The Eater of Dreams

by Kat Cameron

  Grant pulled on his jeans and went downstairs. Hiding behind the bedroom curtains, Zoe stared out into the dark streets, envisioning a fight, a knife. But the couple maintained the distance between them. Grant hovered around the edge of the bubble they created. Zoe couldn’t hear what he said. The woman stopped screaming, started walking away.

  Grant came back upstairs. “She said she was okay. I don’t think there’s anything else I can do. She didn’t want me to call the police.”

  Now that the noise had stopped, Zoe was shaking.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” He pulled her into a bear hug.

  She knew she was safe with him.

  It took three weeks to get her cable connected. The repairman finally showed up, tested the line, banged around in the basement, and ran some new wires. He told her to contact her landlady. When Zoe phoned, the landlady said reproachfully, “I can’t afford all these repairs. The previous tenant never complained.” No surprise there. The previous tenant, a six-foot man, had lived simply: a futon on the floor, one wooden chair with broken slats propping up a battered acoustic guitar, a sprawling stereo system, and a jungle of pot plants in the living room. Zoe had scrubbed the tile floors for two days, removing rings of grime left by months of mouldy plants, restoring the floor’s terracotta shade.

  Each morning at seven, the derelict squatting downstairs woke up. He’d stumble onto the balcony directly below her bedroom window. Five minutes of hacking followed, the deep coughing of an emphysemic patient. Then he’d spit several times into the garden below and light the first cigarette of the day, the acrid smoke drifting into her bedroom. She’d get up, slam the window shut, and then crawl back into bed, pulling a pillow over her head.

  One day she passed him on the second-floor landing. He stank of stale beer and American cigarettes. Unshaved, unkempt, he was dressed in baggy grey track pants and a loose T-shirt with some long-forgotten band on the front, probably bought for three dollars at Value Village. She averted her eyes, feeling angry at his intrusion into her space. Angry that he made her feel guilty. The second-floor apartment was rented by a girl with platinum hair streaked cotton-candy pink; most days she wore purple striped leggings under an oversized wool coat. She’d bang out of her apartment at eight each morning, thud down the stairs, and slam the door like a petulant teenager.

  After a month of this routine, Zoe phoned to give notice.

  “I know, I know,” the landlady apologized. “I’ve been trying to get him evicted all month. He was kicked out of his apartment so he’s staying with his daughter. He’s a bottle picker and an alcoholic. I’ve had complaints, let me tell you.”

  He was gone the next week, but the front door, its lock jammed, still swung open to every intruder.

  In October, the landlady refused to turn on the electric heating. “Here,” she said, lugging in two filthy oil heaters, “you can use these. Last year, this apartment cost $100 a month to heat and I can’t afford that.” As the temperature dropped below zero at night, Zoe’s breath fogged the air while she watched late-night TV, huddling under three comforters. Her right elbow ached in the cold.

  She hurried down the narrow staircase one morning, late for class. Her ex was standing in the hallway. She stumbled, catching at the banister.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Hey, it’s good to see you too.” He loomed over her, his arm barring the exit. She retreated up two steps.

  “How did you find out where I live?”

  “A woman at the university gave me your address.” He could be very charming. She had an unlisted phone number. She’d had a restraining order against him in Vancouver. He had maxed out their credit card and when she wouldn’t give him more money, when she kicked him out, when she changed the locks, he started showing up at the Shopper’s where she worked. One night he followed her home, five paces behind her, swearing under his breath. “Bitch. Cunt. Whore.”

  “I think you should go.” She clipped her consonants like bullets firing. When he didn’t move, she backed up slowly until she reached her apartment and clicked the deadbolt shut.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. She wedged a chair under the broken lock of the back door and sat at her kitchen window, staring out at the tattered yellow leaves still attached to the elm. Around her the apartment creaked and groaned, the ghosts of past alcoholics, unwed mothers, parents with dying children, all emitting pain like a buzz saw in her ears.

