Mom sat down at the table across from me. “It’s Sam’s birthday. I think she probably misses you, sweetie.”
“Have you seen her lately? She’s kind of a weirdo.”
Mom didn’t seem that mad. “Sam’s always been a bit of an odd duck. It never bothered you before.”
I look over at Mom now, but she’s busy helping an old woman clean a spill in the kitchen. A couple of days ago, Mom tried to talk to me about her dead friend Debbie. She asked if I remembered the time at Mandarin Mansion when she couldn’t stop crying over her. I didn’t remember and had no idea what she was talking about, but her point was that it’s OK to feel strange at first about a tragedy. The sadness may just hit you later, it can happen anytime. The conversation made me feel worse. I don’t think I really have the right to cry over this. I wasn’t nice to Sam. Most of this year, I actually wanted to erase ever knowing her at all.
I step out the glass doors and onto the terrace. I don’t have my coat, but it’s been warm all day and it’s not yet dark. There’s one man left smoking at the patio table, so I take a few steps into the garden and pretend to be totally absorbed by Ruthie’s flowerbed: a mound of dirt with a few pale green leaves poking up like rabbit ears. I imagine for a second that Sam is buried under that curved mound, her pale skin dissolving from her bones. I try to kick the thought out of my mind.
I hear the man’s voice behind me. “Were you a friend of Samantha’s?”
I don’t know how to answer him. I make my head do a mix between a nod and a side-to-side head shake.
The guy flicks his ashes onto the flowerbed. “You two knew each other a long time?”
“Since we were babies, pretty much.”
“Ah. I’m sorry.”
“That’s OK.”
“It’s not OK.” He puts his hand on his chest. “Pinchus. Well, Mr. Leftin to her.”
So this is Lefty, Sam’s Hebrew school teacher. She had a crush on him, or at least she pretended to.
“You go to College Heights?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
Lefty has one of those smiles that turns down like a frown. He’s a little bit cute, probably less than thirty. “Good school.”
This was the first year that Sam and I were in the same school. We were supposed to go to middle school together, but her parents moved to Israel for the two years instead. I cried when I found out they were leaving. I had always pictured us making friends and getting boyfriends as a team together. Ruthie made macramé bracelets for Sam and me that said “Best Friends 4-Ever” in the weave.
Lefty crushes his cigarette into an ashtray on the patio table. “Nice that you’re here, kiddo.” He winks like we have a secret.
I have a secret about Lefty. The time Sam made us french kiss, I had to pretend to be him. I didn’t know what he was like, so I put on a fake deep voice: Hey, hey, hey! She said to take off my shirt but leave my jeans on, like those guys that jump out of cakes on birthday cards. I stood half-naked like that, getting cold while she put on eye shadow and stuffed her shirt with both sides of a pantyhose egg. The whole thing makes me feel kind of icky. It’s probably not the best memory to have at a funeral.
It was weird after the Grossmans left because I didn’t miss Sam at all once school started. It was sort of a relief, in a way, not to always have to call her back. Not to do what she said. By the end of eighth grade, before she came home, I was already getting nervous about mixing her in with Ash and my new friends once high school started. For one thing, Sam liked to tell really long stories. With Ash and them, you have to get your story out in one minute or less if you want anyone to keep listening. Also, if Sam ever suggested playing one of her messed-up games, like Jewish refugees or runaway teenage strippers, I would pretty much die. I wasn’t into that kind of stuff anymore; no one I know now was ever into that stuff.
I cross the yard and open the gate to the Grossmans’ pool, which is covered over for winter in a saggy black tarp. Old leaves and brown pine needles float in a puddle on top. My reflection on the surface is a faded moon, my hair slicing down at the water. It’s just April now, but it’s hard to believe the Grossmans will bother opening the pool this season. Sam and I were basically the only ones who ever used it. We dove for Smurfs, swam under each other’s legs, had tea parties, and screamed out bubbles. Sometimes we practised lifesaving: one of us the victim, the other the rescuer. We took turns flipping and dragging each other out of the pool, checking pulses, doing fake mouth-to-mouth on the deck. Sometimes Sam would pretend to be dead and just lie with her eyes open, all rigid and unmoving until I’d get mad and threaten to go home.
