They have started eating dinner at the dining room table every night, which is nice. It’s easier to talk when he is not trying to balance a plate of stir-fry over the sheets. The heavy blond wood table with carefully lathed legs was one of Catherine’s favourite things they bought for the house—she loved it almost as much as the blue living-room sofa.
Catherine lasts through the meal and more of the cleanup every night. Now as he tells her about work, she carefully lathers and rinses their dishes and cutlery while he dries. Still, he senses her scripting, struggling for scraps of their past conversations. Their old normal, with all its relaxed banter and literary criticism and puns, is like a movie he saw a long time ago.
“Did you go to the lunch? With those American sales guys?”
“Yeah, I did. It was really good. They’re sharp but not pushy. You know?”
Catherine runs a fork under the tap, places it in the rack, then pulls a steak knife out of the soapy water. Her face is pale and tight—there is still no slack in her cheeks. “Great.”
He isn’t sure it is—she would probably have said great to anything while she was trying to balance a knife under the spray. He has noticed her care with potential weapons.
There isn’t enough to say about his day, and she says nothing about her own. Jokes that would have made her laugh until she couldn’t breathe in the old days make no sense now, but he doesn’t know what kind of jokes this new Catherine would like. He wants to be the charming sweetheart she fell in love with, but increasingly he feels bogus, an imposter.
“Do you want any books? I’ll get you whatever you want from work. Discount still in effect.” He says it an advertising-y voice, then shakes his head.
She shrugs, carefully sudsing the traces of gravy from a flat white plate. There is the quiet of water trickling into more water, the whirr of the furnace below their feet. It’s the coldest part of winter. “Maybe a cookbook, if you see something nice.”
He nods and leans toward her. She has been trying—clearly trying—to say enough to make him happy, to interact in ways that seem normal. But her attempt is always only, “This episode of 30 Rock is funny.” Never, “Remember when Alan Alda played Jack’s dad on 30 Rock and I laughed until I got the hiccups?” Always normal, never who she used to be.
But Catherine was never a recipe cook, preferring to guess and experiment, to do things her own way. This is new.
“A cookbook? What kind—I mean, what kind of food do you want to cook?”
She shrugs again. “Whatever. And maybe some new pots, with lids that match. It would be nice to have something shiny and new.”
There’s a rust-tinged saucepan lid in his hand, and the old dented grater on the counter beside him. It’s amazing to Grey that after all his resignation and doubt, they still want the same things, a little bit.
—
The store is crowded even on a weeknight, but with fewer manic children than on the weekend. The rubberized steps in the main entrance are wet from tracked snow and far too wide for everyone to have access to a railing. Grey takes Catherine’s hand, which is cold and damp—they had to park so far away. It takes him several seconds to realize this is a move from the old playbook. Catherine has shied from his touch since she returned, sometimes with such fearfulness that he has learned to keep his hands away. But he hasn’t come up with a new way of being near her yet, so sometimes he forgets, like now. Perhaps, for a tiny moment, Catherine has forgotten too, because her hand stays quietly in his. Or perhaps she is just frightened of the crowd.
The second floor is windowless but tastefully lit. Shoppers are surrounded by a honeycomb of small rooms, each stuffed with furniture draped with throws, shams, and sheers, everything freestanding burdened with accessories. They have come here to find the things that they need.
Grey picks up a folded blue blanket wrapped in paper from a wire bin full of identical blankets. It has the density and heft of a teddy bear. He gives it a hug—it feels right—then passes it to Catherine. “For the back of the couch? For while we’re watching TV?”
Catherine wraps her arms around the bundle and squeezes. “Okay.”
The stroll through the designer rooms is aimless. Even though the chair he wants will go in the bedroom, it isn’t thematically “bedroom” and Grey knows they won’t find it in this section. He regains Catherine’s hand and this time it is dry; he suspects she has wiped it on the blanket.
