by Annabel Lyon
Jenny didn’t respond.
* * *
—
At around three that morning, Saskia drove her mother home. Her father insisted on staying with Jenny. The streets were deserted and all the lights were green. The drive, normally forty-five minutes from downtown, took twenty. The big Kerrisdale house was the only one on the street with lights on, and the front door was unlocked. Her parents had left in a panic when the call came from the hospital.
Saskia got her mother upstairs and into her robe. The master bedroom was a plush acre or so of thick, pale carpet, Japanese wallpaper with wading storks, fresh flowers, and hammered-silk curtains. Saskia helped her mother into her king-sized four-poster. Her hair was white-gold down on the gold raw-silk pillow. Jenny had styled this room for her sixtieth birthday, right down to the blue and white Chinese bowl on the bedside table to hold her mother’s rings. Saskia placed a single Ativan in a trinket dish next to her vial of Seconal. By the time she got back from the bathroom with a glass of water, her mother was already asleep.
Saskia made her way downstairs, flicking off lights as she went. The door to the basement was through the kitchen, where she stopped briefly to make herself a tray of tea and crackers. Late as it was, she knew she wouldn’t sleep.
The basement she and Jenny shared had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a laundry room, a kitchen they rarely used, and a sitting area. This was Jenny’s laboratory. She was always trying out different arrangements of furniture, painting this wall or that, bringing home fresh cushions and flea market antiques. Currently she was going with an Indian theme. The walls were spice-reds and browns, the footstool a brass elephant she’d found at a garage sale, and the couch was covered in an embroidered blue-and-orange sari she had repurposed as a throw.
Saskia put her tray on the elephant’s back and dropped onto the couch. The TV offered cop shows about serial killers, reality shows about serial killers, movies about serial killers, cooking shows, infomercials, and a black-and-white comedy from the forties featuring William Powell and Myrna Loy. Saskia sank her tired mind into that glamorous world of silks and furs and gangsters and fast talk.
“I’m a hero. I was shot twice in the Tribune.”
“I read where you were shot five times in the tabloids.”
“It’s not true. He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”
The movie went on while the windows slowly lightened: dawn. Saskia got up to pull the curtains. She needed the dark. She couldn’t bring herself to go into Jenny’s room, though, and pulled her door closed instead. She watched until the last credits had rolled, then turned the TV off and went to her own room to try for a couple of hours’ sleep. She had promised her father she’d be back at the hospital by ten.
On her bedside table sat the chrome tube of aromatherapy spray Jenny had left for her. Saskia picked off the clear plastic sheathing with her fingernails and uncapped the tube.
Sandalwood—she recognized sandalwood. That was their mother’s jewellery box, that smell. They used to take turns pushing their face into it and breathing deep. Cinnamon, and something else: floral, but not sweet. Darkly intoxicating, what black roses would smell like.
“I had it custom mixed for you,” Jenny had told her. “Everything I knew you’d love. Who knows you better than me? You can carry it around with you, take a whiff when you’re feeling down. You’ll be amazed how it rearranges your brain, just one beautiful breath of it.”
Anyone who didn’t know Jenny would say it was a thoughtful gift. Certainly she had put thought into choosing something she knew Saskia would love, but only so she could use it as leverage later. Tell Mum and Dad I came home late and left early, when she stayed out all night. I don’t want to have dinner with them tonight, tell them I have to work late. If David (or Liam or Ellie or Oliver or Rob) calls, tell him I went to Seattle for the weekend. Cover for me. You owe me. I do things for you.
Saskia wondered if Jenny was still able to smell. If she ever would again.
She capped the tube quickly and shoved it into a drawer, where its scent couldn’t reach her.
* * *
—
Their days settled into a dreary pattern. They took turns at the hospital so Jenny would never be alone. Saskia and her father saw each other only in passing. The circumstances of the accident melted into inconsequence. The police interviewed Jenny’s friends and work colleagues. They looked at her email and social media and text messages, and stated in their report that they had found nothing beyond the obvious: Jenny had a history of wildly erratic behaviour and a psychiatric diagnosis to match. She alone was to blame. The other driver, a young mother with toddlers in the back seat, was cleared of wrongdoing. None of them were harmed. There would be no court case.
Saskia asked her father if she might see Jenny’s phone for herself. He was the one who had collected her sister’s things from the police after they concluded their report—her bag, her phone, her clothes. They searched his office together, then his car, then his bedroom.
“I don’t know, Sassy. I’m sure I got it all back. I just can’t remember where I put it.” He started to cry. “I keep having these gaps.”
She hugged him. “We’re all exhausted. It doesn’t matter.”
Saskia’s mother sat at Jenny’s side, sipping from her travel mug, getting in the nurses’ way. Her father aged almost as Saskia watched him. He slumped rather than sat, and lost weight.
“How long do we keep this up?” he asked Saskia, as they traded places, twelve days in, she to take his chair by the bedside, he to go home—if his experience was anything like hers—to takeout and insomnia.
“What do you mean?” But Saskia knew. They were waiting for Jenny to wake, but what if she never did? They couldn’t do this for the rest of their lives. Her father was on stress leave from work, and she had simply stopped going to the University. But eventually their lives would have to resume.
