Left

by Theanna Bischoff

  “Thanks,” Greg said, as Jason turned around, empty-handed, having just shoved a box into Greg’s back seat. “For all of this—and for the website, too.” Why did he feel like he should apologize to everyone? He hadn’t done anything. But he was still the ex.

  Jason looked at Greg blankly, his eyes the same blue as Josie’s. “Yeah. Of course,” he said.

  Josie had boxes of the orange T-shirts for volunteers to wear—to ensure they could spot each other. “I feel like she’s alive somewhere, just not in plain view,” Josie explained, flipping through the pages of a notebook. “I have teams on the ravine that starts at the top of Scenic Park Crescent, and in the ravine area further west, Twelve Mile Coulee...”

  Greg swallowed back a splash of bile. He tried not to look at Josie’s car, or, for that matter, at Natasha’s grinning face on the twins’ T-shirts. Greg didn’t recognize the photo, likely taken after their breakup. She looked unfamiliar, like she’d started doing her hair differently, or something. He couldn’t quite tell.

  Hauling boxes back and forth between the two vehicles, Josie appeared almost manic, moving faster and seemingly lifting more cargo than either of the two men. When they’d finished stuffing Greg’s car with all the materials, Josie slammed Greg’s trunk closed so hard the car bounced.

  “Tomorrow. Eight a.m.” Josie seemed to vibrate. She hugged Greg roughly, then jumped in her car with Jason in the passenger seat and peeled around the corner of the parkade, tires squealing.

  Natasha and Greg had often fought about speeding, about Greg’s tendency to gauge his pace by the flow of traffic instead of checking the speedometer. He could admit that he often drove over the limit, but only by about ten or fifteen clicks, and seriously, driving the speed limit meant contending with irritable honking. How many times had Natasha lectured Greg about the patients she’d seen maimed in motor vehicle accidents? Skin torn away from muscle as they slammed into the concrete, nasty pavement burns. She also lectured him about the fact that he liked drinking Coca-Cola—he had like, three cans a day, the caffeine helped when he had to stay up late working on a paper or something—but apparently this was a “bad habit.” They’d shared pop at the movie theatre as teenagers, before she went to nursing school and became the health police.

  Okay, so he drove over the speed limit and drank too much pop. But Natasha had a habit of buying expensive items when she could get the same thing for significantly cheaper if she would just wait or look harder for a deal. She’d bought her latest car the day she walked into the dealership.

  “It’s just money,” she would tell Greg, when he chastised her. “And it’s money I have, so what’s the problem?” Fair enough, she didn’t have any debt, aside from her mortgage, and she had a good job and property assets, but Daddy had paid for her entire undergraduate degree—including the rent for her off-campus apartment—so she could focus on studying instead of getting a job. She hadn’t even lived with roommates. For obvious reasons, they’d often slept over at Natasha’s during those years instead of Greg’s bedroom at his parents’ house. And Tash had driven when they went to the movies or out to dinner, because Greg’s method of transportation was a bus pass.

  Had it hurt his ego that his girlfriend had the car, the apartment, the cash? Probably. Even after their bachelors’ degrees, Greg had continued on to do his Masters and then Doctorate, taking out student loans and accepting a job as a Teaching Assistant, while Tash landed a full-time job at the hospital and put a down payment on a house in the suburbs. She liked the burbs, said living there was ideal for starting a family. Eventually, he’d thought. They were still in their early twenties when she’d bought the house. Why rush? Ultimately everyone settled down. They would eventually get married, too, have a few kids, at some point. Probably in his thirties. If and when he felt ready.

  Okay, so she had a few expensive items and didn’t put in the effort to get good deals, but she didn’t act spoiled. He couldn’t really complain. And he didn’t really complain, because criticizing Natasha only made her shut down. “Why are you so judgmental?” she would snap, too loudly, even when he used a calm voice and tried to frame his criticism constructively. She had a tendency to keep going, to escalate things. Sometimes, if she had just walked away, cooled down, their bickering might not have gotten so heated. “I’m not good enough for you?” she would say, arms crossed, glaring. “Oh, right, I forgot.”

