by Annabel Lyon
—
They went for Lebanese at Cambie and Hastings, across the street from the cenotaph where the drug dealers watched and waited. They argued that time.
* * *
—
The phone rang again. “I’m sorry,” Saskia said, and Sara said, “I’m sorry.”
* * *
—
They went back to Sara’s apartment. They agreed about some things, disagreed about others. At times each blamed the other’s intransigence on the other’s age. So old! So young! So green! So grey! So hard! So soft!
Actually, they were both hard: angry and unforgiving. Actually, they were both soft, tender with pain and childlike with incomprehension.
* * *
—
“Do you ever wonder about consent?” Sara would ask, and Saskia would repeat the things she’d read about safe words and the psychology of the submissive. “But in the car, that text,” Sara would say, and Saskia would shrug. What must Jenny have been thinking in that moment?
* * *
—
“Do you think Mattie was happy with him?” Saskia asked. Sara looked at the bar; nodded at the bar.
* * *
—
They met for the last time at a pub on Granville Street during happy hour. The place was packed, and they had trouble hearing each other. Not that there was much left to talk about by that point.
Saskia left first. Sara watched her go. She was brittle. A man bumped her and she turned and swore in his face, startling him out of the apologetic grin he had put on. So brittle. Bit by bit she would chip off, shards sharp enough to cut, until there was just a blade of her left in the body’s sheath.
Sara left first. Saskia watched her go. She was frail. Her mind would give out, and her liver. That was guilt. It was the difference between them. Guilt would be the death of Sara, but not of Saskia. There she goes, Saskia thought, in her lovely coat, that cashmere-and-guilt blend so few can afford. That lovely perfume she trails, lilies and guilt. At the door Sara turned and looked back at Saskia, as though she had just remembered something she meant to say, and touched her heart. Saskia almost smiled.
They never spoke again.
PART THREE
CHAPTER ELEVEN
December 2018
In winter the ocean turned the colour of iron and the sky went pale when it wasn’t raining. Rain smudged the world charcoal. Sara spoke with her doctor and her dean and they agreed to a medical leave. She sat in her reading chair, wrapped in a blanket, sipping her wine and watching the greyscale of sea and sky visible from her living room windows. Every day, she balanced the entire weight of her body on a single toe, en pointe, and held it. That was what it felt like. Her psychiatrist said this was delayed grief. Dr. Kumar was a gentle Buddhist who really, really wanted her to quit drinking again and get more exercise.
The phone rang again. She ignored it again.
Hours later, the phone issued the particular stutter of the intercom. Someone was at the front door. This, too, had happened several times. But the next morning, when she went out for coffee and chocolate and oranges and bread—her supplies—she found a note stuck under her nameplate. She tore its little corner, easing it out. He told her later he’d stood across the street for a long time that night, watching the light in her window, seeing it go out. He’d stood for a long time after that, waiting. After all, she was the one who had reached out to him.
* * *
—
Her friend Donna August could not understand any of it. They stood in Hermès, arguing.
“Petrichor.” That was the word Sara had been trying to remember. The saleswoman beamed. Rain on stone—petrichor! Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!
“He doesn’t deserve your time, even for a coffee,” Donna August said. That was one of the things Sara had always intermittently liked about her: she said things straight, even unspeakable things like this one, which was clearly about class. “You’re sick and you’re not thinking straight.”
“You said I wasn’t sick.” That had been the week before, when Sara was trying to explain the nature of her leave and Donna, in her stern and authoritative way, was denying the existence of clinical depression. “Petrichor and jasmine.” Sara nodded at the saleswoman, who began to wrap the small orange box with a chocolate brown ribbon. Oranges and chocolate. “It’s just coffee.” Donna snorted.
Her friend instructed the saleswoman to find her a proper musk, nothing fruity. She excused herself and they watched her walk to the back of the shop. “You’re vulnerable and he’ll take advantage of you. Again. I don’t know why you can’t see it.”
Sara felt herself tire. It came over her like a tide these days. “Maybe he’s changed.”
“Idiot,” Donna hissed. They watched the saleswoman emerge from a discreet door in the back wall and come back to them with a handful of samples. She wore a black sheath and, round her neck and tucked into her belt, an indigo scarf of some impossible fabric, fairy wings, probably. Ten pounds of fairies to make a single scarf, harvested at dawn by peasant women in kerchiefs as the dew began to steam and the field fairies were just drifting up out of the grip of gravity. The women used nets. Once pinioned, the little bodies were tossed into sacks for soup. It was a whole way of life.
“Addiction is a sickness,” Donna said. Conversationally. Sara understood this to mean their conversation, their argument, was to continue in front of the saleswoman. The help, Donna would have called her, with and without irony.
“It is.” The saleswoman sprayed a touche and gave it to Donna, who gave it to Sara after she had sniffed. Donna accepted a second touche but held onto it as she finished her thought. “Have that coffee, and see if he doesn’t want something. No, I don’t like any of these. What do you want with him, anyway?”