When the Grossmans got back from Israel in August, I came over with my bikini under my clothes. It was about a million degrees out, and Ash and Lacey were going to see Sister Act at the mall. I wanted to go with them, but Ruthie had already left two messages to say they were home and I could drop by anytime.
“You look the same,” Sam said when she answered the door. I had no idea what to say because she didn’t look the same at all. She was big. Tall and puffed up. Her hair was huge too, a little like a clown wig. She wore boys’ basketball shorts that fluttered down to new, hulking calves.
I followed her into the frigid air conditioning, into the familiar lime smell of the Grossmans’ clean house. She opened the storage cupboard and stabbed the plastic on a new tray of Cokes with her long dirty fingernails. “Have as many as you want,” she said, and took two warm cans up to her bedroom.
Sam’s room was in the middle of being painted. One wall had a new black coat, but you could still see the old pink underneath. She used to have a bunk bed — me on top, her on bottom — but it had been replaced by a futon with a dark red comforter. Her lace curtains were in a puddle on the floor, and posters of scary looking punk bands I had never heard of were on the wall. All of Sam’s stuffed animals were gone.
I tried asking questions. How was Israel? Hated it. How’s your mom? Fake. Want to swim? You can if you want to. Her face looked like it had been inflated with a bicycle pump. If she suggested one of her freaky games, I’d already decided to laugh like it was a joke. But she didn’t suggest anything. She just turned on Divorce Court.
When I left Sam’s house, I saw Ruthie on the driveway. Because of how fat and weird looking Sam got in Israel, it surprised me that Ruthie could look so totally the same: skinny and tanned. She was hauling big bags of lawn feed out of her trunk, and I helped her bring them around to the backyard. She told me she really liked my hair, but it wasn’t cut in any special way. She asked if I’d done my back-to-school shopping yet. I told her yes, all done, and I was grateful she didn’t offer the annual trip to Yorkdale Mall. She thanked me about ten thousand times for the help. I figured that Sam probably didn’t help with anything.
The whole week before school started, I was freaking out about Sam. I knew for sure that I couldn’t combine her with my new friends. The problem wasn’t just what Sam looked like now. She was a whole different person, almost like a dead person: a fat, black cloud. I wanted her to disappear. It took me a few days to figure out that I didn’t actually have to stay friends with her. Nobody could force us, and it wasn’t like she was phoning me.
Out on the Grossmans’ pool deck, the sun is slipping behind the backyard fence. It’s getting cold without the light. We’ve been at shiva for more than an hour, as long as Mom said we’d stay. Tomorrow’s a parent-teacher conference day at school, and tonight Ash is having a sleepover at her dad’s place downtown. If I get there too late, I’ll miss the Chinese food.
I pull my sweater down over my hands and walk around to the pool cabana. The door swings right open and I walk inside, breathing the old towel smell. The cabana was always a good place to hide out. Today it’s dark and creepy inside, but somehow that feels right.
Most of the interior space is taken up by pool equipment and Styrofoam float toys, but I find a spot on the bench across from an old poster Sam made: “Grossmans’ Pool: Don’t be Gross, man (that m
eans pee or spit).” Sam could be funny, I guess.
I check under the bench for her parents’ copy of the Joy of Sex. We used to hide it back here and flip through the pages to decide on the things we’d do with our boyfriends and the things we’d save just for husbands. It’s not there and I wonder how it got back inside. Did Ruthie bring it in? Did she know Sam was a perv? I stretch my legs out and lean my head against a flutter board. Sam and I camped out in here once at a sleepover until we got too cold and scared about murderers and had to move inside. We also tried tampons in here for the first time, stolen out of Ruthie’s medicine cabinet. I can picture Sam squatting down on the AstroTurf floor, her bathing suit stretched to the side. I don’t think she even had any pubic hair. I blink my eyes a few times, wanting to clear the picture. I should really try harder to think of nicer memories.