Their father reached out to stroke Jenny’s curls back from her forehead. The bandages had come off, but she now had a feeding tube and catheter as well as the IV and the respirator.
“I’m not ready to think about that,” Saskia said.
Her father nodded.
Jenny looked so normal, so like herself. Sleeping Beauty. Someone had wiped the makeup from her face that first day, and though the nurses washed her hair, it went frizzy without styling products. Her mouth was just that little bit too slack. But still she looked tousled from a late Friday night and a hard sleep, about to open her eyes and smile and try to persuade Saskia to come out with her tonight, just this once.
After her father had left, Saskia reached in her purse for the chrome tube. Not the one Jenny had left for her, but its twin, the one she’d found on Jenny’s bedside table last night, when she finally braved the door she’d closed on the first day. She’d sat on the floor, leaning against the open door, and tried to cry, hugging her sister’s pillow, which smelled of her shampoo. Looking dully around the room, she’d spotted the tube.
Slowly she uncapped it and waved it near Jenny’s face. It was different from Saskia’s: lighter, sweeter. Pink flowers. It was her sister, utterly: sweet and pretty and charming and uncomplicated. A lie.
“Wake up,” Saskia said. “Wake up, Jenny.”
Nothing.
She waved the tube closer, brushing the tip of her sister’s nose. She shook her shoulder. “You know this, Jenny. Come on, you recognize this. Wake up!”
“Miss?” an orderly said.
“Wake up! I know you can hear me!” Saskia was shaking her with both hands now.
“Miss.”
She was escorted from the hospital by the orderly, who was kind but firm. Saskia was tired, she needed to go home, she was disturbing the other patients.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Saskia shrugged his hand from her shoulder.
She didn’t go home. She got in her
car and took ten deep breaths. Then she opened the glove box, clicked it closed, and drove to Oakridge Centre.
* * *
—
What had she been thinking? Drunk, unstrapped, blowing through a red light. What the hell had been going through her head?
Saskia drove through that intersection and turned right into the mall parking lot.
You don’t start with clothes, she remembered Jenny saying. Clothes come last. You have to fix yourself naked first.
The salon, then, and the spa.
“That’s going to take a while,” the purple-streaked receptionist at the salon said when Saskia listed everything she wanted done. “Cut and colour, facial, pedicure, waxing—”
“The complete tune-up,” Saskia said.
The receptionist looked blank.
Saskia touched her temple, the pain blossoming there. “It’s been a bad couple of weeks. I need you to fix me, you know? Make things better. I mean, not everything, obviously. But—I need to…”
The receptionist raised her eyebrows, waiting.
“I need to feel pretty.” It was as close as she could get to saying: I need to see my sister again. Awake.
The receptionist reached across the counter, removed Saskia’s glasses, and looked at her for a long moment. “We can do that.”
Once Saskia was in the chair, the blonde Japanese stylist pulled the elastic out of her hair. She lowered her head to Saskia’s level and together they looked into the mirror. “Is this natural?” She fingered a curl.
“Yeah. I never really know what to do with it, though.”
“People pay a lot of money for hair like this. Do you always wear it in a ponytail?”
“Pretty much.”
The stylist looked unimpressed. “And what are we doing today? Let me guess. A trim, but long enough so you can—”
“Put it back in a ponytail,” Saskia finished for her.
“So, we’re going to wash it first,” the stylist said. “Then I’m going to talk you out of that.”
The stylist led her to the sink. “I need you to relax, okay? Relax your neck and your head. And your shoulders.”
Gush of warm water, lather of orange-smelling suds, and the girl’s strong fingers working her scalp. All Saskia could think of was Jenny. Did she feel it when the nurses washed her hair? Could she feel the warm water, smell the lather, feel like a pleasured animal under the scalp massage? How much attention had Saskia herself ever paid to these things? She went to Kwik Kuts. Pleasure had never been part of the equation, never been a part of what she was paying for.
She closed her eyes and inhaled the fragrance of the shampoo, and thought about where fragrance went in your body: how it started in the nose, then filled the head, then travelled somehow to the lungs, the fingertips, the—she hesitated, looking for the right word—the privates. Everything warmed and swelled and relaxed, just from the smell.
Privates? She could hear Jenny laughing. That’s what you call them? Like soldiers?
Genitalia?
Peals of little silver bells.
Chrysanthemum, Saskia thought, remembering a French novel she had read. I feel it in my chrysanthemum. She imagined Jenny howling with laughter, collapsing on the sofa and snorting until her stomach ached.
The stylist wrapped her hair in a warm towel and led her back to the chair by the mirror. “A little colour?”
Saskia had never coloured her hair in her life. She had no grey, so what was the point?
“We’ll just look, for fun.” The stylist handed her a card like a large menu with tiny looped clips of coloured hair taped next to even tinier numbers. The stylist tapped a jade-green fingernail against one. “I like this for you.”
“Seriously?” Saskia glanced at herself in the mirror. She couldn’t picture it.
