by Annabel Lyon
He grabbed her hair and pulled her head back so she had to look up at him. “I put some on her tongue when I was done,” he said. “She was still sexy to me. I wanted her to know that. I gave her a gift none of you could give her, that no one could take away.”
“A gift,” Saskia repeated.
“I didn’t pity her. I didn’t treat her any different. What’s your name?”
“Saskia. My name’s Saskia.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Saskia. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to let go, and I’m going to leave. It’s my rules now. Understand?”
Saskia nodded.
He let go and brushed his hands off. A few of her dark hairs drifted to the ground. “You follow me again, I’m going to assume you want some more.”
Saskia took a step forward. She put her hand on his chest, over his heart, and leaned so close that her hair brushed his cheek. “You’d like that,” she whispered in his ear.
They stood close and still for a long moment.
“I blamed you for killing her,” Saskia murmured. “For a long time. You sent the last text she ever read, right before the accident, and I thought that was the only puzzle piece that fit. But I was wrong. You know who really killed her?”
She inclined her face a little so he could see her eyes.
“Me,” she said. “I’m the one who told the hospital to let her go. My parents couldn’t make the decision, but I could. I sat with her and I told her what we were going to do. I don’t think she could hear me, but I told her anyway, just in case. I wanted her to know it was me.”
His face had gone white.
“Just like I want you to know it was me.”
He took a step back, stumbled, found his feet.
“You’ll see me again,” she said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They met at the cemetery gate at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. It was a relatively busy time, with a service just concluding and many visitors. They went first to Jennifer Anne Gilbert’s grave, as they had agreed. Sara hung back while Robert knelt down, touched the stone, and spoke too quietly for her to hear. Then he rose and rejoined her and they walked to Martha Ellen Landow, 1977 –2016.
They had argued about this, but Sara was adamant. Mattie was what connected them. It had to be Mattie.
Sara had done the research and brought the supplies. They had talked about Sara going first, but Robert had looked at her with such eyes that she said she didn’t mind if he wanted to get it over with.
“I’m afraid,” he confessed. “Not of this. But if our timing’s off and you leave me alone.”
“I won’t leave you alone.”
She took a piece of plastic tarp from her tote bag and laid out the picnic. They sat down together before Mattie’s grave. It was a dry day, luckily. On a rainy day they might have looked odd sitting this way.
He took the antiemetics with a few sips from a bottle of water and ate all of the little ham sandwich she had made him. The pills he took doggedly with a mickey of vodka, his preference. For herself she had brought a half-bottle of wine. She had read of nightmare scenarios, the wishful dead who had to be finished with a plastic bag or pillow, or who vomited up the pills and then had to eat their own vomit to get them down again. But he had no such trouble. After a few minutes he said, “Now you.” Already he was slurring and his breathing was shallow.
Sara didn’t move.
“Sara,” he said thickly. She turned to look at him, to let him see her face. “Sara.” He slumped forward as the forty Seconals swamped his body. “Don’t leave me.”
Sara got up and brushed off her skirt. She picked up her tote bag. Robert Dwyer tried to reach her, tried to stop her. His fingertips brushed her skirt, but he could no longer grip. “No,” he whispered.
Sara walked away.
At the gates she looked back. He had slumped over onto the grave, but in all the time she had been visiting the cemetery Sara had seen much odd behaviour dictated by grief and she guessed that anyone seeing him would only give him space. In the unlikely event that someone had noticed the two of them together, Sara could say she had sought him out as part of her therapy. Donna August would vouch for that because Sara had told her as much, months ago.
Across the street, Saskia leaned against a tree. She was back to her old self, in boots and jeans and a drab rain jacket of some depressingly practical technical fabric. They nodded to each other. Sara walked to the bus stop. Behind her, Saskia would be heading into the cemetery. She would sit with him now, as they had agreed. That would make his prostration over the grave even less suspicious. Anyway, Saskia had wanted to see the end. She would have another half hour or so with him before he lost consciousness, and then several more hours’ watch after that until he died. Sara didn’t need to know how she planned to use that time.
