Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  &My first kiss with Patrick was something we talked about, something I saw coming well in advance. The stitches in my lip following our car accident prevented us from being able to kiss for days. Patrick confessed that he’d intended to kiss me that night, had planned it all out. When I saw Carly the morning after my first kiss with Patrick, she lay back on my bed, her yellow hair fanning out behind her, and bemoaned her own lack of a boyfriend, of romance.

  “You’re fourteen, Car,” I pointed out.

  “Some day, I want to be loved like Papi loved his wife. So romantic.”

  “Papi’s love story wasn’t romantic; it was tragic,” I said. “His wife died when she was twenty-five. They never got to have kids. He ended up a lonely widower for the rest of his life. He never had love again.”

  “Yeah.” Her hair stood out, bright against the grey backdrop of my duvet cover. “I know. It’s, like, Romeo and Juliet love. Beyond-the-grave love.”

  I’d told her to get up and stop mooning around. “You always make me late.”

  “I have to pee first,” she said, and sat up. “Whoa, head rush.”

  Carly took her time in the bathroom, then emerged wearing my lipstick. “If I had someone who wanted to kiss me, I would let him kiss me all the time.”

  My first kiss with Joel happened during his visit to Toronto, in a small restaurant we’d stopped in when it started to rain, thwarting my ability to show him the city. His breath tasted like chicken soup. He pulled back. “I’m having a good trip so far,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Conor called a couple days after Joel’s trip ended.

  “So,” he said, “how was it?”

  “Good,” I said. “It was a good trip.”

  “Yeah, okay. But I meant you sleeping with my brother. How was it? Was it good?”

  “Conor!”

  “What? I’m teasing.”

  “He told you?”

  “Even my holier-than-thou brother isn’t above spilling these beans. Plus, I beat it out of him. He really likes you. He’s not-so-secretly hoping you’ll move back.”

  “I can’t right now. My mom’s a basket case.”

  “Yeah, I know. But we’d both like you to move back eventually. A best buddy and a knight in shining armour. What more could a girl ask for?”

  &A memory — a nightmare, darkness, heartbeat, light feet, pushing open her bedroom door, crawling up into the bed, my shivering body, her sweaty sprawl, open-mouth stinky breath, unaware of her daughter wriggling in beside her.

  Did it actually happen?

  I pulled the hotel sheets up around me, tucked them up under my shoulders, adjusted them around my naked breasts. Pulled my fingers away from where they intertwined with Joel’s as he slept.

  Joel sighed, shifted.

  Maybe it wasn’t me who ran to my mother after a nightmare.

  Maybe it was Carly.

  It had to be Carly.

  Carly — afraid of everything. Of Papi’s dolls, of bumblebees, of E.T., of the homeless guy on the corner with one arm.

  I’d told my mother that I’d had to go to Hamilton for a two-day work training session, and that I’d be back in a couple days. Not ten minutes away, at Joel’s hotel, while he visited Toronto for his conference, for my birthday.

  I got up out of the bed, slid my underwear on, pulled my T-shirt over my head.

  I shouldn’t have left her. Calling didn’t cut it. She could be —

  I sat back down on the foot of the bed. Would Joel understand if I wrote a note explaining that I needed to go back home to make sure my mother was okay? If I slipped out, called him in the morning? I could check on her and still make it back for breakfast.

  I pulled my jeans on, zipped the fly. Reached for my jacket. Scrawled a quick note on the hotel stationery, words I could barely see in the dark. Joel slept.

  Wait, I thought, then. Carly would not have run into my mother’s room for comfort from a bad dream. She always climbed the ladder from her bed to mine, pushed up against me with bony knees and elbows. “Darcy! I dreamed that I was trapped in a cabin and a millionbillion bumblebees were chasing me, so I climbed out the window, but then. . .”

  I closed the heavy hotel room door lightly behind me.

  &I knew I had to keep the baby. Walking down Bloor Street one afternoon, before I even told Joel, I passed one of my favourite sushi restaurants, and a young man outside held out a tray, debuting a new roll with thick, glossy slabs of salmon on top.

