaving, and for days after your crotch and ass hurt like you pushed down on your seat with all the fury and fear you had, and your seat pushed back.

  There’s nowhere to go, nowhere that interests me, nowhere I haven’t been.

  The idea of sex makes me sick. I walk around town, stop in at the store, then go to the iga. I go to the industrial part of town, the library. Everywhere I go, I think I see my dad. I wind up on the highway, at the town limit sign by Joe Play’s. I look out at the suburbs. Car dealerships, hotels, Boston Pizza, the church. All that neon. Town is growing. Maybe someday someone will come and move the sign. Maybe there’ll be an oil boom and Spring Hills will quadruple in size overnight and there’ll be more space to stretch out.

  I want pizza, a simple one with mushrooms. Pizza’s in the sauce. That’s why Perry’s is the best place in town. Sometimes my dad will taunt me, same as he did when we were kids.

  Hey. You want to have peesa for lunch?

  Yeah!! we used to say.

  Naw. And he would chuckle.

  We’ve only had pizza as a family once since Trina left. My dad has diabetes and can’t stand the starch. And my mom — are you joking?

  Perry’s is two hundred feet past the town limit sign like some kind of beacon or holy carrot. The wind picking up around me, I walk slow on the highway shoulder towards it, slow like I’m on a tightrope. It could happen anytime. Fuck it, I think, then start to run. The wind messes up my hair. There’s a feeling you get on the side of the highway, nice when no one’s there. There’s no other feeling like it. Today it’s different, all these cars, how I feel, it’s like the whole world’s rushing with me. I slip on gravel, and when I recover, a car in the other lane zooms towards me. I stand my ground, keep running. Another car passes me in my lane. I’m fine. Then another. Whoosh whoosh. After that, it’s a sparse parade, cars from out of nowhere. Maybe it’s a normal amount. I’m usually in scho
ol this time of day. Cars sound mean, scary, when you’re not in them. I tell myself to be bold. Mostly, I succeed till a Mack truck splits the air with its horn, roars by, makes me jump to the side, it’s more of a fall, the guy pulls his horn again. I’m in the ditch, watching truck exhaust spread into the sky. Cars slow down, one after another. I hunker down and hope that no one stops.

  Once things settle on the highway, I get up, dust myself off, and limp back into town. Nowhere to go so I get a table for one at Giorgio’s, order spaghetti and salad, a glass of milk. I eat slow, count my bites. After that I cross the highway — playing chicken with imaginary cars — to Petro-Can, where I drink three cups of coffee, the first three cups of coffee of my life.

  Somehow I end up on Main, across the street from my house. Lights on, the ceiling fan, they’re watching tv. Which show? The one with Fei Fei.

  There’s a cluster of middle-aged drunks outside the Mount-view Hotel. It’s dark. Are they looking at me? I hear the words little girl. I keep walking, fast, get off Main, go a couple of blocks, turn around. No one there. I turn again, jaywalk across the empty street, look in the windows on Forty-Seventh, keep turning to make sure I’m not being followed. Ugly old dresses on pawnshop mannequins, transparent yellow shades drawn. Bars on the window at the Music Den. Bryan Adams uses Ernie Ball. I slouch on the bench outside the library, stare at the railroad tracks. There are stars. Which ones are planets? Every passing car is Trina. There are no passing cars.

  Someone comes and sits beside me in the dark. It’s Rick Jones, town drunk. Hit on my sisters for years, came into the store just to find them. I smell like coffee, garlic, ditch, sex. He smells like beer, sidles up like he wants something. I get up and speedwalk to the end of the block, then turn the corner and run like hell. The streets all blur together. Am I going the right way? Homing pigeons, magnets. I don’t have magnets in my head. White house, red house, the one with the fences, then Conrad’s.

  The door’s unlocked. I lock the deadbolt, knob, slider behind me and turn on all the main floor lights, grab the biggest knife I can find in the kitchen drawer and sit in the corner of the living room, clutching it. I listen hard, keep looking around. The ghost of someone there, a half image, yellow. What if I’ve locked myself in with it? The heat clicks on, and I jump. The heat turns off, I jump again. The house moans, creaks, grips its foundation as the wind shoves it. There’s nothing to do with fear but have it.

  Then Conrad shows up, hair standing in the back, just another yellow ghost until he says, “Where the hell have you been?”

  I clench the knife, stare. I imagine him attacking me. I can fight if I have to.

  “Chris.”

  The woman who pries a car open to save her family. The kid who climbs a tree to escape a bear.

  “Chrysler, it’s me.” He approaches me slow, talks slow.

  My hands are sore from clasping the knife. I look down. They’re shaking.

  “Chrysler. Put down the knife.”

  Why should I?

  “I stayed up waiting,” he says. “I watched the door. There’s no one else here.”

  Then why’d it take so long for you to come? Where were you when I got here? Felt like two fucking hours sitting here. I was scared and alone — really alone.

  “I didn’t know where you were, if you went back to your parents or what. I didn’t think that you’d come back. I fell asleep.”

  My head slumps down into my arms. My sleeves are wet and warm — have I been crying? — my legs curled under me, an ampersand. And. And what? Sore down there. Conrad, naked, above me. I’m tired. But I’m still clutching the knife.

  “Chris, talk to me. Did something happen? I swear, I’ll fucking kill anyone who even tries to hurt you.”

  My first words in hours, I say them. “I didn’t want to have sex.”

