Bone and Bread (9 page)

“Mom,” said Quinn, “pay attention.”

The ringing of my cellphone breaks the stillness. I fumble in my purse to find it. It's Quinn, calling from downtown. When we got off the train, he'd asked if he could head up the hill to the university, and I said yes. I could tell, once the moment arrived, that he was almost as nervous and reluctant as I was to breach the vacuum of Sadhana's empty apartment.

“Hello?”

“Are you there?” he says.

“I'm here. Can't you hear me?”

“No, I mean, are you
there
?”

“Oh. Yeah. I'm here.”

“And? How is it?”

“It's okay. It's weird. I mean, it is and it isn't. I don't know. It's hard.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“No, it's fine. I just . . .” The temptation with my son, with his strength, is to lean on him. “I haven't started anything yet. I haven't been here long. Where are you?”

“The library. There's a ton of people here, even though classes are over.” I can hear quiet voices in the background. He has seen the campus before, lots of times, but I imagine him now wanting to cut across the paths with an experimental ownership, scope out the cafeteria, rehearse an inner mode of feeling like a university student.

“Well, there are probably summer courses on.”

“Yeah, it's great. There's a barbecue stand out here. I got a hamburger.”

“Lucky you.” I try to evaluate whether or not I'm hungry, probe the source of the strange feeling in my stomach. I wonder if there's still coffee in Sadhana's freezer.

“I know. So I'll see you later? At Uncle's, right?”

“Right. Call if you get lost.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.”

After I click the phone closed, I put it down on the table, where it glints, smooth and alien, next to the potted cactus. Then I pluck the hairs off the couch, hold them up to my head to compare length. Sadhana's hair was shorter than mine is now, which hits well below my shoulders. An unfashionable length for a woman in her thirties. The couch is not as clean as it could be, and as I root around I find change, small pebbles of dirt, even crumbs. She didn't care about vacuuming or ironing, though she did both from time to time. She liked things she could put her hand to without much in between, so the tub was always scrubbed, surfaces polished, rips and worn patches mended within days. Outside of those kinds of things she was not very particular.

She liked having everything out where she could see it, trusting her makeup and jewellery to shallow pottery dishes and trays, her best-loved shoes and clothes laid out on wide shelves and dangling from wall hooks in the bedroom. Though in her way, I imagine there was an order, a system underlying what looked like simple non-conformism on the outside.

It is her meticulousness, along with an arts council grant, that has allowed me this six months' reprieve. For years Sadhana was in the habit of paying her bills in advance whenever she came into money, converting paycheques into rent cheques with just enough lag time to make sure they would clear at the bank. Acting gigs and her health were both unpredictable, but my sister liked to be in control of her life, though she was never good at saving. French television commercials were her financial mainstay, though she also taught drama at a studio on the Plateau after she gave up waitressing.

Her will was straightforward and left everything to me and Quinn. She'd never mentioned to me that she'd had it drawn up, but then, between us there were subjects we always avoided. Uncle paid for the funeral with an attitude that was almost grateful, as though he were getting off more easily than expected.

With pen and paper from my bag I make a list, leaning back along the couch that I can still imagine clinging to her form where she curled up on the farthest side of the L shape, a tiny S of one hundred pounds. What I begin to write, though, becomes redundant, an itemization of belongings, room by room. I scratch it out and write:
Everything
.

During the first weeks after Mama died, Mama's friend Deana stepped in. Her phone number was stuck to the fridge on a stained and curling scrap of paper held by a ladybug magnet. She and Mama had a deal to take over each other's yoga classes if either of them ever got sick. They'd had the arrangement for a year, but Mama never bothered learning a phone number off by heart. She had more important things to keep in there, she said.

When Deana picked up the phone the day after Mama's accident, her voice was husky with sleep even though it was three in the afternoon. I started crying.

“Honey,” she said. “Sweetheart. Don't cry. Who is this?” That was Deana all over. She was ready to comfort a heavy breather if he needed it.

“I woke you up,” I whispered. “I'm sorry. It's me, Beena.” Our names rhymed, so sometimes when I called, I said, “Deana, it's Beena.” And then she would say, “Oh, I thought you were Tina.” Most of the yoga ladies didn't share our corny sense of humour, but Deana was a hoot. Mama's word.

The news about what had happened slipped through my lips like bitter vinegar. I couldn't hold them in, but the words
accident
and
gone
seemed to scour my mouth as they came out. The vinegar burned through my heart and watered my eyes. I swallowed and asked Deana to go to Mama's class at the community centre. “You could tell them,” I said. “Or stay and teach it. Whatever you want.” I hated the thought of the students waiting there for Mama and getting angry with her, and then how awful they would feel later when they found out.

