Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  When I went back into our room, he’d fallen asleep again. I wanted to crawl in beside him, but I had a stack of unmarked multiplication tests still on the kitchen table. Red ink had stained my fingers. I waited at the door for a moment to see if he would wake up, or sense me there. He slept on.

  &On the third day of my mother’s hospitalization, I tracked down my stepfather by calling the construction company where he worked.

  “She can just fuck herself,” he shouted, when I told him where she was.

  “She tried to kill herself,” I reiterated. “She’s your wife, and she tried to kill herself.”

  “Crazy bitch. You fix it. You both can fuck yourselves.”

  I didn’t pass along the message.

  I thought of the house. Could she go back? Dickhead paid the rent; I doubted my unemployed mother had enough money to even scrounge up a month’s worth. I thought of Carly’s vacant childhood bedroom, the now-faded pink and purple butterflies. The doorframe at the bottom of the basement stairs, naked except for the faint pencil scratches of our heights, the gap between them smaller and smaller each year as Carly aged from child to adolescent and I hit adult and stopped growing. In the end, she’d grown taller than me, just by an inch or so. I wondered who lived in our old apartment, the apartment where, for a period of time, it had just been me and my mother and Carly. One of the last times I’d met Papi for coffee, we’d exited the building at the same time as a young woman in her mid-twenties with choppy black hair streaked bright red skirted past us. She juggled an armful of groceries, and as she tried to readjust, two Granny Smith apples spilled from one of the bags. Papi bent to retrieve them with surprising ease given his age, helping others so instinctive.

  “Thanks, Elliot,” the girl said, and beamed at him.

  “She lives in your old apartment,” he explained, once we’d exited the building.

  I tried to imagine what kind of furniture she would have but remembered instead my parents’ old four-poster bed, the ’70s quilt my father had given my mother for their wedding, the blue velvet patches. I remembered sleeping in that bed, the three of us, Mom drooling all over the pillow, and Carly, who always sucked her thumb. Her mouth went up and down, sucking in her sleep, with her raccoon curled up in her fist. Both thumb and raccoon (tail or ear). After our grandmother died, our mother slept a lot. Sleeping away our problems seemed to be a Nolan girls thing. Facing our pillows instead of actually facing problems.

  Once, while my mother and Carly slept, I took out my sketch pad and got my crayons from the little drawer in the kitchen underneath where we kept the forks and spoons. On the blank paper, I drew two little girls like my father’s Diane Arbus photograph, except instead of twins, I drew Carly and me. Carly I drew in round shapes, with a little yellow fuzz on top for hair. Our father had a picture of someone else’s kids instead of his own. My own hair I drew in dark brown, in wiggly S shapes. Then I took the crayon called hot magenta and gave both Carly and me BIG smiles.

  My picture looked small compared to father’s photograph, and compared to the clean white square of wall left behind. I looked down at my drawing, crayon Darcy and crayon Carly, thinking when Mom woke up I would give it to her to see if she would feel better and come play with me. It looked pretty good, I thought. Even if the smiles were a little too big.

  &In the hospital, I brought my mother another coffee in a paper cup from the cafeteria. I pulled the sleeves of my sweater long so that I could hold it without burning myself. My mother appeared both calmer than I remembered her, and puffier, a combination of sedated and resigned.

  “You know exactly what I need,” she said.

  “What’s that?” I asked, but she reached with outstretched hands for the coffee, as though it were that simple.

  &I informed my principal of my resignation and began the process of shedding my Calgary skin in three weeks, selling or giving away my few items of furniture, purging the various crafts and cards I’d received over the years from students. In the time I’d lived in Calgary, I’d moved in with and then broken up with my first love, begun and ended my first career. Carly had been dead for almost a full year. Soon it would be Christmas again, my first without her. Eventually, there would be more Christmases without Carly than there had been with her.

  Patrick was scheduled to leave January 2nd, but I purposely did not contact him to say goodbye before he flew to London. I did not have it in me. He never called, either.

