Interference

by Michelle Berry

  “Yes. We scan it, enter it into our own little scanner. Whatever we need.” Dayton’s daughter stops kicking and watches her mother’s animated face. She giggles. She picks at her nose, which is leaking.

  “That’s $232.50,” the checkout girl says. She cracks her gum. There is a loud pop. Claire marvels that the girl can chew gum with braces like that. And what’s wrong with the girl’s braces? They are greenish in colour.

  Dayton hands over her credit card. “We could bring our scanners to the counter. Then pay and go wait outside and —”

  “And someone from the back would have put our grocery order together and would be there loading the bags into our cars. Oh,” Claire claps her hands together. She can’t help herself. “I really like that idea. I’d shop at that store.” Claire beams.

  Dayton signs her receipt and looks pleased with herself. She goes to the end of the line and starts packing her groceries into the bags she has brought from home. The man behind Claire clears his throat and sighs again. Claire enters the checkout line and begins putting her items — soy milk, organic broccoli, yogurt — onto the counter. She watches Dayton as she puts all her items in her bags. She doesn’t care about the order. Eggs go on the bottom. Bread squished under bananas. She is distracted and chewing her hair. Her daughter is chewing and sucking and generally making a mess of a granola bar she has ripped open out of the box. Claire joins Dayton at the end of the conveyor belt and begins loading her own few groceries into her bags.

  “I’m Claire,” she says, “by the way. And I like your idea a lot.”

  “I’m Dayton. This is Carrie.”

  Both women look at Carrie. Carrie smiles. There is a huge piece of granola bar rolled in her cheek. She looks like a chipmunk. Dayton reaches out and sticks her finger in Carrie’s mouth and pulls it out. She breaks off a small piece of the mush and gives it back to Carrie. Carrie gurgles and smiles. Then Dayton pops the rest of the gooey mess in her own mouth. Claire feels slightly ill.

  “I have a daughter named Caroline. We wanted to call her Carrie as a nickname, but she never let us. She always wanted to be Caroline.”

  “Carrie is Carolina. But I just call her Carrie. Carolina is where my husband, my ex-husband, is from.”

  “My Caroline is much older than this little one.” Claire feels sad saying that. “Seventeen.”

  “Really?” Dayton smiles. “They grow up so fast, don’t they? Sometimes I wish it was faster,” she pulls more granola bar from her daughter’s mouth, eats it, “sometimes not. It was nice to meet you.”

  “You too.”

  The women leave at the same time but Dayton moves faster than Claire, who tires easily these days. The Tamoxifen she’s on doesn’t have the side effects of the chemo, but the whole process, the whole way of life, of living with knowing, of living like this, well, it makes her tired. Claire’s wig is itchy because her hair is finally growing in. She imagines the hair pushing against the inside of the wig, trying to get out. Soon she won’t wear a wig anymore. She only wears it when she goes out. And only because she hates the looks of pity she gets from everyone. Not because she cares about what she looks like. She’d go completely bald all day if people would just stop touching her arm, smiling sadly, giving her brave smiles.

  In the parking lot Claire and Dayton are parked side by side.

  “What a coincidence.”

  “Yes,” says Dayton.

  They get in their cars and drive opposite directions so when they meet up again at the dentist’s office in the afternoon they are both surprised.

  “Are you following me?” Dayton says.

  Claire is taken aback but then realizes it’s a joke. “Checkup?”

  “I chipped a tooth playing hockey,” Dayton says. She points to her teeth. There is a small chip out of one of the front ones.

  “Oh dear. Playing hockey?”

  “I’m in this ladies’ leisure league. It’s really fun. I moved here in the fall and my neighbour introduced me to the game. I should really wear a mouthguard.”

  “I have a woman friend who plays hockey. Trish Mantle. In fact, her husband, Frank, plays hockey with my husband, Ralph.”

  “Trish? She’s the friend who got me to play. She’s my neighbour.”

  “Small world. You live on Edgewood then? I’m right around the corner, a couple blocks away.”

  The women laugh.

  “What a coincidence.”

