Bone and Bread (38 page)

“I thought she was mad at me. I was mad at her.” I have both hands on my face, to the sides of my cheeks and temples. Blinders.

“You had a fight,” he says. “That's normal.”

“Is it? She was dead for a week, and I didn't know.”

Later he says he wants me to show him Montreal, my Montreal. He doesn't realize how tiny it is. There is a lack to my life: it has been small and concentric. I had ascribed this in part to my son and my sister, but when I try to imagine my life without them, it is an invention that feels feeble, like the flap of an atrophied muscle. It is not clear what will be left for me once they have both passed out of my care. But I say nothing about this to Evan.

I take him to a dépanneur, where we buy a bottle of white wine from the fridge and take it to a tiny Thai restaurant down the street. We steer clear of the subject of Quinn and his father, Sadhana and her long illness. The waiter brings us an ice bucket, which he places right on the tablecloth.

I mention the Essaid family and their struggle to stay in Canada. Their evasion of Bassam's removal order, the police raid on the church, their flight to a mystery location under the protection of my sister's friends. The tribunal scheduled to revisit Bassam's appeal. I leave Ravi out of the story.

“What's going to happen to them?” says Evan.

“I don't know. They hope his appeal will be granted. I'm not sure there's much point in claiming sanctuary in another church. I might go to the demonstration.”

“You could get arrested.” He looks strained, almost embarrassed. “Oh, Beena.”

“Don't worry.” I am alternately touched and irked by his concern. “Not all protests involve burning cop cars.”

Evan puts his elbows up on the table and leans his chin against his linked knuckles. “Well, I hope things work out for them, then.”

“I do, too.”

Then Evan talks about the time his family thought they were going to lose their farm. His parents were in debt to a neighbour. They'd bought his land just before a spell of drought sank them into the red for nearly five years.

“And I know why they call it ‘in the red,'” says Evan. “My brother David got a stress rash on his chest,” he says, touching to each side of his collarbones, “from here to here. The two of us would get up early, even before my dad, and try to start the chores. We were dead set on saving us all from having to move to the city.” Evan waves his hand towards the traffic speeding by outside. “That was our worst fear. We thought everyone in the city was homeless. Or that if we went, we would be. We thought we'd be begging in the street. It isn't intuitive, what you do if you lose a farm.”

“Your family would have figured something out. Your parents would have.”

“I know that now. But we were just terrified. Then David got cuts all up and down his arm trying to hook up the combine by himself. We'd gotten ourselves up at four in the morning thinking we could help out our dad by starting even before he did.”

Hearing him talk, I wonder how much of me is in love with this part of him that he's trying to leave behind. The farm boy just as modest as he is hard-working. The part of him that knows his virtues, the ego or pride that might measure itself against other men and rank itself higher, is buried so deep I've rarely seen its traces. Only one night, out on my porch, he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder and whispered, “I bet I'm the strongest man you've ever known, aren't I?”

I feel flushed just sitting across from him. Then I notice the restaurant is so warm that condensation from the metal ice bucket is dripping to form a wet spot seeping steadily towards our plates. Before we finish eating, one whole side of the clean white tablecloth has leached into a soggy grey.

“I have to tell you something,” I say. “I saw Quinn's father.”

While I explain about Quebec First and the connection to the Essaids and Ravi's meetings with Sadhana, Evan leans back. When I tell him about Bombay Palace and how I threatened Ravi, he starts to push back his chair.

“You've been hiding this.”

“I'm sorry. But I'm telling you now.”

“I'm a police officer, Beena, and you're telling me about extortion.” With his right hand, he tugs at his hair by the roots. “You know the kind of background check they put me through?” He grabs the arms of his chair, and his wide eyes are frustrated and a gorgeous blue. “I'm not supposed to be in a relationship with someone who breaks the law.”

“It's not extortion,” I say, swallowing. I can feel the encroaching water reach my wrist on the table, but I keep still. “It has nothing to do with money.”

“It doesn't have to,” says Evan. “It's about coercion. Jesus, Bee.”

“Well, I'm sorry. I didn't realize it was illegal.” The truth is I hadn't bothered to think about it. But I feel horrible. “I wish I hadn't put you in this position.”

Even seems mollified by my apology, if skeptical. He crosses his arms. “So are you going to call him to straighten things out?”

“No,” I say, too fast. Evan looks unimpressed. I add, “I want to see how he reacts. I mean, the damage is already done now, isn't it?”

Evan heaves a sigh, as though defending the rule of law is his responsibility to bear alone. “Fuck,” he says. “I guess so. Let's just go.”

On our walk to the Metro, Evan is surprised by the housing in the neighbourhood, the blocks and blocks of triplexes. Families packed three-deep in rows of walk-ups.

