by Alix Ohlin
“Seems sensible,” I agreed.
“Your sister is kind of like this demon,” he said. “She thinks we have to be tested.”
“What do you think?”
He closed the book as if he’d won an argument with it. Then he turned to me, business-like almost, formal, as if he’d been waiting for this moment, had prepared for it. When he was young, he said, speaking as if to a stranger, he and Robin went to Europe. On the plane, they cuddled under a blanket, kissing, ignoring the annoyed looks of other passengers. He was in a kind of trance, although probably it was partly the drugs he was taking. He was always in a fog in those days, a combined fog of drugs and of being in love with Robin, who was his sun and his moon. I remember him saying this—She was my sun and my moon—as an adult now, a grown man with scarred cheeks and sad eyes, and I remember how he smiled at his younger self without any mockery. He was happy, I thought, to have once been young like that.
He’d never been out of the country before. He’d had no idea, he said, that cities could be so old. They saw churches dating back to the middle ages, castles built of grimy rock crumbling under the weight of centuries. He kept expecting knights to burst forth on horses, like he’d seen—where had he seen this image? He hadn’t grown up with books and couldn’t name a single movie where he’d seen a knight. It was just a thing in his head, a seed planted by an invisible hand.
Robin seemed to know everything, where to go, what to eat, she made friends easily, she played her music easily. He admired her even more than he had at home, and tried to imitate her fearlessness. While she was rehearsing, he walked around the cities, trying to score drugs and just looking around. Before long, he had his own way of navigating, speaking the universal language of drugs. He could always find someone to get high with, and they usually had friends, and even if they didn’t know much English there was a shared code of spacey laughter, of cash passing hand to hand, of nods that meant Thanks, man. He’d found his people and they were the same in ancient Europe as they had been at home.
One morning he woke up—okay, it was the afternoon—and the little man from the orchestra was yelling at him about Robin. It took some time for Bernard to understand what had happened, which was that Robin was blowing off rehearsal. It didn’t seem like that big a deal to him. Everybody blows things off sometimes. Maybe a sober person would have picked up on the situation just a little bit quicker. The little man was at pains to impress upon him the fact that Robin hadn’t been seen in some time. Didn’t you notice? he said. His lips fired spit in Bernard’s face. Didn’t you notice she was gone?
Bernard had not noticed.
The little man couldn’t believe that Bernard didn’t know where she was. That she hadn’t confided her plans to him. It took Bernard some time to believe it himself, and even longer to understand just how adrift he was. Without her, he had no reason to be in Europe, no place to stay, no itinerary. All he had was the cash in his pocket and his passport.
“So you see,” he told me all those years later, smoking another cigarette. “Robin saw I was lost, and she gave me that gift.”
“What gift?” I said.
“She made me figure out how to get home,” he said, “she tore me out of the fog. I was”—he searched for the word for a long time, and we both waited patiently—“complacent, and she took that away from me. It was a gift.”
I thought this was absurd. He’d had to find his way home and later wound up in prison because dealing drugs was the only way he knew to make a living. In what chapter of this story did Robin’s behavior offer him any benefits? Not for the first time I marveled at Bernard’s acceptance of her, his seemingly limitless forgiveness.
“She abandoned you,” I said, “and you think it was a gift?”
He smiled at me and stubbed out the cigarette on the doorsill, spraying sparks into the dark. “I know it was,” he said.
28.
“So what do you want?” Robin said.
“How do you know I want something?”
“You always want something, even when you don’t know what it is,” she said.
It was my last night, and the two of us were sitting in the kitchen, Bernard having made himself scarce.
“I mean, everybody does,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “You’re just more hung up about it than most people. You seem to think wanting anything is a character flaw. Marianne says it’s because of your father leaving.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She thinks that because Todd left when you were a child, you want to prove that you don’t need anyone. You can’t ask anybody for anything. You shut yourself off to prove you can’t be hurt.”
“I was with Wheelock for years.”
“Exactly,” my sister said. “You picked a machine of a man.”
I picked up one of her cigarettes, smelled it, put it down. “He hurt me anyway.”
“I know,” Robin said.
“Anyway, you’re the one who’s shut yourself off. You live up here with your wolves and your visitors. Who’s Derya to you, or Bernard? They come and go, nothing permanent. Maybe that’s because of your father.”
She shook her head, not the slightest bit riled. I couldn’t make a dent in her. “I have the life I want,” she said. She smoked her cigarette and tipped the ash into a beer bottle on the table. Then she added, quietly, “Poor Marianne. She tried.”
“Poor Marianne?” I said. “She drove everyone away.”
“I know. But she wanted us to be happy, in her own way. Don’t you remember how she kept bringing those men around? Trying to find us new fathers.”
“She was making us audition for them, perform like little marionettes.”
“We weren’t auditioning. They were auditioning.”
“Even Hervé?” I said.
She didn’t answer that. “I’m just saying you always think you have no power in any given situation. That’s your problem.”
