The Blondes (3 page)

How can I say this? And yet I am saying it—the thought of a fetus inside me clung to my mind like a brown swimming leech, which was probably about the size of you then. I thought about my body breaking open and tearing down, and something screaming and bloody the size of a football emerging, and I fell to my knees—yes, fell—and vomited into the toilet. I had just peed into it, and the smell of urine combined with regurgitated breakfast made me heave again, but this time nothing came up. I tapped the handle and flushed it all down.

I sat beside the toilet feeling nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing—because I was crying, although I didn’t compute that until a light rap came on the door.

“H-Hannah …?”

It was my new neighbour.

“You all right in there?”

I scrambled up, wiped my sleeve across my face, looked at my watch but couldn’t make out the numbers. My glasses. I found them and pushed them back up my nose. How long had I been in the bathroom? Five minutes? Ten?

Another rap at the door.

“Hazel,” I corrected my neighbour through the door. My voice sounded shredded. “One minute.”

I began running water frantically—off with the glasses again—and splashed it on my face, grabbed the folded white towel from the bar. I looked terrible.
This may very well be the worst impression I will ever make on anyone
, I thought—which of course is hilarious now—and then, oh dear … I laughed. But it was, you know, like a hiccup, and I threw up again, right there in the sink. Bagel is not a nice food to barf.

When I came out, there she was, hovering in the little hallway, a narrow, pinched expression on her wide face. She had ditched the trench coat and wore this short-sleeved sweater that was the colour of an old tennis ball. It seemed tatty, but later I’d realize the texture was only because I’d left my glasses on the sink again.

“It’s—it’s not my business,” she stuttered. “I mean, I don’t even know you, but are you okay? Can I get anything for you?”

I shook my head. I could feel how dreadful I must look, how my eyes burned. “It’s all right. I’m just pregnant,” I said nonchalantly, shaking my hair back.

She looked past me toward the bathroom. “Why don’t I get someone from downstairs?”

“Sorry if you heard me in there. I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I said.

It was then that her gaze seemed to fasten on to something, and I turned and recognized the oblong shape: I’d left the pee stick sitting on the bathroom cabinet.

“Oh,” she said in a voice that was suddenly squeaky, and I realized for the first time that she was maybe a little younger than me. “Oh, Hann—Hazel. Hazel, why don’t you come in and sit down for a minute?” She gestured me into her room, and even though I had forgotten her name, strangely, I found myself stepping over the backpack and inside room 306.

The neighbours have finished burning the hair. I can still smell it, hanging in the air like a thick sheet. Brown; it smells like the colour brown. The smoke goes quickly but the odour lingers. I don’t see the man and woman now—not even from here at the kitchen window, which has the best view past the hill and that row of evergreens. They’ve gone back into their own cottage.

When do you develop your sense of smell? I think Larissa told me that babies practise breathing while they’re still in the womb. At his mid-term ultrasound Larissa’s son was also practising sucking, and had placed his small, transparent thumb up next to his mouth. She had a black-and-white image
of that one taped to her fridge. But I don’t know if breathing and smelling are related in the womb.

You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go over to that neighbouring cabin tomorrow if Grace hasn’t come back, and I’m going to tell that couple my situation. A pregnant woman alone out here? How can I be a threat to anyone? They’ll have to help me. I did go banging on their door once before, but that was at night and they didn’t answer. I’ll try during the day, when they can see me from their window. They must have a car. If they have a car they’ll have to agree to drive me to a hospital when I go into labour. Ordinarily anyone would, right?

I FORGET WHERE I WAS
. Oh, yes: I was telling you about the day I found out about you, which was also the day of the first attack.

I was telling you this hours ago, but it is night now and I feel so alone out here. Earlier you were very active, wriggling around under my skin, bumping under my hand, but now you’ve gone still inside me—as if you’ve fallen asleep. When you’re moving I feel less alone, as if you’re real, or almost real. These days, even though I haven’t met you, you feel more real to me than people I’ve known. Like Karl. Because I can feel your movements, can feel that you are here.

