Bone and Bread (24 page)

The next morning I stood on a St. Catherine Street corner, my heart racing as I dropped a quarter in the box and dialled the number I'd looked up at the library. There was still a listing for a P. Patel at his parents' address. But none for an R. Patel.

“Hello,” I said, when someone answered. I toed a yellow McDonald's hamburger wrapper with my sneaker and watched it catch in the breeze. “I'm hoping you can help me.” I found myself affecting an accent, something warmer and twangier than my real voice. “I'm trying to get in touch with Ravi. We went to high school together, and I'm in town for the weekend, hoping to get the whole gang together.” I paused, and in the silence, ran on: “This isn't by any chance still his parents' house, is it? It's the number I have from all those years ago.” Not the best story, but not the worst. If his parents really were afraid of me or of Quinn, they would have moved or taken themselves out of the book.

“Who's this, please?” This woman did not sound as hard as the one in my memory.

“It's Sarah. I don't know if you'd remember me.” I stared at the hard plastic casing of the payphone, the bright blue lettering of the company.
BELL.
“Sarah Bell.”

“Ah, I'm not sure, dear. Do you have a pen?”

“Yes, I do.” She dictated a Montreal number I could tell she knew by heart, and I took it down, double-tracing the digits with my pen.

“Thanks very much.” I felt almost buoyant as this fake Sarah, who I was suddenly sure had gone on to do a degree in oceanography or social work or human ecology. She might even have joined a sorority. Pleasantries would be second nature to her. “What is Ravi up to these days?”

“Oh, he keeps busy. Very busy. He might not have time to come to your little gathering, though I'm sure he'll do his best. He's always helping out with a campaign, you know, getting all the experience he can.” I heard a clinking sound, like a spoon in a teacup. “We still tell him he might just be prime minister one day.” She laughed a little, but the pride in her voice was unmistakable.

The allusion to Ravi's ambition gave me a funny feeling. “That's the way to do it then, I guess.” I could feel the fictitious Sarah ebbing away. “Thanks, Mrs. Patel. All the best now.”

I walked home with a new wariness of the strangers on the street. Lots of people came downtown. The whole city passed through at one point or another. Scanning the faces of everyone I passed, I felt a keen desire to get away — even as I knew that from then on I would be watching for him, for this one person I wanted so badly to be gone.

Later that week I went to a phone booth and dialled the number his mother had given me. I listened to his voice on the answering machine, discomfited that he was in the city but relieved that there had been no change — that I knew exactly where he was to be found. Unlike his mother's voice, I recognized Ravi's, yet it still surprised me. Its slow syllables and deep baritone.

I returned home to learn that our next-door neighbours on either side of the hallway had been broken into. It was an affordable building, but almost anyone had things that could be stolen. It was drug addicts looking to make some quick cash, or so we speculated with our agitated neighbours, who stood gesticulating in the drab hallway on a Friday evening. The door frames had been split around the latch with a hatchet. Our apartment had escaped unscathed. We examined our lock, which was the same as all the others. It did not even appear to have been tampered with.

“They ran out of time,” I said. Who could guess why the robbers hadn't conducted their business in an orderly fashion, one, two, three in a row?

“Maybe our luck has changed,” said Sadhana. She touched our doorknob as though the brass had some fortunate sheen. Our neighbours stepped around us to commiserate, and as we unlocked our own apartment, I felt a pang for the suddenness of their violation. But, between us, my sister and I had already squandered so much feeling; we could not think about them again once the door had swung shut.

Mostly what had been stolen were TVs, and we probably had the newest television of them all, small as it was. We felt guilty before we bought it, because of Mama, but afterwards we were surprised by how quickly the feeling went away. I patted the flat grey plastic of its top, its rounded back. “I guess the old girl will be sticking around a while longer.”

“Good,” said Quinn. He seemed to notice my glance turn to a stare. “What, Mommy?”

“Nothing.” I was seeing his full lips, the shape of them. It was too soon to say whose lips they resembled. But I was afraid of spotting reminders in him, as though likeness itself might be a bond forging before my eyes.

While I was boiling water for pasta, Sadhana said she was going out. I could see her yarn and needles poking out of her shoulder bag on the table.

“Knitting circle? What about supper?”

“There'll be food there. Really.” Sadhana buttoned up her coat. “I promise.”

I watched the pot and could feel the evening stretching out ahead, flat and dull as a toothless saw. “Why are you so into knitting now, anyway?”

“It's fun, making stuff. Going out. Having friends.” She smiled at me as she picked up her bag. “You should try it.”

That night after supper, once Quinn was asleep, I turned on the television and watched a program about missing children. The next day, while Quinn and Sadhana were at school, I turned it on again. It filled up the place wonderfully. I watched a game show and a cooking show. I watched a talk show with a family of brothers who had traded wives. I almost turned it off after that, but the news was coming on at noon and I waited to see the headlines, then the weather. I left it on while I made myself some lunch. Then there was a stretch where the only thing on was soap operas, so I turned it off while I went out to get groceries. When I came home and started cooking, another talk show was on. This time it was fathers who thought their teenaged daughters dressed too sexily.

The following day I turned it on again after I was alone, and every day after that for the rest of the week. It helped to keep from thinking about Ravi, doing whatever it was he did on the other side of the city. Sometimes I sat and watched, and sometimes I had it on in the background while I did other things. I had a bit of freelance work coming in, mostly editing high school textbooks, something a former professor had hooked me up with. Sadhana was in her last term before she, too, would graduate.

