Bone and Bread (34 page)

“They must have done their beaver warning sign,” I say. “Tail-slapping Morse code.”

“The
-
humans-are-coming, the-humans-are-coming,” says Quinn.

“We could wait,” says Evan. “We could keep perfectly still.”

Quinn kicks some pebbles into the pond with the tip of his sneaker, and they arc and splash. “Nah,” he says. “They can stay under for ages.” He hurries back to the path, leaving us again with the sight of his orange T-shirt and the flapped back pockets of his long khaki shorts growing smaller in the distance.

I sigh and we fall in step behind him, but this time it only takes a few minutes before Quinn is pulling so far ahead that we are in danger of losing sight of him.

Evan says, “Let him go. We'll catch up to him at the end of the trail.”

I slow down. There is a fresher smell along this part of the path as we move up and away from the water. I breathe deep.

“I didn't know you wanted to be a detective.”

“A lot of police work is like a carousel. Picking people up, booking them. Then they're back on the street.”

“You want more,” I say.

“I always want more.”

When we come out at the end, where the path meets the parking lot, Quinn is nowhere in sight.

“Where is he?” I say. “What on earth?” I walk to the other side of the lot and look over at where it joins the road. There are lots of cars but no people.

“Quinn!”

Nothing. Then Evan is next to me, one hand cupped over his eyes to cut the glare from the setting sun as he scans in all directions. He checks the truck, but the flatbed is empty, as we left it.

“There's nowhere else to go,” I say. “What is he doing?” I turn back to where we came out of the woods. “Maybe he had to find a bathroom or step off the trail for a minute.”

“What's his cellphone number?”

“He doesn't have it with him.” I saw it on the bathroom counter, of all places, as we were getting ready to leave. I almost mentioned it until it occurred to me that he might use it to avoid talking to us.

“Where's yours?”

I pat the blue fanny pack clipped around my waist.

“Is it charged?”

“Yes.” I pull it out to be sure.

“Stay here.” He is already moving away from me, holding up a hand when he sees my expression. “No, you have to. One of us has to stay. I'm faster. Just sit tight. I'll call when I find him.” Evan flashes his cellphone at me after checking its battery level and hurries back down the path.

I sit on one of the cement blocks marking the parking spots, arms around my knees, waiting as the sky grows darker. I keep my eyes on the ground after too many false starts of spotting pairs of hikers emerging from the woods only to see them move towards their respective cars and drive away. One of the hikers, a woman, only notices me when she is about two feet away, and her hand travels to her chest as she gives a soft cry.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I'm waiting for someone.”

“Sorry, I didn't see you there!” She calls this out loudly enough that the man who is with her looks over as he unlocks the car. He grips the top of the open door and peers at me over the roof of the silver Jetta.

“I'm sorry,” I say again. “Just waiting for my son. Have a good night.”

They wave goodbye as their car pulls away, and as the sound of the motor fades, the breeze picks up. The treetops flag to the west, leaves brushing leaves in a swishing sound that unsettles my stomach, as though the parking lot is all at once at sea.

Years ago, Quinn got lost in a department store, where Sadhana had dragged us to buy some mixing bowls. Caught up in a debate about the respective merits of a nesting set of spouted cream bowls and a moulded set in baby blue, neither of us noticed Quinn, bored out of his mind, edging away to the bath department and its patterned forest of hanging shower curtains, and from there to housewares, to electronics, and finally onto an escalator going down, in a quest to find the toys. When at last we found him, he was looking for help and just beginning to whimper. Sadhana was angry at me for not watching him, and I was a sobbing wreck. Then Sadhana said to forget it, because it came out all right in the end, so what was the point. She was wonderful at forgiving me, as long as it wasn't on her own behalf.

They are so very much themselves when they come into view, tall and broad-shouldered and, in Quinn's case, lanky to the point of awkwardness, that it makes every eagerness at a stranger's sighting seem ridiculous. They're walking side by side, but seemingly without conversation. If there is a new kind of truce between them, neither seems very excited about it.

“Where the hell were you?” They both slow down when they catch sight of me, so that I'm the one hurrying across the lot to meet them.

