by Annabel Lyon
Increasingly he’s afraid of other people. Or not afraid. They horrify him, or bore him. He behaves stupidly around them, picking fights, joking meanly, demanding to be left alone. He has no plan. On days of nervous energy he walks from the Downtown Eastside to the West End, by the park, where the sisters live.
* * *
—
“The police just called. They found Robert. They’re…going to talk to him for a bit. I can go to work today, and you can go to your drop-in like you always do. Isn’t that good?”
She scribbles through her memories, her imaginings, assorted rags and scraps, bloody fringe from the trial. Now she’s the young neighbour slipping past Robert through the door of their building. Now she’s the gay couple heading for that patio, smiling at Mattie as they pass, arriving ahead of their friends and ordering a bottle of blanquette de Limoux. The waiter stands an ice bucket on a pedestal beside their table. Now she’s the woman parked across the street. She texts a friend before passing her phone to the little boy in the back seat. She starts the car and notices Robert and Mattie when she shoulder-checks to pull into the street.
* * *
—
“The police just called. They found Robert. They’re…going to talk to him for a bit. I can go to work today, and you can go to your drop-in like you always do. Isn’t that good?”
Now she’s reaching for her sister. (The church bells ring out 2:45 a.m., 3:00 a.m., 3:15 a.m. The streets are quiet.) This is the place she always works her way back to, the scab she has to pick. She’s reaching for her sister but Mattie is recoiling. Now she’s shouting and Mattie is crying, not because she’s scared but because someone is angry with her, someone is always angry with her, Sara is always angry with her, and nothing she can do ever makes things right. Now Mattie’s falling backwards, now her dumb fucking head hits the concrete step with a snap, like the last piece of a puzzle finding home.
* * *
—
“You wanted her dead,” imaginary David Park says. “He did you a favour. You wanted her out of your life.”
“I wanted her at a distance,” Sara admits.
“You should never have taken her in. There were alternatives, surely.”
“Group homes. Care.”
“Care,” David echoes.
“My mother never wanted that for her. She was afraid of farming her out to strangers. That’s what she called it.”
“Strangers who might be nice to her.”
“Stop it. Just stop.”
“You shouted at her. You made her cry. You made her feel useless, like she was a burden. You didn’t love her.”
“That’s supposed to be an accusation?”
“Someone else might have loved her. Might have cared for her and loved her enough.”
“Robert?”
“You yourself admit he treated her well. Spoke kindly to her. Kept her clean and well fed. Could have had sex with her and didn’t.”
“He wanted the house. The money.”
“Sure, probably.” David shrugs.
“He didn’t love her. He told me he didn’t.”
“Well, you had that in common, then.”
“You keep coming back to that. You can love someone and be impatient with them. You can love someone and get frustrated. You can love someone and know it makes no difference.”
“Tell me about it,” David Park says.
The truth was that she was mean to Mattie, she was impatient, she was at times very, very cruel. You’ve taken too much cereal again. You need to shower, you smell. Oh, give it to me, let me do it, I can’t stand watching you. Please turn that off. Please stop talking.
Her mother was never like this with Mattie, never, though she was condescending and judgmental and passive-aggressive and awful with everyone else. It was as though she’d had a single switch in herself that she’d flipped the moment she realized what Mattie was going to be. She’d flipped it to patience, she’d flipped it to kindness. She never raised her voice to Mattie, never held a grudge against her, never resisted a hug. Mattie got all she had, the little she had.
“Mattie made your mother better,” David says. They have had this conversation, or conversations like it, many times. It didn’t matter anymore if he was in her bed or in her head. “Without Mattie, what would she have been? A bitter, angry, self-pitying woman. What little nobility she had, Mattie forced it out of her.”
“Can you praise someone for it, if it has to be forced out?”
“I’m not praising your mother, believe me.” He had loathed their mother. “I’m saying if she was nice to Mattie, yes, that was a good thing.”
“No matter the cost.”
“What cost?” David Park hates her in moments like these, she knows. Sees nothing but her mother in her. Bitter, angry, self-pitying.
“The cost to—to her own identity. Who she could have been.”
He’s angry now. “Tell me, Sara. Who could you have been? Who could you have been without Mattie in your life? Tell me all you’ve suffered.”
“Never mind.”
“Tell me all the opportunities you’ve had to turn down. Tell me all the jobs that were refused you. Tell me about your life of poverty and disenfranchisement and abuse.” He’s breathing hard, on the razor’s edge between shouting and tears. “You and your family are the most privileged, entitled people I’ve ever known. You have money and education and power, you travel, what you spend on clothes could put a kid through college. Selfishness, all selfishness.”
“You’re spluttering.”
“How did she hurt you? Tell me one way.”
* * *
—
Sara goes perfume shopping. She wears the dress the colour of sleep, the leather belt, heels. Sunglasses. No scarf, no jewellery. She needs her wrists, and maybe her throat if she finds something she likes.
In the Palais Royal she walks along the arcade. The shop she’s looking for is miniscule, with only one or two flacons on display and two assistants, an older woman and a younger, as well as a third woman in a smock, dusting, dusting. This is a shop where you have to ask for what you want, specifically, and if you don’t know, you don’t go there. You don’t ring that bell, and they don’t let you in.
