Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  “What did you eat?” she wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” I said, truthfully. I knew better: I was not rotting from the outside in, but rather from the inside out.

  Aubrey made me go to the funeral, physically zipping me into one of her dresses, dark grey and with a pink sash that tied in the back. Carly loved pink. The hem hung long around my knees. I felt like a clothes hanger, bones holding up the dress’ frame.

  The manner of death necessitated a closed casket. Bronzed pink, the coffin clashed with the darker fuchsia roses on top. I thought of Carly, as a toddler, sitting on the kitchen counter, squeezing strawberry syrup into a glass of cold milk. She’d always used too much, ribbons of red confection swirling in with the milk, the colour of Pepto-Bismol. Her smile — the thin line of strawberry on her upper lip.

  I had balled her funeral card in my fist without realizing it. I smoothed it out across my lap, across the grey silk of Aubrey’s dress.

  Carly Michelle Nolan

  September 5, 1987 – February 15, 2007

  & Ryan could not — would not? — go back into the apartment. Looking confused, he handed me his keys, the whole set, then said, “I mean,” and took them back. He worked the key he still had for Carly’s apartment off the ring. He had clumsy hands, and it took a moment. He drummed his fingers against the doorframe, glanced back into the hall, shifted from one foot to the other. His hair looked greasy; he raked his hands through it, and I could tell he’d been doing it all day. His beard had grown longer than I’d seen in the pictures Carly had emailed me, longer than I remembered. He looked shorter, too, leaning up against the wall, as though he’d shrunk without her. But then, I barely knew him. Maybe he’d always been less than Carly made him out to be.

  Inside my sister’s apartment, I needed to pee. I danced a little, indecisive. Would it disturb the peace? I put my things down — bulky jacket, backpack, cell phone — in a pile in the doorway, and crossed to her bathroom. A drop of blood had dried in her bathtub, the edges frayed as if it had fallen from a distance, long, sticky spider legs. A bloody nose? Menstrual blood? Cut herself shaving? I noticed in one corner of the tub a sleek, purple disposable razor. Cut herself? — Don’t go there. Under her sink I found a nearly empty bottle of cleaning fluid and paper towels. The stain held stubbornly as I scrubbed at it, and then it lifted, suddenly, the bathtub bare.

  I didn’t know what to look for. Her computer was still on, the rainbow fractal of her screensaver rotating hypnotically. I shook the mouse and the screen flickered still to her desktop picture, the two of us several years earlier on the ferry out to Toronto Island. I opened a browser for her email, but it prompted me for a password. Five minutes of guessing proved fruitless.

  The sun eased lower in the sky, visible from the balcony, orange and blue swirling together like liquid, like a Hawaiian beverage. Carly had always wanted to go to Hawaii, made Ryan swear they’d go for their honeymoon. I crossed the apartment into her bedroom, slid open her jewellery box. It made tinkly music at me, a tiny ballerina twisting around and around, getting dizzy. The box had mostly functioned as a junk drawer; I removed a lone button, a smashed tampon, a receipt, a tag torn from the inside of an item of clothing, a discarded battery. No sign of the necklace Ryan wanted me to retrieve for him, the gift he’d given her for their first anniversary, one teardrop pink Swarovski crystal. Carly had called it her “bling” and wore it even when it clashed with her outfit. It had not been recovered with her personal effects. What had she done with it?

  I lay down in her unmade bed for a moment and pulled the crumpled bedding around me. The smell of her made my chest ache, made me climb off. Too much! I took her raccoon off the bed and touched the spots where its fur had worn away. When she was small, Carly took her raccoon to school, twisting and twiddling the pink bow sewn to its head. After enough handling, the bow popped off. She carried her bald baby home to me, crying.

  I retied the bow and reattached it with my limited sewing skills.

  She held it away from herself, examining it. “It’s not the same!”

  My best attempts at sewing left visible stitches, uneven lengths of ribbon.

  “She’s a real girl now,” I said, manufacturing a story that might soothe her. “That’s how you know. Real people aren’t perfect.”

