Breakfast, toothbrush, winter coat, metro pass. She lived in Verdun, which might or might not technically be part of Montreal at the moment, it was hard to remember. Politics was another thing that didn’t interest her. In any case, the geography never changed even if the borough boundaries did, so it was always thirty-five minutes by metro to the office, unless there was a shutdown and she had to take the bus instead. She left at the same time every day and always timed it so that she arrived just as the train pulled in. Her co-workers complained about their commutes, but Nadia enjoyed hers: most of the time it gave her half an hour or so to sit peacefully and read. She liked old books with leather covers that she could bring close to her face and smell, books by people who were long dead and whom she would never have to change or kill, books where people fell in love without terrible consequences.
The train came into the station in a swirl of newspapers and dust. Nadia shuffled forward with the rest of the morning crowd, and for once there was actually a seat free within reach. She sat gratefully, undoing the top of her coat, and buried her face in Indian Love Poems of Lawrence Hope, glad not to have to face the world just yet.
Just past Beaudry Station she felt it beginning, the first stirrings of restlessness. She sighed and put her book down. Tall black guy with a cane, reading the paper at the far end of the car, sandwiched between the window and a tiny red-haired teenager swathed in an enormous wool scarf. Probably her, Nadia decided. She occasionally made bets with herself who the other target would be, although she was less often right than she would have liked. She focused on him almost by rote; she was tired.
The push felt odd, as though there were an echo. It seemed to work, though, as a gust of wind from the opening doors at Papineau blew the man’s paper down the car into another passenger’s lap. Not the redhead, then, Nadia thought with a mental shrug.
She picked up her book, not wanting to see the death, though likely it wouldn’t happen here anyway. She couldn’t recall a time when the lovers ever saw their dead. For them the connection was always obscured; perhaps it had to be.
The words swam before Nadia’s eyes. There was a prickling in the back of her skull, and with irritation she realized it was happening again already. They had never come this close together before, and her head was already pounding. She closed her book, resisting the urge to slam the covers, and looked around. The diminutive redhead, this time, whose gaze was fixed on the opposite wall with the boredom of the habitual commuter. Nadia concentrated and pushed — and, at the same time, something pulled.
The red-haired girl’s head jerked up, and she locked eyes with Nadia, who sat stunned. The girl yanked her scarf down from her face, stalked over to Nadia’s seat, and said, in tones of mingled amusement and disgust: “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
The metro raced away into the tunnel, a blind worm retracing its tracks into a curving burrow. Nadia and her new acquaintance stood on the Radisson Station platform, studying each other like strange cats. Nadia was the taller by 25 centimetres or more, even with her habitual stoop, and she felt awkward looking down to meet the other’s gaze. The girl had taken off her scarf to reveal farmgirl braids tied with ratty scraps of denim and green eyes that glared at Nadia out of a constellation of freckles. The whole effect would have been adorable if her expression hadn’t been so fierce.
“I have to get to work,” Nadia said weakly at last. “I work here. I mean, near here. I’ll be late.” But she didn’t move.
“Wren,” the other said.
“Sorry?”
“My name’s Wren,” the girl clarified. “Wren Summerstars Duplessis. Any stupid jokes you’re tempted to make, you can get them out of your system now.”
“I wasn’t,” Nadia protested. “Sorry, I’m Nadia. Nadia Kislowicz. I’m a secretary.”
“That sucks.” Wren looked her up and down, taking in Nadia’s worn coat and boots, the efficient ponytail that was her usual work hairstyle and the book she still clutched in one hand. “I don’t get it,” Wren said. “Why you?”
“Sorry?” Nadia repeated.
“You know, I have a girlfriend. I wasn’t looking for someone. Not as such. And you’re definitely not my type.” Wren sighed. “Doesn’t matter, though, does it? The mojo may not make sense, but it’s never made a mistake yet that I’ve seen, and that means there is some reason that you and I are perfect for each other. And I can only think of one.”
