by Annabel Lyon
The next time she saw Donna August she prepared herself for a storm, but her friend was preoccupied with a plagiarism saga involving one of her colleagues at the Law School and didn’t even ask about her coffee with Robert Dwyer. Sara realized that for all Donna’s imperious judgments about her life, she actually occupied relatively little space in the older woman’s mind. Sara said nothing about that meeting, or the next, or the next, and when Donna August finally got around to asking about “that coffee” with Robert Dwyer, Sara was able to say with a degree of honesty, “That was two months ago.”
“Did he ask for anything?” Donna asked.
“Money.”
Donna August nodded.
* * *
—
He did not, in fact, want money, or at least he never asked for it. She gave it to him of her own accord. She paid for things—meals and parking. He would protest, and then after a while he stopped. He let her pay at the gas station, and once just before parting ways they stopped in at the liquor store beneath the SkyTrain station and he put his two-four of beer right beside her Côtes du Rhône like they were a couple. That was the day they hugged goodbye, briefly. “Take care, Sara,” he said. It was what he always said.
Mattie was in that hug, right there in the middle of it, beaming. Her two best people were friends now.
* * *
—
She asked him how it had happened with Mattie.
“I’d been working around the neighbourhood for a year or so. I’d worked for a roofing company for a summer and we did a job down the street from your mother’s house. The homeowner saw I was a hard worker and asked if I could do a few more jobs for him, windows and gutters, yard work, like that. He recommended me to some neighbours, including your mother. I liked her well enough. She was fussy but she paid on time. She used to send Mattie out with coffee and sandwiches. She’d watch us from the front window. I’d tell Mattie sandwiches were my favourite food, or tease her about how pretty she was, and she’d laugh, and then your mother would call her back inside.”
Sara nodded. That sounded like her mother: casting Mattie out to the world and then reeling her back in.
“After your mother passed, Mattie was lonely. One night she just asked me to stay. I made her an omelette. I told her jokes and made her laugh. We watched some TV. I spent a lot of evenings with her when you weren’t around.”
“You saw an opportunity.”
“I saw a lonely girl with too much money and no one getting hurt. I had a dirty life and she was—her face would light up when she saw me. I started looking forward to that.”
They had had this same conversation before, or a version of it. But she hadn’t believed him then. “Marriage?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I was raised Catholic.”
Both eyebrows.
“No, I’m not religious. But she reminded me of being a child. Of being happy and curious and loving people. That was her default setting, loving people.”
“You figured that out, did you?”
“Don’t be nasty. You weren’t around.”
“I was around.”
“Not in the evening. Not at night.”
“Not at night,” Sara agreed.
“Nights get lonely. Don’t you get lonely, Sara?”
“Settle down,” Sara said, and he laughed.
* * *
—
Sometimes he asked the questions. “What was she like as a child?”
“Stubborn. Oh god, so stubborn. She drove us crazy. She used to refuse to tie her shoes, and my mother refused to help her so she would have to learn, and we spent hours with our shoes and coats on standing around in the front hall, waiting for her to try. Just to try.”
“Your mother sounds fierce.”
“She knew us too well. She knew our potential, and refused to let Mattie stop short of her potential.”
“You too.”
“Sure, me too. For me it wasn’t oppressive. I was good at school. It was easy for me. I liked to read, I liked to practice the piano.”
“Freak. What about your dad?”
“He died when I was ten. Mattie was seven. Heart attack.”
“Mattie didn’t really remember him. I asked her once and she started to cry. I felt bad.”
“Death made her cry. Like a reflex, almost. A learned behaviour, I suppose.” She trailed off, thinking about that. Who would she have learned it from? Her mother, as Robert had correctly diagnosed, was fierce. Sara had learned early to keep everything tucked in.
“Hey, Professor. Your dad?”
“He was a journalist. Economic policy, international trade agreements, that kind of thing. He used to travel a lot for the paper and he had a bachelor apartment in Victoria for when the Legislature was sitting. My mother sold it when he died.”
“A bachelor pad,” Robert said with relish.
“Settle down. He had a law degree from Dalhousie. He started out as a civil servant. Journalism was his second career.”
“What was he like?”
“We used to go to Victoria sometimes to visit him, when Mattie and I were little. The place had silverfish and the toilet was always filthy. All he had for furniture was a desk and a typewriter and a TV and a single bed. We had to camp on the floor.” Those had been fun times, actually. “He didn’t have a kitchen, just a sink and a hot plate. The washroom was down the hall. He shared it, with three other men, I think it was. We used to get deli sandwiches and he and my mother would drink beer from bottles.” It was the only time she ever saw her mother drink beer. “I figured that was what adult life was all about, a beer and a sandwich and working to deadline in your own little room. If you leaned out the window you could just see the fairy lights on the Legislature. I hoped that would be my life one day. I knew it wouldn’t be Mattie’s.”
