Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  I’d forgotten how, in Toronto, you saw rain before you felt it, in the light drops ahead of you on the pavement, and in the haze of the sky. You’d touch your hair and realize it was damp, with the sky so warm and humid. And then it would start to pour, fat tears sobbing from the sky. One rainy afternoon, I waved down a cab and had the driver take me to Carly’s cemetery.

  Her rectangular stone looked small compared to the others: a lacklustre greypink granite, with her name carved simply into the stone. I ran my fingers over the letters.

  I lay down with my head at the base of the stone, my body parallel with hers. My ears buzzed. I imagined her, five years old, standing on the sidelines of our apartment pool, knees bent, her arms wrapped around her torso. She wore bright orange water wings, a blue one-piece with a puppy appliqué. A hand-me-down from her big sister. The water came up to my chin. I bobbed up and down on my tippy toes. I stretched my arms out to her. The sign on the wall read: Children under 13 must be supervised. Nobody ever came up to the pool anyway, and Mom had fallen into one of her deep sleeps, where even Carly, poking at her, squirming into the bed beside her, fluttering at her with cold little feet couldn’t wake her up.

  Carly, in her blue bathing suit, stood in front of me on the dock. “I don’t wanna.”

  “You need to learn how to swim,” I told her. “Big girls know how to swim. I promise, I’ll catch you.”

  “What if you don’t?”

  “I cross my heart.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “There’s nothing to be scared about. Come on.”

  “I’m scaaaaared.”

  I lifted my toes up off the bottom of the pool and dogpaddled for a moment, watching her. That morning, I’d put a French braid in her hair. She’d been so excited she couldn’t stop touching it. Now, it was a frizzy mess, strands loose and falling in front of her eyes.

  “Jump, Carly.”

  She paced back a few steps, unsure, then pointed one foot hesitantly forward. Set it back down.

  “Jump, Carly,” I insisted. “Just do it. Jump!”

  She fixed her wide blue eyes on me. Then, in a split second, she leapt into the air, falling down towards the water. Waiting for me to catch her.

  &I slept in on Sunday, and when I woke up, my mother was not in her bedroom. Not in the kitchen.

  She’d wake randomly, not on a schedule. She made two dozen red velvet cupcakes one morning as the sun came up, made a full pancake breakfast one evening just as I shuffled off to bed.

  At work, I phoned her after every ten client calls.

  “Good afternoon, Ma’am. Are you interested in upgrading your Internet to high speed?”

  I wondered what she did while I swivelled in my desk chair and twiddled with my pen. I broke a series of pens with my fiddling; snapped off the backs and burst the ink.

  “Hi, Mom. Just calling to say hi.”

  “To see if I’m alive,” she’d say. “I’m not stupid.”

  I rid the house of razor blades, started waxing my legs and armpits instead, which burned. I flushed all the over-the-counter meds I could find, but I couldn’t get rid of her prescriptions. I started carrying them with me, leaving only those she needed for that day in a small bowl on the kitchen table.

  After a week of this, I came home and found a triple-layer fudge cake that she’d sculpted in my absence. She’d left the oven on, and the room felt hot. She’d cut me a piece and left it in the bowl with a Post-it note that read simply, I’m not a child. I turned the oven off. The cake tasted too sweet, the icing slippery. I scraped the contents of the bowl into the trash.

  Then, Sunday morning, I couldn’t find her.

  “Mom?” I checked the bathrooms, then the closets. I stood at the top of the stairs, my body tingling.

  She’d gone to jump.

  Why use pills or razors? They’d never worked for her in the past. But throwing herself in front of the subway — it’d worked for Carly.

  Together again, mother and daughter.

  And I would —

  Keys in the lock. The front door opened.

  “Mom!” I cried. “What the fuck?”

  Her hair sagged, damp from the rain. She unwound a purple scarf from her neck, shed her faded jacket. “What?”

  “Where the fuck were you?”

  She dropped her keys onto the side table. “You look like a skeleton. I bake all this food, you never eat it.”

  I sunk to sitting. “Where were you? You scared the hell out of me.”