  &Carly and I were both born on the fifth of a month, six years and four months apart. 5/5/81 and 9/5/87. She used 9587 as the pin number for her debit card, which I’d told her sucked as a secret code. I tried various combinations of this to access her email, but nothing worked. Neither did “RYAN,” nor “RYANCARLY,” or any combination of their two names. I tried my own name, feeling hot with shame. It didn’t work, either. At least I knew the PIN code to her savings account.

  In her bank account, Carly left a grand total of $13.84. She had outstanding student loans totaling $32,480.79, and unpaid bills for her cable TV and internet ($74.32), hydro ($63.16) and cell phone (a shocking $698.47, with almost half those calls to Ryan’s number, and the other half, long distance to mine). On the last day of her life, she’d left a single voicemail when Ryan failed to answer her last call at 8:01 AM, and then typed out that one last text message to me, shortly after 9:00 Toronto time.

  Always blur.

  Had she left any last words for Ryan during that call?

  Not really, he told me. Just a few seconds of silent lingering, followed by the sound of her hanging up. I’d wanted to listen to it, to see if I could hear her breathing, but Ryan had deleted it before he knew what she’d done.

  Did he know what her text message meant?

  No, he said, she’d never said anything like that to him.

  &My sixth grade class loved Phys Ed, particularly so because one of their gym periods fell on a Friday afternoon. I could feel their restlessness by the end of the week as they shifted in their desks, dropped pencils, doodled in the margins of their notebooks, tapped each other, passed notes, giggled, and requested bathroom breaks more frequently. The auspiciousness of the scheduling meant that they could release this energy, shift contentedly into weekend mode a few hours earlier. They loved Phys Ed, too, because of the teacher, Conor Fehr, who had modified the rules of regular dodgeball into something rowdy and complicated that I could not follow, but which had made him a legend at St. Sebastian.

  The previous year, he’d taught my students Health and the Catholic school equivalent of Sex Ed: instructions on the signs of puberty and lectures on saving oneself for marriage. I’d applied to both the Catholic and Public school boards, surprised that my mother actually located my baptismal certificate after a week of my nagging. It was hard enough to get a teaching job right out of university, but at least I had twice as many jobs as my secular classmates. When I was offered a position at the Catholic board, I warned Patrick that I’d have to attend church sometimes, and that we’d have to keep the fact that we lived together a secret.

  “A job is a job,” he said. “I hate my job, too.”

  Not quite the same thing.

  I often stayed after the bell on Fridays to help put away the gym equipment, to chat, to do something other than go home. Conor thought it was possible to teach me how to shoot a layup.

  He was blond, with a receding hairline, despite being in his early thirties. He had wide linebacker shoulders and broad hands that seemed to suck the ball from the floor into his palm. Conor dribbled for a moment, casually, before tossing it to me. It hit the lacquered gym floor near me and rebounded away. We both watched it for a moment before he loped after it. He wore his University of Calgary T-shirts inside out on purpose, the logo faintly visible through the cotton. Several of my students had started wearing their gym strip shirts inside out in imitation. Patrick would not be caught dead in a U of C T-shirt, even inside out, still bitter that the only law school that had made him an offer was his last choice. When I’d told Aubrey where I had gotten in, she’d said, “There’s a university in Calgary?”

  “I don’t think I’ll die if I can’t sho
ot hoops.” My voice echoed in the empty gymnasium. Conor lobbed the ball at me again, one-handed, and I caught it against my chest with both hands.

  “Better,” he said. I bounced it back at him, first against the floor.

  “Let’s pack it in and get coffee,” I suggested. “Or a martini. I could use a bit of a buzz.”

  “I would, but I have to go renew my driver’s license. I went to buy wine the other day and the clerk pointed out it’s already three months overdue. If I get pulled over, I’m screwed.” He faked a pass at me, then rose up on the balls of his feet and let the ball loose, sinking a basket.

  The ball hit the floor and rolled in my direction. I picked it up, held onto it. “Want company?”

  He gestured for me to pass to him, smiled as though I’d just said something funny. “I won’t make you come stand in line with me. I’m not that cruel.”