I didn’t know if this was true, or how to answer, so I said nothing. I noticed that her teeth were turning yellow from smoking, and laugh lines starred around her eyes. I saw these details but I couldn’t register them, really. No part of her aging seemed real to me; she would always be my little sister. She put out her cigarette, then lit another, watching me.
She was right that I wanted something. I’d hesitated over the request for days, brooded and questioned it, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It seemed a ridiculous, impossible thing to ask. And yet I’d watched my sister cradle a wolf in her lap, sleep with it at night. If anyone could understand the necessary presence of the ridiculous, could imagine cravings that others might find absurd, it would be her.
“I want a child,” I said. “It’s the thing I most want.”
“Go ahead, then. Get yourself knocked up.”
I thought about a woman I’d overheard talking on the phone at my doctor’s office. She was crying. “People keep telling me the body knows what to do,” she said through her tears. “And I keep saying my body doesn’t. My body is a dumbass.”
I wanted to tell Robin, My body is a dumbass. “It’s not so easy.”
“So adopt one,” she said airily. “Aren’t there a million girls in China or whatever?”
I sighed. I wanted to talk to her about the impulses of the body, about a desire so deeply rooted it felt cellular, but I didn’t know where to begin. Instead I said, “It’s not like picking up a liter of milk at the store.”
There was a moment of quiet. A distant look came over my sister’s face, an almost ghostly absence, as if she subtracted herself briefly from her body, and then returned to it. And then, in one of those quicksilver moments of comprehension that dated back to our childhood, she nodded. “You want to do it a different way,” she said.
I nodded, too. I explained it all as careful
ly as I could, the process, the time, how it would work, what the arrangements would be. She listened and said nothing. And nothing. And nothing.
I folded my hands together. I couldn’t beg her. She had to say yes or no on her own.
“Are you thinking about it?”
“I’m thinking about it,” she said.
We went to bed. I sat up in the small bedroom, my eyes moving over a book I found on the shelf, thinking about the clinic in New York, the nurses in their dark blue scrubs, the tight-lipped women in the waiting room. The smell of cigarettes in the house told me that my sister was awake too. The room was cold, and I pulled a sweater on over my pajamas. The night waned; the sun came up; it was morning, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave the room. Then Robin knocked softly on the door, came in, and sat down on the bed. She said yes, she would do it, she would help me have a child.
29.
On a frozen morning in early December, Marianne disappeared.
Robin called to tell me, and I got on a plane. When I landed in Montreal, the afternoon was brilliantly sunny, but by the time the taxi reached my mother’s neighborhood, the short day was already gone. In front of her building a bicycle had been chained to a parking sign, its wheels lumpy with snow. Next door was a storefront I hadn’t seen before, displaying clothes that looked quirky and chic. Robin and Bernard were both already there: my sister pacing, Bernard in the kitchen making tea, which I knew would offend my mother, if only she were present to be offended. She’d called Robin several days in a row the previous week, leaving voice mail messages that were nothing more than a series of long-winded complaints. She was upset about the traffic on her street, about the noise her upstairs neighbors were making. I asked Robin how Marianne sounded when she called back, was Robin able to calm her? My sister shook her head. She hadn’t called back. By the time she got around to it, Marianne wasn’t answering the phone. She and Bernard had driven down last night to find her gone.
Bernard brought us the tea in our mother’s tiny cups. They looked like doll’s cups in his large hands, profaned by his yellow, cigarette-stained fingers. After delivering the tea he stood to the side, waiting like a butler, his eyes fixed on Robin. She and I made a list of places to look, called the police and hospitals, then divided up neighborhoods and got to work.
I visited Marianne’s favorite diner, where she sometimes had cheap meals and passed the time with the waitress at the counter. I held a picture of her from the previous Christmas, smiling a pained smile. It barely looked like her. In person her eyes had a wicked, vital gleam. But in still photographs she could have been any middle-aged lady, with her short hair, her glasses, her age-spotted hands. Once she’d held them out to me, bitterly. “I never feel old except when I look at my hands,” she’d said. “Life makes you into a monster.” The waitress, when I showed her the picture, only shook her head, as if she didn’t recognize my mother at all.
It was impossible to say where she might be. I wandered along Mount Royal, in and out of places that probably hadn’t changed much since she was a girl: a bookshop, a music store that still sold vinyl records, a café. It was windy and dark, winter’s raw edge carving the air, and I hoped that wherever she’d gone, she was inside.
I called Robin. “Anything?”
“No, you?”
“No.”
I took a taxi to Carré St-Louis, which my mother had always said was the prettiest spot in Montreal. When she was a girl she’d dreamed of living there. It made me think of Claude Jutra, who’d lived there, and whose film Mon Oncle Antoine my high school history teacher had shown to us just before Christmas break one year. In the eighties the filmmaker, suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, had been found dead in the St. Lawrence River. There was a note in his pocket that read Je m’appelle Claude Jutra.