  She sighed. “I went to church. For fuck’s sake. I just went to goddamned Mass!”

  &When the rain let up enough to go for a walk, I wandered past The Upstairs Basement and caught the scent of warm, oven-baked bread, mingled with the wet scent of spring. I stopped to inhale a memory of Carly in mud-spackled rain boots. A dull ache squeezed my breastbone.

  Ryan exited, with his back to me, and turned around to wave at someone still in the building, calling, “Thanks! I’ll see you tomorrow!”

  When he turned, I saw that he’d put on weight and had grown out his beard. He exhaled; his breath smelled brightly of beer.

  “Darcy.”

  “Hi,” I said, looked down. Mud lined the sides of my sneakers.

  “What are you doing here?”

  In fact, all of him smelled like beer. He ran his hand over his face, as though trying to smooth out his expression.

  “I. . .” I felt stupid saying it. “I just sometimes take this route home. It uh. . .it reminds me of Carly.”

  “You live here now?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I moved back a while ago.”

  A pigeon stumbled between us, pecking at the ground, shimmery shades of pink and green under the bland grey and white of its neck feathers. Ryan and I had never been big talkers; Carly had always engulfed all the possible space and silence.

  “Okay then,” I said, and turned away. “Well, I’m going to go.”

  “Wait.” He put his hand on my arm, stopping me. “I just got off. Do you want to go for a drink?”

  We found a small hole-in-the-wall, cash-only Indian restaurant with gloomy, barely-there lighting. I ordered a chai and some naan, wondering whether I should splurge and pick up food to take home to my mother. Would she notice I was taking longer than usual?

  Ryan ordered a Newcastle but no food, and when his drink came, he took a large gulp of the dark ale. There was foam in the hair on his upper lip. His skin was sallow, and there were rings under his eyes.

  “How’s work?” I asked.

  “Oh,” he said, “you know. I do okay, with tips and stuff. I got moved up to bartender, finally. Maybe in a couple years I’ll apply for a management position.” His words lacked enthusiasm.

  “Did you ever go back to school?” He’d had only one semester of college completed when he found out about Autumn.

  He swallowed some more beer. “Can’t afford it. Especially not now, you know? Child support.”

  Child support. So, he probably didn’t live with Jessa. Probably didn’t love her. Possibly didn’t love her. Still, I didn’t want to ask.

  “How is she — uh, your daughter?”

  “She’s great. She’s amazing. She’s the only thing that keeps me going, really, when some days I just want to. . .” Another sip. “She’s so damn smart. She’s about to finish kindergarten. The other night, we were at Swiss Chalet, and she said, Daddy, I want one of these, and pointed to the menu, so I said, Do you know what that says? And she said, Chocolate milkshake. There wasn’t even a picture. Those are long words, too.”

  I pictured them, sitting beside each other in a vinyl booth, Ryan and Autumn, her hair in pigtails, holding the giant plastic menu. Her calling him Daddy.

  “You see a lot of her?” I asked.

  He took the last gulp of his drink. “Not as much as I want. Jessa’s parents. . .I don’t get to see Autumn much. Apparently I’m a shitty, irresponsible high school kid who got their daughter pregnant.”

  “Hey,” I sa
id, tearing off a piece of the buttery naan. “You’re there, aren’t you? You want to talk about shitty fathers? My dad bailed on us when Carly was still a baby.”

  “I know. My parents bailed, too. I didn’t want Autumn to go through what Carly went through.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, never having a dad, always feeling like it was her fault, like she did something wrong. I don’t want Autumn growing up thinking I don’t love her.”

  “Carly talked to you about our father?”

  “A bit. Especially after I found out I had a kid. It killed her — she said how come I didn’t even know my daughter and I wanted to be a dad, when her dad left because of her?”

  “Because of her?”

  “I guess she felt the timing of it — like, when he left — he stayed around for you, she said, then after she came along. . .she thought. . .plus she said your stepdad always told her she was a brat, too hard to handle. Makes me want to punch that guy. I’ve thought about it.”

  I’d shredded the naan into mulch. “Carly thought our dad left because of her?”

