I’ve been thinking about going there all week. If I told Grey or my therapist that I had a plan to go somewhere, anywhere, they’d be delighted, tell me I’m “making progress,” but somehow that makes me not want to tell them. Sometimes I like to pretend, just for a minute, I’m a normal person who might run out to the mall because she wants new gloves, or go to campus to see a friend or grab a book from the library. Someone who whenever she feels like going for a walk would just go. Put on her shoes, drop her phone and keys in her bag, stride down the chipping cement stairs out front. Like I did one thousand times before—more. That old Catherine, relaxed and cheerful, seems like a dreamgirl—impossible. I want to be her again, but I feel a choking tightness in my throat as I stuff my keys and my new phone and $5 from Grey’s change-cup in my pocket. (I miss my Kate Spade purse, lost in the slush in DiGiovanni’s parking lot.) My hands shake doing up my sneakers and the bows are floppy and lopsided. But I force myself to march to the door, down the stairs, and then, the hard part, over the edge of the blacktop driveway and onto the sidewalk.
All my good plans fall apart at the bus stop. I feel so exposed just standing there, not moving, nowhere to go. My shirt sleeves flutter in the breeze. A white top, an old one now too large. The whole thing flutters on me. Why didn’t I think to wear a jacket in March? Goddamnit, I’m not even wearing a bra.
I wrap my arms tightly around my chest so my nipples don’t press against the fabric. The money for my fare jingles in my pocket. Two teenaged boys come up to the stop, snickering and punching each other. They stop when they see me shivering in my self-straitjacket. The one boy is pale and freckled, the other one black with an upturned nose; both about seventeen. Donny was a seventeen-year-old boy just like them. I don’t know if he had freckles because it was too dark in the basement to tell. I was never afraid of Donny, maybe because everything bad that happened to me happened to him too. When you live through the worst with someone, you have to love that person—or at least I did. There wasn’t any other way to survive. Donny loved me too, but he didn’t survive. These are the sweetest-looking boys, but with their large hands, fleshed shoulders and thighs—they could do anything to me here. I’m sure Dex looked sweet to someone too, once. In a flash, I could be thrown to the ground or into a van. There is no van. They are staring at me. I weigh my options: I could call Grey on my phone, the number is in there, I checked and rechecked. But to unlock the phone, open contacts, touch his name—that would take time, time when I wouldn’t be looking out for myself. Anything could happen. I finally fling myself into motion, feet pounding down the street, arms pumping, nipples to the wind. I know it is cowardly to run home, but as my feet thud on the pavement, it seems like the opposite: I feel so strong.
When Grey gets home later that day, I am standing at the edge of the lawn again. But this time I’m doing much better. I’ve got a bra on, tights and shoes, a coat. I’ve brushed my hair, and it’s clean. The car sighs as Grey turns it off. Before he even opens the door his eyes catch on me. I wonder if he notices I’m wearing my nice green dress, the one he used to like. The tidy hem sits exactly in the middle of my kneecaps.
Every time Grey comes home, I remember again that I love him. Alone in the house all day with all these books about other people, I keep forgetting that feeling. When I was away, Grey was a magical concept, this mythical being of love and kindness and rescue, ready to wrap me in some sort of endless perfect hug. Every time Dex made me suck his dick or I was too hurt to move, I thought about when Grey gently kissed me goodnight on my eyelid or gave me his sweater, the bright blue couch he let me buy even though he thought it was uncomfortable, and how I fell asleep holding his hand so many times that if I closed my eyes I could still feel his fingers in mine.
Grey didn’t rescue me, which I guess I was expecting because that’s how it goes in stories about men who love women when bad things happen to the women. Probably I was still expecting it even when I started trying to rescue myself.
He walks across the lawn until he is standing a few feet away from me. The yard is not that wide. We always thought we’d get a bigger place someday with room for kids to run around, when I finally finished school and got a real job. It suddenly jolts into my brain that Grey has carried more responsibilities in the past year than I’ve realized. He kept our old life going, holding open this little space for me to fall back into.
