Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  “I get it!” She pushed her plate away. “Sorry I ruined your life.”

  &I didn’t often take baths. I associated the bathtub with my mother, who, before she met Dick, spent hours sitting lifeless in the water. When she climbed out and fell asleep in her bed, sometimes wearing only a threadbare towel, she usually left the basin full. I cringed, reaching into the smelly, cold water to pull the drain. The water swirled away, leaving the bathtub ringed with soap scum. Because of my tendency to catch colds, I also avoided getting water in my ears, preferring the dull purr of the shower, the way the noise of water hitting chrome could blur out my thoughts.

  The basement bathroom at Dick’s house had a deep, wide soaker tub with a metal handle attached just above the wall, the kind intended for someone elderly or disabled to ease themselves in and out.

  For my fifteenth birthday, Papi had given me a set of three bath bombs. Wide, round, and chalky, they sat on top of my dresser for almost six months. Then, on a day when temperatures dipped and I’d gotten soaked in a slush rain on the way home from the bus stop, I decided to take a bath to warm up. I held them up one at a time, smelling them through the crinkly cellophane. Raspberry vanilla, lavender, and citrus burst. I settled on the lavender. Slip away into the calming sensations of lavender, read the label tied on with coily ribbon.

  I ran the water and peeled my wet clothes away from my skin. When I first stepped into the tub, the tips of my cold toes burned, my nerves trying to acclimatize. I leaned on the wall brace for a moment, then let myself sink down into the water.

  The basement acoustics meant I could hear everything that went on upstairs; with my bedroom just under the kitchen, I’d wake to the sound of my mother, the insomniac, shuffling around at two or three in the morning. Sometimes, I heard the whir of the coffee machine starting up, and then fell back asleep to the monotonous sound of the drip, drip, drip. Other times, there came the whomp, whomp, whomp of my stepfather’s heavy feet on the linoleum. When he came in from working the late shift, he would lumber into the kitchen with his boots still on. Then came the sound of pots and pans banging around, pantry doors swinging open and shut. He preferred midnight macaroni and shots of vodka. In the mornings, there would sit fluorescent orange noodles glued cold to the side of a pan, and his liquor bottle, the cap and shot glass beside it. I could smell the alcohol when I screwed it back on and put it back in the counter, out of Carly’s reach. I don’t know how many shots he took a night.

  Sunk deep and warm in the water, the silence stretched out like the soundtrack to a normal family. Carly had gone to play at a friend’s house after school, and when I’d checked, I didn’t see Mom and Dick’s car in the garage. I sank into the warmth of the aloneness, unwrapped the bath bomb from its cellophane shell and set it gently into the water in front of me. It began to fizz, swirling a little, as it interacted with the water. I could smell the lavender. The water began to take on a purplish foam. The edges of my hair touched the water; I pulled an elastic band off my wrist and tied into a messy knot on the top of my head.

  Then, above me, the front door swung open, and with it came crying and yelling. I flinched at Carly’s wail and Dick’s roar, competing for who could scream the loudest.

  “Why would you do that? Maybe you’re stupid! Nobody except a stupid, little brat would do something as dumb as — ”

  Carly pleaded, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  “Stop crying, you little pussy!”

  I tried to listen for my mother, but I couldn’t hear whether she wasn’t physically present, or she had simply clamped her mouth shut and chosen to be a spectator.

  I lay back in the water, put my ears below the surface. It muffled the sound, but didn’t erase it. I could still hear the mixture of anger and misery all swirled up together, like in a blender. I sat back up, feeling the water in my ears, the water from my hair running like fear down the back of my neck.

  The bath bomb had fizzled and dissolved.

  &My mom dragged Carly and me with her to the mall to get her hair dyed. Carly was seven. I’d been forced to come along to keep an eye on her. Carly behaved like the Tasmanian Devil at the mall, overstimulated by the noise and colour and squish of people. The last time my mother had carted both her daughters to the mall, Carly had spied a plush beluga whale, just like her beloved Raffi song, and thrown herself to the tiled toy store floor when my mother snapped, “You think toys grow on trees?”