  “She never told you that?”

  “Never. I didn’t think. . .she didn’t even remember him.”

  He shrugged, put his glass to his lips even though there was no liquid left, then set it back down.

  “Maybe on some level all kids blame themselves for deadbeat parents. My grandma told me my mom got sick because of drugs. But maybe that’s an excuse. She could have stopped, I think.”

  Did all kids whose parents left feel responsible? Had I felt that way, on some level, when my father walked out? I’d felt the absence of my father’s framed photograph more palpably than the absence of him. Guiltily, I recalled being a teenager, thinking that our mother had checked out because of Carly. However abusive it had been for our stepfather to constantly harass Carly for being a challenging kid, there was truth to it. I would have never said it to her face, or left her because of it. But sometimes, I’d wanted to. Sometimes, she’d been so. . .

  In the dark, I wanted to drown myself in alcohol. Poison myself with it.

  “I miss her,” Ryan said. “I miss her so fucking much. You told me not to call her.”

  I wondered if anyone had heard, despite the noise of the dark restaurant. I wiped my greasy palms on my jeans. “Do you hate me because of it?” Of course he did.

  “No, I just wanted. . .I didn’t want her to hurt anymore. I didn’t know it would — ”

  “I know,” I said. “I didn’t either.”

  He reached in his back pocket and slid out his wallet, pulled out a limp twenty-dollar bill. “I’m going to take off,” he said, and stood.

  I nodded, fished in my purse for some change.

  “She always thought it was funny that the two of you looked nothing alike,” he added. “I guess it’s a good thing, now — sometimes, it hurts to be reminded.”

  &I took another cab to the cemetery, listening to the static of the dispatcher giving directions over the radio. The driver tried to chat with me a few times, but gave up after several one-word answers. A hole in the back of the seat revealed the gaping guts of yellow foam. I picked at the spot, making it worse.

  The driver changed into the left lane and ran over the decomposing corpse of a dead bird; a crow, its body crushed and stiff against the pavement. I turned around to look, as car after car rushed over it. Flattened, flightless, lifeless.

  At Carly’s grave, I sat with my back against the headstone. The shadows of the trees shifted under the vigilant eye of the sun, marking the dawdling time. Half an hour felt like a whole afternoon. Time without Carly had slowed to a standstill, dug its heels into the dirt, refused to pick up the pace. I would drag it by the wrist for the rest of my life.

  I called a cab to take me back home. When we passed over the same spot where the crow was, I watched for it, out the smeary window. There — I could see it. Repeatedly crushed each passing second. As though anything could possibly flatten it more.

  &In May, Joel flew to Toronto for the conference on child abuse offered through the Hospital for Sick Children. The seminar so happened to fall the week after my twenty-seventh birthday. That morning, waking up in the bed I’d abandoned as soon as I’d graduated high school, I wondered whether Patrick would phone. But he couldn’t. He didn’t know I lived in Toronto again. I’d changed my cell phone, my address. My life.

  A recent cold turned into an ear infection. I went to Dr. Martin, who wrote me a prescription for antibiotics. At the drugstore, I paid for my amoxicillin and my mother’s latest stash of antidepressants and mood stabilizers. Happy birthday to me.

  My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She wore one of Dick’s old sweatshirts, the frayed cuffs pushed up around her elbows. “I’m going to bake a cake,” she said. “Black Forest. We had Black Forest once for your birthday. Remember?”

  I remembered a Black Forest cake from one of Carly’s birthdays. She plucked the fake, saccharine cherries from the top of the cake, put them in her mouth, and plucked off the stems. Her lips turned red.

  One week and three days after I turned twenty-seven, Joel took a cab to the airport and I went to work, where the company offered to make my temporary contract permanent. I needed health care benefits; it made the monotony worth it. That same day, as I walked home, a man started walking in my general direction, screaming obscenities. “Fucking whore! Fucking cunt! Fucking cocktease!” Was he angry at someone in particular? Or just at the world? I crossed to the other side of the street.

