Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  Not his fault, but mine. He would probably describe that as something he already knows. He walks a few paces away and lifts up one end of the picnic table, experimentally, before dropping it again to the ground.

  “So she went looking for him anyway?” His face betrays nothing about whether he has been doing the same. I suppose I can only assume that he has.

  “She found him,” I say. “And met with him. And I met with him, too. I wanted to talk about Sadhana.”

  The anger I’m expecting doesn’t rise up to greet me. Maybe it will come later. It is possible I only think I am a part of this thing between them, or that I am a conduit but not a gear in the machine. A couple with a dog passes close by, high on conversation but falling silent as they come near. We stand facing the mountain. Around the tall neon cross at its summit is an emanating glow, a halo caused by the heat of the light.

  Quinn shifts his weight, hands in his pockets. “Did he ask about me?”

  The lie is out of my mouth before I catch myself. Quinn’s relationship with his father, I am almost prepared to concede, is his own business. I might want to stand out of the way, but I am under no obligation to clear the path.

  “No, he didn’t, Quinn. Not once.”

  As planned, Libby comes to meet me at Sadhana’s apartment for the final cleaning. At the top of the stairs she cries out. Her hand feels for my arm and she hides her face in the crinkled cotton of my sleeve.

  “This is hard, isn’t it,” she says. And then, “I want it to be hard.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She answers by stepping past me in sure strides to the kitchen. “Let’s get down to it.”

  Libby moves through the apartment with a natural efficiency. She takes charge of half of the supplies and more than two-thirds of the territory, bending and reaching to pockets of dirt beyond my imagining, wielding herself against baseboards and light fixtures. She fills a bucket with suds and starts splashing around the string mop after I have used the broom to not much more effect than a prop in a dreamy Cinderella impression. After forty-five minutes, Libby’s hands are already a bright, scrubbed red. I clean the bathroom, as penance, with a large pair of rubber gloves.

  “I feel like I’ve taken advantage of you,” I say. “You’re a miracle worker in here.” I feel unworthy of all the help pressed on me the past few days.

  “Nonsense.”

  When Libby progresses to the feather duster, her intensity abates and I sense the possibility for conversation. My failure to locate Sadhana’s diary leaves Libby as my last chance. My only hope of finding out what was going on with my sister. At any rate, I have nothing left to lose.

  “Did Sadhana ever talk to you about me and Quinn?”

  “Of course. Not your business, but the fact of you. I know how close you were. And she was so proud of Quinn.”

  “She was, yeah.”

  “You’ll be leaving soon, won’t you, now that this is done?” Libby straightens up, and in the full sunlight through the window, now stripped of its curtains, I can see faint lines around her eyes when she smiles. She wears no makeup and no jewellery. “I’m going to be sorry to see you go.”

  “I’m leaving the day after the demonstration.”

  We work in silence for a while. By way of the sun and the lemon scent of the cleaning spray, everything seems fresh and golden. When I close my eyes, all I see is yellow. When I open them, I see the light gleaming along the length of the refinished pine floors of which my sister had been so proud.

  “Those last few weeks,” I say. “I don’t know if you know, but we weren’t talking.”

  Libby puts down the duster and looks at me.

  “I guess I just want to know if she was happy. Or if she was sick.”

  Libby stands where the kitchen table used to be and looks as if she is about to say something. Then she steps to the window sill and peers out, placing both hands, palms down, on the lacquered wooden surface.

  “I think,” she says, ducking her head back in, “we should make sure to sweep the front stairs as well as the balcony.” She exits to the balcony, as though literally sidestepping my queries.

  “Libby,” I call out, loud enough for her to hear. “Please.”

  She comes back in, looking chastened, and empties the dustpan into the garbage. Tracing her gaze to the floor, I realize that it is her reluctance to talk about herself that strikes me as familiar. Her deflections. She is maybe a little bit like me. Or at least like the way Sadhana said I was.

