Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  Carly’s birthday was coming up, which I always associated with the start of a new school year. I was supposed to start teaching just days before Carly would have turned twenty. I’d missed watching my class graduate elementary school. The Calgary Catholic School Board emailed me my new class list.

  On the first day of second grade, Carly spilled chocolate milk down the front of her new pink blouse. On the first day of fourth grade, Carly stepped in dog shit in her new purple sneakers.

  She had a red lunchbox shaped like a bus that she carried until age nine, when one of her classmates started singing “The Wheels on the Bus.”

  “The babies on the bus go wah wah wah. . .wah wah wah. . . wah wah wah. . .”

  Late in August, I emerged from my basement with a bag of garbage to put against the fence for pick-up, and noticed a skinny-looking woman on the step, leaning backwards, as though relaxing. Large sunglasses shaded her eyes. She took them off when I came out, perched them on top of her head. What did she think of my sweatpants? Of my giant, uncombed knot of hair?

  “Hi,” she said, and stood up. “Are you Andrew’s tenant?”

  I put down the garbage. “I rent the basement.”

  She smiled, “Oh yeah? I used to rent the basement.”

  Cancer girl, I thought, then felt a flare of guilt. It was the kind of comment my mother would have made.

  “I’m Leah,” she said, when I didn’t respond. “Andrew said he had some of my mail, but he’s not home. Anyway, I hate to do this but — can I use your bathroom? I really need to pee. I was debating coming to knock, but I didn’t know if that would be weird. . .”

  I unlocked the back door and she followed me down.

  “It’s kind of a mess,” I warned her.

  She headed down the stairs, unperturbed. “You should have seen it when I lived here.”

  I waited on one of the kitchen barstools. The size of the apartment didn’t afford very much privacy. I often heard Andrew upstairs walking around. I wondered whether he could hear me. The first day I’d moved in, I turned the radio on before I cried. Now I’d both stopped caring and crying; a cactus, prickly on the outside, water on the inside. I’d swallowed all my feelings.

  She came out of the bathroom wiping her hands on her jeans.

  “My landlord just hiked my rent. Makes me miss living with Andrew.”

  I nodded.

  She pushed some hair out of her eyes. “So, you’re a teacher, right? That’s how you know Andrew?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Well, I’m on leave, right now, I had a — there was a, a family thing.”

  “Right.”

  We stood there. She rubbed her ear. My knowledge of her story made it highly likely that she had knowledge of mine. The two of us, a bad joke: cancer and suicide walk into a bar — “So, Andrew says you and your boyfriend got back together, how’s that going?”

  “Andrew said that?”

  She looked a little sheepish. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I didn’t know what to say; were Patrick and I back together? What was I supposed to do with her? Give her something? Make small talk? “Do you want some tea?” I asked. I probably had some tea bags at the back of the pantry. Tea bags didn’t expire, did they?

  “Sure,” she said, but then Andrew’s front door opened, and we heard his feet stomping on the front mat.

  &“Carly never talked about suicide before?”

  My cell phone felt hot against my face. I hadn’t talked to Aubrey in over a week. “Never. Don’t you think I would have mentioned that?”

  “Not even, like, stupid threats?”

  “No. Obviously she felt like shit, but she never said anything that would have made me think she would have. . .” What had she said? I swallowed. “In the couple days right before she did it, she seemed to be doing better.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know, Aub, she just — she sounded happier on the phone. I called because I figured, Valentine’s Day, she was going to lose it again, without Ryan. But she seemed fine; she started telling me about this new scheme of hers, she was going to be a model.”

  “I remember, you told me about that, after. . .did she do it?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t talk at work, I told her I would talk to her about it later.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “No. She didn’t pick up that night, but she sent me a goodnight text message right before bed.”

  “So, maybe you should stop blaming yourself.”

  That easy.

  &After Carly, I started to remember Before Carly.

  My kindergarten Mother’s Day tea.

  The tightness of my party dress that I’d started to outgrow.