“You can do it, too,” Nadia said. There was no real need to say it, they’d both known inside the train, but somehow she felt like the words mattered.
“Bingo.” Wren glanced up and down the platform. “Well, I don’t see anybody about to be run over. Shall we head up to street level before the powers-that-be start getting antsy?”
“Don’t joke about that,” Nadia snapped. In truth, she’d been keeping an eye out as well. It wasn’t usually more than a few minutes between the meeting and the death.
“Whatever.” Wren grinned suddenly, her whole face folding into a maze of laugh lines. “Hey, I’m sorry. I really am. I don’t mean to come across all, you know, callous and stuff. This is just kind of a shock.”
Despite herself, Nadia smiled. “Likewise.”
“So do you think you can skive off work today or something?” Wren persisted. “I mean, I can skip out, I’m doing my best to get fired right now anyways, but you look kind of, you know, professional.”
“How old are you?” Nadia asked suddenly.
“Nineteen. And you’re, what, thirty-five?”
“Twenty-eight.” Nadia thought she should be offended, but she was used to people thinking she was older, and it rarely seemed worth getting angry over. “I’ve been doing this maybe ten, eleven years. You?”
“Three years.” Wren took Nadia’s arm and pulled her a few steps toward the payphone at the end of the platform. “So, come on, call in sick. We’ll go somewhere and talk.”
“I really can’t,” Nadia said, disentangling herself. “I’m behind on this week’s filing as it is, I can’t just skip work for no reason—”
“Right,” Wren said after a moment. “Got it.” She looked so disappointed that Nadia started to apologize, but Wren waved her off. “No, seriously, I get it. You’re not interested. That’s cool. Listen, let me give you my coordinates, and then I’ll bug off, alright? You call if you feel like calling.”
“It’s not that you don’t seem … nice—” Nadia started to say.
“It’s okay,” Wren said. “Don’t worry about it.” She rummaged in the deep pockets of her coat and found a stub of pencil and a grocery receipt to write on. “Call if you want. Good luck.”
After that there was a lull for several days, as though Nadia’s powers had spent themselves in self-indulgence. No-one died. The weekend passed, and she went back to work on Monday, half wondering if she would see Wren in the train again. She didn’t, and didn’t really expect to. Connections only happen once, she thought. Love at first sight — but it was hardly that, now or ever. Most of the time, the people she caused to meet were friendly at best, at the beginning. They had the chance to be more, though. That was all she gave them, that chance. So give it to yourself, Nadia, why don’t you?
It was guilt as much as anything that finally made her call. She woke up before sunrise from one of her usual nightmares, the faces of the dead blurring in and out of focus before her, and among them was someone whose image would not come clear but who she knew was the one who had died that morning in the metro. She had seen only one death that day, and she thought it must have been linked to the man with the cane; but she and Wren had met, and there should have been two. Just because she hadn’t seen it didn’t mean there hadn’t been a death; by all her experience, there must have been. It wasn’t fair to that person, whoever they were, to throw away what they’d died for. Even if it made no sense.
A male voi
ce answered the phone. “Yeah, hi?”
“Is Wren there?” Nadia asked.
“Hang on. Hey, Brian, where’s Stubby? No, cause there’s somebody on the phone is all. Huh? Lemme ask. Hey, are you the cops?”
It took Nadia a moment to realize she was being addressed. “Um, no. I’m Nadia. Wren knows me.”
“Oh, okay. Jesus, Brian, you’re so paranoid. This is exactly why Sarah dumped you, you know that? Dumbass. Is it the cops? Like they’d tell you if they — no, they don’t have to tell you, shut up. No, that’s just on TV. Anyways, I thought you—”
“Hi?” Wren’s voice broke in. “I got it, Dave.”
“I thought you had a girlfriend?” Nadia asked, the first thing that came to her mind.
“Nadia! Yeah, but she doesn’t live here, just these two losers. Hey, so what’s up?”
“Do you want to meet?” Nadia asked all in a rush, before she lost her nerve.