  “I’m trying,” says Libby, leaning the broom against the counter. She pulls one of the leftover chairs away from the wall and places it some distance away, nearer the door. As she bends to sit, I see her for one moment without the verve that seemed to be at the root of getting in touch with me. Her hair swings back over her shoulders like straw, and she looks as white and dry and worn as a piece of shell on a beach. Seated, she finally turns to me again. “Okay,” she says. “You know we loved each other.”

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “You still don’t believe me.”

  “Why not? We had a lot of secrets from each other.”

  “Well, she had secrets from me, too.” Libby brings up her legs and clutches her knees with her hands. “I couldn’t stand it.” She closes her eyes, head just barely shaking back and forth. “You know, I had an extra key to her apartment ever since she locked herself out one weekend.”

  “All right,” I say. I don’t want to risk interrupting her with questions. I lean back against the fridge as unobtrusively as I can.

  She says, as if this explains things: “I saw Sadie having dinner with Ravi Patel one night.” There is a bitter edge to her voice that I recognize. Jealousy.

  “I saw them having dinner,” she says again, swallowing. “And I asked her about it and she lied. Then I saw another date with him written down in her planner. Everything between us was so confusing. And I worried that she was sick, too, maybe. She was so thin.” She shakes her head. “I had no idea, really.”

  I say nothing. The refrigerator is warm against my back. It feels so hot in the apartment that I look to the windows, but they have all already been flung open.

  “She didn’t like it when I got insecure,” says Libby, looking miserable, “so I didn’t want to bring it up. I even tried to call you once or twice, last fall, to ask — well, I don’t know what exactly. To see what you knew about him. Before all this. I don’t know what I was thinking. But her diary was going to tell me what was going on.” She draws a shaky breath. “I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you. This whole time.”

  “What?” My knees quake as though they’ve already taken on the burden of what’s to come. “Wait,” I say. I pull a second chair out from the wall and sit down opposite her.

  Sadhana, Libby says, had tickets to a play downtown. “She invited me first, to this thing called Juniper Berries, and I said no. I already had a plan to let myself into her apartment to take a peek at her diary. She told me she was going to ask her friend Rachelle.”

  I picture the scene as she describes it. Libby in a panic, mistaking Ravi for a rival. Libby in her black exercise clothes. And Mouse could be left alone at home for the length of an average jog. “I never go for that long,” says Libby, as though this is the failure requiring expiation. “And she knows what to do in case of trouble.”

  Libby coming up the front stairs, silent in her running shoes. Unlocking the second door and leaving it standing open. On the kitchen table, a loaf of bread, and beside it, a bottle of perfume and a notebook. The diary.

  “Hold on,” I say.

  “It was too dark to really read anything,” says Libby. “The lights were mostly off, I think.”

  Bending her head over the notebook, Libby opened it to the last few pages. Then, picking up the perfume, she sniffed it and dabbed some on. Her shirt was sticking to her lower back
as she peered at the diary in the semi-­darkness, and a trickle of sweat soaked into the waistband of her underwear. It was too warm inside the apartment for all her thermal winter sportswear. It was too warm and humid altogether, Libby realized. Something was wrong. Sadhana always turned the heat down before she left the apartment to save money.

  “She was still home,” says Libby. “In the shower.”

  The pair of tickets, Libby found out later, had been given away to some friends of Sadhana’s, a married couple. “She told them she was too tired to go,” says Libby. “Can you believe that?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  Behind her, Libby says, there was a gasp and a thump.

  “And that was all.”

  Her face starting to twist and blotch, Libby tilts her head to one side. I watch her and feel cold. The coldness gives me a strong, lonely feeling.

  “What do you mean?” I say.

  “She was here, in the apartment, Beena. I scared her to death.”

  Why I suddenly think of Sadhana flying across the stage in a red leotard, arms stretched aloft in fifth position, I can’t say. When she did a grand jeté, it was as though she inhabited every plane at once. The world, as it so often did, seemed to bend to the sheer will made manifest in her body.

