by Camilla Gibb
They are not altogether invisible. And that is something, isn’t it?
Dripping Faucet
Nina tells Emma that all they need is time, but she doesn’t really know what it is to live in a family like Emma’s, where people can walk away forever and stop life’s clock. They have a fine role model, their father, before them. They have the potential double burden of genetic predisposition and learned hostility and capacity to abandon. If she doesn’t reach out to her brother, she’ll lose him forever. She doesn’t know who they are in relation to each other any more, but if she doesn’t even ask the question, then they’ll both have to live with another unsolved mystery. They will always wonder about each other. They will drip into each other’s sinks like water from leaking taps. And then one day, after turning each other into idols or monsters, they might come looking for each other because they can’t find washers big enough to stop the dripping. The sound of water will keep them awake forever.
There is a good thick inch of paper piled beside Emma and Nina’s bed—each page beginning, “Dear Blue,” most going no further. It’s a ritual Emma has developed since she and Nina moved in together. Every morning Nina disengages from one or other of the cats and gets up to put the kettle on. She brings Emma a cup of tea and Emma props herself up against the pillows, thanks her, and pulls a fresh sheet of paper across the bed. Those are the only words between them in that first hour of the day. They live well together, she and Nina, moving in and out of words.
“Dear Blue,” Emma writes in black ink, and stops and pauses. Sometimes she holds her pen poised over the paper and stares at those two words for the rest of the hour. This is the hour a day she spends with Blue. Perhaps it is prayer, she doesn’t know. She’s never known what it is to pray, but she does know she would rather pray for the living than the dead.
It doesn’t end there, but with death comes a new beginning. She feels her shape now where she used to feel like nothing more than liquid: clear substance flowing in and out of the holes in other people’s lives. She doesn’t know when she first became aware that she had a body to contain her, but she knows that initially she didn’t resemble anything more than an amphibian. She had grabbed hold instinctively and crawled ashore; her gills desperately sucking in short painful breaths of toxic air; her body, slippery and unformed, naked in the presence of the unfamiliar creatures who call earth their home. Slowly she began to mutate and trust the feeling of ground beneath her. She built her skeleton out of a thousand bones. She built wings and feet and began to feel calmer in this brave new world. There’s no Oliver any more, threatening to come and rip the ground apart and suck her back into some ugly unformed magma-like existence.
Six months later, Blue still doesn’t want to see his sister. Emma gets this news from Amy who flies out and visits him in Vancouver every couple of months. He’s been given the option of relocating to Kingston Penitentiary, much closer to home, but he’s not interested in being incarcerated in familiar landscape. He wants to keep his new life one step removed from the world he used to inhabit. Preserve it in oil.
Amy will join him. She will finish her hairstyling course and move out to Vancouver. They both know that the love between them hasn’t changed, but the life between them has, and will continue to do so for at least the five years of his sentence for attempted murder, before he’s eligible for parole.
Emma resists the urge to send Blue a thousand pieces of paper that say “Dear Blue” and nothing more. She changes the ritual, knowing Blue still does not want to see her, by crawling into the bathtub in the early morning while Nina is still sleeping. She puts a sheet of paper flat against the porcelain. Still, all she manages to write is “Dear Blue.” She can find no other words. She doesn’t understand. I was just beginning to like my life, she thinks. She thought he was too.
She wonders if he will write because she can’t. If neither of them does, they could be lost to each other forever. Maybe they already are. Ends are just as arbitrary as beginnings. You just pick some salient marker, like you do with a lover to mark an anniversary—was it when I first saw you? when we first kissed? when we first made love? when we had that awful fight and you broke down and said you didn’t want to live without me? when I turned your favourite white shirt green and you told me you liked it better? Pick some instance that signifies the start and the finish. You never know whether you have done the right thing—the unanswerable questions—the if-I’d-stayed-longers and the if-I’d-tried-harders still wash over you periodically like guilty waves.
But waiting to see whether he writes becomes slow death. Each day she doesn’t hear from him is like plucking another one of his hairs off her sweater. Soon her sweater will be free of his hair and there will be no evidence of him ever having rested his head in her lap. She has become untwinned from the notion that she and Blue live a symbiotic existence, but she has no idea that her life and her liberty are a result of his partial extinction. In a world of limited love, one Siamese twin is separated so that the other can live and breathe.