  “She’s just a kid,” I argued.

  Mom put her hands on her hips. “Look at you, judging me,” she barked. “Just wait until you have your own screaming brat.” She waited until she’d dragged Carly out of the mall and into an empty subway tunnel before giving her a firm slap across the back of her head. “You scream in public like that again and I’ll smack that mouth of yours right off. I don’t care who’s lookin’.”

  When I tried to convince Carly we should both stay home while mom went to the hairdresser on her own, she stuck out her bottom lip. “But I love the mall!”

  The clerk told us that it would take about two hours before Mom was finished. So, we couldn’t afford for me to wear earrings, but suddenly Mom could have a fancy new dye job? Why couldn’t she do it herself at home? The boxes at the store only cost fifteen bucks, and the poster on the store wall told me that a professional dye job was $70+. You know what else costs seventy dollars? I felt like telling Mom, a new winter coat for Carly, and a new pair of jeans for me. The zipper on Carly’s current coat had stuck, and my jeans were close to splitting at the knees.

  Carly flitted about the salon. “What do you think Mommy will look like with yellow hair like me?”

  “She’s just getting highlights,” I corrected her. “It’s not going to look like your hair. It’s going to look stupid and fake.”

  “I think she’ll look like a princess,” Carly continued.

  I sat slumped on the waiting room sofa, flipping through a magazine of different cuts and styles, wishing my hair didn’t snarl into knotty curls, wishing I had nicer curves like the models in the pictures.

  Carly came back out into the waiting room and started fiddling with a machine that dispensed Skittles for a quarter. “Do you have any monies?” she asked me.

  “Cut it out,” I snapped at her. “Can’t you sit still for a half a second?” I craned my neck so that I could see into the salon; our mother’s hair was still in foils. She wouldn’t be able to see Carly being a brat, or me ignoring her. I slid to the edge of the couch and slouched down even farther, turning my body away from my sister.

  “Let’s go to Toys R Us,” Carly suggested. She stuck two fingers up the mouth of the machine.

  “Mom said we had to stay here.”

  “Yeah, but I’m bored.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  The model in my magazine had an angry face, dark kohl-rimmed eyes, and clenched teeth.

  “Uh oh. . .”

  I looked up again. Carly had managed to bugger up the machine; it spilled multicoloured candy into her open palms and beyond, rainbow tears falling to the floor. Her face revealed a mixture of excitement and panic.

  “What did you do?” I admonished her. I started gathering all the Skittles up from the floor.

  “I — I. . .” Her hands trembled, still holding the sugary beads. “Don’t tell Mommy, okay?”

  &They happened exactly a day apart.

  Patrick went first. The Halloween candy should have tipped me off. The excess of it. The day after his twenty-seventh birthday, Patrick came over, as usual, around five-thirty, with a Tupperware container full of meatloaf.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” I said.

  “Not really.” He ran a hand through his hair, then reached into the bowl of leftover candy and tore open a package of licorice, withdrew a strand, but didn’t put it to his mouth. Instead, he began pulling it apart. Kipling, who had readjusted to his presence, hopped off the second ledge of the bookshelf where she’d been sleeping in a shaft of reflected sunlight. She hopped up
onto the countertop and sniffed at the container, but when Patrick turned to pet her, she pulled back, hopped down, and trotted off.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I need to be honest with you,” he said, and reached for my hand. I didn’t reach back. My hand stayed limp. He took my wrist. “Come sit on the couch.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. Maybe he had a girlfriend I didn’t know about. He’d kept it a secret the whole time. I’d never asked.

  Why had I never asked? Conor had started dating without telling me; Patrick probably had, too. Carly’s death made me fragile, the kind of person who too much information could shatter. What other secrets — He started talking, standing in the kitchen, still holding my wrist.

  He’d been accepted to do a study abroad program at Oxford, to write his Master’s thesis on the psychological history of T.S. Eliot while writing The Waste Land.

  “Stop — ” I said, “What? You’re a lawyer.”