Sandalwood: Sara wants sandalwood. Santal. There are three. The younger woman fetches them from the back and presents them to the older woman, who arranges them on a felt-topped table.
The first is sandalwood and bitter cacao. A bestseller, the older woman murmurs, almost apologetically. A gourmand, rich and refined, but very approachable. Very nice for the fall, for the first cold days. A permanent in the collection. It will never go out of style.
The second is sandalwood and rose. Sara hesitates over this one, for of course rose was Mattie’s flower. Sweet and light and thin, very nice for spring. Dries down sweet and creamy. Here, one on one wrist, one on the other. You see the difference? Unavailable outside of France, the rose. A limited release from six months ago. Once the stock is sold off, it will disappear forever.
The third is sandalwood and cinnamon. A unisex, the woman says, not so sweet, and of course for this reason and because it is the third flacon—like something in a fairy tale—Sara decides it will be the best. She hands Sara a touche and the moment Sara smells it she starts to weep.
But Madame must not apologize. She would be surprised how many have this reaction, not to cinnamon necessarily, but each has her—you say in English—her trigger? Scent is a powerful trigger for memory, this is known. This is the perfumer’s art. The younger woman nods. The woman in the smock nods. Sara accepts a tissue.
“Why santal?” the older woman asks kindly, earnestly. “Why santal today?”
* * *
—
At the hotel, the night man greets her with a smile that fades when he looks more closely at her face.
&
nbsp; “I will tell you,” Sara says in French. “It is the anniversary of my sister’s death. I came here to get away. I have had too much to drink. I started to cry in a shop, a parfumerie. It was very embarrassing.”
The night man looks wary. He offers his condolences in French and then again in English, to make sure she understands.
“She was murdered,” Sara says. She touches the top button on her new dress and of course the man’s eyes go there.
“Madame,” he says. He comes from behind the counter and offers his arm. “I will take you to your room. You will sleep now, and in the morning you will feel better.”
She tells him she prefers the stairs to the elevator. (An elderly couple got in the elevator.) On the landing, she puts her back to the wall and raises her skirt. He’s startled and perhaps therefore not quick, and as he labours the sour, end-of-day smell of him gets stronger. She’s too drunk for her own pleasure. Several layers of what feels like cotton batting insulate her from that, or indeed much sensation at all.
* * *
—
Early the next morning she chooses a place she hasn’t been to yet, across the street from Le Hibou. Les Éditeurs, it’s called: Café of the Editors. Inside are red leather club chairs, a giant’s eye of a wall clock, books. She learns from a note on the menu that the place is favoured by people in publishing. A croissant, coffee, a glass of grapefruit juice, a glass of champagne. “Un anniversaire,” she tells the waiter, who bows. She has decided to buy a red dress today. She wears yesterday’s purchases: the sandalwood, the white plissé skirt, the black cashmere sweater, the cinnamon silk scarf. Her hair is washed. She doesn’t look too rough, though she was up long before dawn, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Here now is her champagne. She raises it to her lips, thinking of Mattie, still alive one year ago this morning.
David Park would have shaken his head at champagne for breakfast.
Lighting money on fire, he would have said, or something like that.
Oriental stinginess, her mother’s voice says. Like Jews, those immigrant families. Well, you can understand it, I suppose, coming from nothing. Did I tell you about the time—
Yes, Sara says.
—the time I saw one trying to haggle the price of fish in Safeway? An Oriental, I mean. I don’t think Jews shop at Safeway, it’s not kosher.
No, Sara says.
* * *
—
Their mother had a teak dressing table with a centre panel that flipped up into a mirror, revealing the compartment where she kept her treasures. When they were little, Sara and Mattie would take these out one by one. Her wedding and engagement rings, too loose on her since the ravages of her young widowing—plain gold and gold set with a modest sapphire. They tried them on. “They’ll be yours one day,” their mother would say, watching them.
Mattie never heard the singularity of that “you,” but Sara did. She felt the burden of it.
There was the garnet necklace. There were the pearl earrings in the grey box. Sara hated pearls. She shivered to touch them. Blind eyes. “Those will have to be yours, then, Mattie,” their mother said. “I’ll take them in someday and have them converted to clips so we won’t have to get your ears pierced.”
The Chanel No. 5, always kept in its box, and the 4711 for every day. The gold-trimmed volume of Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia in which their mother pressed flowers. A few leftover shillings and francs from her London-and-Paris honeymoon. A wooden bead bracelet on a red cotton string, bought impulsively from an African vendor on Granville Island and never worn. A set of white lawn handkerchiefs, still in their box, embroidered with a cardinal, a robin, a lark, and a thrush. A potpourri posy in a painted china thimble—a doll’s bouquet, fragrant with cinnamon and cloves. Two fans: an ivory one from Hong Kong that their father had bought in Chinatown and a carved sandalwood one from Mysore, India, one of fifty their parents had given as keepsakes at their wedding. The ivory fan was kept wrapped in tissue paper, but the sandalwood—perforated with hundreds of tiny holes to make a pattern of flowers—came in a long green-gold box.
