Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  Another of the films shows a wide expanse of park with willow trees at its edges and two children in identical outfits romping in the grass. I stand with my shoulder against the wall and try to get a close look at their faces. It’s us. We’re really little, capering under a lemony light. The camerawork is shoddy: someone is stumbling down a hill as they film. The cameraman must have called to the children because the two girls stop and look back. Their faces lose their graininess as they trot toward me. I see her now, darling Paula. I want to reach into the wall and put my arms around her. A wave of grief washes over me and passes. Why did they dress us alike when we weren’t twins? Suddenly, the lens faces the treetops and the sun bleaches the picture.

  I put on the next reel. Same location. Off we go. I can imagine what he said: “Don’t waste all three minutes acting like idiots. Do some cartwheels or something!” We do cartwheels in the grass and our dresses fly over our heads.

  From somewhere off-screen, two women appear and chase after us. They’re pretending to be monsters, stalking us with huge clumsy steps, their hands formed into claws. We run away until they catch us up in their arms. Our mother has scooped me up, and the other woman grabs Paula.

  I stop the film and rewind it. The women leap backwards. I turn the switch to 12 frames per second and they run in again, more slowly this time. There is real fear on our faces, as well as delight. We peel away, tumbling slowly. The first time I watched the sequence I didn’t see that Paula’s captor had stopped and turned to look at the camera. The light is high behind her, and sundogs swell and obscure her face, but it’s Paula’s mother from my dream, and she’s looking into my eyes from inside the stilled frame. My heart makes a sound like an axe on wood. I turn the film off and rewind it back onto its reel, panting with fear, the skin on my neck buzzing.

  I return that reel to the box. Some of the other containers have labels on them. Many have lost their descriptions: where a label had once been glued down there is only a tracery of white dust. I’m threading another through the projector when all three boys burst into the house. I hear the skates and helmets and pads crash to the floor where later I will grumble while picking them up. They start braying for me: Mummy! Mummy! Hey, Jean!

  I wonder how long they’d look for me before beginning to worry. What would they do without me? I’m the hub and the spokes, the vessel and its contents. Matryoshka!

  I call them up and the thumping approaches. “I scored on Nick!” Reid shouts from halfway up the stairs.

  “It went off the back of my pad,” says Nicholas, running into the room ahead of his brother. “It’s not like you shot it and it went in.”

  “But it did go in!” Reid enters, his eyes glassy from the cold.

  “I also scored on Nick!” comes Ian’s voice from downstairs.

  “You’re so hard to score on!” I say to Nick. “They must have got lucky.”

  “It was luck. And Dad did a slapshot! On a kid!” he shouts. “I’m not going to try to stop a two-hundred-mile’n-hour frozen puck with the second-hand crap you bought me!”

  “Watch it.”

  He flops onto the bed. He hasn’t noticed the projector or the fact that I’m doing something in his room without his permission. He isn’t paying attention to anything but his own humiliation. “Goalies get scored on,” I explain. “Otherwise no one would ever play! You should be happy for these guys that they had a good skate. I bet they didn’t score many and they probably took a lot of shots.”

  “I was dekin’m out comin’ in with the puck,” says Reid, also indifferent to the strange old-fashioned machine on Nick’s side table. “I was just lookin’ through his mask, like at his eyes, lookin’ at where his eyes were lookin’ and—”

  “Aw shut up,” Nick warns him.

  “I dangled and pulled him to the left and just as he was slidin’ over, I jammed it through his five-hole!” He blows imaginary smoke from his fingertip and a red Hot Wheels Corvette bounces off his head. “You ASSHOLE!”

  “Nothing but net!” Nick snarls. Reid is on top of him instantly, pounding away. “And anyway your move wasn’t a dangle, cock-booger.”

  “BOYS!” I shout.

  “It was dumb luck because you whiffed on the wrister I was ready for but you pussied it into the net by accident!” Nick’s got his younger brother flipped over and pinned to the bed and Reid is getting red in the face, getting ready to change the temperature of the whole encounter. I grab Nick off him just as Reid horks a gob of foamy spit that goes up, pauses, and returns to his own face. Nick’s laughter is cruel. “Can’t even aim your own goober!”