  “I dropped out of law school after you and I broke up. I never finished my final semester.”

  Patrick not finishing law school. Patrick couldn’t even start a game of Scrabble and not finish it.

  He made eye contact. “You made it pretty clear you didn’t want me to contact you after we broke up.”

  “Why? Why did you stop?”

  “When we moved to Calgary, I started having panic attacks. First, just once in a while, then they started getting more and more frequent. I couldn’t sleep. Like, at all. Sometimes I’d go for days.”

  I remembered; a feeling recalled from the base of my intestines, guttural. Deep guilt; my fault.

  Patrick continued talking, his thumb on the ulnar veins of my wrist. I’d learned in the CPR training St. Sebastian staff had to take that you should never check someone’s pulse this way, because you could feel your own pulse through your thumb. I wondered which of our hearts was throbbing faster; impossible to tell whose beat was whose.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about all these bad things that could happen. I worried that I would fail school, that there were germs in the house that would make you sick, that maybe I’d left the screen door open and Kipling would get out. . .I kept trying to do everything perfect, keep everything exactly clean, double-check everything. . .but it didn’t help. Then, the less time I spent sleeping the more I became convinced that I would just drive home from the library one day, exhausted, and hit someone with the car. I’d crash and fall asleep for hours — I started missing class, and falling further and further behind. I thought I was making all kinds of mistakes, that I was going to do something terrible, and I couldn’t catch up, I couldn’t figure out — ”

  “You never told me any of this.”

  “You would have thought I was crazy.”

  I pulled my wrist away.

  His arms hung at his sides. “I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t be around anyone. Especially you. We fought all the time. I couldn’t take the stress.”

  “We weren’t fighting,” I challenged.

  “You weren’t communicating.” “You weren’t really communicating either,” he countered.

  “I tried!”

  “Darce, I don’t want to fight about this. I’m trying to tell you — will you just listen to me?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest to hold myself in.

  He sighed. “The same week we broke up — that week, I dropped out. Well, actually, first I thought I would just take a leave and go back, finish that semester later, when I felt, you know, so then I went to one of the counsellors on campus and told her how messed up I felt. She made a referral to a psychiatrist at, at the hospital, at Foothills, and I started seeing her.”

  He didn’t normally stumble over his words. But I hadn’t heard him talk at length in a long time, either. Kipling batted at the window, at a fly fluttering behind the screen. Her tail swished, preparing for the kill.

  “She diagnosed me with OCD — obsessive compulsive disorder. Anyway, I started weekly therapy, and she prescribed some meds. . .I felt so unhappy, you know, in law school. . .in life. I thought if I quit everything. . .” He trailed off, as though remembering something, or trying to forget something.

  “You should have told me. I could have done something.”

  “When I started getting better, I wanted to, but I felt like. . .I dunno, maybe, maybe you were better off without me. Maybe we were both better off. We just stressed each other out. Afterwards, with the therapy and everything, I had some time to think about things, just me — I left the program indefinitely, took some time off, worked. . .then I applied to go back and try something else, see if maybe I couldn’t find a better fit. I started my master’s this fall, when you started teaching again.”

  “So this whole time, you were just. . .?”

  “No, before that, I had a job — at a marketing firm. . .”

  He kept talking. A marketing firm? Patrick? Who thought commercials were cheesy and catered to the idiot masses?

  “. . .because I needed to get out of my own head, you know, so that I didn’t hate everything in my life — myself, you, everybody. I started reading a lot of T.S. Eliot. He actually had a nervous breakdown himself, he was hospitalized for a period — back then they called it nervous disorder.” He stopped. “You look like. . .this is a lot to take in. I’m sorry.”

  “When?” I said.

  “When what?”

  “When do you leave?”

  I wanted him gone, right then.

  &Carly’s voice rambled in my dreams, talking to me in her Carly dialect. She said the word kinda all the time, as though not 100 percent sure of the content of what she was saying, betraying her confidence. Instead of saying, “He said” and “She said,” Carly would say, “He was like,” and “She was like.” And she always interrupted.