When Sadhana was home, I turned off the television and watched her instead. The incident in her second year of university had impressed upon me the need to remain vigilant, to hold on to my suspicion even in the face of all assurances. She wore her hair long, and it was darker and straighter than mine. That spring, she was wearing more eye makeup, two or three blended shades of shadow over her lids and brow bone, and clothes that left less to the imagination than the year before, though she still tended to cover her arms. She had expanded her focus, it seemed, from dance to drama, as well. She spent a few nights a week rehearsing for a play at the end of the semester, but she seemed happy and hungry, from what I could see.

But whatever I could see, there was only that. It was just one sense, one kind of knowing, and it left a good deal out. Maybe even most things. It made me anxious.

I watched Quinn, too. He was a happy kid. He spent time reading or drawing comics, and he had plenty of friends at school, though we tried, given the smallness of our apartment, to avoid having any of them over. In spite of his glasses, Quinn seemed less than other children to suffer from the bumps and scrapes that were the usual result of little kids putting themselves into the world. Sadhana claimed he had inherited her own coordination and agility. At the park, she cheered him across the jungle gym, as I stood ready to run in with soothing kisses that were rarely required.

He grew. He was growing all the time, though it was almost impossible to see. The constant rounding and lengthening of his face that I'd noticed when he was a baby, as he went in and out of growth spurts, was a process that had not stopped, only slowed down. Though I hadn't traced it happening, he'd been growing taller and stronger, increment by increment. He must have been, in order to have become the little boy who was my son, who ran and caught balls and would hurry over to pet strange dogs in the park. Who was six and then seven and then eight.

It was this realization about Quinn that made me wonder whether all the watching of my sister was not making it harder for me to see her, after all — as any shift, minutely observed, becomes imperceptible. You needed fresh eyes to see clearly. And mine were as worn out as our foggy old kaleidoscope, with that split piece of glass I could hear sliding back and forth inside.

Sometimes I watched Sadhana scouring the Dutch oven or peeling carrots with a knife, and I was not at all convinced that the anger she'd harboured when we were teenagers had gone away. She had a sharpness to her, not only her quick way of thinking and the straight angles of her body, but an edge to her opinions that meant you were more likely than not to find yourself cut down or sliced open or otherwise dismissed. She had the kind of mind that could take pleasure in its own severity. She was the very best companion for a movie you were already inclined to hate. Because it was so rarely bestowed, her favour was sought and valued by those who knew how discriminating she could be. And her forgiveness, whether of me or of herself, seemed to come at a premium.

I sat at the kitchen table over the prop of a day-old newspaper, pretending not to watch Sadhana as she scrounged around for lunch between class and rehearsal. Our apartment was just around the corner from campus. She was eating an apple, and it was a twenty-minute affair. She had woken up late that morning and had left the apartment without eating breakfast. And now, as always, I was watching her.

“Don't you have an appointment at Quinn's school?” she said. She was rotating the core of apple as she gnawed it down in a showy kind of consumption. But only an amateur would be taken in by an apple.

“The parent-teacher meetings don't start for another hour and a half.”

She took a sandwich bag of cut-up celery out of the fridge and ate that, her manner seeming to veer between teasing and annoyance as I held fast at the table. Then she took a single piece of bread and made a toasted peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich. One tablespoon of natural peanut butter and one of raspberry jam. She poured a glass of milk and gulped it down.

She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running but no sound of the toilet flushing. When she came out, she heated up some leftover lentil soup.

“Is this fun for you?” she asked. She was half laughing, but her eyes flashed as she got up to rinse her bowl and toss her crusts into the garbage.

“That seemed like a good lunch.”

“Yeah, well, you'd better leave soon if you don't want to be late.” She sat down to lace her sneakers and I knew she would be stopping by the gym.

“I will.” I waited until she had rolled her eyes at me and closed the door behind her before I got up from the table. There was a gnawing in my stomach, but I could no longer tell if it was hunger or worry. I double-checked the kitchen garbage and the one in the bathroom, but there were just the usual coffee grinds and wadded-up tissues. I returned to the kitchen, where I washed the dishes and swept the floor.

My own lunch I prepared with weariness, and I ate it without pleasure.

She came home late. I woke up to the sound of a coat rack falling over. It was three in the morning. I slipped out from under the covers to go check on Quinn, who was fast asleep in the moonlight behind his Spider-Man–patterned curtain. Sadhana was moving through the apartment in the dark. I heard keys tossed on the table, followed by the drop and clatter of one shoe, then the other. She closed herself in the bathroom, and I heard retching. I followed her in. The bathroom did not have a lock because I had removed it. She was sprawled on the bathmat.

“It's not what you think,” she said. Her forehead was on her wrist, which was resting on the edge of the toilet bowl. “I had too much to drink. Me and my knitting ladies.”

“You were out with your knitting circle?” I hadn't pictured her famous knitters as partiers.

“They're amazing, you know.” She half raised her head. “They're really, totally radical. We've got some amazing plans.” Dropping her head, she murmured, “You wouldn't believe.”

“You can't do this,” I said. The toilet was full of vomit and I flushed it.

“I'm twenty-three. I'm supposed to go out and have fun.”

“Not like this you're not.” It might start out with too much tequila, but it would turn into her old calculations. How much her body could bear to lose, which was always less than she was willing to part with. And then it would be every night.

“I'm telling you it's not the same thing.” Her head ducked over the bowl as she shuddered with another bout of retching. Nothing came up except for water and bile.