  It’s about to become a massacre when Ian walks in with hot chocolate. Both kids freeze. They aren’t tamed by the appearance of the drinks as much as their fear of their father. He is a cop, after all. Me they’ll carry on endlessly for, but Ian they don’t mess with. “What’s this?” he asks, seeing what’s actually going on in the room. “You watching old movies?”

  “Yeah.” The boys are shooting looks of murder at each other, but sugar is at hand to narcotize their animal urges. “Get the light.”

  “Oh god,” Nick moans. “Please tell me it’s 3D gay midget porn.”

  “You want to know what kind of ice you’re on now?” I ask him.

  The lights go out and I switch the machine on. The reel is a costume party for children. Gypsies and doggies and pirates gambol about in a dimly lit basement with a low ceiling. I see myself and Paula again. Dressed differently now, older. It’s my birthday. At one point I can make out an “11” on the cake. “Oh jeez, there’s Stephanie Brunson,” Ian says. “She lived at the corner. I had a crush on her, even when we were really little.”

  “Uh, sorry,” I whisper to him, “this is my eleventh birthday party. These are my friends and my sister. That’s not your Stephanie Whatserface.”

  “What are you talking about. That’s Steph Brunson, and this is my eleventh birthday. That’s our basement on St. Spiritu.”

  “What? This is me.” I put my finger on myself on Nick’s wall. “That’s Paula. This is Adam Selby who died, that’s Nialle Tyler.” The boys have become quiet. “And that’s me, blowing out the candles.” On the wall, my childhood self blows out all eleven candles.

  “You think I don’t know what I looked like?” Ian asks. “And I knew Nialle.”

  “You grew up in Saskatchewan, Ian. There weren’t the same people at your eleventh birthday party.”

  Behind us, lying in the bed with their legs stretched out, our sons blow on their mugs and watch us and the movie. The kid in the blindfold turns with a stick in his hand; we watch, too. He spins in and out of the frame and back in.

  “You’re right,” Ian says. “I just thought I recognized everyone.” He starts to leave the room.

  “Hey. But you see that’s me now, right? And there’s Paula.”

  From the hallway: “Yeah. There’s Paula.”

  THEY’VE STARTED LETTING me take Jimmy to the tenth floor, which has a south-facing lounge looking down Spadina Avenue to the lake. We drag the comfy chairs to the window and stare out. He’s glum because I’ve told him I’m going back to Bellevue Square this week, the first time in over seven months. Dr. Morbier thinks I’m ready. Jimmy wants me to wait for him. But he’s not likely to be out any time before spring, and I have to go. I must go.

  I come by to see him weekly now. As winter grinds on, how hard it must be to have to live in a place more drab than the weather. He at last consented to a haircut and a shave, so long as I was present. I came in late one afternoon in early February, and watched his face in the mirror as Mherill cut his hair and lopped off his knotted black-and-grey beard. Little dreadlocks bounced around on the floor. She put a hot towel on his face for a while, took it off, and sprayed foam on his cheeks. When she drew the razor through it, he said, “Looks like you’re shovelling snow.”

  When Mherill was finished, she’d brought his face back into the world. His head appeared squat for losing eleven inches of hair—three o
n top and eight below—and his brown eyes lifted away from their orbits. She wet a cloth and washed the rest of the shaving cream off and the three of us said, almost in unison, “Holy shit.”

  Jimmy ran his palms over his cheeks. “I wanna date myself.”

  He hadn’t shaved in ten months. He told me whenever he got clean-shaven, it meant he’d reached the height of recovery and soon they’d have to turn him out.

  Sitting by the windows, we share our four weekly donuts. I’ve offered to go to the schmancy place on Queen with their bacon & Cap’n Crunch donut, but he wants Tim’s.

  Jimmy takes the apple fritter, the Boston cream, and the chocolate-glazed. I take the maple dip. Now that we’re friends, we know each other’s favourites. I always leave the chocolate-glazed for him, even if I pick first. I can get one any time. He looks down at it, deciding where to chomp.

