Low

by Anna Quon

  Adriana wondered if there was something wrong with her hippocampus. Lately she remembered the past with agonizing clarity but had a difficult time recalling whether she had eaten breakfast or had a shower. The days seemed to blur into one as though they’d all been spun in a blender.

  Adriana was 11 years old, when her mother, Viera, wrathful as a hurricane, died and left the Song family in her wake. Adriana remembered sitting at her desk staring at the roses on her wallpaper, clutching her ears so she wouldn’t hear Beth’s insistent cries, and Aunt Penny’s hushed but urgent tones as she tried to comfort the baby and her grieving brother at the same time. Then one day Penny and the baby were gone and it was just Adriana and her father in a house so quiet it could have been a tomb.

  Not long after, back in Toronto, Penny met a Chinese widower whose own children were grown and who could appreciate Penny’s well-aged, motherly beauty. He died two years ago, leaving Penny the house in downtown Toronto; still, for much of her childhood, Beth had a ready-made surrogate family. Mr. Song, who had agonized over letting Beth go, was thankful but grief-stricken all over again when he heard Beth had called Penny’s husband “baba.” Adriana heard him get up in the middle of the night to sit at the kitchen table, and the muffled thump of a bottle against the tabletop. This went on for a week and a half and then one night her father slept through the night, the sound of his snores from the next room as reassuring to Adriana’s ears as the blanket she slept under.

  Closing her eyes, Adriana willed herself to get up, folding the bedcovers aside neatly as she always had, the way her mother taught her. She’d slip her feet into her mother’s old slippers, stand and stretch, and cough on the swirling dust motes disturbed when she raised the blind. She’d look out the window at the dry, late summer grass in the backyard, punctuated by a dead maple tree whose upswept crown was leafless and brittle. Her father had said several times, absently, that he must get someone to cut it down for firewood, but Adriana knew he had forgotten, and the maple would stand there all winter. That was as far as she got. Something about that tree stopped her in her tracks, and she never got beyond it to imagine what came next.

  Adriana wanted to hang on to sleep for just a little longer, since she had once again failed to find her way out of bed. And because she knew that when she opened her eyes, her mother would be standing in the doorway, glaring at her.

  It was a long time before Adriana woke up again and went to the kitchen. Her father must have left for work when she’d still been fast asleep. What had he thought about her skipping class? He’d been too meek to force her awake.

  She ate breakfast the way she liked it, by herself with the radio on, a huge mug of coffee in her hand. She imagined her mother seated across from her, a cigarette between two languid fingers, blowing smoke in Adriana’s face. Adriana wondered what she’d tell her father. That she couldn’t see the path ahead of her? That it frightened her that she didn’t know what tomorrow looked like, what came next? Then there was her mother, arms crossed, smiling wickedly. What does come next?

  Adriana’s mother turned blurry at the edges, her face stern, matter of fact. Adriana felt weak. There she was, having followed Adriana around all these years, commenting on her messy handwriting, her unorthodox haircuts, and her penchant for chaos. Adriana had always looked hurriedly away, corrected her mistakes and made her bed the way her mother taught her. She had never asked her mother a pointed question, like,Why did you leave me? Why did you die when I still needed you?

  Adriana was afraid to ask. She was afraid to chase the last of her mother away, when that was all she had of her. Suddenly, she felt quite empty, as though a valve had been opened, and all the things that filled her up had drained away. Adriana had felt this way before, like a yawning cavern had opened inside her. She went back to bed, curled in on herself, hugging a pillow to her chest. The phone rang several times but she ignored it. She was asleep when it rang again at lunchtime and in the mid-afternoon.

  Later, Adriana awakened to hear the soft sizzle of onions in the wok. Her father was cooking supper. She stood for a moment in the kitchen door, watching him, and feeling hollow as a reed. There was something wrong with her but talk wouldn’t help.

