by Annabel Lyon
Although she no longer worked, her days were full. She woke early to use the treadmill and free weights in the building’s gym. She showered and ate and dressed carefully and took stock of the fridge before she left each morning. She packed a purse with scarf and sunglasses and transit pass and carried a small umbrella. She walked the ten blocks or so north to Robert Dwyer’s house and waited across the street until he came out to go to work. She followed him back to the station she lived above, and this was really the trickiest part of the day: following at a sufficient distance that he wouldn’t notice her, but then catching up so she wouldn’t lose him on the platform. She always tried to get in the next car from his, but once they ended up in the same car and she was terrified he would see her. She kept her sunglasses on and the scarf over her hair and fortunately he gazed out the window the whole time, and never once looked in her direction.
His work site was across the street from a coffee shop. She could sit there all day, if she felt like it, buying too much coffee and spending enough on lunch that they didn’t turf her out for loitering. She couldn’t always see him—rarely, in fact—but her view of the main gate meant that she knew where he was at all times. She had a bad moment the first day when a group of workers from the site came into the coffee shop for lunch, but he wasn’t with them, and gradually she was able to relax into her days there.
At 4:00 p.m., when he and the others would leave, she would follow at a distance back to the station. Sometimes he would duck into a pub with some of them and she would simply wait across the street until he emerged, rarely more than an hour later. She would tail him home on the train, sometimes following him through Safeway as he bought his Dr. Pepper and a dozen eggs, and then back north to his home. He never saw her, she was confident of that. After the door closed behind him she would walk back to the Safeway, buy her own provisions, and go upstairs to her evening.
Those were weekdays. Weekends he rarely emerged from the house, except on Sunday afternoons. Then she would follow him to Mountain View Cemetery, where he met Sara Landow. They would stand for a long time in front of Sara’s sister’s grave, and then they would drift up and down the paths, talking. She would lose them when they got into his car and drove away.
The first time she saw them together was a shock, certainly. Sara was as beautifully dressed and as haggard as ever, somehow simultaneously puffy and gaunt, and always pale, so pale. But she smiled at Robert Dwyer, and he touched her arm often when they spoke. Saskia could not imagine how they filled all those hours, or what they found to say to each other, or how Sara managed not to spit in his face. Saskia would not have been able to manage it herself. But Sara was no doubt acting out some redemption fantasy, some passion play of confrontation and forgiveness that helped her get through these days. Saskia would not judge her for that.
Still it was hard to watch them together, the man who had killed her sister and the woman to whom she had shown something of her most private self. Saskia found herself occasionally thinking uncharitable thoughts about Sara. Small slights came back to her—those CD cases, her casual dismissal of Saskia’s grief the first time they had met, the way her eyes would take in Saskia’s clothes even as they spoke of other things. She was a snob and a narcissist and a drunk.
But Sara was not Saskia’s focus. She was peripheral now.
The fourth Sunday after Saskia started following Robert, she didn’t go to his house. Instead she rented a car and drove to the cemetery, where she waited until the couple appeared. When they left she was able to follow them all the way to Sara’s apartment and watch them go up together. So.
The next bit was surprisingly easy. She hadn’t known what to expect, whether she would feel let down after, whether his reaction would disappoint her, whether he would be unmoved, or even laugh. She thought she might bring her sharpest kitchen knife so she could cut him if he laughed. That’s what Jenny would have done. Instead he had fallen to his knees and covered his eyes and said oh god, my god, and Saskia had suffered him to look at her until his whole body was shaking. She had walked away then feeling like the angel with the flaming sword.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Which of them was it who first spoke of suicide? Robert, Sara thought. Almost certainly it was Robert. After that strange evening in her apartment he had begged off their cemetery date the following weekend, and Sara thought perhaps they were done. But he called her a few days later and said he wanted to talk, he needed to talk, was she free?
They met in Stanley Park, near the Rowing Club, and walked the seawall. It was a day of soft edges, grey drizzle, mist on the ocean and shreds of mist caught in the trees, and Robert told her some things he had never told her before. His life came into slightly sharper focus for her, though she said little. He didn’t need much prompting.
He had lied to her, he said, about his grandmother. She had committed suicide upon receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. She had waited until they were all out and turned the car on inside the garage. The note she left explained, briefly, that she didn’t intend to be a burden.
He had also lied to her about the dog. It hadn’t run away. He had kicked it for barking and it had bled internally and died. Its shit had turned black, which he knew meant blood. He had been high at the time, and when he came down he had wanted to die himself.
But what he really wanted to tell her, what he was working towards as they made their way round from the eastern part of the seawall, with its views of the city and the container port and the floating gas stations, to the wilder western side with its sheer cliffs looming over the sea, was about the woman who had died. He didn’t know if he had loved her—if that was the right word to describe what had been between them. They had not seen each other often, but when they had the relationship had been intense and at times violent. The accident was in September; her family pulled the plug that Christmas. Grief sent him back to drugs, and by the time he confronted Sara in her office at the University in April he was in terrible shape. He had fought like hell to get his life back after Mattie’s death. He had served his time willingly; he had gotten clean. But now he thought he might be losing his mind, because he felt as though the woman he had loved was following him. He kept thinking he was seeing her.
