by Sara O'Leary
“That’s looking great,” I say. She looks up at me and blows her bangs out of her eyes. Her hair is so fine and pale that it’s like dandelion fluff.
“How was the island?” I ask.
“Oh, fine. I saw my cousins.”
“And your dad?”
“He was pretty busy. He couldn’t make the time.” She says this blithely, but I can hear the raw edge of pain beneath the words.
“Do you get along with anybody?” I ask, looking for a change of subject. Then I realize that sounds harsh. “I mean…is there anyone you pal around with?”
Now I sound inane. “Hang out with?” I try.
Dee gives me a withering look.
“I just mean you never seem to have anyone over here.”
“I like to keep myself to myself,” she says.
I wonder what that even means.
“This cutting thing,” I say. “You said you were a cutter…”
“Oh that,” she says.
“What do you mean, ‘oh that’? Are you a cutter or not?”
“Not,” she says.
“You’re not?”
“Well, don’t sound so disappointed.” She snorts. Holds a hand in front of my face for me to look at her nails. I nod with what I hope passes for an air of approval.
“It’s good,” I say. “It’s good you’re not a cutter.”
“You do know that word sounds stupider every time you say it, right?”
“So, you’re okay, then? There’s nothing you need to talk about?”
“I have a mother, you know,” says Dee. “I hear enough of this from her. She’s finding me someone to talk to, so enough already.”
Why did I think Janet wouldn’t have this situation in hand? How do I know anything? Janet has been stronger in her life than I was ever called on to be. She will make sure that Dee is okay and even if she didn’t know it, Dee never really needed me at all.
“You know,” I say. “People may tell you that this is best time of your life.”
“Right,” she says.
“It’s a lie,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says.
“Is that boy okay?” I ask. “The one from your school?”
She rolls her eyes. “Of course,” she says. “I think so, anyhow.”
Dee is the kind of girl you might expect to have nasty little bitten-down stubs for fingernails, but she has long, perfectly-shaped nails. With a real manicure instead of this grunge DIY job her hands would be beautiful—long, slender fingers bare of rings and the colour of skin they must mean when they say porcelain on the foundation bottles.
“I think you are going to grow into your hands,” I say, surprising even myself.
Dee looks down awkwardly and then holds her hands away from herself as though they are something that should embarrass her. The tips of her ears turn pink.
I reach out to grab her and stop short, my hands hovering above hers. “So lovely,” I say. “Like the woman you’ll become.” And then I give up. “I sound like a tampon ad, don’t I?”
She rewards me with a happy snort.
“Okay, fine,” I say. “I’ll stop. I just wanted to say welcome home.”
I would like a bath. Not that I feel unclean, or tired, or too hot or too cold, or any of those other things that used to make me want a bath. It is just that I don’t feel anything much at all.
I climb into the bathtub, lying down so that I can look out the skylight. Alec had it cut into the ceiling for me for my birthday one year, with a note saying, If I could give you the moon…
Then, before I can do anything about it, Janet is in the bathroom with me. Please don’t go to the toilet in front of me, I think. But then I realize she is crying. She has the taps running so she can’t be heard, and her shoulders are jerking forward like she is trying to fold right into herself. Even with the sound of the tap water babbling I can still hear the sad little gasps she makes between sobs.
I can’t be here.
Janet cries like a child. Maybe it’s only because she thinks there’s no one watching, and this is how everyone cries when they think that they are alone. Maybe I cry this way.
When I sit up straight in the tub I can see her reflection in the vanity mirror. She’s not wiping her face clean or trying to hold back the sobs. Her eyes are closed, and her mouth is distorted. It hurts to look at her.
I’m trying to watch as if from a great distance. I am thinking about everything except the fact that I am two feet away from a human being whose all-too-human heart is breaking.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I SEE ALEC lying on his back in our bed and staring up at me. He looks so sleepy and lovely and warm and rumpled that it makes me want to cry. I seem to be on the ceiling looking down at him. Then I realize that I see myself there in the bed too. I am lying half on top of him with the duvet twisted round my body. My leg is thrown across him, pinning him to the bed. My head is on his shoulder and my face pressed into his pillow. I can imagine that our two hearts are lined up so that together they make one sound. This is the start of the last day.
This is not like the memories I’ve inhabited because this time I am outside, watching myself like I am a character in a film. And instead of that languid narcotic feeling that comes with memories, now I am filled with a cold, clammy fear.
Alec begins to move, trying to shift out from beneath me. He looks toward the clock on the bedside table and then back to me. He smiles. He is young again. Younger. There is a moment where I could still fit my body to his and keep him with me and change the whole shape of the day, our lives even, perhaps. Instead I watch him ease away and leave the bed, leaving me behind. I sleep on. Wake up, I think. Fay, wake up. I roll over in the bed, briefly open my eyes. The sound of the shower starting up in the other room. I close my eyes again.