They left the shop, Sara with her little orange bag. Christmas was coming and Robson Street, when they turned onto it, was crowded.
“It’s part of the process,” Sara said. “Putting the past to rest.”
Donna rolled her eyes.
* * *
—
They met at a coffee shop on Hastings Street in Burnaby, near where he was living now. He’d suggested the place on the note he’d left under her nameplate. He had drifted for a while, but now he was back in town, working again and trying to keep clean.
“I have a friend who says you’re going to take advantage of me.” It had taken Sara an hour on transit to get here from downtown. “Are you?”
“That’s cold.”
Sara shrugged.
* * *
—
His hand, when she shook it, had been dry and calloused, catching in Sara’s memory on the one other time she’d shaken his hand, the day she learned he had married her mentally handicapped sister. (There were other terms that had since gained currency, but Sara was a child of the seventies and “mentally handicapped” was what she had grown up with, what stuck.) David Park’s hands had been soft, manicured. Surgeon’s hands. The hands of her on-and-off lover. Off, now. Never mind.
Robert Dwyer wore a blue check flannel shirt that suited his dry, off-ginger colouring and his pale blue eyes. He wore jeans and leather shoes, and she saw a black leather jacket over the back of a chair at the table he led her to. Early; he had beaten her. She wondered if that gave him a subtle advantage. Donna would have said this was out of character for a former drug addict, former grifter, former inmate, and would have said it was a sign that he was putting on an act for her. But Sara thought she knew a little more about his character than Donna. He had not, during his brief marriage to her sister, done anything other than try to make her happy. Yes, he had moved into their mother’s grand old Kerrisdale mansion with her, slept with her, and spent her money. But he was clean and tidy, cooked good meals, made home repairs, and disappeared without fuss the day Sara came over with a court order. Arguably it was t
he drugs that had dictated his return to their lives, but even through that fog he had done his best. When Mattie smashed her head he had known the police would come, but he hadn’t run. He had held her. She hadn’t died alone.
“Sara.” His voice, too, was appealingly dry and husky, years of cigarettes, probably.
“Robert.”
Coffee for her, green tea for him. He insisted on paying. Wrong, Sara thought at Donna August. You’re wrong about him.
“How are you?” he asked.
She said nothing, studying him. More lines on the face, more grey in the ginger. But she had not grown any younger herself.
“Plans for Christmas?”
He was mocking her now. Mocking her silence with conversation as though they were some kind of friends.
“I have a friend who says I shouldn’t have reached out to you. She says you’re going to use this opportunity to take advantage of me. Are you?”
“That’s cold.”
Sara shrugged, then shivered.
“You’re cold,” he said. “You need a warmer coat.”
“I’m going shopping later.” She had promised herself a treat for getting through this.
His lips quirked, and she saw he knew it was true. He knew her, in his way. It was odd. “Mattie always said you liked to shop.”
Her name between them, a coin on the table. Who would pick it up?
“What can I do for you, Sara?” Robert said.
Sara took a deep breath and exhaled. “I want to visit her grave,” she said. “With you.”
He sat back, studying her.
“I’m not a Christian,” she said. “I don’t believe Mattie’s watching us. I don’t believe any of that. But I miss her and I thought you might miss her too.”
He shook his head. “You don’t care about that.”
“You don’t know me.”
“No, I don’t know you.” His face, in that moment, was unreadable. If he was looking for an advantage, Sara reasoned with the voice of Donna August, he’d put on a show. Furrow his brow. Wipe his eyes.
Maybe, Donna August replied.
“Come with me,” she said.
“Why?”
She paused. Hesitated. “I don’t know.”
He put his head to one side and studied her. He nodded once.
Damn it, said the ghost of Donna August. Sara tried to smile and started to cry.
* * *
—
They stood at Mattie’s graveside. Her mother had purchased the plot years before. They stood before Sara and Mattie’s father’s headstone (Peter James Landow, 1932–1981, Beloved Father and Husband), and their mother’s (Iris Theresa Lee Landow, 1935–2011, Beloved Wife and Mother), and Mattie’s. Martha Ellen Landow, 1977–2016 above an etching of a wild rose.
Robert had brought carnations, from Safeway probably, but at least they were pink. Sara had stopped bringing flowers. He had left, or not seen, the price tag on the edge of the cellophane cone: $4.99. Sara was wealthy enough that she rarely bought anything in shops with prices ending in $.99.
“What will yours say?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“The Practical One,” Robert suggested.
“The Bitch,” Sara offered. Not a word she ever used, for all the feminist reasons, but she suspected it had currency in Robert’s idiolect.
“No.” Robert touched her shoulder, making her look at him. “I understood. Even at the time, I understood.”
He had been quick and sardonic when she first met him. There was something about him now that was slower. That was a change.
They left the cemetery and found another coffee shop. They didn’t speak much, but the silence seemed comfortable.
That’s how these things start, Sara imagined Donna August saying.
What things?
Donna nodded towards Robert Dwyer, who was studying Sara. He smiled when she caught him, a shy smile. He even coloured a little.