“I'm sorry. I got distracted picking up garbage,” says Quinn, swinging into view a plastic bag stuffed full of litter. He still looks draped in shadows in spite of stepping out under the parking lights. After a moment I realize it isn't darkness but dirt clinging to his clothes from top to bottom.

“Since when are you an eco-warrior?”

“Since the glaciers started receding.”

I squeeze his arm above the elbow. “Good answer.” I give him a hard look to make sure I can see repentance or the trace of a reasonable facsimile. His mouth is drawn in tight as a knotted thread.

We head back to Evan's truck, and I make Quinn sit between us, a passive warning of my annoyance, a hint that he will not be getting off so easily. But I shift over to make room for him to stretch his legs under my side of the dash.

“Where was he?” I ask Evan.

“I'm sitting right here,” says Quinn. “I was just off the path, maybe ten minutes back. Maybe a little farther.” Evan nods.

“Radio?” Evan asks then, reaching for the knob. I shake my head.

There are leaves stuck to the bottom on my shoe, yellowing oak leaves, halfway to mulch. I kick my heels together, then start scraping my boot against the side of the truck door until I hear Evan say, “Don't. I just cleaned in here.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I didn't think.”

Quinn says, “I scraped mine off before I got in.” He sounds almost eager, or maybe it's a touch of that old instinct he had with Sadhana, turning himself into the monkey in the middle. The distraction from a fight.

“Thanks,” says Evan. He turns on the radio, to a loud nineties rock station, letting the bellow-voiced singer rule out the need for any further conversation.

Libby calls early in the morning, before I'm out of bed. The cordless receiver remains on the pillow where I left it after hanging up with Evan, once I had finished uttering reassurances that Quinn, no matter his reluctance, would eventually come around. I projected more certainty than I felt. I could hardly even vouch for Quinn's goodwill on my own account.

Libby's voice resounds in my ear as I kick the comforter off my feet. I move the receiver another inch away from my eardrum. “I visited the Essaids yesterday,” she says. “They said to say hello.”

“Hello back.”

“They're feeling a little down. Quebec First took a hit in the polls after the debate, but not as much as we'd hoped. And Ravi might actually win his riding.”

“That's terrible,” I say, sitting up. I don't know which is more awful, the repugnance of their political ideologies or the mere prospect of Ravi's career ambitions fulfilled. I wonder if he will seem triumphant when we meet at Bombay Palace. Public approval must be a powerful confidence booster.

“It really is. I'm afraid some people think they're the new hope. Maybe we'll go visit the Essaids this weekend? You are coming back, aren't you?”

“I am.” Despite Quinn's best efforts and my more haphazard ones, there are still heaps and shambles at my sister's place. Boxes everywhere and the uncategorizable items still lying around in piles. All the things she touched that are impossible to jettison. I get up and go to the window to pull back the curtains, and for once it is overcast. “I guess I'm only half finished. Maybe two-thirds.” There are puddles in the road from an overnight rain.

“It can't be easy,” says Libby, growing quiet, “dealing with her things.”

It is nothing she hasn't said before, but for some reason, hearing the tenderness in her voice, I am seized with an animus of blame — an opportunity to reapportion my own guilt. “You say you and Sadhana were together.”

“Yes.” Into the growing silence, Libby asks, “You don't believe me?”

“I do believe you. But . . . why weren't you worried when Sadhana didn't answer her phone for days on end?”

There is a quick intake of breath and then a pause. “Look,” says Libby. “Sadie was a very independent woman. Sometimes I wondered if she needed me at all. So I tried to be the same way.”

I long to see her face as she says this, but she sounds every bit sincere. “Okay,” I say. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't worry,” says Libby. “And I'll help you. With the apartment. I promise.”

In the kitchen, Quinn is hunched over a bowl of cereal. “You don't need to hide,” he says when he sees me emerge from my bedroom and replace the phone on its charging base.

“I'm not.”

“Oh, I thought you were talking to him.”

Quinn's philosophy of not hiding has been in effect exactly twelve hours. After a tense drop-off from a gruff Evan, Quinn apologized for his behaviour before calling a friend from the phone in the kitchen. Speaking loud enough for me to overhear, he issued an invitation for dinner at our place the following night.