I hadn’t realized how much I’ve come to depend on Grace. I hadn’t realized how vulnerable night can make me feel. It helps to keep talking.

Moira wasn’t from New York either. After she invited me into her room and helped me onto the bed, she disappeared. She’d been gone about five minutes before I thought about getting up off her bed, which was quilted, like mine, and returning to my own room, but my head was like a weight suspended on fishing line, gently swaying, and I realized I shouldn’t budge for the time being. I closed my eyes. I felt a vague vertigo. Or maybe I was having a panic attack. I’d never had one before. I opened my eyes and found I was staring at Moira’s rucksack. I can still picture it. It felt very satisfying, stabilizing, to look at, slumped in the corner where it was, a metal frame extending from the top of it, buckles and zippers and pouches puffing out from the sides. It was khaki green, a nice calm shade in the dim room. My entire acquaintance with its owner had totalled about fifteen sentences strung out over ten minutes, and still Moira had left me, a stranger, with every item she possessed.

She’d run downstairs to alert someone that the bathroom needed cleaning and to fetch us cups of peppermint tea from the café, which she assured me would calm my stomach. She was buying the cups of tea from her own pocket, and meanwhile there I was with all her things in a bag. I couldn’t get over the trust Moira was showing me. It filled up my eyes, and when she returned I was still crying, the grey-green blur of the backpack swimming before my vision.

Moira set the cups on the bedside table and disappeared again. “Here,” she said, right before she vanished, as if I were supposed to take something from her even though she’d left
the room. When she came back a few seconds later, she silently extended a roll of toilet paper with one hand. I could vaguely see my glasses, folded and held gently, in the other. I wiped my eyes with a few squares of the tissue and blew my nose louder than I meant to, then reached for my vintage tortoise-shell glasses and felt the frames perch heavily over my burning cheeks. Embarrassment had begun to set in.

“Drink this,” Moira told me.

I took the hot paper cup in both hands.

The cleaning person was opening the door to our little alcove to go into the bathroom. She was a petite German woman who spoke little English but would thump her breastplate heartily and proclaim, “My job!” dipping her grey-blonde bob, every time I had tried to apologize for the tub that wouldn’t drain properly upstairs on the fourth floor. Moira shut the door and we were alone in the room together.

“I threw it out,” she said abruptly. At first I didn’t know what she meant. Then she added, “The test.”

“It was positive, though?” I looked to her for confirmation. I couldn’t quite believe this stranger had touched something I’d peed on. She was still standing in front of the closed door, as if she wasn’t sure she should sit down with me, even though she had before she went to get the tea, had sat right there, hip to hip, a hand making slow circles on my back, saying, “It’s okay.”

Moira gave a vigorous succession of head nods, biting the bow of her lips, as if she feared I might shoot the messenger. Then she held her cup of tea in front of her face but didn’t
drink from it, just kind of clutched it there as if for warmth, though it was certainly warm enough in the room. Her thick, dark eyebrows rose. “You have a boyfriend?”

I told her no. At forty-six, Karl was too old to be anyone’s boyfriend. “Well … sort of,” I amended. This was more than I’d told even Larissa.

“Where?” Moira asked, which in hindsight was a logical question considering we were in a hotel, but at that moment I got goosebumps from her seeming omniscience.

“Canada. Toronto.”

“Then that’s where you should go,” she said.

She came over and sat down beside me. She was tall but slender, and when she took up space on the bed, it was no more than if a cat had jumped up and perched on the mattress. She said I should phone the father, that I didn’t want to go through this alone.

I hunched my shoulders. “It’s kind of—” I stopped talking to drink more tea. The weight that I’d felt in my head had sunk to my stomach, and I realized it wasn’t anxiety but guilt. “Complicated. I would go through it alone there too,” I told her. “He’s …”

I fought the term
married
, weighing it in my throat, staring at the closed door of this stranger’s room.
Attached
sounded like a chemical compound. Like something bleachy, strong.
Committed
made me think of the mental hospital. Then there were other terms, like
partner, husband, wife
, that sounded like bondage. In the end, I just let my words trail away, and Moira didn’t seem to notice.

