Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  Sometimes I thought I could imagine Mama forgiving me for what I’d done or failed to do, but there was no way to explain this to Sadhana. In her, there was no absolution, for herself or for me.

  Once I unlock the front door of Sadhana’s apartment, some of my dread subsides. The sun is at my back, and the long, curving staircase leading up to the third floor is stuffy and warm from the light streaming in all afternoon. At my feet and massed behind the door is a pile of mail, mostly in the lurid oranges and greens of pizza flyers. Gathering them to my chest, I climb the stairs, and the habit of feeling, the way certain places cause emotion to coast along familiar tracks, takes over. Sadhana is no longer here, but the motion of mounting these stairs still summons up the ghost of my usual anticipation, and the timid rattle of guilt for the way I know I am about to try to interfere.

  The walls of the staircase are creamy white, the paint rubbed away on the top ridges of the wainscoting and chipped in places here and there where the fenders of my sister’s bicycle banged the plaster as she lugged it up and down every winter and spring. The framed photos of Sadhana, the chronicles of her many stage roles, are dull with dust, and I wonder, if dust is mostly particles of human skin, whether this coating is Sadhana. Pieces of her left behind.

  If my sister were here, the second door would already be open, framing her welcoming posture at the top of the stairs, usually opening a bottle of white wine that she would barely drink but press on me, as if keen for me to slip into an indulgent frame of mind, one less equipped to take notice of the state of her health. The last time I was here, in late fall, it had already snowed, and Quinn clomped ahead of me in his winter boots, ready to take over the conversation, pretending to swig from the wine bottle and thawing into a million questions for his aunt about how to pick up girls. When I got to the top, his boots were tipped sideways in a pile of melting snow, and he and Sadhana had already moved into the living room, voices raised and overlapping in the flush of reunion. I could never tell if it was something about her presence that brought out his talkativeness, or whether it was only his earnest desire to keep us locked onto topics besides her health, to keep us from fighting. It could be, though, that I have him backwards, that it is something about his serious-minded mother that makes him mild and silent.

  I unlock the upper door with a quick turn of the key, and, pushing it open, I wait for a sound, a sign, something that will give me an excuse to leave again. I entertain a fantasy of a squatter, rude and violent, or a colony of birds or bats, some infestation that has taken hold in her absence. Something to give me an excuse to turn away and call a professional. But the apartment is still and quiet apart from the sounds of kids playing basketball in the back alley, thumps and crunching gravel and shrieked obscenities in French. It has been six months since anyone has lived here, five months and three weeks since they found my sister’s body.

  I can see at a glance that everything is as it should be. The worn oriental rugs unrolled along the narrow hallways. The four gold-framed bevelled mirrors, hung across from each other at staggered intervals, reflecting the deep purple of the walls leading towards the bedroom. The lone prickly cactus on the low living room table is still sustained by a shaft of light where the drawn curtains are gaping. The horror I expected, the shakiness of stirring in the place where she died, is mostly absent. Every familiar object is a balm to my twitchy gaze. Uncle said they’d cleaned everything up, but when I asked what he meant, who had done it, he said none of Sadhana’s things had been touched. Then I gathered that it was only she who had been cleaned up and taken away.

  In Sadhana’s living room, I tie back the curtains, dump the pile of mail onto the coffee table to go through later. There’s a lot of sorting to be done, and the mail might be the easy part compared to the other projects I have come here to carry out. The clothes, the books, the furniture. The lease. As I sit on the couch, the sun through the front window is hot against my back, and I lean forward, as though pushed by the light, to rest my head in my hands. The room still teems with Sadhana: strands of black hair along the green couch cushions, the magazines stacked underneath the table in three proportional piles of fashion, art, and music. It is almost easy to expect the sound of her voice from the other room, its cackling high register and wilful low melodiousness. As an actress, her voice was the most powerful part of her instrument, and here in the apartment it was mistress and conductor, beckoning us to listen or look, to play our parts a little more broadly, or a little more to her liking.