  She started seeing the ex around corners, staring at her from across the street. Grant slept over most nights, but she still didn’t feel safe. They couldn’t call the police. Restraining orders were useless. On the night her ex followed her home, he’d grabbed her right arm and twisted, slowly, until she screamed and he let go, laughed and walked away. The x-ray revealed a cracked elbow. She’d packed with her left hand, her right arm cradled like a broken wing in a sling.

  She couldn’t win. Once again, she pulled out the boxes filled with crinkled paper, the corrugated cardboard to separate plates and bowls, the bubble wrap for wine glasses. She threw her daiquiri glasses on the wooden balcony, hearing the sharp crack as each stem separated from its bowl, and then stared at the splatter pattern of glass, a false barrier of protection. If he wanted, her ex could invade her life again. Nowhere was safe.

  The last night in the apartment, Zoe watched the news on stolen cable. In a refugee camp in the Sudan, a mother cradled her starving child. The reporter said, “They’ve lost their farm, their livestock, their homes. Everything.” If she wasn’t so tired, she’d strike a match, burn the house down.

  White-Out

  THE BUS ARRIVED LATE AT the Jubilee Auditorium and Zoe didn’t get home from rehearsal until nearly midnight. Along the length of Whyte Avenue, the blue lights in the bare trees glittered. Plumes of exhaust rose straight up in the frosty air.

  Grant was already in bed, covers pulled around his chin, watching The Daily Show.

  “How was rehearsal?”

  “Awful. The director keeps changing his mind about the staging in the second act.” She chucked her skirt and sweater in the corner, hurried into her flannel pajamas, and crawled into bed, snuggling up next to his warmth.

  “Cold hands,” he complained. After a pause, he said, “Aunt Thelma died.”

  “Who?”

  “My great-aunt. The funeral is Saturday afternoon. In Calgary.”

  “I have rehearsal Saturday night.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.” Grant slid his hand under her hair, massaging the knots in her shoulders. “We could drive down on Friday and leave after the funeral. It would mean a lot to my mom if we show up. You’d be back in time.”

  She didn’t want to go to a funeral. But she owed him; he’d gone to her father’s funeral in November. And met her mother. What type of portent was this for their relationship — meeting the family at funerals? At least she had a black dress.

  They arrived in Calgary late Friday night. Grant’s parents lived in a 1950s bungalow in the north-west quadrant of the city.

  “You’re late.” Grant’s mother gave him a quick hug. “I thought you’d make it for supper.”

  “I didn’t get off work until five. And the roads were awful.”

  “You should have phoned.”

  Zoe stood uncomfortably in the back entrance, her mittens and hat dripping with wet snow. She held her coat in one hand until Grant took it from her and slung it over a kitchen chair.

  “Mom, this is Zoe Willis,” Grant said, deflecting his mother’s attention away from himself. “This is my mom.”

  She was a short woman, much shorter than Zoe, dressed in a dark-brown suit. Drab brown hair cut in a short bob. Her face was square and white, with small brown eyes peering out. “Call me Shelia.” The words were friendly, but the eyes weren’t. They were appraising, summing up Zoe’s worth and coming up a few zeros short.

  Zoe bent to unlace her boots. Usually they made her feel confident, the square heels, the silver buckles at the calves shin
ing aggressively. Now she felt like a biker chick crashing a bridge party. She wanted to say, I’m not that person. Whoever it was his mother saw. But maybe she was. Maybe she’d been deceiving herself about her worth all this time.

  The kitchen was a dark cave, curtains shutting out the storm outside. Zoe sat down at the table, uncertain what she was expected to do.

  “Let me get you some tea,” Sheila said. “Unless you prefer coffee?”

  “Tea is fine.”

  “So where are you from, Zoe?” she asked as she poured tea into a set of Esso stoneware, with pictures of Calgary landmarks etched on the side. The Zoo. The Calgary Tower.

  Where was she from? All over, growing up in Germany and Ontario, university in British Columbia, and then teaching in Korea for two years. Two years in Vancouver after that. But she wasn’t going to tell Grant’s mother about her past.

