by Annabel Lyon
“I was thinking rose, maybe.” They drifted, cultured, sure of themselves. Sara could be this person with Donna.
“How is she? With everything that’s been going on.”
“She’s excited about her birthday. I’ve promised her a cake from Fratelli’s.”
“Will she have friends over?”
“For tea, yes.” Mattie had invited three ladies and their staff from the community centre for the afternoon. They would eat cake and watch one of Mattie’s movies. She and Mattie had already been shopping for party favours—sticker books, movie cards, funny socks.
In the end, Sara bought her sister a pretty pink bottle of Kelly Calèche: jasmine, mimosa, sweet pink rose, leather. Donna insisted on buying the suffocating Shalimar. “Even for her just to look at on her dresser. Give her a big hug from Donna. Bring her to campus sometime and we’ll have lunch, the three of us. Do you suppose she remembers me?”
“Oh, yes.” They watched the sales assistant solemnly wrap the gifts. “She remembers things from years ago better than what she had for breakfast this morning. She’ll be thrilled that you thought of her.”
They went to a hotel for drinks so they could sit in nice armchairs and be served. It was their ritual. Everything so exquisite, so expensive, so hushed and plush and tasteful.
“You must be anxious, though,” Donna said. “I’m anxious for you. Are you carrying pepper spray? Are you sleeping?”
“Better than you’d think.” Sara pictured the bottle of Shalimar, imagined spritzing it in Robert’s eyes. She saw him reeling backwards as she strode away in her little black dress, catwalk-style. “I honestly don’t think he intends to hurt Mattie. Or me, for that matter. He never hurt her before, when he had the opportunity. That’s got to count for something.”
“People change. Was he an addict back then?”
“He told me he was clean. I think it might have been one of the nicer times in his life, actually, before I wrecked it for him.”
Donna gave her the stony, patient-impatient look Sara had seen her give some of her duller students.
“He could have hurt me a hundred times over by now,” Sara objected. “He knows where my office is. He knows where I live. In the last four months he’s caught me alone more times than I can count, but he’s never done anything but talk and run away. Eventually the police will catch up to him, and it’ll stop. It’s just a nuisance. I’m being extra-cautious for Mattie’s sake, that’s all. Eventually he’ll give up on me and find someone else to harass.”
Donna raised her glass and they drank to that.
* * *
—
“Mattie.”
Her sister came out of the bathroom in her fuzzy robe and fuzzy slippers, drying her hair with a towel. She was anxious and listening with her big eyes. She held a towel to her head but stopped rubbing it. She couldn’t rub and listen at the same time.
“The police just called. They found Robert. They’re…going to talk to him for a bit. I can go to work today, and you can go to your drop-in like you always do. Isn’t that good?”
The police had mentioned charging Robert with stalking and probably drug possession. He would be in a lockup somewhere, and the sisters could finally go on with their lives. After a quiet morning on her office couch with her iPad, Sara had lunch with a molecular biologist and a bioethicist at the one white-tablecloth restaurant on campus. They ate hundred-mile salads and her colleagues each had a glass of white wine. Sara had Pellegrino. They laughed a lot, and lingered over coffee. “August is my favourite,” the bioethicist said. “No students, no marking, no rush. A little course prep, a little coffee, a little online shopping, am I right?”
Sara worked in her office into the gold-spackled light of the supper hour. She had a view of a quad landscaped with indigenous plants and artificially weathered benches and a winding path of concrete slabs, a legacy gift of some retired dean. There was a plaque that explained the significance of it all. Sara liked to see the few summer students sprawled over their books and listen to the pony-clop of footsteps echoing off the concrete as the shadows lengthened.
She stopped on the way home for Lebanese takeout: hummus, pita, bitter olives, chicken tawook, mujadara. Mattie liked chicken.
From a distance she could see old Mrs. Rutherford sitting on the steps of their building. She lived at the opposite end of the hall from Sara and Mattie, and had lived in that building longer than anyone else, since before her husband died fifteen years before. She attempted authority over the communal aspects of the building residents’ lives—managing the potted geraniums and slipping prickly little notes under people’s doors about recycling and loud music—but she was always kind to Mattie.
“Lovely evening,” Sara called.
Closer, she saw Mrs. Rutherford’s face.
“What happened?” Sara asked.
* * *
—
The funeral was neither as small nor as private as Sara had hoped. A vain hope, with all the news coverage, but her dismay grew as each new person stepped into the nave of the Anglican church their late mother had favoured. Friends of their mother’s, friends of Mattie’s, staff from the group homes where her friends lived, her own colleagues from the University, the police and paramedics who had first responded to the call, neighbours from their building, and utter strangers who had seen the news and thought their own condolences important. Sara delivered the eulogy, mentioning Mattie’s love of musicals and praising her sweetness. When she looked up from her notes, the mourners offered brave smiles and nods of encouragement. She ended with the thought that they should remember Mattie as she had been in life, not in death, and that the world was a better place for having such souls in it. She felt a ripple, then, as the mourners looked without looking at the other Matties sitting amongst them.