Sara was disappointed that none of these big revelations was about Mattie, but she kept this to herself. Let him talk.
Had she ever heard of such a thing, he wondered? Seeing a dead person everywhere?
Sara thought Dr. Kumar would identify this as yet another manifestation of grief, and said as much. Nothing mysterious or otherworldly, just the brain working a little too hard to process its distress.
But the last time, Robert said, she got close enough that he could smell her perfume. It was her, he knew it was her. The three and a half years since her death disappeared in that breath of perfume.
Sara wondered which perfume, but of course he wouldn’t know.
They walked on for a while in silence. Far above them gulls wheeled. It was raining properly now and they encountered few others, only the occasional runner.
Sara remembered something her mother used to say to her about dreams. It didn’t matter what the dream was about, her mother claimed, so much as the emotion you came away with.
“How did you feel when you saw her?” Sara asked.
Robert shook his head, and she saw he was near tears.
Sara tried to imagine what it would be like to be faced with Mattie’s ghost.
“Did she speak to you?” Sara said. “The woman who died?”
Robert shook his head.
Sara conjured Mattie in her memory, her pink cheeks and blunt nails and the smell of her, baby powder when she had bathed and cumin when she hadn’t. She tried to imagine Mattie popping up at bus stops and street corners, hovering just outside the penumbra of a streetlight, but that had not been Mattie’s way. She wouldn’t have known how to torment anybody, wouldn’t have wa
nted to.
Sara confessed that she spoke to Mattie sometimes, replaying scenes in her head where she had been impatient with her and rewriting those scripts, tipping them to kindness.
“You feel guilty,” Robert said.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“About Mattie? You know I do.”
“The other woman. Did she have a name, by the way?”
Robert had declined to reveal her name that time, but eventually it came out: Jenny. Of course Sara already knew the name, but she had wanted to see how long it would take him to trust her with it.
* * *
—
The week after he told her Jenny’s name, Sara showed up at the cemetery with an armful of lilies. Robert met her at Mattie’s grave as usual, but the lilies were not for Mattie. Sara led Robert to a different part of the cemetery, where Jennifer Anne Gilbert had a marble headstone next to her parents. Sara gave Robert the lilies, but he looked stricken, and couldn’t move to place them. “What is this?”
Sara shook her head. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. I thought—I thought…” Sara realized he was crying, and then she was crying too. She helped him lay the lilies and then they held each other until they each were calm again.
“I never knew where she was buried,” Robert told her later, in yet another coffee shop. “It was just a shock, that’s all. I know you meant to be kind.”
“You brought flowers for Mattie, that first time.” Sara shook her head. “I wanted to do something nice for you, for her.”
“I ruin everything. Everything I touch, I fuck it up. Everything.”
Sara touched her coffee cup to his. They sat for a while in silence.
“How did you know where she was?” Robert asked after a while.
“Google,” Sara lied. He nodded.
* * *
—
Now, in the evenings, Robert would pull out a little foil bit of something and take it to the bathroom, and Sara wouldn’t say anything. Eventually he did his drugs in front of her. She wasn’t sure when exactly he had started using again, but she was pretty sure it was after Jenny had started appearing to him. Every time they hugged goodbye, now, she thought he was waiting to be asked to stay.
* * *
—
Sara confessed she had thought of suicide too. Without Mattie to care for, her life didn’t mean a lot. She didn’t have much of a purpose. She was tired all the time, and everything was such an effort. After some hesitation she told Robert about her last trip to Paris and how close she had come there. Hesitation because she guessed Paris might as well have been Pluto, to him. He would never see it in this lifetime.
He asked her if she thought there might be an afterlife.
“Where we’ll see them again?” she asked, and he nodded. She didn’t answer, but thought about Paris. Maybe the afterlife would be like that, little coffees and quais and parfumeries and so on. That would be nice.
“I saw her one last time after the accident,” Robert was saying. Was this before or after his bit of foil? Had he been talking for a while? Her glass was empty again, but he leaned forward to fill it. “I went to the hospital.”
“You said you didn’t,” Sara said thickly. Did it matter, really? Mattie was still dead. His Jenny was still dead. Talking wouldn’t bring them back.
“I know it won’t bring them back,” Robert said. “That’s not why I was telling you. I went to the hospital and snuck into her room. Her eyes were open. She saw me, but she couldn’t move.”
Sara closed her eyes. Opened them. “What did you do?”
“Whatever I wanted.” He began to sob. “I jerked off, okay? She was helpless and it turned me on. I did whatever I wanted, and all she could do was watch.”