  What I didn’t know at the time, but would discover three weeks later at work, having suspiciously and violently thrown up the half can of pineapple I’d consumed that morning for breakfast, was that at some point during the few days prior, I’d conceived my first child.

  As its mother-to-be walked home, attempting to ignore the hatred spewing from the passerby, my baby remained completely oblivious. It had yet to develop ears, or a heart, or a brain. Maybe being oblivious was safer.

  &Patrick had insisted we use as many forms of birth control as possible. I took the pill each night at exactly the same time and we used condoms. I kept my mouth shut about several of Patrick’s rules — such as hand-scrubbing between the grooves of the mosaic bathroom tiles, which were each only approximately an inch square — but I agreed with him about pregnancy prevention. Though I enjoyed other people’s children, and my stomach swooned when one of my co-workers on maternity leave brought her six-week-old son to work and I touched the velvet curve of his bare foot, I had little desire for my own child. At three-thirty, I could say goodbye to my students, close myself in the expanse of my empty classroom with a cup of coffee and sit in silence. The idea of my own child growing older, having something inevitably awful happen to it — dropping out of school, contracting an STI, being arrested for driving drunk, or, perhaps, even, being killed by a drunk driver — that idea always crawled cold up my spine and made me grateful for Patrick’s fastidiousness.

  So it did not surprise me that, despite almost three years of potentially procreative episodes with Patrick, I never became pregnant.

  With Joel, it only took four times.

  By the time Joel came along, I’d stopped trying so hard. He wanted me. So, why not? I thought. Things were going to happen in my life. Things were going to just keep happening. Time was just going to keep going. It didn’t matter.

  & I’d forgotten the heat of Toronto summers, forgotten how the haze of smog gives the misleading impression of a cloudy, overcast sky. I’d forgotten about the dark berries that hung, ripe and pregnant from trees, only to fall and become stamped on the sidewalks like tar.

  When we finished eighth grade, Aubrey’s mother took Aubrey and me to get pedicures as a graduation gift, and got one herself, telling us that well-manicured feet were a necessity when wearing sandals. We met her at the floral boutique where she worked, and she pinned daisies behind our ears.

&n
bsp; “Come on, girls,” she said, an oversized pair of dark sunglasses masking her face. “Let’s go get spoiled.”

  When I got home, my flower hung hot and wilted, and my shoulders glistened pink with the beginnings of a sunburn. My mother watched as I took my sandals off in the doorway, noticed the polished scarlet of my nails. Aubrey’s mom had said red was “classic and timeless.”

  My mother wore a grimy sweatshirt, even though it was over thirty degrees with the humidex. She looked like she had spent all day cleaning.

  “Well, don’t you look hoochy,” she said, as I came into the living room.

  “What are you talking about?” I leaned up against the doorframe. My feet felt sweaty. “Aubrey’s mom took us for pedicures. So what?”

  My mother scratched the nape of her neck, where an elastic twisted her hair into a ragged loop. “Be all fancy and fake. Get all the attention you want. Suit yourself.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re not making any sense.”

  She turned away from me, took out a bottle of all-purpose cleaner. “You should worry about your personality instead of your looks.”

  I clenched my toes into the carpet. “You should worry about your personality! God!”

  She spritzed the cleaner repeatedly onto the counter. Started wiping forceful circles. “If you’re going to be a snarky little bitch, go do it somewhere else.”

  &I think Kipling knew about the baby before I did. When I rescued her, Papi’s neighbours told me that Papi’s nurse had found Kipling curled up on Papi’s feet as he lay there, dead. She was a bait-and-switch kind of cat, the kind who would approach me and butt her head against my leg for attention or crawl up onto my chest while I slept to knead at my chest, only to skitter away when I reached down to pet her or pick her up. Sometimes she hid under the bed for no reason. Typically, she slept on the desk chair on the opposite corner of the room from my bed, watching me through the slats.

  The basement room trapped all the cold in the house, even in the summer, and I woke up shivering. I rolled over onto my stomach and bunched the blankets around me for warmth. Kipling crouched on my back. I didn’t want to move. I felt her shift a little, tuck her paws underneath herself, then lower her chin down onto the space between my shoulder blades.