  Spadina is strung with curtains of multihued blinking neon. Headlights and taillights are red and white going north and south. The wet surfaces catch reflections from everywhere and all the cars and people float upside down in it, inside a continuous psychedelic throbbing.

  He eats his donuts in three bites each. He’s two-thirds of the way through the apple fritter. He asks me if I’m scared to go back to the market. “Since you’re not going to wait for me, you should at least go with someone. I bet Mherill would go with you. She’s a supergiver.”

  “I’m going alone.”

  “That’s cool. You can’t wait forever. This is part of your therapy, it’s gotta take precedent. I understand.”

  “Thank you, Jimmy.”

  “I can’t gain weight, you know. I burn calories all day having thoughts. I don’t think they feed us enough. Thank you,” he says, holding up what’s left of his fritter.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Obviously, your meds are working.”

  I acknowledge that they are and reassure him that his will too. I remind him that I’m cooperating with my doctor and keeping my appointments so that I stay better. I’ve heard him say more than once that they’re never letting him out of here. They’re just going to keep him locked up until he withers away.

  “You might have to break me out of here if they don’t let me go,” Jimmy says, lifting the Boston cream to his mouth. The first time I brought donuts, he offered to demonstrate how he eats a Boston cream in one bite. His method was disgusting, but effective. He thinks it’s funny. The sound of him eating it is bad enough, but it’s the kind of thing you can’t not watch.

  “You’re going to choke to death one day.”

  “An honourable deaf,” he says through the mash. “You ever fink it frew?”

  “Think what through?”

  He swallows. “Ever tried to see the whole situation from her position? Could you work it all out, you know, how your life could actually be a bunch of symbols for hers?”

  “What Ingrid’s hallucination about me means?”

  “Yeah. When Ingrid gets her diagnosis, she goes into shock. She sees her alter ego in a park! She’s going to die and the universe is going to replace her and no one will ever know!” He’s heard the whole story now. You don’t skim here. If you want to make any friends in the bin, you have to spill. Otherwise, no one will trust you, not even the paranoid schizophrenics.

  “Ingrid never saw me in Bellevue Square. I saw her. She wouldn’t even look at me.”

  “Right. So you’re something she can’t look at, can’t face. She’s not ready to accept what you mean. You can see her, because you don’t know what you are—”

  “I’m her replacement.”

  “You are. She could see you if she looked, but she’s in no hurry to confront you. She just keeps watch out of the corner of her eye. One day, she sends her husband into your bookstore, and when he comes out he doesn’t appear to be a man who’s just encountered his wife’s doppelganger. She’s reassured: he didn’t see you. It’s all in her head.”

  “Then I break into her house and make her child a grilled cheese sandwich in a demonstration of transdimensional cookery.”

  We pause to laugh at ourselves. He’s on a sugar high. “Finally, Ingrid confronts you at your home. She tells you she’s ready. And then you wake up.”

  “You should stay on your meds, Jimmy! The side effects are useful. So why’s she dreaming you?”

  He makes a shrugging face. “I don’t know. The chorus? The footnotes?”

  “You’re not a footnote.”

  I can’t finish my donut. He picks it off my napkin and polishes it off. “She lived down there?” he asks, pointing with his chin at the window.

  “Her house was on a street that doesn’t exist. But it was down near Dundas and Beverley. I saw it.”

  “You’re the sickest person in this place and they let you go.”

  “I got better,” I tell him, and I add a wink.

  MY FAMILY TREATS ME like an invalid even though I’ve been at work for ten weeks and it looks good on me! Their solicitations come out in little acts that are ostentatious, given the actors. Beatrice bought me a copy of Celebrity Recipes and a flagstone-sized slab of orangey peanut brittle and told me she knew there’d been something wrong with my colour in the summertime. I know she’s concerned. You don’t want the mother of your grandchildren to go off the actual deep end, or even die! She’s not that bad, for god’s sake.

