Originally written for a Story Club challenge, in which my colleagues and I set ourselves the task of trying to write like one another. This was written in the persona of our enigmatic and marvellous sports editor - a poor imitation, but a fun attempt. This is a version I later revised to enter in a flash fiction contest.
*
One night and the world’s your oyster.
That’s what the guys used to say about this city, on those nights of beer-soaked camaraderie that seem so long ago.
They always said they’d come here one day.
Bangkok.
The name spoke of tantalizing mysteries – exotic women clad in silk, offering forbidden fruits to those who dared to reach for them.
He knows better now.
An oyster? Perhaps. Crushed by a heavy-footed traveller, shell shattered like jagged shards of glass.
There is no pearl here.
Only laughter in the darkness.
And rain.
*
Rain.
He feels it run down his face.
Its warm fingers caress his head and embrace the wiry bristles that are beginning to emerge from the once-smooth skull. Its silver touch slides down his unwashed neck, clings to the faded denim jacket, lends a new lustre to the scuffed shoes.
The shoes.
Florsheims. He bought them to celebrate his first paycheque. He loved to look down and see their dark solidity as he strode down Bay Street to the firm.
He was someone then.
He knew his mind. He owned his heart.
And then she came.
Silver laughter and a teasing smile. A body of curves and sensuous wonder. Hair of molten copper and skin of silk and flame.
She reached out for his heart.
And delicately pried it from his chest with slim fingers extended in a caress.
Even as the thought comes, he wants to laugh. To stave off the inevitable melodramatic metaphor. But the image comes in spite of him.
Her fingers became serpents, sharp fangs digging deep under his skin, pouring their lethal venom into his veins. Intoxicating, poisoning, lulling into the sleep of the damned.
All he knew was her.
And her laughter.
*
Laughter.
The silver sound that carried the poison to his heart.
Love?
He says the word and she repeats it, her light tone airy with disbelief.
Lust maybe, that light voice scoffs, but never love.
Her laughter ripples over him.
And he runs.
*
Runs.
He knows he acts deliberately. Calmly. Secures a leave of absence. Buys a ticket. Catches a flight.
But in his soul, he runs. Stumbling blindly in the night. Fleeing unseen pursuers, heedless of direction or course or destination.
He falls. Gets up. And runs again.
Solace. He yearns for it. Seeks it half a world away, in the oppressive jungle heat that smothers all thought, deadens all emotion.
In the wat where soothing voices chant the refrain of the seeker in pursuit of noble truths, where saffron-coloured robes hide scars from the world’s sight.
They reach for him and he reaches back, a drowning man clinging desperately to a piece of flotsam.
Their shelter is inviting. A fortress against cruelty. A blanket against the cold of night. A rock gently placed to balance a world tilting off-kilter.
But it finds him there.
The laughter. The gilded gates can’t keep it out. The saffron robes are no armour against it.
He leaves their shelter.
He hears their pleas but cannot remain. The fortress is impenetrable no longer, more prison than shelter now.
The gates close behind him, their clang scarcely audible to the world outside.
He is gone. Running.
He is seeking his oyster; a pearl diver in denim jacket and scuffed shoes.
He hears the city’s alluring call.
The promise of Patpong. Of pleasure. Of passion. Of release from pain.
*
Pain.
He feels little of it now. Is it numbness or healing, he wonders as he sits on the curb.
He watches the flickering neon signs made hazy by the rain. The shadowed shapes on the street. The jet-black cascades of hair, the slim hips swaying as, one by one, sellers and buyers seal their bargains and make their way into the night.
The night beckons, its arms reaching out to envelop him in a lover’s embrace, the dark a seductress whispering his name.
But, like a woman, it is all tempting surface and empty soul. Like a woman, Patpong makes promises it cannot keep.
It offers no comfort. No respite. No hope.
Only an interlude of forgetfulness, a blurring of memory, an anesthetic to dull the pain.
So he sits.
He watches the flickering lights.
He feels the rain as it journeys into the very marrow of his bones, into the arteries that travel to his heart.
The night calls to him.
But he will not answer her siren song.
And he will not run.
Not tonight.
He sits.
Friday, January 30, 2009
When Frankie Came
This one was born out of a writing forum – a half-hour write based on something about the "ogbanje" (you'll have to Google it if you really want to know!).
I then developed it into a piece to enter into a flash-fiction contest.
*
Mumma said Frankie was an angel, but I knew she was wrong.
He didn’t have golden curls and he didn’t have any wings.
He looked like a baby, but sort of wobbly and covered in slimy goo.
At least, it looked slimy.
I never touched him. I couldn’t bear to think what it would feel like. Jello, maybe, or marshmallows with something sticky poured overtop of them.
He came to me at 1:07 in the morning.
I know because I looked at the clock when I heard my name.
“Maggie, Maggie.”
This was not a normal thing to hear at 1:07 in the morning, but I wasn’t scared. Mr. Bear was right beside me, and Mr. Bear made night better.
Even the really bad nights, like the one when Pete went away. It was the night Mumma started out all giggly and happy, when her and Pete sent me to my room so they could talk. I knew what that meant, and there wasn’t much talking about it. There never was on those nights.
Usually I just heard the bed squeak, and sometimes the trailer wall rattled. There was no squeaking that time, though. I listened, but all I could hear was Mumma’s voice, that voice she sometimes used when I thought she was gonna cry but didn’t.
And Pete, he yelled a lot. The whole trailer shook when he stomped off.
Mumma started to get fat after that. I thought she’d hate it. She used to like it when Pete put his hands around her waist and told her she was tiny as a girl.
But she didn’t hate her belly at all.
Once she told me about Frankie — we picked the name together, me and Mumma — we’d sing to him and read him stories and sometimes even pet him. I liked it when he kicked, the way it made Mumma jump a little bit and giggle.
We got Frankie his own bed, a white basket with a blue ribbon, and we put it at the end of my bed. I decided, when he came home with Mumma from the hospital, I’d put Mr. Bear in the basket with him.
Only it didn’t happen.
Mumma came home by herself, with her belly smaller and her eyes very sad. I heard her telling Gramma talking about a cord and choking and doctors.
To me, she just said Frankie was an angel.
I knew she was wrong that night I heard him whisper.
“Maggie, Maggie.”
I wondered for a second if Mr. Bear had spoken, but I knew that was stupid. I
turned on my ballerina lamp to see.
There he was. Wobbly, slimy baby Frankie, sitting on the floor beside my bed.
“Frankie?” I said.
Even though I knew it was.
He sort of nodded.
“Why’d you give away my bed, Maggie? I wanted to sleep here.”
I didn’t tell him how the bed had made Mumma cry.
“You died.”
I thought I’d better tell him that, in case he didn’t know yet.
He nodded again.
“But I want to sleep here, Maggie. I want to be with my family.”
I didn’t know much about death and heaven and stuff. I didn’t go to church or Sunday school or anything. But I was pretty sure this was a bit strange.
“Why?”
Frankie moved across the floor, a little closer to me. He didn’t walk or crawl. It was more like floating.
“You’re my sister, Maggie,” he said. “Don’t you want me here?”
His voice was shaky, and I felt pretty bad for making a dead baby sad.
“Of course I do, Frankie.”
I wasn’t sure if that was true, but I didn’t want him to cry.
He seemed happier, but he kept staring like he was waiting for me to do something.
Then it struck me.
“I know!”
Frankie just waited.
“I could make you a new bed.”
I got out of bed and took my socks out of the bottom drawer and shoved them into the top one with my underwear.
Then I folded up my fuzzy blue blanket and tucked it into the drawer with Mr. Bear.
“There,” I told Frankie. “You can sleep there.”
He looked at me, and I think he wanted me to pick him up.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t touch him.
When I got back into bed, Frankie got into the drawer himself, in that floating kind of way.
Then he went to sleep.
He was gone in the morning.
He never came back.
I didn’t tell Mumma he’d been there.
When she asked me how I’d gotten my blue blanket all sticky, I didn’t say.
And I didn’t tell her that angels snore.
I then developed it into a piece to enter into a flash-fiction contest.
*
Mumma said Frankie was an angel, but I knew she was wrong.
He didn’t have golden curls and he didn’t have any wings.
He looked like a baby, but sort of wobbly and covered in slimy goo.
At least, it looked slimy.
I never touched him. I couldn’t bear to think what it would feel like. Jello, maybe, or marshmallows with something sticky poured overtop of them.
He came to me at 1:07 in the morning.
I know because I looked at the clock when I heard my name.
“Maggie, Maggie.”
This was not a normal thing to hear at 1:07 in the morning, but I wasn’t scared. Mr. Bear was right beside me, and Mr. Bear made night better.
Even the really bad nights, like the one when Pete went away. It was the night Mumma started out all giggly and happy, when her and Pete sent me to my room so they could talk. I knew what that meant, and there wasn’t much talking about it. There never was on those nights.
Usually I just heard the bed squeak, and sometimes the trailer wall rattled. There was no squeaking that time, though. I listened, but all I could hear was Mumma’s voice, that voice she sometimes used when I thought she was gonna cry but didn’t.
And Pete, he yelled a lot. The whole trailer shook when he stomped off.
Mumma started to get fat after that. I thought she’d hate it. She used to like it when Pete put his hands around her waist and told her she was tiny as a girl.
But she didn’t hate her belly at all.
Once she told me about Frankie — we picked the name together, me and Mumma — we’d sing to him and read him stories and sometimes even pet him. I liked it when he kicked, the way it made Mumma jump a little bit and giggle.
We got Frankie his own bed, a white basket with a blue ribbon, and we put it at the end of my bed. I decided, when he came home with Mumma from the hospital, I’d put Mr. Bear in the basket with him.
Only it didn’t happen.
Mumma came home by herself, with her belly smaller and her eyes very sad. I heard her telling Gramma talking about a cord and choking and doctors.
To me, she just said Frankie was an angel.
I knew she was wrong that night I heard him whisper.
“Maggie, Maggie.”
I wondered for a second if Mr. Bear had spoken, but I knew that was stupid. I
turned on my ballerina lamp to see.
There he was. Wobbly, slimy baby Frankie, sitting on the floor beside my bed.
“Frankie?” I said.
Even though I knew it was.
He sort of nodded.
“Why’d you give away my bed, Maggie? I wanted to sleep here.”
I didn’t tell him how the bed had made Mumma cry.
“You died.”
I thought I’d better tell him that, in case he didn’t know yet.
He nodded again.
“But I want to sleep here, Maggie. I want to be with my family.”
I didn’t know much about death and heaven and stuff. I didn’t go to church or Sunday school or anything. But I was pretty sure this was a bit strange.
“Why?”
Frankie moved across the floor, a little closer to me. He didn’t walk or crawl. It was more like floating.
“You’re my sister, Maggie,” he said. “Don’t you want me here?”
His voice was shaky, and I felt pretty bad for making a dead baby sad.
“Of course I do, Frankie.”
I wasn’t sure if that was true, but I didn’t want him to cry.
He seemed happier, but he kept staring like he was waiting for me to do something.
Then it struck me.
“I know!”
Frankie just waited.
“I could make you a new bed.”
I got out of bed and took my socks out of the bottom drawer and shoved them into the top one with my underwear.
Then I folded up my fuzzy blue blanket and tucked it into the drawer with Mr. Bear.
“There,” I told Frankie. “You can sleep there.”
He looked at me, and I think he wanted me to pick him up.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t touch him.
When I got back into bed, Frankie got into the drawer himself, in that floating kind of way.
Then he went to sleep.
He was gone in the morning.
He never came back.
I didn’t tell Mumma he’d been there.
When she asked me how I’d gotten my blue blanket all sticky, I didn’t say.
And I didn’t tell her that angels snore.
Into Bed
She shimmers there, it seems to him – fanciful suddenly, as he only allows himself to be in thought, and only between two and three in the morning.
The capable, confident self he projects to the partners over lunch and the guys at O’Toole’s on Thursdays would never use a word like shimmers.
Or ethereal.
He thinks that, too, as she slips out of her black cocktail dress and stockings.
She’s ethereal in the pale moonlight that streams into the room, bathing the almost-white walls in a softer light.
They’ve never gotten around to painting.
They’ve never replaced the curtains, either, though the bland non-colour seems to cry out for splashes of paint. Or dirt. Or something.
He leaves them open most of the time. It’s not like there’s any light to bother them here, so far above False Creek.
Anyway, it’s practical to let in the moonlight, so she doesn’t have to find her way in the dark when she comes home late.
She doesn’t like to wake him with the light, she says.
She’s considerate. He appreciates that.
Though she never used to mind if she woke him.
She used to revel in it, startling him awake with the blinding flash of the bedside lamp, laughingly throwing a pillow over his head when he complained.
She’d toss her clothes in a heap on the floor and dive naked under the covers, crawling across him to her own side of the bed. Knowing he’d emerge from under the pillow to grab her. Knowing she’d grab him back and laugh.
Her laughter always sounded silver to him. Like the moonlight, he thinks now, but trimmed in warmth. Silver with purple edges.
She doesn’t laugh like that anymore.
He thinks this as she hangs the dress neatly and crumples the stockings into the wicker hamper.
When she laughs now, it’s crystal. Clear. Tinkly. Breakable.
He misses the other laugh.
That’s why he loves to watch her like this, light brown hair gleaming silver in the moonlight, pale skin almost translucent as she reaches for the old T-shirt she always sleeps in.
At moments like this, he can almost believe they’ll find it again.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t stir as she climbs into their bed, careful not to touch him as she slides under the white duvet and turns onto her side facing the wall.
He won’t reach out for her.
He could. His hands would find the softness of her breasts, the curve of her lower back, the hollow at the base of her throat that he’s traced so often with his fingertips, with his tongue.
She wouldn’t push him away. She’d respond with passion. Even abandon.
But tonight he can’t bear the thought of rote passion without warmth. Without the silver-purple laughter he loves. Wants. Needs.
It’s over.
The thought arrives, unbidden and unannounced, and it startles him that he’s allowed it to enter the closely guarded fortress that is his mind. He hasn’t pushed it away as he usually does, smothering it in excuses of busy lives, looming deadlines, too much stress.
It’s over.
He says it – nearly out loud, but not quite. He forms the words with his mouth, feeling the crisp meeting of tongue and teeth, the rounding of mouth, the soft fall of lips, the rise and fall of three gentle syllables that spell his life.
He’s known it, he sees with the clarity of the hour, much longer than he’s ever acknowledged. He should have seen it sooner. He should have wondered when they never said forever. Never we. Never us.
Always I. She. Me. Her.
He rolls over to face her but can see only the slim back in its cotton T-shirt.
He lifts his hand, reaches out to touch her. Thinks: I could tell her now. I could say it. I could leave.
He feels momentarily free. Weightless. But he knows it’s a false feeling. He knows he won’t. He lacks the courage. The will. When his two-to-three-o’clock self is asleep again, when harsh glare of sunlight replaces the moon’s silver sheen, he won’t speak.
He knows this.
They will drift, he thinks, on a sea of what used to be and what could have been.
He sees them, in fleeting fancy, floating on the grey water in two small oarless boats, heading endlessly towards an indistinguishable horizon.
It isn’t the silver-purple future he used to dream of.
But at least it’s something.
If he speaks, it’s nothing. A yawning emptiness and a single boat to nowhere.
He will not speak. He flips over, away from the cotton T-shirt, absorbing the glowing red numbers of the clock face.
So this is how it ends, he thinks.
Love.
Time of death. Two-forty-seven a.m.
The capable, confident self he projects to the partners over lunch and the guys at O’Toole’s on Thursdays would never use a word like shimmers.
Or ethereal.
He thinks that, too, as she slips out of her black cocktail dress and stockings.
She’s ethereal in the pale moonlight that streams into the room, bathing the almost-white walls in a softer light.
