“Your mommy is upstairs, listening to her music.”
“I’ll bring her dinner.” You ladle soup into a gold-rimmed bowl and take a heavy silver spoon from the drawer. Then you brush one hand along the banister and count to twenty-three as you walk up the steps. You knock once, and turn the knob to your mother’s room. You notice that the pictures of your father have been allowed to get dusty.
“It’s me, Mom.” You stand in the doorway, and the bottom of the bowl burns your palm. “It’s Cass.”
Your mother has wrapped herself in her ivory duvet, draped it around her tiny shoulders and her grey-streaked hair. You walk to the bed and sit beside her, then take a spoonful, blow on it, and hold it up to her mouth. She opens her lips then swallows, graceful as always.
“It’s your birthday next month,” you say. “And I think we should have a party.” You want a celebration, because there’s no telling how long your mother’s mind will last. Sometimes it sparkles and she remembers things so crisply that to listen to her stories is like looking at an album of photographs. But twice last week she forgot your name—just for a second, and she didn’t admit it. But you recognized the look of bemused confusion, then terror, that crossed her face.
“What do you think, Mom? We could invite Daniel. And Crystal and Evan and their awful kids.”
“Evan?” Your mother stares past you. “Why do I know that name?”
“He’s married to Crystal. Your other daughter.”
She smiles brightly. “Of course, that one. He was so attractive, wasn’t he?”
“You hate him. Said you’d never leave him a dollar and referred to him as ‘the goy.’”
“Of course.” She smiles. “I hate him.” Then she brightens, her face childlike and full of wonder. “Oh, yes,” she says. “A party.”
Sometimes you wonder—briefly and in secret—if she’s faking it, if this is her idea of a joke. You spoon soup to her mouth and watch her smile flirtatiously at the wall, showing her teeth and blinking her blue-streaked lids.
CRYSTAL IS BEING LIFTED on a chair and your extended family sings and dances a hora around her. Your sister’s face is red and sweating from the alcohol and the attention, and the bottom of her dress lifts and drops like a huge tulle wing.
This is when Daniel and Stephen sneak off. You watch as your brother and his friend walk away from the band, the toasts, the candles. They are going toward the dark edge of the forest, to the ravine. They keep pace with each other, their hands in their pockets. From behind, at this distance, they look like brothers. You count Daniel’s steps as he moves away from you—forty-seven until you can’t see him anymore. You stare at that place, where Daniel took his forty-seventh step. The same way he often stares at a branch long after a bird has alighted there, then left.
YOU HOLD YOUR MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY PARTY in the backyard. This time there are no candles or caterers, and there are only five guests. Daniel arrives first, his tattered suitcase in his hand. He took the bus up, and maybe it’s travel that has worn him so thin. The skin of his face is grey and covered in a film of sweat.
“Hey. How are you?” He speaks casually, as though he’s forgotten the years that have passed since you last saw each other.
“Daniel.” You say his name to reassure yourself that this man is really your brother. “Come in.”
You lead him to the backyard, where Rebecca has set a plastic table with placemats and plates and glasses of wine. There is an early spring sun, though it’s not as warm as it looks, and everyone wears sweaters and scarves. During dinner—cream soup, baked chicken, Rebecca’s signature mashed potatoes—your mother makes up for the weather by putting on a wonderful performance. She calls everyone by the correct name and she eats with the correct fork. She tells stories of her past—of how poor she’d been as a child, of how she met her husband—and she tells jokes.
Crystal eats for two, though you are sure she is not planning on any more children. The two kids she does have run through the yard, ignoring the food she served them. “Don’t go too far!” Crystal yells desperately as they run toward the ravine. “Stay where I can see you!”
Evan arrives late—a meeting ran longer than expected—but he is polite. He kisses his wife’s cheek, shakes Daniel’s hand, and looks you in the eye to make it clear he remembers nothing. Then he flirts with your mother.
“I don’t believe it for a second. I don’t believe that you’re sixty-five,” he says to her. “You could be Crystal’s younger sister.”
