Reproduction

by Ian Williams

  She’s not twenty-one.

  I’m nineteen, Felicia said quietly.

  It looks like she’s bleeding from the mouth.

  Anyway, Felicia said. You should feed her.

  She’s not a dog. I don’t feed her. Then he was ashamed for being so prickly. He had to pack and get some sleep, though. He went to the kitchen as if overwhelmed by the choices, when, in fact, he only had a pantry of canned goods.

  Felicia followed him to the kitchen, holding his camera to her eye.

  Where’d you find that? he asked.

  Upstairs. She continued twisting the lens and pushing the shutter. It already have film inside.

  Put it away.

  Felicia let the camera fall away from her face. She rested the camera on the kitchen counter, opened two cans of soup and poured them into a pot.

  Did you call Jerry? Edgar lit a cigarette on the burner.

  Not yet, she said. This is another point where their stories diverge.

  Call him.

  I wanted to ask you a favour first, she said.

  So call Jerry. He’s reasonable. Edgar didn’t tell Felicia that he had already called Jerry, a lanky, pale man with prematurely white hair, born to work in death, to tell him about Felicia. Edgar had told him the story of Felicia’s mother in the hospital and at the end told him he’d pay for the plot in Riverside or Sanctuary Park, find her a nice spot. He wanted Jerry to deliver the news that someone had already covered the cost of the funeral.

  We don’t have big-shot funeral homes where I come from, Felicia said. All you have to do is call Reaper or Horseman when you ready to bury your people. They good. But Horseman does provide better service. From the embalming to the box to the headstone. Reaper does just throw you in a hole, people say.

  Edgar searched his wallet and found another of Jerry’s cards. He began dialling the rotary phone.

  Felicia set her teacup on the table with a click. She took the phone from Edgar’s ear and hung it up.

  Before we do all that, she said, because I don’t have a whole heap of money, I was wondering, she paused, I was wondering if I could use your backyard.

  XX

  11.

  At the funeral, Felicia wore the black dress with the lace décolletage although she didn’t really have the curves for it. And a hat with a brim as wide as her shoulders. Her church met in a rented Anglican church that smelled of ammonia. Its members had not yet reached the building fund target despite sending children with baskets through the pews each week.

  The organist turned a page and began playing “Abide with Me.”

  Because the service was on a Wednesday morning, everyone who attended was over forty and female, except for a sprinkling of husbands.

  Felicia’s mother had requested a closed casket if her hair was grey, open if it was not. Closed it was. Her sisters had seen their mother in private at the funeral home and, for the others on the day of the funeral, Felicia had placed a headshot surrounded by flowers, on a table in front of the pulpit.

  Edgar came late. He was the only white man in the church and he didn’t stay long.

  During Sister Jazz’s tribute, he crouched at the end of Felicia’s pew, gesturing for her attention. She raised her sunglasses.

  I have to get going, he said over the laps of her sisters.

  Thanks for coming, she mouthed. She nudged her sister. That’s the pneumonia man. But she wanted to introduce them properly. How’s your mother?

  Alive, he said.

  She couldn’t go there. She lowered her sunglasses back over her eyes.

  Still crouched in the aisle, he glanced at the front of the church to see what he was missing then turned back to Felicia. She kept her eyes ahead. He scribbled on the back of a business card and passed it to Felicia.

  That’s how the rumour got started that Felicia Shaw would be okay, that she had friends in high places, and, girl, I don’t mean heaven.

  The earth was frozen beneath the surface, the funeral director announced to the black congregation. A lie. It was early November. The body would not be buried that day. True.

  XY

  11.

  The body was not buried until Felicia’s sisters left.

  Felicia stood, wrapped to her eyes in one of her mother’s scarves and watched Edgar dig a hole at the hairline where his backyard became woods. Jerry and his men brought the body to Edgar’s house in a van (the neighbours) at night. Felicia prayed. Jerry and his men filled the grave. Then everyone went into the kitchen and had homemade soup with dumplings.

  Edgar stood behind her while she stirred the soup to prevent the dumplings from sticking to the bottom of the pot. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her how she was feeling so he just stood behind her and sighed twice.

  Felicia did not turn around. I was not nice to you when we first met, she said.

  He waved his hand dismissively. There’s still time to be nice to me, no?

  But by all predictions, they would soon be out of each other’s lives. Edgar had rescheduled his trip to Calgary for Monday. He insisted on the date of the burial to get it over with before he left. Felicia would be back in school on Monday as well.

  After he was back from his trip, they would meet once more to burn her mother’s things in a barrel. Her sisters had taken everything they wanted. What remained was folded in three garbage bags. After Calgary she’d bring the clothes and Edgar would supply the gasoline.

  He tried to keep her talking. Your uncle, he began.

  Which one?

  The one they put tires around and burned, was he into little boys or girls?

  Neither.

  I assumed he was some kind of sexual deviant.

  Felicia shrugged. Does it matter now?

  XX

  12.

  Felicia was supposed to go home the night she didn’t. That was the agreement. She couldn’t miss more school and still complete the semester.

