Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  &When Patrick and I moved to Calgary, I promised Carly I’d talk to her daily, promised I’d pay the long distance bill. We rigged up our computers with webcams and arranged a standing date, which coincided with one of Patrick’s classes. Carly talked too fast for the computer to catch up; I often missed parts of the conversation. She liked sending things in the mail, but she liked receiving the things I sent her more. I collected all her favourite things: candy corn, pink tank tops, fuzzy socks, chocolate-covered pretzels, tiny capsules of perfume. I hadn’t been able to delay my departure date to be in Toronto for her sixteenth birthday, but I’d promised to pay for her to come visit once I’d saved up some cash. I had to dig deep into my student loans for the trip.

  That fall she accepted a job babysitting two afternoons a week for a couple who lived around the corner. I liked that she was out of the house more, and she certainly had the energy to keep up with the couple’s two-year-old boy, but I knew it couldn’t be good for her grades.

  “Actually, I get lots of studying done,” she told me, “because they don’t have cable. When Brody sleeps, the only thing to do is homework! Hey, did I tell you I met a guy from Calgary the other day?”

  “No, where?”

  “He’s the new barista at my Starbucks. I told him I had a sister who lived out west. He made me a custom mocha caramel frappuccino.”

  “Really?” I scrawled a note on a piece of paper to add a Star-bucks gift card to the next package I sent her. Flat gifts definitely cut down on costs.

  “He said one time he was camping, and he and his buddies took some shrooms. . .”

  “What?”

  “You know, mushrooms. Anyway, he told this hilarious story about how — ” She started laughing. She couldn’t get the words out. “About how he had an argument with a mountain, because he thought it was Jabba the Hutt.”

  Whatever, I thought. She was going to school, she’d move out of Mom and Dickhead’s place soon. Whatever kept her laughing instead of ranting and sobbing. Whatever kept her on track.

  &Midway through my first teaching practicum, a set of twins transferred into my class. During a meet-and-greet, their mother confessed that they’d been honeymoon babies, conceived in Italy, which explained their hideously unique monikers: Amalfi and Sicily. They came to school dressed in identical inappropriate outfits, too fancy for the classroom: white wool dresses and white stockings.

  Though my host teacher figured out a way to tell them apart, by Christmas I still accidentally called each of them by her sister’s name. Even the other students had figured it out.

  “Miss Darcy, can you help me?” I didn’t know which one I was talking to.

  Twins.

  My father had been a twin, a lone twin, the surviving half of a divided egg. What did you do when you were only half of what was supposed to be a single person?

  &Despite the disrepair that they’d kept the house in, the previous tenants of the home our stepfather rented kept a well-maintained garden in the backyard, a small rectangle of dirt oddly tucked on the right side of the house, between the wall and the fence that ran between our property and the neighbour’s, in a place where the sun never reached. The blossoms had started to droop, their edges brown. At the very corner, I found a dangling stem, heavy with a row of teardrop petals, obscenely pink, in the shape of hearts. I plucked one off and pinched it between my finger and my thumb, applying pressure until it cracked open.

  &When he broke up with me, Patrick made perogies.

  The grease in the frying pan sizzled, agitated. Papi often made perogies smothered in butter and onions. He’d taught Carly and me to cut vegetables by rocking the knife back and forth. We cut the onions and laughed and then cried, our eyes watering with a mixture of pleasure and salt.

  “Hey Darce,” Patrick said, “you hungry? I found these at Safeway on sale; there’s lots of extra, I put them in the freezer.”

  Patrick rarely cooked. In retrospect, maybe I should have seen this generous gesture on his behalf as evidence of premeditation. He was, after all, a lawyer in progress. He started ranting, stalling. Already thinking about how to soften the explosion. Instead, I thought he was trying to apologize for an argument we’d had the previous day.

  I said, “Those look really good.”

  “I tried to get them golden, but I burnt a few.” He slid four onto a plate and handed them to me.

  “That’s okay.” I sat down at the table, speared one with my fork. “Is this about yesterday?”

  His face washed greenish in the harsh kitchen lights. “I’m sorry.” But he seemed distracted when he said it, as though looking for something else in the room. Kipling, maybe.