  Mr. Song didn’t hear her standing in the doorway. He was humming something under his breath, at home in the kitchen, with her mother’s old apron on. Adriana couldn’t believe her father had survived this world, as fragile and goofy as he was. She sat down at the table, soundlessly. Somehow her father knew she was there. Without turning around, he said, “We’re having steak, hon. I got a tip today.” Adriana’s mind let that turn over. Did engineers get tips? “It’s a bonus, really,” he said apologetically. “But it’s a small bonus. More like a tip.”

  Adriana didn’t realize that her father was joking—she barely acknowledged that he had a sense of humour, especially now that her own was so ragged. Her stomach was delicate as a butterfly. “I’m not hungry Dad,” she said, and it was true. She felt weak, but heavy, as though lined by cement. Adriana stood up, dragging her blanket around her, and trailed out of the kitchen. Mr. Song raised his hand with the metal spatula, as though he was about to strike a fly, and watched her go. Then he turned back to the stove, where a pot of rice was bubbling. Out of all the things in his life that had changed, he thought, the bubbling of the rice pot remained the same.

  Chapter 4

  Mr. Song realized eventually that Adriana had stopped going to class and called in sick to the fabric store one too many times. He’d given up trying to coax her out with things she liked, such as coffee milkshakes, games of Boggle and home movies. At least, he thought she liked those things. She used to. Mr. Song was full of fear, his face shiny with it. She was such a bright little girl, always bursting with something—enthusiasm, a secret, hot dogs. Round-bellied, bubbling with laughter, her short legs carrying her twice as fast as her father wherever she wanted to go. Now she was pale, drawn and melodramatic. He felt something was eating her from inside, and that one day he’d wake up and there would be nothing but a pile of sawdust.

  Mr. Song thought about trying to talk to Jazz about Adriana, but he felt too awkward with her to actually have a conversation. Something about the way Jazz looked at him with those cool eyes of hers bothered him. He felt like he never quite measured up, as though Jazz were the parent, and he were the one under scrutiny. He and Jazz never had anything to say to one another, but he was grateful for her friendship with Adriana.

  Instead of talking to Jazz, Mr. Song called the helpline one day and had a heart-to-heart with one of the volunteers. Adriana was depressed, he figured. The helpline volunteer told him there were options—the mental health crisis unit, for example—if things got too bad. “You’ve got to get her to talk to someone,” the woman said. Mr. Song pictured the volunteer as a middle-aged woman, dyed blonde hair, a wad of chewing gum stuck to its wrapper in front of her.

  Can you get her to see someone, was where they left it. And no, he couldn’t get her to see someone. They barely talked. When he got up the courage to knock on the door of her room, she didn’t answer, and when he opened the door, she was sleeping, her face to the wall. She seemed to sleep all the time he was in the house, even when he lay in bed at night, waiting to hear the fridge door open or some other sign that she was alive.

  That day, when her father came home from work, he sat on the edge of her bed, his briefcase between his feet. He didn’t look at her. “Addy, I need you to talk to someone.” His voice was tremulous. He knew she was asleep, that he was only practicing, but nevertheless his stomach jumped around nervously.

  It was the same feeling he used to get when her mother was alive and he had something to say that he knew she wouldn’t like. She would look at him with heavy-lidded eyes and laugh a low, throaty laugh that thrilled and terrified him. “Dahling, you’re full of shit,” she would say in her Slovak accent. He felt reassured that she didn’t disown him, that she allowed him to say hi
s piece, even though he was wrong and she of course was right. Often a day or so later he would discover that she had in fact come around to his point of view. She showed him as much in discreet ways, such as by folding his socks together instead of tubing them, as he had asked, or by changing the bathroom scale to one that measured kilograms instead of just pounds. “I like kilograms,” she said, smiling slyly. “They make me feel slimmer.”

  The day Mr. Song ate steak alone at the kitchen table, was the first time he noticed Adriana’s face. Pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She looked haunted. And what cut to his heart, she looked distant. Disdainful of him and his open-arm policy. As if she would have respected him more if he’d taken a more firm and forceful approach. That just wasn’t his style—in fact it was so foreign to him that he couldn’t even imagine what it would look like. Would he yank her from her bed and cart her off to the doctor? Mr. Song ran his hand through his hair, thinking. He couldn’t do that. He had no other choice—it was time to talk to Jazz.