A hand on her elbow on the steps of the church, just as she thought it was over: David Park.
They hugged. High school sweethearts, they had been—introverted, studious, ambitious. They had barely touched each other. Something had kindled briefly when she returned home at Christmas from her abortive first try at university in Toronto, but they had fought over her treatment of Mattie and he had ended it. They hadn’t seen each other now in—how long had it been?
“I’m so sorry,” he said into her hair, as though it were his fault. He was crying. He looked (Sara couldn’t help noticing) lovely: that dark suit, those cheekbones.
“You smell nice,” she said.
They went for a walk. Summer was crisping and browning, readying for fall despite the lingering heat.
She learned that he had become a surgeon (the plan since he was fourteen), and that his parents were both still alive. He was married. He still played the violin, and seemed perplexed and disappointed when she said she no longer kept up her piano. She told him about her career at the University, her mother’s death, and the birthday Mattie had been looking forward to so much: the cake, the friends.
“I was unkind to you,” David said. “You took care of her right to the end. I’m the one who walked away. I underestimated you.”
“Not quite to the end.”
David stopped walking and so did she. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. “None of this is your fault.”
“I haven’t cried. I can’t cry.”
“Shock.”
She shrugged. “I just assumed they’d lock him up right away. I thought we were safe. It never occurred to me they’d question him and let him go.”
He offered to drive her home in his immaculate Prius. A foil-wrapped casserole sat on her doormat, with a note from the gay couple two floors down. She put the casserole in the fridge.
“Show me her room,” David said.
The bed, closet, dresser, stuffed animals, movie posters; the silly pretty chandelier, soft curtains, beads and baubles in a china dis
h, shoes, slippers, and the blue beaded wallet; the cup on the nightstand from her warm milk and cinnamon, one week ago now, the night before the last day.
“I’ll help you with it,” David Park said. “When you’re ready.”
In Sara’s bedroom they finished what they had started a long time before. He was sure of himself in a way he’d never been when she’d known him. Married, she reminded herself. That must be where he’d learned it.
“You can help me with one thing today,” she said as he tied his shoes.
“Anything.”
“Take these.” From the desk drawer she fetched the two gift-wrapped bottles of perfume. “Just—take them.”
They hugged once more at the door. “Will you move? I mean, you’re okay here by yourself? You wouldn’t rather be in a hotel?”
“No.”
It had been twenty-six years—she worked it out after he’d gone.
* * *
—
There had been many witnesses to the events of that August afternoon. One of Sara’s neighbours, a young woman returning from work, saw Robert standing by the intercom. She had been afraid he would try to let himself in behind her, but he did not.
Another woman, parked across the street with her son in the back seat, saw Robert and Mattie talking on the sidewalk. She did not see where Mattie had come from. But the gay couple, headed for after-work drinks with colleagues on Denman Street, passed Mattie walking home. She smiled when they greeted her and seemed her normal, happy self. It was concluded from the keys found still zipped in her purse that she had stopped to speak with Robert in front of the building. She never made it inside.
Everyone who was home had windows open—it was a prewar building without central air conditioning—and once the shouting started several witnesses had gone to their windows to see what was going on. You love me, they remembered hearing, and Don’t you love me? They saw Robert take Mattie by the shoulders, saw Mattie push him away. They saw Robert reach for her again, saw her jerk away from his touch and trip and fall backwards and hit her head on the concrete step and not get up.
Help, Robert had called. Someone call 911.
He had stayed while the neighbours ran outside to find him cradling her head in his lap, stayed while the ambulance came, stayed weeping until the police came and took him away. All this had happened just twenty minutes before Sara got home to find Mrs. Rutherford waiting for her on the steps. Sara had accidentally left her cell phone plugged into her charger at work, which was why no one had been able to reach her.
Mattie died in the ambulance of a cerebral hemorrhage right around the time Sara would have been stopping for Lebanese.
* * *
—
The coroner declared Mattie’s death an accident. Robert pled guilty to criminal harassment. Sara saw him at sentencing. If he’d looked ill before, now he looked devastated. He wept frequently, and when he saw Sara he mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
Sara did not give a victim impact statement.
In the end, the judge sentenced Robert to a year in jail. He took into consideration the fact that Robert had not fled the scene, he had called for help, he had waited for first responders, and his story was entirely corroborated by the many witnesses. Robert read a statement in which he confirmed he was attending Narcotics Anonymous and would remember Mattie’s goodness every day for the rest of his life. He would give his own life to bring her back if he could. Anything Sara asked of him, he would do.
* * *
—
The movie played again and again in Sara’s mind. “The police just called. They found Robert. They’re…going to talk to him for a bit. I can go to work today, and you can go to your drop-in like you always do. Isn’t that good?”
Mattie had stared at Sara, trying to understand.
“I’m going to work now,” Sara said again, slower. “You’ll be all right.” It wasn’t a question.
Mattie started to cry.
“No. Stop it.”
Mattie went back into the bathroom, still crying, and closed the door.
Sara went to work.