The bus was crowded, and Sara was forced to stand all the way back into town. By the time she got off the bus she felt so exhausted that she ducked into the nearest café for a cup of tea to fortify her for the walk back to her apartment. Needing tea to walk three blocks—that was age tapping her on the shoulder. The windows of the café were steamy. She thought she might stop for a box of dandan noodles to eat in front of an old movie. Myrna Loy and William Powell, maybe. A quiet night in.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
July 2019
After the suicide of Robert Dwyer, Saskia called Fen. “So soon?” Fen said.
“I’ve decided to travel.”
Even though it had only been a few months, Saskia made a profit on the sale of the condo—that was Vancouver for you. She took Jenny’s clothes and the kitchenware to a women’s shelter. She kept Jenny’s phone and her mother’s sapphire engagement ring, and she downloaded her father’s favourite music from iTunes.
“Twenty-seven,” the man next to her on the plane said. “Oh, to be twenty-seven again. You’ve got your whole life in front of you.”
Saskia put in her earbuds. The ocean from this height was dull, reminding her of the skin that forms on hot milk. She felt she could reach down and with the touch of a finger pull away the surface of the sea.
* * *
—
London was muggy daytime after the twilight of the plane. Saskia took the Tube to the National Gallery to eat a salad and kill time before her appointment that evening.
The pub he had chosen—the Silver Cross, south of Trafalgar Square—was cozy but unremarkable. It had flagstones and wingback chairs and seemed to be staffed entirely by Australians. She recognized his long, aging-rock-star hair from the back. She thought about the fact that he had elected to present himself to her this way, to let her see him before he saw her. She touched his shoulder. “Professor Taillac.”
He turned, stood, took the hand she held out to shake and pulled her in to press each of his cheeks to hers. “Michel,” he said.
“Michel.”
He went to the bar and returned with a couple of pints.
“Why here?” Saskia asked a little while later. “Why not Paris?” For he did seem very French in this very English place. A parody, almost. The barkeep had mocked his accent so viciously that Saskia understood he was a regular and they liked each other quite well.
“I did initially retire there,” Michel Taillac admitted. “But it didn’t fit me anymore. My family are dead or moved away, and my old friends have all moved on, in their different ways.” He shrugged. “I found it lonely. So much has changed there, and my memories are important to me. I didn’t want them overlaid with what Paris has become, so that I would no longer be able to distinguish what belonged to me and what did not. London, for me, has no such associations. It is very clean in my mind.”
“There was never a question of remaining in Vancouver?”
A wave of the hand. “I am European. I have more than enough money to spend the rest of my days indulging in my own
particular comforts. Vancouver”—he leaned forward and lowered his voice—“is very boring.”
Saskia laughed. He leaned back, surprised, pleased. She caught his eyes flickering across her body, and knew he would go to bed happy that night because he had, maybe for one of the last times in his life, made a woman give way to pleasure.
She wiped her eyes and they touched glasses. “If only you knew.”
They spoke for another hour, about the books he was reading and the exhibition she had seen that afternoon, which he had also seen. He asked about her plans.
“I’ve decided to go back to school, actually. Law school.”
“I didn’t know that was an interest of yours.”
“My father was a lawyer. He always wanted me to join his practice, but I was too close to it. Or too close to him. It feels less fraught, now that he’s gone. Real estate law, maybe. I seem to have a knack for real estate. I start in September, anyway.” Saskia had not slept on the plane, and exhaustion began its wash. She yawned and yawned again.
“How long are you in London?” Michel Taillac asked.
She intuited he would suggest they meet again. “Just tonight. I’m going to be in Italy, mostly.” From her bag she withdrew the book he had given her at their last meeting and set it on the table between them. “I contacted you because I wanted to return this.”
“Ah.” She waited until both their fingers were touching the cover before releasing it. He said, “What did you think?”
“Honestly, I was expecting some kind of filth.” Saskia watched him brush his fingers over the title, tracing the letters one by one, reclaiming his treasure as he listened to her. “Some kind of sadisme, dégradation. I only opened it for the first time very recently.”