By the time Grey saw the photo of the basement where Catherine was held, things had probably been moved around or hauled into other parts of the house. He tried to imagine her living there—sleeping, watching the old tube TV in the corner—but it was impossible. He just kept picturing her in her waitressing uniform with that ridiculous apron that covered nothing, bouncing around his car and drumming on the dash, listening to something angry by Sinead O’Connor. He’d known her so well for so long, and then she just disappeared. How was that even possible?
“What was Donny like?” He had sat in a lot of overheated uncomfortable rooms next to the Zimmermans, nervous and quiet, but bonded in their shared misery. He felt as though he’d met Donny many times through their stories, the pictures they carried in their pockets like passports. “You must think about him a lot. I think about him a lot.”
She does not answer immediately. As they walk past a teenager’s room with thick blue blankets draped artfully on a loft bed, Catherine pulls her hand back from Grey and begins to stroke their blanket as if it were a puppy.
They are in a large, loud room filled with couches now, the walls rimmed with chairs. A child zips past their knees, ponytail streaming. Still stroking the blanket, she says, “He used to tell me stories. We both did. There wasn’t much else to do. We were friends.”
“Can you tell me one? One of Donny’s stories?”
She is standing beside an angular red couch when her knees seem to just drop out from under her, and suddenly she is sitting down. He sits down beside her.
“Well, I don’t know. He had this plan for prom. He wanted to take his girlfriend on his bike. Like riding doubles, you know? He said they rode like that the first time he took her out for coffee after school. It sounded romantic, but I was worried about her dress…I guess it doesn’t matter now.” She dips her head, swallows wetly.
For a moment his palm hovers over her shaking back, hesitating, before he finally lets it rest between her shoulder blades, feel the warmth of her living body. She doesn’t flinch. “I’m sorry. It must’ve been terrible to lose him.”
She strokes the bright red canvas of the couch cushion between them—Grey remembers the furniture in this place being nicer. “Yeah. He was a sweet kid. He helped me.” A tear plops on the upholstery.
“His parents gave me their number in case you wanted to talk to them. His girlfriend too.”
She shakes her head. “I want to be kind. I know they—they must be so sad. But I’m not—”
“It’s fine to wait.” He taps the back of her hand. “They know you’ve been through a lot.”
“I’m alive though.” She sighs and looks away, her gaze resting on a bin of cellophane-wrapped tins beyond the arm of the couch. She reaches across him without standing, picks one up and holds it out to him. “This is so perfect. See, it’s a grater that catches the cheese.”
He runs his fingers over the surface, the sharp-edged holes dulled by the cellophane. “Yes, perfect. Let’s buy it.”
Catherine smiles, a trickle of tear sliding beside her nose. She stands and goes over to the sales desk to get a vinyl shopping bag and drops the blanket in. When she returns and holds the bag open to him, he adds the grater. Once he’s up from the couch, he takes the straps from her and slings it over his shoulder.
Will they always live in quiet now? Slow sentences instead of constant chatter, long silences? But perhaps eventually, someday, the feeling will be the same as it always was—the feeling that she is the only person who really hears what he is saying, and that he can be that for her too, as l
ong as he listens very closely.
Standing beside him, her fingers touch his and then she clasps his hand. They start to walk again, surfing through the crowd of other shoppers. They move faster now than they did before, maybe because the few items they have found show them how much more they need.
Sometimes the Door Sticks
First-person books have always been my favourite. Novels, short stories, memoir, poetry, anything with an “I” in there somewhere. I love the idea that the characters own the book, that the story is lived-in, intimate. It’s always nice to slip into someone else’s skull and leave my own behind. Before, when I closed a book, real life used to drape slowly back over me: Oh yeah, I’m Catherine. I need to get off the bus, go to work, do my CanLit paper. Now the shock is sharper. When the story ends abruptly or the book falls shut or my attention wanders—and suddenly I’m me again, feeling the rug where my T-shirt’s rucked up—it’s a blast of cold water, a kick in the back of the knee.