  In the morning, I could never remember what she needed to tell me, everything garbled. Her silly, mixed-up songs played over and over in my head.

  I like to eat, eat, eat, eepples and banee-nees

  I like to oot, oot, oot, ooples and banoo-noos

  I like to oat, oat, oat, oapples and banoh-nos

  &No way I could go to Joel’s housewarming party. I didn’t want to have to make happy small-talk. How are you? I’m fine. Did anyone ever answer that question with anything but fine or good?

  But that meant another night alone, just me and myself. Every time I heard Andrew’s footsteps above, I kept thinking it was Patrick, walking down the basement stairs. I was being dissected, piece by piece; first Carly, and then Patrick. Kipling brushed up against me, butting her head against my legs.

  I forgot that I owed Andrew rent, but when I went to root in my drawer for cheques, I realized I didn’t have any. Going to the bank gave me something to do. After work, I zipped up my boots and shooed Kipling away from the door. I hadn’t eaten lunch, but had no appetite.

  A few of my neighbours lingered on the street, scraping raw snow off their driveways, chipping away at the frozen ground with the tips of their shovels. In Toronto, the city trucks just dumped salt on the ground, salt that gnawed at the undercarriage of cars and left the bottoms of jeans bleached white. Why shovel, I thought, when it will just snow again tomorrow? Why not crawl in, give up, and let Mother Nature melt it all in the spring? Let it thaw on its own time? My hands felt dry, chapped. I picked at a hangnail, making it worse.

  My phone rang in my jacket pocket. It took a few seconds of groping around with cold hands to retrieve it, and by the time I pulled it out the call had gone to voicemail. I’d walked a couple blocks from home already, halfway to the bank.

  I pinned the phone between my ear and my shoulder so I could listen to the message but put my hand back in my pocket to warm it up.

  “Hello, this is Sheila Stratton from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. This message is for Darcy Nolan. I’m calling to inform you that your mother has been admitted to the psychiatric ward following a suicide attempt. She asked us to call you. We were hoping you would be able to com
e in — ”

  &In kids’ television shows, there were the good guys and the bad guys. Cartoons seemed to generally have a good life, aside from the terrible evil force, lurking. At some point, inevitably, the bad guys would do something bad, and the good guys would try to stop them. Sometimes the situation looked touch-and-go. But ultimately, good always triumphed over evil. The bad guys eventually slinked back to their lair. But then the cycle repeated itself in the next episode. The evil never really vanished; instead, the good guys had to face the bad guys over and over again, day after day. The good guys could never just relax or enjoy life, because the bad guys were just going to pop out again.

  After these messages, we’ll be right back.

  &By the time I arrived at Mount Sinai and got to talk to a doctor, it was almost four in the morning, Toronto time. My stomach gurgled. I bought a Styrofoam cup of coffee from one of the machines on the floor. Afterwards, I felt more awake, but the coffee’s bitterness gnawed at my empty stomach. I’d maxed out my credit card buying a last-minute, full-price airline ticket to Toronto. I’d filled three bowls of food and water for Kipling not knowing how long the trip would take and how long it would be before I’d get a chance to talk to Andrew, my cat sitter in a pinch. Andrew and Kipling had bonded after Carly’s death, when I’d flown to Toronto for her funeral. When I returned, Kipling stayed wary of me for a week, sleeping on the other side of the room rather than at the foot of my bed. It wasn’t the first time Kipling had to fend for herself with an overflowing bowl of food, I reminded myself, picturing Papi, lying still, in striped pyjamas. The hospital corridor smelled like antiseptic and death.

  Finally, the psychiatric resident requested I follow her into one of the rooms. She had small flecks of blood on the cuff of her sleeve. “I’m Dr. Garza, I’m the on-call resident tonight. I have some questions for you about your mother’s psychiatric history.”

  “Okay.” I pressed my fingernails into the palms of my hands. “I can try. We haven’t really been in much contact — I’ve lived in Calgary for the last several years, so. . .”