Everyone takes seconds and compliments Rebecca. Only Daniel doesn’t eat much. As you watch him slowly lift his fork to his mouth, you think of one of your past boyfriends, someone whose name you can’t quite remember. He was from Brazil, and before he immigrated, he’d been a doctor. Once, he showed you a book that you couldn’t keep your eyes from: A Guide to Tropical Disease. There were pictures of microscopic bacteria that bloomed like flowers. And there was a photo of a man with the same thin look your brother has now. The caption explained that he was afflicted with an illness that is rare among humans. One that passes between birds, as they nest high above jungles.
“You look cold,” you say to Daniel, then go inside to get him an extra sweater. The only one you find is from his days at that private school. It has hung in his closet for years, but when he pulls it on, it still fits. He’s even skinnier than when he was a teenager.
“Bad memories,” he says as he adjusts the collar.
YOUR SISTER FLIES AROUND THE DANCE FLOOR, gripping the chair. You stand from the table but don’t know where to go. You want to be at the ravine, to hear leaves crunch under your party shoes and to pick up smooth stones to show Daniel. Years ago, the two of you invented a secret language of tunes and whistles. You pretended that you could communicate with birds. That’s what you’d like to do now: sing and whistle. But Stephen and Daniel are down there, and you are not invited. There are different languages and different secrets to learn now.
Evan’s not dancing the hora. He’s not even watching his wife, though she looks happier and lighter than ever before. Evan is looking at you, where you stand with one foot on the tile floor and one on the grass.
AFTER DINNER, you hug Crystal and the others goodbye, help Rebecca with the dishes, then take the stairs to your brother’s room. You knock on his door, with no excuse prepared.
“Yeah?”
You turn the knob with both hands and look into his dark room. Your brother is reading in bed. He doesn’t seem to recognize you at first, but still, you sit on the edge of the mattress. You notice his protruding clavicle. The bone juts two inches from his body, covered by pale flesh.
“What’s going on?” You use a voice you haven’t heard in years—the voice of your younger, anxious self. “Are you okay? Are you sick?”
“I’m fine, Cassy,” he says. “And look what I found. It was under the pillow.” He holds up the Field Guide, the cover curved from so many years.
You don’t tell him that you left the book there for him. That over the past years you have read the field marks and range of nearly every bird, starting with all forty-four of the warblers, then moving through the thrushes, bluebirds, solitaires. When you had trouble sleeping, you read to yourself in Daniel’s voice, that steady, deliberate whisper. “‘Yellow-Throated Warbler,’” you said. “‘A grey-backed bird with a yellow bib. Creeps about the branches of trees.’”
Some phrases from the book have reached into your dreams so often that you don’t need to look at the page. “Black-Throated Green Warbler: a soft, lisping song.” And when you were sixteen, before he moved for the first time, Daniel pointed out a Wood Thrush to you. You can still describe the bird’s deep red feathers and flutelike song from memory.
Tonight, you take the book from Daniel’s hands and read to him of “Exotics: Introduced Birds and Escapes.”
“‘Yellow-Crowned Night Heron. A straggler—’”
Most of these you have never seen, and you have no idea if Daniel has ever glimp
sed a Red-Crested Cardinal or a Black-Necked Swan.
“Daniel? Are you awake?”
“Huh? Yeah.” But his eyes are closed and you know he is tired and wants quiet.
You press your hand to his chest and feel the faint rhythm, the rise and fall of his webbed bones. You’ve waited six years for your brother to come home, so you could feel safe, take comfort, and talk to the only man who’s ever been your friend. But now that he’s here, it’s not what you’d hoped. You think of Evan, after, when he’d looked at your skinny legs and tangled hair. Disappointment—terror—in his eyes. “Cassy,” he’d said—the only time you’ve heard his voice falter. “Get dressed.”
Daniel’s breathing deepens: he is asleep, guarding his own secrets. So you tuck the book under his arm, then leave. You close the door softly, walk across the hall to your mother’s room, and don’t bother to knock. A Chorus Line bounces in the background, and your mother’s eyes are as blank as snow. Her small voice rises as she sings along to “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love.”
You sit beside her on the bed. “Great party, Mom.”
“Thank you, Birdie.”