“Sure. Where at? I’d ask you over, but Dave and Brian are here and it’s kind of a small apartment. Where do you live?”
“Verdun,” Nadia answered. “You?”
“Downtown. Here, come meet me, there’s a Timmy’s at Sherbrooke and University, it’s a good place to chat.”
All Nadia’s usual instincts screamed against going outside unnecessarily, but she had to, she knew it, at least this once. Just to make it worth it. Just to make sure. She kept repeating that to herself, and the rhythm of the words carried her into the metro and out again in one breathless swoop, and she was standing just inside the door of the Tim Horton’s while bundled patrons squeezed irritably past her, and all her attention was fixed on the redhead looking at her over her coffee mug with a knowing grin. “Hi,” Wren said. “You came.”
They had breakfast there and then lunch and dinner, talking as though all the words in the world would pour out of them at once, and the crowd ebbed and flowed around them, a hundred coffee-fuelled dramas in a bizarrely private public space. The air outside was bright with snow, and the last metro of the night left without them. Sometime between three and four in the morning, Wren pulled out her cellphone and broke up with her girlfriend by voicemail. Nadia watched with an eyebrow raised, a feat that raised a fit of giggles from Wren as she tried to emulate it. “That doesn’t change anything, you know,” Nadia said.
“Wasn’t supposed to,” Wren said.
Nadia shook her head. “You’re something else, you know that? Do you do everything on the spur of the moment?”
“Of course not,” Wren said haughtily. “I’m a very thoughtful person.” She stretched, her shoulder blades cracking. Crumbs of toasted bagel clung to the elbows of her sweater. “But what we are is impulsive, you know, Nadia. We don’t know any of these people—” She started to gesture around them at the crowded tables. The coffee shop was filled with students hunched over laptops, bus drivers and police officers coming off the night shift, homeless men delaying their return to the snowy streets, all of them oblivious. Nadia caught Wren’s wrist.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t spoil it.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Wren protested. “I was just saying. We don’t know them, we don’t know anything about them, we don’t know if they deserve the chances we give them—”
“Or whether the ones that die deserve to live,” Nadia said softly. She picked up the empty paper cup in front of her and began absently shredding it. Her side of the table was already littered with the debris of her fidgeting.
“You can’t think about that,” Wren said, taking the cup from her hands and setting it firmly out of reach. “You’ll go crazy.”
“I have to think about it,” Nadia answered. “Someone does.”
“No, you don’t,” Wren insisted, leaning forward. Her braids dipped perilously close to the surface of her coffee, and she brushed them back over her shoulder. “You told me you tried to stop doing it, once. So did I, and I don’t think we can, or should. So what’s the good of feeling guilty? It’s just self-indulgence.”
“That’s awfully cold,” Nadia said.
Wren shrugged exaggeratedly. “People die by the dozens every day in this city. You can’t bleed for all of them.” But the words sounded too much like bravado, and Nadia looked at Wren with pity for the first time. She suddenly seemed so much younger than she was. Just wait, Nadia thought but could not say. It grinds you down, year after year, until one day you realize you’ve lost any chance for a life. And then, But she hasn’t, yet. And I never had anyone to talk to.
It was Wren who did most of the talking, during the hours of morning until the metro opened again. They shared their life stories, but Nadia’s took little time to tell: she had grown up in Montreal, graduated from Dawson College and decided against university, and worked at the same job for the past decade. “Things happened, obviously,” Nadia said, a little defensively. “I’m not saying nothing happened. It’s just — not interesting.”
Wren, on the other hand, found her own life very interesting. She animatedly described the commune in the Townships where she’d grown up and her move to Montreal at fourteen after her parents’ cohort of aging hippies split apart in a bitter property dispute. “I didn’t really want to go to Vegas with Papa,” she said, “and we don’t really know where Mama went, so I moved in with this aunt of mine here. They made me go to school, though.” She had coasted through high school, bright enough to skimp on classwork and still get by. Now she was in her third year at Dawson, having changed her major twice already. (“So that’s one thing we’ve got in common,” Nadia said, laughing.) Wren was in Fine Arts at the moment, but wasn’t sure if she wanted to stick with it. “Besides,” she added, “I figure I’ve got a destiny. I mean, we’re special, right? So what I do in school probably won’t make a difference anyway.”