Snow was falling now, fizzy and yellow under the streetlights, and I stood on a corner hoping my mother would magically appear. Instead I saw a man asleep on a bench, under a dirty blanket, and a woman walking her dog, begging it to hurry up and finish its business.
Robin called. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You?”
“Nothing.”
* * *
—
It was the police who found her. She’d boarded a bus to Trois-Rivières and taken a room at a small hotel. Why did she go there? She wouldn’t say. In her purse was a pack of cigarettes and several boxes of Glosette chocolate-covered raisins. When the Glosettes ran out, she tried to shoplift more from a dépanneur. She was not a discreet thief. When the cashier questioned her, she became argumentative, and the police were called. She wouldn’t give her name, but the officer had read the bulletin about a missing woman in Montreal, and he found her identification in her pocketbook.
Whatever else she’d done in Trois-Rivières, she kept to herself. The hotel, not far from the bus station, was grimy and run-down. There was a small television in the room, a shower stall cloudy with age, a coffee maker. I know this from reading online reviews, not from my mother, who never spoke of it. When the police officer arrived at the dépanneur, she went with him obediently, like a criminal who understood that the gig was up. But she wouldn’t speak to him. I don’t know whether this was because she didn’t want to tell him anything or because she herself didn’t know the answers to the questions he asked.
Robin and I picked her up at the police station in Trois-Rivières. They’d brought her some tea in a paper cup, which she was sipping with an air of disgust. Her winter coat was draped over the seat behind her. She was wearing a blue cable-knit cardigan with a silver brooch, and seemed none the worse for her escapade. When she saw us come in, she frowned.
“We’re here to take you home,” my sister said. “It’s time to go.”
Our mother set her tea down, and stood. “It took you long enough to get here,” she said.
“You were the one who went away.”
“You always say that,” our mother said angrily. “I think you almost believe it’s true.”
“It is true,” Robin said, annoyed.
I put my hand up to stop them arguing. “Marianne,” I said, “you should be nicer to Robin.”
“Why?” said our mother, her voice trembling with complaint.
“Because she’s pregnant,” I said.
Our mother shook her head. “That has nothing to do with me,” she said.
Over the months that followed, as our mother’s condition worsened, I came to believe that if she could have, she would never have returned from Trois-Rivières. She would have left of her own volition, when she was still able to do so. She knew what was coming for her, and she boarded that bus with the last vestiges of her defiance. When I grieve for her, as I still do, I think about how much she would have liked to engineer her own exit, to exert in her final days a control over her life that had so often been denied her; I think about the last and greatest loss, how it must have pained her, how badly she wanted to hold on to it. Her pride.
30.
Robin was three months along. During the summer she’d stayed with me in New York, leaving Bernard and Derya in charge at home, and conducted the business of treatment—paperwork; medications; implantation—with the same efficiency she’d shown when finding me an apartment. Elena and the other neighbors greeted her with warmth that made clear I’d always been their second choice. When they invited us over for drinks and dinner, Robin asked for water; she’d quit smoking and drinking. “I will be a temple,” she said with mock seriousness, waving a hand across her body.
We went to a different clinic than the one I’d used before—I wanted a change, hoping for better luck—and this doctor was a slender, dark-haired woman whose bedside manner was even more impersonal than the first one’s had been. She asked nothing about our situation—we could have been a couple, for all she knew—and spoke only in numbers: these we
re Robin’s levels, these were the days on which we were to come back for testing. On the forms required, Robin gave her date of birth; described her health as excellent; answered the questions about previous pregnancies (one) and children (zero). I wanted so much to ask her about that one, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it; it was like a wall I kept walking toward, pressed my palms against, and then turned away from.
But she knew I had seen it; she must have known I was wondering. If I understood anything about Robin, it was that she would not be pushed; she would only offer what she was prepared to offer, and no more.
I remembered her postcard from Sweden—Don’t look for me—and didn’t ask.
The first doctor sent over my last remaining embryos. I didn’t ask the second doctor what she thought about them; I didn’t want to hear her say they were lovely or not. On transfer day Robin and I took a taxi to Midtown together. I remembered the days when I’d leaned back and crossed my fingers, trying to be calm. Now it didn’t matter whether my body was a stressful environment; I could be as anxious as I pleased, and worry grew inside me like a weed, easier to nourish than hope. At the clinic, my sister closed her eyes, her long hair trailing down her chest. The nurses had given her a mild sedative, and she smiled like a saint. When they came back to check on us, she was snoring.
Two weeks later we returned for a blood test, and the nurse called in the afternoon to say that Robin was pregnant. Detectable levels of HCG were present. Robin proposed champagne, “for you, I mean.” I said it was too early to celebrate, that we should wait for a few weeks, to be sure it was real.
“How much more real could it be? Detectable levels of HCG sounds confirmed to me.”
“It’s too early,” I said.
“When will it be late enough for you? When the thing is coming out of my body?”