  “Right now, I’m from Edmonton.”

  “But where do your parents live?”

  “My mother lives in Nelson.”

  “Are your parents divorced?” It felt like being interviewed by Oprah. Maybe she should have said, “In Nelson, Sheila,” but she couldn’t bring herself to call Grant’s mother by her name.

  “My dad died last year.”

  She saw the surprise, quickly masked. His mother thinking, She can’t be that old. Zoe didn’t offer any further details.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that. Are you the only child?” Fishing for details. Was she the youngest, was she a trailer, was she years older than Grant? Zoe felt like yanking her chain, claiming to be forty. Hadn’t Grant told his parents anything about her?

  “I have an older brother.”

  “And you moved to Edmonton last summer. Was that for school?”

  Grant interrupted. “Zoe had some problems with her last boyfriend. I told you that.”

  Squirming under the scrutiny, Zoe knew herself to be unworthy, a tainted woman trailing past relationships like cheap perfume.

  “I’m in the music program at the U of A,” she offered. Anything to stop the questions. “I’m doing my master’s degree.”

  “In piano?

  “No, voice. I sing opera.”

  “Opera. Well, that’s different.” Not very practical.

  “She’s a member of the Edmonton Opera Chorus,” Grant boasted. He would tell this to anyone, people at work, strangers he met. “They’re doing Bohème.”

  “I’m just in the chorus,” Zoe was glad that Grant was standing up for her but oddly embarrassed. “I’m one of the street people.” She was making things worse.

  “Well,” said Sheila. “How interesting.” She checked her watch. “Visiting hours end at nine. We should get going.”

  “I didn’t think we’d go tonight,” Grant said. “I’m beat from the drive.”

  “Oh, you have to go. It wouldn’t look right to miss visiting hours.”

  Ten minutes later, they were following Grant’s parents south along Shaganappi Trail. After insisting that Grant had to show up, that his cousin would be insulted if he didn’t, Sheila had wondered whether it was sensible to take an extra car, but Grant had won that point. Zoe stayed quiet. More than anything, she wished that they could afford a motel, but even the cheap ones in Calgary were over $100 a night.

  The funeral home was a concrete building in the south-west. In a sterile reception area with a grey carpet, two huge arrangements of white mums and lilies stood like attendants.

  They followed Grant’s parents, turning right into a room that smelled of lemon furniture polish, overlaid with a bitter note of embalming fluid. Just inside the door stood a couple in their forties, the man in a black suit, the woman in an incongruous pink blouse and a long blue skirt. Zoe shook their hands, barely hearing the introductions. Wooden pews lined either side of an aisle with a red carpet. At the end was the open casket, with fuchsia curtains looped back with tasselled cords on either side.

  The great-aunt wore a black crepe dress with a shiny butterfly brooch pinned at the shoulder. Her crossed hands were speckled with large brown spots. Skin like a crumpled moth. Unable to stop herself, Zoe reached out and touched the cold hand.

  The cloying perfume of lilies permeated the room. Zoe swayed, images spilling across her mind. Her father in ICU, his face drained, the cheeks sunken like a papier-mâché mask. The respirator with its automatic timed breaths: whoosh, click, whoosh, click. In, out, in, out.

  Her knees buckled. Grant grabbed her elbow to hold her up.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I need to go outside.” She could feel Sheila’s disapproval pulsing towards her.

  Snow was falling on the blue spruces clustered outside the entrance. Zoe took a deep breath, the icy air a slap to her face.

  “It’s like the scene with Mimi and Rudolpho. Your little hand is cold. Her hand was so cold.” She was babbling, her mind skittering away from the edge of nothingness. They’d had a closed casket at her father’s funeral. But the smell of the funeral home was the same.

  Grant squeezed her hand, his fingers warm and comforting.

  She held on tight. “I don’t think I can go back in. Can we leave?”