  “New red scorpion roll!” He announced. It had teeth fashioned out of cucumber, stripes on its back squirted in mayonnaise. I’d spent that morning lying on the couch with a cold towel over my eyes after having vomited as soon as I’d woken up. I’d stayed on the couch, in the only position bearable, until I felt brave enough to see whether the morning sickness had passed. When I felt stable enough to venture off the couch, I showered and dressed. I’d lost weight after Carly died, either turned off by the taste of food or impassive to it. I’d forgotten what food tasted like. Sometimes, I’d forgotten to eat. I’d lost even more weight when I’d taken up running again after returning to Toronto. I looked gaunt, my collarbone protruding. I couldn’t tell if my breasts were larger or not. They felt sore when I slipped into my bra.

  “Darcy!” My mother hollered from upstairs. “I’m not feeling well. Can you do the dishes?” The bowls and measuring cups she’d used to bake an apple rhubarb pie filled the sink.

  I hadn’t eaten that morning; had vomited the contents of a stomach mostly empty aside from the remnants of the bland crackers I’d chewed on the night before, having read that eating carbs before bed might offset early morning sickness. It hadn’t worked. The sushi looked fresh and fatty in the outdoor light. The man smiled at me, thinking I would take some.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I can’t, I’m pregnant.”

  I’d said it aloud.

  The baby was supposed to happen, was here for a reason. Maybe it was why Joel and I had somehow ended up together, without me even realizing how it’d happened. I could not conceive of being responsible for the loss of another life. I wanted the baby to be inside someone else, where it would be safe. Each morning, I climbed wearily out of bed, lifted the sweaty hair off the back of my neck, sunk to my bare knees on the cold bathroom floor, and vomited. Penance that I deserved.

  Morning sickness persisted, following me around much like Kipling still did, perching on the edge of the bathtub, a shadowy smudge behind the opaque shower curtain. I called in sick from work two shifts in a row. I lined up a row of crackers and a glass of water on my bedside table. I wondered what it would be like to have a boyfriend or husband with me to hold my hair back, to scrub vomit circles out of the inside of the toilet. I held off telling Joel. Perfect Joel, now tethered to me for life.

  Joel sometimes called later than he said he would, always apologetic, noting that he’d accidentally let a session run too long or got caught up in a call with a client’s parent. He ordered more textbooks on child development than he could possibly read. He was too good a listener, often pausing as if to mull over my comments before selecting his words. He overused semicolons in emails, even in texts. He sometimes dictated pro/con lists out loud while trying to make a decision.

  Even his dating flaw — being drawn to damsels in distress — didn’t really feel like a flaw. He just wanted to take care of others.

  I did not deserve his support.

  &One evening, when the queasiness persisted past dinnertime and my mother had gone to bed early, I found myself restlessly flicking between channels, finally settling on an evening news station broadcasting the story of a mother who, in her haste to get to work on time, had accidentally backed out of the driveway and crushed her six-year-old daughter, who was pedalling unsteadily on her new bike, a birthday gift she’d begged to try out that morning. The child’s father saw the whole thing from the front window. I imagined what it would have been like for that mother; the sound of her daughter’s body and twisted
metal being compressed under the massive wheels of her SUV. The thump of the car upon impact and then the horrific silence of the engine stopping, one lone bicycle wheel spinning, training wheels still attached. The mild fluttering of purple tassels in the autumn wind. Their daughter’s picture stayed on the screen a little too long.

  When I thought I couldn’t stand looking at her face anymore, the story transitioned to a seventeen-year-old girl with hair halfway down her back and a pink cardigan buttoned all the way up to the neckline, who’d been out driving just a few weeks after getting her license, her boyfriend in the passenger seat. She’d hit a patch of black ice and overcompensated, sending the car spinning forward across the median line and into a tree. Her boyfriend hit his head on the top on the car ceiling and snapped his neck. The girl driving the car came away from the wreckage uninjured. The police deemed it an accident, but noted that the girl’s inexperience had likely led to the crash. She had not had any alcohol, hadn’t made any phone calls, hadn’t fiddled with the radio. The girl’s tears streamed down her face. Her mother, whose hand rested firmly on her daughters’ knee, held out an 8 × 10 photo of the deceased boy. Her daughter’s first love. The girl reported that, since the accident, she had to start homeschooling, because her boyfriend’s friends had written MURDERER on her locker in permanent marker.