They’ve never gotten around to painting.
They’ve never replaced the curtains, either, though the bland non-colour seems to cry out for splashes of paint. Or dirt. Or something.
He leaves them open most of the time. It’s not like there’s any light to bother them here, so far above False Creek.
Anyway, it’s practical to let in the moonlight, so she doesn’t have to find her way in the dark when she comes home late.
She doesn’t like to wake him with the light, she says.
She’s considerate. He appreciates that.
Though she never used to mind if she woke him.
She used to revel in it, startling him awake with the blinding flash of the bedside lamp, laughingly throwing a pillow over his head when he complained.
She’d toss her clothes in a heap on the floor and dive naked under the covers, crawling across him to her own side of the bed. Knowing he’d emerge from under the pillow to grab her. Knowing she’d grab him back and laugh.
Her laughter always sounded silver to him. Like the moonlight, he thinks now, but trimmed in warmth. Silver with purple edges.
She doesn’t laugh like that anymore.
He thinks this as she hangs the dress neatly and crumples the stockings into the wicker hamper.
When she laughs now, it’s crystal. Clear. Tinkly. Breakable.
He misses the other laugh.
That’s why he loves to watch her like this, light brown hair gleaming silver in the moonlight, pale skin almost translucent as she reaches for the old T-shirt she always sleeps in.
At moments like this, he can almost believe they’ll find it again.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t stir as she climbs into their bed, careful not to touch him as she slides under the white duvet and turns onto her side facing the wall.
He won’t reach out for her.
He could. His hands would find the softness of her breasts, the curve of her lower back, the hollow at the base of her throat that he’s traced so often with his fingertips, with his tongue.
She wouldn’t push him away. She’d respond with passion. Even abandon.
But tonight he can’t bear the thought of rote passion without warmth. Without the silver-purple laughter he loves. Wants. Needs.
It’s over.
The thought arrives, unbidden and unannounced, and it startles him that he’s allowed it to enter the closely guarded fortress that is his mind. He hasn’t pushed it away as he usually does, smothering it in excuses of busy lives, looming deadlines, too much stress.
It’s over.
He says it – nearly out loud, but not quite. He forms the words with his mouth, feeling the crisp meeting of tongue and teeth, the rounding of mouth, the soft fall of lips, the rise and fall of three gentle syllables that spell his life.
He’s known it, he sees with the clarity of the hour, much longer than he’s ever acknowledged. He should have seen it sooner. He should have wondered when they never said forever. Never we. Never us.
Always I. She. Me. Her.
He rolls over to face her but can see only the slim back in its cotton T-shirt.
He lifts his hand, reaches out to touch her. Thinks: I could tell her now. I could say it. I could leave.
He feels momentarily free. Weightless. But he knows it’s a false feeling. He knows he won’t. He lacks the courage. The will. When his two-to-three-o’clock self is asleep again, when harsh glare of sunlight replaces the moon’s silver sheen, he won’t speak.
He knows this.
They will drift, he thinks, on a sea of what used to be and what could have been.
He sees them, in fleeting fancy, floating on the grey water in two small oarless boats, heading endlessly towards an indistinguishable horizon.
It isn’t the silver-purple future he used to dream of.
But at least it’s something.
If he speaks, it’s nothing. A yawning emptiness and a single boat to nowhere.
He will not speak. He flips over, away from the cotton T-shirt, absorbing the glowing red numbers of the clock face.
So this is how it ends, he thinks.
Love.
Time of death. Two-forty-seven a.m.
On Death and Jian Ghomeshi
The story below doesn't really have a title yet, so I'm open to suggestions.
It, too, came out of a story club assignment a long while ago. Which helps to explain some of the slightly odd vocabulary (gadroon, for one, and injera). It's been revised slightly since, but it remains one of my favourites!
*
Heaven sucks.
This isn’t an appropriate thought for a good Catholic girl, I know.
Fuck it.
“HEAVEN SUCKS!”
My bellow would make Pavarotti proud, and “ux ux ux” rings off the peaks around me.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
I’m Ace.
Not really, but it’s better than Alice Catherine Elizabeth – the moniker I got saddled with courtesy of two grandmothers and a great-aunt who was supposed to leave me her fortune.
Except I kind of pre-empted her on the whole dying thing.
Which is funny, considering she’s a miserable eighty-seven-year-old who should have choked to death on her own bile years ago, and I’m a fit twenty-four-year-old with no health problems whatsoever. Except the random bruises, skull fracture and assorted internal injuries suffered when I took a header off a slippery log while crossing a creek during a romantic hike to Kokanee Glacier.
In seventeen more minutes, Cameron was going to propose.
I didn’t know that then. I know now, though. Now that I’m dead, I know everything.
Which isn’t as useful as you might think.
Does it help me to know that Derek Goldman had a crush on me in Grade 9? Or that Emily has lustful thoughts about Gabriel Martinez (so lustful, in fact, that I have to tune out – there’s some things you don’t need to know about your baby sister).
It’s shitty to know this stuff and not be able to tell anyone.
Have I mentioned heaven sucks?
For one thing, it looks like Kokanee Glacier Park. The only thing that’s different is the signpost at the top of the first hill that used to read ‘Cabin 6 km.’ Now it just says ‘Heaven,’ with an arrow.
The ‘To parking lot’ sign that pointed downhill is gone.
I tried walking downhill when I first arrived. I kept walking and walking and walking till I got bored – I have no idea if it was nine hours or nine days, since heaven appears to be stuck at three in the afternoon. When I stopped walking, I was still at the edge of the lake.
Cute trick, God.
Ever since I turned and started walking the other way, following the arrow to heaven like an obedient schoolgirl, it’s been boring as hell. (Pardon the expression.)
I haven’t been tired, mind you. All that walking – apparently, heaven doesn’t have mountain bikes – and no burning quads. No aching back. No blistered toes. I’d feel envigorated, actually, if only Cameron were here. Or Emily. Or Mom. Or anybody.
I’ve lost all track of time. I’ve passed the sapphire lake and the wildflower meadow and the flat rock where we always stop for lunch.
Lunch.
Even as the thought occurs to me, it appears: a plate bearing flat brown bread. It’s a nice plate, too, like Granny’s wedding china, rose-patterned with gadroon edging. (I was getting that china, by the way, when I married Cameron.)
Not that I dwell long on the plate. I’m more drawn to the brown hand that holds it and the person attached to the hand. A twentysomething male person of the lean-but-muscular variety, in jeans and black T-shirt, with a mane of black curls falling into his eyes.
A familiar person, at that.
I blink.
I didn’t expect to run into Jian Ghomeshi. Especially since, as far as I know, he’s very much alive and – if it’s still 1994 – touring with Moxy Früvous.
I don’t try to figure it out. Who am I to mess with some divine plan? I just reach for the bread.
Is this what manna looks like?
I don’t ask aloud, but Jian chuckles anyway.
“No, not manna. It’s injera.” He tears off a chunk and pops it into his mouth. “But it takes like anything you want.”
Apparently, I want jalapeño poppers, since that’s what the first bite tastes like. Then it’s Aunt Elizabeth’s Branston pickle. Then, weirdly, smarties.
Cheap tricks, God. Aren’t you above these Willy Wonka stunts?
Jian laughs again.
“We have to do something to get your attention.”
His chocolate eyes dance merrily, and I’ve gotta admit I’m hooked. Whatever mysterious plan God has devised, he could’ve done worse than to send Jian.
Who, naturally, laughs again. (This mind-reading is starting to get annoying.)
“I’m not Jian, by the way.” His polite, resigned tone suggests he’s explained this one before. “Like this place” – he gestures sweepingly around the mountain peaks – “I merely take the form of someone the new arrival can relate to.”
He grins.
“Yesterday I had to look like Don Cherry, and that’s not easy to pull off. Those ties, you know.”
I nod rather stupidly. There doesn’t seem to be any way to respond to that.
And it begs the question of who, exactly, this guy is.
“You’d probably know me best as Peter.”
I sense I’m being mocked.
“As in, Saint Peter? Guardian of the pearly gates?”
I refrain from pointing out there’s not a gate or a pearl in sight.
He chuckles.
“A gate is merely a physical representation of a metaphysical concept. But it’s a nice image, don’t you think?”
And, ta-da, there they are, as shiny and sparklingly pearly a pair of gates as ever graced the pages of a catechism book, with cherubs pirouetting and jetéing around them. At least, I assume they’re cherubs. They look like those creepy, chubby little dolls that Aunt Elizabeth bought for me and Emily one Christmas. Just add fluffy wings and snowy white dresses.
So this is heaven. Cheap tricks and stupid jokes. Nice job, God.
This time, Jian doesn’t laugh. He draws his brows together in a frown that makes me quake a little. I’m not sure what happens if you piss off Saint Peter – or someone claiming to be a rather sexy rock’n’roll version of him – but it’s probably not a good thing.
Would it help to recite the Act of Contrition?
I can tell by the quirk of his mouth that Jian is amused.
“Words are just words, Alice. It’s not about what you say, it’s about what you feel.”
What I feel, actually, is pissed off.
I don’t bother to wonder if Jian knows that. He knows I think God was cruel to let me slip and to let Cameron be just out of reach and to let that rock be there and to let my head strike it and my body get sucked up in the current and float away like flotsam and to let that sadly, hauntingly, desperately beautiful sapphire ring sit buried at the back of Cameron’s sock drawer.
I’m twenty-four, for Christ’s sake. What did I ever do to you?
More to the point, you fucking asshole, you with your signposts and gatekeepers and stupid cheap tricks, what did Cameron ever do to you?
A warm hand touches my arm, so softly I sense more than feel it.
“You can’t hold onto this anger, Alice. Let it go.”
Let him go.
The words hang there, unspoken, and I shake my head. I can’t let Cameron go. Not yet. Not when we’d barely begun.
“Watch.”
Jian’s voice is gentle, but something in it commands me to look up.
A large silvery screen has appeared in front of the gates, and the words ‘Cameron Anthony McCormack’ scroll across it, flashing on scenes of a baby in his mother’s arms.
So now he’s Frank Freakin’ Capra. God couldn’t think of anything more original than this?
Jian turns his chocolate stare on me again.
“God sends messages in the form in which you are ready to receive them.”
So all I’m ready for is some schlocky Hollywood takeoff? Gee, thanks God.
Jian’s eyes search my face. He says nothing, but suddenly it’s not a movie anymore. I’m not watching Cameron from the safe distance of that floating silver screen. I am him.
I’m wet and bewildered and cross as I’m dragged out of the warmth and softness of my mother into the harsh fluorescent light of the hospital room.
I’m soothed in the safety of my mother’s arms.
I’m scared when I start school. I wonder if I’ll pee my pants and if the other kids will laugh at me.
I’m nervous when I pick up Andrea Miller for the Grade 11 formal. I’m sweating profusely in the car afterwards when I realize she isn’t going to stop me from unzipping her blue taffeta dress.
I spiral on, through jobs and exams and friends and parties, till suddenly, there I am.
Foolishly, helplessly, unabashedly staring at a girl across from me in Statistics 331.
A small girl with straight red hair whose nose is a bit crooked, whose smile is lopsided, whose ears stick out and who seems to me just then to be the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on.
“Hi.” She grins. “I’m Alice. My friends call me Ace.”
And then it’s all about her.
Ace with her head cocked to one side, listening intently in class. Ace watching TV on my couch. Ace naked under my old blue comforter. Ace giggling as I run my fingers gently up her spine. Ace laughing as she runs ahead on the trail.
Ace falling.
I see nothing more.
I only feel.
Pain. Searing. Wrenching. Gut-tearing. A cold hard band tightens mercilessly around my ribcage.
I can’t breathe.
I try to scream. To cry. To say I’ve had enough.
I make no sound, but here I am.
Ace again. Beside Jian on the hillside.
“What the hell was that?” I spit the words at him.
His voice is gentle.
“Not many can bear the pain of a broken heart.”
Jian reaches out again with that fleeting touch.
“It’s up to you, Alice. You can see him again.”
Hope floods into me – only to be dashed when I see the look in those deep eyes.
“There’s a part of him that wants to be here. With you. Say the word, Alice, and he can come. You can wait for him here.”
I know there’s a gigantic “but” coming.
“But.” Jian smiles slightly. Mirthlessly. “He’d have to leave this behind.”
And in a whirl of silver and sound and sense I’m him again.
Smiling at a short, brown-haired woman whose frizzy curls bounce as she runs along the beach.
Laughing at the whistle and squeak of the warm golden sand beneath our feet.
Curling up with her in the hammock at our beachside hut.
Reaching out for her. Feeling her warmth as she slides closer to me.
Whoa whoa whoa.
I’m not Cameron now. I’m Ace on the hillside and I’m more than a little pissed off. Even God can’t expect me to sit through this. And what the bloody hell is Cameron doing? I’ve only been dead – well, come to think of it, I don’t know how long.
Jian touches me gently on the cheek with one finger.
“Six months.”
He touches my other cheek.
“It isn’t happening yet, Alice. He hasn’t even met her. He doesn’t ever have to.”
He can come to me instead.
The thought is there before I can stop it.
Jian nods, slowly.
“He can if you truly want him to.”
I look away from Jian.
Without his guidance, I see it. The diamond ring and white dress and packed church. Her glowing skin and growing body and the small perfect girl-child who emerges blinking into the world. Chubby hands and skinned knees and math homework. First date and first broken heart and first real love. The next diamond, the next white dress, the next packed church.
And Cameron’s smile.
A lifetime of Cameron’s smiles.
I turn and look into Jian’s watchful eyes.
Slowly, I shake my head.
A smile lights his face, and Jian reaches out for me.
“Then come, Alice.”
I feel myself wrapped in a warm embrace, and the mountain vista starts to dissolve, like the fade-to-black of an old movie.
“But where –”
A warm finger touches my lips, and we’re on our way.
It, too, came out of a story club assignment a long while ago. Which helps to explain some of the slightly odd vocabulary (gadroon, for one, and injera). It's been revised slightly since, but it remains one of my favourites!
*
Heaven sucks.
This isn’t an appropriate thought for a good Catholic girl, I know.
Fuck it.
“HEAVEN SUCKS!”
My bellow would make Pavarotti proud, and “ux ux ux” rings off the peaks around me.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
I’m Ace.
Not really, but it’s better than Alice Catherine Elizabeth – the moniker I got saddled with courtesy of two grandmothers and a great-aunt who was supposed to leave me her fortune.
Except I kind of pre-empted her on the whole dying thing.
Which is funny, considering she’s a miserable eighty-seven-year-old who should have choked to death on her own bile years ago, and I’m a fit twenty-four-year-old with no health problems whatsoever. Except the random bruises, skull fracture and assorted internal injuries suffered when I took a header off a slippery log while crossing a creek during a romantic hike to Kokanee Glacier.
In seventeen more minutes, Cameron was going to propose.
I didn’t know that then. I know now, though. Now that I’m dead, I know everything.
Which isn’t as useful as you might think.
Does it help me to know that Derek Goldman had a crush on me in Grade 9? Or that Emily has lustful thoughts about Gabriel Martinez (so lustful, in fact, that I have to tune out – there’s some things you don’t need to know about your baby sister).
It’s shitty to know this stuff and not be able to tell anyone.
Have I mentioned heaven sucks?
For one thing, it looks like Kokanee Glacier Park. The only thing that’s different is the signpost at the top of the first hill that used to read ‘Cabin 6 km.’ Now it just says ‘Heaven,’ with an arrow.
The ‘To parking lot’ sign that pointed downhill is gone.
I tried walking downhill when I first arrived. I kept walking and walking and walking till I got bored – I have no idea if it was nine hours or nine days, since heaven appears to be stuck at three in the afternoon. When I stopped walking, I was still at the edge of the lake.