Through a moon-shaped cut-out on the cabana wall, I can see lights in the Grossmans’ windows. Their house always looked like this on shabbat: warm and yellowy, filled with people. I used to wish it were my house. For a moment, I try to imagine that it’s not Sam’s shiva, but a regular Friday in fifth grade. At the end of dinner, Sam and I would always wait for Ruthie to read our fortunes from the bottom of empty cups of cocoa. “I see your names in lights,” she’d say, tilting a cup forward and back. “I see a very special friendship.”
When we started high school last September, Sam didn’t cling or even try to talk to me. I could go a long time without thinking about her, but sometimes I felt her staring in the hall. Once after exams, before the Christmas holidays, she found me alone at the bus stop. Her big cheeks were all red from the cold. “I got you a present in Israel,” she said, digging out this mash of pink tissue paper from her backpack. “You probably don’t even want it, but my Mom said to give it to you.” I hoped no one was watching us. That was pretty much all I cared about. We sat next to each other on the bus, but I faked an orthodontist appointment and got off four stops early. At home I flushed the tissue paper without even looking inside. I felt guilty, but I thought it would be worse if I just left it hanging around in my room.
Sam’s second floor window is the only one in the house that isn’t lit. I try to imagine her bedroom window the way it used to be: her lace curtains, the god’s eye we made with yarn and popsicle sticks, her collection of crystal animals that lined the ledge and sparkled when the sun came through. Everything is gone, I tell myself. It’s so sad. But I’m not even close to crying.
There’s a clackety-clack of heels on the terrace outside and then Mom’s voice. “I saw her come out.”
“Who?” It sounds like Lefty. He must be smoking non-stop.
“My daughter. She didn’t have her coat. She’s an old friend of Sam’s.”
I can’t hear what they say next, it’s too muffled. Then Lefty says, “If she’s not back . . . ”
“Just send her in if you see her.”
The pool gate whines open and I hear Mom’s shoes circling the deck. I wonder if she’s remembering the hottest day of sixth grade when she came over to swim laps while Sam and I did handstands in the shallow end. Ruthie sat in a lawn chair wearing a yellow floppy hat. She said to Mom, “I’d kill for your shoulders.” I thought, Kill who? But I was proud that Mom was good at something and everyone could see it. It felt sometimes like Ruthie wanted me to wish that she were my mom instead.
The pool gate slams shut again, and I’m glad Mom didn’t find me. I don’t want to go back in. Ruthie’s rib-crushing hugs, her calling me a sweet girl, it’s too much. The best plan is to sneak out along the side of the house and meet Mom at the car. I get on my knees to watch through the moon shape as Mom crosses the yard and back to the living room. What would she do if I died of meningitis? If I were the freak accident? Would she be nice to Sam at my funeral? She’s probably the only one who would be.
The tears that come out next don’t feel like normal tears. They’re hard and hot like the last drops out of a dishrag after twisting and squeezing. But it’s not Sam I’m crying for. I bet Ruthie didn’t like what Sam did to her room or her hair this year, either. Maybe she called Mom about the birthday party because she knew Sam wouldn’t call me. Sam and I were ready to stop being friends; Ruthie just wasn’t. In a few years, I’m sure she would have gotten used to me being out of the picture. Probably Sam would have switched schools, found lots of new friends that were weird and pervy like her, and Ruthie would have figured out the truth and moved on. But that hadn’t happened yet. It doesn’t get to happen now. What did happen, for sure, is that Sam and I were best friends once. There’s more than one truth, and Ruthie should get to remember whatever part she wants.
Lefty’s by the pool gate now, and he smiles as I come out of the cabana, leaning back with his hands in his pockets. My own hands are shaky.
“See you around,” he says. But he won’t, so I don’t say anything back. People like us have no reason to come together again.
I pass the pool and brush the cabana dust off the back of my pants, getting ready to head inside and say goodbye to Ruthie.
The Favour
Fall, 1993
Lorna peered through the gap in her office door. Edwina Needham looked nothing like her father. Too tentative, too pink-faced. Ian had poise; Ian had melanin.
Sitting in reception, Edwina’s gaze was planted on the restrooms across the lobby. Her shoulders were forward, her purse hung, unzipped, from her wrist. The jean skirt was the strangest part by far. Edwina looked like she was waiting for a bus, not a job interview.
