You Are Not What We Expected

by Sidura Ludwig

  Elaine yelled down, “Be quiet! Your grandfather’s going to sleep!”

  Adam looked up and raised his middle finger. He whispered, “Fuck off, you bat!”

  Kovi and Ava looked at each other, mouths open, completely still. When Elaine didn’t answer, they all covered their mouths and laughed into their hands. And then Adam reached into his pocket and pulled out one of Oscar’s blue pills. He held it in his palm like the beginning of a magic trick. It was here. And now it’s gone. He said, “Okay. So let’s make this.”

  The basement was unfinished. It had a bathroom, but the walls and the door were just plain wood. The bathroom was the last thing Oscar did before his hand started shaking and it was no longer safe for him to hold a hammer. The toilet was pink, and so was the pedestal sink. There was a matching fuzzy bathmat between the toilet and the sink so that you didn’t have to stand on the concrete floor when you were peeing or washing your hands. The rest of the basement was dark concrete. It smelled like wet cardboard and the mouldy decomposition of sewage that had nowhere else to go.

  Adam stood at the sink with the bathroom door open. Kovi and Ava stayed on the couch that was folded out into a hide-a-bed, but without sheets. Sometimes Adam slept in the basement when it was too hot for him upstairs and Elaine wouldn’t put on the air conditioner in case Oscar caught a chill. Adam had drawn on the walls, stick men fighting with stick guns and their little stick hearts getting blown to pieces. There were dead guys all over the walls and Ava realized that yes, this was like a dungeon, full of dead people they had forgotten about.

  Kovi whined beside her. “I thought I was doing this.”

  “Shh,” Ava said. “Adam’s in grade five.”

  Adam had Kovi’s bag of stuff. He mixed everything in a plastic margarine tub in the sink. He crushed the chicken bones with Oscar’s hammer and then licked off the marrow. He jumped up and down like one of his Wii boxing players before a fight. He curled his hands into fists while he was thinking.

  Kovi said, “We’re moving. We found our house.”

  He said it like it was something they’d lost and had been looking for all this time. Ava felt her stomach ache. She wondered when she would be able to say, I found my mum.

  But she said, “Where?”

  Kovi said, “Aurora. It’s called semi-detached. I get to share a pool. You can come swim!”

  Aurora sounded far away. Like a star. Like a constellation. An aura. Like something you see when you shut your eyes tight and your head is pounding from heat and garbage stench and your grandmother always telling you to be quiet, like she wants you to pretend you’re not there.

  “It’s far?” Ava asked.

  He shrugged. But she could tell he’d already been. It must have been a long car ride. Once he moved, he wouldn’t be coming back here. He’d be disappearing. Ava would be riding around the neighbourhood, circling his apartment building like the wasps hovering over the garbage no one would take away. And he’d be the invisible one.

  Ava said, “Adam, you almost done?”

  Adam used Oscar’s hammer to tap the blue pill until it crushed into a soft power on the edge of the sink. He wiped it with his finger into the margarine container and it fell like snow. Snow felt like ages away. Like another world, where Kovi would have a yard and snowmen and nothing to even remember who Ava was. Like her mother, cutting beautiful people’s hair, those stars with hair so blond it fell like fine white powder by her feet. Ava wondered if the sun in Las Vegas shone bright, like an aura.

  Adam brought over the container. He said, “You need to drink the whole thing. Right, Harry?” He called Kovi “Harry” to make him feel a part of it all. Like it was all his idea in the first place.

  Adam said, “You tell her, Harry. You tell her how if she drinks this, she’ll disappear and she can go wherever she wants.”

  Ava looked over at Kovi and he was back to smiling. Adam knew what to say. Kovi sat up straighter on the couch. He clutched his book and shook it for emphasis. He said, “Yah! You will! You’ll be like ghost. You will haunt people!”

  All of the sudden, Ava couldn’t stand his bright, wide eyes, his bright enthusiasm. The whole idea that just because he got to leave, that somehow she should disappear and then reappear to find him gone. “So you do it,” she said to Kovi.

