Maybe you are lonely, or maybe you’re not, either way it doesn’t matter because you’re not the You I built from old memories and new disappointments.
And, besides, if it was you and me instead of me and him and you and her, I might be writing this shit about him because then he’d be the one that got away.
Felix stirs. I put the phone down and lift him up so his head rests heavy on my shoulder. Complete surrender. It is sometimes my most favourite thing in the world. I look out the living room window at the snowy tree against the February sky, but there’s no song playing, no camera doing a slow pan away from high above to mark the end of the episode. No cutting to a black screen with white credits.
Carol dries her hands on a dishtowel and comes to take Felix. I resist.
“Aren’t you going to rest? I’m here to give you a break. Go. Go now.”
The landline rings and the call display shows it’s the call Mitch has been waiting for. I let it go to voicemail so he can hear it first. I gently pass Carol the sleeping child and go to the kitchen to put a bottle of Prosecco in the freezer so it will be cold when he gets home, so we can celebrate.
WHAT HAPPENS
Lilacs.
I’ll start there.
It was as though, all at once, every yard on our street had a lilac tree pushing through the chain-link fence, trying to catch my sweater or brush against my face as I walked past. I held my breath and looked down at the sidewalk, but I could still smell the bloom and the whole inside of my nose felt like it was being singed with a match. Spring.
It’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. But it mustn’t have bothered me long ago when Mom cut clusters off our bush out back with the dull kitchen scissors, twisting and tearing the stubborn green marrow before wrapping the raw stems in a crunch of tinfoil. My fingers smelled like wet metal by the time I got to school and handed the drooping purple blossoms to whomever they were for—Mrs. Philips, Mlle Poucette, Ms. Bukowski, the librarian. The flowers sagging in a tea-stained mug by the blackboard for the remainder of the day, despite the quick blast of tap water they’d been given. That’s another thing about lilacs. They never last long, after they’ve been cut.
It was around the time the lilacs bloomed that Mom aired out the house, snapping up blinds and yanking hard to lift the old living room windows. Just a bit more air, a cross breeze. Feel that? There. That’s what we need. She used to wedge heavy books between the frame and the sill to keep the sashes from crashing down on our fingers while my sister and I examined the corpses of flies that had mummified over the winter. Hardcovers, library discards mainly, old mystery novels with plastic jackets that crinkled in the breeze. Rejection stamped in red across the top edge of the pages. DISCARD. Mom must have thought we were looking out at the street when she saw us there kneeling on cushions, but really it was the flies that drew us, lying on their backs with their dead stick legs folded neatly against their bodies, tiny invisible rosaries woven in their grips.
She got rid of those books. Threw them all in boxes that she dumped by the sidewalk along with everything else she suddenly considered non-essential. I picked one up and smelled it when I came home and saw them there that day. Cracked its spine, inhaled and felt the sting of memory. After the books were gone, she used blocks of wood to prop up the panes, and sucked up the flies with the nozzle of her vacuum.
I began to hate the sounds that bled in through those opened windows. Honks and sirens and thumping bass and kids yelling as they ran by with basketballs tucked under their arms. The double-ding warning of a bicycle bell, the warbling music of ice cream trucks. But soon that all blended with the ch-ch-ch of sprinklers and the protests of seagulls and the crescendos of cicadas, stirred into the soup of summer noise. And summer was nothing but a hot haze of exhaustion after all that hating in the spring.
Sprinklers.
Always the same memory: us, lying still on top of the sheets in our cotton nightgowns, yearning for a breeze to waft in through the screen, listening to the beat of the sprinkler next door. And just when its rhythm began to lull us to sleep, it stopped with a squeak of a knob and the other sounds of summer nights rose up through the air. Crickets. Footsteps on the sidewalk in time to the jingle of a dog collar. Caustic teenage laughter, somewhere. A car approaching from far down the road, pausing at the stop sign, then accelerating with a soft drone. Lonely. Maybe not, but when it kept to the slow speed limit, it sounded like it had nowhere to go. We lay and listened and drifted, agreeing without words when it was time to fall asleep.