I’ve lost interest in me—and that’s all anyone wants to talk about now, it seems. I prefer not to be in my own head if I can avoid it. During my therapy sessions, Dr. D asks me a lot about what I feel and what the experience has done to me. The short answer is that it’s turned me into a person who lies on the floor all day reading instead of going to work or school or the grocery store, but therapists never want the short answer and I don’t usually have the strength to elaborate.
Everybody tells me that I’m “doing so much better.” And it’s true, I guess. When I first came back, I couldn’t concentrate enough to read a line, couldn’t even follow along when Grey was reading to me. The effort of just staying conscious, of not going back in my mind to the worst things, kept the stories out; my own life loomed so huge that I couldn’t imagine anyone else’s. Later, I had to focus on the basics of taking enough steps to get across a room, of looking back at people looking at me, saying hi. These normal things take so much concentration when you’ve gotten out of the habit. Washing my hair and putting on clothes feel like putting a ballgown on a cat—so much effort and what was the point? I’m trying to get back the autopilot I used to have. When I watch movies with my mom, I try to anticipate the moments when I’m supposed to laugh. It’s hard, but her shoulders relax when I react like I’m normal. Sometimes I wish I were a robot, feeling nothing, able to follow a program and glide through the day on a series of commands I don’t even have to think about. Then there are days when I feel like I already am one, ignoring everything good and beautiful in my life, just clonking forward, and I have to fight to not be a robot. Every day is exhausting.
At least I can read again. My mind wanders and I often have to flip back to remember what I’ve read, but I’m getting to the point of living with the characters again and forgetting who I am for a little while. So far I’ve been reading mainly short stories, just because Grey bought so many collections for me when I was in the hospital. I like the brief glimpses into the lives of people I’ll never know. The stories feel like a good primer on how life works, how families and lovers and jobs and friendships are. All the inexplicable things that I used to be able to deal with.
I don’t think I’m ready for poetry yet. I’m not ready to fill in all those ellipses with my own mind, but eventually I want to go back to Julianna’s poems. I found one of her books in the living room. It wasn’t my copy; there were none of my careful notes in the margins. The weird thing was, I was too scared to read any of the poems—I just flipped through the pages but wouldn’t let my eyes focus on any stanzas or individual words; it all blurred together. I recited her poems so many times while I was in the basement, especially the one about prying a stuck door open with a butter knife, that they started to feel like prayers. Will reading them now make me feel like I’m back there again, with all the doors stuck? Did I even remember them right or understand what she was trying to say at all?
I can’t read the poems I like, I can’t go outside alone. I can’t even lie on the blue couch that I’ve missed so much. Perched on the stiff cushions, I feel awkward and exposed, unsafe. If Grey is sitting there beside me, I grit my teeth and sit up straight, but otherwise I go back to sprawling on the floor, the way Donny and I always did. It’s safer—you can’t be knocked down. And sometimes it feels like he is still with me down there.
The front door creaks and jingles, then swings open into the hall. Grey shuffles in, his rain jacket drooping around him like a broken tent. “Hello,” he says quietly, voice directed nowhere in particular, before he looks around the doorjamb and sees me there on the floor. “Catherine. Are you okay?”
Catherine is all he ever calls me now. I guess Cat feels too familiar, considering how little we know each other anymore. Slowly, I sit up, then tip to my hands and knees and at last coil and stretch up to standing. “Fine. How was your day?”
“Bit slow, but I got a lot of little things done.” He has wandered into the kitchen, where the roast chicken and potatoes should be nearly done. “Smells good in here.”
Small things are all I can do for Grey. It’s for him I get out of bed, wash my hair, put on pants, shirts, underwear. Roast a chicken and potatoes. We met in an emergency room when I was twenty. I would never have met him anywhere else; he’s ten years older than me and I would’ve thought him nerdy and fat if I’d met him in high school. But late at night eight years ago, with a dishcloth on my scalded arm, I saw that he was sweet and smart and would remember not only my birthday but my mother’s too, would buy me books for my commute that were exactly what I wanted to read, would eat in my restaurant and compliment me on how well I handled rude customers instead of how cute I looked in my uniform. He was so charming. He probably still is charming, but I don’t seem to be capable of enjoying it anymore. Every interaction is only draining.
