Behind the eyes we meet

by Mélissa Verreault

  Manue pulled up her leggings and ran over to Hector’s fish tank. She spun the bowl around, shook the coloured pebbles lying on the bottom, stuck her hand in and swirled the water around, and pulled up the artificial plant: Hector was officially gone. She decided to empty the aquarium as a last-ditch effort, thinking that if the poor fish’s body were stuck under the rocks, she would eventually find it. But when the water had been emptied and the pebbles strewn across the bottom of the sink, she had to face the facts: Hector had indeed disappeared.

  How was this possible? Goldfish don’t just vanish into thin air with an “Abracadabra, sushi!” dammit.

  •

  Manue made a mental list of scenarios, both logical and ridiculous, to explain her fish’s disappearance:

  Her darling Hector had become depressed and chosen to end his life. No longer able to tolerate the ennui of aquatic life, he jumped out of his bowl and headed straight down the drain to join the largemouth bass, tadpole madtoms, and blacknose shiners of the Saint Lawrence River.

  Hector was not suffering from seasonal depression, but rather from acute disgust for his owner: fed up with her bizarro lovers and depraved escapades, he’d packed his things, bringing only the essentials, and fled—by escaping down the drain of course. He was free at last.

  A little-known phenomenon, spontaneous combustion is as rare in humans as it is in members of the aquatic species. But rare is not impossible, which explains what happened to the late Hector, the bitterly missed pet fish, so loyal and understanding. His organs caught fire and he exploded, leaving only a pile of forlorn ashes that Manue hadn’t been able to distinguish from the fibrous excrement that floated to the surface of the water when she’d emptied the bowl.

  In an attempt to get back at Manue after she’d been so brusque with him, “premature” Dave had decided to kidnap the innocent goldfish. He’d brought him home in a plastic bag filled with chilly water. If she wanted to see her friend alive again, Manue would have to pay a staggering ransom. Since she wouldn’t be able to get her hands on the cash quickly enough, David would end up eliminating Hector and serving his remains as canapés to seafood-loving guests.

  No matter what had happened to Hector, Manue regretted not being more attentive to his needs while he was still alive. She staggered under the weight of remorse. What if she had cleaned his bowl more often? Bought him better quality fish flakes and fed him every day instead of two or three times a week? Brought home an undersea diver or a treasure chest to decorate his tank? Would Hector still have disappeared, or could she have prevented the tragedy?

  Suddenly, Manue realized that he might not be dead after all. She didn’t know how long a goldfish could survive out of water. There might still be a chance to save him. The odds were slim, but she couldn’t afford to throw in the beach towel so easily and give up the search before it had really begun. Out of respect, she owed it to Hector to dig deeper and try to track him down. Whatever it cost. Drop by drop.

  Losing a goldfish was a feat worthy of the greatest illusionists. A remarkable event, an unlikely possibility—yet it had happened to her. If she could misplace Hector, she should be able to find him again. Wasn’t there some law that if a cat climbs up a tree, it should be able to come down again? If a person loses a goldfish, they should be able to find it again. Otherwise, in the face of unbearable anxiety, we’re forced to acknowledge that the impossible leaves us all powerless. Manue wasn’t ready to admit defeat when confronted with life’s baffling absurdity.

  Proverb for a Lost Fish

  manue didn’t sleep much that night. She was too busy designing the poster she planned to hang on all the neighbourhood telephone poles the next morning.

  LOST

  Goldfish answering

  to the name Hector

  (known as “Heck” to friends – as in What the heck?!)

  Orange with reddish highlights on his fins

  Hector disappeared Saturday evening

  If you see him, please contact his owner ASAP

  Reward

  514-287-5464

  She doubted it would lead anywhere, but she needed to channel her emotions into something constructive. Since drawing and designing in Photoshop was just about the only thing her hands were good for, making a poster seemed the best way to relieve her anxiety.

  Hector’s disappearance was bothering her much more than she cared to admit. Come on, it’s just a goldfish, she kept repeating to herself. Get over it.

  Though he was but a goldfish, Hector was the only living being she trusted. She was well aware that this was becoming a serious problem. Having an animal that swims in circles inside a fish tank all day as your only friend was probably not what you’d call a healthy social life. But what could she do? It wasn’t her fault she’d been hurt so often she’d stopped pursuing any type of meaningful relationship.

  Once bitten, twice shy. The dog that licks ashes, trust not with a meal. One bitten by a snake dreads rope for a decade. He who has been beaten by a firebrand runs away at the sight of a firefly. The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders at even a calm sea. The bull which suffers in the sun trembles at the sight of the moon. A man once beaten fears a reed. He who is burned by hot milk drinks even yogurt carefully.

  Manue had read the proverbs pages of her dictionary over and over and knew every expression that described how, after having been deeply wounded, it was difficult for a person to open up again.

  •

  Memories bubbled up in her as she worked on the poster. She thought back to all those mornings spent cutting, pasting, colouring, painting, and ripping when she was a child. Sitting alone at the kitchen table of the family bungalow, she would do crafts for hours—even when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Good weather was not enough to convince her she wanted to be out in the world. She wasn’t a believer in after the rain comes the sun. She was much more the when it rains, it pours type.