  Later that fall, Conor’s car crapped out, and I offered him a ride home. Not only had my students taken a liking to him that year, but so had the single mother of one of my boys. “She actually asked me whether you were single,” I teased, turning on the windshield wipers.

  Conor removed his gloves and held his hands towards the hot air. “What’d you tell her?”

  “I said I didn’t know. I mean, are you single?” Conor didn’t wear a ring. Sometimes, he arrived at school wearing mismatched socks. No girlfriend would let that happen, at least not more than once.

  Conor rubbed his hands together. “I am. And I don’t know why I’m telling you this, because really, we don’t know each other that well, but I feel like I can trust you.”

  “Why you’re telling me you’re single?”

  “Why I’m telling you I’m gay.”

  Being a teacher at a Catholic elementary school in Calgary necessitated his secret. He was right — we didn’t know each other that well — but maybe he told me because on some level he realized I, too, had secrets. Patrick hadn’t kissed me in three weeks.

  &Andrew O’Leary, the other male teacher at St. Sebastian, taught the sixth grade class opposite mine. Mr. O, the one kids hoped to get. He kept sour gumballs in large jars on a rack above his desk and doled them out as rewards for correct answers in a trivia-style game with which he concluded each day. Just the look of those gumballs — pinks and yellows and blues like fluorescent Timbits — made my jaws ache.

  Conor suggested Andrew’s basement suite to me as an option after Patrick and I broke up. Patrick vacated our apartment as a courtesy for a few days to stay at a hotel. He got custody of the apartment on a technicality: our suite manager was friends with his uncle. However distantly removed, I didn’t want to stay, even though I didn’t want to live in Andrew’s basement either. I packed my things the first night, using garbage bags for my clothes when I ran out of boxes, and then stood, surveying my packaged life in his hallway. Around one AM, I needed sleep, but didn’t want to be near our bed. I took a set of extra sheets out of the closet and made up the futon. Kipling, in solidarity, slept at my feet.

  The basement suite had remained vacant since its previous owner, a woman about my age, in recovery from breast cancer, had moved to Edmonton.

  “What is this place?” I asked Andrew, trying to sound flippant. “A basement catch-all for damaged goods?”

  He hoisted one of the garbage bags I’d used to gather my belongings over his shoulder. “Nice pack job, Darce.”

  The first night in the ugly, 600-square-foot basement hole, I allowed myself one long, unfastened cry, obscured by the noise of my stereo. Afterwards, I drank a tall mug of black tea and spread Vaseline on the dark bruises under my eyes.

  In bed, I pressed the tea bags to my skin, caffeine to shrink the blood vessels, wet against my raw eyes and cheekbones, attempting to read at the same time. The bags fell off my face, cold and damp against my fingers as I repositioned them.

  When I put the book down, my fingers had stained the pages, the evidence wizened and brown, permanent.

  &After the funeral, I had only one week to get Carly’s things out of her place, to take what I wanted. Her landlord wanted the apartment on the market again on the first of the month. I didn’t want to pack up my sister’s possessions, but Aubrey told me she would tackle the bathroom and then left me alone to handle the disastrously cluttered living room. I didn’t know where to start. Aubrey thought this was a possible feat.

  When we moved into the rental house with Dick the Dickhead, Carly and I got our own rooms for the first time. My basement room had pale, neutral walls, a colour so faded I could not guess at its exact shade. Off-white? Peach? Carly’s room upstairs was painted carnation pink, with a butterfly border that ran across the entire midline of the room. I wondered about the previous owner of the room, somebody’s very wanted baby, perhaps a much longed for girly-girl after a series of older brothers. Carly loved the butterflies and set to naming them all, her butterfly friends, frozen in flutter, trapped in their eight-inch border, unable to fly away.

  Downstairs in my drab basement room, I unpacked just my bare necessities at first, as though perhaps our new living arrangements were temporary. The large window behind me caught me off-guard every time I turned around, the bisected earth: a slice of ground, a slice of blue sky. I stood at the window, eye-level with the grass. I could see each blade, the flecks of dirt, the fallen leaves. I’d spent a long time on the top bunk of the top floor of our apartment building. It was a long way down.