Grey used to make me feel warm and relaxed, eager to tell him everything I thought or felt. I dreamed of him every day I was gone—him hugging me to his chest, reading me stories in bed, telling me I’m beautiful. Now that I’m actually back, I feel like a ghost of my old self, haunting my life but not a part of it. I can touch him but not really. There are days now when Grey is the only person I see.
Because Grey is a good husband, he starts setting the table without even going upstairs to change his clothes or check his email. I get the chicken out of the oven. It takes me a while to assemble the meal—I do everything slowly now—but eventually we sit at the dining-room table and fork chicken and salad into our mouths. “It’s warm out, for March,” says Grey. “Feels like spring, almost.”
He won’t go quite so far as to suggest a walk after dinner: he knows that I am still afraid of our polite quiet street, the neighbours with their dogs and babies, their Honda Civics and snow shovels. He knows that everything is overwhelming to me, but he wants to pretend otherwise, so he doesn’t ask me to do anything extra.
“Would you like some barbecue sauce?” I don’t know where this housewifely side is coming from, nor Grey’s grim masculinity—just one sharp nod, a zip of the chin, to indicate assent. Who is this person? I’m tired of silence, but I don’t have anything to say. I used to talk so much—about school, about work, about things I wanted to do or read or buy. We would both read the same book and then talk about the characters as if they were friends of ours. Now the barbecue sauce is all I have to offer.
I zone out for a bit, staring at the blinking clock over the stove. I know how to fix it, but I haven’t. The blinking 12:00 is calming, as if time isn’t moving forward. As if I have as much time as I need to patch all the holes Dex left in me. I’m not sure how long I watch the clock, but when I tune back into the dining room, the meal is nearly done, the last few bites ready to be scooped up and chewed. And then the dishes, and then I can start to wander toward the bedroom and the joy of unconsciousness.
Grey has never been hit in the face with violent intent; a few accidental pokes during street-hockey games, maybe, but that’s it. I can’t think of anyone I know who’s been hit hard in the face, and I u
sed to know a lot of people. Most problems just aren’t handled violently these days, not in the places I would go anyway. Not at the restaurant, no matter how drunk or pissy a patron might get over the wrong salad dressing. Not at school either, where everyone would talk about privilege and voice and try so hard not to trample on anyone else’s thoughts, or seem to. Besides, these days there are so many easier ways to mess someone up. Steal their credit card, hack into their Facebook account, tell them they’re bad in bed and boring out of it. Before Dex, I had never really imagined a life that included being hit, even though I read about it in books of course, heard about it on the news, watched it happen in movies, a crisp thwack of flesh on flesh, knocking the hero backwards but leaving no permanent mark.
That was the thing that happened to me most at Dex’s house—a lot of things happened there, but always interspersed with the blows, the fear of blows, the huddled crying after. Donny and I were always hurting from the last time, and steeling ourselves against the next.
When I saw Dex’s hand looming toward me the first time, I closed my eyes, the way you do for a kiss. The punch felt more like a wall smashing into my cheekbone instead of a fist. I couldn’t make out the individual knuckles against my flesh, or even the shape of a hand—it was just a thud of pain at the side of my face, throwing me back, stinging my nose and eyes. I staggered but stayed standing, wobbling at the foot of the basement stairs. I was still coming out from whatever he drugged me with. Donny told me later that he was in the corner watching, terrified for me, terrified for himself. But I didn’t know Donny yet. I think if I had, I would have felt better knowing he was there, but since he was a stranger, his dark shape across the room just added to the fear. He could have done anything to me; Dex did.
So Much Love Page 21