Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  Quinn’s face in the half-dark is like a mask, his features at rest below eyes that seem to be retreating. The curtains are a pale striped cotton, a mere filter for light, and the shadows lying long across the room are tweaking my perspective. I think of the newscast, of Ravi onscreen, his declamation on the refugee family. It is impossible not to shudder at the inadequacy of memory to render a living face. Or maybe I shudder only at his refusal to remain in the past. I wonder through what trick of sympathetic physiognomy Quinn has managed to resemble my sister, with his strong cheekbones and wide, dark eyes. His father, for all his glamour, never had those cheekbones.

  “Nope,” says Quinn. “We can’t.” He rolls over onto his back and says, “Maybe I can move into her old apartment.”

  “What?”

  “Why not? She always talked about how cheap it was. And all-inclusive, right? I don’t want to live in residence, share a room with someone.”

  “You were lucky to get a spot.”

  “Not if I don’t want to live there.”

  I try to think back to when we put in his application and made the arrangements. Was I the one pushing that through alone? Quinn was quiet, I remember, not too forthcoming, but that was at the beginning of the year, when two words together from him was something approaching chatty.

  “Well, it’s been rented, anyway, I’m sure. By now. There’ll be a new lease.”

  “So I’ve missed my chance.” There is an accusatory undertone there, and I retaliate.

  “Well, you ought to have said you wanted to get an apartment. You ought to have said something before now.” There is an expectation, in becoming a parent, of accumulating blame, but my tally is already so high that I judge it to be worth the effort of deflecting.

  Quinn turns over to face the wall. I wait for him to say something more, but before he does, I am asleep.

  The morning breaks grey and wet, with the hiss and splash of cars on slick pavement. Quinn’s bed is empty, his pyjamas neatly folded on top of his zipped suitcase. I notice my clothes from the day before heaped in a pile on the rug. Being under Uncle’s roof is bringing out the opposite of our usual habits. Even through the rain I can smell the garlic-and-onion bagels in the ovens downstairs, as I get up, make coffee, and, after downing a cup, return to the bedroom.

  I pull out the number from where I’ve folded it in my purse. When a woman picks up, I ask to speak to Libby Carr.

  The woman on the other end sounds flustered, then surprised. “That’s me.”

  “Oh my goodness,” she says next, when I tell her my name. “Just one sec.” I hear a crash and then a rustling, as though the mouthpiece is being clutched to her body. Then her bold voice again, half breathless. “Just getting some privacy,” she says. “Well, some quiet, really.”

  I wait. Then, after a beat, I say, “It’s no problem.”

  “Thanks so much for calling me back. I know it must seem a bit crazy.” Though her voice on my machine had been measured, she addresses me quickly, in rapid, almost musical cadences.

  “It was unexpected,” I say. My dread of whatever it is that she wants to say seems at odds with her ebullience. But then again, it feels like decades that I’ve been mixing up fear and hope. I hardly know what I feel.

  “It’s wonderful of you to call me,” she says. “It’s really terrific. So what do you think about getting together?”

  “Well.” I remember her strange declaration on my answering machine. There’s something else you ought to know. I wonder if there is any way she will just come out and say it, whatever it is. “In your message —”

  She keeps on. “I’ve been having a hard time making sense of everything. Sadie being gone.” I can hear her breathing. “But . . .” She stops for a moment, and I can hear noises in the background at her end, a child talking. “I did offer my condolences at the funeral, but you probably don’t remember. I’m not sure I even introduced myself.”

  Stretching out my legs from where I sit on my old bed, I knead my toes into the pile of the brown and orange carpet. A monarch butterfly pattern, a giant shag square that used to be in Mama’s bedroom, left in here as a compromise when neither Sadhana nor I could agree who should have it. I am still in my bathrobe. I’ve chosen to dive into what I would have preferred to put off. Leaning forward, I rest my elbows on my knees.