  Reid has put himself in charge of the toaster. In the after-school specials he watches, sick people are forever being given toast. He has made some variations on the theme, which include butter-and-sugar-and-cinnamon toast; linzer torte toast, which is two pieces spread with cream cheese and red jam, cut into one-centimetre strips and arranged in a criss-cross fashion; egg-in-the-hole in rye bread and egg-in-the-hole in cinnamon-raisin bread, the discovery of which put paid his rye version.

  Lately, Nick has been giving me looks of frank fear. My illness has scared him straight and he’s upped his game at home. I have seen him put dirty dishes into the dishwasher, and once I had to leave the kitchen to keep from gasping because he was sweeping crumbs off the countertop into his hand. When I see his anxiety, I take the opportunity to have a quiet talk with him. It’s 2017, it’s Canada, it’s Toronto. Good people are looking after your mother. And these things happen, they keep happening the longer you’re around and the more people you care about. But look at me (I’ll put in a grand curtsey here): I’m in one piece, feeling better every day, and eating like a horse.

  “If you die, I’m going to kill myself,” he says.

  “I’d feel the same way if anything happened to you. Look, it’s awful to feel scared, but so what? Being scared means you’re part of something you care about, and that’s a good way to spend your time on Earth.” If the lights are out and I’m in bed with him, he’ll talk to me like he used to, when he was littler, about what scares him, and he’s willing to hear his mother tell him something not untrue and not unkind. “Life is like this. We don’t know how good things will happen, how bad things will happen. We just know they’ll happen.”

  “Not if you’re dead. Things don’t happen to you when you’re dead, right?”

  “If anyone knows the answer to that question, they haven’t been able to pass a message back.”

  “I bet if you die, all three of us will kill ourselves in horrible ways.” His tone of voice acknowledges he’s being ridiculous. I go along with his idea of lightening the moment.

  “How you gonna do it?” I ask him. “I mean, if you’re going to make a big symbolic gesture like that, I hope you have a plan.”

  “We’ll stand on the front lawn and drink all the stuff that’s under the sink until we collapse on the ground, twitching and gushing blood from our eyes. People’ll come and try to rescue us, but then they won’t be able to, because we’ll be dead from drinking poison.”

  “You should have a sign that says HONK IF YOU’VE LOST SOMEONE.”

  “That’s nice, Mum. I wonder when people would realize something was wrong. Probably when the diarrhe
a started shooting out of our noses.”

  “I wouldn’t stop for that,” I say, getting out of his bed and tucking the covers around him. “I’d throw you a quarter, though.”

  —

  Ian is not his usual self. He follows me around the house as though I might veer off course and walk through a wall. There have been nights of attempted normality while we both pretend to watch television, but in bed, I feel him not sleeping, his body stiff and alert beside me. I wonder how far the effects of my illness will extend. I imagine my sickness like a layer of smoke that crawls along the floor and goes into the boys’ bedrooms and under their beds.

  My husband is tender with me. Does that feel right? Is this okay? I can tune his thoughts in and he’s wondering how he’s going to raise two kids alone.

  And then the days start to go by again. The roses he gave me for when I came home have lowered their bloodblack heads and time shows on the inside of the vase in powdery white lines. At the bank, the trucks of new cash roll in through the back.

  I never told Ian what Nick said to me. I’ve just kept my eye on our now thirteen-year-old. For his birthday, we got him a phone and an electric razor. “I’m not old enough to shave!” he protested, but Ian ran the back of his hand up his face and said ouch.

  BELLEVUE SQUARE IS BRIGHT with snow. I come up Denison, passing Dr. Morbier’s home and office without so much as a glance. My eyes are trained on the corner of the square, white and shiny as an unlicked envelope flap.

  Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. It’s a welcome break from the monotony of repetitive thoughts that grow on you from the middle of January. Will this ever end? is one of the thoughts. Others are I want to kill and I want to die. Of course, Valentine’s is only a pleasure if you have someone to love, and I doubt the collection of misfits I used to know in the park have anyone to love them. I doubt the greeting-card companies have included them in their budget projections.