  “Why didn’t you help her?”

  Libby’s lips tremble. “Why didn’t she know it was me? It was dark, but still . . . she should have known.” Her voice, for once, is tiny. “It was only me.”

  “But why didn’t you call an ambulance?” I can feel my own tears coming. “Why didn’t you tell someone?”

  “She was dead, Beena,” says Libby. “Her eyes were open. She dropped dead. It isn’t just an expression.” With a terrible, choking sob, she rises from her chair and approaches mine, crumpling at my feet. Her fingers clutch at my sleeve as she weeps apologies I can barely comprehend. She looks terrified.

  I close my eyes and think of CPR or the paddles that can zap a person back to life, as if dying might be a kind of running out of batteries, something that can be reversed if the current is just turned back on quickly enough. Then I feel the coldness again, and once I grab hold of it, it seems like the one strong thing floating in the dark sea of Libby’s confession.

  I push her hands off me. “Do you know how long she was left here?” My sister, disintegrating on her own floor.

  “I know it took a couple of days,” says Libby, pressing her eyes closed.

  “A week. It was a week.” In a week, a body begins to bloat. And smell. It was the downstairs neighbour who called the landlord in the end. I loathe the pettiness of knowing how Sadhana would have hated that.

  Libby moans and rubs her nose with the heel of her hand, then wipes her palm on her jeans. “I thought someone would find her.” Her voice is hiccupy. “I knew it was too late, so I grabbed everything I’d touched and ran. I would have to explain, and there was just no way to do it.” Threads of gold light up in her hair as she moves her head. The sun-soaked kitchen feels like a different place entirely from the scene of fear and death she’s describing. “But someone would find her. She had so many friends.” Libby’s voice is pleading, and she gulps air like it might be running out. “She had you, Beena.”

  “The diary,” I say, ignoring this. “What happened to it?”

  “It’s gone.” Her knee twitches and squeaks as it rubs against the linoleum. “I threw it out.”

  It may be that she is bent as a supplicant in the very spot where Sadhana fell. I wish she would get up.

  Finding my voice, I vacate my seat with shaky legs.

  “Get up,” I say. “And get out.”

  There is no redress to Libby’s story. There is not even a way to prove she was there. But why it should be proven or who should be told or what should happen now is not something I can make sense of anyway. I am relieved that she obeyed me and left without another word. If she’d kept talking, I’d have to move on to the next thought, the next moment.

  On my way home, I cross paths with Quinn in the park. The weather has changed. It is raining again, a warm drizzle.

  “Small world, stranger,” I call out to him, and he looks up, startled. I take a step closer and flash a smile that must be ghastly.

  Quinn is carrying an unopened umbrella. “Hi. Wow. Do you have a tracking chip on me or something?” He swings around the umbrella by a string attached to its handle. “Heading back to Uncle’s?”

  “Yes. Walk with me?”

  He nods. We skirt the opposite side of the park from where we walked the night before, past the playground and a wading pool.

  “I used to bring you here when you were little,” I say.

  “I know.”

  Of Libby’s story, I am determined to say nothing to Quinn. Just now I am less angry with her than I would have guessed, though I feel as sad and sorry as if I were the one in her place. Between our mutual failures, it seems we were unwitting collaborators in Sadhana’s death.

  “So do you remember the thing we saw on the news?” I say instead. “About the family in the church? The tribunal is going to make a decision tomorrow, and there’s going to be a demonstration.” I slow our pace so that I can look at him while we talk. “Do you want to come?”

  “I’m going already,” says Quinn. “Caro wants me to help her film it. Maybe hold a microphone or something. She knows some of the people who are organizing everything.” He looks anxious and, if I’m not mistaken, guilty. I wonder if he is feeling some shame of privilege, the luck he owes to where he happened to be born.

  “Great,” I say. “I hope it will make a difference.” The meeting with the Essaid family has stayed with me, as well as the love I have read into their faces. I wonder if there is any chance that Ravi will yield to my threats and throw his support behind them.