  The subscriptions to Rolling Stone and NME were mostly for Quinn to leaf through on our visits, though Sadhana sometimes scanned them herself with an interested eye because she liked to be up-to-date on those matters, the things that people talk about at parties. She said it was the only reason she hadn’t thrown out her television, though I know she liked to watch movies, the old ones, with the kind of actresses who made legends of their own personalities. Her own CD collection never strayed far from jazz or the hypnotic lounge music that she put on when she was tidying up. The CDs. Something else to take care of.

  Housekeeping, for Sadhana, was something manic. She would get up while Quinn and I were still eating dinner, taking an abrasive yellow sponge to the dishes she’d used, donning elbow-high blue rubber gloves and a severe focus. She’d rinse and stack any takeout packages or pizza boxes, refrigerate leftovers, and wash and moisturize her hands, all while Quinn and I sat eating, making alternating and desultory attempts to win back her attention.

  “I heard honeybees are disappearing,” I had said to her last winter, putting down my fork. “Nobody knows why billions of them haven’t been returning to the hives.”

  Quinn nodded, but Sadhana made no indication she’d heard me. “That’ll be a problem for pollination,” he said. “And the food supply.” He had his face to me, but his dark eyes were on her as she flitted back and forth in front of the sink. The dining room looked into the kitchen as though through a picture window, adjoined by a high-flung shallow archway.

  Quinn raised his voice. “A lot of crops need the bees.” He waited less than a beat before changing tack. “Auntie, I wonder if you would take a look at my French assignment and check the grammar. It’s a paper on Toulouse-Lautrec.”

  Sadhana was draining the water from the sink, returning the dish soap to the cupboard below. She had cleared her plate before I’d had time to judge how much she’d eaten. “If you like,” she said. At last she came back to the table, narrowing her eyes at the rest of my buttered roll. She said, “Toulouse-Lautrec paintings always make me wish I wore stockings more often.”

  It was hard to tell which came first between us: the scrutiny or the deflections.

  There are photos in rows on the mantelpiece. A couple of the two of us, one of Mama. More of Quinn. Many of friends. I don’t know all their names, though I have lingered in front of their images often enough that they are all familiar. Sadhana kissing her friend Rachelle on the cheek. Sadhana and the women in her knitting circle. Sadhana and the cast of Hedda Gabler. Sadhana and the men and women in her dance troupe. Sadhana posing with the other organizers at a fundraising gala for refugees. Sadhana and her friend Terence on Halloween, wearing matching nurse outfits and platinum wigs. There is only one photo I don’t recognize: Sadhana and a young woman with long blonde hair, riding a merry-go-round. I run my finger along its fur of dust before tucking my hand into my pocket.

  She had so many friends, so many people in her life. I can’t understand how so many of us failed her.

  There were dozens of actors at my sister’s funeral. I knew them right off from the colours, or thought I did: bold reds, turquoise, a few shades of violet. One or two oversized handbags of canary yellow bobbing just below eye level like a meagre harvest of huge squash. I barely noticed, but if I’d thought about it, I would have put it down to flamboyance without too much deliberation. Later, though, I was told that Terence had sent around a group email requesting that
nobody wear black. Apparently he and Sadhana had planned their funerals together one evening over buckets of sake and decided they wanted colour, an infinite palette on parade, followed by an Irish-style piss-up. A number of people mentioned the email to me, probably having second thoughts about their hot-pink blazers or orange ties, but my only feeling on the matter was a sensation of being underdressed myself, that I had misgauged the occasion entirely.

  The ceremony was at a funeral home. Uncle had arranged things, though I remembered him asking me questions and me saying yes, yes, yes, that’s fine, yes. It was at the place where Sikh families from the gurdwara held their funerals, though I did not think we were going to do it quite like that, chanting prayers to ease the deathless soul out of its cycle of reincarnation. But I did know there was going to be a cremation, and I had a vague terror that we were supposed to stay for that, to utter prayers as it was happening, for I knew this was what sometimes took place, though I could not remember ever having seen it done. I would leave, that was all. I would leave if it came to that.