  I do not remember a Libby. There was a man with thick, steely hair and a wool coat, who pressed his pity into my arm with a leather glove. A group of women in quick succession whom I thought might be members of Sadhana’s knitting group, albeit with radically evolved haircuts and outfits. A blonde woman with waist-length ringlets who told me she’d sent an arrangement of pussy willows. She had been Juliet in a dance show that Sadhana and I had enjoyed, had mentioned for weeks afterwards in appreciation of the lean, muscular body of the male lead. Romeo of the ropy arms. I hadn’t realized Sadhana even knew her. There was a soft handshake, too, from a young man with rubber plugs in his earlobes who looked as if he had been crying. But I cannot recall a single name, even if one was ever spoken.

  “You know, I can’t say I remember much about anyone I met that day. But thank you for coming. I’m sure Sadhana — well . . .” I break off. No need to speak for the dead. “Anyway.” It seems clear that this woman wants to speak in person, and I feel ungracious declining. “Um, sure. Okay, let’s meet.”

  “Wonderful,” says Libby. She sounds both eager and exultant. “That’s great. So, when’s good for you? You live in Ottawa, right?”

  “I do, but I’m here now. For the weekend.”

  “Aha, I see the area code.” I hear a tapping, like a fingernail against a call-display screen. “You’re in Montreal. That’s perfect. I’m free today, if you are.”

  “I’m clearing out her place, actually,” I say. “Finally. I’ve sort of been postponing it.”

  “Oh, that must be hard.” Her voice thickens. “I’m sorry. God.”

  I close my eyes. Some emotion bristles between us on the line like static, but I can’t tell if it is grief or sympathy. I let her suggest a time and place.

  “I’ll see you then,” I say, scarcely believing it, and after bidding her goodbye, hang up.

  I am almost late to meet her. After waiting around for Quinn to return to the apartment, I finally give up, leaving him a note on the kitchen table. Then I head in the direction of Sadhana’s place, stopping for a salad and a slice of quiche at a restaurant we’d often dined at. A block farther, when I pass a post office, I stop in to buy scissors and some rolls of packing tape. At every intersection, I notice, there are campaign posters affixed to telephone poles, and out of curiosity, I check along both main streets that Quinn may have taken. I count six different political parties, but I see no signs for Ravi.

  At last, noting the time, I decide to take the long way around the park to meet Libby rather than get started with everything at Sadhana’s. Although the café is only a few blocks from my sister’s apartment, I somehow find myself almost out of breath by the time I get there, anticipation lodged like a stitch in my side.

  “Beena! Hey,” she calls, catching sight of me. Clad in loose jeans and a thin grey shirt, Libby Carr is standing behind a table laden with a pitcher of sangria and two wine glasses. She has her hand cupped over her eyes, watching for me against the dazzle of the afternoon sun. She’d described herself as “a skinny blonde with bad shoes.” When I told her that didn’t narrow it down much, she said she’d seen photos of me and not to worry. But I could have guessed who she was. Apart from her expectant posture, she has a complex, interrogative gaze and a long, pretty face tapering to a decisive chin. She looks like someone Sadhana would be friends with. Maybe even the girl from the photograph on the merry-go-round.

  I walk to her quickly, aware of people’s eyes on us after Libby’s loud greeting. She is perhaps thirty, with dirty blonde hair that hangs well past her armpits. She gives
the impression of height but sits before I can compare. Once I’m seated, she sort of laughs, then reaches out across the table for my hand and shakes it with what I think of as an American kind of vigour, a physical friendliness. I am aware of a tingling in my elbow.

  “I’m so glad you decided to come,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind that I ordered for us. The waitress seemed totally frazzled, and I thought I’d better get something. But if you want something else, go ahead. I can finish this myself.” She laughs again, a little loudly. There is a boldness to her voice that seems self-consciously reined in, possibly for my benefit. A hurricane losing strength over land. “I’m kidding, I think.” It occurs to me she might be nervous.