“Thank you for paying the mortgage all these months.”
“What?”
I close my eyes and everything spins. “And the hydro bills and the garbage fees and all that. Oh god, did you send my taxes in April? They were almost done… ”
I hear Grey shift his feet in the squishy wet grass. I open my eyes, and his hand is above my shoulder, waiting to rest once I’ve seen it, been forewarned. “It’s okay, I took care of it. I would do anything for you, Catherine, you know that. Your taxes…it’s not that much.”
“Thank you,” I tell him, tears dribbling down my face. I can’t believe I can fall apart so quickly, even in my pretty dress.
“I wish I could do, could have done more.”
I look at him, finally. The crisp beard, trimmed around his square jaw, the warm dark eyes, the broad shoulders obvious even under his bulky jacket.
“I wish you could too.” I sniff, trying to stop myself from crying. I feel like I’m always crying. “But it doesn’t work that way. I have to do it, mainly.”
“But what, though? What do you have to do? I mean, I under—”
“Remember my life. And forget this year. I don’t know how I can keep remembering Dex and just walk around.”
Grey shifts his briefcase from one hand to the other. “I don’t know either. But you’re doing it.”
I shake my head and my hair whips into my eyes. “My life was stolen. Remember when we used to actually have sex sometimes and it was amazing and easy, and now I can barely let you hug me? Remember how I was never shy about talking to strangers because waitressing kills shyness? Remember how good my tips used to be because people liked me? You liked me.”
“I love you,” Grey says loudly, his eyes panicked. He tries to reach out for me, but he’s still holding the briefcase. We both look down, so he opens it and holds out a thick clothbound book. “It’s fairy tales—the old-school ones, by the Brothers Grimm. I thought you might like something simpler, more straightforward. Wicked witches, the occasional wolf. It’s a little violent, but not too bad. Don’t read too much into it.”
“It shouldn’t need to be simple. Remember how good my essays were? Professor Altaris said my midterm paper was witty. But now I can’t do anything. Now I’m just—” I flop my hands at my sides, standing in the cold on my wet lawn with cars slipping by in both directions, our neighbours heading home, glancing curiously in our direction. “I have nothing left.”
Grey closes his eyes for a long moment and then opens them. “It’s late. Do you want to go inside?”
“I dream about Donny all the time, and then I wake up and it’s like he’s died all over again. No one rescued him. We were together every day for so long, and then he was just gone. I keep feeling like he’s next to me.”
Grey nods slowly and swallows. “I know a little about how that feels.” He means me, but I can’t think about that—all my losses crowd out his. Suddenly he looks smaller, weaker, his jacket too long in the arms, the cuffs hanging over his hands. “Do you want to tell me about it? Let’s go inside and sit down.”
“I do not want to go back into the house. It took me half the day just to get here.”
“Ok. I’m sorry—”
“What are you sorry for?”
“Nothing, I—”
Suddenly I feel a million degrees, sweating and frazzled and furious. “Dex buried him in the backyard, but I heard the police found the body and took him somewhere. I don’t know where.” I stop, almost choking on my own breath.
“You must miss him a lot.”
I close my eyes, keeping the tears in. “Of co
urse I do. He was all I had for a long time. And then Dex—”
“You must have hated Dex.”
“I hated him, sure, but I’d hate a wave if I were drowning too.”
“It’s okay to be angry. There’s nothing you can’t say to me.”
My eyes spring open and Grey is still there, nervous and sad, waiting for me to say something. “Of course I’m angry—all I am is angry. Everyone keeps saying it’s fine, it’s normal to have this rage, but they don’t say what to do with it. And I’ve already done so much. Nobody rescued me, no one came to help Donny, and I have to live the rest of my life without him.” I hunch my shoulders, wrap my arms around myself—the only hug I can bear. My armpits and collar are soaked with sweat. “Everything was supposed to go back to being easy and perfect when I came back—the way I didn’t even know it was before. But Dex is still everywhere, and everything is tainted. Now I can’t touch you, and I can’t read the poems I love or see any of my friends. It isn’t fair, and there’s no one left to be angry at, and there’s no one here to fix it but me.” A sob catches in my throat but I push it down—I’m so sick of crying, of losing my voice, of letting it all overwhelm me.