Cute trick, God.
Ever since I turned and started walking the other way, following the arrow to heaven like an obedient schoolgirl, it’s been boring as hell. (Pardon the expression.)
I haven’t been tired, mind you. All that walking – apparently, heaven doesn’t have mountain bikes – and no burning quads. No aching back. No blistered toes. I’d feel envigorated, actually, if only Cameron were here. Or Emily. Or Mom. Or anybody.
I’ve lost all track of time. I’ve passed the sapphire lake and the wildflower meadow and the flat rock where we always stop for lunch.
Lunch.
Even as the thought occurs to me, it appears: a plate bearing flat brown bread. It’s a nice plate, too, like Granny’s wedding china, rose-patterned with gadroon edging. (I was getting that china, by the way, when I married Cameron.)
Not that I dwell long on the plate. I’m more drawn to the brown hand that holds it and the person attached to the hand. A twentysomething male person of the lean-but-muscular variety, in jeans and black T-shirt, with a mane of black curls falling into his eyes.
A familiar person, at that.
I blink.
I didn’t expect to run into Jian Ghomeshi. Especially since, as far as I know, he’s very much alive and – if it’s still 1994 – touring with Moxy Früvous.
I don’t try to figure it out. Who am I to mess with some divine plan? I just reach for the bread.
Is this what manna looks like?
I don’t ask aloud, but Jian chuckles anyway.
“No, not manna. It’s injera.” He tears off a chunk and pops it into his mouth. “But it takes like anything you want.”
Apparently, I want jalapeño poppers, since that’s what the first bite tastes like. Then it’s Aunt Elizabeth’s Branston pickle. Then, weirdly, smarties.
Cheap tricks, God. Aren’t you above these Willy Wonka stunts?
Jian laughs again.
“We have to do something to get your attention.”
His chocolate eyes dance merrily, and I’ve gotta admit I’m hooked. Whatever mysterious plan God has devised, he could’ve done worse than to send Jian.
Who, naturally, laughs again. (This mind-reading is starting to get annoying.)
“I’m not Jian, by the way.” His polite, resigned tone suggests he’s explained this one before. “Like this place” – he gestures sweepingly around the mountain peaks – “I merely take the form of someone the new arrival can relate to.”
He grins.
“Yesterday I had to look like Don Cherry, and that’s not easy to pull off. Those ties, you know.”
I nod rather stupidly. There doesn’t seem to be any way to respond to that.
And it begs the question of who, exactly, this guy is.
“You’d probably know me best as Peter.”
I sense I’m being mocked.
“As in, Saint Peter? Guardian of the pearly gates?”
I refrain from pointing out there’s not a gate or a pearl in sight.
He chuckles.
“A gate is merely a physical representation of a metaphysical concept. But it’s a nice image, don’t you think?”
And, ta-da, there they are, as shiny and sparklingly pearly a pair of gates as ever graced the pages of a catechism book, with cherubs pirouetting and jetéing around them. At least, I assume they’re cherubs. They look like those creepy, chubby little dolls that Aunt Elizabeth bought for me and Emily one Christmas. Just add fluffy wings and snowy white dresses.
So this is heaven. Cheap tricks and stupid jokes. Nice job, God.
This time, Jian doesn’t laugh. He draws his brows together in a frown that makes me quake a little. I’m not sure what happens if you piss off Saint Peter – or someone claiming to be a rather sexy rock’n’roll version of him – but it’s probably not a good thing.
Would it help to recite the Act of Contrition?
I can tell by the quirk of his mouth that Jian is amused.
“Words are just words, Alice. It’s not about what you say, it’s about what you feel.”
What I feel, actually, is pissed off.
I don’t bother to wonder if Jian knows that. He knows I think God was cruel to let me slip and to let Cameron be just out of reach and to let that rock be there and to let my head strike it and my body get sucked up in the current and float away like flotsam and to let that sadly, hauntingly, desperately beautiful sapphire ring sit buried at the back of Cameron’s sock drawer.
I’m twenty-four, for Christ’s sake. What did I ever do to you?
More to the point, you fucking asshole, you with your signposts and gatekeepers and stupid cheap tricks, what did Cameron ever do to you?
A warm hand touches my arm, so softly I sense more than feel it.
“You can’t hold onto this anger, Alice. Let it go.”
Let him go.
The words hang there, unspoken, and I shake my head. I can’t let Cameron go. Not yet. Not when we’d barely begun.
“Watch.”
Jian’s voice is gentle, but something in it commands me to look up.
A large silvery screen has appeared in front of the gates, and the words ‘Cameron Anthony McCormack’ scroll across it, flashing on scenes of a baby in his mother’s arms.
So now he’s Frank Freakin’ Capra. God couldn’t think of anything more original than this?
Jian turns his chocolate stare on me again.
“God sends messages in the form in which you are ready to receive them.”
So all I’m ready for is some schlocky Hollywood takeoff? Gee, thanks God.
Jian’s eyes search my face. He says nothing, but suddenly it’s not a movie anymore. I’m not watching Cameron from the safe distance of that floating silver screen. I am him.
I’m wet and bewildered and cross as I’m dragged out of the warmth and softness of my mother into the harsh fluorescent light of the hospital room.
I’m soothed in the safety of my mother’s arms.
I’m scared when I start school. I wonder if I’ll pee my pants and if the other kids will laugh at me.
I’m nervous when I pick up Andrea Miller for the Grade 11 formal. I’m sweating profusely in the car afterwards when I realize she isn’t going to stop me from unzipping her blue taffeta dress.
I spiral on, through jobs and exams and friends and parties, till suddenly, there I am.
Foolishly, helplessly, unabashedly staring at a girl across from me in Statistics 331.
A small girl with straight red hair whose nose is a bit crooked, whose smile is lopsided, whose ears stick out and who seems to me just then to be the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on.
“Hi.” She grins. “I’m Alice. My friends call me Ace.”
And then it’s all about her.
Ace with her head cocked to one side, listening intently in class. Ace watching TV on my couch. Ace naked under my old blue comforter. Ace giggling as I run my fingers gently up her spine. Ace laughing as she runs ahead on the trail.
Ace falling.
I see nothing more.
I only feel.
Pain. Searing. Wrenching. Gut-tearing. A cold hard band tightens mercilessly around my ribcage.
I can’t breathe.
I try to scream. To cry. To say I’ve had enough.
I make no sound, but here I am.
Ace again. Beside Jian on the hillside.
“What the hell was that?” I spit the words at him.
His voice is gentle.
“Not many can bear the pain of a broken heart.”
Jian reaches out again with that fleeting touch.
“It’s up to you, Alice. You can see him again.”
Hope floods into me – only to be dashed when I see the look in those deep eyes.
“There’s a part of him that wants to be here. With you. Say the word, Alice, and he can come. You can wait for him here.”
I know there’s a gigantic “but” coming.
“But.” Jian smiles slightly. Mirthlessly. “He’d have to leave this behind.”
And in a whirl of silver and sound and sense I’m him again.
Smiling at a short, brown-haired woman whose frizzy curls bounce as she runs along the beach.
Laughing at the whistle and squeak of the warm golden sand beneath our feet.
Curling up with her in the hammock at our beachside hut.
Reaching out for her. Feeling her warmth as she slides closer to me.
Whoa whoa whoa.
I’m not Cameron now. I’m Ace on the hillside and I’m more than a little pissed off. Even God can’t expect me to sit through this. And what the bloody hell is Cameron doing? I’ve only been dead – well, come to think of it, I don’t know how long.
Jian touches me gently on the cheek with one finger.
“Six months.”
He touches my other cheek.
“It isn’t happening yet, Alice. He hasn’t even met her. He doesn’t ever have to.”
He can come to me instead.
The thought is there before I can stop it.
Jian nods, slowly.
“He can if you truly want him to.”
I look away from Jian.
Without his guidance, I see it. The diamond ring and white dress and packed church. Her glowing skin and growing body and the small perfect girl-child who emerges blinking into the world. Chubby hands and skinned knees and math homework. First date and first broken heart and first real love. The next diamond, the next white dress, the next packed church.
And Cameron’s smile.
A lifetime of Cameron’s smiles.
I turn and look into Jian’s watchful eyes.
Slowly, I shake my head.
A smile lights his face, and Jian reaches out for me.
“Then come, Alice.”
I feel myself wrapped in a warm embrace, and the mountain vista starts to dissolve, like the fade-to-black of an old movie.
“But where –”
A warm finger touches my lips, and we’re on our way.
I Remember Minna
Another Story Club challenge story … and I can't remember the elements either ...
***
I remember Minna.
I remember every detail about her.
Sarah always tells me that’s not true. That I was too young that summer to remember anything much.
Sarah’s wrong.
I remember springy dark curls and small brown eyes and a gigantic smile with two big front teeth that made her look a bit like Bugs Bunny in those episodes where he dressed up as a girl.
I remember the laugh, the loud uncontrolled snorting outburst that used to echo over the quiet lake.
I even remember the smell, the salty sweaty odour and the sweet cookie scent of the lotion she spread on herself before she went into the sunshine.
“That’s coconut, dopey,” Sarah always said. “It’s Hawaiian Tropic.”
I had only vaguely heard of Hawaii (the farthest we ever went was the lake, and that was only two hours up Highway 69) and I had no real idea what a tropic was.
I didn’t care. Minna always smelled like cookies to me, those fancy little puffy white cookies Mom only made when the girls – she always said girls, even though they were all a hundred years old – came over for tea and cards.
I say none of this on the phone.
He doesn’t care about Mom’s euchre friends. He doesn’t care that Minna’s mom was never one of them.
“I remember Minna.”
This is all I say.
We were all on the lake as we always were – Murphys and Cancillas and O’Tooles and Matyses and us. I was one of the middle kids that summer, too old for playing on Cancillas’ lawn under the watchful eye of one of the mothers and too young for swimming to the raft.
The corner with the little store, the church and the gas station was the end of the world, and we hardly ever went that far. Usually we just hung around the dock, went swimming, ran inside for Kool-Aid breaks and climbed the willow tree at the edge of the lake.
Kelly Murphy and Joseph Cancilla and I were always there, and sometimes the O’Toole twins, but they annoyed us because there was a huge gap between their seven years and our ten. Well, Kelly was almost ten, she was a whole nine-and-three-quarters, and she was better company than Joseph – who was, after all, a boy. He never wanted to play Nancy Drew, even though we let him be George so that he didn’t have to act girly. (I usually got to be Nancy, since Kelly was blonde and giggled a lot and seemed more like Bess.)
Joseph was more into other stuff, like playing cowboys and Indians or knights and dragons, which would’ve been cool except he never wanted there to be a story, just a chase and a death. Kelly and I liked long drawn-out plots that started in the morning and often hadn’t reached their climax by sunset.
We played, the big girls ignored us and that’s how it went.
Until that day.
Sarah, of course, was on the raft, stretching out her already long legs and practising a just-so flip of her feathered hair, à la Jill and Kelly on Charlie’s Angels.
She and Connie Murphy and Lisa Cancilla were annoying that summer, giggling over Nick Matys and strutting around in what passed for bikinis among Holy Rosary girls. As far as I was concerned they could keep their breasts. Why anyone would even want boobs was beyond me.
But you couldn’t ask Sarah stuff like that.
“Doesn’t it hurt when they do that?” I asked her once, watching their hypnotic up-and-down motion as she jogged across the lawn.
She just laughed at me in that way I hated, the laugh that said she knew something I didn’t because I was still skinny and flat as a board.
So, anyway, there they were, Sarah and Lisa and Connie, all pleased with themselves, when up swam someone none of us had ever seen before.
I didn’t see a person at first, just a dark blob skimming across the top of the water. The blob reached the dock and revealed itself to be a head, attached to a tanned, roundish body as it emerged like a seal from the water. (Or like I imagined a seal must look, since I’d never seen seals except in my parents’ photo albums of their trip to Vancouver Island before Sarah was born.)
The stranger pulled herself up onto the raft.
“Hi,” she said to no one in particular, loudly enough so we could hear her from the dock. “I’m Minna.”
Sarah, Lisa and Connie all kind of giggled and tossed their hair like they did when they were forced to talk to girls who played in band or worked on the school newspaper.
Sarah says I’m wrong, that they liked Minna right away.
I don’t think so. I think they made fun of her. I’m sure I heard them call her Blubber, like the Judy Blume book Kelly and I were reading that summer.
But it wasn’t long before Minna was the centre of everything that happened at the lake.
She was the only one of the big girls who paid attention to the rest of us.
She never made fun of the inflatable orange water wings Kelly and I had to wear, even though we knew how to swim.
Mom was afraid we’d get into trouble. We never understood what trouble we could get into. We never saw a hazard in the little four-cornered kingdom that stretched from our back porch, to the dock at the left of the yard, to the raft in the water, to the fence at Cancillas’ cottage on the right.
It was paradise, and nothing bad ever happened in paradise.
“So you are that Sadie O’Donnell,” he says, and I can hear his pen scratching as he speaks. “I wondered if it was you when I saw the name in the article.”
I laugh a little, that slightly fake, overbright laugh I often hear myself use when I’m talking to strangers.
“Oh, yes, it was me,” I say.
I anticipate his next question before he asks it.
“And, yes, it was about her.”
Minna helped us all swim to the raft.
That wasn’t the first day, that was later.
But in my mind it’s the first thing that happened after Minna arrived, because it was such a big day. The day the mid-kids got to sit with the big girls and even Nick Matys came out and listened.
The water was cold that day. It had been cloudy the day before and I didn’t like the feel of the unwarmed lake as it tickled my stomach. I pretty much wanted to puke when I stood there, up to my belly in chilly wetness, and saw how far away that raft was.
It was only the look on Sarah’s face that stopped me from running into the house.
I lamely considered begging off for a glass of Kool-Aid, but I knew I couldn’t drink slow enough to make them forget the whole thing and, anyway, it would just get worse waiting. So I took a deep breath and plunged in, paddling as far as the big rock that marked the spot where one more stroke would take me over my head.
It was there that I stopped, stood on tippy-toe, and nearly turned around.
Then I felt a warm hand on my shoulder.
“It’s okay, Sadie, I’m right here.”
It was Minna. Her hand stayed right beside me as, inch by triumphant inch, I swam to the raft.
Kelly made it, too, and Joseph. Minna made sure of that.
Nobody laughed at us, not even Sarah, when we all settled ourselves in the sunshine on the raft.
I remember the moment exactly. The water droplets that glistened on my arm, twinkling and sparkling like the earrings Mom only wore at Christmas. The hot breath of the breeze blowing down the lake. The gentle swish-swash of the waves on the raft as we rocked oh-so-gently to and fro. The sweat-and-coconut tang in the air.
Then Minna opened her mouth.
She never raised her voice. But no one spoke or even moved as her tongue tripped merrily through the confusing phrases of Jabberwocky.
I’d read it before. I’d felt it my duty to read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass since Aunt Mary had given me such nice copies of my very own, red with gold lettering on the front and way nicer than anything Sarah owned.
But that day, I could picture the slithy toves and I knew exactly how mimsy the borogoves were. I could just see it when Minna talked.
It was the first of many times we’d sit out there and listen as Minna recited poetry or told us stories. We travelled far that summer, across deserts and over mountains, from the great halls of Scottish castles to the Arabian landscape with its minarets and mosques.
I learned both those words from Minna that summer, words to live alongside “steeple” and “church” in my vocabulary.
Though when I said them to Mom that afternoon, I remember she frowned.
She didn’t say anything then. But I heard her talking to Dad that night, when they thought I was asleep in my top bunk.