  I speared a perogy with my fork.

  I don’t remember what he actually said. Or maybe I don’t want to.

  Just that, when I bit into the dough, the potato inside was still frozen.

  &“Did you know I was adopted?” Carly asked me one day, shortly after our mother remarried.

  “Dream on,” I informed her. She held one of her Beanie Babies, twisted its head nervously, her poor unicorn, dying by manual strangulation. “I was there, remember? I remember Mom being huge. You want proof? Go look at her C-section scar.”

  Mom had told me about my natural birth: a full day of labour, a full head of dark hair. I appeared more frequently in the family photo albums, likely, I reasoned, because of the novelty of firstborns and because my parents had still been young and hopeful, not yet tainted by sleep deprivation, runny noses, and temper tantrums. Carly, on the other hand, was the result of an emergency C-section, her massive head becoming lodged in the birth canal, the umbilical cord looped around her neck.

  Once, we rode the elevator downstairs with a woman in our apartment and her just-weeks-old infant, asleep in a stroller.

  “You’re so slim already!” my mother exclaimed, almost as though it were a bad thing. “Did you push it out all natural? With this one,” she gestured to Carly, “they had to carve me open like a pumpkin! I’ve still got that nasty scar.” She ran her knuckles across the top of Carly’s head, making my sister squirm. “Hear that, kiddo? You made me ugly!”

  And, when my mother had friends, in those unapologetic conversations (which Carly could have easily overheard, had she been paying attention versus off in some fairy dreamland or dancing to Sesame Street): “That C-section messed with my head. Dr. Martin said it was hormones. I was a basket case for weeks after Carly was born.” Understatement.

  Carly twisted her unicorn’s head the other direction. “Then I was switched at birth.”

  “Go away, Car.” I shifted on the couch to see the TV better. I didn’t really like The Simpsons, but it beat playing Hungry Hungry Hippos with Carly ten times in a row. I picked at a scab on my knee from shaving my legs. A spot of blood welled up behind it.

  “You look exactly like Mom,” Carly continued. “I look the total opposite of you guys. The TOTAL OPPOSITE!”

  “You look like our dad,” I said. This both was and wasn’t true. She would have to, I reasoned, look somewhat like our dad, what with her being 50 percent his DNA. But I could not remember at all what he looked like, my image of him distorted by men I saw in line at the grocery store, at the bank, on the subway.

  Adding to my confusion, our mother had taken scissors to the family photo album and cut him out of all the snapshots. Then, perhaps because she had shitty self-esteem, cut herself out of the family photos, too. She took the cut-out Mom and Dad and chopped all the heads off, then threw both heads and corpses in the trash.

  Our childhood photo albums seemed to suggest, not necessarily inaccurately, that we’d raised ourselves.

  &At first, the cops thought Stefany had run away. On the news, they said she’d bickered with her sister; she’d left the apartment voluntarily. She was nine years old, old enough to know how to navigate the subway. Her face didn’t start appearing in the paper, on posters, until a few days after her disappearance.

  MISSING CHILD: Stefany Erin Beal
e

  DATE OF BIRTH: July 19, 1983

  MISSING SINCE: September 27, 1992

  MISSING FROM: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  EYES: Brown

  HAIR: Red

  HEIGHT: 3'8"

  WEIGHT: 59 lbs

  Last seen wearing a pink and purple windbreaker,

  jeans, and purple high top sneakers.

  One week after she went missing, the community hosted a vigil in the park near our apartment. I saw the flickering lights as we walked home from Dominion, a bag of apples bumping up against my knees. Carly had her shoes on the wrong feet, her thumb in her mouth.

  “What’s that?” Carly asked, taking her thumb out to point.

  “It’s nothing,” our mother said, sharply. And then, “Darcy! Stop gawking!”

  Six months later, I stood outside the music store on Lawrence Avenue, waiting for Aubrey to finish cello lessons. I’d run to the Mac’s to get us some five-cent candies: cubed caramels wrapped in cellophane, sugar-crusted cola soda bottles, sticky blue sharks with marshmallow tummies. We had to build a model of an ecosystem. We’d already made one attempt, but ate all the wildlife. Aubrey liked to decapitate Gummi bears with her teeth, affixing their heads to other bears’ bodies.