“A lot more room where I'm from,” he says, forging a truce by breaking the silence. “There's a whole field between the road and the houses. Fields in every direction.”

“And I bet you knew more of your neighbours.”

“Every one.”

“Maybe too much closeness keeps people apart.”

“Like in New York City.”

“Self-preservation.”

“I wonder.”

An hour later, at the coffee shop where I warned my son I was going to meet him, I stand outside looking in the window. Quinn and Caro are sitting in the corner, and Quinn is telling a story, it looks like, with his feet planted, hands wide and waving, his whole bright face matching his body in animation. Caro is laughing, arms hugging her chest. Her straight brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail, revealing red earrings shaped like telephone receivers hanging from her earlobes.

I rap on the window and wait for the moment when Quinn sees me and his face falls. There. After a moment, he and Caro come out to meet me.

“Good time?” I ask.

“Not bad,” says Caro. This is a kind of teasing for my son, I can tell. She dons a bicycle helmet and bids us goodnight as she unlocks her bike from a pole. “See you tomorrow, Quinn.”

“Bye,” says Quinn. We watch her pedal off in the direction of her grandmother's house. I notice it is not the direction in which I saw Quinn taking the bus the other day.

Quinn is more forthcoming than he was in the morning, when he heard Evan was coming to town. “Caro speaks three languages, you know. English, French, and Spanish.”

“That's amazing.”

“She's working on a zillion projects at once, too. The thing with her grandmother. And another thing, about political refugees.”

“Oh?” I am not sure whether there is a hidden prompt here to ask about the Essaid family, if that is indeed the story Caro is following. If Quinn is trying to get me to say something, to see if I know anything about his father, he is hiding it well.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that's terrific,” I say. “She seems very engaged with what she wants to do.”

The air is so warm that even our slow stroll is making me perspire. The aromas of different menus cling to all the restaurants we pass.

“So where's your boyfriend tonight?”

I hope he still is my boyfriend. We parted at the Metro without further conversation, Evan turning away from my kiss. “Don't ask unless you really want to know,” I tell Quinn.

“I'm not opposed to knowing.”

“At a hotel.”

“Good.”

As we walk home under a sky too overcast for stars, our secrets start to weigh on me while we wind our way along the path through the park. I slow down when we get to the picnic table near the trees, where the other night men called out to me in the dark.

“Are we stopping?”

“I have to talk to you.”

He waits, expectant, not looking at me. With his sneaker he traces a soft, grinding circle into the sand and gravel of the path.

“Did Sadhana tell you she was looking for your father? After that time she came to visit?”

“No.” There is anguish there. “We didn't talk after she left. I meant to call her. I don't know why I didn't.”

So there is to be no late-breaking forgiveness for me, after all. Only the same guilt I've been carrying all along, but for the two of us, and nothing to offer him instead.

“It's not your fault,” I say. “You know that, right? It was just a fight. We'd had them before.”

Not his fault, but mine. He would probably describe that as something he already knows. He walks a few paces away and lifts up one end of the picnic table, experimentally, before dropping it again to the ground.

“So she went looking for him anyway?” His face betrays nothing about whether he has been doing the same. I suppose I can only assume that he has.

“She found him,” I say. “And met with him. And I met with him, too. I wanted to talk about Sadhana.”

The anger I'm expecting doesn't rise up to greet me. Maybe it will come later. It is possible I only think I am a part of this thing between them, or that I am a conduit but not a gear in the machine. A couple with a dog passes close by, high on conversation but falling silent as they come near. We stand facing the mountain. Around the tall neon cross at its summit is an emanating glow, a halo caused by the heat of the light.

Quinn shifts his weight, hands in his pockets. “Did he ask about me?”

The lie is out of my mouth before I catch myself. Quinn's relationship with his father, I am almost prepared to concede, is his own business. I might want to stand out of the way, but I am under no obligation to clear the path.

“No, he didn't, Quinn. Not once.”

As planned, Libby comes to meet me at Sadhana's apartment for the final cleaning. At the top of the stairs she cries out. Her hand feels for my arm and she hides her face in the crinkled cotton of my sleeve.

“This is hard, isn't it,” she says. And then, “I want it to be hard.”

“Are you okay?”

She answers by stepping past me in sure strides to the kitchen. “Let's get down to it.”

Libby moves through the apartment with a natural efficiency. She takes charge of half of the supplies and more than two-thirds of the territory, bending and reaching to pockets of dirt beyond my imagining, wielding herself against baseboards and light fixtures. She fills a bucket with suds and starts splashing around the string mop after I have used the broom to not much more effect than a prop in a dreamy Cinderella impression. After forty-five minutes, Libby's hands are already a bright, scrubbed red. I clean the bathroom, as penance, with a large pair of rubber gloves.