  Later, we would take her ashes to sprinkle them into moving water, since a soul to be reborn needs no monument. And that is what I waited for that day, for Sadhana to leave my hands. For it to be over.

  Quinn was next to me, holding my arm as we came in to take our places at the front. I was suffering from a headache that added to the sense of unreality, a buffer of moderate pain between me and the world as it normally seemed. Anything in the head seems to undo me more than it should. Touching my fingers to just above my right temple, I could feel my pulse thudding fast and hard, like a current just breaching a dam. Physical pain always startles me with its intensity, its immediacy and insistence upon being felt. The body’s broad signals. The way pain isolates and reduces and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to focus care outwards while it runs its course.

  “We’re sitting now,” Quinn said, pulling me down next to him. I looked upwards to the ceiling, its decorative wooden beams and clean spackled ceiling. Three large fans, slowly rotating, hung from the central beam running down the length of the room. It seemed that the funeral home was hot even in December. I noticed the collar of my black blouse clinging to the back of my neck, stuck like wet newsprint.

  At the front of the room, just a few metres from where we sat, there was a coffin, closed, which I tried not to look at. Before it, resting on an easel, was a large photograph of Sadhana, a colour candid of her somewhere outside, smiling in front of a backdrop of autumn trees. It seemed recent. Her left hand was up in what looked like a wave, but I had a feeling it was caught en route from pushing her hair back from her face, a typical Sadhana movement and one that she always made before pictures. It was a good photograph, though I thought Sadhana herself would have preferred one of her professional black-and-white headshots, which were perfect and stunning. I supposed it didn’t really matter. Likely someone thought a headshot was too impersonal, though I had no idea who that someone might have been. Surely not Uncle.

  I remembered Sadhana at our mother’s funeral, sitting next to me in a flowing black dress of Mama’s that looked like spun cobwebs, outlandish, with billowing sleeves and a long asymmetrical skirt cut on the bias. It was gathered at the throat like widow’s weeds, but the chest was pure lace from neck to bodice. Uncle had not yet stepped in to take charge of us, and though there were a few horrified glances, Sadhana’s outfit seemed mostly to inspire pity among Mama’s friends. We had turned into orphans, and though we were teenagers, we were really only children. Sadhana playing dress-up in a mourning costume.

  Sadhana spoke at that ceremony. She speculated about how Mama must be happy in heaven with Papa, how badly she had missed him. She recited a poem by Emily Dickinson, something about Death stopping his carriage to carry her to immortality. Sadhana’s chin quivered above the lace of the dress, her small hands flitting back and forth as she spoke. I had seen her practice elocution like this in front of the round mirror on Mama’s dresser.

  She talked about reincarnation, too, how Mama thought it was the most beautiful and logical way of looking at death. The funeral itself was held not in the temple but in the large landscaped backyard of a woman who lived up on the mountain, who’d taken private yoga lessons from Mama. There were red-winged blackbirds swooping in back of her when Sadhana said, “I’ll be looking for her now, for both of them. Wherever they are, I know they’re together.” She had everyone in tears.

  Then Quinn’s elbow was at my arm, nudging me. His cheeks were wet, and I could hear that Terence was still talking, his British-accented voice low and resonant in a theatrical declamation about Sadhana’s career.

  “Mom,” said Quinn, “pay attention.”

  The ringing of my cellphone breaks the stillness. I fumble in my purse to find it. It’s Quinn, calling from downtown. When we got off the train, he’d asked if he could head up the hill to the university, and I said yes. I could tell, once the moment arrived, that he was almost as nervous and reluctant as I was to breach the vacuum of Sadhana’s empty apartment.

  “Hello?”

  “Are you there?” he says.

  “I’m here. Can’t you hear me?”

  “No, I mean, are you there?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I’m here.”

  “And? How is it?”

  “It’s okay. It’s weird. I mean, it is and it isn’t. I don’t know. It’s hard.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “No, it’s fine. I just . . .” The temptation with my son, with his strength, is to lean on him. “I haven’t started anything yet. I haven’t been here long. Where are you?”