“Do you think she’s the right influence for Sadie?” I heard her ask in that half-whisper tone they used for their not-for-children’s-ears conversations. “Sarah’s old enough. She understands. But Sadie’s very … impressionable.”
I wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.
A good thing, I decided, when I heard Dad’s warm chuckle.
“If Sadie’s learning something from this Minna, we should be happy,” he said. “She seems a sensible girl.”
“But she’s – ” Mom started to say, then stopped abruptly.
I wondered for a long time what the end of that sentence was going to be.
There’s a pause, and I can almost hear him trying to figure out what to ask next. Whether to pry deeper or to ask something superficial about the lyrics or the melody or if I expected it to become a hit.
He surprises me by ignoring my last statement altogether.
“Tell me about her,” he says instead.
It was Sunday morning.
Sarah and I were in our cotton sundresses and sandals – the good thing about going to the little white church was that you didn’t have to wear your tights and pinchy buckle shoes – and waiting for Mom at the station wagon when we heard a cheerful hello from the dusty road.
It was Minna, cycling by in her cutoffs and T-shirt.
We both waved back.
Then I suddenly realized something.
“Doesn’t Minna go to church?” I asked.
Dad glanced towards the door of the cottage before he answered.
“Her church is different, Sadie,” he said. “They celebrate the sabbath on Saturdays.”
“Oh,” I said, not understanding. Then something about the word “sabbath” clued in, and I remember feeling quite pleased with myself for figuring it out, like a code or a cipher or one of those three-minute mysteries.
“She’s Jewish,” I said out loud.
Mom’s voice stopped me from saying anything more.
“Get in the car, Sadie, we’re running late.”
She didn’t sound happy.
I got in the car.
After that, I didn’t say much to Mom about Minna.
But I started asking Minna lots of questions. I’d never met a real Jewish person before and I wanted to know stuff, like did they have communion and were their rabbis just as boring as priests and were there any lady rabbis and did they have to confess their sins and give up chocolate or soda pop every Lent? Were they allowed to smoke and drink beer?
Minna laughed and usually answered (no, yes, no and no, she said, and she’d never smoked or drunk beer although, yes, some people did). Sometimes she told me other stuff, like that she and her family kept kosher. This I never quite understood, since as far as I could see it only seemed to mean that Minna never ate hot dogs with us when we roasted them over the bonfire in Cancillas’ backyard, and that her mom’s pickles – which Minna would bring over to share with us sometimes – tasted way better than the ones in our fridge.
After awhile, though, Minna stopped laughing when I asked questions.
One day she told me to stop asking. That my mom probably wouldn’t like it.
“I won’t tell Mom,” I protested, not sure why Minna cared what my mother thought. It’s not like she had to live with the silences – silences that were louder than yelling somehow – or with the little speeches that always began with, “Sadie Elizabeth O’Donnell, I’m very disappointed in you.”
But Minna just shook her head, and I never asked again.
Looking back, I wonder if that shouldn’t have been a defining moment, the moment when everything changed. In fiction, it probably would have been.
But life isn’t that convenient. Nothing changed at all.
It seemed like summer would last forever.
Then he finally asks it, the question I know he’s been wanting to ask, the only question that really matters.
“What happened?”
He can’t possibly know how many times I’ve asked myself the exact same question.
I didn’t see Minna at all that day.
I figured she’d gone into town with her family when they went to buy groceries – they didn’t use the little store up the street like the rest of us.
But I knew she’d turn up at Cancillas’ because it was bonfire night and she never missed bonfire night, even though she never ate the wieners.
She never said much, just sat in the shadows at the edge of the lake and watched the flames. She was quieter when the grownups were there.
Her parents never came. I wonder now that none of us ever asked why. But Minna came and sat with us. Sometimes she braided flowers into my hair and Kelly’s while we listened to the grownups talk.
That night, though, Kelly and I had already devoured two wieners each and had moved on to roasting marshmallows. Kelly liked to do hers slowly, over the coals at the edge of the fire, so the whole thing would take on a golden glow. I always stuck mine right into the flames. I loved it when it went black all over and you peeled off the charcoal coating to reveal the sticky sweetness inside.
When a dark figure came around the corner of Cancillas’ cottage, we both looked up hopefully. But it wasn’t Minna. It was her mom.
I’d seen Mrs. Goldberg around, but I’d never heard her speak. I heard her voice that night. Loud. Angry, I thought at the time. Scared, I realized later.
“Where’s Minna?” was what she said.
“What have you done with Minna?”
It all turned strange after that.
I remember the night in shards and fragments, pieces of a shattered dish I’ve never been able to glue back together.
I remember the smell of the smoke and how it burned my eyes and made me cough, the bits of ash and charred wood drifting on the breeze.
I remember the sparks, hissing and spitting and crackling as they floated up into the night sky, alighting sometimes on the grass when they failed to catch the wind.
I remember the sound of voices. So many voices, talking at once. Loudly and angrily (my mom, Mr. Cancilla, Minna’s mom). Softly and calmly (Dad). Questions being asked, people running, grownups heading inside, phone calls being made. Minna’s mom sitting at Cancillas’ kitchen table with a mug in her hand that I never saw her drink from, a plate of Mom’s fancy white cookies untouched beside her.
I remember the water was cold. I went and sat beside the lake. I stuck my hand in the water, trailing my fingers through the silvery darkness, watching as the still surface rippled and folded in on itself.
I remember Kelly cried and Joseph told her to stop being such a girl.
I remember looking up and seeing a misty white band stretching across the sky, enfolding stars in its depths like jewels in a bride’s veil. I remember thinking: That’s the Milky Way. I’d never seen the Milky Way before.
I remember Dad leaning down in front of me, taking my shoulders in his hands and saying, “Think carefully, Sadie, this is important. When did you last see Minna? Did something happen?”
I don’t remember answering.
Most of all I remember Sarah coming to me at the edge of the water and tugging something soft and warm over my head. It was her favourite pink Roots sweatshirt and I remember thinking she never let me wear it before.
She put her arm around me and sat with me for a long time.
Then Dad came and said it was time for us to go home.
I remember Sarah cried.
This is what I remember.
He’s thinking, I can tell. His pen has stopped scratching and he isn’t speaking.
He’s wondering how to phrase the question he knows he has to ask.
Finally, he just asks.
“Do you think she’s dead?” he says.
“Her mother doesn’t think so,” I say.
It’s not quite an answer.
Mrs. Goldberg came back the next summer, but Mr. Goldberg didn’t. We’d see her sometimes, driving by or sitting alone on her dock – never swimming, never walking over to join us on bonfire night.
Dad would go over there sometimes. When he’d come home, it would be one of those nights. Those loudly silent nights when Mom would clatter pots and fling cutlery on the table and stir the Manwich or Hamburger Helper with an energy that frightened me a little, though I never knew why.
He never said Minna’s name when Sarah and I were there.
But I’d hear their conversations sometimes after we were in bed.
“Why doesn’t she just go home?” Mom said one night.
Dad never got angry, but he got angry then.
She stayed because she was waiting for Minna, he said, while her husband waited at their home in the city in case Minna went back there instead.
“How can you expect her to leave?” He’d abandoned his hush-the-children-are-sleeping voice and was almost yelling. “For God’s sake, Margaret, the woman is living a nightmare.”
I never heard Mom’s answer.
I wondered if they would talk about her again. I forced myself to lie awake every night, driving my fingernails into my palms so that the pain would stop my eyelids from closing.
I hadn’t stayed awake so much since the summer before, when the police were coming to all the cottages and asking questions. That was the summer the reporter came, when he asked all of us, even me and Kelly and Joseph, about Minna and what she was like and what we did together and whether we liked her.
I kept hoping I’d hear more.
But after the night when Dad got angry, I never heard them say Minna’s name again.
He notices, of course.
“But what do you think?” he asks.
I wonder how to answer that.
“I hope she’s alive,” I tell him. “I hope her mother is right.”
I pause and then I say, “That’s why I wrote the song, you know. For her. I hoped she’d hear it on the radio somewhere and know it was about her and decide to come home.”
The reporter doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. He only knows what he found in those 20-year-old clippings, the clippings that made him decide to do a followup on the disappearance of a teenage girl from a small cottage-country community in 1981.
It’s just a story to him.
I remember Minna.
This is what I also remember.
I remember Nick Matys smiling at her. Watching her with an expression I didn’t quite get but that looked like something from Sarah’s stupid Young and the Restless show.
I remember Sarah watching Nick with a look of her own – a dark, angry look that reminded me of the way she glared at me when I read her diary that one time. Only this was worse because she turned it into a smile so fast when Nick turned around and caught her eye.
I remember Sarah and Lisa and Connie whispering a lot. I remember their murmured name for her changing from ‘Blubber’ to ‘Jew-Girl.’
I remember Connie said something to Nick once about cashews, something that made him so mad he turned red in the face and looked like he was going to hit her. I remember he just walked away.
I remember Minna and Nick weren’t there one afternoon.
I remember Sarah was snotty to me that day.
I remember the three of them being really nice to Minna the day after that. Suggesting a trip into town – all four of them would go buy clothes or nail polish or makeup or whatever it was the big girls went into town for.
I remember Minna said she’d go. She’d meet them there the next afternoon because her family was going into town anyway, and then she’d catch a ride back with the girls for bonfire night.
I remember they all smiled.
I never told anyone that stuff.
It’s a lie.
The reporter doesn’t know that. He doesn’t even seem to sense it as he goes on asking the questions I predicted, about the lyrics and the melody and whether I expected Lost Girl to be a hit (I wrote it from my heart, the tune came to me in my sleep and I never even thought I’d end up with a recording contract, never mind a hit song).
I didn’t write it for Minna.
I wrote it for Sarah.
She’s never said a word about it. But I’m sure she knows.
Sarah’s pretty smart, even if she is wrong about some things. Like about how I was too young that summer to remember anything much.
I remember Minna.
And I can still smell sweat and coconut cookies.
***
I remember Minna.
I remember every detail about her.
Sarah always tells me that’s not true. That I was too young that summer to remember anything much.
Sarah’s wrong.
I remember springy dark curls and small brown eyes and a gigantic smile with two big front teeth that made her look a bit like Bugs Bunny in those episodes where he dressed up as a girl.
I remember the laugh, the loud uncontrolled snorting outburst that used to echo over the quiet lake.
I even remember the smell, the salty sweaty odour and the sweet cookie scent of the lotion she spread on herself before she went into the sunshine.
“That’s coconut, dopey,” Sarah always said. “It’s Hawaiian Tropic.”
I had only vaguely heard of Hawaii (the farthest we ever went was the lake, and that was only two hours up Highway 69) and I had no real idea what a tropic was.
I didn’t care. Minna always smelled like cookies to me, those fancy little puffy white cookies Mom only made when the girls – she always said girls, even though they were all a hundred years old – came over for tea and cards.
I say none of this on the phone.
He doesn’t care about Mom’s euchre friends. He doesn’t care that Minna’s mom was never one of them.
“I remember Minna.”
This is all I say.
We were all on the lake as we always were – Murphys and Cancillas and O’Tooles and Matyses and us. I was one of the middle kids that summer, too old for playing on Cancillas’ lawn under the watchful eye of one of the mothers and too young for swimming to the raft.
The corner with the little store, the church and the gas station was the end of the world, and we hardly ever went that far. Usually we just hung around the dock, went swimming, ran inside for Kool-Aid breaks and climbed the willow tree at the edge of the lake.
Kelly Murphy and Joseph Cancilla and I were always there, and sometimes the O’Toole twins, but they annoyed us because there was a huge gap between their seven years and our ten. Well, Kelly was almost ten, she was a whole nine-and-three-quarters, and she was better company than Joseph – who was, after all, a boy. He never wanted to play Nancy Drew, even though we let him be George so that he didn’t have to act girly. (I usually got to be Nancy, since Kelly was blonde and giggled a lot and seemed more like Bess.)
Joseph was more into other stuff, like playing cowboys and Indians or knights and dragons, which would’ve been cool except he never wanted there to be a story, just a chase and a death. Kelly and I liked long drawn-out plots that started in the morning and often hadn’t reached their climax by sunset.
We played, the big girls ignored us and that’s how it went.
Until that day.
Sarah, of course, was on the raft, stretching out her already long legs and practising a just-so flip of her feathered hair, à la Jill and Kelly on Charlie’s Angels.
She and Connie Murphy and Lisa Cancilla were annoying that summer, giggling over Nick Matys and strutting around in what passed for bikinis among Holy Rosary girls. As far as I was concerned they could keep their breasts. Why anyone would even want boobs was beyond me.
But you couldn’t ask Sarah stuff like that.
“Doesn’t it hurt when they do that?” I asked her once, watching their hypnotic up-and-down motion as she jogged across the lawn.
She just laughed at me in that way I hated, the laugh that said she knew something I didn’t because I was still skinny and flat as a board.
So, anyway, there they were, Sarah and Lisa and Connie, all pleased with themselves, when up swam someone none of us had ever seen before.
I didn’t see a person at first, just a dark blob skimming across the top of the water. The blob reached the dock and revealed itself to be a head, attached to a tanned, roundish body as it emerged like a seal from the water. (Or like I imagined a seal must look, since I’d never seen seals except in my parents’ photo albums of their trip to Vancouver Island before Sarah was born.)
The stranger pulled herself up onto the raft.
“Hi,” she said to no one in particular, loudly enough so we could hear her from the dock. “I’m Minna.”
Sarah, Lisa and Connie all kind of giggled and tossed their hair like they did when they were forced to talk to girls who played in band or worked on the school newspaper.
Sarah says I’m wrong, that they liked Minna right away.
I don’t think so. I think they made fun of her. I’m sure I heard them call her Blubber, like the Judy Blume book Kelly and I were reading that summer.
But it wasn’t long before Minna was the centre of everything that happened at the lake.
She was the only one of the big girls who paid attention to the rest of us.
She never made fun of the inflatable orange water wings Kelly and I had to wear, even though we knew how to swim.
Mom was afraid we’d get into trouble. We never understood what trouble we could get into. We never saw a hazard in the little four-cornered kingdom that stretched from our back porch, to the dock at the left of the yard, to the raft in the water, to the fence at Cancillas’ cottage on the right.
It was paradise, and nothing bad ever happened in paradise.
“So you are that Sadie O’Donnell,” he says, and I can hear his pen scratching as he speaks. “I wondered if it was you when I saw the name in the article.”
I laugh a little, that slightly fake, overbright laugh I often hear myself use when I’m talking to strangers.
“Oh, yes, it was me,” I say.
I anticipate his next question before he asks it.
“And, yes, it was about her.”
Minna helped us all swim to the raft.
That wasn’t the first day, that was later.
But in my mind it’s the first thing that happened after Minna arrived, because it was such a big day. The day the mid-kids got to sit with the big girls and even Nick Matys came out and listened.
The water was cold that day. It had been cloudy the day before and I didn’t like the feel of the unwarmed lake as it tickled my stomach. I pretty much wanted to puke when I stood there, up to my belly in chilly wetness, and saw how far away that raft was.
It was only the look on Sarah’s face that stopped me from running into the house.
I lamely considered begging off for a glass of Kool-Aid, but I knew I couldn’t drink slow enough to make them forget the whole thing and, anyway, it would just get worse waiting. So I took a deep breath and plunged in, paddling as far as the big rock that marked the spot where one more stroke would take me over my head.
It was there that I stopped, stood on tippy-toe, and nearly turned around.
Then I felt a warm hand on my shoulder.
“It’s okay, Sadie, I’m right here.”
It was Minna. Her hand stayed right beside me as, inch by triumphant inch, I swam to the raft.
Kelly made it, too, and Joseph. Minna made sure of that.
Nobody laughed at us, not even Sarah, when we all settled ourselves in the sunshine on the raft.
