Everything Was Good-Bye

by Gurjinder Basran

  When Ms. Richards saw me loitering along the side, she yelled at me to get in. I edged into the pool slowly, feeling for the bottom, fighting against the water’s attempts to swallow me. I bobbed along until there was no bottom for me to push against. My heart began to race as my legs flailed beneath me. I told myself not to panic, and in between mouthfuls of water, I told myself that I was fine. I felt like I was inside a wave: a hollow hum passed through my ears and over my head, until all sound was a dampened echo. The water above me punctured, a surge of pressure came towards me, and Liam’s hand reached for mine. “It’s okay, I’ve got you, you’re fine… you’re fine.” Now Liam walked out of the water, silver and clean, his shadow falling over me. He flopped onto his back in the sand, sun-drying, eyes closed. I looked over at him, watching the heat radiate offhis skin until I felt its flush on my own skin, felt my own pulse deepen. I tried to stop looking but couldn’t. I’d never seen a naked man except for the ones in the Playgirl magazine at a 7-Eleven that Carrie had dared me to look at. All the men were oiled and erect; their expression, wanting and contrived. None of them were as beautiful and vulnerable as Liam.

  “You should have come. The water was great.” I didn’t answer and quickly looked away as he got up and pulled on his jeans. I handed him his shirt; sand fell from his flesh onto mine like brown sugar. “You would have liked it,” he said pulling his shirt over his head. Patches of sand on his skin shimmered, the hairs on his body lit up like gold filigree.

  I looked over his head into the sun. “Another time,” I said, and walked back along the shore, combing through the tidal debris with my toes. Liam came and stood next to me, skipping rocks along the water.

  “Teach me to do that?”

  “Sure.” He pulled a rock from his pocket and handed it to me, explaining that the rock had to hit the water at just the right angle and speed to skip. This was all about physics.

  He stood behind me, rock in my hand, his hand on mine, imitating the motion a few times before pulling my hand back with his and freeing the stone. I counted the ripples as it skipped across the surface.

  “See. Now you try it.” He handed me another rock and I held it in my palm for a moment before I lobbed it towards the horizon. I looked back at him quizzically when it plopped into the water.

  “It takes practice.” He picked up a pebble to demonstrate. “You just have to snap your wrist faster.”

  The breeze twisted my hair into ribbons. “Show-off!”

  A rush of whitewater chased me from the shore and I retreated to a nearby log while Liam walked into the waves. He knelt down, etched something in the sand with a stick and watched the water take it away. I pulled my journal out of my bag and as I read my thoughts, hoped the tide would pull them out to sea. Liam wiped his hands on his jeans and sat next to me. “What are you writing?”

  I closed the book. “Nothing.”

  “Can I see it then?”

  I hugged the leather journal close to me. “No. It’s private.”

  “Come on.” He reached over again, placed his hand on mine, tilted his head and looked up at me with a smile that curled on one side like the crest of a wave. “Come on, let me see.”

  “Okay. But promise you won’t laugh.”

  “Yeah, promise.” He pried the book from me and opened it to the dog-eared page. Sand from his fingers sprinkled across the page and settled in the crease as he began to read: “The smell of chai—fennel, cloves and cinnamon tucked me into my blanket like a seed in a cardamom pod… .”

  “Liam, don’t read it out loud!”

  “Okay, but I can’t read silently, never could. I can’t comprehend anything that way. Some weird learning disability… so I’ll whisper it, okay?”

  I agreed, but before he continued, I took the book back. “I changed my mind.”

  He reached into the sand and picked up a piece of paper that had fallen out of the book. “What’s this?”

  I tried to grab it. “Give it here.”

  He unfolded it and held it out of reach, mumbling the words as he skimmed the contents, announcing the highlights. “Your personal essay ‘The Have Nots’… has been awarded second place in our Young Writers of Canada contest… invited to Toronto to accept your scholarship prize… .”

  I grabbed it from him and crumpled it into my bag with the journal. “What’s the matter? This is amazing. Why aren’t you happy about it?”

  I shook my head and pitched my toes in the sand. “Because my mom won’t let me go.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.” I watched the tide roll over itself.

  “Well, then, explain it to me,” he said, scrawling my name into the sand with the sharp end of a stone.

  “Because Toronto is too far from home and because she thinks that writing is a waste of time and wants me to do something more productive.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. She wants me to go to university, be a lawyer or a doctor, some shit like that.”

  “You can’t let her tell you what to do. You’ve got to go. It’s what you want, what you’ve always talked about.”

  “I wish it were that simple.” I scooped a fistful of sand, sifting it through my fingers like an hourglass. “Sometimes I just want to run away, you know. Figure things out on my own.”

  “So why don’t you?” he asked.

  I thought about Harj. I had almost admired her for running away, for doing what no other Punjabi girl before her had done, until I experienced the consequences of her leaving, felt the rawness of my mother’s tears, the ripples that her absence had created in all of us. Her choice to leave seemed to leave me with one less choice. “I don’t think I could ever outrun myself.” I picked up a rock and tossed it into the water, surprised that it skipped.