Eventually she deposited me back to my room. No—
deposited
is the wrong word. Moira said kindly—she was very kind—“Maybe you should go and give him a call.”

I figured this was code for “Get the hell out of my room.”

She walked with me to the door of my room, a foot outside her door, of course, and there she touched my elbow and said simply, “Don’t worry.” I remember those two words because they felt solid as stones gripped in either hand:
Don’t
and
Worry
. She turned and disappeared into room 306, and a second later I heard the backpack as it was heaved and dropped onto her bed, presumably to be unpacked.

I closed my door and sat down on my bed.

I meant to call him. I have to tell you, baby: I was
going to
. I want you to know that I did, at least, think about it. And then, there I was two hours later. I simply sat unmoving until feeling overwhelmed me and I knew I had to get out of that room.

There’s a map of New York inside my head. The streets are in white and the buildings are in yellow and the bridges with subway lines stretch red over the blue Hudson. But I also have a three-dimensional memory of the city. There are the stone buildings with small faces etched into them above doorways, and I remember the way the buildings cut the light six storeys up. There’s the black corsetry of fire escapes, a symphony of car honks, and the way all the florists and corner stores arrange their carnations and lilies on pedestals with bows, as if any given weekday is as important as prom night. There are
the children at the nearby elementary school, dressed and styled like they are priming to be in indie-rock bands. There is a thin girl in a tank top, leaning out an apartment window, smoking her cigarette for all eternity. I can’t remember anymore the exact day I saw her—but the image is still there, lodged in my brain. The thing about going to a city not your own is that everyone looks like someone you know, but they can’t possibly be. There’s that sense of strangeness mingled with déjà vu. Then there are the people I would see standing on street corners—earbuds corded into cellphones that glowed in their palms—looking disconcerted and full of intent at the same time, as though waiting for directives to be beamed down so they could know where to go and what to do next. And after work, the streets would fill with the skinniest, most beautiful women—all teetering along, looking as if they might burst into tears, as if a morsel of food hadn’t passed their lips in twenty-four hours, as faint and sad as Shirley MacLaine in that 1960s Billy Wilder movie
The Apartment
. And truthfully, if it weren’t for the illness and the events that soon followed, I might have come away from New York with this floating, movie-inspired view of the city forever in my mind.

That day I found out about you, I headed out into those streets. I sat for a while in Union Square, which always seemed like more of a circle to me. I loved it best on weekends, when there were vegetable and fruit stands. During the weekdays it was just another park, with people sitting around its edges, stabbing at things in Styrofoam containers, and pigeons pecking at every speck on the sidewalk, and someone handing out flyers
for the coming apocalypse, and skateboarders shooting down the steps in disregard of the tourists. Usually I took a perverse pleasure in watching the debt clock tallying what the nation owed so silently and with such dizzying speed, but that day I wasn’t seeing anything.

A couple on the bench next to mine had begun to quarrel. He was black and wore a fisherman’s hat. I remember the brim was turned down and I thought he looked fashionable. His knees were pulled up, his elbows draped over them, lanky, hands dangling, and his white sneakers were braced against the bench. I can see things like this, little moments, crisp and still like photographs, when I close my eyes. His companion was a chubby white girl with very black hair and red lipstick, and maybe a pair of striped leg warmers over her Converse sneakers, even though it was plenty warm out. I had stopped there to scroll through the numbers on my cellphone, and I paused at Larissa’s name, then at my mother’s, and finally at Karl’s, before flipping back to the menu screen. I’d been meaning to buy a New York cellphone, but I had so few people to call that I’d procrastinated on the expense, which meant my signal had to bounce all the way back to Canada. A mere three minutes of roaming fees could buy my dinner, I told myself.