  The night of the burial, after Jerry left, Edgar drank a little on the sofa while she scrubbed Mutter’s dentures with baking soda. He told her about Olympic Stadium in Montreal. She told him about defrosting the freezer. He told her about Nadia Comaneci, that tiny body flipping. She told him about Mutter’s face when she saw the Buckley’s bottle. He told her about the difference between a Montreal bagel and a New York bagel. She was telling him about how Miss Havisham died when, mid-sentence again, he started rubbing circles into her forehead with his thumb.

  He kissed where her neck met her shoulder. Mutter was right there, sleeping on a twin bed, yes, breathing heavily, yes, but facing their direction, only a few feet away. Felicia still had her teeth in her hands.

  Your mother, Felicia said.

  I’ll be quiet.

  No, she said, twisting her neck away from him like a burning horse.

  Her dress just caught on fire? Edgar led her by the elbow. She wasn’t smoking? You sure you read that correctly.

  Felicia held on to the denture and toothbrush all the way up the stairs.

  I think I hear Mutter, she said.

  But he had already spun her into his room and closed the door behind them.

  * * *

  +

  She was inside that closed door. Outside of wedlock. He had not turned on any lights.

  She was not alarmed or surprised. She was unusually alert, thinking of her mother, waiting for her mother to appear to stop her Fleecy from fornicating. It was an experiment against death. You thought you could die. You won’t let me do this. At each step of Edgar’s advance, she waited for an intervention, a phone call, an aneurysm.

  Edgar tried to undress himself, the top half and the bottom half at the same time, which resulted in his pants gathered at his ankles, his shirt unbuttoned and off, but one sleeve attached to him at the wrist where his hand was unable to pass through the buttoned cuff.

  His watch—she thought Mutter had it—caught in her hair. He took it off and she heard it thud against the rug near the four-post bed.

  He di
dn’t undress her, quite, he tried, he started to. He pushed his hand under her sweater and clawed at her left breast, sliding his whole shirt up there behind him, clawed like the claw of a tractor. Her mother was about to freeze him, to give him sudden kidney pains.

  Felicia wanted him to press down on her and crush her face into stone so someone would come in and rescue her. Yet, contradictorily, she kept trying not to get hurt, kicking his zipper away from her ankle, where it was grating, trying to breathe under the weight of his body. He did not remove her underwear, or allow her to, she tried, but he slid it aside. And if not her mother, then the boy with the cow eyelashes from the small unrecognized island would intervene, the same half-muscle half-bone feeling of a turkey neck, in her hand, when she, because he had to be helped if she wanted him to kill her, but in her hand, now inside her, he only felt like a low hum, like a fluorescent light buzzing, despite the earnest thrusting of a snowman’s carrot, the smell of his armpit and smoke and alcohol, his face buried in the pillow beside her face, was that his lip on her shoulder, was he dribbling, despite what she felt to be an earnest effort by a man ascending the mysterious and simple heights of male pleasure, already oblivious to her name and face, to whom she had died, despite this man so attentive to the pleasure her body offered him that he wouldn’t care if a cat or his mother walked in, despite all that, she could only feel a low hum, the vibration of an automobile in park. Intervene.

  Afterward, he took off his shirt and pants completely, finally. She found herself apologizing to him, telling him about human and animal skulls they found behind a church on her small unrecognized island.

  Edgar smoked two cigarettes and fell asleep as she was talking. He was tired, after all, from digging a grave. Felicia concentrated on the snail crawling out of her. When his breathing deepened (he slept so quietly, with his lips sealed, his face settled into sternness, very proper, no slackness in his face at all), she got up in the night and went and slept on the couch across from Mutter because she had no way home.

  XY

  12.

  Edgar had no recollection of having transactional sex with Felicia.

  Did he have any memory of sex with Felicia?

  As far as Edgar was concerned, Felicia was an hungred, and he gave her meat: she was thirsty, and he gave her drink: she was a stranger, and he took her in: 36 naked, and he— Next. She was sick, her mother was, and he visited her, yes, technically he was there: she was in prison, and here ends the comparison.

  Did he have any memory of sex with Felicia?

  Well, of course, but not as she remembered it.

  He had closed the door to the bedroom to access a linen closet on the inside of his room. She briefly stepped inside the master to avoid the door’s swing path. He gave her sheets as she was telling him about a wave of girls that went missing on her small unrecognized island. They’d go to school and wouldn’t come home. About twenty of them all over the country in a matter of days, she said.

  And they turned up dead, Edgar said, because he really was quite tired and wanted to sleep and was used to Felicia’s horror stories. I get it, Felicia. The world’s a terrible place. You don’t need to scare people off.

  She held the sheets to her chest. No, not that I was saying. They went missing and the family calling calling the police trying to find their daughters but before they could really declare an emergency, the girls showed up. They had just run off with men, a bunch of old men them.

  And, of course, after such innuendo, if he had any desire for Felicia, he quickly pissed it out.

