by Sharon Bala
Laura, of course, will remain young, beautiful, tragic.
“You couldn’t handle it in there, either, huh?” the woman asks.
“Nope.”
She lights her own cigarette and takes a drag. Her nails are a familiar shade of pink. Showy and grossly inappropriate for a funeral.
“Viva la Vulva?”
The woman looks down at her hands and laughs. “It always sounds so much worse when said out loud like that.”
“I’m not really a nail polish kind of girl.” I hesitate for a moment, then puff out. “But Laura liked that one.”
“Is that right? I take it you and Laura were close?”
I let the silence ring for a moment, observing her. She’s too put together, too eager. I shrug. “Not really.”
The woman turns in toward me. Her eyes are shrewd, calculating like a jungle cat’s, her face angular and lean. Her voice drops to a whisper.
“Listen, I have a favour to ask. My name’s April Hopkins and I’m a reporter for The Star. I know you said you didn’t know Laura very well, but I could really use a few quotes. If I could just ask you a couple questions—”
“How’d you find out about this?”
She gives a thin smile. “Just a hunch.”
That’s bullshit. Nothing was publicized. The funeral’s in downtown Ohsweken, a full hundred kilometres from where Roy and Laura lived. None of Laura’s flaky friends—of which she had many—were notified. Aunt Chelsea’s sticking pretty faithfully to this mourning mother routine. And Roy would never have talked to this reporter. He hasn’t talked to anyone, really.
So then who was the sellout?
“I know it’s probably really hard for you in light of the circumstances. But this can be your chance to set the record straight. Show people the real Laura.”
Before I can even respond she pulls out a notepad and starts rifling through the pages.
“I’m going to be honest with you. A lot of people I’ve talked to are saying a lot of really awful things. Kayley Blatchford has gone on the record calling her a sadist. Something about getting in a lot of fights in college, really messing her knuckles up. Made it sound like a form of self-mutilation.”
“Well then she obviously doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘sadist,’ does she? Laura got those scars in grade eight playing too much bloody knuckles.”
“Really?” She fishes through her purse for a notebook and starts scribbling immediately. “Now you see why I need more opinions. It’s hard to find balance with a story like this. People want a monster, so they create a monster. Especially with the whole race thing.” She says it in such a careless, blasé way, the way people do when they don’t have to consider the whole race thing in their everyday lives. She’s right, though. I’ve seen it. Figures from Laura’s past rematerializing in print and on tape, spinning a common tale of a troubled girl. I knew that people would talk; they did enough when she was alive. But for some reason every time another person came forward I felt attacked. Like I was the one being picked apart and analyzed.
Laura would have loved this. I can imagine her laughing, egging rumours on with some exaggerated truth or outright lie. Always building her own myth, disregarding how it affected those around her.
That doesn’t explain Sherry, though. Laura was different when she had her. She prided herself on being a good mom. Took up baby massage and breastfed; I want to say something that shows this. Even something as simple as, “Laura was a fantastic mother. She loved her daughter.” But I can’t. Maybe the reporters and pundits are right. Maybe our family is “predisposed to violence.” Maybe our people are “naturally self-destructive.”
The reporter leans in closer. “Will you help me help Laura? Please?”
People begin pouring out the door. April gives only a cursory glance to the other mourners. Her focus is me. I haven’t had much experience with reporters but I can tell this woman’s very good at her job. She’s going to get her balanced quote—if that’s what she even wants—with or without me.
I see Mom propping up Aunt Chelsea. Tom walks closely behind them, hands up, as though spotting.
I turn and grab Tom’s arm. “Is it over? Where are they?”
He glances between me and April, then back toward the door. “He won’t let them leave yet.”
“What?”
Tom shrugs and backs away, leaving me once again with the reporter with the camera lens eyes.
“Sorry, did he just say—”
I look April straight in the face and, bluntly, as though my words were a hammer striking a nail, say, “Fuck you.”