Sara closed her eyes.
“I didn’t think she would die. I didn’t know her family would freak out because of what I’d done and take her out of the hospital. That’s why she died, because of what I did. If she’d stayed in the hospital, she might have survived. I killed her, okay? It was me.”
How tiresome he was, after all. Revelation after revelation, as though his honesty was precious to her when really it was all just Christmas tinsel.
Then they were in her bedroom and he was telling her to lie down. She thought he might get in with her but he tucked her in and sat in the chair in the corner for a long time, watching her. She lay on her back for him, as still as she could, and after a while he left. She heard the snick of the apartment door closing as he let himself out.
* * *
—
Which of them was it who first spoke of suicide? Sara woke the next morning with a dry mouth and a throbbing head. She vomited into the toilet and then she called Robert. “We should just do it. Together. It’ll be easier that way.”
A long silence. Then: “Yeah.”
She hung up and pulled with her fingernails on a rachis spiking out from one of the sofa pillows, and a tiny down feather emerged—sleek as she pulled and then sprung to fluff. Sara let it go and watched it drift in the sunlight for what felt like a long time before it landed on the carpet. That was life, wasn’t it? It didn’t seem like you were falling.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Saskia eased up on Robert Dwyer for a couple of weeks, just to fuck with him. To let him think that maybe, just maybe, it was over. Meantime she went to a salon and bought a wig, straight and honey-coloured, unremarkable. She thought of telling the kindly saleswoman that it was for her sister who was having chemo, but in the end said it was for an audition. The saleswoman didn’t care what it was for. She rang up the purchase, and had already turned to the next customer before Saskia had finished putting her wallet away.
The wig let her get closer to him than ever before. She could sit in the same car on the SkyTrain now, and once she scored a booth behind his and Sara’s on their maudlin post-graveyard Sunday afternoon coffee date. That day she heard everything. Sara spoke to him in a way that set Saskia’s teeth on edge, though it took her a while to figure out why. Sara was frank and funny, and eventually Saskia realized it was because she was speaking to him as a peer. She’d always held a little something back with Saskia, been a little cool, but with Robert she was all warmth. She’d really gone all in.
Well then, Saskia thought.
On her way home, she wadded the wig into a ball and dropped it into a dumpster in the parkade below her building.
The next time Saskia saw Robert Dwyer it was at night. She had thought about wearing the dog collar and leash but she wasn’t looking for opera, and the collar—though distressing to her in its own way—wasn’t what she held against him. Enough with the ghost bullshit.
Instead, she used Jenny’s phone to text him a photo and then a message.
He showed up at the empty parking lot she’d chosen for their rendezvous looking pale but determined. “You’re the sister,” he said immediately. “I’m so fucking stupid. I should have figured it out.”
Saskia didn’t say anything, because she realized in that moment that the sound of her voice would be the sound of Jenny’s voice to him, and perhaps that would be a gift.
“Why are you following me? What do you want?”
She stepped closer to him, and she saw him will himself not to flinch. Closer; close enough to touch, to smell, to hold.
He said, “I miss her too, okay? I wish she was still alive.”
“So you could hurt her some more?”
She saw her voice do what she had feared. His body opened to it and his eyes softened. His voice went rough. “I never did anything she didn’t ask for.” His eyes went down her and up again. “She mentioned a sister, but never that you were twins.” Down, up. “What do you want?”
“I wanted to take a look at you. We didn’t have secrets, but she kept you a secret. I wanted to see you for myself.”
He shook his head.
“You’re a real little mindfucker.”
“You knew she wasn’t well, right?” Saskia said. “Of course you knew. You knew you could get her to do anything you wanted. That was part of her sickness.”
“I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. I tried to make her happy. You know she wasn’t a happy person, right? You know she hated your parents? Your mom was a drunk and your dad was a bully. Yeah, she told me shit about your family. But you, you.” Down, up. “She said the two of you were strangers. She said even though you lived in the same house, you didn’t know her and she didn’t know you and she didn’t see that ever changing. You needed her for everything and she was so fucking tired of you. Tired of being smarter than you and prettier and more successful. Tired of being tied to you. She wouldn’t even tell me your name. How about that?”
But of course that was wrong. Saskia was the one who had been tired.
“When I heard about the accident I went to the hospital but they wouldn’t let me see her. Because I wasn’t family. She could have you sick fucks around her but not me. She wanted me there, I know she did. I knew what she wanted better than she did.”
“You went to the hospital?”
He shook his head. “Of course I fucking went to the fucking hospital.”
“The man who assaulted her. That was you.”
“Assaulted.” He looked at her wonderingly. “You really are the dumb twin, aren’t you?”
“What would you call it?”
“I knew what she liked. Maybe you’re not so different from her after all. That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? You’re not angry—you’re curious. You want a taste.”
“No.”
“Sure you do. What’s your name?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Leave you alone? No, that’s not what you want. I know what you want.”