  There, in the window of a boutique: Stefany’s grainy greyscale face. She had a missing tooth in the picture, on the upper right side. Behind the photo, through the glass, the store mannequins shivered, their bare shoulders exposed, decked out in halter tops and sundresses. The new spring merchandise seemed out of place, not ready to face the world. Last seen wearing a pink and purple windbreaker, jeans, and purple high top sneakers. I put my hand in the bag of candy, put a Skittle on my tongue, and swallowed.

  &Ryan left Carly.

  Ryan rode the Carly rollercoaster with a salesman smile and his arms up in the air, waving. In contrast to my own white-knuckled ascent, the drop in my stomach at the beginning of a big plunge.

  I assumed, at first, that their break-up would eventually fix itself. He would leave, but then return, likely with flowers, store-bought and slightly limp multihued carnations over which she would make a big, excited fuss, kissing him sloppily.

  Except that he did not come back. He had a kid now. Parents who abandoned their kids — like his own mother — didn’t deserve beautiful little girls like Autumn. Didn’t deserve kids at all.

  I heard it all through Carly. He didn’t want to drag her into it, he said. He needed time to focus. It wasn’t her fault that he’d messed up. He wanted to see his daughter, get to know her. He needed to sort things out. I wondered how much Carly had distorted the real story due to her own distress. I didn’t tell Carly that Ryan’s reaction didn’t seem that bad. He just wanted to see his little girl.

  At first, Carly assumed that he was leaving her for Jessa. “He’s sleeping with her. I know he’s sleeping with her. When he talks about her he can’t even look me in the eye. That means he’s lying, right?”

  But Jessa, she said, didn’t even want to see Ryan, let alone let him see his daughter, until he could pay the child support she felt she deserved. It seemed a tad vindictive — letting him know he was a father, but withholding Autumn. Jessa had sent a picture, but Ryan had not let Carly see it, telling her only that he thought Autumn looked just like him. Carly sobbed — but then, she always sobbed.

  “He said kids need a mom and a dad.” I could picture her, on the other end of the phone, just by her voice; runny nose, bed head, raccoon circles under her eyes. “It’s not like we had a dad, and we turned out fine!”

  Just fine.

  “Plus, it’s not like he can’t be with me and have a kid. I told him, go over there, see the kid, fine, whatever. I kinda don’t even care if he drops out of school. He doesn’t get it. Darce, you have to phone him and explain it. Tell him to come back.”

  “He’ll come back,” I said.

  &One anxious week during their relationship, Carly insisted she was “late” and then discovered, instead, that she had simply miscounted. Her ineptitude at math combined with forgetfulness meant that she often missed a pill. I stayed at their apartment during one visit home, crashing on their couch instead of sharing living quarters with my mother. While brushing my teeth, I discovered her pack of pink birth control, four days behind.

  “Carly!” I admonished. “You have to be careful with this stuff!”

  “Oops!” She popped them out of the pack one by one and into her palm, then tipped her whole hand into her mouth, as though the progesterone were Tic Tacs. “This is still going to kill all the sperm, right?”

  “No,” I said, “don’t you read the instructions? If you forget, even for a day, you have to use a back-up method.”

  She frowned. “I don’t like condoms. They’re all slimy.”

  &A few days before Carly died, I sat in the staff room grading math tests while the children were in an assembly. I got up and poured myself a coffee, put my lips to the edge of the cup. Lukewarm. I popped it in the microwave, stretched.

  A female student sat in the main office on a chair opposite the secretary’s desk, clutching a mass of Kleenex to her nose. She had a few specks of blood down the front of her sweatshirt. She swung her legs back and forth, unperturbed, waiting for the flow to die down.

  The microwave chirped. I reached for my coffee, sliding the sleeve of my shirt down over my hand to protect against the heat of the cup.

  The little girl watched me, her legs just dangling, her bangs brushing her eyebrows.

  I remembered sitting on the edge of the bathroom counter, my legs dangling. My mother had combed my wet hair over the front of my face. She snipped away, bits of hair tickling my eyes. Then I could see again.