* * *
—
There are two matching caskets: one large, one small, both closed. There is one picture: a portrait of Laura and Sherry four months after the birth. They look so much alike. Their eyes are a matching shade of amber, their hair is smooth and straight and black. Laura refused to wear matching outfits, so their dresses clash fantastically. Both look beautiful and somehow amused, Sherry already sporting the ironic smirk it took Laura years to perfect. I want to move forward and touch the caskets but my muscles stick. I want to say something meaningful but nothing comes.
“What did you tell her?” Angry, accusatory. So unlike any voice I’ve heard I’m almost convinced I’ve imagined it. Then I turn and see Roy standing in the corner, his face a mass of puffy pink.
This is the first time I’ve seen him since the night it happened. I went straight over and saw him crumpled in a heap in the corner of Sherry’s nursery, her just-used sheets ripped from her mattress and held tight against his nose. “I can still smell her.” He repeated it over and over. I pulled a chair from another room and sat. It seemed wrong to sit in the rocking chair.
“What did you say to her, Em?”
I stay very still. “Who?”
“April from The Star.”
My muscles release, slightly. “Nothing.”
He exhales. “She’s been following me for days trying to convince me I owe everyone a quote.”
So that was how April conducted her investigative journalism: stalking. No one actually told her anything. Everyone was loyal.
“You should call the cops. Get a restraining order or something.”
“No point.”
I can understand why Roy hasn’t talked in days. These conversations are painful, not cathartic. We’re trying to talk like we normally would but it’s a poor imitation. We can’t even say their names. And yet by not talking about it we’re still talking about it. Laura: forever the centre of attention. How she always managed to creep into conversations, even when she wasn’t there, will always be a mystery to me. She was the gel in so many relationships.
Her whole relationship with Roy was the centrepiece of college gossip. Before Roy, all of Laura’s flings were interchangeable. Big, sturdy barrels of men with stamina and little else. The closest she ever came to loving a boy was drunkenly tattooing a high school boyfriend’s name on her shoulder after graduation. She never bothered to cover it after they broke up.
Roy was something else altogether. He was the quiet, studious roommate of some moron she was dating in college. The night Laura met Roy, Bryan drank three pitchers of beer by himself. On their way back to his apartment he collapsed. She dragged his two-hundred-and-thirty-pound frame to the door, swearing and grunting the whole time. As she rifled through his pockets for keys, Roy opened the door: wiry, pale, freckled. Between the two of them, they managed to get Bryan inside. Then Roy offered to make Laura a French press of coffee. And that’s when she said she knew.
“Not once did he look down my shirt. And I was wearing my black tank top—you know, the one with the sequins? Cleavage everywhere, and here he is, asking me my opinions on Akira Kurosawa. Like he actually thought a rez girl like me would know anything about Akira Fucking Kurosawa.”
She seemed amazed that there was a man alive who would want to spend four hours talking to her without the promise of sex. That there was a man alive who coul
d see her as a person.
I’m not sure he did, though. Roy marrying Laura was like the nerd finally bagging the head cheerleader. For all his reverence for her, I think Roy both recognized and relished this. It was almost grotesque the way they showed one another off: he with his gorgeous, glowing Pocahottie, she with her white, sure-to-earn-six-figures sugar daddy.
When they announced their engagement six months later it was met with hard cynicism. Typical Laura, everyone back home thought, riding a whim to get attention. I thought so, too, until their wedding day. We were in the back room waiting for our cue to leave, she in her white gown. She turned to me, her face pursed.
“Em. What if he finally realizes he’s marrying me and just leaves?”
Their marriage was more than an impulse. It was a dive into the dark and she was terrified.
And yet she left him, willingly, taking everything with her.
I reach over, feel the crisp linen of Roy’s sleeve—
“Don’t.” He brushes my hand off. It was stupid of me to think he could handle these kinds of interactions. I can’t even imagine how he could get dressed, much less put up with condolences from strangers. I try to get him to look into my face but he won’t.