  “The library. There’s a ton of people here, even though classes are over.” I can hear quiet voices in the background. He has seen the campus before, lots of times, but I imagine him now wanting to cut across the paths with an experimental ownership, scope out the cafeteria, rehearse an inner mode of feeling like a university student.

  “Well, there are probably summer courses on.”

  “Yeah, it’s great. There’s a barbecue stand out here. I got a hamburger.”

  “Lucky you.” I try to evaluate whether or not I’m hungry, probe the source of the strange feeling in my stomach. I wonder if there’s still coffee in Sadhana’s freezer.

  “I know. So I’ll see you later? At Uncle’s, right?”

  “Right. Call if you get lost.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  After I click the phone closed, I put it down on the table, where it glints, smooth and alien, next to the potted cactus. Then I pluck the hairs off the couch, hold them up to my head to compare length. Sadhana’s hair was shorter than mine is now, which hits well below my shoulders. An unfashionable length for a woman in her thirties. The couch is not as clean as it could be, and as I root around I find change, small pebbles of dirt, even crumbs. She didn’t care about vacuuming or ironing, though she did both from time to time. She liked things she could put her hand to without much in between, so the tub was always scrubbed, surfaces polished, rips and worn patches mended within days. Outside of those kinds of things she was not very particular.

  She liked having everything out where she could see it, trusting her makeup and jewellery to shallow pottery dishes and trays, her best-loved shoes and clothes laid out on wide shelves and dangling from wall hooks in the bedroom. Though in her way, I imagine there was an order, a system underlying what looked like simple non-conformism on the outside.

  It is her meticulousness, along with an arts council grant, that has allowed me this six months’ reprieve. For years Sadhana was in the habit of paying her bills in advance whenever she came into money, converting paycheques into rent cheques with just enough lag time to make sure they would clear at the bank. Acting gigs and her health were both unpredictable, but my sister liked to be in control of her life, though she was never good at saving. French television commercials were her fi
nancial mainstay, though she also taught drama at a studio on the Plateau after she gave up waitressing.

  Her will was straightforward and left everything to me and Quinn. She’d never mentioned to me that she’d had it drawn up, but then, between us there were subjects we always avoided. Uncle paid for the funeral with an attitude that was almost grateful, as though he were getting off more easily than expected.

  With pen and paper from my bag I make a list, leaning back along the couch that I can still imagine clinging to her form where she curled up on the farthest side of the L shape, a tiny S of one hundred pounds. What I begin to write, though, becomes redundant, an itemization of belongings, room by room. I scratch it out and write: Everything.

  During the first weeks after Mama died, Mama’s friend Deana stepped in. Her phone number was stuck to the fridge on a stained and curling scrap of paper held by a ladybug magnet. She and Mama had a deal to take over each other’s yoga classes if either of them ever got sick. They’d had the arrangement for a year, but Mama never bothered learning a phone number off by heart. She had more important things to keep in there, she said.

  When Deana picked up the phone the day after Mama’s accident, her voice was husky with sleep even though it was three in the afternoon. I started crying.

  “Honey,” she said. “Sweetheart. Don’t cry. Who is this?” That was Deana all over. She was ready to comfort a heavy breather if he needed it.

  “I woke you up,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. It’s me, Beena.” Our names rhymed, so sometimes when I called, I said, “Deana, it’s Beena.” And then she would say, “Oh, I thought you were Tina.” Most of the yoga ladies didn’t share our corny sense of humour, but Deana was a hoot. Mama’s word.

  The news about what had happened slipped through my lips like bitter vinegar. I couldn’t hold them in, but the words accident and gone seemed to scour my mouth as they came out. The vinegar burned through my heart and watered my eyes. I swallowed and asked Deana to go to Mama’s class at the community centre. “You could tell them,” I said. “Or stay and teach it. Whatever you want.” I hated the thought of the students waiting there for Mama and getting angry with her, and then how awful they would feel later when they found out.