Left

by Theanna Bischoff

  At the funeral, my mom cried, which I thought was kind of funny since she didn’t really know Jason very well, so how could she miss him? I asked her afterwards why she was crying, and she said, “Aunt Natasha never got to have a funeral.” We were in the little McInnis and Holloway room after the service was over having snacks and punch. Everyone was telling Auntie Jo and her parents and Finn they were so sorry Jason died and what a good man he was. Maybe when you die everyone thinks you’re a hero and it doesn’t matter what you did when you were alive.

  “Do you want a sandwich?” I asked my mom. I picked an egg salad bun off the table and made it into a little mouth, made the bread open and close at her. “Hello,” I said, making my voice silly. “Please don’t eat me.”

  That made her laugh a little bit. I hate it when my mom cries.

  NATASHA

  MARCH 2002

  Sometimes not picking up the phone to call Greg involves physically leaving the house. Lacing up her sneakers and running as far away from the house as she can. If she runs long enough, sometimes exhaustion turns into euphoria, a runner’s high, endorphins and the cold air surging through her lungs.

  Which is worse? The waiting? The constant waiting for Greg to feel ready to marry her, to have a baby? Or the craving—the constant craving to call him, to hug him, to hear his laugh, to drink hot chocolate together in front of the fireplace, to drop him off on campus and kiss him goodbye, to snack on his homemade pepperoni and pineapple pizza, to sleep in one of his white cotton undershirts, to argue over which late night TV host is funnier, to raise eyebrows at him during a family dinner, to steal his sunglasses while out for brunch, to boil raw ginger into tea when he has a cold, to flip through his sketchbook when he’s asleep...

  On Thursday, she caved.

  A middle-aged woman and a teenaged girl had come into the ER following a car accident. Natasha had attended to the girl, who’d been burned when flames began to lick up the car from the asphalt. No head injuries or signs of organ damage, but, from the sounds of it, the driver hadn’t been so lucky. The girl’s polyester pants had melted into her flesh; she had to be put under general anesthesia so that the team could pick the fragments out of her molten skin. Her face had been spared, but the severity of the burns meant she would have to learn to live with ridges of scars, mottled, mismatched skin. She would likely require multiple surgeries, grafts. The pain would recede over time, but dull into pins and needles, itching, tingling. She would likely go to college self-conscious about wearing a bikini, about undressing in front of a lover.

  When she roused from anesthesia, the girl moaned like an abused animal. If she hurt this bad now, tomorrow’s procedures would shave a whole other level off her soul. Natasha had never personally experienced true burn pain before—just minor sunburns and, once, a nasty scald on the underside of her chin from a slip of a curling iron. But after years of working on the unit, she could gauge pain tolerance by the level of analgesic requested by patients in combination with the hollow, hopeless notes of their cries.

  Natasha had asked the girl if she needed more pain relief.

  “No,” the girl whispered, her voice hoarse. She reached a bandaged hand up and looked at it, where the IV fed into fragile skin.

  “Lie still,” Natasha instructed. “Your grandparents are on their way.” The middle-aged woman was the girl’s mother. The girl’s father was not in the picture.

  “Is my mom okay?” the girl asked.

  Hospital policy dictated that information about other patients could only be released by certain personnel and under certain circumstances. Since her patient was under eighteen, Natasha could not divulge anything about the mother’s condition without a guardian present. Bad news delivered at the wrong time, in the wrong way, could be detrimental to a patient’s recovery. Then again, she knew what not knowing felt like. What it felt like to wait for her mother to call, to send a postcard. Anything.

  Natasha tried to make her voice as calm as possible. “Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Singh are looking after her,” she said. “They’re the dream team. If it was my mother—” She swallowed, before concluding, “She’s in the best hands possible.” Small brown flecks speckled the left thigh of her pink cotton scrubs. Natasha usually wore brightly coloured scrubs, having read studies that suggested they put patients at ease more than sterile white or traditional cornflower blue.

