by Paige Cooper
“It has paint cans in it. Old paint cans.”
“You went over there?”
“I’ve been to all the yards. T’es pas fâchée?”
I ask, “Why did you go over there?”
“I like secrets,” she whispers, her eyes sparkling.
“Do you want me to tell you one?” I ask. Claire nods soberly. “My mother thought I was ugly.”
“She did?” Claire asks. But in saying it, in calling her my mother, naming her formally in relation to myself, rather than Maman, the air is suddenly dense with the ghost-grey weight of her. Under the flood lights, the long shadows on the slats of the porch change quickly with the breeze.
“It wasn’t something she said. It was this look she had.” When I put my arm around Claire her shoulders collapse against my ribs. I can feel her breath in my own body. I remember the way Maman got thinner and thinner while her veins and the walls of her heart grew thicker and thicker until you could almost see it beating in her chest. Since she died, visions of her enfeebled body occasionally startle me, as if I’ve really seen her out of the corner of my eye. It hurts me that she’s stuck in my mind in that condition. If she were still here she’d tell me to give my pain to the Lord. That he can do more with pain than with happiness. Maybe she was right. Or maybe she hoarded her sorrows until she was swollen with them. It wasn’t her fault. There was nowhere for her to put them. Claire sticks her thumb in her mouth, regressing in a moment of stress, and I gently take it out. Normally, if I oppose her on even the smallest thing she will insist. But she simply pretends it didn’t happen. With Claire’s weight on me, but her eyes cast at the sky or closed, I can’t tell, I can say the kind of thing that I can’t under her gaze.
“Don’t keep any secrets that make you feel angry or scared. Tell me, or tell daddy, we’ll keep them for you,” I say. Claire rights her posture and turns her face to me.
“Even if I broke the law?” Claire asks, her face is gentle like mine, pretty in an unextraordinary way, with a gaze that’s sometimes too firm, like mine, to suit her soft features. Maybe, Maman didn’t think I was ugly. Maybe it was only the terror of recognition. “Even if I stole something? Even if I hurt someone on accident, or on purpose?” She whispers, cowed by the thought but following it in the guileless way a musician follows a chord progression to its resolution.
I laugh with all the buoyancy of the cognac I’ve drunk, but stop when I feel Claire’s gaze flick over me with worry. “You’re not going to hurt someone on purpose. But tell me, tu me le dis, if you do.”
If You Start Breathing
Thea Lim
It’s the day after Chuck’s funeral, the first day that there’s nothing to do with him, or for him. Louise’s left arm and left leg are on the floor and the rest of her body is embedded in Ben. Ben has been camping out in his parents’ living room since Chuck, his dad, got sick, sleeping on a leather couch with undetachable cushions the colour of bricks. When Louise stays over, there is only enough space if they get into strict cuddle formation and don’t move all night.
She extracts herself bone by bone, replacing her shape with bedding so that he doesn’t topple to the floor. There is a red imprint on her right thigh where the flesh got pushed the wrong way and then just had to deal with it. By the icy light coming through the curtains, she checks her old, decrepit cell phone, its screen attached by strips of duct tape that leave sticky scum on her fingers. Ben and his family are still in that period when it’s socially acceptable to miss work and ignore the phone. Louise gets some slack by proximity, but she’s only a new girlfriend and her phone brims with work emails and missed calls from her mother, with whom she has been having a polite argument all week. Louise’s mother wanted Louise to come home this weekend. Chuck’s funeral is on Saturday, Louise told her. Come home on Sunday, her mother texted. I can’t just up and leave, Louise replied, that would be hurtful. Why do you care about these people you just met you don’t even know them, her mother said. To win the argument Louise wrote, Of course I’ll be there why wouldn’t I be.
Louise works in fundraising at Princess Margaret Hospital, where they hold memorial services in the lobby for people who died upstairs. In November, Louise was watching the bereaved light each other’s candles, tipping the white tapers away from the dark of their coats, when she noticed Ben watching too. He was tall and baby-faced and wearing a pink sweater. As she turned to leave, he whispered, “Do you come here often? I sure hope not.” His dad was in Palliative, on the eleventh floor.