  “I don’t know what to do,” was all he could think of to say when he called Jazz to meet him at a coffee shop. Jazz sat, spine as straight as a book, in the chair opposite, while he poured her tea.

  She gazed at him impassively. He took another stab. “Could you—is there something you could do to help her?” He had never asked anything of Jazz before, and it seemed like a momentous occasion that he was doing so now.

  Jazz pulled out her wallet. “I think Adriana needs a night on the town,” was what she said. “I’d like to take her to see Bartholomew Banks at the Westin, but it will cost twenty dollars.” Mr. Song, thinking Bartholomew Banks must be some kind of teen heartthrob, handed her twenty dollars no questions asked, and felt something like relief, to know that Jazz had a plan of some kind.

  The barometric pressure of Adriana’s life was about to change. She didn’t know it at the time, but it was as though an inexorable plough were pushing the trash of her life up against the landfill fence.

  Chapter 5

  When Adriana woke up in the late morning, there was a red light blinking on her phone. It would be Jazz. They hadn’t talked in a couple days because Adriana knew if she called Jazz, it would be the end of the silence that contained what she wasn’t yet ready to give up. Depression, with its familiar blue fingers encircling her throat, and a bottle of sleeping pills that she’d bought at the pharmacy, the day she was let go from the fabric store.

  Adriana felt like a candle burning down, its singed wick drooping in a cave of wax. If only she could pull the pieces of herself together into a pile, it would be less obvious that she had fallen completely apart. Jazz was still possessed with the notion that Adriana could pull herself out of this funk, with affirmations and will power. Adriana didn’t bother to contradict her. It took too much energy, even to entertain the idea.

  Adriana’s mother watched her, stern as a drill sergeant. A dutiful daughter, Adriana had tried. But weakness had overtaken her. You are so like your father, her mother said with scorn.

  There was a ceiling fan in Adriana’s bedroom. She liked to keep it on, even on cool days, because she liked the feel of air moving on her face. But today her teeth chattered and the sound of the fan’s whirring blades terrified her, as she imagined they were an instrument of torture which would descend from the ceiling and drill right through her as she slept. It took a minute for Adriana to remember she could turn the fan off with the flick of a switch. She wobbled out of bed, seasick, ducking under the fan on her way to the wall switch. The whirring blades gently slowed to a stop, and Adriana, exhausted and relieved, fell back into bed.

  She pulled a blanket up to her chin and tried to fall asleep. This is what a corpse feels like, she thought. The Egyptian mummies, Tut and his kin, had their arms folded across their chests. Adriana tried it too. She felt as though she’d been laid on a ceremonial slab in order that her brains could be extracted through her nose. The thought made her giggle, a high unnatural sound that frightened her. She was afraid that her father would come home and find her like this, laughing like a mad person.

  Adriana dozed, never quite sleeping; then, resigned to the fact that she was awake, folded the bed covers aside neatly, as though turning the pages of a book. The red light on her phone, still blinking, was a beacon of a sort; an urgent pulsing, like the light on a police car. She called Jazz, without listening to the message. The phone rang a few times before Adriana, nonplussed by the thought of the incessant ringing in an empty room, hung up.

  Adriana pulled the blanket at the end of her bed around her shoulders. She tried not to think about the bottle of sleeping pills she’d bought at the drugstore and hid in her bedside table, but it was as if they were magnetic and her thoughts were iron filings. To escape them she made her way to the kitchen. It seemed like days since she’d eaten, but her stomach felt iffy so all she had was a cup of tea. She sat at the kitchen table, hunched under her blanket, hollow inside.

  There was a sound at the door and Adriana looked up, startled. Jazz had her face mashed against the screen, and was making strangled noises. “Let me in!” she rumbled. Adriana, stomach drawn, got up and unlocked the screen door.

  Jazz went straight to the fridge. “I’m hungry, what do you have in here?” Adriana shrugged helplessly. Adriana looked to her like one of those starving children on Oxfam commercials, not just because she was thin, but because of how limp she seemed in the face of life. Jazz wanted to shake her, but there was the chance she’d break.