  “What are you talking about? Who are you talking about? I’ll fucking kill him.”

  “You,” I say, raspy. “What you did. The way you did it. The way you looked.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “I went to the highway, almost got hit by a truck.”

  Air comes out of him, slow like an old balloon, his eyes like open sores. I go into my pocket. I wish I had tissue. I never do. He wipes his eyes on his sleeve. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I got carried away.”

  He asks me if I want a hug. I don’t know if I do. I let him hold me, but don’t hug back.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’ll never happen again.” I let my eyes close. “I’m sorry.” I let go of the knife. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” he says.

  I make him check all the rooms in the house — in the closets and under the beds. We sleep with the lamp on and his room door locked. His bed is big enough we don’t have to touch. Before he falls asleep, he says, “Remember all the good stuff.”

  I think of him as the bee, doing the helicopter with a kid, the kid squealing with delight. I think of him making pizza, his hands and arms, how he went to buy gloves so he could see my parents. I picture him standing up to his mom and Bob, telling them he doesn’t believe in God, even though he loves his mom — a lot. I think of him alone in a clearing, drawing plants, happy and in awe, all alone. I think of him in a jungle somewhere, after a long flight, looking up at all the trees, all the different kinds of plants and animals and bugs in every shape and colour. What would it be like to see those birds in person — say, a splendid astrapia, whose feathers are red, yellow, green, and an impossible shade of electric teal, or a toucan with a beak like a lobster claw — when all you’ve ever seen are sparrows and magpies?

  I wake up on the edge of the bed. Windows dark. I can feel him there. You could fit two people between us. Without moving, I go back to sleep.

  We wake up after noon when the phone rings. Conrad picks up, talks, and hands it to me.

  “Hello?” I say.

  It’s my mom. My dad’s gone missing.

  26

  *

  SHE SAYS SHE last saw him last night. They fell asleep together. She didn’t say goodnight, just turned the light off after tv, washing up, and reading. When she woke up, he was gone.

  “Why’d you wait so long to tell me?” I say. They wake at five. It’s 1:30 now. More than eight hours.

  “I wanted to make sure.”

  “Sure of what? Are you crazy?” My dad needs so many things. Food, insulin, medicine. “You didn’t look for him?”

  “I did,” she says, exasperated. “I did look for him. Dan hai kuey ja truck, a maa.”

  “The truck is gone?” For fuck sakes, Mom! I almost say. He hasn’t driven in more than two years, and he’s been in half a dozen bad wrecks. “Did he say anything about where he would have gone?” I say it loud and slow like she’s stupid. Eight hours! She fucking is.

  She says he didn’t tell her anything.

  I meet her at the Radio Shack to grab some walkie-talkies. She insists on paying, holds hers in two hands like it’s heavy. We separate, my mom to walk the streets, and me to search the highway. I walk to iga, the Co-op, the industrial part of town, my eyes peeled for him and for his truck. In my head, shit, shit, shit, shit. Out loud to everyone, “Have you seen my dad?” All the cars are his, all the red vehicles. I picture the truck smashed up, parked, puttering along. I stand on the highway shoulder and stare.

  Another one gone and I didn’t fucking say goodbye.

  I go to the railroad tracks, check the hospital, call every hospital within fifty miles. But no one knows anything. I picture the truck in the ditch, the driver’s side smashed in. I look for him in every store in town. Some places I check twice. Back at the Co-op, I imagine myself buying a roast beef and roasting it with all the windows and doors open to lure him home. That’s when I see the in-store pharmacy. Of course. The pharmacy. I really should have checked there first. He’d be dead without his insulin.

  Neil Carson behind the counter. I’ve never seen Neil without a cowlick. Maybe he gets it permed that way. I go up and
ask him when my dad last got his meds and he says that information’s private.

  “Even to family members?”

  “Yes.”

  “I really have to know.”

  “Sorry, no can do. Why not send him over, have him check himself?”

  I end up having to spell it out for him and, finally, Neil sees it in my face. He checks his files and says my dad topped up his medicine yesterday. Then he comes out from behind the counter, checks a shelf of travel medicine bags — pink, yellow, turquoise swirls like eighties windbreakers — and says one is missing and that my dad maybe has it.

  Outside, it’s sunny and hot. I cross the highway and imagine the bag riding shotgun in the truck, stuffed with ice and insulin. The ice is melting, water seeps into the seat. Where is he? Did he go back to somewhere important? Houseboat fishing in the Shuswaps? His paper father’s grave in Saskatchewan? Maybe he wants a new life. Daughters fucked off, other kids dead, boring wife. Maybe. But he’s seventy-two, has fucking vision problems. Why wouldn’t he stay somewhere safe? There has to be a reason.

  As I run home, an idea pops into my head. I get to the store, come in through the front door like a customer.

  “Mom!”

  She’s at the counter, ringing in boots. She says to the man buying them, “Do you need extra laces?”

  “Just the boots,” he says.

  “Polish, waterproof, insoles?”

  He wants her to get on with it. Her fingers slow and sure on the till keys.

  “Mom!” I say again.

  “That’s one hundred sixty-three thirty-five,” she says. He pays by credit card. “Do you need written receipt?” she says.

  “I think your daughter wants to tell you something,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says to the air before turning to the credit card machine. She doesn’t look at me. It spits out a receipt, he signs it and leaves. She makes sure the register’s all closed and everything’s put away before she gives me her attention.

  “Mom!” I say as she finishes. Third time. Angry.