There was something very comforting about Ben, in the way he was neither worried Louise might reject his advances, nor that his dad might soon die. The next week as he undid her buttons in the greying light of Saturday afternoon, he said, “I know we don’t know each other, but we should get married. I’ll never have a better meet-cute with anyone else.” She has only seen him mourn once, after they removed his father’s body from the ward. He knelt on the floor, laid his forehead on the cold metal of the empty bedframe, and wept.
Last night Louise and Ben watched episode after episode of Futurama in silence, and she monitored him carefully for signs of the need to talk, but he stayed quiet. Quiet, even when the whites of his eyes gleamed during an ad for car insurance for retirees, though no tears came. Eventually he fell asleep and when she was sure he was far enough under that the door wouldn’t wake him, she gathered her things and tiptoed to the back door. But when she turned on the light she found his sister Sammy at the kitchen table, trying to shield her crying from the violence of the overhead brightness.
“Jesus Christ, what are you doing?” Sammy said. Louise squeaked apologies all the way across the linoleum, but her winter boots had elaborate laces that took a long time to do up, so she turned off the light and sat there lacing in the dark. Sammy kept sighing, too irritated to cry.
Sammy is an Olympian, a triathlete with an aerodynamic body and a gaze that seems equally efficient, with little focus to spare for Louise. Louise is twenty-eight and even though she wishes she were not the kind of woman who thought like this, Ben seems like something of a final chance. He is gentle, a rare commodity. So his sister’s disdain makes Louise uneasy. It was out of pure nervousness that Louise said, “Sammy, we haven’t talked much, but I wanted to tell you, that if you ever want to talk to someone, I understand what you’re feeling.”
“Oh yeah,” Sammy said, and though Louise couldn’t see her face, she could feel Sammy’s cheek scrunching with scorn.
“My sister died. I’ve lost someone too.”
“Oh yeah,” Sammy said, with different intonation now.
“Yes, it was hard.”
Sammy patted the flat of the tabletop with her hand. Streetlight came in through the skylight. Sammy said, “Ben said that you didn’t have any siblings.”
Horror seeped through Louise.
When they met, Ben asked, as people always regrettably do, if Louise had brothers or sisters, and she had said no. This wasn’t a lie; she’d had a sister, but she didn’t have one. She wasn’t trying to be coy; death is a faux pas. When do you tell someone your sister is dead? Certainly not on a first date. You could try on the second, but what if his father is dying? You can’t say you have lost someone till you have it-gets-better advice.
Louise was trying to say “Ben must have forgotten” or “I told him not to tell anyone” when Sammy said, “Why would Ben lie about you having a sister?”
“He didn’t lie.” She said this too loud for a house full of sleeping people. “I just haven’t told Ben yet. There hasn’t been time.”
“Right.”
“I mean I will tell him,” Louise found herself saying, “I was planning to tell him tomorrow.” This was true. Louise was always planning to tell Ben tomorrow. Now she would stay the night, she would tell him tomorrow.
Tomorrow was the fourth anniversary of Joanne’s death.
“This is uncomfortable,”
Sammy said.
*
It is just after 8 a.m. Exactly four years ago, Louise’s mother called to say Joanne was dead. Louise was in the kitchen with her roommate. She remembers fixing her eyes upon a tomato stain on a chair leg as her mother told her, Joanne was drinking and she must have taken some pills and it was an accident, all in her answering machine voice. Louise remembers how the white of the tomato had dried in a pattern like the spokes of a wheel, and how she’d hung on to the childish thought that tomatoes were wheels, a reference point to keep her steady as the world began to tip.