  She could almost hear her mother now. “It’s a beautiful day! Why don’t you go out and play with your friends?”

  But she didn’t really have any friends. From an early age, Manue had turned inwards, preferring her own company to games of pear ball with friends. Her mother fretted over her forlorn and sullen daughter, but she didn’t know what to say or do to comfort her and pique her interest in the world. Nicole hadn’t yet begun reading the pop psych books you could find at any decent drugstore; she was still new to the world of child psychology. So she hid behind denial and silence, naively believing that if she avoided topics that made her daughter sad and fragile, Manue would eventually forget about them and return to her former happy and carefree self. But what Nicole didn’t realize was that her daughter had never really been happy and carefree. Emmanuelle’s angst, the hardness in her features, her tendency to avoid social interaction, preferring fairy tales to reality and dolls to real people, didn’t just appear overnight. You had to go back to the story of her birth to understand her bitterness for life—a life which should have been sweet and simple, like that of other children.

  Manue saved the poster on her hard drive in a new folder she called “What the Heck” under the name disappearingfish.psd. She would need to invent a new proverb to express the utter despair a person feels when they lose their most cherished possession.

  She who loses her fish finds her soul even further adrift.

  Caramel Sundae

  during her adolescence, the tragedy kept piling up. Manue got her period for the first time. Her cat Garfield had to be put down at the ripe old age of sixteen. The transition to high school was a catastrophe, peppered with acne breakouts and sub-par grades in math and science. Wilfred St-Gelais wouldn’t go out with her. The local corner store shut down owing to the mountain of gambling debts accumulated by its owner, forcing Manue to walk three kilometres for a bag of gummy bears—her guilty pleasure and the only thing that helped her momentarily forget that her
life was an utter failure.

  Then, for the cherry on top, Yvon Bélanger got lung cancer. Emmanuelle’s father had never smoked a day in his life. If he had known this wouldn’t prevent him from developing untreatable tumours, he would have happily put away two packs a day during the hippy years of his youth. But by the time the doctors discovered the cancer in December 1994, it was too late. The diagnosis was clear: Yvon had only a month and a half to live, two if he was lucky. And since he’d never been the type of guy to win the lottery, he only made it three weeks. Emmanuelle didn’t find out he was sick until the day before he died.

  The service was held in a seedy funeral parlour in Yvon’s native Lower St. Lawrence region, since he had wanted to be buried in the Bélanger family plot. The only things Emmanuelle would remember later were the crustless sandwiches, the macaroni salad, and the peach punch served at the reception following the religious ceremony. Dozens of people she’d never seen before swept her into their arms and told her they were there for her if she ever needed to talk.

  •

  The wall of silence Manue hid behind worried her mother but proved life-saving to the adolescent. She’d learned that words were sharp weapons and she preferred to avoid them altogether. But her silence was one-sided, for her ears were constantly buzzing with sound. She never went anywhere without her Sony Walkman and spent her days listening to Green Day and Blink-182. Music was her refuge, and drawing her release.

  One morning, Nicole had had enough. She ripped off Emmanuelle’s headphones in frustration and shouted, “That’s it! Listen to me!”

  “I’m listening, Mom,” Manue answered, not looking up from her drawing of a purple marshmallow-breathing dragon. “But hurry up, my favourite part’s about to start.”

  “It’s rude to have your ears plugged up like that all day long.”

  “What’s rude about it?”

  “Look, kiddo, we’re going to have to help each other out. Because now this family is just you and me. We were four and now we’re only two, so we’ve gotta look out for each other if we want to make it through, OK?”

  “What do you mean, ‘four’? Who was the fourth?”

  “I said three, not four.”

  “Don’t even. You said four.”

  “Everyone messes up sometimes. I just slipped; I meant three.”

  “I know you, you never get numbers wrong. You’re an accountant. You said four, and that’s what you meant.”

  Nicole burst into tears. At first Emmanuelle thought it was because of how disrespectful she’d been, so she apologized for her behaviour. But then she realized she wasn’t the only reason her mother was crying uncontrollably. Nicole had come undone.

  Her secret was out.

  “You have a sister,” she said coldly. “Or you had, at any rate.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Manue, thinking her mother had gone off the deep end.

  “When you were born, you weren’t alone. There was Gabrielle, too. My beautiful twin babies. But Gaby wasn’t strong like you were. She couldn’t handle being born thirteen weeks early. She only lived fifteen days.”

  “You’re crazy. If I’d had a sister, I would know. Papa would have told me.”

  “He didn’t know.”

  “What do you mean, he didn’t know? That’s impossible.”

  “Believe me, it’s possible.”

  “So why are you telling me now? You like seeing me get hurt? Are you trying to make me cry?”

  “Of course not, babydoll…”

  “Don’t call me babydoll.”

  “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell your father. He died without…”

  She began to sob even harder.

  “So you didn’t want me to die without knowing I had a sister? Gee, thanks!”

  Manue wanted to grab her mother’s throat with both hands, squeeze with all her might, and watch her slowly slip away. Instead, she threw her Walkman in her face and ran out of the dining room, slamming the door behind her.

