Gav raises a palm. “That’s a crazy thing to do, I get it. But—”
“That doesn’t mean anything necessarily,” Drew says slowly.
Carly whirls to face Ayesha, who has taken her keys out of her bag, just to have something to play with. “You remember that day Drew knocked all that marinara onto Juli, and I had to lend her a top?”
Ayesha shakes her head but says, “Yeah. But that wasn’t because of—she said she fell.”
“Her whole back was one giant bruise. Where did she fall from, the sky?”
Ayesha whispers, “It was yellow and green and purple. I never saw a bruise like that before. She didn’t hear us, didn’t know we’d come into the locker room.”
Carly looked hard at Ayesha, who was letting the tears fall down her face. “He did that, he did it to her.”
“Okay,” Gav says. “Okay, he was abusive, he hurt her. But that doesn’t prove anything, it doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“Except that she’s dead.” Carly bites her lip hard enough to draw blood. “But you think some other crazy guy jumped out of a bush and killed her?”
Gav’s gaze tilts away to the floor, the soft beige carpet.
Julianna never knew that Carly had come to see her. Sean never said anything. He had been so gentle and kind during that awful period, carefully changing the dressings on her cuts, sitting with her while she read to just gaze at her face, even cooking simple little dinners. When she went back to work after the worst damage had healed, she had been so concerned with deflecting questions about where she had been, she didn’t realize Carly’s questions were different—more pointed, sharper, but also frightened. Julianna needed to protect Sean, and herself, from the judgment of people who didn’t understand. He had hurt her, a lot, but he loved her, and had learned from his mistakes. Or so she’d thought. Now she doesn’t know what to think.
“I read in the paper that her face was all busted up, her hands… ” Drew stammered. “He loved her.”
“I don’t doubt he loved her. It’s just that he didn’t do anything good with it.”
She can conjure the icy tiles and the sharp wind under the door, the thick wool socks she was wearing, the cat rubbing against her ankle, and the grit of sleep in her eyes with mascara overtop, but what does it all mean, really? That the day was Tuesday, so her shift started at four. That Sean’s temper was worse in winter, when there wasn’t much construction work. That she had her heavy bag over her shoulder and her boots were by the door at the top of the stairs. That they’d never been lucky, either together or on their own.
Things are never as clear as you want them to be.
She had been napping. The previous evening’s shift had been endless, and she spent the morning cleaning the apartment, so after lunch she fell asleep under the green duvet. When she woke up, Sean was lying next to her, watching TV in bed, his legs in baggy sweats crossing over hers, his hand on her thigh. Don’t get up yet, not yet, please. His bedroom voice: sexy, sad. Pleading. Stay with me, just another minute. You’re so sweet, I just want to hold you a little longer.
But Sheila had been serious: “Julianna, this is the last time you’re late for a shift because next time, you won’t have a shift to be late for.”
She needed the job; Sean had bought a used van for work and now they were eating hot dogs every other night. Julianna got up, twisted away, and rolled out of bed.
Hey, baby, don’t go.
I have to go to work, Sean.
Ah, fuck that. You just go where you goddamned want to. You just—
You know I don’t want to serve ravioli to people for eight hours, I need the job.
What was that? You think you shouldn’t have to work, you think I oughta support you so you would just have a life of luxury around here? Is that what you think?
She scurried out into the hallway, ducking as if his words were things he threw at her, went up the cold steps to the landing where her tall faux-suede boots stood knock-kneed beside the door, below her puffy grey parka hanging from a bent nail. The cat started to follow but stopped at the bottom of the stairs—the cement steps must have been too cold for him. She can’t remember how mad she really was at that point. Every time she goes back to the memory, she understands it less. She had her coat on but not done up, her purse on the floor by the door. She remembers she pulled fuzzy pink socks over her tights for the long cold walk to the bus stop, but not where her book proofs were—on the kitchen counter or her bedside table? She didn’t take them with her, but she can’t recall if that was because she was rushing or because she didn’t want to face Sean again if she went back downstairs.