She must have mistaken you for a friend she once had, in a past life you can’t imagine. You take her hand anyway. Something about the cool light of her bedroom, the motherly smell of Chanel No. 5, and her innocent, absent face makes you confess. You tell her about your brother-in-law, the night of the wedding, the twenty minutes the two of you slipped unnoticed from the party while the bride was hoisted around the dance floor.
You tell her how you can’t remember who pushed whom to the ground, how you hardly felt the blunt pain of it, how coldness rushed through you like splintering wind. How you’d wanted to be included, to be adult, but were left feeling young and ugly and alone. You even tell her of after: how Daniel was the only one you trusted, so you crawled to his room, pressed your face to his pillow, and didn’t know where he was, when he would return. How you wanted to be at the ravine, singing and playing, but already that felt childish. Already, it was an old memory.
When you finish, you’re shivering. Your mother looks as though she doesn’t recognize you, and you worry that she’s going to call you by some other name. But this time, she gets it right. “Thank God your sister didn’t find out, Cassy,” she whispers, as though you are both schoolgirls, getting away with it.
Then she pulls you to her chest and holds you there, warming you. She starts to sing, and her voice is high and sweet. Your secret is hers now, to keep in the jumbled drawer of her mind. It is hers now, to lose.
f r a n k
THIS WAS BEFORE THE CITY had any money, and we didn’t have any either. I lived with my girlfriend in an apartment near Northland Mall, which was just a bunch of stores you’d never heard of, along with a Mrs. Vanelli’s, an A&W, and the Cinerama. The building was a muddy brown, the colour that snow becomes during the last weeks of winter. But then, that day I’m thinking of, winter had just begun. The snow was new, and everything was a pristine kind of white.
We lived in a building with grey siding on the outside and mustard yellow carpeting on the inside. Our apartment was a one-bedroom that contained hardly any furniture. Simmy and I didn’t do anything like decorate or paint or keep potted plants because we never planned to stay long, though we didn’t have any plans to leave either. There was a couch that we’d found on the street and carried eight blocks to our place, and a dining set that Simmy’s parents had given us. The furniture, the apartment itself, and the lives we lived in it never really felt like our own. I don’t mean that we weren’t happy. We were happy in the way that kids are happy when they’re playing at pretend.
We had jobs: I worked in the Safeway—produce—and Simmy worked at a dry-cleaning place. My job was to unload boxes of cantaloupes or tomatoes or oranges from the backs of trucks, and hers was to put clothes on and take clothes off hangers. We didn’t make much money, but we were too young to care. And we liked the perks: I got a discount on food, so we had a good supply of things like frozen peas and boxes of cereal. And at the dry-cleaning place, when customers forgot to pick up their clothes, Simmy was allowed to keep them. We had a closet full of power suits and well-ironed slacks, and when we were bored, we’d try them on. We were often bored, since we didn’t have any money, didn’t know anyone in the city, and it was too cold to go out much that winter.
I’d rented the apartment to impress Simmy, and it had worked. I was nineteen and would have done almost anything to be with a girl. That’s not quite true. I’d do almost anything to be with Simmy. We’d known each other since we were kids, and for a long time I’d hardly given her any thought. But during our last year of high school, I started to notice things about her. There was her dark hair, which she kept short. Her sneakers and jeans and the sweaters she got second-hand. The tattoo of an anchor on her arm, even though she’d never seen the ocean. The fact that, as a kid, she’d done rhythmic gymnastics—ribbons and cartwheels and that sort of thing—and the fact that we both found that funny.
And since she’d moved in, there was the way she slouched around the apartment. She was like a cat, and when I came home from work I’d find her curled up asleep on the part of the couch warmed by the winter sun. She got off work earlier than I did, and slept until I came home. And even though I didn’t like the city, the weather, or my job, I’d walk in the door, see her sleeping, and I’d feel okay. I knew I had a good thing going when I could lie beside Simmy and warm myself against her body.