I could have roused myself. Pulled my weary body from the bed, shaken off the hangover, the laziness, the innate inertia. I could have gone downstairs and made the coffee and it could have been just another ordinary day. Instead, I groan and curl my body into a C. Instead I am here watching myself.
Alec appears in the doorway. He is dressed and ready for work. He stands there a moment looking at me and then comes across and leans in to kiss me.
I mumble at him.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“Don’t kiss me,” I say. “I have dragon breath.”
He kisses me. Runs his hand under the sheet. Kisses me again. I see it happening rather than feel it. The ache of this.
Alec leaves and I roll over in the bed, turn my head toward the window and the light. The next thing is that my hand comes out of the tangle of sheets and closes on a phone on his bedside table. He’s forgotten his phone.
“Alec,” I call out.
There is no answer.
I drag myself from the bed. I am wearing only my string of black pearls. I grab the shirt Alec was wearing last night off the chair and pull it around me. There is the sound of the front door slamming shut, and then I run to the window and rap on the glass.
There is something comic in all this pointless activity. Something of the farce. I watch myself run from the room.
Next thing I am at the top of the stairs watching myself tumbling down, arms wildly flailing. I hear the nauseating crack as the back of my skull connects with the wooden stair. And then I am looking down at myself lying there on the floor like a rag doll.
Is that it? I look at myself lying there. Am I dead? Is that what I look like dead?
But then I groan, and I pick myself up off the floor. Look out the window of the front door. I see myself put my hand up to the back of my head, run it over the curve of my skull and then hold it in front of my face. Checking for blood. There is none.
I sit down on the final step to steady myself and then look at the phone in my hand
.
Call for help, I think. Call Alec. But I have his phone.
After a minute I get up. Stand rubbing the back of my head. Walk out to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water. Take it into the living room with me. I rub my eyes a few times, the way a child would with scrunched-up fists. I feel absurdly tender watching myself. Unable to do anything. Unable to change what is happening.
I’m standing in the living room looking at the piano. I can’t tell what I am thinking as I do this. I watch myself set the half-empty glass down on the coffee table and lie down on the couch, resting my head on the soft velvet of the arm. I turn so that I am gazing at the dollhouse and then I close my eyes.
And that’s it.
I look at myself lying there. My body. Is that all I am?
I think about sitting with Marjorie and how from one moment to the next she looked just the same and yet I knew I was alone in the room.
It is all so ordinary. A perfectly ordinary death.
Alec is making up his bed in the study for the night. He is humming to himself again and I think about how this is a gift. This little oasis of contentment. The two of us together.
“Alec,” I say. He keeps lifting the sheet and letting it fall like a parachute over the couch. I remember him doing this on hot Montreal nights. Me lying naked on the bed and the sheet drifting down over me again and again. “Stop a minute,” I say.
He stops. Sits down on the half-made couch. Waits.
I sit beside him. Long to sit closer.
“I hit my head, didn’t I?”
“You hit your head,” he says. “Yes. I wasn’t here.”
“I know,” I say. “I saw it. Remembered it.”
“Not being with you—” His voice breaks.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You mustn’t mind about that.”
“Were you afraid?” he asks. “I’ve always thought you must have been frightened.”
“I wasn’t,” I say.
“I’m glad.”
“Alec,” I say and am interrupted by a knock at the study door. He looks at me and I stand and walk over to the corner of the room.
“Yes,” he says. He clears his throat. “Yes,” he says, louder this time, and the door opens. Janet puts her head around the door, and I realize that she is nervous.
“I’m going up now,” she says. “Are you sleeping down here again?”
He nods.
Now she steps into the room.
“Al, what is it? What have I done?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing. I just won’t be good company for you. I have an awful headache.” He presses the heels of his hands into the sockets of his eyes. He does look like he is easing a headache, but really I think he is trying not to look at me while he is talking to her.
“Are you all right? Really?” she asks. She kneels down, putting her hands on his thighs and looking up into his face. “Do you think you should see the doctor?”
She is beautiful. It’s hard to admit but she really is. There is something so perfectly symmetrical in her features. She has one of those faces that could fill a movie screen. I never looked like that. Not even when I was young. And she is so pure and clean-looking. I’m not even sure she’s wearing any makeup at all. I look and her earlobes are perfect and intact. I can’t say why, but this is the final insult.
Alec shakes his head. Furrows his brow in a way that signals he is feeling guilty. Stands up and walks in a circle around his desk.
“Janet. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to do this to you.” His voice is constrained. I know it isn’t because he doesn’t feel anything but because he feels too much. I don’t know which hurts more.
“If you’re sure you’re all right,” says Janet, uncertainly.
She reaches out for his hands. He doesn’t pull away.
“I am,” he says, looking into her eyes and trying to smile. “I will be. We’ll get through this,” he says. And I realize that they will. And that they should.
“Do you think you called me back?” I ask, when she’s gone. “Do you think you somehow wished me back into being?”