I remember the moment exactly. The water droplets that glistened on my arm, twinkling and sparkling like the earrings Mom only wore at Christmas. The hot breath of the breeze blowing down the lake. The gentle swish-swash of the waves on the raft as we rocked oh-so-gently to and fro. The sweat-and-coconut tang in the air.
Then Minna opened her mouth.
She never raised her voice. But no one spoke or even moved as her tongue tripped merrily through the confusing phrases of Jabberwocky.
I’d read it before. I’d felt it my duty to read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass since Aunt Mary had given me such nice copies of my very own, red with gold lettering on the front and way nicer than anything Sarah owned.
But that day, I could picture the slithy toves and I knew exactly how mimsy the borogoves were. I could just see it when Minna talked.
It was the first of many times we’d sit out there and listen as Minna recited poetry or told us stories. We travelled far that summer, across deserts and over mountains, from the great halls of Scottish castles to the Arabian landscape with its minarets and mosques.
I learned both those words from Minna that summer, words to live alongside “steeple” and “church” in my vocabulary.
Though when I said them to Mom that afternoon, I remember she frowned.
She didn’t say anything then. But I heard her talking to Dad that night, when they thought I was asleep in my top bunk.
“Do you think she’s the right influence for Sadie?” I heard her ask in that half-whisper tone they used for their not-for-children’s-ears conversations. “Sarah’s old enough. She understands. But Sadie’s very … impressionable.”
I wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.
A good thing, I decided, when I heard Dad’s warm chuckle.
“If Sadie’s learning something from this Minna, we should be happy,” he said. “She seems a sensible girl.”
“But she’s – ” Mom started to say, then stopped abruptly.
I wondered for a long time what the end of that sentence was going to be.
There’s a pause, and I can almost hear him trying to figure out what to ask next. Whether to pry deeper or to ask something superficial about the lyrics or the melody or if I expected it to become a hit.
He surprises me by ignoring my last statement altogether.
“Tell me about her,” he says instead.
It was Sunday morning.
Sarah and I were in our cotton sundresses and sandals – the good thing about going to the little white church was that you didn’t have to wear your tights and pinchy buckle shoes – and waiting for Mom at the station wagon when we heard a cheerful hello from the dusty road.
It was Minna, cycling by in her cutoffs and T-shirt.
We both waved back.
Then I suddenly realized something.
“Doesn’t Minna go to church?” I asked.
Dad glanced towards the door of the cottage before he answered.
“Her church is different, Sadie,” he said. “They celebrate the sabbath on Saturdays.”
“Oh,” I said, not understanding. Then something about the word “sabbath” clued in, and I remember feeling quite pleased with myself for figuring it out, like a code or a cipher or one of those three-minute mysteries.
“She’s Jewish,” I said out loud.
Mom’s voice stopped me from saying anything more.
“Get in the car, Sadie, we’re running late.”
She didn’t sound happy.
I got in the car.
After that, I didn’t say much to Mom about Minna.
But I started asking Minna lots of questions. I’d never met a real Jewish person before and I wanted to know stuff, like did they have communion and were their rabbis just as boring as priests and were there any lady rabbis and did they have to confess their sins and give up chocolate or soda pop every Lent? Were they allowed to smoke and drink beer?
Minna laughed and usually answered (no, yes, no and no, she said, and she’d never smoked or drunk beer although, yes, some people did). Sometimes she told me other stuff, like that she and her family kept kosher. This I never quite understood, since as far as I could see it only seemed to mean that Minna never ate hot dogs with us when we roasted them over the bonfire in Cancillas’ backyard, and that her mom’s pickles – which Minna would bring over to share with us sometimes – tasted way better than the ones in our fridge.
After awhile, though, Minna stopped laughing when I asked questions.
One day she told me to stop asking. That my mom probably wouldn’t like it.
“I won’t tell Mom,” I protested, not sure why Minna cared what my mother thought. It’s not like she had to live with the silences – silences that were louder than yelling somehow – or with the little speeches that always began with, “Sadie Elizabeth O’Donnell, I’m very disappointed in you.”
But Minna just shook her head, and I never asked again.
Looking back, I wonder if that shouldn’t have been a defining moment, the moment when everything changed. In fiction, it probably would have been.
But life isn’t that convenient. Nothing changed at all.
It seemed like summer would last forever.
Then he finally asks it, the question I know he’s been wanting to ask, the only question that really matters.
“What happened?”
He can’t possibly know how many times I’ve asked myself the exact same question.
I didn’t see Minna at all that day.
I figured she’d gone into town with her family when they went to buy groceries – they didn’t use the little store up the street like the rest of us.
But I knew she’d turn up at Cancillas’ because it was bonfire night and she never missed bonfire night, even though she never ate the wieners.
She never said much, just sat in the shadows at the edge of the lake and watched the flames. She was quieter when the grownups were there.
Her parents never came. I wonder now that none of us ever asked why. But Minna came and sat with us. Sometimes she braided flowers into my hair and Kelly’s while we listened to the grownups talk.
That night, though, Kelly and I had already devoured two wieners each and had moved on to roasting marshmallows. Kelly liked to do hers slowly, over the coals at the edge of the fire, so the whole thing would take on a golden glow. I always stuck mine right into the flames. I loved it when it went black all over and you peeled off the charcoal coating to reveal the sticky sweetness inside.
When a dark figure came around the corner of Cancillas’ cottage, we both looked up hopefully. But it wasn’t Minna. It was her mom.
I’d seen Mrs. Goldberg around, but I’d never heard her speak. I heard her voice that night. Loud. Angry, I thought at the time. Scared, I realized later.
“Where’s Minna?” was what she said.
“What have you done with Minna?”
It all turned strange after that.
I remember the night in shards and fragments, pieces of a shattered dish I’ve never been able to glue back together.
I remember the smell of the smoke and how it burned my eyes and made me cough, the bits of ash and charred wood drifting on the breeze.
I remember the sparks, hissing and spitting and crackling as they floated up into the night sky, alighting sometimes on the grass when they failed to catch the wind.
I remember the sound of voices. So many voices, talking at once. Loudly and angrily (my mom, Mr. Cancilla, Minna’s mom). Softly and calmly (Dad). Questions being asked, people running, grownups heading inside, phone calls being made. Minna’s mom sitting at Cancillas’ kitchen table with a mug in her hand that I never saw her drink from, a plate of Mom’s fancy white cookies untouched beside her.
I remember the water was cold. I went and sat beside the lake. I stuck my hand in the water, trailing my fingers through the silvery darkness, watching as the still surface rippled and folded in on itself.
I remember Kelly cried and Joseph told her to stop being such a girl.
I remember looking up and seeing a misty white band stretching across the sky, enfolding stars in its depths like jewels in a bride’s veil. I remember thinking: That’s the Milky Way. I’d never seen the Milky Way before.
I remember Dad leaning down in front of me, taking my shoulders in his hands and saying, “Think carefully, Sadie, this is important. When did you last see Minna? Did something happen?”
I don’t remember answering.
Most of all I remember Sarah coming to me at the edge of the water and tugging something soft and warm over my head. It was her favourite pink Roots sweatshirt and I remember thinking she never let me wear it before.
She put her arm around me and sat with me for a long time.
Then Dad came and said it was time for us to go home.
I remember Sarah cried.
This is what I remember.
He’s thinking, I can tell. His pen has stopped scratching and he isn’t speaking.
He’s wondering how to phrase the question he knows he has to ask.
Finally, he just asks.
“Do you think she’s dead?” he says.
“Her mother doesn’t think so,” I say.
It’s not quite an answer.
Mrs. Goldberg came back the next summer, but Mr. Goldberg didn’t. We’d see her sometimes, driving by or sitting alone on her dock – never swimming, never walking over to join us on bonfire night.
Dad would go over there sometimes. When he’d come home, it would be one of those nights. Those loudly silent nights when Mom would clatter pots and fling cutlery on the table and stir the Manwich or Hamburger Helper with an energy that frightened me a little, though I never knew why.
He never said Minna’s name when Sarah and I were there.
But I’d hear their conversations sometimes after we were in bed.
“Why doesn’t she just go home?” Mom said one night.
Dad never got angry, but he got angry then.
She stayed because she was waiting for Minna, he said, while her husband waited at their home in the city in case Minna went back there instead.
“How can you expect her to leave?” He’d abandoned his hush-the-children-are-sleeping voice and was almost yelling. “For God’s sake, Margaret, the woman is living a nightmare.”
I never heard Mom’s answer.
I wondered if they would talk about her again. I forced myself to lie awake every night, driving my fingernails into my palms so that the pain would stop my eyelids from closing.
I hadn’t stayed awake so much since the summer before, when the police were coming to all the cottages and asking questions. That was the summer the reporter came, when he asked all of us, even me and Kelly and Joseph, about Minna and what she was like and what we did together and whether we liked her.
I kept hoping I’d hear more.
But after the night when Dad got angry, I never heard them say Minna’s name again.
He notices, of course.
“But what do you think?” he asks.
I wonder how to answer that.
“I hope she’s alive,” I tell him. “I hope her mother is right.”
I pause and then I say, “That’s why I wrote the song, you know. For her. I hoped she’d hear it on the radio somewhere and know it was about her and decide to come home.”
The reporter doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. He only knows what he found in those 20-year-old clippings, the clippings that made him decide to do a followup on the disappearance of a teenage girl from a small cottage-country community in 1981.
It’s just a story to him.
I remember Minna.
This is what I also remember.
I remember Nick Matys smiling at her. Watching her with an expression I didn’t quite get but that looked like something from Sarah’s stupid Young and the Restless show.
I remember Sarah watching Nick with a look of her own – a dark, angry look that reminded me of the way she glared at me when I read her diary that one time. Only this was worse because she turned it into a smile so fast when Nick turned around and caught her eye.
I remember Sarah and Lisa and Connie whispering a lot. I remember their murmured name for her changing from ‘Blubber’ to ‘Jew-Girl.’
I remember Connie said something to Nick once about cashews, something that made him so mad he turned red in the face and looked like he was going to hit her. I remember he just walked away.
I remember Minna and Nick weren’t there one afternoon.
I remember Sarah was snotty to me that day.
I remember the three of them being really nice to Minna the day after that. Suggesting a trip into town – all four of them would go buy clothes or nail polish or makeup or whatever it was the big girls went into town for.
I remember Minna said she’d go. She’d meet them there the next afternoon because her family was going into town anyway, and then she’d catch a ride back with the girls for bonfire night.
I remember they all smiled.
I never told anyone that stuff.
It’s a lie.
The reporter doesn’t know that. He doesn’t even seem to sense it as he goes on asking the questions I predicted, about the lyrics and the melody and whether I expected Lost Girl to be a hit (I wrote it from my heart, the tune came to me in my sleep and I never even thought I’d end up with a recording contract, never mind a hit song).
I didn’t write it for Minna.
I wrote it for Sarah.
She’s never said a word about it. But I’m sure she knows.
Sarah’s pretty smart, even if she is wrong about some things. Like about how I was too young that summer to remember anything much.
I remember Minna.
And I can still smell sweat and coconut cookies.
Each Other
Once again, created for a Story Club challenge – and I can no longer remember what the required elements were!
*
She isn’t home.
This Liam tells himself as he stands in her front yard, under the half-shelter of the maple tree’s arching branches. Watching the rain hit the sidewalk, run along the rutted street, stream between the rusted bars of the grate and into the storm drain. Smelling the sharp aroma of wet cedar, the peatiness of damp earth — the smells he knows she loves.
She isn’t home.
This Liam repeats to himself more strongly. A warning? A reassurance? He isn’t sure.
Their car isn’t in the driveway. That grey four-door sedan, the symbol of all that is safe and domestic and dull.
She deserves better.
This thought, too, he repeats. But even as he thinks it, he knows it isn’t true. He hears a whisper repeat the soft truth.
She loves him.
Liam hates that whisper. He tries to push it into the darkest corner of his mind, where unacknowledged truths live in the shadows.
long hair
wet from the shower
clinging to her face
catching the light as she leans over her cup of tea
Liam reaches his hand out from beneath the maple tree’s sheltering embrace. Lets the rain slide through his open fingers, tickling his palm with a touch as soft as hers.
He never used to like the rain. A child of sunnier climes, he couldn’t get used to the West Coast weather. The damp. The chill. The rain that turned his neatly pressed clothes into sodden rags and (though he’d never admit this aloud) flattened his wavy hair.
He has nice hair. He thinks this but never says it, feeling it too weak — too female, if truth be told — to admit that the thought had even crossed his mind. At his age (thirty-eight, though he never admits that aloud either), he could be greying. Thinning. Most of his high school buddies are. He never mentions it on those rare occasions when he sees them, but he notices all the same. His thick dark hair has long been a source of unspoken pride, a secret held closely to himself.
He’s never told anyone. Except Erin.
He confessed once, during one of their walks in the rain, how much he hated that grey Vancouver downpour for what it did to his hair.
He sees that moment clearly.
She turns — she’s three steps ahead, as she always is, energy brimming over in a walk that’s half-bounce, half-skip — and laughs.
Not at him, though. At the rain.
She reaches up a slim hand and pulls off her tuque. Her Amazing Technicolor Dreamhat, she always calls it. A loosely knitted tangle of purple and red and blue and green that should look ridiculous.
Somehow, though, it doesn’t. It clings to her head as if it’s always been part of her, smoothly hugging her shining hair — hair the colour of the liquid honey she spreads on her toast in the mornings.
Mornings she shares with him. Their two heads bend together over matching blue pottery coffee mugs, flushed cheeks and tangled hair telling the story of their morning’s awakening, the lazy dawn loving that sends her smiling into the day.
Liam shoves the thought away and replaces it with the picture of Erin. That moment on the street when she tilts her head back. Lets the cold fingers of rain caress her face, slide along the shining surface of her hair, run down the smooth white curve of her neck.
a flash of white neck
white shoulder exposed
white fingers curled around mug
a glimpse of softly rounded breast as she tugs at the white towel
She smiles. A child’s grin that dances with mischief, an eight-year-old girl in a slim woman’s body. She twirls. Down the sidewalk. Around the stop sign. Past the arbutus hedge that lines the schoolyard fence. Eyes meeting his and laughing. Always laughing.
Liam loves her laughter.
He loves her serious moments, too.
When she curls up in the high-backed armchair in her sunny front window, head bent over a Carol Shields novel.
When she sprawls on the couch in front of one of her favourite videos — Pride and Prejudice (“two words: Colin Firth,” she giggles) or Much Ado About Nothing (“two more words,” she says, nose wrinkling impishly as she grins, “Kenneth Branagh”).
When she curls up cross-legged on the floor, guitar in her lap.
Those nights, Liam loves to watch her. She leans forward, slight shoulders rounded, hair falling into her face, chewing her bottom lip in concentration as she works her way through the difficult fingering of an unfamiliar passage. The flickering firelight catches the red tints of her hair and casts a rosy glow on her white face.
She doesn’t see Liam those nights.
She sees only him.
a startled giggle
a tentative smile
fingers clutching towel closed
a hint of white thigh as she turns
oh! where did you come from? how did you get in?
She does see Liam sometimes.
When she’s arguing, for one. Sounding off, as she is wont to do, about the problems of the provincial government, giving short shrift to Liam’s half-hearted protestations that the Liberals haven’t done that bad a job. Or about the state of society and whether the world is a place of turpitude and moral decay — as Liam often argues — or whether people are inherently good.
“It’s not like there’s no evil, Liam.” She’ll lean forward, elbows on the worn wooden table in the corner of the pub, impatiently shoving her hair back as her words spill out in an eager torrent. “It’s just that I don’t believe it’s the norm. Most people do the best they can with who they are. Sometimes they screw up, that’s all.”
