So Much Love

by Rebecca Rosenblum

  Catherine Reindeer

  Spring helps. Not as much as I was hoping, but having the windows open reminds me that there’s not all that much difference between inside and out, and the green grass and silver-budded trees make leaving the house more attractive than it was a month ago. I’m also feeling stronger, better able to deal with real life—or maybe just used to how easily overwhelmed I am now. Perspective, that’s the hardest thing.

  Having Grey with me helps too. The walk to the bus stop is almost pleasant with him strolling right next to me, and I feel pretty calm standing there, maybe because no one else is waiting. A couple of times he starts to speak—I hear the faint click of his mouth opening—but then he stops himself. I would like to say something, put him at ease, but all my attention is focused on waiting for the bus. Whether it’s in sight or not shouldn’t matter, but somehow I need to concentrate my mind on the horizon, wait for the route display to appear over the hill.

  When the bus doors open, we can’t decide who should get on first: me because Grey is gentlemanly or Grey because I am scared? Me, in the end, maybe because I am brave. I have the change already counted out, sweaty in my hand, and dump in enough for both of us. This is the first time I’ve made it this far. I let the accordion doors shut behind me.

  The bus is a tight hot box of strangers. There are men with hair on the backs of their necks and tucked-in shirts and women with silver and black nail polish. Any of them, all of them, could turn on me at a moment’s notice, digging, smacking, whatever it took to make me fall, vulnerable, available to be carried away. Sweat slicks the underside of my bra, the waistband of my tights. Everything is damp, cold. My wet palm slips out of the rubber loop hanging from the ceiling, but the hand that grips Grey’s is tight.

  I can’t even look at Grey. I wanted him to be proud of me, but now I’m worried that my knees will buckle and I’ll collapse onto the gritty bus floor among the spike heels and stroller wheels. He’ll have to carry me off, carry me home. And we’d be back where we started from.

  When I turn to tell him I need to get off, need to give up for today and maybe try again tomorrow, Grey is making faces at two tiny children sitting behind and slightly above us, up the little flight of stairs. He tips forward on his toes, wiggles his eyebrows, sticks out his tongue. The older girl has cornrows with pink-and-purple bobbles at the ends. She grins and waves both hands at Grey. He glances at me, smiles a more dignified smile, and then goes back to his clowning. The children at the back of the bus don’t terrify me the way most other humans do these days. They are something else, alarming and charming, both at once. The little one squirms away from her sister and dances in the aisle, staggers as the bus stops, bangs her head on the pole. Her mother pops up from the seat behind, tugs the little girl back into her wool-coated arms before the child can weep, and in fact she never does. Magic.

  As we travel downtown, I try to remember the thing in me that once wanted to be a mother. That sweet ache in the middle of my chest that made me want to hold a baby there. I can’t quite feel it over the rough breathing of my fears, but I can imagine. When Daria came by with a frozen poundcake and her little Stevie, I was overwhelmed just watching him wriggle on the floor and squawk at the vase of daffodils on the coffee table. He was so bright and loud, so unstoppable and incomprehensible. “Do you want to hold him?” Daria asked because in my previous life I always wanted to hold him. But we were both different people then, Stevie a cuddly infant and me all excitement and biological-clock ticks. Now Stevie’s eighteen months old and able to run from my limp hands and pounding heart, and that seemed about right, honestly. Kids are more perceptive than adults; most people would have run from what I felt at that moment, if they knew. I would have.

  Out the front window of the bus, I can see the stone buildings of the university, the tangle of bare wet tree branches over the brick wall at the edge of campus; we’re almost at my stop. This used to be the point when I’d put the bookmark in, take out my gloves, make sure I had a clear pathway to the bell pull. But it’s too warm for gloves and I’m not reading anything, and the calm routine is gone—I’ve been staring at the yellow pull-cord, waiting to reach out and grab it since we got on. When I pull it, I’ll be getting off the bus alone.

  Grey leans toward me, staring too hard, and whispers, “Are you sure? You’re shaking. Tomorrow’s Saturday—you wouldn’t have to wait for me to get home. We could go out first thing.”