“These past few days all I could think about was talking to you. I had a list of questions. A whole goddamn speech. But now that you’re in front of me…”
“Maybe this isn’t the right time for this,” I say. Roy rubs his hands over his face. I feel a numbness creeping up my knees. I shouldn’t have worn such high heels.
“I don’t want you there. It doesn’t seem right.”
For a moment the room seems to tilt.
“What do you mean? You don’t want me where?”
He blinks and blinks.
“You don’t want me where, Roy?”
“The burial. The reception after. I didn’t really want you here, but you’re her cousin. Her best friend. People would ask questions.”
“But…nothing happened.”
Roy looks inflamed. Sharp words are waiting to be said, I can tell. I hope he says them. I hope they draw blood. There’s been enough pretending for the sake of saving face. We did what we were supposed to. All the tiptoeing, the planning…all of it was for nothing. I never got to taste second-hand red wine on his tongue or feel his slender fingers between my thighs. I never will. I shouldn’t feel resentment—not now, of all times—and yet here it is, crippling and noxious.
He looks directly at me and his face is set. “Please. Don’t. Come.”
* * *
—
Every five to ten minutes the high-pitched shriek sounds. The wheels are stopped by force. Violent, desperate, like the last moment of struggle before surrender. The subway train smashes to a halt: doors open, people rush, bells chime, doors close. The station left barren.
With traffic it took me two and a half hours to drive here, ten minutes to find parking. St. George. One of the busiest subway stations in Toronto. Isolating even at capacity. It’s a depressing shade of green—one I imagine I’d find peeling from the walls of a crack house bathroom on the Trail.
I lean out, well past the platform’s yellow line. When I turn back eyes are on me, some wide and worried, some dull and uncaring. People watch and watch but never do anything.
It happened here, at the centre of two lines. A crossroad, of sorts. Was that intentional? I know I need to stop. There’s no meaning in these walls or their placement on a map. Only she knows why she chose this place, if it was even a choice at all.
No two accounts are the same, but all agree she wheeled Sherry off the elevator in that obscenely expensive stroller she loved so much. Either she didn’t say anything or she cooed to Sherry as she moved to the end of the platform. The train going Northbound wailed its way into the station. Sherry started to cry. Laura picked her up and clutched her to her chest, kissing her or trying to shush her or looking maudlin. The air started to shift, another whistling could be heard.
The TV screen said the next train Southbound would be arriving in less than a minute. Some people thought she was just peeking down the tunnel to see the train, the way people do. Others said she looked distraught. At the last minute she shifted Sherry onto her hip as she took off her purse and thrust it into the seat of the stroller. Or she wasn’t wearing a purse. Then she turned her back toward the oncoming train, hugged Sherry tight, and stepped sideways off the platform.
I didn’t notice her unhappiness. I was too busy parcelling pieces of her perfect life to take for myself. She practically told me her plans right there on the phone and I hung up. Hung up to meet her husband in Burlington—the halfway point between our homes, our families. Back then, of course, I told myself it wasn’t cheating. It was easy enough to believe; our skin barely touched. When it did, though, those slight, soft strokes were everything to me. Amazing that something so small could be so erotic. I lived for the chance that we’d brush hands under the table. Even as it was happening to me I put myself above it. Roy and I were doing things the right way. We were going to keep collateral damage to a minimum.
That last time we talked Laura was going on about Sue Stevenson, soon to be Sue Kristoff. She had just sent Laura an invitation to her wedding and Laura was micro-analyzing the handwritten postscript. Apparently “Vlad and I would love for you to come. We have so much catching up to do!” was code for “I married someone richer and want to rub it in your face.”
“Maybe she really does want to see you and catch up. She was your roommate. You guys were close.”
“We were not. Sue and all those white, trust fund bitches don’t make friends. They gather audiences. I could call every one of them right now and tell them I’m going to kill myself and they’d just laugh and ramble on about how they used to cut themselves in eighth grade.”