  The street is iced over and it’s hard to walk. The trees crack above her. Caroline walks clutching her homework to her chest. Friggin’ cold, she thinks. The cold makes her eyes water. She has to pee. She always has to pee when it’s cold outside. Although she wants the money, she kind of wishes her mom didn’t tell this woman she would babysit. Caroline has a lot of homework and is feeling stressed all the time because her English teacher keeps piling on the projects. There’s Othello now. And an Independent Studies Unit. There’s something wrong with him, her teacher. He’s angry all the time and takes it out on the class. One day he made a girl stand up in class and he tore her essay in half in front of her. She started to cry and the teacher said, “Don’t be a sissy.” Caroline was shocked. Caroline needs to do well in all her courses this year so that she’s set for applying to universities next year. Seventeen years old and she feels already as if she’s had enough — she’s worried all the time, angry, anxious, losing weight. There’s just too much going on in her life right now.

  Dayton meets her at the door and ushers her into the warm house.

  “That’s a huge tree,” Caroline says. “I walked past it every day going to school when I was a kid and I guess I never really noticed it.”

  Dayton looks out at the tree and nods. “Sometimes we don’t notice things if they are always in front of us.”

  With the mood Caroline is in, with the sadness that always seems to follow her these days, the stress, Caroline thinks that this woman in front of her, this Dayton, is incredibly perceptive and, in fact, brilliant. Caroline gets a little teary and blushes. Everything makes her feel emotional these days — huge waves of highs and lows. Ever since her mother has been sick.

  Dayton shows Caroline around the house. They tiptoe past little Carrie’s room but Dayton doesn’t take her in and instead shows her the sleeping child on the video baby monitor. Caroline has never seen one of these monitors before and she marvels at it.

  “You can watch her all night long,” Caroline says. “Look, she rolled. Look, she’s sucking her thumb.”

  Dayton heads out the front door, clutching her hockey stick and bag. The bag is so big that she has to turn sideways but still she gets stuck. Caroline gives her a little push. They laugh.

  “Thanks so much for doing this. I’m so glad I ran into your mom the other day. I won’t be too late.” Dayton takes a step down the stairs then turns and says, “Oh, I forgot about Max. The kitten. Don’t let him out. There he is. Watch it —”

  A kitten sneaks up behind Caroline and she uses her foot to stop him from going outside. He looks up at Caroline. A snobby look. As if he knows who the boss is. She looks down at him. He walks back towards the kitchen, tail in the air.

  Caroline watches as Dayton meets up with Trish next door, one of her mom’s old friends from before the cancer, and they load their bags and sticks into Trish’s car. They beep as they pull out. Caroline waves. They drive off. Caroline still watches. She watches the tree. It’s so huge, it takes up the entire sky. How could she never have noticed it before? She’s never seen anything so large and scary. If this tree fell, it would definitely kill someone. In fact, it would probably take out quite a few houses. Caroline thinks about how her mom doesn’t have many friends anymore and how she used to have lots of them. The before-cancer friends and no after-cancer friends. It’s weird. You’d think that after cancer is when you’d need your friends the most, but Caroline’s mother doesn’t seem to want to do an
ything with anyone other than Caroline’s dad. She turns back to the baby monitor and watches that. Soon she gets bored and turns on the TV to watch instead. Her homework lies open on the coffee table in front of her. Her English essay. Her ISU book. A book about war because that’s what the mean English teacher said he wanted her to read. “But it’s independent study,” Caroline had said quietly, “shouldn’t I pick it on my own?” And he exploded at her, shouted something about being a feminist. She teared up. Rushed out of the classroom. Now she’s reading a book about war. And hating it.

  When the phone rings it startles her. In the video monitor she sees little Carrie stir. The last thing she wants is for the baby to wake up. Caroline likes kids, but she really doesn’t want to have to deal with tears or diapers right now. Besides, Carrie won’t know who she is and might be startled.

  “Hello?”

  There is a sound. Like wind. Like wind in a tunnel. And then a shout. Click.

  “Hello?” Caroline shrugs and hangs up the phone. A shout. A man’s shout or a woman’s shout? And would she call it a shout or a scream? Or just background noise, as if the caller was in a busy place? Caroline wraps her sweater tighter around her torso and looks around the big living room. She looks at the blackened windows. She looks at the front door. Did she lock it?