“What?” Sara asked.
“I was trying to see Mattie in you.”
Sara nodded. Then she shook her head, looking for the words. “I’m an alcoholic.”
He laughed, and after a moment she did too. “You’re intense, is what you are. And honest. You don’t look much like Mattie, but she was honest too.”
“She didn’t know how to lie.”
“You do, though.”
Sara nodded. “You?”
He shrugged, of course.
“You look like you’ve been taking care of yourself since you got out of prison.”
He leaned back. “Is that what you want, Sara? You want to hear about prison?”
She got up and went to the counter and bought two toasted everything bagels to go with their coffee. He ate quickly. She was still picking at her first half when he pushed the plate away. “What do you do for work?” she asked.
“Drywall.”
She searched for something to say about that. “Where?” she asked finally.
“All over.”
“At the moment, I mean.”
“Surrey. Did she ever ask about me?”
“No.”
“You didn’t even have to think about that.”
“She didn’t. She thought about what was in front of her. You can’t take it personally.”
“No, I can’t take anything personally. I know that. I thought I made her happy, that’s all.”
“It’s like making a dog happy. I’m not sure how much it means by the next day.” She touched her temple. “That’s an awful thing to say. You must think I’m an awful person.”
“I like dogs. I always had dogs when I was a kid.”
“Not since then?”
“Not since Mattie.”
He was shaming her, or daring her. “Please don’t.”
He half-turned to get into the coat he had slung over the back of his chair. But then: “I’ll show you where I work, if you like.”
“In Surrey?”
“It’s not so far. Just the one bridge.”
“But on transit,” Sara said.
It turned out he had come by car, a ten-year-old silver Versa he kept neat and clean.
“I’m not kidnapping you, Sara,” he said, as she hesitated with one foot on the lip of the passenger well and one on the sidewalk. “It’s just something to do. Have to kill the rest of this day, right?”
It was true. She never knew what to do with herself on grave days, after.
He was a good driver, waving other cars ahead of him and keeping to the speed limit. His work site was a row of half-finished townhouses near a strip mall. It was drizzling, so they parked next to a chainlink fence hung with site safety rules. Beyond the first row of houses was a mud pit. “That’s phase two. It’s already sold out. Guess what they’re worth?”
She shook her head.
“Vancouver is the third most expensive city in the world after Tokyo, Japan, and London, England. These shitholes go for half a million. Half a million for a one-bedroom shithole in the suburbs. You want a burger?”
Sara wasn’t sure if things were happening very fast or very slowly. It was genuinely hard to tell.
* * *
—
They made a date for the following weekend and bid goodbye on the sidewalk. He drove off, east, while she went to wait for the SkyTrain, west, back into town. She got off on Granville Street by the Holt Renfrew entrance and found that the ghost of Donna August had been replaced by the ghost of Robert Dwyer. He said nothing but noticed everything, details Sara herself had missed on multiple visits: the Plexiglas sensors at the doors, the padlocked chains looped through the most expensive clothes, the security guards. She showed him a pretty scarf, irises on a watermark of skulls, and told him about the suicide of Alexander McQueen. His rough fing
ers snagged the silk, or maybe it was her rough thoughts of him.
* * *
—
Sara did not miss her sister, exactly, but there was no one in the world who had been closer to Mattie than Sara, except their mother. Mattie had been work, hard work, and had occupied Sara’s mind the way a child would, constantly tugging at her, wanting her attention. Where was she, what was she doing, had she eaten, what had she eaten, was she clean, was she safe, was she bored, was she busy, was she happy? All of this had been Sara’s responsibility, and while Mattie was alive Sara had felt resentment. Resentment had transmuted—predictably enough, following Mattie’s death—to guilt. But miss her?
In her mind, Sara packed a bag for Paris. She could have gone, could have left the next day. She had time, she had money. In many ways, it was all she wanted. But she feared that some tiny moment would derail her and leave her weeping in some airport departures lounge or Métro car or boulevard—some tiny moment would ruin everything. She had moments of clarity that struck like lightning, or cracking ice. Hairline fractures that revealed the abyss.
And so she packed, again and again, in her mind. The brown boots, suede skirt, grey turtleneck, wool coat, and McQueen scarf for the plane. In her bag the jeans, black cashmere pullover, black dress. Boots with everything. She would buy the rest. Arrived with nothing; left with a modest number of outrageously expensive clothes. There was her epitaph.
* * *
—
“I’m an alcoholic,” Sara had said. She knew he had once attended NA meetings and had given him an opening, but he hadn’t taken it. He assumed intimacy without offering intimacy. An uncluttered approach, anyway.
Sara had a glass of wine while he ate a burger and fries in a sports pub. In the Dairy Queen next door she had coffee while he had ice cream. By the time he dropped her off it was dark. As he pulled up to a red light, she got out almost before the car had stopped, to spare them both the awkwardness of parting. They had already arranged to meet at Mattie’s grave again the following weekend, but a bit later in the day.