  The cupcakes on a table in the classroom, the thick pink icing.

  Moms mulled around, moms wearing dresses and high-heeled shoes. My mom owned one pair of heels, but didn’t wear them anymore, because of the baby in her tummy. Sometimes she let me put my hand on her belly and feel the baby kick. My little brother or sister was coming at the beginning of Grade One, which seemed a long way away.

  “Where’s your mom?” Someone else’s mom asked me.

  I was the only one without a mom.

  My teacher pulled me onto her lap.

  I ate my cupcake.

  I ate my mom’s cupcake.

  Two of them burned my tongue. Too much, too much sugar.

  She came in late, when we were all lined up at the front of the room, reading a Mother’s Day poem.

  The door opened, noisy. Everybody looked at her: The teachers, the kids, the other moms.

  I forgot my line.

  Afterwards, she squeezed in beside me on one of the little folding chairs.

  “Where were you?” I asked, and squeezed up against her.

  “I had a doctor’s appointment. Stop whining.”

  &When I think back to that time when Carly’s relationship with Ryan overlapped with mine, I remember Patrick pulling away, like an elastic band, stretching until we snapped.

  The Christmas before Patrick and I split up, Carly had the idea to go on an all-inclusive vacation to Cuba. Neither she nor Ryan had any money. She begged Patrick and me to come. The brutality of Calgary winters made this a tempting offer. I reasoned that it might be one of only a few holidays left before Patrick started articling and would have even less time off than he already had. Carly found cheap tickets flying out of Toronto, and promised a “terrific” deal for the week after her exams, leading up to Christmas.

  “Darce, you have to live in the moment!”

  And so I set about convincing Patrick. He seemed into it, at first. I came home from class and he’d made tacos. The meat tasted slightly too spicy. Tacos weren’t actually Cuban, but I valued the effort, a nice break from Patrick’s usual studying, worrying about his grades. He took out a book from the library about Varadero, asked if I wanted to do a day trip into Havana. Carly texted me asking if I would do an excursion with her where we would get to swim with dolphins. I pressed a layer of grated cheddar into my taco, trying to make it stay in place. Patrick and I had sex for the first time in a month, and he kissed me with an urgency that made me realize I still had a bit of beef in my teeth.

  Lying there, afterwards, he mused, aloud, “How well do you think the hotels in Cuba wash their sheets?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m pretty sure hotels cater to tourists, though.”

  “You never know.” He had a thin glaze of sweat across his lower abdomen. He looked skinny lying on his back, his stomach concave. “You could stay at a hotel and have no idea how many people had slept on those sheets before. They could just pretend to change them. I bet hotels do it all the time, to save on their water costs.”

  “I suppose.”

  He shivered. “It’s disgusting! Can you imagine all the germs?” He got up out of the bed to pee, and did not come back. When I wandered out later, I found him on the computer, Googling “dirty hotels exposed.”


  “If you really care that much, we can just bring our own sheets and make the bed ourselves.”

  “The sheets are just the beginning! Look at the toilet! This is what these researchers discovered with infrared technology.”

  That night he spent so long in the shower that when he came out, he’d rubbed his skin bright red and raw. He threw both sets of our sheets in the wash — even the spare set, which had been resting clean and folded in the closet. I wanted to sleep, but they still had a half hour to go in the dryer.

  “You’re being obsessive,” I pointed out. He took a textbook into the kitchen. I took a novel into the laundry closet and watched our sheets tumble dry.

  &Had Carly actually gone through with her plan to be a model?

  I set to finding out, contacting her friend Heather first. Heather had come to the funeral in a short and clingy black dress, with a gaggle of Carly’s new friends from school. Carly often tried to initiate “girls’ nights” at the apartment she shared with Ryan. They came, but I wondered if they did so because she had her own apartment and had tendencies to purchase large quantities of cookie dough and fruity coolers, never requiring the other girls to contribute. At the funeral, they all sat in a row, with perky, slightly chubby legs and ’80s names: Heather, Jessica, Sarah, Christina — their perfect outfits, perfect teeth. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek.