  Caroline shakes her head. Wrong number, she thinks. In the video monitor little Carrie flicks off her sheets and rolls to one side of the crib. Caroline can see her breathing, that’s how good the video is. Caroline turns back to the TV and then, suddenly, she begins to cry. Caroline’s fear is palpable. She is seventeen years old and her mother is dying of breast cancer. Her mother had no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes even. It’s growing back now, the hair, but still. Caroline sobs quietly. She stares straight ahead and just lets the tears roll down her cheeks. Her eyes hurt all the time. If they aren’t actually swollen from crying they are tingling and she is about to cry. She wakes up with exhausted eyes. A headache. Dryness. As if she’s leaked out all the water inside of her. Her chest and stomach hurt constantly. Caroline thought it would get better, that she would get used to this, but she hasn’t. Her mother has been operated on, she has had chemo and radiation. Now there is peach fuzz on her head. And Caroline continues to cry.

  The phone rings again.

  Max chirps and jumps into Caroline’s lap.

  She startles and knocks the video monitor off the table.

  “Hello?”

  The same thing. A sound. Like wind. Coming at her from within a tunnel. A shout. Male? Female? Click.

  “Fuck,” Caroline says and continues to cry. Max turns twice in her lap, his small claws digging into her jeans. They are sharp and they hurt. He settles himself and begins to purr. And then Caroline hears another sound. A howl that starts low and reaches higher into the air — a pitched, anxious howl. She looks around. What could it be? Then she sees the monitor on the floor and there it is, that’s where the sound is coming from — the baby crying from upstairs. Caroline wipes her eyes and places Max on the other side of the sofa. He sticks to her and she has to wrench him off. He meows, annoyed. She reaches down and picks up the video monitor from the floor and looks at it. Little Carrie is standing in her crib, staring straight at the screen, straight at Caroline. Her mouth is a round, gaping hole. Her eyes are wide and ringed with tears, terrified. Caroline drops the monitor and rushes up the stairs.

  The phone rings again.

  Caroline doesn’t answer it.

  There is a knock on the door. A voice. “Knock knock,” the voice says.

  Caroline doesn’t hear it.

  In the baby’s room Caroline reaches down into the crib to pick little Carrie up but the baby doesn’t know her and screams even louder when she sees the older girl’s arms coming in. There is a sudden smell in the air. Caroline stands there, seventeen years old, her mother dying, an essay on Othello due, a fucking war book to read, and a baby shrieking so loudly she can’t hear herself think. There is the smell of shit in the air and someone crank-phoning her. Caroline resumes crying. She joins the child. Both cry. One loud and wailing and uncomfortable. The other with shoulders shaking, big, loud gulps of air. Until finally the baby stops crying and studies the older girl. She moves over to the far side of her crib and curls up in the corner, one eye open on the big girl who is still sobbing, and she sniffles once, twice, closes her eye and falls asleep. Her soiled diaper looks huge, warm and wet.

  Downstairs there is a knock again. A quiet tap, tap, tap.

  Caroline settles down on the floor of the baby’s room and looks around. There are bears and dolphins and dinosaurs and princesses — toys everywhere. There are books in a large pile in the corner. A closet door is open and Caroline can see small, wildly coloured dresses hanging in a row, a laundry bag on the floor. Caroline doesn’t remember when she was little, but she remembers her brother, Jude, when he was young and how their mother would bend into the crib to take Jude out when he cried. How she would soothe him by blowing on his neck until he giggled. Caroline would say, “Now me,” and her mother would lean down and blow on Caroline’s neck and the warm breath would turn cold quickly and Caroline would shiver and laugh.

  How is it possible, Caroline thinks, to lose your mother? She’s not even gone, and I’ve lost her. Once her mother bent down to blow on her neck, now Caroline is taller than her mother and her mother will never blow on her neck to make her giggle again.

  They didn’t tell Caroline or Jude about the cancer until it was confirmed and there was no turning back. So there were a couple months where the siblings knew something was up, where they could feel it in the air, which seemed thick with sorrow. Caroline thought her parents were getting a divorce. She assumed, from the way Jude was acting, that he didn’t think anything. He just waded through the liquid air sluggishly and came and left the house silently and with skill. He wouldn’t talk to Caroline about it. Caroline complained a lot: why was everyone so quiet? Why was everyone ignoring her? “Why,” she asked one night, “is everyone being so nice to each other?”