  To walk out into the navy blue evening by myself, vulnerable to anything and anyone, seems the most impossible thing. I shake my head, and a hank of hair falls out of my ponytail and lashes across my face. “We’ve made it this far. I’ll go. It won’t kill me.”

  “Do you want me to get off with you? I can wait at the gates, or somewhere?”

  I do want him to do that, but I say no again. He pats my little black purse, where he knows my new cellphone is.

  “Call me and I’ll come pick you up in the car in a millisecond, if you want.”

  “I’ll be all right. I can just get a cab.”

  Then I hear it—someone has pinged for the university stop. It’s like we’re in a Second World War movie and I’m shipping out. No, it isn’t; it’s like Grey and me on the bus, and I’m on my way to school and he’s going to work or to Evan’s house, like we’ve done a thousand times before. Like the way we used to move through the world, living our lives. Like us.

  I lean forward and kiss him on the mouth—our first kiss since I’ve been back. It was something Dex never tried with me, wasn’t his thing. And Donny I kissed so many times, but always on the cheek, the forehead, shoulder, not the lips. In this kiss on the bus, there is no memory except for other kisses with Grey—his chapped winter lips on mine at the movies, running out the door at home, the first time on the steps outside the restaurant where I used to work. This one little act, untainted by memory.

  As I move toward the back doors, Grey’s hand is resting on my shoulder, not grasping or holding, just touching. We lose the connection when I have to walk round someone’s bundle buggy. The bus jerks to a stop and I lock my gaze on Grey as I push out the doors. He looks the way I feel, scared and trembling, like I’m stepping out into the sea and not a curbside slush puddle. The pause where the doors hang open is the worst because I could dart back on if I wanted to. And I do want to, but I remind myself that I am getting off at the university, once one of my favourite places on Earth. That thought takes me through one breath in and one breath out before the doors flap shut.

  And then I am standing alone on the edge of main campus. The lawn is stiff and yellow, recovering from winter. Spring is coming. Dex took me right before the spring thaw last year. Today the trees are naked and wet, making a brittle rustle in the wind. Around me, younger people in slouchy wool coats float through the gates in both directions. The day is ending, evening classes beginning. There’s no reason to be terrified, except I’m surrounded by all these strangers, all this space, and anything could happen. I feel my boots clinging to the sidewalk; I can’t move. People just keep walking past me in the fading light; it’s nearly six now and the sun is giving up. A girl with a glittery scarf and a tuque pushed back on her head catches my gaze accidentally as I stand there, staring into space. She just smiles and shrugs.

  No one here knows who I am or what happened to me. Or if they know, they either don’t notice me or they don’t recognize me from the newspapers and posters. The blank, pleasant faces around me are focused on wherever they are going, only seeing some simple outline of me—a student, typical enough, but moving slowly. No one is worried, or menacing, or paying attention at all, and that lets me turn toward the gates and finally walk onto campus.

  I want to be the person these people imagine me to be. Normal, friendly, functional. Sometimes I can even convince my mom this is true. She watches me constantly when we sit in the living room, her with The New Yorker on the couch, staring over the tops of her pages at me with some novel on the floor. I miss her, even though I see
her all the time. I miss the way she used to watch me as if I were a fascinating TV show instead of a terrifying one—we both miss all the things I used to be able to tell her about my life. I would love to tell her things now, but I feel like I’m having to learn our language all over again, figure out how to navigate her gestures and glances, cultivate my own. I think a lot about how I used to climb that tree up to her apartment. I don’t remember the handholds anymore, but they weren’t that hard to learn the first time. I’ll get them back, I think. I’d love to see her face when I slip through her window.

  Grey is better at pretending he isn’t watching me, but still I can sense it, that concerned and tender glance. And I know he feels what I feel—homesick for the lives we used to have. The kiss was like a flashback to a time when I didn’t flinch when he brushed against me, when I could make conversation without having to push myself from sentence to sentence. That kiss was hopeful. It was hope.