  What was the point of trotting out these people and their guilt for everyone to gawk at them? I wanted to turn it off, but I couldn’t move. I felt a buzzing from the centre of my breastbone out. My stomach rose and boiled over. I leaned over the edge of the couch and vomited onto the shiny laminate floor.

  &It rained and rained and rained and rained. I remembered a day without Papi, a day when Carly mourned by the window while it rained the long, steady, never-ending rain of a song stuck on repeat. The next morning, when the sun glazed the windows, Carly slipped on her red ladybug rubber boots, a hand-me-down from Aubrey, and went outside. Mom had “asked” me to babysit. I took the novel I’d chosen to read for English class downstairs and sat on a bench out front of the apartment. I could always tell where Carly was by the noise she made; she hummed and stomped and sang and cried and yelled and cheered. After a while, though, I noticed that I hadn’t heard her for some time.

  “Carly!” I yelled. “Carly!” Had she wandered off? Distracted by a red-breasted robin or the neighbours’ newly installed trampoline? Stefany Beale ran through my mind, her red ponytail bouncing behind her. “Carly!” I ran alongside of the house to the gate. “Carly!”

  When I reached the back of the apartment, still screaming for her, she looked up from where she squatted beside the sidewalk.

  “Carly!” I barked, breathlessly. “Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “I’m collecting earthworms!” She held out her hands. Slick, fat, and struggling, some dangled in pieces, a severed head or body segment writhing in her palm. I couldn’t tell which was which.

  “Listen,” I said. “You’re supposed to play where I can see you. I call you, you come. Okay?”

  “Do you know what’s cool about earthworms?” she said. “If you kill them, they can just come back to life again. They can get cut in half, even, and then they just. . .grow another head or something. They can never die.”

  I’d forgotten to bring an umbrella to work, and by the time I made it home, my clothes clung to my body. I peeled them off and stepped into a steaming shower. Outwardly, you couldn’t tell I was pregnant yet.

  Joel and Conor had actually been born on separate days; Joel just before midnight on August 11th, Conor just after midnight on August 12th. I’d mailed Conor a CD and a card the previous week, but hadn’t figured out what to send Joel. He wanted me to fly back out to Calgary.

  “What does your mother’s therapist say? Maybe she’d be stable enough for you to come and visit.”

  “I don’t talk to her therapist,” I said. “I take her there, I pick her up. That’s it.” He wanted me to visit in September. I was due February 10th, but my obstetrician had told me that first babies were often late, commenting, “Maybe you’ll have a Valentine’s baby.”

  In my recurring nightmares, my abdomen bulged with twins. Joel, my father — it ran in the family. I dreamed that two little girls came into my room, identical Carlys in corduroy jumpers. One happy, one angry.

  They were both equally bad scenarios: finding out via telephone, or not being told for three months.

  I got out of the shower and plucked my wet jeans, sweater, and underwear up off the bathroom floor and dropped them in the washing machine. Dark spots along the carpet traced my path in wet footprints. I climbed into bed still wearing my towel. Kipling, asleep on the foot of the bed, stood up, arched her back, and stretched, paced in a circle a few times, then coiled into a ball.

  I dialled Joel’s number.

  &“Wait. . .what? You’re. . .I came out there in. . .May! Which is like — ”

  “Three months.” Could my mother hear me upstairs, like I’d heard her all those times, through the floorboards?

  “You said you were on the pill.”

  “I was. But I also took antibiotics for an ear infection. I’d just finished taking them when you came out, I thought — ” I could imagine Aubrey telling me I was so ignorant about sex. “I thought they only affected the pill while you were actually taking them.”