“Are you cooking?” I asked, when he hung up.

“Ha ha.”

Before going in to shower, he left his laptop sitting on the kitchen counter, open to a website for someone named Caroline Henderson. There was a little bio and five or six short films that could be clicked on and watched. Based on the picture in the left-hand corner of the screen, it was the girl with the glasses from the hardware store. Our dinner guest, I surmised.

Now as I finish my cup of coffee, I caution Quinn as I prepare to head out to the grocery store. “If I make supper for you and your friend, it means you have to be nice to me tonight.”

His response is more complacent than I would have guessed.

“I know.”

Quinn's friend turns out to be less serious than her black-and-white website photo suggests. She shows up in a checkered skirt with red suspenders, carrying a pecan pie.

“Thanks for having me over,” she says, handing me the dessert in its aluminum plate. “It's not homemade or anything. Did you know that people smile at you if you carry a pie on the bus?”

“No, I didn't know that.”

“I think I'm going to start carrying one around indefinitely.”

Behind me, Quinn thunders down from his bedroom to intervene. “Mom, this is Caro.”

We shake hands over the pie.

“Caroline. But everyone calls me Caro.”

We sit around the table and Quinn and Caro pass each other the salad while I serve portions of vegetarian lasagna from a glass casserole clutched in an oven mitt. Quinn has fiddled with the lights, turning down the dimmer, and there is a quiet CD playing on the stereo. Leonard Cohen. I'm tempted to make a comment on these unusual efforts, but I hold back. The music is a nice touch.

“I'm a vegetarian,” says Caro. “I think it's so great that that's how Quinn was raised. My parents are still hoping I'll come around.”

“I can't really take the credit,” I say. “It was how I was raised, too. I'm not a vegetarian anymore, though. I just don't like cooking meat.”

“My mother's a bit of a hypocrite,” says Quinn.

“Quinn.”

“Kidding.”

“This is really great, Mrs. Singh.”

“Not Mrs.,” I say. “Beena is fine.”

“Quinn says you're from Montreal. You both are.”

“That's right.”

“My grandmother lives in Montreal. I spend a lot of weekends there.”

“You two should meet up the next time we're all there.”

“Actually, we already have. Quinn's been helping me with one of my movies.” She shoots him a quick glance. “In between his studying.”

The scramble of looks passing between us in pairs is like the breeze on a windmill, spinning us and stirring up something new from the current. Apology and panic between Caro and Quinn. Guilt in my direction. I ignore it.

“What's the movie about?” I ask.

Caro pauses a moment. “Mostly just about my grandmother. I record her talking about her life. Then I kind of take the camera on a walk around the neighbourhood for local colour.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“I hope so. I'm trying hard to learn a lot.” She is very earnest, extremely self-possessed for a seventeen-year-old. “I really want to make serious political documentaries. Poverty, immigration, environmental devastation. The works.”

She takes another mouthful of the lasagna and chews quickly. “And I'd love to learn how to make this, too, if you'll show me some time. I need to figure out how to cook before I graduate from high school.”

Over dessert, Quinn and Caro start talking about film, and the fluidity of their discourse feels like a window into Quinn's adulthood. I can see my sister strong in him, her tastes and opinions. She had taken pains with his artistic apprenticeship, in a way that sometimes seemed vain, but watching Caro incline her head and laugh and touch his elbow to interrupt makes me wonder if this was the kind of outcome Sadhana had imagined.

Any weekend with Sadhana meant a minimum of two movies, always handpicked to conform to her diagnosis of Quinn's burgeoning aesthetics and to further his cinematic education. As a formality, I might be consulted, but I was not the intended audience. One visit it was
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
,
His Girl Friday
, and
Strangers on a Train
. Another weekend it was
The Last Picture Show
and
Written on the Wind
. They were great films, and they knit a thread between the three of us, a second history of narratives and images. It was easier for us to hold on to other people's stories.

One time she showed up on our doorstep with a VCR under her arm, plugs trailing down to her boots. “They only had
All That Jazz
on tape.” She waved the plastic case under my nose.