Maybe because she slept so much during the day, she never slept through the night. That was something I never got used to. I’d wake up and the room would be dark and the space beside me cold. From where I lay in bed, I could hear her wandering through the kitchen and living room, picking things up and putting them down. I didn’t know if she was awake or asleep, and I wondered what she was looking for. She reminded me again of a cat, stepping lightly through the night. We couldn’t afford to heat the apartment much, and sometimes she’d be gone from our bed for so long that I’d start to shiver from the cold. I’d start to believe that I was alone in that sprawling city.
But then light would slant into the room and Simmy would be in the doorway. She’d stand there naked, with her eyes half closed. “Sim? Are you awake?” When I talked, she jumped like a startled animal. Then she came back to bed, her body slurring toward me through the dark.
BUT I DON’T WANT to talk about Simmy. That’s another story and everybody knows how it ends. Everybody’s been young and in love. Everybody’s lived through it. What I really want to talk about is that kid. He must be about nineteen or twenty himself now. Sometimes I still think about him, even though I don’t remember his name. It was a name that sounded too grown-up for a kid that age—he was only four or five. It was something like Ernest or Warren or Frank. Let’s say it was Frank. Let’s say he was a five-year-old kid, with dark eyelashes like a girl’s, a furrow in his forehead, and his name was Frank.
The night before we met him, it was our six-month anniversary. Six months since I’d called Simmy up and asked her to be my girlfriend. It had taken me weeks to get up the courage to call her, and I’d rehearsed my speech before I phoned. But when she picked up, I was clumsy. It seemed that I was in a dark room, and the words I said were pieces of furniture I kept tripping over. “Hey, Simmy.” I took a breath. “It’s Mike. Mike Sanders.”
“Hi, Mike. What’s up?”
I pictured her sitting on one of the overstuffed chairs in her parents’ living room. I told her about my job and the apartment and I described the city. I tried to sound like a guy who had his shit together. I didn’t tell her how lonely I’d been for the past two months. I said, “I’m calling to invite you down here.”
“Why?” Simmy wasn’t flirting—I don’t think she knew how to flirt. This was a serious question.
“’Cause I think about you all the time.” That wasn’t exactly true, but it wasn’t a lie either. “I want you to be my girlfriend.” There was silence on
the line. “Hey, Sim? Are you there?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll come down.”
She sounded like she’d been waiting for an offer like mine all along. And maybe she had. Simmy was a smart girl, and she knew she didn’t want to stay in that town forever, working at the pub four nights a week.
“Really? You’ll come? That’s great. That’s really great.”
She laughed. She was the only person who could laugh at me without it pissing me off. “I’ll need a couple days to pack my stuff.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“I’m just coming for a while, Mike. Not forever.”
“Okay. Sure. No problem.”
She arrived on the bus, and I met her at the depot, carried her bags, and used the last of my paycheque for a cab to take us to the apartment. Even though I’d exaggerated the size and cleanliness of the apartment on the phone, Simmy didn’t seem disappointed. She set her stuff down, smiled at me, and suddenly everything was okay.
She’d only planned to stay a few weeks, but six months had passed. And we were so young that six months felt huge, so we wanted to celebrate. After work I went to the liquor store and brought home two bottles of sparkling wine. The wine wasn’t expensive, and we had to drink it out of mugs we’d got for free at the gas station. But it was sweet and bubbly and made us feel good.
Simmy suggested that we dress for the occasion, so we put on some of the clothes she’d brought home from work. I wore a suit made for a broader man and Simmy wore a skirt, a blouse with a bow, and a sweater with gold buttons. We invented names for each other, names that suited the outfits: I called Simmy Eileen and she called me Steve. The new clothes and our new names made everything we did—heat up dinner, top up our mugs of wine—seem outside our real lives, as though we were watching ourselves on TV. And the more we drank, the more hilarious our show seemed. We used a Polaroid camera that we’d bought at a garage sale to take pictures of each other. In one, Simmy was sitting on our kitchen counter, the wine bottle in her hand, looking like an alcoholic housewife. In another, I was on the couch with the remote—a tired husband home from the office. These scenarios were funny because they seemed impossible. If someone had told us that one day we’d stop being young, that our lives would expand past that winter and that new city and each other, we wouldn’t have believed them.
Vanishing and Other Stories Page 14