  “Look, Baby! You have bangs, just like Mommy!”

  I put the coffee to my mouth again and almost burnt my tongue.

  &There were a number of public service announcements in the nineties, when Carly and I grew up. The Ninja Turtles explained why, instead of succumbing to the peer pressure of smoking marijuana, I should tell a parent, or order a pizza. Louie the Lightning Bug reminded me never to fly kites where power lines go. Two fuzzy blue puppets sang about the dangers of consuming unknown products: “Don’t ya put it in your mouth.” Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod encouraged me to get active and take a Body Break. Cartoon rollerblading rabbits Bert and Gert reminded me to “Stay Alert, Stay Safe.”

  Public service announcements instructed kids to stay away from people they didn’t know. Strangers could look like normal people. They told kids never to get into cars with strangers, never to look for lost dogs or give directions. Never to answer the door to a stranger when home alone. Never tell the person on the other end of the phone that your mom and dad weren’t home. I already knew all that. I could be smarter than Stefany Beale. Carly feared stupid things, like Rataxes, the cartoon rhinoceros on Babar, and the sound of balloons popping. But she always wanted to show off her cute high tops. She would offer to sing the alphabet to people at the park (out of tune). She asked about their gadgets and pets. Once, when she could have been no more than three or four, we walked past a man with a pit bull. This dog had a giant boulder of a head and pinched, feline ears. Carly walked right up to it, patted its rump, and crooned, “Nice pib-tull.”

  Maybe I was smart enough not to get snatched or killed by a stranger, but my trusting little sister wasn’t. Carly had a powerful set of lungs. I tried to teach her to kick and scream when approached, to raise a holy fit. But when I approached her, saying, “Okay, Carly, remember, I’m a bad guy,” and then, in the smarmiest voice I could muster, “Hey, there, little girl, want some candy?” she just smiled up at me and said, “Look! This rock looks like a bum!”

  Something bad was going to happen to her, I knew it.

  I knew the public service announcement slogans by heart. Remember, kids, always trust your instincts about a situation. If something feels wrong, it probably is wrong.

  & Patrick lay asleep beside me, the tips of his fingers dangling on m
y arm, imperceptible, as though make-believe.

  My sister. Dead.

  Sometimes I had panic attacks, through which Patrick slept, unaware, and I lay shaking, unable to breathe, my thoughts tying knots in my brain. I didn’t take my medication. I didn’t deserve any relief. When the crest of the panic began to subside, I’d look over at Patrick, my fingers and toes tingly, like they’d fallen asleep. His snoring occasionally gave way to breathing that sounded like blowing bubbles. He looked like an infant: pink cheeks, rising belly, deeply rested. I thought back to the nights when he’d been unable to sleep, when he’d been a twitchy, nocturnal creature.

  He never made any advances. I kept waiting for him to. We lay side by side in the bed like siblings, the way Carly used to cuddle up beside me when she had a nightmare. Patrick a hard, heavy sleeper, who couldn’t wake up. Me, light and fizzy, drifting away.

  &For several days I couldn’t figure out why Kipling sat, waiting, facing the corner where my bookshelf met the wall, her ears alert. Finally, I dragged the shelf away from the wall out of sheer curiosity. One of my framed pictures from on top, Aubrey and I in matching dark sunglasses, clattered to the floor. The glass shattered. Kipling emerged, tangled in my feet, a fuzzy purple mouse caught between her teeth, her tail erect, triumphant. See? she seemed to tell me.

  &Winter became spring became summer. In late August, the leaves began to change colours, falling in pairs, angels committing suicide, their airy summer souls departing, leaving their wings behind to rot. Reckless sleep. Phone calls to Aubrey. Walks in circles around the block. I left a bag of garbage in the bin but forgot to put it out for pick-up. When I finally lifted the bag out, white maggots squirmed in a slimy pool underneath where it had sat. I had all my photos of Carly printed, and flipped through them, one at a time, counting each. Three hundred and twenty-seven. Not even a full year’s worth. The photos marked her life from fifteen to nineteen. I wondered if I would stop remembering, at some point, what she looked like as a little girl.