  Her mother. The operations. The chemotherapy. The radiation. Her nails cracked and fell off. Her hair fell out. Her eyebrows and eyelashes disappeared. Her mother’s skin was covered in rashes. Her cheeks red and scaly.

  Sometimes, still, Caroline catches her mother crying in the bathroom. The door is locked but Caroline can hear the deep, guttural sobs.

  And all she can think, all the time, is it’s not fair.

  “Life isn’t fair,” her father says. “Get used to it.”

  But Caroline can’t understand that. Or she doesn’t want to understand that. It doesn’t make sense to her. I’m only seventeen, Caroline thinks. For some reason I thought life was fair.

  Max pushes open the door and comes into the room. Caroline stands, bends to scoop him up before he meows and wakes the baby, and carries him with her into the hall. The fresh air in the hall hits her. She really should have changed the baby’s diaper.

  The diaper reminds Caroline of the story circulating around her high school these days. Jude says it isn’t true, but Caroline is sure it can happen. Liquid Leonard is what they call him now, all the kids. Left to die in his reclining chair. Left there for four months. Leaked straight through to the basement.

  But the most disturbing thing about this story, Caroline thinks, is that his wife lived there with him. She kept taking in the dinner, left it there on his TV tray. She gave him the TV guide. She sprayed him daily with Raid to keep the flies off. When they found him, the story goes, he had that week’s TV guide right beside him. And his dinner was only a day old.

  “Can you imagine the smell?” Jude says.

  Caroline thinks of him, Liquid Leonard, slowly sinking into the recliner. She thinks of his wife, not being able to handle his death, wanting to ignore it, thinking it isn’t fair that he died before she did. She gags a little, there on the stairs at Dayton’s house, a
small gag as the imagined smell combines with the left­over diaper fumes from the baby’s room. Max hisses and jumps out of her arms.

  A door slams downstairs. Caroline jumps.

  The phone rings again.

  Dayton stands outside on the front porch, watching Caroline walk quickly down the dark sidewalk, trying not to slip on the ice, towards home. Strange girl. She looked stoned. Her eyes were all red. But Dayton supposes Caroline is a more appropriate babysitter than Trish’s daughter, Rachel, who is only twelve. Even if Caroline might smoke pot.

  Still, Dayton wishes the girl had got a ride home from her mother. Claire tried to pick her up. Dayton could hear her on the phone arguing. But Caroline wanted to walk and Claire didn’t seem to have the will to fight her.

  The hockey game went well tonight even if they lost again. Dayton is getting the hang of it. She’s able to throw her small weight around a little more. She takes chances now. She trusts her equipment to protect her. And, even if it doesn’t, she trusts her teammates to save her from harm.

  Inside, the phone rings again. Caroline mentioned there were a lot of prank calls. Dayton wonders if it’s John. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was calling and hanging up. A grown man. It seems so childish. But Dayton doesn’t know exactly what he is capable of — after all, Dayton took his daughter and disappeared. Dayton turns to go inside, to answer it, when she sees something in the mailbox. As she reaches for it, a pamphlet, something moves outside under the tree in the shadows. A person? A little man? A boy? She swivels quickly back to see what it is, but there is nothing there. Forgetting the pamphlet, Dayton goes inside and shuts the door. Locks it. The phone stops ringing. She leans back on the front door. She wonders when she will stop worrying about John, about the fact that the emails stopped, that he seems to have lost his job. When will she stop worrying? Is that even possible? When will she feel safe inside her house, or even outside of it? When will she be okay?

  When Dayton stole Carrie out into the night, whisked her away from California, away from John, she didn’t think it all through properly. She felt she had reason to leave. John’s affair. John’s verbal, emotional abuse. She was worried for herself. Worried for Carrie. But stealing your child in the dark of night, escaping through the air, lying to the customs officers, renting a house with cash and fake identification, and settling in as if nothing will hurt you, that’s just plain crazy. What was she thinking? Dayton sinks down to the floor and takes Max into her lap. Was there no other option? What else could she have done? What if she had gone the normal route — divorce — and John had retained custody of Carrie? What if she couldn’t see her baby ever again, or only on weekends? John, after all, had the job. Dayton had nothing. Except an old bottle of Prozac she is ashamed of, hidden in her underwear drawer. Prozac John could easily use against her.