  The girl’s eyes looked like an overcast sky. “Can you check?” she pleaded.

  Natasha averted her gaze to the girl’s chart. “Okay. Let me see if they know anything yet.” She rode the elevator down a few floors.

  Sometimes her mother had slept in Natasha’s twin bed, the two of them squished together, Natasha up against the wall. Natasha’s mommy had blue silk pajamas, and Natasha smooshed her face up against the cool silk of her mommy’s back while mommy slept. She didn’t like it when her mommy was so sick, but she liked cuddling. She used her fingers to untangle one of mommy’s curls very carefully without waking her up.

  At the nurse’s station a couple of floors down, Natasha asked whether anyone had seen Pav or Mitch or one of the assisting nurses. They’d gotten out of surgery early, she was informed, they’d have to be paged. Then Mitch had come around the corner, wringing his hands like he was washing them the way they all had to do so many times a day. Natasha had noticed that she herself did this sometimes, when stressed, or when having an intense conversation.

  “Female, forties, MVA,” Natasha probed, then felt guilty for identifying the victim—someone’s daughter, someone’s mother—by her trauma. “I have the daughter upstairs. How’d surgery go?”

  Mitch shook his head, looked down.

  Fuck.

  Back upstairs, Natasha poked her head in the girl’s room, forced a smile. “I couldn’t find anyone yet, sorry, sweetheart.” The girl’s hopeful face collapsed. She took a few shuddery breaths. “You’ll keep checking, right? You’ll tell me as soon as you know?”

  Natasha’s face felt like stretched plastic. “Sure.”

  As Abby’s pregnancy advanced, Natasha typically didn’t accept invitations to go out for drinks with her colleagues, but she had the next day off and she didn’t want to feel anything. She’d gone straight from work to the pub downtown, carpooling with Melissa, having changed into a pair of dark jeans and a silky black top. She left her car in the hospital parkade. She could ask Jason to drive her back to get it later, since he was scheduled to come over to help set up the baby monitors and fix the Internet connection, which, for the past week, had been flickering in and out like a spotty pulse. Thank God for knowing an IT expert.

  Her first beer tasted like soap, the second like the aftertaste of vomit. She sipped at the foam, feeling lightheaded, listening to Melissa and Danielle gossip about Danielle’s cowboy-themed bachelorette party, scheduled for the second Friday during Stampede. Melissa had gotten married at twenty-two, but she’d recently separated from her husband, and, she confessed, was casually seeing one of the new residents. “You know who I’d really like to bang?” she declared, after a round of shots. “Dr. Kennedy.”

  “Mitchell Kennedy?” Danielle squealed, twisting her diamond solitaire back and forth. “Seriously? He’s ancient!”

  “Silver fox!” Melissa chortled. “Plus he’s probably loaded.”

  Natasha pictured Mitch coming around the corner, scrubbing at his empty hands. “He did a surgery on my patient’s mom today,” she said. Her friends looked at her like enough with the shoptalk!

  Danielle grinned, slapped the table with both hands. “We need more shots!”

  The two subsequent shots made the inside of her mouth feel numb. Natasha excused herself and went to the bathroom, threw up neatly into the toilet. The stall smelled sour; toilet paper littered the floor and the toilet basin appeared dis-coloured. Goosebumps dotted her bare arms. She cupped her hand under the faucet and spilled some water into her palm, wiped it across her mouth. She just wanted someone to warm her up. She needed a hot bath. Memories stumbl
ed into her brain, then; her mother’s long fingers rubbing shampoo into her hair, wrapping her in a giant bath towel; vanilla bubble bath, legs tangled up with Greg’s, trying to fit both of them in the bathtub, someone knocking a row of tea lights into the water, extinguishing the flames. Their wet hair on the pillow afterwards, his arms wrapped around her. She dialled, clumsily. “Can you come get me?”