I wait but he doesn’t answer.
“Alec, my love,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I think that must have been it.”
“Tell me about the baby,” I say.
“What baby?”
“The one they named for me,” I say. “What’s she like?”
“I hardly know her,” he says. “I’ve only met her once or twice. Vicki brought her over when she was visiting your mother last Christmas. She brought both girls. They were sweet.”
“And…?”
“What do you want me to tell you?” he asks. “She’s a baby.”
I don’t say anything. Wait.
“The thing is, Fay, you would be thrilled to see Vicki now. It’s remarkable. It started with the adoption. It was like she opened up…” His voice is light. “She is deliriously happy being a mother. Maybe it would have been different if she hadn’t waited so long. Tried so hard. But she is so happy.”
I picture this. My sister’s face. The sweetness in her that had always needed a place to go.
“She has your eyes,” he says. “The baby. Fay. She has the look of you.” He takes a breath and holds it for an unnaturally long time. “It broke my heart,” he says. “It broke my goddamn heart.”
I think about that baby. Carrying my name into some future I will have no part of. I think of the baby we lost and all the ones I never had. I told myself for years that what I felt was fear. A fear of failing again. But now I see it for what it really was. An inability to make that decision. To commit to that life. I see that my refusal to take risks limited the life that Alec could have with me, that it was always the unspoken thing between us.
“I think Janet will be able to give you what I couldn’t. That makes me almost as happy as it does sad. I know you gave things up because of me. I know you always wanted a family.”
“I always thought that if I waited, you’d be ready.”
“You don’t regret it? Me coming back. All this disruption?” I say disruption when what I mean is pain. All this pain.
“I wouldn’t give it up,” he says, which is not answering the question but will have to do.
“Remember the Swedenborg?” I ask.
“I do understand now that we are spirits, not bodies,” says Alec.
“Why do you think I came back now?” I ask. I see him hesitate. His lips draw tight, as though holding back the words he might say. I release him. “I think it’s because you need to move on. I think it’s because I want you to have your life. To have someone to share it.”
“I’ll love you until the day I die,” he says. “Longer.”
I know. If ever I doubted it, I don’t now.
“I’m going to have to go soon,” I say.
“Not yet,” he says. “Not yet.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT IS THAT middle bit of the night. Alec lies with his hands behind his head and looks up at the ceiling. Is he thinking about his new wife in bed up there? Is he thinking about me and all the nights we lay tangled together?
I sit on the floor beside him. We are perhaps a foot apart and I think of how in the early days, no matter what it was that we were doing together, some parts of our bodies would be in contact. A hand in a hand. A head on a shoulder. Thigh pressed to thigh.
“Dee thinks she raised me from the dead. She used a Ouija app on her phone.”
“A Ouija app. That’s ridiculous.”
It’s easier to talk to him in this weird half-light. “Completely ridiculous, of course. Except that she called, and I came, and here we are. So.” Long silence. I let my eye follow a small maze in the pattern of the rug and wait for Alec to catch up. “She wanted me to ruin your marriage. She wanted her mother to leave you and
go back to her first husband. To Dee’s father. She wanted her family back.”
“That’s not going to happen. I told you what he’s like. I told you a little of what he’s like. That is not going to happen.” Alec stands and the blanket falls to the floor. I am happy to see how moved he is by this. “We’re her family now. She’s safe here.”
“Good,” I say. “I want her to be safe. I really, really, want that. She was cutting herself, Alec. Self-harming.”
“Yes, we know all about that. Janet’s taking her to see someone. She’s doing better. We’re keeping an eye on her. Trying to get her to spend more time with the living.”
Our eyes meet. I have to laugh. “I’m serious, Alec. I want her to be loved. I want her to be cherished and adored and all of those things that our child—if we’d had one—would have been.”
Alec sits back down on the side of the couch, cradles his hands behind his head and leans forward.
I lie down on the floor beside him and cross my arms over my chest. Are people in coffins really laid out that way, or is that just on stone effigies? I roll over onto my side and prop my head up on my hand.
“I want you to have your family, Alec. I want everything for you.”
“I had so many things I wanted to tell you. Something would happen and I would think, ‘I can’t wait to tell Fay,’ but then I couldn’t. It meant that for a long time nothing felt real. That anything I couldn’t share with you hadn’t really happened, in a sense. I felt like I was living a pretend life.”
“And then what?”
He looks guilty. Rubs his hands over his face as though he is trying to erase something from his expression.
“Life is an irresistible force. Like all you want to do is stand still and you keep on getting pulled forward. So I had to get up every day and shave my face and put on clothes and talk to people and pretend to be one of the living. And I guess after a while I forgot I was pretending. And then eventually I started just living again.”
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I say. But a small part of me still thinks how could he? How could he live when I was dead? How could he eat a sandwich or watch a movie or kiss another woman? Love another woman. “I can’t say what I would have done if it was me.” I can’t say but I know. I would have died too.