  “Yah! Okay!” he said, but then Adam looked unsure. There was Kovi reaching out his pudgy, thick hands for the margarine container, Adam holding it steady, looking over at Ava. Adam saying, “But, Ava, I made this for you.”

  Ava said, “Kovi’s the one who does magic. His uncle’s going to be on America’s Got Talent. Let him try.”

  Adam looked down at the concoction, stuck his fingers into the liquid as if to scoop out whatever powder from the pill hadn’t dissolved. He lifted his hand back out and shook the drops off, saying, “Fine, whatever. This was your guys’ stupid idea.”

  “No!” Kovi said. It came out like a bark. He leapt off the couch and grabbed the container from Adam. The liquid pooled together like an oil puddle on the pavement behind his building.

  “It’s not stupid idea! It’s real,” Kovi said. Then he gulped the whole thing down without even making a face. It smelled worse than the garbage outside. It smelled like juice from rotten fruit and old cooked meat. Aurora sounded like a place where garbage wouldn’t even be allowed.

  “Shit,” Adam whispered. He looked at the stairs and then back at Kovi, who was now lying on the hide-a-bed, staring upward at the ceiling, a trickle of potion running out of the corner of his mouth as he said, “It’s working. I feel my fingers going away.”

  They weren’t. Ava held his hand and counted his fingers with her thumb back and forth as his eyes fluttered closed. As his words began to slur, “I . . . goin . . .” She wouldn’t even leave his side when Adam said, “Ava, go tell Bubby something’s wrong with him.”

  Ava wasn’t allowed to hold his hand at the hospital later. She wasn’t even allowed to go. Later that night Kovi’s mother called Elaine and yelled at her in Russian. Elaine hung up the phone and said to Ava, “Fear sounds the same in any language.”

  Sometime after all this Ava saw a moving truck in the parking lot of the apartment building. The movers wore face masks to counter the stench of that garbage summer. She watched until she saw them bring out the hand-me-down dining set and then she rode away. Her handlebars were wrapped in squishy foam for comfort, and grasping them reminded her of holding Kovi’s hand that night. How she had counted his fingers back and forth, making sure that he didn’t leave.

  Joy of Vicks

  Inspired by Purple America,

  Rick Moody

  She who sits at her kitchen table across from her mother, who has flown in for the birth of this child; she who hears her mother’s rattled, shaky cough, a chesty, phlegmy obstruction that sounds like guns popping as her mother’s face turns red; she who gets up to fill a glass of water, to find the tissue box (which is empty because her household just finished a round of colds); she who passes her mother a torn paper towel instead; she who lets the water run cold so that it will refresh as it pushes back against the nagging cough, but really she who stands at the sink because she doesn’t want to watch her mother spitting up the phlegm into the napkin, horking and gagging to battle against this cough that has probably been lingering for months. She who doesn’t look, does not have to see.

  She, who just started maternity leave, finally returns to the table and wonders when the wrinkles beneath her mother’s eyes became as deep as bird footprints in snow, for how long has her mother’s hand shaken like that? Exactly when did she turn into an old woman? She who takes a deep breath and feels the air moving unobstructed in and out of her lungs, silent and smooth. She who has managed this pregnancy without nausea, whose hair has grown thicker and shinier as the child develops within; she who looks at her mother’s hair and sees where it is thinning, where her mother
has teased and sprayed to give it body, to puff herself out, to mask what she is losing.

  She who asks dumbly, “Have you seen your doctor?” and then wonders how many doctor’s appointments there will be back home in the winter, her mother coughing at her own kitchen sink, and spitting out gobs of green gunk, spitting it down the drain, willing it to slide away, willing her head to stop spinning from breathing too fast and too shallow, standing there in an empty house, counting the steps to her car parked in a garage that is detached even though in the winter temperatures reach −40°C. She who thinks of her mother driving herself to her appointments, listening to the doctor’s instructions for puffers and narcotic cough syrup and lung X-rays, and nights of her mother not sleeping as she sits up in her bed in her dark, still house, coughing against the echoes of colds and flus and dry coughs she once nursed for years before, the pulse of a house that at one time burst with the rhythm of a family healthy, then sick, then mending; children calling out to said mother in the middle of the night, “Mummy? Come lie with me.”