  Conor and Joel appeared to take my decision identically hard. I told them each, separately, and watched their faces contort into the same expression: slightly raised eyebrows, lips parted, eyes widened and then wilted.

  Joel tried unconvincingly to be supportive, exercising years of psychological training, saying he understood how unimaginable my stress must be and why it must feel like I needed to go back. “It’s probably not a decision you want to make right away. Remember that you have a lot of emotional support here. Me, Conor, your friends. . .Take your time and think about it.”

  As though I hadn’t already made my decision.

  I’d had a dream about him at the Holiday Inn, during an intermittent middle-of-the-afternoon nap. In it, he’d flown out to Toronto to surprise me, and he and Papi stood outside my hotel door, knocking, telling me they didn’t want me to be alone. But it was just hotel maintenance interrupting my sleep to change the sheets and empty the garbage. It took me a few minutes to wake, and when I did, the housekeeper had already unlocked the door.

  “Sorry! Sorry, Ma’am!” She tripped over herself, yanking her cumbersome cart back out the door.

  I didn’t tell Joel about the dream, even though he continued to call while I was in Toronto during my mother’s hospital stay to check up on me, and to try to explain the barrage of doctorspeak I had to decipher about my mother. “It sounds like she’s had depression for a long time. Parenting two young children, being pregnant again, having her husband leave, having a miscarriage, losing her mother. . .” He trailed off. After a moment, he said, “It must have been hard, having a mother who was so severely depressed. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  I didn’t deserve his concern.

  Conor tried a different tactic to get me to stay. He directed me to two chairs near a fireplace in the corner of the coffee shop where I’d decided to break the news. “Quitting in the middle of a year will look bad on your teaching record. This time, you can’t say that your sister died. I don’t think a principal will cut you a break again; there aren’t that many jobs available anymore. Can’t you just wait until Christmas break and then decide? You’re such a good teacher — I don’t want the board to think you’re flaky or irresponsible.”

  “I’m a terrible teacher,” I countered. “I don’t have it in me anymore. I look at my students, and I just think of Carly. So many of these kids have learning disabilities, AD/HD, shitty parents, crappy life situations. . . I can’t save them. If I can’t even help my own family, how am I supposed to help all these kids?” I took the lid off my coffee to add sugar, and some of it sloshed over the side.

  Conor reached for a napkin.

  “I’ll get it,” I said.

  &I dreamed of squares.

  The floor of a shopping mall, a checker pattern.

  One blue, one white, one blue, one white.

  I hop from blue to blue.

  White ones are bad luck.

  Mom pushes her shopping cart. She says we need stuff for the baby.

  Can’t the baby just use my old stuff?

  Like my ABC blocks, and my dinosaur puzzle, and my zebra puppet.

  I outgrowed all that stuff.

  Blue, blue, blue.

  “Where’s your mom?” says a mom-sized lady, in a flower dress. She squats down beside me.

  Where is my mom?

  I’m looking for her — I see grown-ups and shopping bags and stores.

  I’m standing on a blue. I can’t move.

  The lady puts her hands on my shoulders. “Where’d your mom go
, Sweetheart?”

  Mom!

  I’m crying, and my nose starts running.

  She left me here, when I wasn’t looking.

  “What’s your mom’s name, Sweetheart? We can go to the desk and get security to call her over the loud speaker.”

  I can’t tell her my mom’s name. I wipe my nose on my sleeve.

  I’ll be good, I promise.

  Then Mom comes up right beside me. “Why are you crying?” To the lady, she says, “This is my daughter.” Then, to me, “Darcy, stop! Be quiet! You’re fine.”

  We go outside, onto the busy street and stand in the snow. I don’t like the wind. My jacket isn’t zipped up. People keep pushing by.

  “You better never wander off like that again!” Mom says. “You stay beside me or you’re going to get lost, and something bad is going to happen to you. You have to be good, always.”

  &I didn’t think Dickhead would answer a phone call from me again. Sure enough, I got his automated voicemail.