“I feel like I've taken advantage of you,” I say. “You're a miracle worker in here.” I feel unworthy of all the help pressed on me the past few days.

“Nonsense.”

When Libby progresses to the feather duster, her intensity abates and I sense the possibility for conversation. My failure to locate Sadhana's diary leaves Libby as my last chance. My only hope of finding out what was going on with my sister. At any rate, I have nothing left to lose.

“Did Sadhana ever talk to you about me and Quinn?”

“Of course. Not your business, but the fact of you. I know how close you were. And she was so proud of Quinn.”

“She was, yeah.”

“You'll be leaving soon, won't you, now that this is done?” Libby straightens up, and in the full sunlight through the window, now stripped of its curtains, I can see faint lines around her eyes when she smiles. She wears no makeup and no jewellery. “I'm going to be sorry to see you go.”

“I'm leaving the day after the demonstration.”

We work in silence for a while. By way of the sun and the lemon scent of the cleaning spray, everything seems fresh and golden. When I close my eyes, all I see is yellow. When I open them, I see the light gleaming along the length of the refinished pine floors of which my sister had been so proud.

“Those last few weeks,” I say. “I don't know if you know, but we weren't talking.”

Libby puts down the duster and looks at me.

“I guess I just want to know if she was happy. Or if she was sick.”

Libby stands where the kitchen table used to be and looks as if she is about to say something. Then she steps to the window sill and peers out, placing both hands, palms down, on the lacquered wooden surface.

“I think,” she says, ducking her head back in, “we should make sure to sweep the front stairs as well as the balcony.” She exits to the balcony, as though literally sidestepping my queries.

“Libby,” I call out, loud enough for her to hear. “Please.”

She comes back in, looking chastened, and empties the dustpan into the garbage. Tracing her gaze to the floor, I realize that it is her reluctance to talk about herself that strikes me as familiar. Her deflections. She is maybe a little bit like me. Or at least like the way Sadhana said I was.

“I'm trying,” says Libby, leaning the broom against the counter. She pulls one of the leftover chairs away from the wall and places it some distance away, nearer the door. As she bends to sit, I see her for one moment without the verve that seemed to be at the root of getting in touch with me. Her hair swings back over her shoulders like straw, and she looks as white and dry and worn as a piece of shell on a beach. Seated, she finally turns to me again. “Okay,” she says. “You know we loved each other.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“You still don't believe me.”

“Why not? We had a lot of secrets from each other.”

“Well, she had secrets from me, too.” Libby brings up her legs and clutches her knees with her hands. “I couldn't stand it.” She closes her eyes, head just barely shaking back and forth. “You know, I had an extra key to her apartment ever since she locked herself out one weekend.”

“All right,” I say. I don't want to risk interrupting her with questions. I lean back against the fridge as unobtrusively as I can.

She says, as if this explains things: “I saw Sadie having dinner with Ravi Patel one night.” There is a bitter edge to her voice that I recognize. Jealousy.

“I saw them having dinner,” she says again, swallowing. “And I asked her about it and she lied. Then I saw another date with him written down in her planner. Everything between us was so confusing. And I worried that she was sick, too, maybe. She was so thin.” She shakes her head. “I had no idea, really.”

I say nothing. The refrigerator is warm against my back. It feels so hot in the apartment that I look to the windows, but they have all already been flung open.

“She didn't like it when I got insecure,” says Libby, looking miserable, “so I didn't want to bring it up. I even tried to call you once or twice, last fall, to ask — well, I don't know what exactly. To see what you knew about him. Before all this. I don't know what I was thinking. But her diary was going to tell me what was going on.” She draws a shaky breath. “I've been trying to find a way to tell you. This whole time.”

“What?” My knees quake as though they've already taken on the burden of what's to come. “Wait,” I say. I pull a second chair out from the wall and sit down opposite her.

Sadhana, Libby says, had tickets to a play downtown. “She invited me first, to this thing called
Juniper Berries,
and I said no. I already had a plan to let myself into her apartment to take a peek at her diary. She told me she was going to ask her friend Rachelle.”

I picture the scene as she describes it. Libby in a panic, mistaking Ravi for a rival. Libby in her black exercise clothes. And Mouse could be left alone at home for the length of an average jog. “I never go for that long,” says Libby, as though this is the failure requiring expiation. “And she knows what to do in case of trouble.”

Libby coming up the front stairs, silent in her running shoes. Unlocking the second door and leaving it standing open. On the kitchen table, a loaf of bread, and beside it, a bottle of perfume and a notebook. The diary.

“Hold on,” I say.

“It was too dark to really read anything,” says Libby. “The lights were mostly off, I think.”