She knows she wanted to take the proofs. She was nearly done reading through, one more look on the bus would’ve done it. The book would be out in the spring, actually printed and on shelves waiting to be read. Impossible; astounding. She could hear Sean grunting and rummaging in the bedroom. Part of her wanted to hug him goodbye, to leave on a good note, but a larger part knew it wouldn’t go that way—they’d just wind up continuing the argument. She could work on new poems on the bus instead of the proofs. There were always more poems to write. The ideas that churned in her brain used to be such a joy, a feeling of plenty even when she was broke. That’s something she misses in this strange afterlife—poems don’t come to her anymore.
She bent down to tug on her left boot, but the zipper caught on the fuzz of her pink sock. Sean came up the stairs as she attempted to jam her heel down into the boot but it wouldn’t budge—she had to pull her foot out and tear the sock a bit. Sean started talking about how hard he worked, how she didn’t appreciate him, how disrespectful she was. She was yanked around by her elbow—Sean, that’s not what I said—up against the wall at the top of the stairs. C’mon, Sean, let me go. I gotta go to work or Sheila will—
He pushed her down the stairs. No, that’s not what happened. He pushed her away while she had her boot awkwardly half-on and she slipped. No, he grabbed her arm and she jerked away, then tumbled. No, she stepped back from his angry face and tripped. He shook her shoulders and pushed her back, too far. He only meant to cuff her gently to get her under control but didn’t know his own strength.
No matter how many times she replays the scene, she doesn’t know exactly what happened at that crucial moment. She can see herself staggering back and tumbling, thudding into the wall and then half somersaulting down the narrow staircase, her head whacking the edge of a step, then again on the grey concrete pad at the bottom. After enough replays she thinks she can see the instant when her neck jerks and snaps against the side of the third-last stair. But was she still alive when she hit the landing, her coat rucked over her face, her hair a tangle of milkweed? If she was, she’d been knocked unconscious and doesn’t remember. She must have been breathing when she stopped falling—but for how long afterwards? She can’t say for sure: her old bulky winter coat keeps her from seeing the parts of her body that breathe. Breathed. Shouldn’t she know? Shouldn’t there be something inside her that tells her, that speaks from her former body to her dead self now? Why doesn’t she know?
She remembers the fear fluttering in her belly when Sean came up the stairs behind her. Not terror—she knew him, she loved him—but fear that he would get rough, get difficult, make her late, maybe hurt her. She remembers the weight of his feet on the creaky plywood, the huff of his breathing. She remembers the ache behind her eyes as she realized he wasn’t going to let go of her arm, how her jaw and shoulders clenched, her disappointment that he never gave her the hug goodbye she craved. Sean always refused to see how much she loved him, always doubted her—that is the hardest thing to accept, even with the knowledge she has now, that she’d end up crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, dying. Or dead. She honestly doesn’t know.
The thing is, even though she can’t quite examine the details or explain the exact physics of how her left foot skidded on the avocado-coloured linoleum of the landing, she can see Sean’s face and almost hear his thoughts, the
way she can’t hear her own. She can see the horror, the tenderness, the yearning for that time when she was in grade eleven and they spent hours making that disgusting banana ice cream, both of them ending up collapsed on the kitchen floor, laughing and spooning runny slimy ice cream into each other’s mouths. They were the only two people on Earth who knew that story, and there were so many more like it. On those stairs, she was watching the last one.
All this—the tenderness, the memories, the love—does not obscure the fact that after a minute, after two, after watching her neck turn so strangely, Sean didn’t come down the stairs to see what was damaged under Julianna’s heavy coat. After five minutes, he was still standing at the top of the stairs, white-knuckling the banister with tears in his eyes, but they didn’t fall and he didn’t go to her. Not after ten minutes. Not after twenty. She loses track of the minutes. Whether she was breathing when she hit the bottom, she was not by the time he plodded down the steps—carefully, he was still in his socks—and pulled her arm and coat and hair away from her face. Her arm fell back and thudded to the floor like a tire. She was no longer alive, no longer the person Sean loved and resented and sometimes knocked around. The book, the job, the cat—there were too many things she was doing lately that he didn’t control, and he wanted this victory, or had wanted it in the moment. He wanted her to fall, but didn’t want to admit he made it happen, not even to himself. He hated her. They loved each other.