  “I’m bringing my mother home from the hospital tomorrow,” I said. “It’s her house, too.” I paused. Did I have anything else to say? “And I’m moving in with her. So, if you want to keep living there, fine. But you’re going to have to live with us both. Your choice.”

  &The Calgary Stampede, a ten-day-long cowboy-themed festival in July, consumed the whole city, forcing everyone to participate — even Patrick. When the office where he had a summer job threw a pancake breakfast, he’d caved to the Stampede spirit only by wearing jeans, and pushed the sloppy beans and bacon around on the paper plate in front of him. His fellow student colleagues wore bolo ties and cowboy boots, guzzled beer despite the fact that it wasn’t even noon yet, and called me “Lassie,” as in “Git yer pardner to loosen up and have a drink, Lassie!”

  “I read that the rates of hospital admissions skyrocket during Stampede,” Patrick commented, one morning, fumbling in the dark with the buttons of his dress shirt. The sun had yet to come up. Way too early for going to work, especially for summer. Patrick insisted on going into work early during Stampede, saying that he hated the crowds that rode the C-train to and from the Stampede Grounds, clogging up his usual commute. I’d tried to convince him that waking up at five was excessive; he’d argued that he’d finish work and come home sooner. We both knew, though, that summer students did not have the option of finishing early; while he was there, associates always found something for him to do.

  I tried to go back to bed after Patrick left, but found myself lying awake. The summer before moving to Calgary, he and Aubrey had run a 10k for prostate cancer wearing boxer briefs instead of gym shorts. Louis, who was Aubrey’s boy-toy at the time, and I, had waited at the finish line with Gatorade. Patrick crossed the finish line; gave me a sweaty hug that lifted me off my feet.

  In bed, unable to sleep after Patrick left, I rolled over and looked out the window. The sun rose through the windows Patrick had cleaned the night before.

  &I went to the house before bringing my mother home. Opened the garage. No car. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t come back, though. The sink lay full of dishes. In their room, drawers hung open, empty. Her ratty clothes took up less than half the space. The basement room — first mine, then Carly’s — felt stale, unused, the sheets pulled up and smoothed tight, the way it had never looked when occupied by my sister.

  Back in the kitchen, I pulled a chair up to the counter and opened the cabinet above the fridge.

  When my father left, I knew because of the absence of his framed photograph.

  When my mother’s husband left, I knew because of the absence of his booze.

  &Back in Toronto, I was reminded of a different kind of cold, a wet cold that licked at my bones. Kipling sniffed around the basement room before settling onto the windowsill. She wanted to be up high, but even on the window, she only reached ground level. I’d moved from basement to basement to basement. So much for moving up. Kipling hung her head over the side. Doleful, black marble eyes.

  &The doctors put my mother on a new medication that made her talkative, fidgety. She took up knitting to keep her fingers still, but kept making mistakes, tying knots on top of knots. Her fingers trembled while she tried to undo them. Her stories distracted her, but I wanted her to keep talking.

  She learned two lessons the hard way, she told me: that breastfeeding was not a very effective form of birth control, and that my father was an asshole.

  They conceived me before getting married, the little push (or maybe the big shove) that led to the quickie courthouse wedding with only two witnesses, and not even their parents. My mother went on the pill right after I was born, but Carly still somehow managed to make an appearance, six years later, right as my father started his master’s in Business. He’d finished his undergraduate degree during my toddlerhood, and then worked for a few years to pay back their debt.

  “Your father kept taking out student loans,” she informed me. “I told him, you know we have to pay those back, right? He told me I should go back to work. Before you were born, I worked at the Shoppers Drug Mart.”

  My mother went into labour with Carly on the first day of my father’s second year of his MBA. My mother took a taxi to the hospital, left me with my grandmother, and laboured alone for eight hours while my father finished the two classes he had for that day. He still made it to the hospital in time; my mother’s labour with Carly took a total of thirty-one hours, which culminated in a C-section.