  “You know, a lot of things that don’t make sense are done because people don’t question things enough.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll show you.” Liam got up and walked towards the railway track. I followed, stepping on the cross ties as he balanced on the edge. “The distance between these rails is 56 ½ inches, not because it’s the best-engineered width but because of the cultural engineering surrounding the gauge.”

  “What are you talking about? What does a railway track have to do with me?”

  “Well, the width of a railway track is based on the width of the wheel spacing on a horse-drawn wagon, which was actually designed based on the width of a Roman chariot, which was designed to accommodate the width of two horses’ asses. Technically, the tracks should have been wider; the trains would have been more stable and there’d be a lot less derailments. But no one ever even thought to make it differently. No one questioned anything.”

  “So what you’re saying is that if we don’t question anything we’ll make asses of ourselves?” I laughed and shoved him from the rail. He got up smiling, dusted the sand offhis jeans and chased me along the dormant tracks towards the abandoned house that was the scene of many drunken teenage parties.

  The house reminded me of home. Of the house my father had bought when he came to Canada, how abandoned it looked on the day that we moved away with the last of our belongings piled into the trunk of Mamaji’s Chevrolet Impala. When my mother locked the door and stood in front of the freshly sprayed graffiti that marred our leaving, I realized that in the face of such unyielding realities we had vacated my father’s dreams, taking only the emptiness that remained.

  I ran up the porch steps and looked through the dirty glass that had been cracked and sparingly boarded. Liam tried the door. It shook but didn’t open.

  “There’s got to be a way in.”

  I followed him to the back of the house. “Liam, we shouldn’t.”

  He pulled a loose board off the window and climbed in. “Go around to the front. I’ll open the door.”

  As I entered, I covered my mouth with my hand. The house smelled like cat piss and weed. “Home sweet home,” I muttered. My voice resonated through the gr
affiti-covered walls and the only inhabitants of the house—a few pieces of decrepit furniture, that lingered in rooms like ghosts. “I wonder why whoever lived here would leave their stuff.”

  Liam shrugged. He had taken a camera out of his backpack and was taking pictures. It was the newest of the old cameras he’d found at the thrift store the last time we’d ditched class. We always cruised the Sally Ann aisles and loitered in the furniture section, where we sat on settees with split upholstery, reading five-cent romance paperbacks, before checking out the antiquated electronic sections for yet another camera for his collection.

  “Maybe it was easier,” he mused between frames. “You know, leave the past in its place… Hey, do you have a felt pen?”

  I took my backpack off, pulled a felt marker out and handed it to Liam, who had put down his camera to read the writing on the wall—love, hate and lust all tumbling over each other towards the white space where he scrawled “Liam and Meena were here May, 1990.” Then he took a picture of it.

  When I got home, Serena and my mother were in the bedroom talking in hushed voices. I pressed my ear against the door, trying to hear without being heard. Serena seemed upset; her tone rose and fell in broken words that I couldn’t make out. I wondered if she and Dev were fighting again and if she would really leave him this time. Just after A.J. was born, she moved back home for a month and lay on the couch in my mother’s housecoat watching reruns of Dallas, drinking countless cups of tea, her bruised ribs mending. “It hurts to breathe,” she’d told me. I nodded as though I understood, and in a way I did. Life was asphyxiating. Once Serena was well enough, my mother had called her mother-in-law and brokered her return. They came to collect her, drinking their tea in measured apology, and in return we all became good at avoiding asking her how she was; we learned to look away when we talked to her and pretended not to notice her vacant eyes and dramatic weight loss. Her body was pulled in on itself, flesh wrapped tight, calling attention to protruding bones and joints. Sometimes I’d reach for her hand and pluck bones like guitar strings.

  Cupping my hand around my ear, I pressed my body close to the door just like Harj had taught me to. “Be strong,” my mother said. “Think of your son. He needs his father.” Serena did not seem to answer. I wondered why she still sought my mother’s counsel—the advice never changed. Perhaps that was what she wanted: Affirmation. Validation. Acceptance. How easily we confused these things with love.

  I rushed into my room when I heard their voices draw closer. A moment later Serena was in my doorway, her face pale as she looked in on me. She was transparent, barely a fraction of her former self. I waited for her to say something, but she just stood there in a daze, eyelids drooping, leaning against the wall as if she were holding the house up. Hollow-eyed, she stared out at nothing just as we all did—with blindness and longing.

  1.4

  J ust before third period, I grabbed my Walkman and backpack and hurried across the parking lot, squinting through intermittent raindrops. I turned the music up, matching my steps to the rhythm of “Personal Jesus,” navigating past the smoke pit and huddled fringe groups who hung out by the portables. “Feeling unknown… .” I replayed it until I was offschool grounds and on my way to Liam’s house. He had missed school before, but never for this long. Last time it had been a week, but even then he’d dropped a postcard in my locker—his way of saying “see you soon.” Liam was always buying old photographs and postcards from thrift stores and he occasionally passed some on to me. Once when we were reading the back of 1960s’ vacation postcards, I told him that it was sad to buy other people’s memories; he reminded me that he was the only person who wanted them. He made collages out of them, adding in new pictures that he had taken, until you couldn’t tell new from old. My favourite was simply a collection of postmarks pasted and overlapped on photographs of corner stores, stop-lights, park benches, street corners and empty beaches. He called it “Wish You Were Here.”