  Instead, Jazz sat down opposite Adriana and thrust an apple at her. “Here,” she said, “I have news I want to share with you,” Jazz said, as grandly as she could with a mouth full of apple. “We’ve got tickets to a fun evening with Dr. Bartholomew Banks.” Adriana didn’t react. Jazz leaned toward her, cupping her hand to her ear. “Who is this Dr. Banks, you ask?” Jazz leaned toward her then and in a confidential tone, said “He’s a celebrated spiritualist and psychic who can…” Jazz then put her hand on Adriana’s forehead and proclaimed loudly, “HEEEAAAAL the sick. HEEAAALLL, I say.”

  Adriana looked down at her hands. A spiritualist? She wasn’t even sure what that was. Did Jazz think she was sick?

  Jazz put her hands on Adriana’s cheeks. “Come on,” she said quietly, “it can’t hurt worse than it already does.” She took two tickets from her pocket and waved them at her. “Huh? Huh?” Jazz coaxed. Adriana took a ticket and examined it. “Bartholomew Banks, celebrated spiritualist, psychic, and healer.” Adriana’s nose wrinkled, until Jazz punched her in the arm.

  Adriana looked at her blankly and handed the ticket back. “No, thank you,” she whispered.

  Jazz lost patience. “Listen, Miss Snot Nose, these tickets cost me two hours housecleaning money,” she said. Adriana looked at her, stricken. Jazz had spent her hard-earned money on crap because she thought it would help? A tear trickled down Adriana’s nose. Jazz softened. “You really do have a snotty nose,” she said, as Adriana began to bawl. “Come on, bubble gum,” Jazz said quietly, pulling Adriana’s head to her cheek.

  The night of the spiritualist’s performance, Jazz came by for Adriana around 6 p.m. They were planning to take Mr. Song’s car, Jazz driving and Adriana sitting slumped in the passenger seat. But at the last minute, Mr. Song decided he would prefer to drive them himself. Jazz fixed him with a cool stare. Looking sheepish, Mr. Song said “I’ll run a few errands while you’re at the… spiritualist,” he said, glancing at his daughter. Adriana sat with her head down, stringy hair hanging.

  Adriana had wearily explained to him that Bartholomew Banks was no one she knew, but that he was a spiritualist, and Jazz had tickets. He had nodded sagely, and offered the car, but secretly felt bewildered and perturbed. From the dictionary definition, he gathered that a spiritualist was something like a fortune teller in China, someone who could converse with the souls of the dead. Although he had long since given up his belief in such superstitions, he found himself frequently
wishing he could talk to his wife. She had grown pale in his mind, faded to a wisp, especially since the recent troubles with Adriana. But if anyone knew what to do about their daughter, it would be her.

  Jazz sat in the passenger seat with Mr. Song on the drive to the hotel where Bartholomew Banks was to perform. Their conversation was stilted. Usually Mr. Song tried harder with Jazz but he didn’t want to be distracted while driving. Adriana was no help at all, slumped in the back seat. Her mind was grey and empty, the sounds of her father and Jazz speaking echoing around inside her like the buzzing of a bee.

  “Uh, how is your mother doing these days?” Mr. Song asked Jazz, looking straight ahead, as they sat briefly at a four way stop. It was a bit of a throw away question, and he regretted it as soon as he asked. Jazz’s mother was a tall, semi-attractive middle-aged woman whom he couldn’t have picked out of a crowd. She always looked prim and dour, even when she smiled.

  Jazz peered out the window at a homeless guy, bumming change. Sometimes she fantasized that her father was one of these street people. She would look into their face and see her own blue eyes staring back at her. “My mum’s just dandy,” she replied, “Just dandy.”

  Mr. Song didn’t know whether Jazz was being sarcastic or not but suspected she was. He realized with shame that he didn’t even remember Jazz’s mother’s name. She wasn’t someone he ever thought about, and he was sure Jazz knew that. Jazz knew a remarkable number of things. It was difficult to keep anything from her.