  ABBY

  I WOULD HAVE BEEN YOUR MAID OF HONOUR WHEN YOU AND Greg got married, right? I know you and Josie were the same age and technically you knew her longer than me. But we’re sisters. Plus, I would have thrown you a way better bachelorette party. We would have started at the spa, then had a 1980s dance party at your house while getting ready to go out. We would have had a red velvet cake, a classy one. Double-decker with a sparkly crown as a cake topper, and the words, Future Mrs. Morgan! We would have toasted you with champagne. For you, we would have taken a limo, all worn silver dresses, and you would have worn something smokin’ hot, like a white sequin dress with a low back. If you got it, flaunt it, right? I sure don’t.

  Doesn’t that sound better than what Josie would have planned? I remember the list of rules Josie gave you when you planned her bachelorette party. No strippers, no alcohol, no lingerie, no novelty genitalia. No fun.

  Other than being super bored, I remember only a few things about Josie’s wedding. Like how cheesy and pink it was. I’d wanted to wear your blue silk dress. You finally said yes, even though it was expensive, but then I couldn’t get the zipper to do up. So I ended up wearing one of my old dresses and sitting at the kid’s table listening to the violinist and staring at a display of framed wedding photos near the entrance—her parents, her grandparents, Solomon’s parents, Solomon’s grandparents. Even a set of great-grandparents. What show-offs.

  One time, you showed me a photo you’d stolen from your parents’ wedding album when they split up. Dad looked so young—but also kind of like a pedophile, with big 1970s glasses and mustache and pleated cummerbund. Your mom’s dress wasn’t too hideous, given the year. But she should have ditched the long sleeves and high neck. I haven’t seen that many pictures of your mom over the years, other than her wedding photo and the picture of the two of you on the piano bench, the one I made Reuben put up so that he wouldn’t see you as just some missing girl, but as a real person. From that one photo, I can tell your mom was gorgeous. That picture was your favourite memory, you told me. You and your mother watching Princess Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles, eating homemade scones and sipping tea, playing the wedding march on the piano. It’s not fair that you loved weddings so much but never got to have your own. And it’s not fair that you wanted children so badly but never got to sit on a piano bench sipping tea with your own little girl.

  There are no pictures of my parents’ wedding, at least none that I’ve seen. Apparently they just went down to city hall one day and made it legal. You, Kayla, and I weren’t even there. Well, technically I was, since Mom was pregnant with me at the time. They were probably too embarrassed to host a big country club shindig with five hundred something guests. They’re separated now, anyway, although they pretended not to be for that awful TV interview they did two months ago. Of course, Kayla volunteered to do it (that bitch). Dad tried to get me to do it, too. Apparently it’s better if a family presents a unified front. Better for who? Dad said viewers would be more sympathetic if Summer was there. I said, “Over my dead body,” and he flinched.

  Honestly, I don’t know whether my parents will ever actually file for divorce—probably too expensive. Dad has softened without my mother, though. He came to Jason’s funeral, which was kind of weird, since Dad has never been the sentimental type, and I didn’t know he was coming until I ran into him there.

  “Jay was a good kid,” he said. “He helped a lot when Natasha…” He wiped his nose with his thumb and forefinger and looked away. Was he crying? “Anyway, life is short, right?”

  Life is short. Actually, for a lot of people, life is agonizingly long, like eighty years of fuck-ups one after the other, eighty years of bad things happening to them. Maybe life is better short. Because I will probably spend the next sixty or seventy years waking up every morning to the same punch in the gut: you are still gone.

  After the funeral, Dad and I were sitting with Summer, eating appetizers, and then Summer went off with Josie for a bit, and Dad said, “Do you think we should have a memorial for your sister?” Technically, we should have been mourning Jason. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you, either. How we never really had a chance to say a formal goodbye.

  “I don’t know,” I said. A few years ago, my mother asked whether we should have you declared legally dead. I don’t think their marriage ever really recovered from that. Or maybe it had started unravelling long before and her suggestion was just one of those strings near the end, you tug and the whole thing unravels, but the sweater was already ruined anyway. I know how much your parents’ divorce crushed you, Tash. But when mine finally pulled the plug, I just thought, whatever.