“And we need to get rid of some of this length. It’s too heavy. It’s pulling the curls straight so you can’t even see them. And this frizz at the ends? This is damage. I need to get rid of all this.”
Saskia handed her back the menu. “Tell you what. You do it, okay? I trust you. Just—do what you think will work. You’re the boss.”
* * *
—
“What the fuck are you playing at?” her father said. “Your sister’s in a coma and you go to the hairdresser? This is why you’re late? We thought something happened to you.”
Her mother was pale with shock. “I thought you were Jenny, walking through the door,” she whispered. “I thought Jenny had come home.”
“I’m sorry,” Saskia said. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t realize. I just needed a change.”
“A change?” A vein pulsed in her father’s forehead.
“I’m sorry,” Saskia whispered.
They had planned a rare supper together at home. It had been almost three weeks since the accident, and they were all worn out by keeping vigil at Jenny’s bedside twenty-four hours a day. Her father had asked her mother to cook a meal, had asked Saskia to be home for six o’clock. Saskia knew a talk was coming, the talk. They had to get on with their lives. He had to go back to work. Saskia had to go back to school. Decisions would have to be made.
Had Saskia written “Decisions would have to be made” in a paper, Madame Brossard would have circled it with her red pen. “In grammar, this is called the passive voice,” she would say. “We cannot tell who is making these decisions. It is vague, it avoids accountability. Politicians love the passive voice, yes? French academics, not so much. Again, please.”
They would have to make decisions: her father, her mother, Saskia. They would have to decide whether to keep hoping for Jenny’s recovery or to wall themselves off from that hope and try to get on with their lives.
When the stylist was done, Saskia had put her glasses back on and looked in the mirror. Jenny looked back: sleek, sultry, polished. Her brows tweezed, her skin pink, her lips cherry, her hair darker and glossier and curlier, her nails brightened with the French tips Jenny favoured. The tiny extra weight of the manicure on her fingertips distracted her for days.
Cutting her hair was a betrayal.
“If I wear my hair down, I’m going to look like Jenny,” she said now. “I mean, obviously. We’re twins. I’m sorry if I scared you.”
“You’re sorry.” Her father shook his head.
Her mother couldn’t look away. Even as she walked towards the kitchen, her eyes slid sideways, watching Saskia as though she were a dangerous dog.
“Smells good,” Saskia said.
“It’s ready. We might as well eat.”
They sat at the table while her mother served lasagna and salad. Her father poured wine for himself and Saskia.
“Are you wearing makeup?” her father demanded.
“Just a little.”
“It’s uncanny.” His voice had gone gruff. Saskia recognized the tone that came when his anger was down to the embers, almost out.
“You look lovely.” Her mother was clearly trying to rally.
“Would it be better if I took off the makeup?”
“Yes,” both her parents said.
When she came back to the table, face washed, her parents broke off their whispered conversation.
“That’s a new dress,” her mother said.
“You hate it.”
“No. It’s different for you, that’s all. But you need new clothes. It’s time you started dressing like a grown-up. I think I will have that glass of wine, thank you, darling.”
Her father complied. Saskia saw he was too tired to fight. She looked down at her lap so she wouldn’t have to see her mother’s thirst. She smoothed her napkin over the cool silk. After the salon she had meant to drive home, she really had, but she had instead gone into a store she recognized from the bags Jenny would bring home after a day’s shopping. One of Jenny’s favourites. At fi
rst she was intimidated by the polished wood floor, the quiet after the Muzak of the mall, and the expensive coats and dresses softly spot-lit, displayed like museum pieces. But then the saleslady, a woman her mother’s age, smiled warmly and came around the counter to greet her. “Welcome back. We haven’t seen you in a while.”
After only the slightest hesitation: “I’ve been sick.”
“I’ve saved some pieces for you.”
In the change room Saskia stripped, leaving her black T-shirt and grey hoodie and jeans in a morose pile on the floor. The first dress was a simple grey jersey tunic with silver embroidery along the hem. “Wear it with tights and boots and that blue leather jacket of yours,” the saleslady said when she stepped through the curtain. The second was a green shirt dress, the kind where Saskia would do up four buttons and Jenny would do up three. Today, Saskia did up three. The third dress was a blue silk shift, so pale at the shoulders it was almost white, deepening shade by shade through an ombré dye to indigo at the hem.
Saskia couldn’t look away from the mirrors. “I’ll wear this one home.”
“I should think so,” the saleslady said.
The other two dresses and her university clothes went into the glossy bag with the silk cord handles and the familiar logo. Saskia paid more than she had for last term’s tuition.
“Do me a favour, honey,” the saleslady said before she left. Saskia nodded. “Your shoes.”
They both looked down. Under the blue silk, Saskia was wearing Doc Martens.
Two pairs of heels, three scarves, and a bracelet later, Saskia went home.
“I’ve been thinking.” Saskia took some more salad. “I’ve been thinking about what Jenny would want.”
Her parents were childlike, listening. They looked so, so tired.
“She’d want us to—to live. I mean, really to live. To enjoy life. Like she did. She wouldn’t want us to—I don’t know how to say it. To shut down.”