He’ll fight back, riling her by telling her that in ten years — when she’s as old as he is now — she’ll see things differently. He never wins. She always wears him down in her Liam-you’re-such-an-eejit-and-someone-needs-to-set-you-straight kind of way.
And she’ll reach across his pint and pat his hand, in an affectionate gesture that’s part mother, part friend, part little sister.
Liam steels himself for those moments. She never knows what the laughing caress does to him, never sees his need to reach for her. She never realizes that the feather-light touch helps Liam see straight into her soul.
In those moments, he knows her better than she knows herself.
a shake of her wet hair
a slightly embarrassed grin
sorry, I didn’t know he was home yet
if I’d known he let you in, I’d have gotten dressed before I came down
let me just get my jeans
Liam knows her so well. Better than he does, Liam often thinks. But never says.
Doesn’t he mind that they spend time together, Liam wonders.
He asks her once, over pints at their corner table.
“We’re not joined at the hip, Liam,” she responds chidingly, putting on her best mock-schoolmarm glare. “I’m allowed to have friends, amn’t I?”
She giggles, meeting his gaze with a grin that flashes through the air and into his eyes.
Into his heart.
The thought escapes the safe confines of its shadowy prison, rises from the quagmire of confusion and chaos and turmoil that inhabits the darkest corner of his mind.
The corner where the word lurks. The word Liam never says, even to himself.
The word she’s already said to someone else. The word that flashes a warning every time she moves her hand and the light catches the delicate circlet of gold on her thin fourth finger.
can I get by? don’t be an eejit
let me get my clothes
I’ll be right back
thin hands clutching towel
white leg shoving chair aside
damp skin brushing his arm as she steps by
damp skin loosed from white towel
damp skin under his fingertips
Liam knows she was beautiful the day he put that ring on her finger.
Liam wasn’t there. He didn’t know her yet. (He often finds this odd, that he hasn’t known her always.)
Liam likes to rewrite this in his mind.
Scene 1: Liam is there, sitting in the third row on the bride’s side, between crotchety Aunt Gloria and chatty Aunt Ellie, passing them kleenex and patting their hands comfortingly.
Sometimes he prefers Scene 2: He isn’t there. Erin wants him to be, of course, but he’s out of the country. Riding a camel across the Moroccan sands or downing pints of Guinness in a dark Irish pub or cleansing his soul at a mountaintop monastery in Tibet.
Liam never lets himself write Scene 3: Liam knows her first. She never meets him. She reaches out to receive the delicate circlet of gold not from him but from Liam.
He doesn’t let himself think it. When the idea creeps into his mind, he shoves it back into the darkness where it belongs.
Liam wasn’t there. He didn’t see her in the long white dress that skims her thin shoulders, clings to the curve of her breast, hugs her small waist, slides in a silken waterfall to the floor.
He knows she smiled a lot. That she was the happiest bride everyone had ever seen. That’s what her friends Sandra and Kelly — the other HR clerks in their overcrowded office — always say.
That’s what the picture says too.
Liam sees that photo every day. It perches on her desk among the piles of paperwork she never quite gets around to filing — “Filing is overrated, Liam,” she pronounces, “and, anyway, I know where everything is.”
In the photo, she’s looking up at him. They’re both smiling, heads bent so close they’re almost touching, seeing nothing in the world but each other.
Liam doesn’t like that picture. But he can never look away.
what are you doing
damp skin on fire
stop it, what are you doing
dry hair against wet
dry lips on moist trembling mouth
dry hands on damp skin
what are you doing
stop it stop it stop it
liam!
“She doesn’t love you.”
The sound of his own voice startles him, recalls him to the moment where he is. In her front yard, under the half-shelter of the maple tree’s arching branches. Watching the rain hit the sidewalk, run along the rutted street, stream between the rusted bars of the grate and into the storm drain.
“She doesn’t love you.”
He says it again and feels it hit him.
The wave of darkness rolls out of its shadowy corner and threatens to consume him. The darkness that envelops him and makes him believe in her. In her smiles and touches and glances and twirls and laughter.
He’s never given in to the darkness.
Except once.
Except tonight.
tears in waves
sobs racking thin body
white skin exposed on cold tile floor
white limbs curled into tight ball
white face buried in thin hands
gold glinting on white finger
get out get out get out get out get out
Liam smells the peatiness of damp earth, the sharp aroma of wet cedar. He feels the rain trickle through the fingers of his outstretched hand. Sees the empty driveway where their car should be parked. The dark front windows where the soft amber of firelight should cast a warm glow over the yard.
Liam wonders where they’ve gone. What she said. What he will do.
He steps out from under the tree and feels the cold grey rain.
He sees her in his mind. That moment in the rain when she turns and laughs.
He holds that moment until the laughter turns to tears. Until the dancing eyes fill with pain. Until the slim twirling body lies white and trembling beneath him.
He shoves the thought away, back into the darkest corner of his mind, where unacknowledged truths live in the shadows.
Slowly, he starts to walk away.
The rain is cold.
There is no laughter in it tonight.
*
She isn’t home.
This Liam tells himself as he stands in her front yard, under the half-shelter of the maple tree’s arching branches. Watching the rain hit the sidewalk, run along the rutted street, stream between the rusted bars of the grate and into the storm drain. Smelling the sharp aroma of wet cedar, the peatiness of damp earth — the smells he knows she loves.
She isn’t home.
This Liam repeats to himself more strongly. A warning? A reassurance? He isn’t sure.
Their car isn’t in the driveway. That grey four-door sedan, the symbol of all that is safe and domestic and dull.
She deserves better.
This thought, too, he repeats. But even as he thinks it, he knows it isn’t true. He hears a whisper repeat the soft truth.
She loves him.
Liam hates that whisper. He tries to push it into the darkest corner of his mind, where unacknowledged truths live in the shadows.
long hair
wet from the shower
clinging to her face
catching the light as she leans over her cup of tea
Liam reaches his hand out from beneath the maple tree’s sheltering embrace. Lets the rain slide through his open fingers, tickling his palm with a touch as soft as hers.
He never used to like the rain. A child of sunnier climes, he couldn’t get used to the West Coast weather. The damp. The chill. The rain that turned his neatly pressed clothes into sodden rags and (though he’d never admit this aloud) flattened his wavy hair.
He has nice hair. He thinks this but never says it, feeling it too weak — too female, if truth be told — to admit that the thought had even crossed his mind. At his age (thirty-eight, though he never admits that aloud either), he could be greying. Thinning. Most of his high school buddies are. He never mentions it on those rare occasions when he sees them, but he notices all the same. His thick dark hair has long been a source of unspoken pride, a secret held closely to himself.
He’s never told anyone. Except Erin.
He confessed once, during one of their walks in the rain, how much he hated that grey Vancouver downpour for what it did to his hair.
He sees that moment clearly.
She turns — she’s three steps ahead, as she always is, energy brimming over in a walk that’s half-bounce, half-skip — and laughs.
Not at him, though. At the rain.
She reaches up a slim hand and pulls off her tuque. Her Amazing Technicolor Dreamhat, she always calls it. A loosely knitted tangle of purple and red and blue and green that should look ridiculous.
Somehow, though, it doesn’t. It clings to her head as if it’s always been part of her, smoothly hugging her shining hair — hair the colour of the liquid honey she spreads on her toast in the mornings.
Mornings she shares with him. Their two heads bend together over matching blue pottery coffee mugs, flushed cheeks and tangled hair telling the story of their morning’s awakening, the lazy dawn loving that sends her smiling into the day.
Liam shoves the thought away and replaces it with the picture of Erin. That moment on the street when she tilts her head back. Lets the cold fingers of rain caress her face, slide along the shining surface of her hair, run down the smooth white curve of her neck.
a flash of white neck
white shoulder exposed
white fingers curled around mug
a glimpse of softly rounded breast as she tugs at the white towel
She smiles. A child’s grin that dances with mischief, an eight-year-old girl in a slim woman’s body. She twirls. Down the sidewalk. Around the stop sign. Past the arbutus hedge that lines the schoolyard fence. Eyes meeting his and laughing. Always laughing.
Liam loves her laughter.
He loves her serious moments, too.
When she curls up in the high-backed armchair in her sunny front window, head bent over a Carol Shields novel.
When she sprawls on the couch in front of one of her favourite videos — Pride and Prejudice (“two words: Colin Firth,” she giggles) or Much Ado About Nothing (“two more words,” she says, nose wrinkling impishly as she grins, “Kenneth Branagh”).
When she curls up cross-legged on the floor, guitar in her lap.
Those nights, Liam loves to watch her. She leans forward, slight shoulders rounded, hair falling into her face, chewing her bottom lip in concentration as she works her way through the difficult fingering of an unfamiliar passage. The flickering firelight catches the red tints of her hair and casts a rosy glow on her white face.
She doesn’t see Liam those nights.
She sees only him.
a startled giggle
a tentative smile
fingers clutching towel closed
a hint of white thigh as she turns
oh! where did you come from? how did you get in?
She does see Liam sometimes.
When she’s arguing, for one. Sounding off, as she is wont to do, about the problems of the provincial government, giving short shrift to Liam’s half-hearted protestations that the Liberals haven’t done that bad a job. Or about the state of society and whether the world is a place of turpitude and moral decay — as Liam often argues — or whether people are inherently good.
“It’s not like there’s no evil, Liam.” She’ll lean forward, elbows on the worn wooden table in the corner of the pub, impatiently shoving her hair back as her words spill out in an eager torrent. “It’s just that I don’t believe it’s the norm. Most people do the best they can with who they are. Sometimes they screw up, that’s all.”
He’ll fight back, riling her by telling her that in ten years — when she’s as old as he is now — she’ll see things differently. He never wins. She always wears him down in her Liam-you’re-such-an-eejit-and-someone-needs-to-set-you-straight kind of way.
And she’ll reach across his pint and pat his hand, in an affectionate gesture that’s part mother, part friend, part little sister.
Liam steels himself for those moments. She never knows what the laughing caress does to him, never sees his need to reach for her. She never realizes that the feather-light touch helps Liam see straight into her soul.
In those moments, he knows her better than she knows herself.
a shake of her wet hair
a slightly embarrassed grin
sorry, I didn’t know he was home yet
if I’d known he let you in, I’d have gotten dressed before I came down
let me just get my jeans
Liam knows her so well. Better than he does, Liam often thinks. But never says.
Doesn’t he mind that they spend time together, Liam wonders.
He asks her once, over pints at their corner table.
“We’re not joined at the hip, Liam,” she responds chidingly, putting on her best mock-schoolmarm glare. “I’m allowed to have friends, amn’t I?”
She giggles, meeting his gaze with a grin that flashes through the air and into his eyes.
Into his heart.
The thought escapes the safe confines of its shadowy prison, rises from the quagmire of confusion and chaos and turmoil that inhabits the darkest corner of his mind.
The corner where the word lurks. The word Liam never says, even to himself.
The word she’s already said to someone else. The word that flashes a warning every time she moves her hand and the light catches the delicate circlet of gold on her thin fourth finger.
can I get by? don’t be an eejit
let me get my clothes
I’ll be right back
thin hands clutching towel
white leg shoving chair aside
damp skin brushing his arm as she steps by
damp skin loosed from white towel
damp skin under his fingertips
Liam knows she was beautiful the day he put that ring on her finger.
Liam wasn’t there. He didn’t know her yet. (He often finds this odd, that he hasn’t known her always.)
Liam likes to rewrite this in his mind.
Scene 1: Liam is there, sitting in the third row on the bride’s side, between crotchety Aunt Gloria and chatty Aunt Ellie, passing them kleenex and patting their hands comfortingly.
Sometimes he prefers Scene 2: He isn’t there. Erin wants him to be, of course, but he’s out of the country. Riding a camel across the Moroccan sands or downing pints of Guinness in a dark Irish pub or cleansing his soul at a mountaintop monastery in Tibet.
Liam never lets himself write Scene 3: Liam knows her first. She never meets him. She reaches out to receive the delicate circlet of gold not from him but from Liam.
He doesn’t let himself think it. When the idea creeps into his mind, he shoves it back into the darkness where it belongs.
Liam wasn’t there. He didn’t see her in the long white dress that skims her thin shoulders, clings to the curve of her breast, hugs her small waist, slides in a silken waterfall to the floor.
He knows she smiled a lot. That she was the happiest bride everyone had ever seen. That’s what her friends Sandra and Kelly — the other HR clerks in their overcrowded office — always say.
That’s what the picture says too.
Liam sees that photo every day. It perches on her desk among the piles of paperwork she never quite gets around to filing — “Filing is overrated, Liam,” she pronounces, “and, anyway, I know where everything is.”
In the photo, she’s looking up at him. They’re both smiling, heads bent so close they’re almost touching, seeing nothing in the world but each other.
Liam doesn’t like that picture. But he can never look away.
what are you doing
damp skin on fire
stop it, what are you doing
dry hair against wet
dry lips on moist trembling mouth
dry hands on damp skin
what are you doing
stop it stop it stop it
liam!
“She doesn’t love you.”
The sound of his own voice startles him, recalls him to the moment where he is. In her front yard, under the half-shelter of the maple tree’s arching branches. Watching the rain hit the sidewalk, run along the rutted street, stream between the rusted bars of the grate and into the storm drain.
“She doesn’t love you.”
He says it again and feels it hit him.
The wave of darkness rolls out of its shadowy corner and threatens to consume him. The darkness that envelops him and makes him believe in her. In her smiles and touches and glances and twirls and laughter.
He’s never given in to the darkness.
Except once.
Except tonight.
tears in waves
sobs racking thin body
white skin exposed on cold tile floor
white limbs curled into tight ball
white face buried in thin hands
gold glinting on white finger
get out get out get out get out get out
Liam smells the peatiness of damp earth, the sharp aroma of wet cedar. He feels the rain trickle through the fingers of his outstretched hand. Sees the empty driveway where their car should be parked. The dark front windows where the soft amber of firelight should cast a warm glow over the yard.
Liam wonders where they’ve gone. What she said. What he will do.
He steps out from under the tree and feels the cold grey rain.
He sees her in his mind. That moment in the rain when she turns and laughs.
He holds that moment until the laughter turns to tears. Until the dancing eyes fill with pain. Until the slim twirling body lies white and trembling beneath him.
He shoves the thought away, back into the darkest corner of his mind, where unacknowledged truths live in the shadows.
Slowly, he starts to walk away.
The rain is cold.
There is no laughter in it tonight.
Conversations
A piece for the Sunday afternoon writers ...
*
It’s funny, she thinks, that this is where she met him.
After it all ended. Or began. Depending how you deconstruct the timeline of her life.
Either way, it was here. Here in this red phone box on this corner on this unprepossessing street of once-fine houses that have decayed over the decades into damp and drafty flats.
Here is where she was sitting. Sort of. If perching on the edge of one of those hard, narrow wooden seats can be considered sitting. Head cradled against the cold glass, receiver held tight against her ear as if only she pressed hard enough she could draw his voice through the deafening silence of five thousand kilometres, erase the abrupt click that had cut off her lifeline.
She’d lost track of time. She was aware, in some vague and distant way, of a searing pain up the left side of her neck and an odd numbness in her buttocks.
(She’s lifted this word from the English. Likes it better than the Canadian alternatives. Ass. Butt. Rear. She much prefers her buttocks with two syllables. She’d prefer them with a stone less fat, too. But that, she reflected as she shifted in her uncomfortable seat, would hardly have been enough to change the outcome of the conversation. Or would it. Would a slimmer, sleeker, more confident version of herself have been able to find the words.)
She wasn’t upset at the time. She’s sure of this. She didn’t feel it. Didn’t think she looked it, either. She just sat there. Wondering about the intangibility of conversation. The improbability that words spoken across oceans could do so much to shape souls and alter destinies.