  She who remembers steamers and hot showers running for fifteen minutes in a closed bathroom, and Vicks VapoRub and medicine that tastes like sour cherries or spiked lemonade. She whose own house pulsates like that now, whose baby will be number three; whose mother, settled now from her coughing spasm, sips the lemon water with honey and says, “I’m fine. It’s not that big a deal.”

  She who knows her mother is lying. She who is suddenly tired of being lied to. She who says back, “Why haven’t you seen anyone? You can’t breathe, for God’s sake!”

  Whose mother replies, “There’s no one left to take me!”

  She who sighs because they have always fought like this, blowing out a hot sigh, wordless notes on scales of frustration. She who can think of nothing else to say except “That’s not an excuse”; who wants to pound the table and yell, You don’t get to choose not to look after yourself! She who does not want to upset her mother in the first hour of this visit, who instead sits back in her chair, rubs her swollen belly while her mother starts coughing again, while she spits out honey lemon water that lands in droplets like blinking eyes on the table between them.

  She who thought they would walk the Promenade Mall this afternoon to try to induce labour, who had pictured her mother flying in to rub her back against the Braxton Hicks contractions; she who has two best friends who have both buried mothers, who drove mothers to appointments, who took notes, who made soups and spoon-fed their mothers in hospital beds set up in childhood bedrooms; who were exhausted at the end of each day from waiting and resisting and knowing and wishing and praying and hoping and fighting and carrying and caring and soothing and witnessing and rubbing and crying and counting and waiting.

  She who for the first time wonders which visit will be her mother’s last.

  She who walks her mother up the stairs to her daughter’s bedroom, to a bed overflowing with stuffed animals, whose daughter will sleep with her in her room on the floor in a sleeping bag; she who takes an armful of stuffies off the bed and piles them on the floor so that they look like a cartoon shot of zoo creatures piling up to escape an enclosure; she who pulls back the covers to her daughter’s bed, as she does every night, but she who tucks her mother inside it, whose mother’s eyes are closed before they hit the pillow; she who leans over to kiss the side of her mother’s face, the wrinkles like a map of pathways that have brought her here to this bed, the lilac duvet cover, the unicorn poster taped on the wall above, the blind she is lowering so that the sun does not disturb her mother, whose shoulders shake from the cough that clings to her insides; she who leaves the room and closes the door and tries to remember where she put the humidifier and if she’s changed the filter lately and whether she should fill the basin with water from the tub and then plug it in to steam her daughter’s lilac and blue room that they just painted last summer because her daughter is eight now and has opinions.

  She who wonders about calling her sister in Phoenix, her brother in Chicago, who thinks it’s time to say, What do we do about Mum? She who imagines her brother on his bad cellphone connection saying, It’s just a cold. Her sister saying, She should use oil of oregano, but pronouncing it o-re-GAN-o because she works in a health food store. She who feels her baby shift and push against her insides, which are tightening around his growing limbs (she who knows this baby is a boy but has told no one, but now wonders if she should tell her mother, just so they can share something). She who feels like pushing and pulling her way out of this house, even as she crouches by the bathtub, moves the plastic toys away from the faucet, fills the steamer so that she is doing something, hears more coughing from her daughter’s bedroom and with each gasp wants to bolt. She who carries in the steamer, the Vicks, more pillows to prop up her mother’s pale head; she who says, “Mum, let’s give this a try.”