Deana drove right over in her boyfriend's car. We had all the lights in the apartment blazing. Uncle was working downstairs, because nothing could close the bagel shop, not even this, the end of the world, and Travis, the second shift manager, had come up twice to check on us. The first time he came up with his condolences. The second time he came up with a long face and a cooling glass casserole dish of cheese and noodles his wife had fixed for us. Sadhana was putting it, uneaten, into the fridge, and I was watching out the window as Deana parked the car in the tow-away zone in front of the store and tripped up the steps of the side door. I buzzed her up.

When she got upstairs, she was already crying, great black triangles of mascara bleeding down under her eyes. I was so numb I almost asked her what was wrong.

“I'm here, sweetpea,” she said. She slung her huge shoulder bag onto the floor. “And I'm so sorry.”

She held open her arms, lips trembling, then folded me into an embrace that widened to include Sadhana, who pounded over to us in her sock feet. My sister and I had stayed up the whole long night after leaving the hospital, weeping and dozing by turns, first on Sadhana's bed, then on opposite sides of the room after Uncle silenced a sudden screaming match. He'd spent the night on the couch, since it was too late to drive home to the suburbs. Terrified by the sudden emergence of his huge, angry face, Sadhana and I had stopped fighting and stopped talking, too. All morning we'd been fretting and weeping alone in different parts of the apartment. But squeezed together on the front mat by Deana, neither of us pulled away, and I was relieved. I closed my eyes and leaned in to smell Deana's scent of pears and powder and Sadhana's dirty hair. It didn't feel like Mama hugging us, because Deana was much taller than both of us, and Mama had been almost a full head shorter.

Deana let us go to wipe her eyes, and then she said, “I'm starving. Have you guys eaten? I have to eat when I get upset or I turn into a demon.” She kept one arm around each of our waists and propelled us into the kitchen. When Sadhana told her about the casserole, she let go and rushed on ahead of us.

“Sit down, sit down,” she called. “You shouldn't have to do anything. Do you want some? Are you hungry?” From the back she looked a bit like Mama, though she was younger, in her twenties, and her hair was a bit lighter, more gold than red. She was an extraordinarily pretty woman. She had fine, pale hands and a wide, hilarious mouth. I knew that when she subbed for Mama, the new students sometimes asked if she was her daughter.

Sadhana and I sat at the kitchen table watching Deana spoon noodles into a bowl to reheat. She was telling a story about our mother. I wondered how she could go so quickly from crying to talking to bustling around, when the pain of it all was stabbing me in the chest, in the throat.

She was saying, “I took my first yoga class from your mother. My first class ever. I'd just graduated from high school. Did you know that? She took one look at me and knew I was in pain. She invited me to stay afterwards for spiced tea with milk, and I told her all about Mike, my crummy boyfriend.”

Deana turned on the oven and popped her bowl inside. I was worried that the porcelain would crack and looked over at Sadhana, but she was intent on Deana, or at least staring in her direction.

“I started training with your mother, and I left Mike.” Deana sat down and reached across the table to squeeze Sadhana's hands, which were lying on the table, knotted in a hard knuckle lump. My sister barely blinked. “It must have been about seven years ago. And I've never looked back. Your mother even helped me quit smoking.”

“How did she do that?” asked Sadhana. She was gazing past Deana now, at some indefinable point of interest in the direction of the refrigerator. It was calming, somehow, to watch Sadhana, the way she had of sailing forward into something but keeping herself separate. For my part, I was afraid to stir or ask a question. Anything that kept us moving ahead in time without Mama.

Deana shook her head. “I've no idea. I swear, she must have hypnotized me or something. I still don't understand it. She just told me not to do it, so I didn't.”

She took her bowl out of the oven, though the food could not have been hot but only warmed. She ate while we watched. Every once in a while she would swallow and look up at us and smile, and Sadhana and I tried to smile back. I could guess what my face must have looked like by seeing my sister's, which was pale in the cheeks and dark in the eyes. Quivering and dry and too soft in the mouth.

If Deana saw the thinness of our rallying, she didn't show it. To me she said, “I'm going to stay as long as you need me.” I nodded, and she went on, “I mean it. I'm not leaving you guys one second before you're ready for me to go.”

“Okay.”

She got up from the table, looking beatific in her blue jeans with the gold glinting in her hair, like an angel sent to save us. But then she was leaning over the counter with her hand over her face, tears flowing. It was as though once she had eaten she remembered why she had come, and she started breaking down again, just as she clinked her empty bowl into the sink.

We learned a lot about her in those weeks, about her father the pig farmer, her brother who was in the navy but wished he could be a pilot, her mother who taught piano to all the children in the neighbourhood. She talked and talked, and her voice became a thread that was pulling us along. It was nice to have her there, filling up the silence. We did not stop to wonder why her heart went out to us in our trouble, for to us our trouble was the whole world. It was only puzzling that the rest of the world was not there with us.