Blue could tell her as much, but to him, it’s not the point. She will probably never know, and that is the truest form of sacrifice. Blue sits on a leaden mattress in a room off a lonely corridor with the certain knowledge that he has been victorious. He has single-handedly wrestled the guy with horns to the ground and, in so doing, restored some partial sanity for himself and spared Emma. He feels regret for the pain he caused an innocent man, enough so that he admits it to the prison psychiatrist and considers the chapel on Sunday mornings, but it was the unavoidable collateral damage in a war that needed to be won. He reminds himself of this. He has to draw solid lines because otherwise he’ll never be able to walk straight. He writes to his sister:
Em,
I just want you to know that I don’t blame you for what happened in the courtroom. So it wasn’t Dad. What were you going to do? Lie? I wouldn’t expect you to do that. So it wasn’t Dad. But that’s not really the point.
At some level I knew Dad was dead. I knew it earlier in the year when the police came to question me. I guess I knew it on what you could call a technical level, but not on any other. I mean, how the fuck could he get away with it all so easily? Guy just fuckin’ dies? It just seems so unfair. So you hear he’s dead and you just want to fucking kill him even more. Do you know what I’m saying? I still wanted to kill him. He was haunting my fucking head and it was only getting worse. Can you imagine what it feels like having someone crawling around on all fours taking big bites out of your brain? I thought I was going mental, Em. So the guy I stabbed wasn’t Dad. It was still the only way I could kill him. And you know, as soon as I did it, I didn’t feel like I was going mental any more. And that made it worth it. I’d do it all again if I had to.
You just don’t seem to get it. That’s why I’m mad at you. Not because you said the guy wasn’t Dad—but because you didn’t understand. He’s dead—I’m relieved and you’re safe. This is a happy ending. So don’t feel sorry for me or anything. It’s not all bad.
He’s straightening lines that are forever twisted; doing his best to create order, box any uncertainty, prevent spillage.
Amy passes Emma the photo of the wild-haired man in a poncho. Pushes it across Emma and Nina’s kitchen table. “Blue wanted you to have this.”
“What would I want this for?” Emma asks.
“He’s giving you a gift, Emma,” Amy says, almost annoyed.
“Some gift. This, in lieu of Blue.”
“We haven’t lost him.”
“But he sounds dead. He stabs a guy, the ghosts leave his head, but then down falls a heavy iron curtain.”
“He’s not dead at all,” Amy defends. “He’s alive—in the here and now.”
“Yeah, well, some life.”
“He’s says it’s not all bad. He gets to do his tattooing, gets dope, smokes. He doesn’t want a whole lot more right now.”
“Like I said, some life.”
“But he did it for you, Emma. Don’t yo
u get it? So that at least one of you could be free.”
“But I never asked him to,” she says.
“You didn’t have to.”
Postcard from Hell
Oliver sends a postcard.
Dear Kids,
Marie and I are having a fabulous time on Salt Spring Island. You wouldn’t believe the scenery. Blue—you would kill to see fish like these swimming alongside each other—it’s as if they were family. Emma—my God, the girls … like your mother at twenty-five. If I were your age, I’d be in heaven, but as it is, I’m in hell.
Love lots,
Daddy O
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Martha Kanya-Forstner, Maya Mavjee, Ravi Mirchandani, Louise Dennys, Jen Shepherd, Suzanne Brandreth, Dean Cooke, Anne McDermid, Gary Crawford, and Anne Shepherd, and to my family and friends, Heather, Sheila, Stan, Alex, Annie and Vibika.
About the Author
Camilla Gibb was born in London, England, and grew up in Toronto. She has a B.A. in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Toronto, completed her Ph.D. in social anthropology at Oxford University in 1997, and spent two years at the University of Toronto as a post-doctoral research fellow before becoming a full-time writer.
Her debut novel, Mouthing the Words, was winner of the City of Toronto Book Award in 2000, and she received the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction in 2001. Her latest novel, the bestselling Sweetness in the Belly, was winner of the Trillium Book Award in 2006, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her books have been published in 19 countries and translated into 15 languages. She is one of 21 writers on the “Orange Futures List”—a list of young writers to watch in the new century, compiled by the jury of the prestigious Orange Prize.
Camilla Gibb has been writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta and at the University of Toronto, where she is now an adjunct faculty member of the English Department’s M.A. in Creative Writing Program. She is currently at work on a new novel.