  She who dips her fingers into the eucalyptus Vaseline, who coughs herself from the sharp scent, who spreads the jelly on her mother’s chest across her collarbone, who pulls down the V-neck T-shirt so as not to get it dirty. She who wants not to look but sees anyway, her mother’s breasts, shrivelled and empty from nursing a long time ago, deflated against her pretty bra; she who feels both sadness and relief that her mother would still choose such a bra — an eggshell blue, a vine of flowers from the padded cups to the shoulder straps. She who keeps rubbing, stays away from her mother’s breasts and instead kneads the leathery skin stretched across her chest, the top of her rib cage. She who feels the jagged breath rattling in and out of her mother’s rib cage and presses deeper into her flesh as if the pressure might suppress it. She who begins to feel the humidity in the room rising, who watches the droplets form on the base of the window beneath the blind, who feels her mother relax beneath her touch, whose mother takes her first deep breath, who lets one tear roll down her cheek at the joy of having made a difference.

  Like Landing

  the Gimli Glider

  Isaac is not sure how he ended up in his car, being directed by his nine-year-old grandniece.

  “Park around the corner,” Ava tells him. She wraps a red leash around her hand like a bandage, winding it tight until the tips of her fingers turn red.

  “You’re not supposed to take something that isn’t yours,” Isaac says, pulling over the curb. How could she have missed this lesson? Doesn’t Elaine send her to that Jewish day school? Isaac never went to Jewish day school, but he knew the Ten Commandments. Especially number eight: Thou shalt not steal.

  “His owners aren’t looking after him,” Ava said, looking out the side window at the sidewalk. “This isn’t stealing, it’s rescuing.”

  The entitlement. But still he sits there with her, puts the car in park.

  “There he is!” Ava calls out, opening the car door before Isaac can grab her arm. Is that what he’s supposed to do, as her great-uncle and not her parent? She’s running up the sidewalk, yelling, “Cookie! Come here, Cookie!” and she’s waving the leash like it’s something a dog should come running toward, not away from.

  But Cookie does indeed approach Ava. He is one of those tiny dogs that remind Isaac of the petite, skinny mothers he sees at the Promenade Mall when it’s too cold for him to walk the neighbourhood. The ones with double strollers and cup holders for their Aroma lattes. They have high voices and throw their heads back when they’re laughing. Cookie and Ava chase each other around one of the trees near the curb. Cookie crouches with his bum up in the air, his tail wagging. Ava laughs, crouching down in front of his pointy face, curling her finger at him and whispering. He leaps into her arms to lick her nose and chin and cheeks.

  She drapes the leash over her arm and walks back to the car, cradling this dog like a baby. Isaac looks up and down the street. No one has come after the dog. Ava says, “See? They’re not looking after him. He’s been loose for days.”

  She had first told him this when he was crouched beside her amongst all her Legos on Elaine’
s living room floor. She was playing with a set designed to be a veterinarian’s office. The little Lego people were all girls, with the same plastic hairstyle in different colours — blond, red, black, poofy around the head and then curled up at the bottom just past their shoulders. One of them had her arm stretched out to pat a pony and there was a white rabbit lying at her feet.

  Ava said they had to save this dog because otherwise he could get hit by a car. Or kidnapped. When Isaac said, “I guess when you put it that way,” she threw her arms around him and squealed, “Oh my God! You’re the best!”

  * * *

  Had Isaac given in too early to his younger sister? There was nothing drawing him back to Toronto and it’s not as if he’d left on good terms, fifty years ago. A lifetime of births and deaths, of people from his family growing up and leaving and only knowing him through photographs, postcards, the odd trip in for a wedding or bar mitzvah. Before Thornhill, this suburb north of Toronto, Isaac lived in Melbourne, Israel, New York, Barcelona, Singapore. For the last three years he lived in L.A., selling protein powder and bars for a friend through eBay, renting his friend’s apartment with a terracotta patio and a palm tree for shade. He was sitting out on that patio, shirt untucked, forehead sweating from the intense morning sun, when he got the call from Elaine. She was sobbing. And Isaac’s younger sister never sobbed. Not after her daughter, Carly, left the kids to take a trip to Las Vegas with some girlfriends and then decided not to come back. Not after her husband of almost forty years died of an aneurysm soon after that. Elaine got quiet when she was sad. Resigned. She would say things like “I have to be strong for the kids.”

  But this sobbing Elaine sounded completely different. She was crying so hard she was hiccupping.

  “I’m all they’ve got and that’s not enough. They need more family.”