  Aside from getting married, which had topped the list of most fought about subject during their relationship from around the time they graduated high school onwards, the second most heated subject had been fighting itself, one of Greg’s biggest reasons for not feeling ready to move in together, for not proposing. They bickered too much, Greg repeatedly pointed out, to which Natasha consistently replied, “All couples argue! Fighting is normal!”

  Greg’s parents never fought. At least not in front of him. And they never used the kind of language that sometimes flew out of his and Natasha’s mouths in the heat of an argument when he’d accused her of something (sometimes constructively and sometimes less-than-constructively), and when she’d then snapped back about his moral high-horse, his unwillingness to commit. What unwillingness to commit? Had he not been faithful to her since they were teenagers? He hadn’t even dated anyone else during their few brief breakups, though he suspected she had. She was unfairly suspicious because of her father’s history of cheating.

  Greg always regretted when he lost his temper, said something rash, told Natasha she was behaving like a bitch or something. Even though she could spar right back with equal intensity. He always caved first after such a blowout—often with a drugstore greeting card that apologized in prose he himself could have never articulated. One time he’d sketched a picture of her standing in a field of dandelions, her wide eyes, lips slightly upturned, as though about to laugh. But what if she thought it was cheesy or didn’t think it looked like her? He couldn’t get the mouth right. He’d crumpled the drawing instead.

  Natasha’s parents’ failed marriage and then her father’s second marriage with passive-aggressive Kathleen were not good examples of marriage. Maybe having grown up exposed to so much conflict—not to mention her biological mother’s outright abandonment right at the cusp of Natasha’s adolescence—was to blame for the fact that, despite her ability to dish it right back at him, when he got mad at her for something, she could simply turn off emotionally, crawl inside of herself, stop talking until Greg lured her back out with promises of how much he loved her. How he would never leave her. How she was good enough.

  “Your parents are not normal,” Natasha had once spat at him, when he’d touted their successful relationship as something he and she should aspire to. “Don’t you ever wonder why they never fight?” Uh, no, he hadn’t. Because they loved each other. That’s why. But when his own parents had calmly announced their separation like they’d decided what to order for breakfast, Natasha had never once thrown it back in his face. She’d tried to get him to talk about it. Stroked his back. Cooked him comfort foods. Didn’t protest his wanting to spend nights alone at his condo when he said he needed space. And, instead, he had crawled inside of himself. If his own parents couldn’t make it, who could? Eventually, undoubtedly, he would lose her.

  Greg crossed the police station parking lot to his car, opened the driver’s side door to a wave of heat. The July sunshine had become trapped inside, like a greenhouse, despite the fact that he’d left one window open a crack. Now the water bottles for all the searchers would be warm. Useless.

  Tip #49

  July 9, 2002

  Last week, I went to a baby shower for my cousin in Scenic Acres and I parked my car on the street and when I came out from the party my car had been ransacked and a bunch of my stuff taken, like my cds and all the coins in my dashboard! I swear to God I locked it. I made a police report at the time. It was June thirtieth, I remember exactly because it was my brother’s birthday. And Scenic Acres is the same neighbourhood as where that girl went
missing. Maybe it was a botched robbery or something, it could be connected. You should come dust my car for prints.

  ABBY

  SO WHAT? I HAD UNPROTECTED SEX IN HIGH SCHOOL WITH a guy who had a girlfriend. And one time, I drove home from a house party after having four shots of Sour Puss. And before Cam, Jessica met this older guy in a chat room, and he messaged her to meet up, and she didn’t want to go alone, so we got together with him and his friend at Boston Pizza and then went for a walk with them in the off-leash area in Fish Creek Park. Jessica made out with one of the guys, and they could have totally murdered us right there if they’d wanted to—just thrown our bodies into the creek or whatever. Last summer, I agreed to film myself having sex, and I never told anyone about it, not even Jess. And I tried E once. I remember only part of that night and it involved chugging several litres of blue Kool-Aid. I didn’t tell you any of this, for obvious reasons.

  But I also didn’t tell you that I saw a condom wrapper in your bathroom trash only a few weeks before you went missing. You got all lecturey about the fact that I slept with Cam after we broke up, about how I needed to make better decisions. About how in just a few months I would have a baby to think about. You called me “selfish.”