  Walking through campus is easier than getting on the bus, since it’s a place I loved. Love still. I wander through the teenagers with their bulky backpacks, the continuing education students with grey hair and briefcases, jocks throwing footballs, couples holding hands. I stroll past the wishing fountain, the enormous Engineering building with its slit windows and tiny doors. I wanted to come here today for the same reason I always wanted to be on campus—it makes me feel like I’m on my way. Even if I wasn’t all that smart yet, I was getting smarter, learning things, meeting people. I read, and listened, and wrote, and talked to people. I had hoped Donny would come here, someday. I really thought I would meet him for coffee on campus and we’d talk about what we were reading while eating giant stale muffins. I can picture his long skinny body loping over the lawns, ignoring the pathways, rushing to class or basketball practice, grinning at everyone.

  I step carefully over a slick of dead leaves in a puddle and gaze up at the library—the sunset is bright behind the building, bright enough that the windows are just glossy shadows. In an hour, everyone inside will be clearly visible as they pass in front of the windows. Professor Altaris told my class that Julianna Ohlin went to this school, took English classes, same as us. At the time I didn’t understand why he was so excited about it, but now it does seem amazing to me that she could have sat in the library at one of those big wooden tables with sixteen chairs, and read some of the same books I did, The Stone Angel, or something by Hemingway, or P.K. Page, with her feet propped on her backpack under the table. Maybe this is where she started writing poetry. How does anyone start? How do you build something more than reality if reality is all you have?

  I keep walking, toward the Humanities building. Professor Altaris’s office is on the third floor. It’s probably too late in the day for him to be there, but it’s good to have a destination, even if I just walk up the stairs and then back down. Altaris is on my mind because I’ve been thinking so much about Julianna. I think he thought a lot about her too; the way he taught her poetry made it seem like he did, like he was just giving us a few little notes from a giant book on her that he kept in his head. Now that I’m reading her poems again, though, I wish he’d talked more about them specifically, about individual lines and what they mean, and how they seem to mean different things depending on where you pause, where you breathe. The versions I told to Donny in the basement felt right, even though I got so much wrong. When I read the real poems, they still sound like what I whispered to Donny. The heart of them is still the same.

  What makes a poem what it is? And how much can it change before it becomes something else, someone else’s? That’s what I’d like to know. I wonder what Julianna would think of my versions of her poems, the ones I scribble out in the back of my journal when I can’t think of anything else to write. I wonder if she would recognize them.

  Sometimes I wish that I didn’t know she was dead, or at least not how she died. It’s hard not to think about it whenever I read her work. One moment of violence is not what matters about her, yet it is the shadow that’s cast back over the poems. She couldn’t know how she would die, but certain lines feel ominous to me, like signs. Sometimes I look back on that last day at the restaurant—a dropped knife, the sunset seemed so early—and wonder if I should have known what would happen. That’s crazy, but once you’ve been through the worst things, it colours every memory.

  Is the person I was before dead? Or will the worst things that happened to me eventually get diluted by the rest of my life, become just a part of the story that I’ve always been writing? That is what Grey, my mom, everyone is waiting to find out. Even me.

  I am so tired of interior monologue. I wish Grey were here so I could tell him what I’m thinking. I’ll tell him when I get home, even if I’m tired. I will.

  I want to just go back to being the person I was before, but you can’t stop being the person you’ve become. You just have to keep going forward. Which is why, though my stomach wobbles at the thought of the poorly lit, echoing hallways, I find myself going up the stairs in front of the Humanities building.

  At the top of the steps, I turn and look back. It’s nearly full dark now but the bright windows of the library stay where they’ve always been, and behind the light, I can see all the books I haven’t yet read.