  I trampled through his overgrown front lawn, past the unkempt flower beds that hinted at better days, and up the steps to the front door. The stoop was littered with local newspapers, junk mail and cigarette butts that hadn’t made it to the tinfoil ashtray on the railing. I knocked and knelt down to pick up the mail and was sorting it into a neat stack when Liam answered.

  He pulled my headphones off. “Miss me?”

  “Just curious where you’ve been.” I handed him the pile of junk mail, trying not to bite my lip on the lie. By now he knew all my tells.

  The house smelled likestale smoke and wet dogs, like the cheap motels my mother cleaned. I followed him up a few stairs and down a dingy, green-carpeted hallway adorned with a “Jesus loves you” embroidered wall hanging and fading family photos. I stared into the placid smiles and sol-emn eyes, pausing at a photo of a four-year-old Liam blowing out birthday candles, his mother smiling at his side.

  “Do you miss her?” I asked.

  “What’s to miss? I barely knew her.” He went quiet for a minute and stared at the pictures. I reached for his hand but he moved away before I could hold it. “She lives in Saskatchewan with a guy named Chuck.” He laughed that painful laugh that I had initially misinterpreted as satisfaction. “Can you believe that? Chuck, what a name… Chuck rhymes with fuck.” He walked farther down the hallway. “This is my room,” he said, pushing the door open. The walls were covered in vintage art and rock ’n’ roll posters tacked and taped in place, one overlapping the next. His photographs were thumbtacked all over his closet door. There was even one of me. I had my hands up in a don’t-take-my-picture way, but you could still see I was smiling. His bed was unmade and showed no signs of ever having been made, his mahogany dresser and nightstand were missing handles and he had a milk crate full of records beside a 1970s’ sideboard-style stereo. Books were balanced in piles on the threadbare carpet, and between the Prousts and Emersons were mounds of clothing. His room was like a flea market—a crowded thrift store at best.

  I picked up one of his cameras and looked at him through the lens. “So… where have you been lately? Are you sick?”

  “Yeah,” he said and reached for the camera to show me where the shutter release was. I clicked off a few frames.” Well, I mean, no. Not really.”

  He sighed and pushed his hair away from his eyes, only to have it slip back. “You know, I’m just sick of school, so I’m taking a break. A sabbatical, so to speak.”

  “What does your dad think about that?” I asked.

  “He’s hardly around.” He picked up another camera and took my picture taking his picture. “That’ll be a neat one,” he said, taking another.

  “Aren’t you worried that he’ll find out?”

  “No, not really. Besides, he wouldn’t even care.”

  I nodded. Part of me wanted to ask him why, but our relationship was built on not knowing.

  I put the camera down and walked across the room to look out the window at the backyard. It was littered with rubbish: car parts, rusty bicycles, a dilapidated 1970s’ swing set, a Mr. Turtle pool filled with rainwater and leaves, and an old German shepherd who appeared equally defeated. I looked away, not wanting to see my reflection in the neglect. Liam was sitting with legs outstretched on the bed, flipping through an encyclopedia. A stack of them teetered on the floor nearby.

  “Did you rob the library or something?”

  “Funny,” he said flatly. “I picked them up from the Sally Ann; this is my education in lieu of school. I’m already on D.”

  “Wow,” I said, matching his tone.

  “Did you know that dinosaurs only get a few pages? Millions of years ruling the earth and they get a few measly pages.”

  I picked up the newspaper that was on his bed and unfolded it to the crossword. “Well, I guess humans should only get a then.”

  “I was thinking a footnote, if we’re lucky.”

  He picked up volume E, opened it and started reading. His lips mouthed the words like tiny breaths. I sat down next to him, pulled o
ut the pencil that I’d used to tie up my hair, and shook the knot loose just like the girls on all the shampoo commercials did.

  I worked away at the puzzle for an hour, aware of how close we were sitting to each other, aware that he had looked up from his encyclopedia several times and traced the line of my leg to the hem of my “Blondie” miniskirt. I was sure I had seen a picture of Debbie Harry wearing a similar black-and-white-striped skirt, or maybe I’d seen it on tv. I couldn’t remember; I was just a kid when my sisters had huddled around the tv set watching her sing “Heart of Glass” on American Bandstand. We always watched AB on Saturday mornings and Solid Gold in the evenings. When other kids were going to piano, ballet or soccer practice on Saturday mornings, I was taking the bus downtown to a&b Sound, Zulu Records and Odyssey Imports.

  I walked over to Liam’s stereo and pulled a record from the yellow Dairyland crate. “Platinum Blonde?”

  “I just liked the one song.”

  “Doesn’t Really Matter?” I asked, as I put the album back and picked up Simple Minds.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. I have the record too, only mine is autographed.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way. They were signing records at a&b. My sister and I lined up for three hours to meet them.”

  “So what were they like?”