She didn’t cry.
Not then.
A gentle tap on the glass made her start.
She didn’t turn her head until a more commanding tap came. Followed by the creaking of the door being slowly pushed open. And him. Leaning in. Freckle-faced, with tousled red-blonde hair and an uncertain look on his face.
“Listen, um …”
“You want the phone.”
She replaced the receiver, ignoring the zap of pain that shot up her neck – the crick, as Mom would have said, in that rural Ontario vernacular that made them all laugh. She straightened, feeling awkward as she tried to pick up her purse and shuffle out of his way.
“No, no.”
He put a hand out, and for a moment she wondered a little wildly if he was going to stroke her hair.
“It’s just … I saw you in here half an hour ago when I went down to the high street. And you were still here when I came back and I …”
She just stared at him, realizing from an accent not unlike her own and the self-consciousness with which he said “high street” that he was likely even more green than she. Which was saying something, since she had become convinced that everyone could still smell the maple syrup running through her veins.
“I’m sorry. You want to be alone. You don’t need some jackass coming over here to bother you. Look, I – I’m sorry.”
He backed away from the door and turned away.
She found her voice then. “No.”
He paused and turned back slightly.
“It’s okay.” She could hear the tightness in her voice, but she tried for a smile. “It was just some bad news, but I’m okay now. Thanks, um …”
His face creased in a crooked grin that made her smile back.
“Hey, you’re Canadian too, eh?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m from Toronto. I’m Michael.”
He stuck out his hand abruptly, as if only belatedly realizing his manners.
She tried another smile.
“I’m Emily. From Orangeville.”
She took the extended hand and shook it.
That was when she started to cry.
*
Emily has no idea what time it is when they finally get back to her flat. Or how many pints of Guinness he’d brought back to the scuffed wooden table, despite her feeble protests that she hadn’t acquired a taste for it yet. Or how, for that matter, they’d made their way to the pub in the first place.
She remembers sitting there with him, babbling only half-coherently over the apparently bottomless pint glass, filling the dark bitter depths with tears as she chokes out the bare bones of the story.
She’s a cliché, she knows. Even in her hazy state she can hear the inevitability of the tale. Girl meets Boy. Girl likes Boy. Boy and Girl get together. Boy wants more. Girl isn’t sure. Run, Girl, run.
She’s not sure how Michael takes this tale. She has no recollection of him saying anything at all. She knows he patted her hand once. Tentatively. As if he wasn’t sure he should touch her but didn’t know what else to do with the stranger melting down into her pint glass across the table.
She doesn’t remember telling him her address. But she knows she must have because here they are, in front of the door with its peeling red paint.
He’s not speaking. He’s just standing there, a steadying presence at her shoulder as she scrabbles in her purse for the old iron key that opens the front door. She tries to insert it into the lock. Finds the key doesn’t fit. Jiggles it impatiently. Feels warm fingers fold around her own and insert the key gently into the keyhole, turning it with a soft click.
She turns to him, tilting her head up to smile a thank-you.
He’s tall, she realizes. Taller than she’s used to.
She sees concern in his eyes. And something else. Something that makes her reach up and stroke his cheek. Something that makes her stand on tiptoe to move her face closer to his. Something that lulls her into a trance-like peacefulness as she leans in towards the warmth of him.
She feels him there, his face moving closer to hers, his shoulders rounding as he bends towards her.
Then she feels two hands on her shoulders, pushing her gently back onto flat feet.
“Good night.”
She reaches her hand out again, seeking his face, shaking her head.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m fine. Come in.”
She knows he won’t. Knows there’s no point but can’t stop herself from trying. Standing on tiptoe, reaching up, lips seeking his.
The warm hands shove her back onto flat feet again, more firmly this time.
“No way. I’m not that much of a jackass.” He leans past her and pushes the door open, shoves her gently through the open doorway with one warm hand on her back. “Good night.”
*
She wills her eyes to open and feels them respond. Barely. Through the narrow slits she can see bright sunlight streaming in through the French doors that open out to the small, ragged patch of grass that the ‘To Let’ listing had optimistically referred to as a garden.
She starts to move, feels the searing pain in her neck and head. Thinks her skull may shatter into a thousand fragments of glass if she shifts position even a little.
She’s afraid to roll over. To confirm what she half knows. To let the full realization wash over her of what had happened after he tried to push her in the door.
She couldn’t have, she thinks.
She couldn’t have flung herself at him right there on the doorstep, grasping his hair with both hands, half dragging his face towards her own, seeking the warmth of his lips and tongue.
She couldn’t have reached for his shirt buttons like that, toying with the light fuzz on his chest with one hand as she unbuttoned the collar with the other, propelling him down the stairs to her small basement apartment – garden flat, she corrects herself automatically. She couldn’t have shoved him through the door and onto the lumpy, narrow single bed.
She shuts her eyes again, squeezing them closed, ignoring the pain that shoots through her temples.
She knows she can’t avoid the moment forever. She feels the warm presence behind her and knows there will have to be words. Someone will have to speak.
She opens her eyes and rolls over slowly.
He’s lying on his back, eyes closed. He’s breathing deeply, snoring a little, mouth half-open, one arm dangling off the edge of the bed, the other across his chest. In sleep he’s edged towards the other side of the small bed as if he wants to be anywhere but next to her.
She slides out from under the wool blanket, still silently, grabbing the clothes she’d shed on the floor beside the bed. Creeps to the cold bathroom and gives herself a hasty scrub before dressing.
It’s Sunday, she knows. She doesn’t have to be at the shop today. She doesn’t have anywhere to go.
She goes anyway.
*
She’s at Camden Market. It’s three weeks later. Twenty-three days, actually. Not that’s she’s counted. Not that she’s wondered every one of those twenty-three days what he was thinking. Whether he’d wondered if she read his note. Whether he’d hoped she would phone him.
No. And no.
She’s standing in front of an irritated stallkeeper, who’s shifting from foot to foot as he watches her swither between two multicoloured patchwork shirts. One has more green (which brings out her eyes, she thinks), and one has more brown (which brings out the faint red highlights in her otherwise mousy hair).
“Green.”
She hears the voice and nearly drops both. Wonders if there’s any way to pretend she hasn’t heard him. Or if she could just walk away.
She doesn’t, of course.
She turns and sees him there. Funny, she thinks, it’s the same way he looked the first time she saw him. Freckle-faced, tousle-haired and a little uncertain.
Despite herself, she smiles. She overcomes the compulsion to reach up and push back the stray lock of hair that flops onto his forehead. To stroke his cheek again.
“Thanks.”
She sets down the brown one and hands the ten-quid note to the stallkeeper, who grunts and turns to another customer.
She slings the shirt over her arm and looks at him.
“Hi,” she says.
His face creases in that same crooked grin. “Hi. I’m glad I bumped into you.”
“Yeah. Me too.” She says it by rote yet realizes with surprise that she actually means it.
His grin grows wider. “Let’s go get a cup of tea, shall we?”
“My, haven’t you become English?” She grins teasingly at him and curls a hand around his arm as they start to walk. “Can I have a scone, too?”
*
Tea becomes lunch. Lunch becomes afternoon. In Regent’s Park. At the zoo. Walking by the pond. Watching animals. Watching people. Afternoon becomes evening. Chips wrapped in newspaper, sprinkled with malt vinegar, munching companionably as they walk. And talk. And talk. And talk.
She knows him now. Everything about him, she thinks.
How his mom cried when he left. How his sister, certifiable pain in the ass like all little sisters, cried too, and hugged him so hard she made all of them laugh at the airport. How his buddies wondered why he didn’t just get a job like everyone else coming out of university. How his dad thought he was throwing away a perfectly good education by going to work in a pub in some downmarket corner of London when he could be working on Bay Street. How he thinks Bay Street wouldn’t give him the life he wants.
“I’m such a cliché.” He laughs, but she can tell from the uncertainty in the blue eyes that he means it too. “Going overseas to find myself. Renting an attic flat and bartending at night and painting in the park in the morning.”
“At least you’re not me.” She grins up at him. “Running away from a romance and thinking I can write a novel in a horrible garden flat that must under no circumstances be called a basement apartment.”
He kisses her then. A mere brush of the lips, soft as a butterfly’s wing, so soft that she wonders later whether it happened or whether she just imagined it.
“You couldn’t be a cliché if you tried,” he says.
She isn’t sure what that means. Isn’t sure he knows either. But it makes them grin foolishly at each other.
He walks her home and leaves her at the door with another soft kiss.
*
She watches him, smiling to herself, knowing he hasn’t seen her yet.
He’s perched on his small folding stool, leaning in towards his easel, half-squinting in that way he has that makes her wonder if he should be wearing glasses. The gentle breeze is doing what her fingers itch to do, tousling his hair and pushing it away from his face.
He’s painting with swift, sure strokes, oblivious to the small crowd of people who have gathered around him to watch.
She circles silently behind them to see for herself.
She catches her breath at the life in it. The breeze that’s ruffling the woman’s hair. The light in her eyes as she tilts her head and smiles towards the watcher, oblivious to the beauty of the seascape behind her, appearing to see only the person who’s capturing this moment.
She’s beautiful, Emily realizes, ignoring the pang that gives her. Why shouldn’t she be beautiful. Why shouldn’t he paint her.
“Who is she?”
Emily is startled to hear the question that’s in her own mind being asked by someone else, a small girl in a sunhat who’s watching with a plump, slightly harassed-looking woman who must be her mother.
“Now, Jenny, don’t bother the nice man.”
Michael turns to the girl with the familiar grin that makes Emily smile despite herself.
“She’s someone I used to know.”
The sunhatted girl smiles back. “Did you love her?”
The girl’s mother looks horrified. “Jenny!”
Michael smiles up at her and winks conspiratorially at Jenny, nodding.
“Yes,” he says. “I did.”
Emily has the feeling that she’s intruded on a private moment. Wonders whether she should stay or make her escape before he sees her.
He makes the decision for her when his glance turns her way.
“You came,” he says simply.
And the crooked grin makes his face light up again.
*
“Her name is Isabel.”
They’re installed at the small corner table in the teashop, sharing a plate of scones and a pot of tea. Neither one has spoken since they sat down.
Emily nearly chokes on a mouthful of scalding tea.
“Oh.” It’s a less than brilliant response, she thinks. But she isn’t sure what else to say.
“I was going to ask her to marry me.”
She watches him silently, noticing that he isn’t meeting her gaze as he usually does. He’s looking over her shoulder, staring fixedly at the wall above her head.
“She decided my best friend was more her type.”
He speaks lightly, almost ironically, but the blue eyes harden with an expression she hasn’t seen on his face before.
She reaches out and rests her hand gently on his on the tabletop.
She says nothing. Strokes his hand in silence.
He shifts his gaze and meets her eyes, his expression softening.
“It’s okay now,” he says. “I’m over it.”
Emily watches her fingers steal up and stroke his cheek, not obeying the part of her that says to flee. Now. Quickly.
She shakes her head.
“I saw your painting,” she replies. “You’re not over it.”
He captures her hand and pulls it to his lips, kissing her lightly on the fingertips.
“What can I say?” He shrugs. “Denial keeps me alive.”
“Me too.”
She’s not sure why they both find that funny. But they laugh so hard the other people in the teashop turn and stare.
*
“Your turn,” he says.
She’s lying with her head on his shoulder, his hands playing with the ends of the long hair spread out on the pillow behind her. She has an arm and a leg wrapped around him, absorbing his heat, warding off the damp early-morning chill that seems to permeate her flat.
She pushes herself up on one elbow and smiles down at him.
“My turn to what?”
He runs a hand through her hair, pushing it away from her face.
“Tell me.”
She knows what he means.
“I’ve told you everything already,” she objects.
He narrows his eyes at her and the head on the pillow rolls from side to side in an emphatic No. “You were drunk at the time, and you told me hardly anything. You didn’t even tell me why you left.”
She shifts her gaze to the wall above the bed, noticing how cracked the old plaster is, marvelling that the wall hasn’t started to crumble in on her.
She attempts a nonchalant shrug.
“It was too much.”
He’s silent, but his fingers keep stroking her hair.
“It was like my life was all figured out already.”
“A lot of people would kill to have that problem.” He laughs a little, but gently, and she knows he’s not making fun of her.
She shifts her eyes back to meet his.
“I know. Funny, huh? All my girlfriends just want to meet the right guy, and I have him and all I can think is, I’m twenty-three, I’m not ready for this, how can anybody make this decision at twenty-three?”
He’s still listening silently, and his eyes are gentle.
“He didn’t want me to come here.”
She hears the harshness of the words and corrects herself.
“I mean, that’s not true. He wanted me to come. It’s just that he wanted to come too. I said no. He said I couldn’t expect him to wait while I made up my mind. I could go or we could be together, my choice.”
She pauses. Gathers her thoughts. Decides to tell him the rest.
“That night I met you, I’d decided to call him. Just to say hi, I guess. His girlfriend answered the phone.”
She stops talking.
Michael rests his palm on her cheek. “Do you still love him?”
She starts to shake her head, No, but the movement turns into a slow nod, and she feels tears well up in her eyes.
Michael cups her other cheek with his free hand, and something in the gesture makes her lean over and plant a kiss on the tip of his nose.
He shifts on the bed, disentangling himself from her limbs, pushing her weight gently off him to the edge of the narrow bed.
“Okay,” he says. “What do you want for breakfast?”
*
“You’re quiet today.”
She speaks lightly, but she watches him carefully.
He’s sprawling on the park bench, his easel and paint box beside him, leaning back and looking up at what would have been the sun if it had decided to shine.
The silence grows as he stares at the sky and she stares at him. It expands to become something almost tangible, filling the space between them on the park bench, making it impossible for her to slide closer to him, to nestle her head on his shoulder as she usually does.
She’s still. Watching.
He sits up abruptly, and his voice is unexpectedly loud. “You have to decide.”
Decide what, she starts to say, but knows he deserves better than that.
“Yes.” Her voice is so quiet she can barely hear herself. “I do.”
“I should get back to it.” He stands up and turns, gathering his belongings to set up his station again.
She watches for a long moment, willing him to look her way.
But he doesn’t turn back, and he doesn’t say anything more.
*
It’s funny, she thinks, that this is where she is again. At the phone box. The same phone box where she sat with a crick in her neck listening to silence across a vast grey ocean. The same phone box where the worried freckled face came to find her. To save her.
The same phone box where life ended. Or began.
She feeds in her coins and dials the international operator.
There’s the ring. Again. And again. And again.
Then.
“Hello.”
The warm baritone sounds a little groggy, and she realizes she’s done the math wrong. It’s only six where he is. He isn’t even up yet.
Unbidden, the picture comes – him lying under her old blue comforter, sprawled on his back with legs splayed, arms flung out, chest rising and falling in rhythm with the gentle sound of his sleeping breath.
She feels a smile so wide it could almost crack her face in two.
“Hello.” He repeats the word slightly impatiently, and she realizes she hasn’t spoken yet.
Now or never, she thinks. This is when it happens. When it begins. Or ends.
She takes a deep breath.
“Hi,” she says. “It’s me.”
*
It’s funny, she thinks, that this is where she met him.
After it all ended. Or began. Depending how you deconstruct the timeline of her life.
Either way, it was here. Here in this red phone box on this corner on this unprepossessing street of once-fine houses that have decayed over the decades into damp and drafty flats.
Here is where she was sitting. Sort of. If perching on the edge of one of those hard, narrow wooden seats can be considered sitting. Head cradled against the cold glass, receiver held tight against her ear as if only she pressed hard enough she could draw his voice through the deafening silence of five thousand kilometres, erase the abrupt click that had cut off her lifeline.
She’d lost track of time. She was aware, in some vague and distant way, of a searing pain up the left side of her neck and an odd numbness in her buttocks.