Not that this was an interview in any true sense. Marcus wanted to give the girl a starter job, a favour to her mother, and of course it fell to Lorna to set everything up. Lorna was nervous, though she told herself not to be. Edwina was just a girl, a little older than Cara, who’d had tough luck. Lorna checked her breath before leaving her office and wiped her palms down the length of her skirt.
Edwina’s head turned instantly when Lorna entered the lobby. She didn’t stand the way most applicants did; she just stared up.
Lorna smiled and strode toward her, hand outstretched. “I’m Lorna Kedzie. Do I call you Edwina, or . . . ?” Edie was the name she’d heard Ian use, the name etched in plaster on the tiny “Happy Father’s Day” footprint that hung on his office wall, but she didn’t say it.
“Ed-wee-na,” the young woman said, standing slowly. “You say it like wean a baby, not win a prize.” Her handshake was moist. Her blouse stretched and gaped at the breasts, and Lorna could see the ridge of a beige bra and a V of patchy, pink skin. Lorna had calculated Edwina’s age at roughly twenty-three, but she looked younger. Her makeup was ill chosen and ineptly applied: the work of a girl in a rush or without much space or light. The sort of over-pencilled eyebrows and peach-tinted pimples you’d expect to see emerge from a bus station bathroom.
“Well, it’s a pleasure.” Lorna renewed her smile and led Edwina across the lobby and into her office. She gestured at the seat across from her desk.
Edwina put her bag down and sat carefully in the leather chair, smoothing her jean skirt underneath her. She wiped a hand under her nose; it was not a straight nose like Ian’s, but slightly warped at the tip. Perhaps a sports injury? Lorna scanned the resumé on her desk. There were no extracurricular activities of note, although surely Edwina had grown up with summer camps, ski trips, riding lessons. Lorna really knew very little about Ian’s only child. In general, she’d appreciated how infrequently Ian talked about his family because she couldn’t stand bragging fathers, especially the ones who, like Ian, spent so little time at home. Once, Lorna remembered, Ian had described Edwina as “rudderless,” but his tone was not unkind, as though rudderlessness was part of the romance of being a university student. To be honest, the description reassured Lorna. She wondered if Cara might share that same adrift quality, and if it was fine enough for Ian’s daughter, maybe Cara wasn’t doomed after all. Although, according to Edwina’s resumé, she never graduated from university.
“I want
you to know how very sorry I am for your loss, Edwina,” Lorna said, after they’d both settled into their spots. “Your father and I worked together a long time.”
“I know,” Edwina said. Lorna nodded, hoping it might encourage Edwina to say more about what she knew. Had Ian talked about his colleagues at home? She was quite sure her own children wouldn’t be able to name a single one of the people she worked with.
“We were good friends,” Lorna said.
Edwina looked out into the hallway. “His office had a view of the lake,” she said. “It was nicer than this one. I used to come in with him sometimes when I was little, before you worked here. We could see sailboats as far as . . . I don’t know. Far.”
Lorna nodded. Ian’s office was still empty
“Is this his desk you’re sitting at?” The young woman’s face flushed hard pink as she turned back to Lorna.
“Oh.” Lorna put a protective hand on the polished teak surface. She tried and failed to catch Edwina’s eye. “It used to be, yes. It’s a beautiful piece, isn’t it? I always admired it.” He would have wanted me to have it was what Lorna didn’t say, though she felt accused. She’d also taken his Montblanc pen and his crystal shot glass of mint toothpicks.
Edwina wiped her palm across the desktop, leaving a quickly vanishing smear of moisture. The edges of her fingertips were raw and peeled looking. “So weren’t you, like, his secretary?”
“I’m a researcher,” Lorna said. “And I manage all our client relations.”
“My Dad said client service is like being a hooker. The people who hire you know you’re involved with other clients, but they don’t want any evidence.”
“I’ve heard him say that as well.”
“So you took care of that part?”
“What part?”
“I don’t know. Keeping everything separate.”
Lorna offered a third smile, not sure how else to respond. “Sounds like your Dad taught you a thing or two about the biz.”
Catch My Drift Page 18