—
I saw the low moan of her name spray-painted on the back of a park bench near the school, not long after it happened. The A stretched wider than the rest of the letters, so you hear it drawn out in your mind.
SADIE
Nothing left. Nothing left to do but breathe in again. It was impossible to tell if it had been painted there before or after, or even if it was in reference to her at all, but I didn’t know any other Sadies. It was easy to believe it was done by some boy transfixed by her white teeth and auburn hair that dried in waves on our walk to school each day; easy to imagine him with a shattered heart standing alone at night in the park, spray can in hand, the tip of his index finger blackened by his longing.
I like thinking of the boy like that. Feeling real things. It slices through the melodrama that overtook our high school when the news broke. I wasn’t there, of course, but I knew what was happening—the dispatched counsellors, the assembly, her “favourite” song played over the PA system during the morning announcements (a weepy ballad she once said she liked; God knows who said it was her favourite). I could see the police arriving early that morning to speak directly to our principal, Father O’Neill, to tell him what happened, to ask him questions. His office door closing behind them, the younger officers removing their hats, uncertain of the measure of respect due a man of the cloth these days.
I didn’t have to be there to know what it was like. When we were in grade nine, two years before, a twelfth-grader named Dwight Reid was killed in a car accident on an icy road. It was January. A Tuesday. On Wednesday, girls who never knew him were weeping by their lockers, waving away attempts at comfort as they ran to the washrooms in competing states of grief. Aidan Walker, who played baseball with Dwight, punched a wall and broke his finger and two of his knuckles, an injury that led some American college to revoke his scholarship. He was a pitcher, I think.
The day before the funeral, there was a school-wide assembly with a slide show of pictures from Dwight’s life, soundtracked by an instrumental recording of “Little Wing.” That it was Dwight himself playing the guitar rippled through the crowd (Oh! He loved Jimi Hendrix!!), though that was never confirmed. And each photo projected on the screen—a Christmas-morning toothless grin, in the shadows of a cottage bonfire, on his concrete front porch in a beige suit beside Lisa Myers-Lincoln before last year’s semi-formal—evoked its own murmur or applause, each picture more naked and naive than the last.
Lisa, his girlfriend, sat in the front row surrounded by a gaggle of sad-faced girls who fought to embrace her when she turned to fall into someone’s arms. The friend she’d chosen stroked her hair and whispered in her ear and looked skyward for an answer, conscious of her current role in the spotlight, which, literally, fell upon her due to badly angled stage lighting that no one had bothered to fix. The others thrust clouds of Kleenex at Lisa, cooing and hugging one another in a tangle of bony arms and a cascade of dripping tears, carefully dabbing beneath their eyes lest their mascara begin to run.
Dwight’s mother was there. Just for a short time. Long enough, I’m now sure, to realize that no comfort could be found in that auditorium. She had been sitting somewhere in a darkened part of the front row with Dwight’s older brother, Dylan, who’d just graduated and attracted lingering gazes from the teary-eyed girls on his quick ascent up the aisle. Shortly after the slide show started, his mother got up and retreated to the back doors, clutching her brown purse
to her body. That’s his mom! That’s his mom! the assembly whispered in waves, falling silent as she passed. Ashen. Someone handed her a rose, which she took without smiling, Dylan a few steps behind.
There was a part of me that wanted to be a crying girl in the front row. They were so pretty with their wet faces, so close to the epicentre of tragedy. Sadie had snuck out for a smoke by then. Bullshit, all of it, she’d thought. We’d begun to diverge around that time. I was still languid with after-school TV and Tiger Beat magazines; she was catalyzed by The Cure, Doc Martens, and friends with black lips. Further from me but, still, I could sense what she was thinking. Usually. Even if we weren’t identical, we were still twins.