When it had been Louise’s turn to tell her roommate what had happened, it had come out in the same formal voice. It had been only later that she could have an unscripted reaction, up on the roof as the sun set at 4:30, where it’d been just her and all the crooked little houses of the neighbourhood. Sharing her pain with other people meant that her pain belonged to her less, Joanne belonged to her less. Louise never got better at the etiquette of loss. If anything she got more ungracious and stingy with her feelings. Lovers left her.
*
Ben’s mother is reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. Joy seems to like Louise. She has already told Louise that it was fortuitous—with stress on each separate syllable—that Ben met Louise at such a difficult time in his life.
“Tea? There’s a muffin. Biscuit?” Joy says.
“I’ll just have something quick. I should be on my way.”
“Stay a while. No rush!”
Joy is already neatly dressed, though her clothes bear the impact of the back of a drawer. Her regular rotation clothes are dirty and no one has done laundry.
Early on Louise tried to do the housework, a way to legitimize her presence. She longed to remain in this bubble of the doing of death, the only space where you were absolved from feeling. But Winston, Sammy’s husband, told her to stop. Stop fussing, he said kindly.
Louise’s anxiety dims. They make cheerful small talk about Joy’s medical practice. Louise stirs her coffee.
“These are nice,” Louise says, straightening the placemats on the table, printed with dancing peppers.
Joy sags. “There’s just so much,” she says.
“Pardon?” Louise missed something.
“You always say sorry to family when a patient dies. But I had no idea how much work death involves. Chuck left so many belongings behind.”
The kitchen door bangs open. Ben comes in, Sammy and Winston behind him.
“Morning,” Joy cries, her heartache put away as fast as it came out.
Winston arranges cookies on a plate and talks in a Yoda voice. Everyone is weirdly jolly, the way people are when severely sleep deprived, or when every possible thing has gone wrong and there’s nothing left to worry about.
Then Sammy says, “There’s no more cream.” She puts both hands around the spent carton that cants weakly on the counter. She gazes down into its spout. “Who finished this?” She turns to them, sharp-shouldered.
Louise covers her mug so Sammy doesn’t see the honeyed tones of her own coffee, coloured by the cream. Winston rummages in the fridge, mostly mysterious Styrofoam and fogged-up Tupperware.
“There’s some skim in the back there,” Louise whispers to him.
“Yuck.” Sammy scowls. She looks in Ben’s mug. She says something in Cantonese. Ben responds in Cantonese and soon all of them are laughing, even Winston, who is Filipino.
Louise can’t understand. She is inadequately Chinese, her parents only ever succeeded in teaching her the words for ‘rice’, ‘thank you’, and ‘crazy’; if Sammy is telling them about Joanne, Louise has no defences.
She sneaks out. She goes into Ben’s makeshift bedroom. His shirts hang from the folding shoji screen, his comic books lean on the tchotchke cabinet. She lies on the couch and listens to the voices on the other side of the wall crest, then avalanche into laughter. Her cell phone is buzzing but she lacks the strength to get it out of her pocket.
Decorations from the funeral spool across the floor: a banner, white ribbons, huge framed photos of Chuck: Chuck on a bike hike, Chuck in Barcelona, Chuck meeting Jackie Chan. Louise has the distinction of being the last person Chuck ever met. He was almost gone, he looked nothing like the photos. “Hello Louise,” he said, “be brave.” He could barely speak, and she had worried about what he saw in her that propelled this message; the energy he was willing to expend to deliver it. Now she thinks it was a meaningless thing to say, as if he was just carrying out some kind of death bed protocol.
The kitchen door squeaks open and shut, and if the footsteps in the hallway are Ben’s, Louise will tell him now, of course she will, this is ludicrous.
“Hi,” he says. He moves her legs and sits down beside her. “None of us can stand to be in this house today. We’re going to the park. Can we give you a ride somewhere?” He lifts her hair and smooths it down her back, and she loves the feeling of his hand there.
Louise doesn’t know how to begin the sentence about Joanne. She can’t think of a good opening word.
She says, “Do you want me to come with you to the park?”
“If you want.” There’s a pause. “You don’t have somewhere else to be?”