  I could’ve had an abortion when Dad suggested it. I swear, as soon as I told him I was pregnant, his hand hovered towards his back pocket, reaching for his wallet. Money fixes everything, right? Would it have been a better decision to spread my legs and let them suck the baby out of me? To just make it all go away?

  And why the condom wrapper, Tash? Wasn’t it against the rules to sleep with an ex? So much for your clean break with Greg. Did you hook up when I was at a doctor’s appointment or something? When I was asleep? How much of everything else you told me was bullshit? How many other secrets were you keeping? Protecting me from things you didn’t think I could handle. Things I’m not supposed to know.

  You went running sometimes before a shift, at like, four a.m. Running in the middle of the goddamned night, without even taking your phone. Why not just buy a treadmill? You always said you liked running outside, the fresh air, the ability to take a different route but still end up at the same place—home—every time.

  Except this time.

  Only one detective came that night. He looked bored, like you were just going to show up any minute and this would all be a waste of his time. He told the female officer—a street cop, who showed up first—to go, which seemed to piss her off. I guess he thought he was a bigwig. I was thinking, don’t leave! I need all of you. All the cops were probably clustered downtown by the bars outside of the Stampede grounds. Last summer, Jessica and I snuck into Cowboys nightclub and watched a guy in a Jack Daniel’s T-shirt knock a guy with leather chaps to the ground and stomp on his stomach with the metal heel of his boots.

  You only have one life, Abby, you’d said. You have to take things seriously. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but you do. Especially now.

  One detective, Tash. That’s all you got.

  GREG

  CHRISTMAS, SEVEN MONTHS BEFORE THEY BROKE UP, Greg woke up squashed next to Natasha in the double bed in his parents’ guest room, before dawn, from a dream of wandering barefoot in a field of snow. Natasha slept on, having pulled all the sheets and the quilt to her side, sprawled with one arm up over her head, dark eyelashes fluttering. Natasha always slept on the right side, Greg on the left. Greg slid out of bed, pulled on his thin plaid robe, and went downstairs to the kitchen.

  The first time she’d slept over, when Natasha fell asleep, he’d just stared at her, at the pale, naked curve of her shoulder, her slightly parted lips, her vertebrae like a string of pearls, and thanked God for his parents being out of town. He’d gotten up and wandered into the kitchen for milk. His parents called semi-skimmed milk a symbol of the many conciliations they’d made in marriage: prior to the wedding, his mother had preferred skim milk, his father whole. “When we got married, I gained five pounds,” his mother joked. “And I lost five!” his father inevitably added. Why couldn’t they have just bought both kinds? His new girlfriend asleep upstairs, teenaged Greg had microwaved a cup of compromise. His mother used to give him a bottle of milk to lie down with to put him back to sleep as a child, a habit he’d later learned from Natasha contributed to inner ear infections and cavities. Somehow, Greg had managed to escape childhood without either of these problems.

  “There you are,” Natasha had said, the night of the first sleepover, emerging in the kitchen, wrapped in Greg’s duvet, her hair tousled and hanging in her eyes, one bare shoulder deliciously exposed.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Greg said, smiling. “You’re dating an insomniac.”

  She shuffled over, barefoot, the duvet dragging along the floor. “I got cold up there, all alone, without you.”

  “My parents are coming back tomorrow,” he teased, wrapping his arms around both her and the duvet. “Don’t get too used to this.”

  Early that last Christmas morning, though, the only milk in the fridge had passed its expiry date. Greg sniffed the contents before emptying it into the sink. He filled a glass with lukewarm tap water and perched on the edge of the counter, waiting. Waiting for what? How many years since Natasha had woken up, discovered Greg had wandered off, and gotten up herself to find him and bring him back?

  Earlier in the day, Greg’s mother had made some joke about the possibility that Natasha might finally get a ring for Christmas and Greg had scoffed, “Christmas is such an obvious time to propose.” He’d put his arm around Natasha’s shoulders, but she stiffened.