She slept in Mama's room, and we slept in there too, taking turns next to her and on a pallet on the floor piled with blankets. She breathed through her mouth while she slept, and I liked the windy sound of it, loud and even. In the night, she kicked off all the sheets and it was cold with the breeze from the window she kept open, but Sadhana and I didn't complain or give up our turns in the bed. We stayed up later and later, until it was normal for us to be waking up around noon. Sometimes Deana left while we were still asleep and went home to see her boyfriend Freddy, and then she would come back with another bag of clothes or a bunch of new records to play.

There was nothing to do, after the funeral. Deana and the other ladies divvied up Mama's yoga classes and cancelled some. Uncle still ran the store, like always. It was summer, so there was no school.

I was getting better at frying eggs. We ate a lot of fried-egg sandwiches. Sadhana took to heating up beans from a can and frying bologna that we dipped in mustard, small suns of yellow squirted on our flowered plates. I don't know where we got the idea to eat that way, as Mama's way of cooking had always leaned to whole grains and stews and lots of vegetables, but Deana seemed to think it was fine. When she cooked, she made spicy spaghetti or fish sticks. We ate a lot of bagels from the store, since they were free. My stomach started hurting most of the time, but Deana told me it was only because I was sad. In between telling stories and playing records, she seemed almost as tired and sorrowful as we were.

She got the idea one Friday night, from looking at Mama's box of candles, that we'd have a candlelight dinner. She'd found them in the cupboard when she was looking for clean towels. “Candlelight makes everything look better,” said Deana. “Even food.”

I was all for it, but Sadhana disapproved. She traced her fingers over the lid of the box, covered with lilac paper doilies and curling silver ribbons. A strange remnant of our crafty years, but canny enough to be obviously Mama's handiwork. Sadhana reminded me that we weren't allowed to touch the candles.

“I'm sure that was just for safety reasons, honey,” said Deana, who was listening. “It'll be okay.”

Sadhana shook her head. “No, it's not just that. These were our mother's meditation candles.”

“Really?” Deana pried the top off the box. Inside was a jumble of white tea lights, tapers of every colour, and pillar candles in gradient shades of dark purple.

“Lovely,” said Deana.

“She made those ones.” Sadhana pointed.

Deana reached past the candles she'd indicated and took out two of the tall orange tapers. “These two will be perfect. Don't you think?” She was asking Sadhana, who nodded. Deana took them, and Sadhana carried the box to our room and shoved it under her bed. I followed her.

“They need to stay in a cool, dry place,” she said when she turned and saw me looking. “They'll melt otherwise.”

“I thought you didn't believe in meditation.”

“That's not the point.” Sadhana looked ready for a fight, but I didn't press it. She could get fierce about loyalties, and anyway, I knew how she felt.

Back in the kitchen, Deana had found two Christmas holders, sprigged red and green around the base with fake holly. She'd placed them on either side of a large serving dish atop the burgundy linen tablecloth, and there was ketchup in a little blue bowl with a tiny spoon beside it. She'd found the cloth napkins, too.

“See?” said Deana, putting in the tapers. “They match the Kraft Dinner.” She lit the candles with a lighter in a beaded case she pulled from her pocket, then flicked off the lights. In the dimness, the pale wax matched the food, just like she said. Creamsicle orange. I asked her why she had a lighter if she had quit smoking.

“For occasions like this one,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and I realized it wasn't only in her looks that she reminded me of Mama.

We all sat down, but then Deana got up to put on a Carole King record. She said, “I can't stand the sound of people chewing and swallowing. Even you guys. Even me.”

As she came back, the end of her hair passed close to the flame, just as Sadhana bumped the candleholder reaching for the ketchup. The taper wobbled twice in its stand and connected with Deana's hair. In half a moment, the flame licked up the end of her ponytail as a dozen strands of red-gold hair sparked and blackened and shrivelled to dust. I gasped, but Sadhana quickly clapped the hair between her hands and it was out.

I stood up. “Oh God,” I said. “It was an accident. Are you okay?”

Sadhana pushed back her chair from the table.

“Are you okay?” I said again. There was an awful smell, and Sadhana had her hand muffling her nose.

Deana was unruffled. She inspected the end of her ponytail. “Oh, I have a lot of hair. No big deal. But that was a close one. No more candles for us, I'd say.”

I let out a breath. Deana smiled and patted the turquoise seat of my chair in invitation until the vinyl started squeaking. Then she blew out the candles. “Don't worry. It's safe now.”

I sat and started eating, and Sadhana edged in a little closer. Deana tucked up her feet so she was sitting cross-­legged. “Did you know hair is growing all the time?” she asked. She pointed the drooping end of her ponytail at each of us in turn. “It's dead tissue. It keeps on growing even after you die. Just like your fingernails.”

There was a small noise from Sadhana, who let her fork clatter to the floor as she bolted from the table. I heard our bedroom door slam.

“Oh no,” said Deana in a hushed voice. “Your mama.”