  Nine months later, my mother discovered she was pregnant again; eight weeks along. She’d mistaken her absent periods for normal fluctuation while breastfeeding, thinking it was too early to go back on the pill. She began vomiting as soon as she woke up, so it occurred to her to take a pregnancy test. She told me the stick turned pink right away, before the time limit; outside the bathroom, Carly sat and screamed and pounded her little fists on the door.

  She told my father on her birthday, June 1st. He left on June 2nd, before I got home from school. My mother said she went into her bedroom and lay on her bed on top of all the laundry she hadn’t yet folded. When she got up, she found Carly in the bathroom, having pulled herself up to the edge of the toilet, dangling her fingers in the basin, splashing the cold water everywhere. “That,” she told me, “was Carly’s first spanking.” She laughed. “First of many, hey?” My mother didn’t tell us that my father had left, assuming he would come back in a couple of days.

  Sitting on the couch in front of me, she fumbled with a ball of yarn; it rolled away from her, dangling by a single string.

  I picked it up, rolled the string around my hand. “Where did he go?”

  “First to his dad’s. His parents never really liked me; they wanted him to marry someone educated. And they said you girls weren’t well behaved. His mom died shortly after Carly was born, and his father was an alcoholic.”

  “Does he know that you lost the baby?”

  “I never told him. He paid child support for you and Carly — it came right off his paycheque, until your eighteenth birthdays. But obviously, he never paid anything for the baby, so. . .bastard probably thought I got an abortion. That’s what he wanted me to do.” She picked at a tangle in her scarf. “The doctors said if you miscarry it usually happens earlier on. . .They did the ultrasound and told me she was a girl, and then two days later I was standing in the shower and I started bleeding. They had to. . .they had to cut her out of me. I picked the name Vanessa — something really girly. Your father picked your name, and Carly’s. This baby was going to be mine. Screw him if he didn’t want anything to do with her.” She paused, reached to take the string I’d collected. “There was. . .there was so much blood. It was all over the towel. I tried to clean it up so it wouldn’t scare you girls.”

  “He paid child support?”

  “Not much; he was still in school, he didn’t have a job. I had enough money to keep Carly in daycare for a while, pay the bills. I worked, too — cleaning houses, you remember — and then I waitressed. When he finally g
ot a job, the money got a bit better.”

  “Did he ever ask to come see us?”

  She looked up from the mess in her lap. “I need some coffee. You want some?”

  “Sure.”

  It tasted too strong.

  “People say waitressing is good cash, but the other waitresses were younger than me, pretty, with bigger tits. Big tits, big tips.”

  When she tired of knitting, my mother would bake. She’d burned the underside of a loaf of banana bread that morning. She didn’t seem to notice the blackened bottom, or the fact that it barely tasted of banana. She’d used yellow ones, fresh from the produce aisle, instead of the ripe ones that the recipe called for. I bit into a slice.

  “Does he know Carly died?”

  She talked with her mouth full. “Do you want more? I’m going to have more. My meds make me so hungry.”

  “I’m okay.”

  She’d gone back in the kitchen to cut another slab. I asked again. “Does he know Carly died?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “I haven’t talked to him since he walked out on you girls.”

  And you, I thought.

  She swallowed. “I thought I saw him at the funeral, at the very back. It kind of looked like him. He always had that scratchy beard. I couldn’t tell. He was too far away.”

  &At the temp agency, I passed the typing test and the computer literacy test.

  “We have a sales position available,” the staffer informed me. He looked like he hadn’t slept. “It’s for a, uh, cable company.”

  “What kind of sales?”

  “You know, calling people, asking if they want more channels, that kind of thing.”

  “So, telemarketing.”

  “Basically. You interested?”

  They gave me a six-month contract, a maternity leave. I needed the money. Outside, I waited for the bus, standing underneath the building overhang. I hadn’t anticipated the layer of frost outside when I’d dressed; my legs shivered bare without nylons.