  “Your father proposed to me at Christmas,” said his mother.

  He took another sip of water. Swallowed. His parents’ fridge hummed, its stainless steel face bare of the photos and magnets and grade school art of the old white one they’d had during his childhood. Greg could vaguely see the Christmas tree in the living room from his roost, but his mother had unplugged it before they’d all gone to bed and the lively rainbow lights lay dormant in the dark. A fake tree, garish polyvinyl chloride, so unlike the beautiful pinophyte it was supposed to represent. Pinophyta, or coniferous—cone-bearing seed plants, able to keep their leaves year-round.

  He and Natasha had celebrated Christmas Eve earlier in the day with Natasha’s dad and stepmom and her sisters, and then made the cross-city drive to Greg’s parents’ house separately so they’d each have their cars in the morning. Greg followed Natasha until she zipped through a yellow light and left him behind as it turned red. He rubbed his hands together while he waited. The hot air in his crapmobile took forever to get going. The light turned green. He’d lost her. He’d have to catch up to her later, at the house.

  Every Christmas, they did the back-and-forth. Natasha had what Greg’s mother referred to as a “blended” family, which made Greg think of Natasha and her dad and stepmom Kathleen and stepsister and half-sister and whoever her sisters’ temporary boyfriends happened to be all thrown together in a blender, slamming up against each other until the blender tore them all up. Every holiday someone started a fight, usually Abby. Then Natasha would get quiet and say “nothing,” when Greg asked what was wrong, but he assumed then that she’d started thinking about her mother, who’d bailed on the family after she found out that Natasha’s father had gotten Kathleen pregnant. Still, Natasha idolized her mother.

  By the time they’d made it to Greg’s parents’ house, it was late, almost time for bed, but not late enough that his mother couldn’t spoil things by making that ring comment. Greg didn’t feel ready to get married. So what? He wasn’t even thirty, hadn’t even finished his Ph.D. Most of his friends and colleagues were unmarried. People could have kids into their forties—why rush?

  Natasha went up to the guest bedroom, formerly Greg’s bedroom. Greg’s mother went to floss her teeth. Greg’s father went to the den to watch a CBC documentary. Greg didn’t feel tired, but he had a headache, and his headaches often preceded a bout of insomnia. None of the medications Natasha had suggested
—Advil, Sleep-Eze, magnesium, valerian—made any difference. He’d simply been an insomniac since childhood, woken by vivid, erratic dreams of his parents dying in a roller coaster accident, of having to perform an ’80s fitness routine at a school assembly, of having his legs cut off and having octopus legs attached. And so on.

  In the bed, Natasha had stripped down to her underwear and a thin T-shirt. She always got cold in the night and stole the blankets, so why not sleep in sweatpants? Not that he minded, really. That night, she’d crawled into bed without waiting for him, without saying anything. Probably thinking about her mom, still. He slid in behind her and snuggled up to her to keep her warm. Kissed her on the back of her head.

  “You’re never going to marry me,” she said, then. A statement, not a question.

  Hours later, wide awake, Greg finished his water. She wasn’t coming down. Merry fucking Christmas.

  ABBY

  YOUR HIGH SCHOOL PROM FELL ON THE SAME NIGHT AS MY sixth birthday and your party dress looked prettier than mine. I threw a tantrum and my mom made me sit on the naughty step during my own party. I just wanted to be exactly like you.

  When you hauled your dress out of storage a couple of months ago, you thought it would cheer me up—big sis parading around in her ’90s ball gown because little sis was seven months pregnant and refusing to go to her own prom. But I still loved that dress. Blue satin, sweetheart neckline, black lace cross-stitched over the bodice, off-the-shoulder puffy sleeves, crinoline-lined skirt. You still fit into it, eleven years later. You’d even lost weight, toned up since joining the campus cross-country team during your nursing degree. Who loses weight instead of gaining the freshman fifteen? You.

  By the time I made it to the twelfth grade, vintage was totally in. Had ’90s fashion been making a comeback, I could have worn the dress I’d longed for at age six. Except I’d have had to a) not be pregnant and b) undertaken one of my mother’s celery-juice cleanses to have fit into it.