Grey is crying too, which is even worse. “I’m here. I can’t fix anything, but I am here.” A tear plops on the collar of his jacket.
“I don’t want you to cry,” I tell him. “I want you to be okay. Someone has to be.”
“Yeah,” he says breathlessly, “all right.” He wipes his cheek on his biceps. “I’ll try.” He looks down at the book in his hand. “This is a stupid gift, I’m sorry. I know you’re not able to read much these days and I just thought…something simple… ”
“It’s okay. I think we actually have this one. My mom gave it to us, ages ago.”
“Oh, well, fuck it.” He’s quiet for a moment, then he holds the book out to me again. “Do you want to tear the pages out?”
“What? No, you can just bring it back.”
“You could rip it up, if you want. Maybe it would be cathartic—give you something to do with your feelings.”
I finally take it from him. The cloth binding is rough against my fingertips. I open the book and tear out one page—it makes a good solid ripping noise, but it’s only a blank endpaper. I try to toss it onto the lawn to pick up later, but the wind tumbles it over the dead grass and into the street where a Civic smushes it into a puddle. Satisfyingly destroyed—it’s just brown wet mush when the car drives away. I grasp the title page and pull that out too, then crumple the page into a tight ball in my fist before dropping it to the dead grass at my feet. I tear out and crunch another page, and another. Grey cocks his head and bites his lips as he watches me. I flip to the first page of an actual story, but as I slide my fingers and start to tear, I read the words Once upon a time. I almost forget what I’m doing, it’s so natural to read a story when I see those words. I stop with only a tiny ragged rip at the top of the page. Then I close the book and hand it to him.
“No?”
I shake my head. “It was worth a shot. Maybe I’ll tear some blank paper later. I like books too much.”
He clutches the book to his chest. “At least that hasn’t changed.”
“That’s true.”
“If you change your mind, let me know. I get these at a discount, you know.”
A quiet laugh blurts out of my throat. “I’m not crying anymore.”
“Me neither.” His eyes are still wet though, and red around the edges. Probably mine are too. I can tell he feels awkward standing out here from the way he keeps angling his body toward the front porch, but he’s trying.
“Do you know where Donny is? I mean, his grave?”
“I don’t know, but I can find out.”
“I’d like to meet his girlfriend sometime. Kyla. Donny told me a lot about her.”
“She called, remember, while you were still in the hospital.”
I nod, swallow, rub my wet cheek with the back of my hand. “What did she—does she know that I haven’t really been—”
“It’s okay, she seemed to understand. I have her number, you can call whenever you’re ready.”
“Of course.” Grey is watching me closely, waiting to see if I will say more. “Sometime soon, I do want to call her. She loved him and I loved him too, but we knew different parts of him. I can tell her what I know.”
“I’m glad, Cat. I know I’d want that, if it was—” he breathes deeply “—Donny who survived.”
I decide then that I can take his hand, that we can go inside and eat something for dinner and that the evening will go on. Grey’s free hand looks warm and strong. When I slide my cold fingers into his, I feel the pads are calloused. Then I bite my lip and carefully tip my body against his, like a tree falling in slow motion. For a moment he doesn’t respond, is still as a statue, but then he draws his arm around my waist, presses his mouth into my hair. My heart is pounding, but I think it will quiet down soon. His embrace is loose, and I know I could break away if I needed to.
What the Dead Remember
Before she died, Julianna didn’t consider herself a very interesting person. On her days off, she sometimes went to a bar with her boyfriend, Sean, or to the movies with her best friend, Carly. She had a cat named Archie, and she wrote poems at the breakfast table in her pyjamas. A publisher was going to put out a book of them in the spring. Her poems were the most interesting thing about her when she was alive, but they seem less important now, even though she knows they’re the only real thing left of her in the world.