At this point—trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to concentrate on anything at all—Sara’s mind always walked away from her own body, which was walking to the bus that would take her to campus, walked back into the apartment, and lived Mattie’s last hours with her.
In the bathroom Mattie stood on the bathmat as she had been taught, because she was still dripping, and wept. She wept for her husband, and for her sister who was so mean, who made her so lonely. She looked in the mirror and saw her face all ugly with crying, and that made her cry harder. She turned away so as not to see herself and there was the empty rail. She hung her towel as she had been taught, and then she squeezed a dab of styling creme into her palm to tame the frizzies, as Sara had taught her. Mattie had the frizzies because she was curly. The creme smelled like coconut.
She hung the bathmat over the lip of the tub as Sara liked it and went to her room to dress. Clean underwear. Smell your bra, if it’s smelly put it in the hamper and Sara will wash it by hand when she has time. Wear a nude bra under a light-coloured blouse, then it won’t show. Wear a slip, then your underwear won’t show. Ladies wear skirts. Her mother had taught her that. Mattie had to cry again a little to think of her mother, who had loved her all her life and sang to her in her frail quavering voice, and didn’t mind when Mattie sang along. Mattie wore her blue skirt and a white blouse and leather shoes, not sneakers, because ladies didn’t wear sneakers. Mattie couldn’t remember whether that was her mother or Sara. She wore the soft white cardigan with the white blouse.
In the hallway, as she was locking the door with her key, she heard someone grumbling around the corner. It was old Mrs. Rutherford, whose son had married an Oriental. She always had a smile for Mattie, though, and told her she looked very fresh and pretty today.
They waited together for the elevator.
“Someone is erasing names from the sign-up sheet in the laundry room again,” Mrs. Rutherford said.
“Uh-oh,” Mattie said.
Mrs. Rutherford had some more to say about that while the lights above the door walked to the left, past all the numbers. Now they were on the ground.
“You’ll tell your sister,” Mrs. Rutherford said.
“Sara.” Mattie didn’t know what Mrs. Rutherford wanted her to tell Sara, but Sara would know.
Mrs. Rutherford thanked her, and began the slow business of finding her mailbox key in her pocket. Mattie said goodbye and walked outside.
At the bus stop she lined up behind five people. She was number six. Number five was an Oriental staring at his phone. Mattie smiled at him but he didn’t see. When the bus came, Mattie showed her pass and the driver nodded. She smiled at him.
The only free seats were the ones at the front, for the elderly and disabled. Mattie went to the back and stood with her legs far apart for balance, the way Sara had taught her. Sara had bought her a bag that hung diagonally across her body by a good strap so she would have both hands free to hold on. Their mother had not thought of that, but their mother had never ridden the bus. Sara had wanted her to choose the black one but Mattie had wanted the yellow. Inside the yellow cross-body bag was her blue beaded wallet and some tissues and the phone that was not for using like the Oriental used his, only for emergencies. It was a less complicated phone. Mattie pulled it out to look at sometimes, even though Sara had told her not to, because there might be a message. Mattie didn’t know what a message would look like, but one day there might be a word on the screen, that would be it: Message. One day.
Drop-in was busy, and today was lunch program. Her friends were happy to see her. Karen, one of the staff, wondered where Sara was and Mattie told her Sara had gone to work. Karen looked at Toby but Toby said Sara had already called him and he would explain later and it was fine.
&
nbsp; Mattie sat with her friends and made a bird feeder. When Karen and David called them for lunch, they went and had sandwiches and juice and her friends who had medications took their medications. After lunch was yoga stretches and then bingo.
“You’re thoughtful today,” Karen said to her while she waited for them to call the numbers. Karen was sitting at her table.
“I’m all right,” Mattie said.
Karen put her arm around Mattie’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze, a hug with one arm.
“Someone is erasing the names from the sign-up sheet in the laundry room again,” Mattie told her.
“That’s no good,” Karen said.
At four o’clock it was time to go home. Mattie had won a sticker book at bingo. The stickers were shiny foil Easter eggs and bunnies even though it was August because it was almost her birthday. She put it in her cross-body purse for later. Her purse had a zip, that was safe.
The bus home was very busy and it was hard to stand wide. When she stumbled, a man stood up and offered her his seat. She smiled at him. He was an Oriental. Sara had told her not to say “Oriental” because it was rude. She said it was their mother’s word and their mother had been old-fashioned about some things and people from Asia were not from another planet for god’s sake. What about David Park? Sara said, and Mattie remembered David Park. He was an Oriental too. He had been their friend.
The walk from the bus stop to home was hot and by the time Mattie got to the steps of their building she thought she might have a big glass of cold water once she got upstairs. That would be all right: a big glass of cold water.
But on the sidewalk in front of her building stood her Robert.
He was already talking and kept talking as he walked towards her, making her stumble back in surprise. He was talking very fast and she couldn’t understand and she wanted a hug but he was talking so fast, and finally she understood he wanted money. He was yelling, why was he yelling? He was pointing his finger at Mattie, jabbing his finger, talking so fast. He got up close to her but not to hug or kiss. He was yelling. She stepped back.