People watched her. She was beautiful, yes, but she was also intense and self-assured, her gaze solid and straight ahead. Always a few steps behind, I learned to expect people’s eyes on her, men, women, other girls hot with flames of envy. Sometimes they’d catch me catch them and they’d look away, embarrassed, or briefly glance back with curiosity, as though trying to figure out what genes she and I shared.
I was sixteen when their eyes shifted to me, and usually only when they thought I couldn’t see them. Months after it happened, I would walk by wearing headphones while they stood staring in their yards, leaning on their rakes, or they’d close their lockers as I passed and watch me as if I were a ghost floating down the hall.
That’s her.
I wasn’t floating, though. Each step felt like it was taken in knee-deep quicksand. I knew what they were thinking, what they were wondering.
What happens to. Now.
When we were in grade four, there was a quiet boy named Ramon whose twin sister had died at birth. We didn’t find that out until he’d been at our school for a number of months, and when I heard, everything about him changed. An absence settled all around him. I could see it echoing, undulating, encircling him like a moat as he sat at his desk by the windows, drawing spirals in his notebooks or turning to look outside at the maples over the teachers’ cars below. Mrs. Fitzpatrick would tell him to stop dreaming and pay attention and I wanted to tell her to shut her mouth. The legs of my chair screeched against the linoleum as I shifted closer to Sadie, who sat beside me then.
So, what happens to. Now.
Absence, yes. All around.
And.
The smell of lilacs on the breeze through the screen. Faraway rattling ramshackle aches, a barren plain once home to despair, tired heart pumping still. Some part of it indifferent enough to keep you alive despite. The deepest part, I think. A metal engine in a dark space far below the surface with pistons that pump and pump and nothing else.
They—someone—said to write. That it helps with. It’s been a long time, Rose.
But there is no straight line anymore. Fragments now. Pieces to pretend to fit together.
—
Lilacs, the smell on the breeze coming through my bedroom screen. Men at the door, voices low. A howl from my mother who’d only that day opened all the windows to let in the spring.
I didn’t go down, didn’t need to hear. Before there were words to describe it I had been cut.
They opened my door and saw me there.
A girl wrapped in a crunch of tinfoil.
THE CENTRE
I once told Colette to shoot me when it comes time to put me in a home.
“I know you don’t mean that, Mama,” she’d said, cutting the stems off strawberries at the sink. She smiled, easy, and hummed some tune I couldn’t place.
“I’m not fooling around,” I told her as I laced my white shoes at the front door. “Find a pistol, point it at my temple and pull the trigger.”
“Nice, Ma. Real nice image.” She rinsed the strawberries in a colander. I stood back up, knees cracking.
“Hear that? Getting old. Can’t have that much longer. Better yet, just sneak up behind me with the gun so I don’t see you coming.”
“You want any of these?” She turned, eyes wide and blue. The spit, right then, of her father. Funny, almost. You try and try to blank out the memory of the one you hate most in the world and bam! there he is, like a crack of lightning, in the face you love best of all. I turned away, pretended to rummage through my purse for my keys.
“Nah. I’ll grab Timmy’s on my way.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. Then, “Love you, Mama!” like she always called out when the screen door creaked shut behind me.
“Love you too,” I called back, wanting to sing it with the force of a gospel choir, wishing I could spread out around her like wings to carry her through the rest of her life, her feet never touching down on filthy ground again.
—
Framed pictures on the walls of lakes and trees and sunsets, puffy vinyl couches, magazines fanned out on coffee tables—Cottage Life, Chatelaine, Zoomer. Like the people sitting around are just waiting to get a tooth pulled. None of that is fooling anybody. You know by the smell when you step through that door that they might be waiting on something, but it ain’t the dentist.