Julianna is still too wrapped up in what the living are doing to be worried about how they will remember her. She always imagined that the world would fade from her view when she died, but it hasn’t, so how can she turn away? She floats in the middle of the restaurant kitchen, watching it all swirl. Drew training the sprayer on a crooked castle of saucepans, Ayesha counting her tips and jamming them into her apron pockets, Gav chasing up and down the grill with a flipper in hand. It’s negative degrees outside but this white-tile room is all steam and smoke. There’s a wash of colour and noise, but it’s only early evening so the chefs’ whites are still white, the stainless steel still glossy.
Carly hefts a tray of first-course orders onto her shoulder, wrist straining—somehow she is heavy-armed but not very strong, which always struck Julianna as unfair—then strides toward the swinging doors with the tray above her head. Julianna drifts behind, watching her swing her bum to push open the out-door into the back hallway, then cross over the dirty hall carpet to the proper green rug and good lighting and a new kind of noise and rush. She dodges around a running child, grins at a man miming a signature in the air, zips around a parka on the back of a chair, and reaches the table that ordered all that salad. Julianna loves watching her be so good at her job.
“ ’Kay, I got the two salads, I did ’em separate so you could have the dressing on the side but you don’t have to.” She plonks the bowls down, then the stack of chilled plates. Julianna always liked how they felt on her palm, icy and dry. “Would you like cheese on your salads?” Carly takes the rotary grater off her tray and waves it like a pompom. “Or pepper? Anyone for pepper?” Everyone takes cheese, no one pepper, which is standard. Julianna isn’t crazy about black pepper on anything, the way the sharp grits sit on her tongue without dissolving. But now, with the world and all its flavours about to leave her behind, it bothers her that she can’t recall the exact taste of pepper, beyond sharp and gritty.
It’s so strange what slips away and what stays.
The bright fireworks pattern of yellow and orange on the industrial carpeting, the metallic smell of bottled tomatoes, the shriek of a child who has just dumped a glass of ice cubes onto his lap—these everyday memories outshine moments she thought would burn so bright from her life on earth: her first kiss; her father lifting her up a moment before the neighbour’s dog would have bitten her; the first time someone—the librarian at Secord High—read one of her poems and said it was good.
And she does treasure all those big, important moments. It’s just that the aimless boring nights at the restaurant, those nights where nothing happened but everything smelled like oregano and Windex—for some reason they cling the hardest.
When she was alive, Julianna would have tried to write this all down, make the Windex and the wind slipping through the cracks under the kitchen door and Gav’s voice yelling orders come together in a few perfect lines she could keep, and share. Over the years, she’s written so many poems about penne pasta, flat shoes, and pleated shorts, the bun clamped to the back of her head in the damp and grease of the kitchen that wouldn’t come down even when she took the pins out. The way sometimes she was so tired, she’d slump sideways on the bus, and let Carly take the pins out for her. Sometimes she wrote less narrative, more feeling—about how it felt to fall in love or the colour of the sky ten seconds after the sun set—but it was all of a piece. She was trying to make moments—things that had happened, ways she had felt—stay with her in a way she could come back to whenever she needed to.
When Julianna looks around again, Carly is coming back into the kitchen at a trot.
Ayesha yells from the salad station, “What time is the visitation?”
Carly fumbles trying to clip her order up above the hot table because her head is turned toward Ayesha. “It’s seven ’til ten, but you don’t have to go for the entire time. We could just get off an hour early and go for nine.”
“What? No, Carly,” Ayesha says, pausing to count out her croutons—once a lady yelled at her because she didn’t get enough. She puts four more on a Caesar salad, then returns to the conversation. “We don’t walk into the church while it’s going on. That’s disrespectful.”
“No, it’s not—it’s not at a church. This isn’t the funeral. It’s the visitation.”
So Much Love Page 23