“You still haven’t told me what he was like.”
“Gentle. Mild. Took his work seriously. Weeks would go by and we wouldn’t see him. I assumed that was the way for everyone’s dad. When he was home, he was like a visitor in the house.”
“Maybe he was a faggot,” Robert mused.
“Maybe,” Sara said calmly. “We’ll never know, now. What about your father?”
“What about him,” Robert said, not a question.
* * *
—
Eventually she got more out of him. By this time he was driving her home, and then he was coming up. Not to stay; never to stay. But to drink, and to talk, and to listen. He was the last person in the world who had known Mattie, really known her. Sara sat on the couch with her feet under her. He sat in the reading chair.
“I got my hair from my mother and her mother,” he said. “The old lady was born in Scotland, and she knew some words of Gaelic. I have an older sister from a different dad, then me, and then a couple younger brothers. I don’t know my brothers. My sister had an aneurysm last year but she’s doing okay. We have blood pressure in the family, all of us. Our grandmother raised us for a few years there while our mom went to work up north. She cooked in a logging camp, and when she got home she never wanted to cook. Then my mom married again and I moved out.”
“How old were you?” The rain on the window, the fire in the grate, the wine in the cup.
“Seventeen. I took the dog. I loved that dog. A little bully cross, a rescue. I got an apartment and a job at a gas station. I’d cook us both eggs in the morning and take him for walks in the evening and teach him to be nice around girls. Then my grandmother died. I guess that hit me pretty hard.”
Sara read his silence. “Is that when you started using drugs?”
“Well, before then.” Robert smiled that crooked half-smile. “But it got worse around then. The dog ran away around the same time.”
“I’m sorry. What was his name?”
“Booker.”
“Aw,” Sara said.
“Because when we first got him, every time he heard a male voice, he would book it. My voice hadn’t broken yet so I guess he thought I was a girl.”
They built intimacy like this, quietly—embers in the grate, dregs in the cup. After Robert left she would straighten up the apartment and get ready for bed. But she would leave the empty wine bottle on the coffee table until the next morning. Once he left his reading glasses behind. He had taken them out to look at some old photos she had found of Mattie and the family at the beach in Jurassic times, 1978 or so. She didn’t mind the wine bottle because she could wash it up and restore it to anonymity whenever she wanted. But the reading glasses were troubling. She found she didn’t even want to touch them, so they sat on the table staring at her for the whole week.
“There they are,” he said on his next visit, and put them in his pocket. Then she was alone in her apartment again.
* * *
—
After their childhoods, they spoke of their lovers. They each spoke with mature retrospection, and acknowledged each other’s evasiveness with only the occasional glance, the half-smile, the sidelong not-quite-look.
Sara spoke without bitterness of David Park, and made the story of the concert into a comedy.
Robert spoke of a woman who was paralyzed in a car accident. This was after Sara had his marriage to Mattie annulled. They had met through friends.
“Friends?”
At a club they both went to, he clarified. He had noticed her there before, but thought she was out of his league. Young, beautiful, confident. One night he asked her to dance, bought her a drink. They chatted. It turned out they had interests in common.
“Interests,” Sara repeated.
“Tastes,” Robert said. The relationship had developed quickly. She was a thrill-seeker, a risk-taker, like no one he’d ever met before. She was fearless, impetuous, white-hot. He couldn’t get enough of her.
“A change from Mattie, then,” Sara said.
“I didn’t love Mattie,” Robert said evenly. “I loved her, though. It got to a point where I couldn’t tell if she brought out the best or the worst in me. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. I did everything she asked. I did things with her I’ve never done with anyone else.”
“What kind of things?” Sara asked.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. She drove away from me one afternoon and the next thing I knew she was in a coma in the hospital. A car accident.”
“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“I didn’t go see her. I couldn’t. She’d been so alive, so fierce. I couldn’t go see her lying in a hospital bed. I never held her hand again, or kissed her, or told her I loved her. I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life.”
Held her hand. Sara felt a flicker of contempt. “Is that why you stayed with Mattie? When she hit her head?”
He nodded.
* * *
—
Of course it was all heading towards something, and the night finally came in late January, though none of it was as she had expected. She had gone to Mattie’s grave as usual but he hadn’t showed. She took the bus home and arrived at her apartment wet and cross. She took off her trench coat and the scarf he had once said was pretty. She rubbed her wet hair with a towel and heated up some leftovers for supper. She tried to read.
At a quarter to eight her intercom stuttered. She thought about ignoring it.
When she opened the door, his eyes were wild. She led him to the couch and poured him a brandy, then resumed her place in the reading chair, where she had already spent most of the evening. “What happened?”
His eyes roved her apartment. She saw that he was frightened and that fear made him reckless. He shot the brandy and asked for more. She left the bottle on the table so he could help himself. After a while he took a deep, shaky breath and said, “I saw something.”