  There were, in fact, a series of photos that had been taken the last day I talked to her, the afternoon before she died. Carly had underestimated the age of Jamie, the photographer, by several years, though when I surfed Jamie’s website, he had pictures of himself, in which he, as Carly had correctly reported, sported a hat — a black fedora with a green band, making him look like a mobster. Heather had gone to the photo shoot too, which Jamie proved by emailing me several shots of Heather, wearing only strategically placed pieces of duct tape, including, in one photo, a strip across her mouth. Jamie’s cavalier forwarding of Heather’s naked photos made me wonder who else had already seen Carly’s stripped snapshots.

  Though Carly and Heather did not appear in any photos together (or at least none that I was shown), the date stamp on both sets of pictures read the same: February 14, 2007. Both Heather and Jamie said Carly left first, on her own, and Heather had hung out with Jamie longer because she’d had a thing for him.

  Heather’s over eighteen, Jamie wrote in his email, I just took their pictures that’s it. I’m sorry shes dead. I usually charge for electronic negatives but you can have these ones for free.

  Smarmy, self-celebrated asshole. Had he done something to her? Said something? He wouldn’t have told me if he had. He claimed he was giving me the full set of Carly’s photos, saying he felt it would be disrespectful to her if he were to include them in his “book.”

  The photos were not particularly tasteful, as Carly had assured me. She knelt, with one leg crossed in front of the other, exposing the rounded curve of her thigh and bum. She had her hands up and over her breasts but splayed open like stars, with her middle fingers covering her nipples, though some areola was still visible. She arched her back slightly, her hair wild and tousled. I could make out the small scar above her belly button, from the piercing she’d removed. Her eyes looked straight at the camera, wide and gullible. I’m a model! She seemed to be thinking. I hope I don’t look fat in these pictures. Ryan is going to phone tonight.

  The last photographs of my sister alive.

  &I sold the car I’d bought after moving to Calgary for less than it was worth and put the excess cash in my savings account. I dreaded having to go back to teaching, having to go back to being responsible for needy children. Wasn’t I destined to just fuck them up? When I expressed my concerns, my doctor suggested changing my medication to a daily dosage. I shook my head. The bottle at home still contained the full set of pills. At one point, it had fallen off my bathroom counter and Kipling ran off with it, batting it between her paws like a rattle. I snatched it back from her, glad for the childproof lid.

  I walked the full forty minutes to the office, unwilling to take the C-train. So far, the long walk hadn’t been an issue. I hadn’t thought ahead as far as the fall, or worse, the winter.

  Leaving the office after my check-up, I stopped at the café in the bottom of the building to get a bottle of water. Was it — Conor? — in line, ahead of me? Conor wearing dress pants? I had never, in the years I’d known him, seen Conor wearing dress pants. I tried to think of the last time I’d seen him. Was he on a date?

  “Conor?” I said, experimentally.

  He turned around, cocked his head, as if trying to place me. “Hi,” he said. “This is probably confusing — I’m Joel, Conor’s brother.”

  “Oh,” I said, and then, embarrassed, laughed. Carly certainly wasn’t laughing. Who was I to laugh, when —

  I shut my mouth.

  “And you are?” he asked.

  “Darcy. I teach with — I used to teach with — well, I was on leave last year.”

  Conor had mentioned his brother, but not the fact that they were twins. My blathering seemed redundant — I’d probably come up in conversations between the two of them before. That poor girl whose sister jumped in front of the subway. What an unexpected tragedy.

  Joel stepped away from the counter. I still held the bottle of water I hadn’t yet paid for.

  “I work in the building.” He balanced a Styrofoam container of soup and a croissant in one hand and a rolled-up copy of The Globe and Mail in the other. “I’m on my lunch break.”

  I smiled, trying to be polite. An unfamiliar version of a very familiar person.

  “You’re welcome to join me,” he offered.

  I took a step back. “Uh, that’s okay, I should get home.”