She had never hated her sister. If anyone had asked, she would have said she loved her. When they fanned each other, the ivory was always Mattie’s, the sandalwood Sara’s. Mattie would close her eyes and breathe the smell—that creamy wood smell—and open her eyes, and smile.
* * *
—
She phones David Park. He can hear it in her voice. “Come home.”
“Hear what?”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’ve been phoning and phoning, but I always get Alice. I’ve been hanging up.”
“Yes. We know.”
There will be a problem when she gets home, and then there will be a solution. That’s what she hears in his voice.
“I’ve bought some pretty dresses. Pretty frocks. With my pin money.”
“Please, Sara.”
“Please what?”
“You’re going to kill yourself.”
Sara laughs in astonishment and delight. “I could.” There will be a problem, and then there will be a solution. A red velvet suicide.
“You were her better self,” David says. “And she was yours.”
Sara hangs up the phone. I was her punishment, certainly, she thinks, taking the empty suitcase out from under the bed. As she was mine. But remind me again of our crime?
CHAPTER SEVEN
November 2017
On a Monday night in November, Saskia came home to her basement apartment to find Marcel Bouchard leaning against the door. She had been swimming at the community centre, and was conscious of her damp hair. Her father’s colleague hugged her, and she realized in that warm, wordless moment that she was standing on another black line separating before and after. Before and after what?
“It was quick,” he told her, over tea he made in her kitchenette. She sat at the table watching the steam from her mug. “No pain.”
“No pain.” Saskia held the words in her mouth while she waited for her brain to catch up. “Who was driving?”
Her mother. But that was wrong. Her mother never drove.
“I haven’t seen them in a year,” Saskia said.
Marcel Bouchard took her hand. “I guessed, although we never talked about it, Hugh and I. He loved you very much.”
“After I dropped out of school, after I moved out, he said I was throwing my life away. Each visit was worse than the last. Finally I stopped going. My mother called once or twice since the last time I saw them but I never called back. My father never called.”
“Il t’aimait,” her father’s colleague repeated. He was from the suburbs of Montreal originally and always used to speak French with her, starting in Grade Six when she joined an immersion program. It had meant a bus ride alone to the public school rather than a walk with her mother and sister to the private school. It was a time when Jenny’s erratic behaviour eclipsed Saskia entirely in her parents’ minds. Jenny would skip school and refuse to tell anyone where she went all day. She would sneak out through her bedroom window at night. She was caught with cigarettes, fireworks, vodka, boys, girls. Marcel Bouchard saw all of this; he used to come regularly to the house for supper. He had just been through a divorce and was melancholy in those days. He was wary around Jenny, but his face lit up when he could speak French with Saskia.
He was talking now about legal matters, the funeral, the house, the will. He would help her with everything. He trailed off when he realized she wasn’t taking it in.
“Why don’t you come home with me tonight? Christine wanted me to ask you.” He had remarried some years ago, a kindly woman who had just retired as a provincial court judge.
Saskia stared at him. She had heard the words, and was waiting for their meaning to sink in.
“Viens.” Marcel Bouchard led her to the bathroom and found her
toiletry bag under the sink. He told her what to put in it. He got her backpack from the closet and supervised her packing of a couple of days’ worth of clothes. But when the cab came, she asked him to take her to her parents’ house instead.
They had died abroad, on vacation in Scotland. Scotland in November—who but her father? A distillery tour, an unfamiliar rental car, the wrong side of the road. The family home was locked up tight, but fortunately the security code—hers and Jenny’s birthdate—was unchanged and Saskia was able to disarm the house alarm before it occurred to her that her parents might have changed it without telling her. Marcel walked her inside while the cab idled at the curb. “Are you sure?” he said.
“I feel numb, that’s all.” The truth. “I’d like to—have them around me, tonight, I guess. Look at photo albums, stuff like that. I’ll call you tomorrow, if that’s okay. I understand there’s going to be a lot to do.”
“You’re not alone in this world, Saskia.” Marcel hugged her. “Christine and I love you. We have a big place. You could move in with us if you wanted. Even just for a few months.” He hesitated. “You know, it’s okay to cry.”
Once he was gone, she got the photo albums from the bottom of the bookcase in the front room and set them on the kitchen island. It didn’t all have to be lies, not tonight. But leafing through them made her restless. She had turned these same pages not so long ago, it felt like, for Jenny, holding them so her sister could see and narrating their contents. There were no surprises left here, no feelings she wasn’t ready for.
Her father’s office had changed little since she last saw it, except that it was diminished. In her mind, the office was the brain of the house, throbbing and outsized. In reality it was a small room, overdecorated in a fussy, manly style—heavy wood, leather, autumnal colours, bottle green and so on. Saskia sat at her father’s desk, in her father’s swivel chair, a designer piece ordered from Denmark back in the seventies. Black leather and steel. Jenny had confided in Saskia that it was the only good piece her father had ever bought by himself, for himself, and if she were ever to redo his office she would remove everything but the chair and build out from it.