  I’m gathering myself to open the heavy wooden door when a group of laughing and yelling students pours out and around me. A boy in a leather jacket hangs back to hold the door for me, so I have to go in. His hands are thick and I don’t look him in the eye. In my head, Donny whispers, Just go ahead, you can handle this. Donny is still taking care of me, or at least I like to feel he is. Inside, dull yellow lights seem to not quite fully illuminate the stone hallways. People feel closer indoors, and it’s more terrifying to see the men walking toward me, bros in their hoodies and warmups, hipsters with skinny jeans and scarves. But they don’t see me, not really. A female body, maybe the soft blue coat that Grey bought me, at most. Maybe I won’t really see them either, someday. For now, the details press in on me.

  Winter term is ending, a year after I failed Professor Altaris’s class because I was locked in a basement on the east edge of town. I will only last a few more minutes in this building. My heart is pounding and I’m sweating beneath my coat. But I think I’ll be ready to be a student again by the fall. There’s a lot to do between now and then—so many journal entries, therapist visits, dinners. I will call Kyla back at last, and we’ll talk about Donny. I will tell her whatever she wants to know, if I can. I’ll tell her the stories he told me about her, the things he remembered most and best—the flashcards she made to help him with organic chem, them riding doubles on his bike, the way they sang little melodies to each other when there wasn’t anything to say. And then I’ll ask her where she’s going to school in the fall. Donny said she’s smart. Maybe I’ll see her here someday, walking down these same stone halls. Maybe if we can work through the weight of all that history, we could even become friends.

  Upstairs is quieter, and even darker. I can see Professor Altaris’s door is ajar, light spreading yellow into the dim corridor. I stand beside the doorway to see if he has a student with him, and find myself admiring all his shelves and stacks of books. So much to read. He is alone and reading a book flat on his desk.

  I had thought my shadow in the doorway would make him notice me but it doesn’t. “Hello, um, Professor Altaris.” He looks up immediately, startled the way he always seemed startled, even when he was lecturing. “I’m Catherine Reindeer. I was in your Canadian Poetry class last year.”

  “Yes, I remember you,” he says hurriedly, starting to stand up and move toward me. I’m not ready to talk to anyone at close range, so I wave for him to sit back down and he does. “I remember you.” And he clearly does know me, who I was then and everything that’s happened since. His eyes are wide behind his narrow glasses. I’ve seen this look before, from people so certain I was dead that my living self is hard to process, even if they’re glad to see me. You can be happy and still be afraid of ghosts.
There’s a long pause. He could easily mention the news reports, all the horrifying things this whole town has probably imagined happening to me. Instead he says, “You were a good student.”

  “I know.” I think for a second and realize I do know it. “I’m planning on coming back to school in the fall. I’ve missed it.”

  He grins. “That’s wonderful. There are some great new classes next—”

  I step forward and shake my head, and he understands, falls silent. It was too hard to get here not to talk about what I want to talk about. “There were some poems I read in your class that I’ve been thinking about. I have some ideas about what they mean that I wanted to talk over with you. I have a lot of ideas.”

  Acknowledgements

  I am sincerely grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Works in Progress program, and the Toronto Council for the Arts for their financial support during the writing of So Much Love.

  Early readers helped the work immeasurably. They are Carolyn Black, Kerry Clare, Brahm Nathans, Nadia Pestrak, Ben Rosenblum, Mark Sampson, Elizabeth Ross, and S. Kennedy Sobol. Prior versions of the book were supported and encouraged by my teachers and colleagues at McGill, Concordia, George Brown College, and the University of Toronto. I appreciate all the support I received on this very long road.

  Various research elements were aided by Aaron Scott MacRae, Mike Butler, and Jaime Murdoch and her family. Miranda Hill’s suggestion helped greatly with the chapter “Long Live Home.” In very different ways, this book was supported by the Toronto Women’s Writing Salon and the Nelson gang, particularly Lunch Club and Jane High. Many thanks to you all!

  Several chapters were published previously, in much different form: “Marriage” (The New Quarterly), “The House That Modern Art Built” (PRISM international), and “At the End of Breath” (Ars Medica). I am grateful to those editors for helping me strengthen these pieces. I also must thank the editors of The Rusty Toque and Little Fiction for working with me on and publishing other chapters from this narrative that were not included in the final novel.