  “Okay,” he said, “It was nice to meet you. And don’t worry about thinking I was Conor. Happens all the time.”

  When I was outside the café, in the furious sun, I realized I’d walked out without paying for the water, my hands like fists around the stolen bottle.

  &Often, the long forgotten memories would find me, tugging on the edges of my shirts the way Carly used to. Remember us? Carly, two years old, wearing a blanket over her head, pretending to be a ghost, slamming into the apartment wall and rebounding back onto her diapered bum, letting out a delayed wail of shock.

  Carly, six years old, sitting in the bathtub, drawing hearts on the tiles with bath-time crayons, her hair lathered into a swirl on the top of her head, singing, “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I’m gonna eat some worms!” A cat, kidnapped from Papi’s apartment, walking along the edge of the tub, sniffing curiously at the masses of bubbles.

  Carly, seven years old, having begged me to take her to church because all her classmates went, and Mom had stopped taking us. When the priest began talking about the Holy Spirit, the symbol of a dove, which each person had inside of him or herself, she’d whispered into my ear. “I bet I know where they keep it. In the rib cage.”

  Carly, eleven, prancing around in her pink polka-dot bathing suit in front of the Victoria’s Secret runway show on TV.

  Carly, thirteen, caught chatting on the Internet with HOT_ BOI664, naively pecking in our home phone number.

  Carly, fourteen, the one and only time (she swore!) she’d smoked a cigarette, in her bedroom, as though she wanted to get caught. What was that smell? Why was Carly coughing so loudly? “I promise, I just wanted to see what it was all about!”

  Carly, fifteen, Carly, sixteen, Carly, seventeen —

  I walked too far past the turn to my apartment and found myself at an intersection, in front of a homeless woman and her doleful-eyed German shepherd. Her sign read “$1 for Good Karma.” The dog raised its head at me for a moment, then lowered its chin into its owner’s lap, hungry. Hopeless.

  There was an old lady who swallowed a cat.

  Imagine that! She swallowed a cat.

  She swallowed the cat to catch the bird.

  She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
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br />   that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

  She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

  I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.

  Perhaps she’ll die.

  &When I graduated high school, a month after my eighteenth birthday, I began hunting the classifieds for apartments near campus. My acceptance letter to the University of Toronto English department had arrived months earlier, and I’d originally planned to live at home as long as possible because of Carly. The six-year age difference was a major problem. I sat in silent rage at the dinner table while Dick shovelled overcooked lasagne onto our plates, watching Carly squirm and pinch her lips together. She often sat at the table long after he and our mother went to watch one of their sitcoms, crying softly and trying to swallow bites of whatever gristly casserole he’d prepared that night — they all tasted exactly the same. And, in the same chair, gnawing on her pencil, forced to finish her homework before bed. Often, her notebooks had holes in them from erasing so hard. the book i am doing my report on is ann of green gabuls a book about a gril who is an orphun and she cause lots of trubel. I couldn’t stay, but I couldn’t imagine leaving her there. She would not even turn twelve until September. She wouldn’t graduate high school — if she even graduated at all — for over five years.

  I met Papi for coffee on College Street, and paid for my cinnamon latte and his black-with-one-sugar. As soon as I’d paid, I regretted it. I’d wanted to demonstrate my maturity as an independent, fully functioning adult so that he would be more likely to go along with what my plan for Carly to live with me. But then I realized I should have demonstrated thriftiness, showing him I intended to save my money to raise my sister, not splurging on frilly, sugary drinks.

  I would do a better job than my mother and asshole stepfather. I wouldn’t sit in the bathtub all day. I wouldn’t go on random, spontaneous vacations and abandon my kids. I wouldn’t force Carly to sit at the table doing her homework without help, trying unsuccessfully to cry without making too much noise, using her napkin or the edge of her shirt to muffle the sound. Plus, Carly being in school all day made caregiving arrangements unnecessary. If I had to take a night class, maybe Papi could babysit. He had before our mother remarried. Why not now?