He stared at her face, the bruises ripening on her pale cheeks, a cut across the thin-skinned bridge of her nose. He touched the side of her neck, put his fingers in front of her mouth and nose. He stared at the person he once loved for a minute, for five, for ten, and then he went and got the laundry sack to take her body around back to his van.
Julianna had thought all that was the end of her and Sean, but it wasn’t. She is still here, a week after the memorial, floating, worrying, remembering.
Gav, Drew, Carly, and Ayesha are driving slowly along Avison Street in Drew’s girlfriend’s car, one block west of where Julianna used to live, when she lived. They turn into the lane between the streets, where the alleys end and the light is wavering yellow in the gritty snow. Drew parks two houses away from Julianna’s basement apartment and they all sit staring forward through the black windows. It looks like Sean’s not there yet, but it’s getting dark. He’ll be home soon.
“What are we even doing here?” asks Drew, still watching the windows. He draws the emergency brake up, then pushes it back down with a creak. “The cops already interviewed him. You saw in the paper. Seven hours of questioning, and then the next day too—and they let him go. What are we going to say to him? Why would he talk to us, even? We aren’t the cops, we aren’t the goddamned Scooby-Doo gang.”
Carly puts her palm on her purse on the back seat beside her. “The cops didn’t know her, they don’t care. Remember how hard she worked on her poems? Remember how she’d repeat a line over and over if she thought no one was listening? A whole shift, just going back and forth between ‘The yellow-orange ball of the sun’ and ‘orange-yellow.’ Now she’ll never see her book in print. She was going to do a reading just for us—I wanted to hear her read. It isn’t fair.”
Carly is shaking with rage. Julianna is startled by her passion. They were always good friends, but Juli had her books, her difficult boyfriend, her long commute. Carly lived alone in the attic apartment of a family whose baby was always waking her up. When she went to a movie or shopping with Juli, that was the best thing in Carly’s week—otherwise, she watched network TV with her landlord’s aerial and worked extra shifts. The emotion that is radiating from Carly is love.
“We have to send a message,” she says, pulling down the thick gold zipper on her little purse. “The police aren’t doing anything.”
In the front passenger seat, Gav twists to see Carly’s face but mainly sees the gun inside her purse—her brother’s gun, silver and black and shiny. He immediately reaches for the bag. Carly snatches it back, like a child with candy.
“I’m not going to shoot anybody—I just want to scare him. He can’t kill someone and think nothing’s going to happen. That there’d be no repercussions.”
Ayesha is calm beside her. Ayesha, who has been crying for a week, is suddenly dry-eyed. “If he never hurt Julianna, then you’re threatening someone innocent—you’re acting crazy. And if he did, then you’re taking a deadly weapon to someone who already killed one person—that’s crazy too.”
“It isn’t loaded, but he doesn’t know that. If I can make him think I’m serious, maybe we can get him to confess.”
“Carls,” Drew says gently, leaning as far as he can into the back seat. “We’re all really sad. Juli was our friend. We loved her too. But this isn’t a good plan.”
“You want him to be fine? You want him to go on drinking beers, sitting in bars ogling the waitress? You want him to get another girlfriend?”
Gav stares down at his hand in his lap as if it were wounded. “No, I don’t.”
Drew pats Gav’s knee and Ayesha puts her hand on Carly’s shoulder and together all four of them look at the gun. Ayesha says slowly, “The police’ll get him. I mean, if he did it. Or his conscience will.”
“Who else would want to kill Juli except her motherfucking boyfriend?”