(She’s lifted this word from the English. Likes it better than the Canadian alternatives. Ass. Butt. Rear. She much prefers her buttocks with two syllables. She’d prefer them with a stone less fat, too. But that, she reflected as she shifted in her uncomfortable seat, would hardly have been enough to change the outcome of the conversation. Or would it. Would a slimmer, sleeker, more confident version of herself have been able to find the words.)
She wasn’t upset at the time. She’s sure of this. She didn’t feel it. Didn’t think she looked it, either. She just sat there. Wondering about the intangibility of conversation. The improbability that words spoken across oceans could do so much to shape souls and alter destinies.
She didn’t cry.
Not then.
A gentle tap on the glass made her start.
She didn’t turn her head until a more commanding tap came. Followed by the creaking of the door being slowly pushed open. And him. Leaning in. Freckle-faced, with tousled red-blonde hair and an uncertain look on his face.
“Listen, um …”
“You want the phone.”
She replaced the receiver, ignoring the zap of pain that shot up her neck – the crick, as Mom would have said, in that rural Ontario vernacular that made them all laugh. She straightened, feeling awkward as she tried to pick up her purse and shuffle out of his way.
“No, no.”
He put a hand out, and for a moment she wondered a little wildly if he was going to stroke her hair.
“It’s just … I saw you in here half an hour ago when I went down to the high street. And you were still here when I came back and I …”
She just stared at him, realizing from an accent not unlike her own and the self-consciousness with which he said “high street” that he was likely even more green than she. Which was saying something, since she had become convinced that everyone could still smell the maple syrup running through her veins.
“I’m sorry. You want to be alone. You don’t need some jackass coming over here to bother you. Look, I – I’m sorry.”
He backed away from the door and turned away.
She found her voice then. “No.”
He paused and turned back slightly.
“It’s okay.” She could hear the tightness in her voice, but she tried for a smile. “It was just some bad news, but I’m okay now. Thanks, um …”
His face creased in a crooked grin that made her smile back.
“Hey, you’re Canadian too, eh?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m from Toronto. I’m Michael.”
He stuck out his hand abruptly, as if only belatedly realizing his manners.
She tried another smile.
“I’m Emily. From Orangeville.”
She took the extended hand and shook it.
That was when she started to cry.
*
Emily has no idea what time it is when they finally get back to her flat. Or how many pints of Guinness he’d brought back to the scuffed wooden table, despite her feeble protests that she hadn’t acquired a taste for it yet. Or how, for that matter, they’d made their way to the pub in the first place.
She remembers sitting there with him, babbling only half-coherently over the apparently bottomless pint glass, filling the dark bitter depths with tears as she chokes out the bare bones of the story.
She’s a cliché, she knows. Even in her hazy state she can hear the inevitability of the tale. Girl meets Boy. Girl likes Boy. Boy and Girl get together. Boy wants more. Girl isn’t sure. Run, Girl, run.
She’s not sure how Michael takes this tale. She has no recollection of him saying anything at all. She knows he patted her hand once. Tentatively. As if he wasn’t sure he should touch her but didn’t know what else to do with the stranger melting down into her pint glass across the table.
She doesn’t remember telling him her address. But she knows she must have because here they are, in front of the door with its peeling red paint.
He’s not speaking. He’s just standing there, a steadying presence at her shoulder as she scrabbles in her purse for the old iron key that opens the front door. She tries to insert it into the lock. Finds the key doesn’t fit. Jiggles it impatiently. Feels warm fingers fold around her own and insert the key gently into the keyhole, turning it with a soft click.
She turns to him, tilting her head up to smile a thank-you.
He’s tall, she realizes. Taller than she’s used to.
She sees concern in his eyes. And something else. Something that makes her reach up and stroke his cheek. Something that makes her stand on tiptoe to move her face closer to his. Something that lulls her into a trance-like peacefulness as she leans in towards the warmth of him.
She feels him there, his face moving closer to hers, his shoulders rounding as he bends towards her.
Then she feels two hands on her shoulders, pushing her gently back onto flat feet.
“Good night.”
She reaches her hand out again, seeking his face, shaking her head.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m fine. Come in.”
She knows he won’t. Knows there’s no point but can’t stop herself from trying. Standing on tiptoe, reaching up, lips seeking his.
The warm hands shove her back onto flat feet again, more firmly this time.
“No way. I’m not that much of a jackass.” He leans past her and pushes the door open, shoves her gently through the open doorway with one warm hand on her back. “Good night.”
*
She wills her eyes to open and feels them respond. Barely. Through the narrow slits she can see bright sunlight streaming in through the French doors that open out to the small, ragged patch of grass that the ‘To Let’ listing had optimistically referred to as a garden.
She starts to move, feels the searing pain in her neck and head. Thinks her skull may shatter into a thousand fragments of glass if she shifts position even a little.
She’s afraid to roll over. To confirm what she half knows. To let the full realization wash over her of what had happened after he tried to push her in the door.
She couldn’t have, she thinks.
She couldn’t have flung herself at him right there on the doorstep, grasping his hair with both hands, half dragging his face towards her own, seeking the warmth of his lips and tongue.
She couldn’t have reached for his shirt buttons like that, toying with the light fuzz on his chest with one hand as she unbuttoned the collar with the other, propelling him down the stairs to her small basement apartment – garden flat, she corrects herself automatically. She couldn’t have shoved him through the door and onto the lumpy, narrow single bed.
She shuts her eyes again, squeezing them closed, ignoring the pain that shoots through her temples.
She knows she can’t avoid the moment forever. She feels the warm presence behind her and knows there will have to be words. Someone will have to speak.
She opens her eyes and rolls over slowly.
He’s lying on his back, eyes closed. He’s breathing deeply, snoring a little, mouth half-open, one arm dangling off the edge of the bed, the other across his chest. In sleep he’s edged towards the other side of the small bed as if he wants to be anywhere but next to her.
She slides out from under the wool blanket, still silently, grabbing the clothes she’d shed on the floor beside the bed. Creeps to the cold bathroom and gives herself a hasty scrub before dressing.
It’s Sunday, she knows. She doesn’t have to be at the shop today. She doesn’t have anywhere to go.
She goes anyway.
*
She’s at Camden Market. It’s three weeks later. Twenty-three days, actually. Not that’s she’s counted. Not that she’s wondered every one of those twenty-three days what he was thinking. Whether he’d wondered if she read his note. Whether he’d hoped she would phone him.
No. And no.
She’s standing in front of an irritated stallkeeper, who’s shifting from foot to foot as he watches her swither between two multicoloured patchwork shirts. One has more green (which brings out her eyes, she thinks), and one has more brown (which brings out the faint red highlights in her otherwise mousy hair).
“Green.”
She hears the voice and nearly drops both. Wonders if there’s any way to pretend she hasn’t heard him. Or if she could just walk away.
She doesn’t, of course.
She turns and sees him there. Funny, she thinks, it’s the same way he looked the first time she saw him. Freckle-faced, tousle-haired and a little uncertain.
Despite herself, she smiles. She overcomes the compulsion to reach up and push back the stray lock of hair that flops onto his forehead. To stroke his cheek again.
“Thanks.”
She sets down the brown one and hands the ten-quid note to the stallkeeper, who grunts and turns to another customer.
She slings the shirt over her arm and looks at him.
“Hi,” she says.
His face creases in that same crooked grin. “Hi. I’m glad I bumped into you.”
“Yeah. Me too.” She says it by rote yet realizes with surprise that she actually means it.
His grin grows wider. “Let’s go get a cup of tea, shall we?”
“My, haven’t you become English?” She grins teasingly at him and curls a hand around his arm as they start to walk. “Can I have a scone, too?”
*
Tea becomes lunch. Lunch becomes afternoon. In Regent’s Park. At the zoo. Walking by the pond. Watching animals. Watching people. Afternoon becomes evening. Chips wrapped in newspaper, sprinkled with malt vinegar, munching companionably as they walk. And talk. And talk. And talk.
She knows him now. Everything about him, she thinks.
How his mom cried when he left. How his sister, certifiable pain in the ass like all little sisters, cried too, and hugged him so hard she made all of them laugh at the airport. How his buddies wondered why he didn’t just get a job like everyone else coming out of university. How his dad thought he was throwing away a perfectly good education by going to work in a pub in some downmarket corner of London when he could be working on Bay Street. How he thinks Bay Street wouldn’t give him the life he wants.
“I’m such a cliché.” He laughs, but she can tell from the uncertainty in the blue eyes that he means it too. “Going overseas to find myself. Renting an attic flat and bartending at night and painting in the park in the morning.”
“At least you’re not me.” She grins up at him. “Running away from a romance and thinking I can write a novel in a horrible garden flat that must under no circumstances be called a basement apartment.”
He kisses her then. A mere brush of the lips, soft as a butterfly’s wing, so soft that she wonders later whether it happened or whether she just imagined it.
“You couldn’t be a cliché if you tried,” he says.
She isn’t sure what that means. Isn’t sure he knows either. But it makes them grin foolishly at each other.
He walks her home and leaves her at the door with another soft kiss.
*
She watches him, smiling to herself, knowing he hasn’t seen her yet.
He’s perched on his small folding stool, leaning in towards his easel, half-squinting in that way he has that makes her wonder if he should be wearing glasses. The gentle breeze is doing what her fingers itch to do, tousling his hair and pushing it away from his face.
He’s painting with swift, sure strokes, oblivious to the small crowd of people who have gathered around him to watch.
She circles silently behind them to see for herself.
She catches her breath at the life in it. The breeze that’s ruffling the woman’s hair. The light in her eyes as she tilts her head and smiles towards the watcher, oblivious to the beauty of the seascape behind her, appearing to see only the person who’s capturing this moment.
She’s beautiful, Emily realizes, ignoring the pang that gives her. Why shouldn’t she be beautiful. Why shouldn’t he paint her.
“Who is she?”
Emily is startled to hear the question that’s in her own mind being asked by someone else, a small girl in a sunhat who’s watching with a plump, slightly harassed-looking woman who must be her mother.
“Now, Jenny, don’t bother the nice man.”
Michael turns to the girl with the familiar grin that makes Emily smile despite herself.
“She’s someone I used to know.”
The sunhatted girl smiles back. “Did you love her?”
The girl’s mother looks horrified. “Jenny!”
Michael smiles up at her and winks conspiratorially at Jenny, nodding.
“Yes,” he says. “I did.”
Emily has the feeling that she’s intruded on a private moment. Wonders whether she should stay or make her escape before he sees her.
He makes the decision for her when his glance turns her way.
“You came,” he says simply.
And the crooked grin makes his face light up again.
*
“Her name is Isabel.”
They’re installed at the small corner table in the teashop, sharing a plate of scones and a pot of tea. Neither one has spoken since they sat down.
Emily nearly chokes on a mouthful of scalding tea.
“Oh.” It’s a less than brilliant response, she thinks. But she isn’t sure what else to say.
“I was going to ask her to marry me.”
She watches him silently, noticing that he isn’t meeting her gaze as he usually does. He’s looking over her shoulder, staring fixedly at the wall above her head.
“She decided my best friend was more her type.”
He speaks lightly, almost ironically, but the blue eyes harden with an expression she hasn’t seen on his face before.
She reaches out and rests her hand gently on his on the tabletop.
She says nothing. Strokes his hand in silence.
He shifts his gaze and meets her eyes, his expression softening.
“It’s okay now,” he says. “I’m over it.”
Emily watches her fingers steal up and stroke his cheek, not obeying the part of her that says to flee. Now. Quickly.
She shakes her head.
“I saw your painting,” she replies. “You’re not over it.”
He captures her hand and pulls it to his lips, kissing her lightly on the fingertips.
“What can I say?” He shrugs. “Denial keeps me alive.”
“Me too.”
She’s not sure why they both find that funny. But they laugh so hard the other people in the teashop turn and stare.
*
“Your turn,” he says.
She’s lying with her head on his shoulder, his hands playing with the ends of the long hair spread out on the pillow behind her. She has an arm and a leg wrapped around him, absorbing his heat, warding off the damp early-morning chill that seems to permeate her flat.
She pushes herself up on one elbow and smiles down at him.
“My turn to what?”
He runs a hand through her hair, pushing it away from her face.
“Tell me.”
She knows what he means.
“I’ve told you everything already,” she objects.
He narrows his eyes at her and the head on the pillow rolls from side to side in an emphatic No. “You were drunk at the time, and you told me hardly anything. You didn’t even tell me why you left.”
She shifts her gaze to the wall above the bed, noticing how cracked the old plaster is, marvelling that the wall hasn’t started to crumble in on her.
She attempts a nonchalant shrug.
“It was too much.”
He’s silent, but his fingers keep stroking her hair.
“It was like my life was all figured out already.”
“A lot of people would kill to have that problem.” He laughs a little, but gently, and she knows he’s not making fun of her.
She shifts her eyes back to meet his.
“I know. Funny, huh? All my girlfriends just want to meet the right guy, and I have him and all I can think is, I’m twenty-three, I’m not ready for this, how can anybody make this decision at twenty-three?”
He’s still listening silently, and his eyes are gentle.
“He didn’t want me to come here.”
She hears the harshness of the words and corrects herself.
“I mean, that’s not true. He wanted me to come. It’s just that he wanted to come too. I said no. He said I couldn’t expect him to wait while I made up my mind. I could go or we could be together, my choice.”
She pauses. Gathers her thoughts. Decides to tell him the rest.
“That night I met you, I’d decided to call him. Just to say hi, I guess. His girlfriend answered the phone.”
She stops talking.
Michael rests his palm on her cheek. “Do you still love him?”
She starts to shake her head, No, but the movement turns into a slow nod, and she feels tears well up in her eyes.
Michael cups her other cheek with his free hand, and something in the gesture makes her lean over and plant a kiss on the tip of his nose.
He shifts on the bed, disentangling himself from her limbs, pushing her weight gently off him to the edge of the narrow bed.
“Okay,” he says. “What do you want for breakfast?”
*
“You’re quiet today.”
She speaks lightly, but she watches him carefully.
He’s sprawling on the park bench, his easel and paint box beside him, leaning back and looking up at what would have been the sun if it had decided to shine.
The silence grows as he stares at the sky and she stares at him. It expands to become something almost tangible, filling the space between them on the park bench, making it impossible for her to slide closer to him, to nestle her head on his shoulder as she usually does.
She’s still. Watching.
He sits up abruptly, and his voice is unexpectedly loud. “You have to decide.”
Decide what, she starts to say, but knows he deserves better than that.
“Yes.” Her voice is so quiet she can barely hear herself. “I do.”
“I should get back to it.” He stands up and turns, gathering his belongings to set up his station again.
She watches for a long moment, willing him to look her way.
But he doesn’t turn back, and he doesn’t say anything more.
*
It’s funny, she thinks, that this is where she is again. At the phone box. The same phone box where she sat with a crick in her neck listening to silence across a vast grey ocean. The same phone box where the worried freckled face came to find her. To save her.
The same phone box where life ended. Or began.
She feeds in her coins and dials the international operator.
There’s the ring. Again. And again. And again.
Then.
“Hello.”
The warm baritone sounds a little groggy, and she realizes she’s done the math wrong. It’s only six where he is. He isn’t even up yet.
Unbidden, the picture comes – him lying under her old blue comforter, sprawled on his back with legs splayed, arms flung out, chest rising and falling in rhythm with the gentle sound of his sleeping breath.
She feels a smile so wide it could almost crack her face in two.
“Hello.” He repeats the word slightly impatiently, and she realizes she hasn’t spoken yet.
Now or never, she thinks. This is when it happens. When it begins. Or ends.
She takes a deep breath.
“Hi,” she says. “It’s me.”
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