  After enough bad stuff happens to you, new bad stuff doesn’t make a difference. It’s just like scab forming over scab. At the funeral, Josie’s mother came over to us, and my dad stood up and gave her a hug, and then she hugged me, too, and then got sucked back into the crowd of people probably all saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Like, everything happens for a reason, which more than one person said to me when you went missing. Like there was a good reason you disappeared from my life without any warning. Like maybe I deserved that.

  I remember when Mrs. Carey had breast cancer, when that was the worst thing that had ever happened to their family. Then they’d lost you, and you were like a daughter to them. And now, they have to mourn Jason. Like I said, scab over scab, scar tissue over scar tissue.

  I spied Summer across the room, chatting with Finn. What will Finn remember about his father? If I die, what memories will Summer have? Was I a good enough mother when she was little? Is being a good enough mother even possible when you’re just a shell of a human being?

  What did you remember of your parents, of your mother, before she left? You mentioned how much they’d argued, but only a few times, when you slipped up, when you weren’t on guard trying to protect me from the big bad world. The odd time, you’d mentioned that your mom had been sick, near the end. A chronic illness, maybe? Or depression? Had she sensed our father was a cheating bastard about to leave her for his mistress? These moments happened so rarely, though—you always recovered pretty quickly, made a joke, changed the subject. I never got the full story.

  NATASHA

  JUNE 2002

  In the aftermath of the breakup, Natasha resigned herself to the fact that, if she were ever to have sex with anyone other than Greg, it would, for the remainder of her lifespan, always feel like cheating. She imagined her sex life with Greg like a slow bell curve; an awkward start, followed by a gradual incline, a peak in their early-to-mid twenties, followed by a gradual decline. She continued taking her birth control pills, but felt a hot flare in her gut every time her period came. She was pretty sure if a pregnancy did happen, Greg would finally propose, move into her house, put his hand on her growing belly to feel the baby’s outlines and curves, just like she sat with Abby, her hand resting under Abby’s belly button, feeling the rush of joy as the baby kicked, followed by the hot letdown. She could only feel the baby from the outside in—Abby got to feel the baby from the inside out, Abby got to be “mama.”

  Natasha would never, ever deliberately get pregnant until Greg was on board with the decision, but if life were to make that choice for her...

  She and Greg had waited a long time to have sex, over a year. Greg had unwrapped the condom, the first she’d seen out of its wrapper, a slimy, collapsed balloon. “Promise me you’ll tell me if it hurts,” he said. “I’ll stop. I don’t want it to hurt.” Natasha had the bedding pulled up under her armpits. Greg had seen her bare breasts before, touched them, put his mouth on them—they’d
fooled around plenty of times—but this felt different, a plan in motion from the time Greg’s parents won a weekend at a B&B at the school silent auction. If she had wanted to take it back—which she didn’t think she did—but if she had wanted to take it back, it was probably too late.

  It had not, actually, been that painful. Not pleasant, but not unpleasant. Better than some of the first-time horror stories she’d read in Seventeen magazine. When Greg had fallen asleep, Natasha eased out from where she’d tucked up under his sweaty armpit and went to the bathroom and peed, which was what you were supposed to do to prevent urinary tract infections. She looked at herself in the mirror, smoothed her hair, wrapped her arms around herself. Her dark hair, tousled and wild, reminded her of her stepmother after a visit to the salon, her hair teased and blown-out. How old was Kathleen when she lost her virginity? Probably really young. She probably bragged about it afterwards.

  Natasha had never showered in Greg’s bathroom before. She turned on the water and waggled her fingers underneath it until the temperature felt just right, then stepped in. She bent and retrieved a bottle of body wash from the shower’s tiled floor, squirted a small amount of the bright blue fluid into her open palm, and smelled. Wrinkled her nose. So sharp and woodsy, Greg’s smell, but too concentrated. She held her hand towards the stream of water and let the blue syrup wash away down the drain.