Is this concern for her time, or for his? She doesn’t know him well enough to tell.
“I’ll come if you want me to,” she says.
“It’s up to you.”
*
Sammy is angry. There isn’t enough room in the station wagon for all five of them, plus Joy’s debris, and Winston has to sit in the hatch. Sammy takes Winston’s arm, holding his elbow as if his limb is a delicate thing she must protect.
Louise saw Sammy do the same thing with Chuck, fingers outstretched to catch her father’s arm every time it slipped from the bed, as he drifted in and out of consciousness. It was a tiny gesture that held such boundless love, that Louise felt embarrassed for having witnessed it. Seeing it resurface, over something so insignificant, irritates her.
It’s a Sunday in February, and everything has been petrified by the cold. Branches and rooftops have turned pale, and the sidewalks feel harder, as if the cement molecules are shrinking together for warmth. Toronto winters are rarely sunny, but when the sun comes out it seems to be overcompensating for the gloom. On the crest above Grenadier Pond, the sunlight slams into and off the ice, and they can barely see. Groups of people cluster on the vast, snow-covered surface of the pond, amused by the novelty of walking on water. The five of them wend their way down the long trail. Little dogs in hooded jackets scurry past.
Ben’s family pulls ahead of them and Louise says to Ben, “Are you all right?’
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Her phone rings. She ignores it.
“Should you get that?”
“It’s just my mother.”
They have reached the edge of the pond. Sammy and Winston have taken Joy onto the ice and they are marching arm-in-arm across it. Louise puts her arm though Ben’s to slow him down.
“Can we talk? Over here.” She does not want anyone but him to see her face. She heads for a thicket of dead shrubbery. Ben steps off the path with her, straight into a puddle of slush.
“Oh. Shit.” His face screws up in disgust.
“I didn’t put that puddle there. It’s not my fault.”
“No one’s blaming you.”
He mumbles curses and her phone buzzes audibly.
“You should get that. It sounds like your mother is having an emergency.”
He tugs at a branch, looking for a tool to scrape his boot. His tugging turns violent. It looks like the whole shrub is going to come up at the roots.
“Careful. The bush,” she says. He tries to hide it but clear as day, his eyeballs roll. She should have chosen his feelings over the shrub’s.
She could wait to tell him about Joanne, next week or next
month. But the worst is yet to come for him. The funeral is the easy part. In the photos from Joanne’s funeral, people were laughing so hard you could see the roofs of their mouths. It’s the afterwards that’s impossible, the bereavement version of the first day back to work in January. And Sammy will tattle first.
“I have something to tell you,” she says.
But they speak simultaneously. “If you have other places to be today, you should go. We could use some family time. Sorry. What did you say?”
It was different when she was willing to volunteer the information. Now she is on the spot and her anger comes in, sudden and hot.
“I’ve been getting the feeling I’m not wanted. Especially when your mom and sister insist on speaking Cantonese when they know I can’t understand.” She feels unhinged. Why is she saying these things?
He is quiet for a terrible moment. Then he says, “It’s rude for my mother and sister to speak their language the day after we buried my dad?”
He doesn’t break eye contact. He wants an answer, but there is none.
“I’m sorry. I should go. I should call my mother. I’ll come and say goodbye when I get things sorted out.” She is panicky and she talks too fast; it sounds as if she is saying sorry for leaving, not for causing so many problems when she meant to help.
He jams his hands in his pockets. “Sure. Sounds good.” He walks away. He steps down and rocks his weight into his heels and sails across the ice.
Louise’s hands are shaking but she focuses on the new texts from her mother that say, I am making macaroni soup for you and If you catch the 1:43 train dad can pick you up.
Louise still has Joanne’s number in this phone. Every time she has to call someone whose name begins with a ‘J’, the number’s there. She can’t bring herself to delete it, or get rid of the phone. She has tried to be careless, hoping the phone will fall in a toilet or get lost at the mall on its own. But instead stupendous advances in mobile technology have passed her by.