I worried she was trying to make Quinn into some rarefied thing, that she would be disappointed if his gifts didn't tend that way — as hers did, to art. I wanted us to leave the world open for him. It was only a matter of time before a rebellion, and Sadhana wouldn't be the one standing in its way. But by then Quinn was almost fifteen and still nothing but a good kid, somehow unencumbered. He had his dumb jokes and his own music that he played too loud every night in his room, until I bought him a pair of headphones, but he was present and not at all closed off. He crawled back behind the television and hooked up the VCR, genial and easy, and I wondered if there was anything of me in him, if it was the kind of thing I was too close to trace. Then I saw him bounce back to the couch with the remote controls, breathless, waiting for my sister to open the proceedings, energized by her presence, and I knew we were exactly the same.

I get up from my seat on the pretext of making tea and leave them to talk that has been skimming past me since I brought the pie to the table. Caro says something and Quinn's laugh comes out throaty, commanding attention. Sadhana's laugh. I put the kettle on to boil, wondering as usual whether I should have changed the water or whether boiled water always comes clean. While it begins to bubble, Quinn and Caro start talking themselves into a movie at the theatre downtown, and I do what I can to encourage them. I give Quinn twenty dollars, and he takes it from me with hesitation, wary of a bribe for goodwill extending beyond tonight's truce.

“Take it. Don't worry. Have fun.” I want the place to myself for when Evan finishes his shift. Quinn shoots me a grin as they head off to the bus stop, and my gratitude is so unreasonable it's a relief to hide myself behind the door as I swing it shut.

When he arrives, Evan pauses in the doorway as though listening for something.

“I told you, he's not here. Don't be nervous.”

“I'm not.” Evan sounds disgruntled, but his expression changes to one of interest as he comes in the house. It's the first time I've invited him over to somewhere other than the back porch.

“I'm sorry about all that yesterday,” I say. I pour us some whiskies and bring them over to the couch.

“No problem.” Evan is studying some of the framed photos on the wall, but he sits down when I hand him his glass. His gaze lingers over one of me, Sadhana, and Quinn, taken by Terence at one of her dinner parties last summer. I am reminded by our outfits that there had been a lengthy and spirited debate about Terence's sweater and whether or not an ironic fashion choice could be considered legitimately chic. Sadhana and Terence had pounded the table until my wine began to leap from its glass and assault the tablecloth. The argument had petered out only after Sadhana called Terence a “bingo grandmother” and, falling into a fit of giggles, had to push back from the table, clutching at her left side below her ribs, where she was starting to get a stitch.

I change the subject to something I've been wanting to ask. “Do you think the stress of a fight could kill someone? Give them a heart attack?”

“Like a physical fight?”

“No, a disagreement.”

Evan takes a small sip of his drink and a moment to consider. “Maybe? I guess it has to do with blood pressure. Maybe in the heat of the moment it could be too much for someone.”

“That's just it,” I say. “People don't die of a heart attack for no reason. They get angry or they're shovelling snow or playing football or something.” As I say this, I realize I am giving voice to something I have been thinking for a long time. “Even people with weak hearts.”

“What are you trying to get at, exactly?”

“I'm saying something happened to my sister.” Evan's point about the heat of the moment helps me discard my own role in the theory, so even as I say this aloud I feel the possibility of absolution. Our fight, however it may have broken Quinn's heart, did not break Sadhana's. The hope almost makes me want to cry.

Evan puts down his glass. He reaches out and clasps my arms below the elbows with a light touch. “What about all the startling things that happen every day?” He is offering alternatives as though my guilty conscience is still hanging in the balance. “An alarm clock going off or an ambulance driving by with its siren. A mouse running across the floor.”

“I wonder.” I imagine an argument with Libby, or maybe with a downstairs neighbour. I remember there was a woman who once made a noise complaint after a party. Our fight may have been old news by the time of Sadhana's death, but what else could have happened in her life in the meantime?

“It could have been anything, Beena,” says Evan, as if I'd spoken aloud. “She could have carried too many groceries up the stairs. If her heart was really that bad, it could have given out. They call it a ticker, don't they? Sometimes they run down.”

“That's what her doctor implied.”

“And she was sick for how long with her eating disorder?”