  “Well, great. So. . .you’re. . .so you didn’t tell me. Why?”

  “I wanted time. To think.”

  “You wanted to think? Are you sure it’s mine?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s yours. I’m not seeing anybody else.”

  “Christ!” he muttered. “And now it’s too late.”

  “To late to what?”

  “To have an abortion.”

  “You would have wanted me to have an abortion?”

  “Well?” He paused. “Wouldn’t you? Do you know how irresponsible it is to have a child when you’re not prepared for one, when you weren’t planning on one? What did you think we were going to do, Darcy?”

  “I never wanted an abortion.”

  Kipling’s ears were perked, listening. Unable to hear him, only able to hear my side of the conversation. Words. Words could be anything, to her. Just sounds. Just noise. “Well, good thing you decided for me then,” Joel snapped.

  “Joel — you love kids!”

  “I do love kids. Doesn’t mean I want one. The kids I work with have so many issues — I’m with that all day, I don’t want to come home to that, you know? I told you I didn’t want kids.”

  “Not outright. Not like, I never want to have kids, ever.”

  “But you knew. I told you I saw enough kids at work.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t want one, either. But — ”

  “But you’ve got one now, I guess.” I heard him get up, start going down a flight of stairs. Or — up a flight of stairs? Where was he going? Where was all of this going?

  “You’re Catholic,” I pointed out. “You’re not supposed to believe in abortion.”

  “Conor’s Catholic. I live in the real world. There are lots of studies that show that embryos — it’s not even about that. Do you know how messed up kids can get, even when the parents try their best?”

  “I worked with kids, too.”

  “Okay, well, then you should know! And, really, do you think you’re in a good place to raise a kid right now? You’re in a co-dependent relationship with your mom, you can’t even take care of yourself — ”

  “Hey.” I sat up, clutching the towel to my chest. It was too early to feel the baby move, but maybe deep inside me, I could feel it fighting. “Isn’t that why you wanted to be with me in the first place? Because I’m damaged? So you could swoop in and be the saviour?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “This isn’t a game, Joel. This is real life, now.”

  He took a long time to respond. “Look. If you want to do this, that’s your choice.”

  &“What do you think about coming with me to therapy?” My m
other’s open mouth revealed chewed spaghetti. Pisgetti, Carly had called it. When I’d tried to make meatballs in the frying pan, they’d crumbled, refused to hold their shape.

  “Did you use enough raw egg?” my mother had asked, hovering. Her baking had actually improved. That morning, she’d left a plate of oatmeal raisin muffins on the counter. Comfort foods. I’d eaten one on the way to work. It actually tasted good.

  I’d taken her to the therapist every week, sat in the waiting room reading magazines for fifty minutes, and then taken her back home. The first few months I’d read through six issues of Reader’s Digest. But in the last month, I’d started reading parenting magazines: practical articles on diaper rash, schmaltzy articles on mother’s intuition.

  Mother’s intuition. Everyone has it, you just have to find it.

  Right.

  Now she wanted me to come in with her?

  “Why?” I twirled my fork around my noodles.

  “Because I think it would be helpful.” My mother chewed her last mangled meatball. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “So talk,” I said. “I’m sitting right in front of you.”

  She got up, went to the fridge. Poured herself a glass of milk. Then came back, and sat down. “Did you know that, when I was pregnant with you — that winter before you were born — your father went to work in Burlington and he lived with one of his relatives for a couple of months. I was so tired and lonely and it was so cold out. . .we lived across the street from a little gas station with a convenient store in it. Sometimes your father didn’t phone for two or three days at a time. I was too pregnant to work — we had a little TV that got only two channels. I got so big with you that I couldn’t do up my winter coat anymore. I used to hold my coat shut and waddle across the street to the store and get Oreos and Orange Crush every day, and then sit real close to the TV until my eyes got sore and I fell asleep. I couldn’t wait for you to come. So I’d have someone else to talk to. Someone else to do something with.”

  “Okay,” I said. Was this supposed to have a point?