  “This is fine, thanks.” I draw my chair in closer to the wrought-iron table. The café is popular and we are surrounded on all sides by other patrons, those of us unfortunate enough to be only two people together all relegated to the row of smaller tables placed down the middle length of the patio. Waitresses in black aprons stream past on either side. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  “No, you’re perfect. You’re right on time. I got here early.” Libby takes hold of the two plastic stir sticks and swirls them in the pitcher, looking at me. Slices of orange and lime bob in the drink. “Oh wow, it’s so freaky meeting people’s siblings,” she says. “Seeing resemblances.”

  “Sure.” I hope she doesn’t say anything about whether or not I look like Sadhana. The comparisons have always struck me as unflattering, even when that hasn’t been the intention.

  “Good genes,” is all she says, cocking her head to evaluate. “Both of you.” She shakes her head then, waves her hand. “Oh god, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “No, I — it’s okay.” In a blink, an image comes to me of Sadhana, unmoving on the floor of her kitchen, and a quiver seizes my back. The vision I’d dreaded at her apartment has arrived without warning. I try to keep my eyes trained on Libby’s sober face.

  “I’ve been having a hard time these past six months,” she is saying, pouring sangria into a glass for me. She holds the stir sticks in a V, straining out the fruit, then in a neat motion nudges in a few slices with barely a splash. “I’ve been wanting to call you for a long time, actually, but I had to sort of work up the nerve. I did call you once or twice before she died, but I hung up when you answered the phone.”

  “You did?” I feel as if I must have misheard something. Libby is talking mostly into her glass. “Why?”

  “Yeah,” she says, as though I haven’t asked. The calls, I guess, were to do with whatever it is she wants to tell me. She goes on, “Sadie and I were very close.”

  I let the statement alone to see how it fills up, as Libby presses her lips together, and her eyelids flicker rapidly as I try to read her. There is a subtle defensiveness in her expression I can’t quite account for. “I miss her, too,” I say at last. “And I’m glad you left me that message. I needed a push to come back here to pack up her things.”

  “That must be hard.”

  “It isn’t easy.” An understatement, though I know now it’s not the apartment, but me who’s haunted. It will be a matter of throwing myself into the job without pausing to think. I take a long sip of the sangria and, over the rim of the glass, observe Libby looking miserable. I feel a vague pressure to say something. “So how did you meet my sister?”

  Libby makes an effort to smile. “Through theatre stuff. I do lighting.”

  “For a living?”

  She nods. “It’s kind of amazing. I did a college diploma in it when I first came here because it was subsidized and it seemed artistic, but now I love it. I get to be around creative people all the time, and my little one, Mouse, is usually able to tag along.”

  “Mouse?”

  “Christiane, my daughter. Somehow her given name hasn’t quite stuck.”

  “Ah.” I know so little about this woman, or what she hopes to accomplish by getting to know me. I had imagined a clearer direction to our conversation. “And where were you before Montreal?”

  “Hearst,” she says. “Way up north. It’s in Ontario, but most of the town is French. It’s a small town, so that was an adjustment, but the language thing was an easy transition, anyway.”

  “You speak French?”

  She nods. “My husband is francophone. My ex.” She shifts in her seat as she crosses one leg over the other. I see the shoes that she mocked on the phone, just regular black canvas sneakers with white laces. “Though he’s bad news. A very bad dude, in the end. He’s why I left.”

  “Good for you.” I have a bizarre moment of envy. Better to be the one who leaves than gets left behind. I wonder what Quinn would think of me if leaving Ravi was a choice I had made for us.

  “It’s too bad, in a way, because his family is nice. But Mouse is really thriving here. She’s seven and a half. Right now she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up. That or a ballerina.” Her fingers drum the edge of the table as her eyes invite me to laugh along with her. I calculate that Libby must have married young, in her early twenties at the latest. “Let me top you up,” she says then, gesturing with the pitcher. I slide my glass across the table. Libby says as she pours, “What was Sadhana like as a little girl?”