  “I hope so, too.”

  As we near the swing set, Quinn cuts off the path and collapses into one of the swings. “So I called him up,” he says next. He makes an upside-down V with his sneakers. “My father.”

  “You did.”

  “We got together this morning. Caro came, too, though he didn’t like that.” Quinn looks over at me, and there is a question in his eyes. “Actually, he thought you sent me.”

  “I see.”

  There is a small grey cloud hanging over the park, clear sky darkening beyond it in the distance. The rain is holding to a drizzle, but my shirt is wet through across the shoulders. There is no telling what Ravi might have said to Quinn about me. At this point, I’m not sure which worries me more: lies or the truth. More likely, some tricky combination. Politician-speak. I say nothing.

  “He seemed concerned you were going to tell his wife or something.”

  “The newspapers, actually.”

  Quinn looks bewildered, and I’m about to break into an explanation of the point of the whole thing, the deal I thought I’d struck to help the Essaids, but he heads me off.

  “You can’t,” he says.

  “Why not?”

  “I promised we wouldn’t say anything for now. He wants a relationship, when the time is right.”

  “Oh, Quinn.”

  “No.” He gets up and steps through the mud of the swing set pit back to the path. “You’re out of this now.”

  The day of the demonstration breaks overcast, the kitchen curtains pulling back to reveal a sky the colour of murky dishwater. I make coffee and Quinn and I sit quietly drinking it, eyes down into our cups.

  “I’m kind of excited,” he says. Quinn is trying to make amends by being talkative and by making certain we don’t discuss Ravi. “I’ve never been to something like this before.”

  “Be careful,” I say. “There might be some unpredictable people in attendance.” But it is the kind of concern that ebbs with disclosure. Quinn rolls his eyes as though I am being crazy.
/>
  “I’m serious.” As the words leave my mouth, I remember scoffing at the same caution when it was counselled by Evan.

  “I know.”

  “If you see a police officer,” I say, “you run the other way.”

  “Except your boyfriend.”

  The word makes me flinch. “Right.”

  This morning he is drinking his coffee black, his lips recoiling after every sip.

  “Are you going with Caro?”

  “Meeting her. She’s probably already heading over with her video camera and three extra memory cards.”

  “Great,” I say. “I’ll see you there.” Before the demonstration, Quinn is working a short shift down at the shop, where Uncle is waiting to train him on the cash register. As for Quinn working as a bagel boy, I’ve shelved my objections for now. I’ll need to save them for dealing with Ravi, if some relationship develops there. Quinn watches me as I let myself out.

  “Don’t get arrested,” I say.

  “I’ll try.” And then, seeing my face: “I won’t.”

  The government building housing the Department of Immigration is faced by a small park the size of a single city block. With eight small maples, six flowerboxes, and a large Victorian iron fountain, it is more of an idea of a park than an actual green space. There are benches and picnic tables nailed down at intervals across the concrete square that surrounds one weedy stretch of grass. It is a place where the employees can take their lunch and feel some relief.

  When I finally arrive, I see that a sizeable crowd has already gathered. There is a clown wearing flippers handing out balloons. She doesn’t speak but pulls faces and putters a squat little circle dance around the children and parents who approach, her arms pumping like a runner. A young man in fatigues is helping Cherise dish out free samosas and spicy rice and beans to a long lineup. And all around me, among the people eating and carrying signs, are people distributing leaflets to passersby and employees from the adjoining office towers.

  I spot Caro standing on the end of one of the benches, wielding her video camera. Quinn is at her side, holding a microphone attached to what looks like a boom rigged out of an extendable curtain rod. I catch his eye across the grass. The air is full of energy and chatter, the city smell of exhaust, and the bite of cooked green chilies. I wave and he waves back. Whatever happened between him and Ravi, Quinn seems intact. I wonder if they hugged. What on earth they might have said.