  The following morning, sure, he was in his underwear when he came down the stairs, but he was covered in his navy coat. It wasn’t like he was immodest. He kissed Mutter on the cheek. He looked for Felicia and she was gone. He went through the first floor, calling for her. Then he went out the back door and found her in her boots and one of Mutter’s coats, pouring coffee on the mound under which her mother was buried.

  XX

  13.

  They were almost at her school. Felicia was so worried about whether Edgar would kiss her when he dropped her off and who would see this old man leaning over and kissing her that she didn’t really process what he said about his mother. She heard it though.

  I have it under control, he said.

  He was going to head back home and arrange a day nurse, like the ones he got to watch Mutter while he was at work. There were rentals, his word, something like that. That morning he had come down the stairs in his underwear and coat—did he not own a robe—and asked why she slept downstairs and she offered some feeble reason, Mutter wanted water or something. She went to the kitchen to boil eggs and make coffee for Mutter and, well, Edgar and, well, herself as well. He put his thumb on her forehead. She told him no, she had to go to school this morning. He held her face in both hands then tried to pull her head down the front of his shirt, she thought as a weird embrace, and she couldn’t understand why until he was upstairs getting dressed and the toaster ejaculated.

  He returned and placed his suitcase at the door.

  In the car, now, he said, Mutter knows the drill.

  I just think someone should be with her.

  She’ll be okay. I’m heading right back.

  He found a lighter in the glove compartment. If he kissed her, he was going to taste charred, like licking the oven rack.

  From how he smoked, Felicia could tell that he was nervous as well about being seen with her. And from his tone. All that reassurance transferred on to Mutter.

  Old man in his big green Passat. But she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She would turn her head and hug him, convert the kiss to a hug over the car’s gearbox. Or maybe he could drop her off at the traffic lights. But, truth be told, part of her did want others to compound the enigma that had become Felicia Shaw. She was already the girl with the dead mother who teachers never called on. She didn’t have friends here. The girls she sat next to were careful with her, as if death could be detonated in her by saying the wrong thing. No one from school had called. Or maybe someone had. She hadn’t been home much.

  Edgar braked in the drop-off zone.

  Don’t kiss me, she said.

  I wasn’t going to, he said.

  XY

  13.

  Within an hour, Edgar was back at Felicia’s school. The office buzzed her during English and told her to bring her things.

  Tell her it’s an emergency.

  It’s an emergency, the secretary said.

  He saw Felicia before she saw him. She forgot to bring her things. A student in the office pointed her head to the fire doors, where Edgar had situated himself for privacy, then continued wiping the rouge from her cheeks harshly with a tissue.

  Something happen to Mutter?

  Sort of. Yes. Edgar turned his back to the office. I called for a day nurse but she can only work for half the day.

  So someone’s with her now? You couldn’t ask me this in the car?

  I didn’t know in the car.

  Or yesterday? Is not now you know you travelling.

  I had it worked out but when I went to confirm, the agency told me, you know, what I just said.

  How long can she stay?

  Until noon. I told you.

  Noon!

  At the latest. Listen, I can’t get into the details. As I was saying, I’ll pay you what I was paying her. I have to get to Montreal. People are walking away from the table, Edgar said and imagined a literal table surrounded by duplicates of his father.

  Now?

  Yes, now. But I can’t drive you back either.

  Felicia looked between Edgar and the office. I can’t miss no more school if I want to get my papers.

  What do they need, a note?

  She shook her head. It’s just for the afternoon?

  Today and tomorrow, he said. He knew that she had missed a lot of school already. He knew she was catching up the best she could. He knew she still hadn’t finished that brick she was reading.

  She
chewed both her lips. He didn’t want to hear her say no.

  Listen, Edgar said pre-emptively, I’ll figure something out. Go back to class. And he pushed the heavy school doors and left.

  And came back before the door even shut. In the intervening second, their history pulsed through him: the two chairs, back to back, then beside, then facing each other. The flood. The mask. The blood in the Styrofoam cup. Salt gargling by the standpipe. The handkerchief on Grossmutter’s face. The front of his wrinkled coat. All that history.

  He didn’t have to say a thing.

  Felicia was nodding. If you get somebody until three, I’ll go after school.

  Noon, he said.

  All you have to do is call the day nurse from the airport and offer her double pay to stay three more hours.

  Noon, he said again. The request had turned into a demand somehow. In front of the office glass panels, with the secretary and Rouge watching, Edgar gave Felicia the house key, three bills from his wallet, and somewhat desperately, his watch.

  You go need your watch, she said.

  He pushed her hand back at her.

  That’s for a cab and for any expenses, Edgar said. He wasn’t thinking of damaging Felicia’s reputation. But reading his lips through the office window, he might have seemed to say, That’s for a cab after. You’re expensive.

  And that’s how Edgar inadvertently began the rumour that Felicia left school to go awhoring.

  XX

  14.

  When Felicia let herself into Edgar’s house at noon, it was obvious that no nurse had been called at all and that Mutter was alone all this time. Her blanket was on the floor as if she had tried to get out of bed. She was still in her nightclothes. She hadn’t been changed.