“Me and my little bookcase of the forbidden.” Their eyes met. “All sound and fury, I’m afraid. I did enjoy my reputation while it lasted, though. And?”
“It’s extraordinary.” Romances of the Petty Christ was its faded golden title, and beneath that, translated by a Gentlewoman. The gentlewoman, according to the Victorian foreword, was a sixteenth-century Florentine lady, a sheltered autodidact who had found in her father’s library this medieval manuscript and translated it, to pass the time, from French (her fourth language) into English (her fifth). The translation was halting and clumsy (“petty” for petit, as an example). Nonetheless the stories were of an ethereal sweetness, otherworldly gnostic tales of the childhood of the Saviour. A modern afterword to the book explained that the actual author was an inmate of a Louisiana mental asylum in the nineteen-fifties, a young woman who did not otherwise speak or communicate and had been thought at the time to be an idiot. She had written the romances on the inside of her hospital robes, where they remained undiscovered until the undertaker removed her clothing to bathe her for the grave. There was no Victorian foreword or medieval French manuscript or Florentine gentlewoman. The whole Borgesian project came from the troubled mind of this young woman who died in her late twenties.
“An extraordinary number of contradictions to reconcile,” Michel Taillac said. “And an extraordinary number of lives for one life to contain. It stretches credibility, doesn’t it? Still, I find it comforting, sa foi. Her faith.” He stopped tapping and pushed it back towards her. “You should keep it.”
“Why?”
He held her gaze for a long moment, then excused himself to the washroom. It was a quarter of an hour before she realized he wasn’t coming back.
Outside it was early evening. After-work crowds surged around her. At a newsagent’s down the street she bought a postage-paid cardboard pouch. From her bag she took the other book, Christine Bouchard’s, sealed it inside, and addressed it. She dropped it into a nearby postbox. Without much thought, she let Jenny tip Michel Taillac’s book and note in after it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
August 2019
On the third anniversary of Mattie’s death, Sara made a little picnic of nice things: cambozola on a baguette, cornichons, cherries, strawberries. She spent considerable time choosing the wine, eventually deciding on both a crémant and a rosé from the Languedoc. Choosing the right rose perfume took even longer. She wore her palest blue linen dress and the Alaïa sandals, and carried the white silk shawl in her bag for her shoulders in case it cooled down later.
Sara’s leave had ended in early May. Though she was not scheduled to teach again until September, there’d been much to keep her busy at the University—letters of reference, course prep, peer reviews, digitization of the student thesis library. This last had consisted of overseeing a summer work-learn student, an immensely tall young man who was writing a thesis about the ethical implications of identity theft, who spent hours at the department scanner, earbuds cemented in. She had tried to chat with him a couple of times but it was a lost cause. He would smile patiently and nod and never move to take the earbuds out. He’d reminded her of Saskia.
She had waited, after Robert Dwyer’s suicide, for the phone call, the knock at the door, the uniform and the boots and down to the station for a few questions, but it never came.
She was alone now, utterly alone.
She knew nothing of Saskia’s plans. That had been the arrangement. Saskia knew nothing of hers. And so Sara had spent the summer enjoying summer’s gifts: the lengthening days, a few good books, an early music concert. She went coffee-and-shopping with Donna August. She’d thought about David Park, but when she said the testing words to herself—never again—she felt nothing. So be it.
At the cemetery, she swept Jenny’s gravestone and placed a bouquet of larkspur just so. She brushed her fingertips along Jenny’s name.
Mattie’s stone was dusty and looked neglected. Sara spent a few minutes washing and weeding before she spread her blanket and laid out her picnic. She took the first tablet with the crémant and ate the food, a little doggedly towards the end.
She closed her eyes to listen to a lone gull exulting, way up there in the blue.
The cork in the rosé gave her a bit of trouble. For a few moments she wondered if her whole plan would fall through because she had been too much of a snob to buy a screw top.
ANNABEL LYON is the author of seven books for adults and kids, including the internationally bestselling The Golden Mean. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.