I laughed, the way I always did.
“I’m serious. And it’s really fucking sad when you think about it.”
“Look, I got to go. I’m supposed to meet Tom for dinner in ten. We can trash all your old friends tomorrow. I’ll call you around, say, four?”
“Oh. Okay. Emily?”
“Yeah?”
Something big was bothering her. She never used my full name. I could hear her ragged breathing as I feverously applied red lipstick in front of the bathroom mirror.
“Speak now or forever hold your peace.” I meant for it to be playful.
“Forget it. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I don’t remember what I ate for dinner that night, what I wore, what lie I told Tom to get out of the house. I don’t remember anything that Roy and I talked about. But I remember the hollow of her voice, or at least I tell myself I do.
JASON JOBIN
BEFORE HE LEFT
The next morning when I crawled from bed and peeked out the window, Billy still sat below the tree. Sat as if tranquilized, legs in lotus, nestled in the curved roots of our front yard’s cedar. Maybe we needed the authorities. Child Services. A babysitter with the new rhetoric. Some wise, jean-vested mentor. They’d have so many questions. Craig unwound himself from the covers and came to stand with me. He had brown ingots of mucus at the inner corner of his eyes, hair in spikes, the look of someone whose shoulders are harnessed in backpack straps. Open-mouthed, we watched our son from the bedroom window. Billy’s posture hadn’t changed since the previous night. The grey blanket had fallen or been shrugged off his shoulders. Songbirds hopped around him and pecked at the grass and I wondered what their claws must feel like and if he noticed them.
“What do we do?” I sucked on the hair in my mouth.
Craig smelled like weeks without laundry.
“I checked earlier, like 4 a.m. He didn’t touch the toast I brought out. Squirrels ate most of it.” He squinted and picked at the shoulder of his white T-shirt
“How do you know it was squirrels?”
“It was torn to shreds, covered in fur.”
“You can’t assume and just—”
“Jan.
Jan.” He put his arm around me, dug a few fingers into the side of my breast. “It’s okay. He’ll give up eventually.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
We let that sink in. Wind now rippled Billy’s short hair. I pressed into Craig’s ribs. He felt heavy next to me, waterlogged
“He needs to stay hydrated,” I said
“He needs a rain tarp,” said Craig
“Maybe a protein bar.”
“What’s the forecast?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Rain and downpours and—”
“We can set up a tarp.” Craig nodded seriously at the idea of tarps.
“But it’s cold out there; it’s so cold. Freezing out there. Frost on his eyelashes.”
“Jan, we can get him some warm clothes and a space heater. One of those restaurant patio lamps.”
“The lamps that shoot fire?”
“Yeah. The ones with warnings.”
“One of those big red poles that get so hot and look like a machine gun.”
“Yeah.”
We were fine. Solutions had arisen
“We can’t do this,” I said. “We need to stop.”
“Stop?”
“We can’t be okay with, can’t facilitate, this.”
“He’s out there under a tree, Jan. That’s where we are.”
* * *
—
It all started with the dragonfly, is how I chart the timeline. You can’t make sense of something without a timeline. Billy was eight, I think. Around when Craig had admitted to getting a drink after work with a female colleague and when I began going to the gym five days a week. Around that time. And maybe because of the working out, or maybe because of an invisible lead collar I felt around my neck, a heavy, bruising leash, I stayed perpetually exhausted.
Craig had gone downtown to watch a hockey game, I hoped and prayed, while Billy and I tidied up dinner. Billy stood barefoot on a small plastic stool in front of our triple sink. I’d been leaning against the window in the kitchen nook, my cheek flush with the glass. Songbirds flew big sorties over the yard. Fork tines rang off spoons and other forks. Spears of twilight transformed our dusty kitchen into some glossy Le Creuset ancient tomb. I tried to keep awake in that haze of noise and light.