  I remember Sadhana and me as children, performing a routine in Mama’s gypsy skirts, a strange dance-pantomime hybrid we had made up to the song “Penny Lane.” I couldn’t stop tripping over my hem, but Sadhana had mastered the knack of keeping the skirt spinning out, away from her toes. Even before she became a perfectionist, she was perfect.

  “She was just like you might imagine,” I say. “Fun, graceful. Though maybe less opinionated back then.”

  Tears spring to Libby’s eyes, and she bows her head in a gesture that seems ancient and marked by grief. In a spontaneous move that takes me by surprise, I cover her hand with mine, but after a moment, she pulls hers away, holding her sleeve up to her eyes. When she takes it down, it is soaked. “I’m sorry. I thought I was ready for this.”

  “Oh,” I say, startled. “But,” I hesitate. “Wasn’t there something you wanted to tell me?”

  She bobs her head in a jerky nod. “Maybe another time?” Her glass clinks against the iron of the table as she sets it down. “Next time.”

  “I guess so,” I say. “Yes, if you like.”

  “Thanks. I really am sorry about this.” Libby motions for the bill, and once we have paid, she says she has to pick up her daughter from school.

  “Mouse is my reason for getting up in the morning,” she says, calmer now as we walk together to the corner. “My absolute all.”

  Beside Libby on the sidewalk, I find we are more or less the same height. She strolls with her hands in her pockets and gives me a two-fingered salute when we part ways. “Good luck,” she says, which seems vague.

  “You too.”

  Then, “Talk to you soon.” And before I can reply, Libby crosses the street as the light turns green and is out of earshot, loping up the hill.

  Watching her diminishing figure, I feel myself deflate. Whatever she wants to tell me, I badly want to know. Whatever Sadhana said or did, Libby thinks it important, and my curiosity is piqued even as I anticipate disappointment. I’d never known my sister to confide in other people with any regularity. Beyond the pages of her diary, I’m not sure anyone was truly her confidante.

  Her diary. It is a recollection to make me stop still. My eyes widen and water in the glare of the afternoon sun, and when I blink, I register something more than a mere physical relief. If I can find it — if she was still writing in it — it might have something to tell me. The truth of what happened in those last few days might be recorded there, or maybe even other, bigger truths. Whether she was sick again, or not. Whether she was happy. Whether she had spent most of her life really wanting to die and was holding off only for my sake. Whether she really did b
lame me for everything that had gone wrong. For leaving. For Mama.

  I plod north towards St. Viateur Street with renewed resolve, the ranks of grey walk-ups on my left with their hand-lettered garden-fence signs reading Pas de bicyclettes! seeming like a cartoon backdrop, a small stretch of background spliced together on a reel stretching up to the horizon, a black dog and an old woman frowning into the sun appearing at paced intervals as I pass. Or so it seems. I try to blink away the tiredness. There is something about the angle of the light on the land that gives everything a hallucinatory shimmer. I check the street sign at the corner to make sure I haven’t walked too far.

  The liquor store surrenders a lucky yield of empty boxes, their former contents enough to flatten a fleet on leave for a week. I carry them as a tower, nestled one in the other, my arms looped beneath, fingers locked like a foothold at the bottom of a cheerleading tower. The top of the pile is about level with my head, and everyone I pass turns to give me a look, some sympathetic, some almost envious, as though my spectacle has reminded them that they ought to begin packing.

  Less than three weeks until Moving Day. Mama always said it was the separatists who set things up this way, the lease system, everyone moving on the first of July and too busy to give a crap about Canada. A paraphrase, of course. But that isn’t true, though I can no longer remember how it is supposed to have come about. Such a difference here from Ottawa on the first of July, that sea of red and white, the city’s mild stuffiness replaced for one day with the brash pride of football hooliganism. It’s cheery enough there until the drunkenness of the wee hours, post-fireworks. Here it’s just the best day of the year to find a free couch.