I can tell you first hand, nothing makes that piss smell go away. Not even when we Pledge the tables and mop the floors with bleach. The odour hangs in the air day and night no matter what we do to keep the place clean. To keep the people clean. And this, one of the fancier homes in town. No way we could afford to live here even if we wanted to when the time comes. And I’d never let Colette put up all that cash for me neither, not when she could keep it for herself. Can’t say I notice the smell much after working here the better part of ten years, but you sure can see it in the faces of the people who come to check out the home for their parents. Men especially. I see them stride up the sunlit sidewalk, all hopeful and determined, coffee cup in hand from the Starbucks down the block. You can almost hear the thoughts running through their heads as they press the buzzer by the door and take in the exterior:
This is good. A good place. Nice stores to walk to in the neighbourhood, to get coffee with her new friends. And we’ll visit all the time, of course. It’ll be even better than her apartment/house/cottage with the willows by the lake.
But then Lyle buzzes them in and the doors swish open, and the men, the sons, they step inside and get a noseful before their vision can adjust to the light. That’s when you see their faces drop and their eyes flare. Guilt, sadness. That flicker of fear.
It’s not long before they catch a glimpse of the holy trinity—Lois, Henry and Mad Mary—all sitting in their wheelchairs facing the door like they do every day, waiting for someone to come take them home. Lois with her wispy hair set in curls, she does her royal wave, says, “Hello, dear, just looking for David. Was he out there parking the car?” Henry gives a stern nod like he means business, then sets his eyes back out the window, and Mad Mary, well, she can’t say much anymore. Just lets her head sag over her shoulder like it does, mouth not quite closed, bony arms crossed over her lap. Hard to imagine now the whip she was not long ago, yelling at us all to go to hell, throwing tea-time biscuits halfway across the dining room with the arm of a minor-leaguer.
Strange what you miss when it’s gone.
The look on those man-boy faces doesn’t ever last long, though. They’re barely inside half a minute before Agnes is strutting out of her office, hand extended for a hearty shake, smile sparkling as though they’ve just boarded her cruise ship. The men straighten up when they see her, shoulders back, strong again, some kind of pride or relief rearranging their faces as they reach out to shake her hand. Vitality in her grip, a wink in her eyes. She knows, she understands, her face tells them, and you can see the new thoughts churning in their minds
This is the only option
tightening the grip
Really, it’s the only thing we can do
of the wrench tugging at their guts.
It’ll be fine. Mom will be fine here. Happy, even.
And with a lift of her arm like goddamn Vanna White at the puzzle board, Agnes points the way to her office, and the two of them disappear to the pla
ce where voices are low, decisions are made, and names are signed in ink here, here and here.
I’ve seen it enough times to know that the womenkids, they’re different from the men. Almost like they know what to expect before the door opens. Like the smell of old-people piss is just one more thing to add to the long list of secretions they’ve had to deal with as mothers, as wives, as women. Peed on, puked on, shit on, bled on. I remember sucking phlegm out of Colette’s nose when she was just a baby and couldn’t breathe. Nothing more, nothing less than the way it is. Makes sense to me anyway, why the smell alone doesn’t make their faces fall.
I’m not saying it’s easier for the ladies. I see the way some of them hesitate before pressing the buzzer, the way they adjust their purses on their shoulders, smooth out their hair with their fingers. The way they look at their reflections in the glass door, hard and still, not knowing that we can see them from the other side. When the doors slide open, they take in the room with a long, slow sweep of their eyes, heads nodding as though running through some checklist as they clutch at their purse straps like lifelines. Some of the women smile at Lois when she asks if they saw David in the parking lot, some say they didn’t see him but they’re sure he’ll be there soon. They nod back at Henry and let their eyes linger on Mad Mary before their names ring out in the stale air, Agnes parading out toward them. They’re already straight and strong, the women, so not much changes when they shake hands with the manager; it’s only when they’re back in their cars, seat belts buckled, keys in the ignition, that they crumple a little bit and let their heads rest down on the steering wheel.
The Dead Husband Project Page 9