  Always blur. Always blur. Always blur.

  Not even a sentence, my sister’s last message to me. She’d called words or phrases that didn’t make sense to her “jibber jabber.”

  I started with her desk, crammed with stacks of loose-leaf pages, scribbled notes, handouts, bills. In the living room I began a mindless sorting, separating homework from invoices, from art projects, from forms for George Brown, from magazines. Her friends had chipped in and ordered her a subscription to Cosmopolitan for her last birthday. “How many new sexual positions can they invent?” I’d asked her the first summer after moving to Calgary, about a month before she met Ryan. We’d been wandering the Toronto Public Library, and when I went to find her again, my arms full of Joyce Carol Oates and Wally Lamb, I found her poring over the glossy publication, an article on how to detect when a man might propose. She was still over a year away from being legal to vote.

  She smirked. “What, you don’t think Patrick would be impressed with the Joystick Joyride?”

  I’d cringed. My baby sister!

  There’d been two before Ryan. The first, Jensen, she’d met after joining the yearbook committee. She’d played romantic, idealistic love ballads on repeat, singing along, hideously off-key. She pierced her belly button and began wearing strategically short T-shirts when our mother wasn’t around. She repeated his jokes to me, giggling excessively, almost as though he was present. “So, two midgets take a trip to Las Vegas. . .and they see these two, like, strippers. . .” After two or three of these jokes, I’d cut her off.

  “Don’t you think those jokes are a little offensive?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re such a prude.” The wound around her belly button barbell looked infected.

  Jensen invited her over one evening, and she couldn’t help bubbling about it to me on the phone. “The whole yearbook committee gets to go, but I think he really wants me to come. He kinda flirts with me non-stop. I’m so excited. Were you like this when you first met Patrick?”

  A few days later, she called and confessed they’d played strip poker at Jensen’s house, and later, she’d let him remove the last items of her clothing once everybody else had left. She was fifteen. It was her first time, but not his. “Was it supposed to feel so — ?” Unable to find words.

  The next time she talked about him, she tried to explain. “He says he has baggage from his ex. He doesn’t know what he wants right now. He can’t be in a relationship. He wants space.” It’s not you, it’s me.

  The second, she hadn’t even pined for. She just met him
at some random birthday party near the end of Grade Eleven. He lived in another province and had flown in for the weekend just to visit his cousin. She’d slept with him that night. She wouldn’t even tell me his name.

  The heedlessness of it made sense for Carly, but I’d felt a merry-go-round spin in my stomach when she told me. I’d come home for a weekend to visit and she confessed that it had happened six weeks prior. I scheduled a doctor’s appointment for her, gave her a few packs of birth control from my own supply, bought her a box of condoms, tore the box open, and popped two in a side pocket of her purse. She seemed more distressed by having a pap smear than having an unprotected one-night stand. Afterwards, we went for coffee, and she’d stirred her hot chocolate noisily, her spoon clinking against the glass, fidgeting in her chair. I closed my eyes for a second. I wanted to stay that way. To fall asleep, right there. The coffee shop, the steam from my mug, smelled like our mother.

  Ryan came along, just before she started Grade Twelve. He was one year older, already out working, trying to save money for college, trying to move out of his grandparents’ place and be on his own. In her mess of papers, I found a birthday card signed with Ryan’s all-capitals scrawl, HAPPY BIRTHDAY BEAUTIFUL! I put the card in its own pile. It sat there, a small rectangle on the floor, alone next to the chaos of the pile beside it.

  &Jessa Ryce, Ryan’s ex-girlfriend, had been a pageant girl. When Carly told me this, I’d said, “They have pageants in Toronto?”

  “I guess. You should see this girl, Darce, she kinda looks like Barbie.”

  “Plastic?”

  “Perfect. I look like a total heifer compared to this girl.”

  I balanced the phone between my shoulder and my ear, trying to twist my hair into some semblance of a bun, running late for work.