  She left without a coat and fought against the unrelenting January wind until she got to the grocery store. She went straight to the frozen food aisle and grabbed three containers of caramel sundae ice cream. She went outside, sat down at the picnic bench that employees used for their smoke breaks, and set about devouring the three tubs.

  It was minus eighteen out with the wind chill. Manue was frozen stiff, but she couldn’t stop. She had to polish off the ice cream. With bare hands, fighting cold with cold. She believed it was the only way to get through the winter that was gnawing away at her soul.

  Buoy

  hector’s disappearance brought to the surface memories Manue thought she’d buried deep in the sands of time. She managed to drift off around five o’clock, her laptop screen casting a bluish glow around the darkened room.

  She dreamed that she was stuck in a mountain of ice cream and couldn’t free her leg from the shifting caramel. Gaby had tried unsuccessfully to pull her out, clamouring, “I’m the fourth! I’m the fourth!” Alerted by the unrelenting cries, a paunchy man in his fifties appeared and offered to help the girls out of the mess. “I’m your father,” he claimed. “Impossible!” Manue and Gaby protested in unison. “Our father was tall, thin, and bald. You have way too much hair!” The man explained that he owed his generous mane to a recent hair transplant. “I reclaimed my masculinity with the help of technology.”

  Emmanuelle woke up around eleven o’clock with the words “reclaimed my masculinity” echoing in her head. She was hungry enough to eat a horse, so she decided to go to Princesses, the diner with the sexy waitresses where Serena worked weekends. “It’s just to get me through school,” her friend maintained. “After I finish, I’ll find another job. A real one.” She’d been in school for over seven years already. Serena defended the job, claiming that although it was demeaning to women, it was her way of being a feminist. By flaunting her womanly virtues to anyone interested in ogling, she was actually reclaiming her body along with the effect it had on others. “It’s not objectification if I’m exploiting myself. I’m my own work tool. It’s the definition of freedom, if you think about it.” At least she’d retained one or two concepts from her Marketing Theory class.

  Deep down, Manue thought her friend was an exhibitionist whose job was too lucrative to trade in for a dull government position once she finished her communications degree. But she wouldn’t dare say anything; her friend had inherited her Colombian mother’s Latin temperament and flared up at even the slightest provocation. Moreover, Manue enjoyed visiting her at work. It was soothing.

  The kind of crowd this type of establishment attracted consisted mainly of truckers, along with couples looking to rekindle the spark and lawyers too shy to utter the word vagina. Manue’s squeaky-clean schoolgirl image stood out against the restaurant’s motley characters. That’s what was comforting about the place: she was never the strangest person in the room. At Princesses she was the one in a position to judge, for a change. But she never did. She avoided either pigeonholing the people she came across in these seedy establishments or criticizing them from a distance. What was comforting was simply the notion that, for once, she could look on sanctimoniously if she wished.

  When she got to Princesses, Serena was bent over behind the bar sorting empty beer bottles. Her overly-mini skirt revealed a lack of underwear, and Manue caught glimpses of her friend’s bushy stubble. She’d grown used to Serena’s genitals and was no longer shocked by the sight. She didn’t bat an eyelash when she saw her crack open Coors Lights in the skimpiest of outfits. What bothered her more was how early some customers began getting drunk.

  “Isn’t it too early to be serving pitchers?” Manue called out in the way of a hello.

  “Hey, there you are!” Serena countered. “You want the usual?”

  “I dunno. I’m feeling more like pancakes for breakfast.”<
br />
  “OK, but I’m warning you: we’ve only got the fake syrup.”

  “That’s all right, it’ll remind me of my childhood. You know what? Never mind. I came here to forget my childhood. Two eggs over easy, sausage, white bread no butter, the usual.”

  “Coming right up! But hey, what’s up with your childhood? Why do you want to forget it?”

  “Long story. Hector went missing last night and it really threw me.”

  “I don’t get it. Hector? Your goldfish? You’ve had him since you were a kid?”

  “No, no.”

  “And how can a goldfish go missing? I’m lost.”

  Manue told her what had happened, running off all the possible leads she had come up with that might explain Hector’s disappearance. But she was tight-lipped when it came to the distant memories that had bubbled back up: Serena didn’t know about Gaby, and Manue had no desire to bring up the subject. Serena had no idea that when Emmanuelle appeared to be talking to herself, she was in fact speaking to her dead sister. Since the moment she had learned of her twin, Manue had developed a habit of saying everything aloud, as if her sister were constantly at her side listening to her rants. It was her way of grieving belatedly, of breathing life into this immaterial ghost. Of honouring the lost.

  As much as Manue had resented her mother for keeping her twin’s existence a secret for twelve years, she also silently thanked her for identifying the malaise that had haunted her since childhood. The black hole piercing her chest, the feeling of abandonment she’d felt from birth, the desert expanding within her, growing along with her desire to flee, to withdraw, to sow her solitude elsewhere: it was all Gabrielle. This was the reason Emmanuelle had always felt that a part of her was missing, that she’d lost a piece of her inner puzzle. Because she lacked her twin. Gabrielle had left her alone to face the terrifying world of the living.