Bending her head over the notebook, Libby opened it to the last few pages. Then, picking up the perfume, she sniffed it and dabbed some on. Her shirt was sticking to her lower back as she peered at the diary in the semi-­darkness, and a trickle of sweat soaked into the waistband of her underwear. It was too warm inside the apartment for all her thermal winter sportswear. It was too warm and humid altogether, Libby realized. Something was wrong. Sadhana always turned the heat down before she left the apartment to save money.

“She was still home,” says Libby. “In the shower.”

The pair of tickets, Libby found out later, had been given away to some friends of Sadhana's, a married couple. “She told them she was too tired to go,” says Libby. “Can you believe that?”

“No,” I say. “I don't understand any of this.”

Behind her, Libby says, there was a gasp and a thump.

“And that was all.”

Her face starting to twist and blotch, Libby tilts her head to one side. I watch her and feel cold. The coldness gives me a strong, lonely feeling.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“She was here, in the apartment, Beena. I scared her to death.”

Why I suddenly think of Sadhana flying across the stage in a red leotard, arms stretched aloft in fifth position, I can't say. When she did a grand jeté, it was as though she inhabited every plane at once. The world, as it so often did, seemed to bend to the sheer will made manifest in her body.

“Why didn't you help her?”

Libby's lips tremble. “Why didn't she know it was me? It was dark, but still . . . she should have known.” Her voice, for once, is tiny. “It was only me.”

“But why didn't you call an ambulance?” I can feel my own tears coming. “Why didn't you tell someone?”

“She was dead, Beena,” says Libby. “Her eyes were open. She dropped dead. It isn't just an expression.” With a terrible, choking sob, she rises from her chair and approaches mine, crumpling at my feet. Her fingers clutch at my sleeve as she weeps apologies I can barely comprehend. She looks terrified.

I close my eyes and think of CPR or the paddles that can zap a person back to life, as if dying might be a kind of running out of batteries, something that can be reversed if the current is just turned back on quickly enough. Then I feel the coldness again, and once I grab hold of it, it seems like the one strong thing floating in the dark sea of Libby's confession.

I push her hands off me. “Do you know how long she was left here?” My sister, disintegrating on her own floor.

“I know it took a couple of days,” says Libby, pressing her eyes closed.

“A week. It was a week.” In a week, a body begins to bloat. And smell. It was the downstairs neighbour who called the landlord in the end. I loathe the pettiness of knowing how Sadhana would have hated that.

Libby moans and rubs her nose with the heel of her hand, then wipes her palm on her jeans. “I thought someone would find her.” Her voice is hiccupy. “I knew it was too late, so I grabbed everything I'd touched and ran. I would have to explain, and there was just no way to do it.” Threads of gold light up in her hair as she moves her head. The sun-soaked kitchen feels like a different place entirely from the scene of fear and death she's describing. “But someone would find her. She had so many friends.” Libby's voice is pleading, and she gulps air like it might be running out. “She had you, Beena.”

“The diary,” I say, ignoring this. “What happened to it?”

“It's gone.” Her knee twitches and squeaks as it rubs against the linoleum. “I threw it out.”

It may be that she is bent as a supplicant in the very spot where Sadhana fell. I wish she would get up.

Finding my voice, I vacate my seat with shaky legs.

“Get up,” I say. “And get out.”

There is no redress to Libby's story. There is not even a way to prove she was there. But why it should be proven or who should be told or what should happen now is not something I can make sense of anyway. I am relieved that she obeyed me and left without another word. If she'd kept talking, I'd have to move on to the next thought, the next moment.

On my way home, I cross paths with Quinn in the park. The weather has changed. It is raining again, a warm drizzle.

“Small world, stranger,” I call out to him, and he looks up, startled. I take a step closer and flash a smile that must be ghastly.

Quinn is carrying an unopened umbrella. “Hi. Wow. Do you have a tracking chip on me or something?” He swings around the umbrella by a string attached to its handle. “Heading back to Uncle's?”

“Yes. Walk with me?”

He nods. We skirt the opposite side of the park from where we walked the night before, past the playground and a wading pool.

“I used to bring you here when you were little,” I say.

“I know.”

Of Libby's story, I am determined to say nothing to Quinn. Just now I am less angry with her than I would have guessed, though I feel as sad and sorry as if I were the one in her place. Between our mutual failures, it seems we were unwitting collaborators in Sadhana's death.

“So do you remember the thing we saw on the news?” I say instead. “About the family in the church? The tribunal is going to make a decision tomorrow, and there's going to be a demonstration.” I slow our pace so that I can look at him while we talk. “Do you want to come?”

“I'm going already,” says Quinn. “Caro wants me to help her film it. Maybe hold a microphone or something. She knows some of the people who are organizing everything.” He looks anxious and, if I'm not mistaken, guilty. I wonder if he is feeling some shame of privilege, the luck he owes to where he happened to be born.