  That night she curled up alone in a single bed. She’d been given the guest bedroom, two single beds with crocheted white spreads, white sheets, white shag carpet, white walls. In this blank space her mind whirred, a film projector ratcheting over images she couldn’t control. Her father in a hospital bed, his skin as white as the walls. Her mother shivering uncontrollably in the private room when the doctor gave them the news. Her brother hadn’t visited once.

  She’d read a piece in Wired a few weeks earlier. A man in France had stolen $1.4 billion of art from museums. A Breughel painting: Cheat Profiting from His Master. A Watteau drawing, a seventeenth-century violin. Stashes of medieval weapons. He had stored them in his mother’s house. Canvases stacked in his tiny bedroom. Ivory statues hidden in a wardrobe. When the man was arrested, his mother chopped up the paintings with a stolen axe and threw them in the Rhine-Rhone canal.

  Zoe imagined the pictures floating slowly to the bottom of the murky canal, water seeping into the canvases. The utter waste of it all.

  Her life reminded her of that story.

  She woke up, smelling coffee and bacon. Zoe lay still for a moment, her head stuffy from the lack of sleep. Eight o’clock. Seven more hours of being polite. The funeral was at two and the wake after that. By three, four at the latest, they would be on their way home.

  Grant’s father had his face hidden behind the Calgary Herald. Zoe sidled into a chair beside Grant.

  “Just coffee for me, please.” Should she get it herself? Or would Sheila resent this?

  “Oh, you need more than that. Let me make you some eggs.”

  “No, please, don’t go to any trouble.” She was hoping to stop at the Tims on the way to the funeral and pick up a blueberry muffin.

  “We have cereal, if you prefer.”

  “No, thank you. Just coffee.” Why didn’t Grant say something, instead of just sitting there, forking in mouthfuls of egg?

  Sheila set down a cup of coffee, and then sat down herself. “I was thinking, Zoe. You’re a singer, aren’t you? Well, maybe you could sing something at the funeral. Aunt Thelma loved “Amazing Grace”. Do you know it?”

  Her mind blanked. She couldn’t think of an excuse.

  “Would her family want me to sing?” she finally said.

  “That’s why I’m asking. I talked it over with Dan last night and told him you’re a singer.”

  Zoe nodded. Dan must be the man she’d met at the funeral home.

  “Umm, okay.” She knew she sounded ungracious, but she didn’t know how she could go back into that funeral home and keep her composure.

  On the drive over, she asked Grant, “Why did your mother put me on the spot like that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Arranging for me to sing without even asking me first.”

  “You know the song, don’
t you?”

  “Of course I do. I’ve sung it at funerals before. But I don’t know the accompanist. I need to practice.”

  “She thought it would be a nice gesture. I think she was trying to include you.” He was staring straight ahead, not looking at her. He sounded unconvinced by his own argument.

  “I don’t think I can sing right now. I’ll mess it up.”

  “No one will care how you sing.”

  She cared. She shut up and looked out the window. Snow covered the sidewalks in front of the strip malls, softening their inherent ugliness.

  At the next red light, Grant put his hand on her thigh. “Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  The funeral was in the same room as the night before. About forty people crowded into the back pews, avoiding the front like schoolchildren in a classroom. Zoe and Grant sat in a corner next to a woman whose rayon skirt spread over the seat. Looking around at the white heads, Zoe saw that she and Grant were the youngest people there, except for Dan’s two teenagers, sitting forlornly in the front pew with their parents.

  The minister had that ubiquitous haircut, short on the side with a floppy brown wave over the forehead. He stuttered over Thelma’s name and didn’t seem to know any details of her life. As he prayed that Thelma would be graciously received by the Lord, Zoe wondered if the great-aunt had believed any of this. She didn’t know what she herself believed.

  Memory grabbed her again, the ICU waiting room with its grey low-backed couches and the TV constantly turned to CBC news. Nights drinking stale coffee. Whispering promises over and over. Let him live. I’ll switch to a sensible career, so he can be proud of me. I’ll stay away from losers, date a normal guy, so he can stop worrying. She didn’t know just whom she was making those promises to. She hadn’t kept any of them, unless Grant counted as normal. She reached over and squeezed his hand.