“Everything makes a difference,” Nadia said, sipping her umpteenth coffee. “If anybody should know that, it’s us.”
Then the sun was rising in a square of sky between the buildings outside, glinting off the cars that nudged the curb like dolphins, friendly and inquisitive. Nadia glanced at her watch: six forty-nine. The trains would be running again, and she had her job to go to. She hadn’t stayed up all night since college, and the tiredness and the coffee made her light-headed. As they walked south, everything she could see seemed edged in light.
They stood at the door of the metro, all the words of the long night suddenly gone. Wren tilted her head up, looking nervous for the first time. “Can I kiss you goodbye?” she asked. Something of Nadia’s reaction must have shown in her face, because Wren gave a bright, reflexive smile. “No, that was stupid, forget I said it.”
“It’s just—” Nadia looked down at the ground, flustered. “It’s not that — I mean, you’re nice and all, I just — I don’t—”
“You don’t date girls,” Wren supplied, looking a little amused at Nadia’s floundering. The moment of vulnerability was already well buried.
Nadia shook her head. “I don’t date,” she said. “Girls or boys.”
“Right,” Wren said. “I get it.”
That was the moment to turn away, thank Wren for a pleasant time, and go home. Nadia never remembered later which of them moved first, but she guessed it must have been her; Wren wouldn’t have been so forward, not at such a time. It must have been Nadia, but being unable to remember the specifics of that moment was something that would always trouble her later.
She didn’t know what she expected. Nadia had kissed three boys in her life, all in high school, and hadn’t thought she had missed it. Wren’s lips were rough, chapped with winter, not at all what Nadia would have expected. She could taste the toast Wren had ordered for breakfast, mixed with the bitter coffee on her own tongue. Early-morning commuters pushed past them through the pivoting doorway, brushing Nadia’s coat, hands, hair, touching without impinging on her space, as though within Wren
’s tiny arms she was safe from all the world.
“You are trying so hard to live up to a stereotype,” Nadia told her, sometime during that first long conversation. “You’re such a hippie. Look at you. Look at your life.”
Wren denied it, but Nadia considered herself proven right the first time Wren called her at three in the morning, high and giggling, to declare herself hopelessly in love, with her two roommates arguing about globalization at top volume in the background. The three of them were vegetarian and had a compost heap and went to protests and smoked pot in the park on the mountain. Dave played guitar in a band called Gluten Free, and Brian belonged to a bicycle collective. Between them they managed to nail every stereotype Nadia had ever heard of about activist stoner student types. Her mother, she thought, would disapprove.
It was a week before Nadia realized her nightmares had stopped, and when she noticed it she was briefly disgusted. I’m turning into a cliché myself, she thought. Head over heels in love. You’re nearly thirty, Nadia. Stop it.
But that was patently impossible, and so she didn’t really try. She walked through the city with an odd lightness and saw the meetings and the deaths alike with wonder instead of the stony indifference to which she’d grown accustomed. It’s because it’s worth it, she realized one afternoon, amazed, as Wren pushed and two dogs outside the window suddenly growled and lunged at each other, and the dog-walkers scolded them and apologized to each other and found they were both avid scuba divers. If they feel what I’m feeling, if they even get the chance to, it’s worth the cost.
“Of course it is,” Wren agreed blithely, when she said so aloud. “God, if anybody ever told me I’d fall in love with some forty-year-old secretary—”
“I’m twenty-eight,” Nadia said indignantly, “and who said anything about love?” Across the café, a young man was half out of his seat, choking on a piece of pastry while his friends fruitlessly pounded him on the back.
Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction Page 10