Julianna is outside the car but inside it too. And inside the apartment downstairs, watching Sean sitting on the toilet reading one of her books—a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. How much of the way he treated her—the mocking laughter, the dismissal of everything good she accomplished except being pretty, the swats, the slaps, the punches and kicks—was the fear that he wouldn’t be able to keep her in his life and how much was just a need to keep her in line?
He loved her. He pushed her down the stairs and then he watched her die. She knows both these things are true but can’t comprehend how they can be. Maybe she didn’t really understand him after all. And in the end he didn’t understand her, didn’t understand how much she loved him, and he hurt her for it. But she did. And he didn’t understand that her poems were just a way to cling to the life she had, not a gateway to a new one.
She knows she was a good poet—perhaps too awkward with punctuation, too slow to revise, too quick to sacrifice the stanza for the line—and now she’ll never know if she could have become a great one. She knows she died on a cold dirty floor that she’d forgotten to sweep that morning when she did the rest of the apartment. She knows she wasn’t alone when she died, but something worse than alone. And that’s her last memory of life on Earth. But she wants to do one more thing.
She draws closer to Carly, whom she loved the way she thinks she would have loved a sister if she had one. Even without the blood bond, Julianna was closer to Carly than almost anyone—she didn’t have many friends as an adult because of Sean. Work was the loophole Carly could pass through, the legitimate excuse for two happy females to sit counting tips and drinking vodka gingers—which wasn’t even a real drink—snuck from the bar. Carly’s invitations to go shopping or to the movies were usually thwarted because Sean didn’t want his girlfriend out “partying” without him. Julianna had to make excuses, and watch Carly try hard not to judge. Carly had her own problems, really just needed a fucking friend, and Sean had taken that away from her.
Julianna’s friend is holding her brother’s gun loosely in both hands, eyes closed. She has heard Carly describe her brother as a thug and an idiot. She’s positive Carly has never held the gun before and has no real plan, just wants desperately for the story to end happily. But that is impossible now. Julianna will just aim for an ending that can be a beginning too. She leans in close and whispers, “Remember when I got my period early and you were coming off-shift so you lent me your work shorts and went home with two sweaters tied around your waist? Remember when our old supervisor called me Carly and you Julianna for months and we swapped nametags and cheques and just went with it? Remember that bus driver who was in love with you, and you ma
de him let me ride for free too? Remember I kept writing that same poem about the butter knife and the door over and over, and you read every version?” With her bodyless mouth on Carly’s ear, Julianna remembers Carly’s shoulder jiggling against hers with helpless laugher the one time Julianna had gone over to her apartment while Sean was on a fishing weekend. They had watched Melrose Place and ordered pizza and sprawled around in plaid flannel pyjamas—it turned out they both had the same set. “You were a good friend—the best. We had fun and when you read my poems, sometimes I felt like you were breathing them in, like they were becoming part of you. That’s how I want you to remember me. Let that be what we remember.”
Down in the basement apartment, Sean stands up, flushes, and as he reaches for his pants knocks the book into the sink. When he picks it up, there are rivulets of wet on the blue-grey cover, the edges of the pages. Water trails down the margins when he opens it again. Julianna knows he’s in pain, mourning, regretful, but she has only one thing left to do and it’s for Carly.
In the car Julianna whispers, “I love you, but I’m almost gone.” She doesn’t know if she can touch anyone anymore but she tries, dipping her invisible shoulder against Carly’s warm solid one, pressed firm, the way they always did when they sat together. They weren’t huggers, either of them, but they didn’t need to be. They were always so close to each other. “Don’t make this the big moment in your life, Carly. Don’t let him hurt you. Live your own life.”
Carly bites her lip again, and Julianna can smell the orange blossom perfume she always wears, and almost see the future Carly wants for herself: the serious job and pretty clothes, the nice man and sweet children. Julianna wants it for her too. She wants her to go forward into this future without something terrible happening tonight. And Carly does it: she opens her eyes, closes her purse, and says to Drew, “Let’s go the fuck home.”
So Much Love Page 25