Sara waited.
“Someone.” He barked a laugh. “A ghost.”
“Mattie?”
For a moment he looked as though he had no idea who she was talking about. Then he apologized for missing their date at the graveside.
“Who did you see?” Sara asked, but he shook his head. She watched him take another shot of brandy, and another. “Have you eaten?”
Then she was putting crackers on a plate and heating soup in the microwave. The soup was organic vegetable, the second of two cans she had bought months ago, on sale. She hadn’t liked the first one. But she was lucky to have anything at all for him in the cupboard. Usually she shopped day by day. She sliced an apple to go with the crackers and added the last of her salted chocolate, four squares no bigger than watch faces, individually wrapped in rose-gold foil. When she returned to the living room he had left the sofa and was standing at the window, staring out at the apartments across the street. She put the food on the table and went to stand beside him.
“You stood here once,” he said. “And I was down there, on the sidewalk. And we were talking on the phone. Do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“I was awful to you.” He pulled her into a hug and she let him. He held on until she felt the beginning of his erection against her leg. He kissed her hair as she pulled away.
“You should eat before it gets cold,” she said.
She remained at the window with her glass of wine while he ate the soup and the crackers and the apple and the chocolate. He ate everything and then she said she had a doctor’s appointment in the morning and she ought to get an early night.
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me any more?” she asked.
He hesitated. “It was nothing. Just the mind playing tricks, you know? I’m really sorry about today. My head was a mess.”
She saw him to the door, and then returned to the window to watch him walk down the street a little ways to his parked car. He turned to wave to her, even though she had turned off the living room lights and knew he couldn’t see her this time. She didn’t wave back.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Spring 2019
Fen, Saskia’s realtor, sold the family home for a million over asking. That was Vancouver for you. She took Saskia for bubbles to discuss next steps. That was what she called it: bubbles.
“Something small,” Saskia said. “And on a SkyTrain line. I don’t want a car.”
“Yaletown would be perfect for you,” Fen said, but Saskia didn’t want to pay a premium to be downtown. She told Fen the suburbs suited her fine. Burnaby, for instance. They arranged to meet in a few days to look at listings. Fen paid for the champagne and put on her black blazer and picked up her black leather valise and Saskia followed her ticking heels to the door. It was raining again. They shook hands, and Saskia stood back under the doorway awning, watching Fen get into her black BMW.
* * *
—
The condo Saskia chose was a studio in an anonymous tower built over a SkyTrain station. You could get to the platform without going outside. The station was on a direct line to downtown—a modest, intelligent, long-term investment. Marcel Bouchard would have approved. The station included a movie theatre and a Safeway and a few hole-in-the-wall places she got to know—the sushi place, the noodle place, the noodle soup place.
On the first night, she got to the building at around four o’clock to receive the keys. She had rented a minivan for her boxes, and spent an hour hauling them up from the loading zone in front of the building. She stacked them in the front hall, purposely not walking through the rest of the apartment, and went back downstairs to return the van to the rental place. She took transit back, stopping in for takeout on her way upstairs. She would get groceries tomorrow.
The door clicked closed behind her.
Slowly she stepped from the hall into the main room and savoured the empty newness of the place, the bamboo
floors, the stainless fridge, the twenty-third floor view of the Fraser River. Fen’s gift basket—more bubbles, cheese, fruit, chocolate, and an inexplicable stuffed teddy bear—sat on the floor next to the fridge. Saskia put the food in the fridge. She would toss the bear and basket tomorrow. She unrolled her tatami mat and sleeping bag. On the bathroom counter she put her mother’s and sister’s perfumes. Her father’s CDs went on the windowsill: Wagner overtures, the Elgar cello concerto, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a Schubert symphony, Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder.
Saskia found this music at once dark and luminous, revealing a passionate, melancholic side of her father one wouldn’t otherwise have suspected. Sara had laughed when she saw the little collection and called it “greatest hits,” which Saskia found condescending. The music was beautiful.
Knives and pots in the kitchen, Jenny’s clothes in the closet, laptop and iPhone dock on the floor. She had no way to play her father’s CDs, actually; they were only keepsakes. She opened her styrofoam tub of wonton soup and ate on the floor, listening to the overture to Tristan and Isolde on YouTube. The night sky was blue and the pinprick lights across the river were orange. The trains were another river, lulling in their regularity, and didn’t keep her awake.
* * *
—
The next day, Saskia started wearing Jenny’s clothes again. She had recently got her hair dyed dark and glossy and made sure to put on pink lipstick before she went out in the morning and red before she went out in the evening, to the movies mostly. Apart from the clothes, she kept living like a student. Her parents’ money sat cozy in its bank account, and she got by on the interest. She liked coming home to her spare little apartment and cooking her spare little meals and watching Netflix on her laptop, or in bed on her phone.
