What We Hold In Our Hands (14 page)

It was Friday afternoon, and Mrs. Santos was long gone. Naked and thirsty, Lily tiptoed to the kitchen and gulped ice water from the tap in the fridge door.

She hadn't known she was lonely until the September evening when the phone rang while she was folding Emma's and Beth's
T
-shirts and jeans. They'd been more than old enough to do their own laundry, but between homework, hockey, ballet, and basketball, they simply hadn't had time. Lily usually slammed the phone on solicitations, but when a clear, fine baritone had said, “Lilian Vance, I have the answers to all of your questions,” she'd found herself swallowing the words, surprised at how smoothly they went down.

“Yes,” she'd said. “I want to come to your seminar on mutual funds.”

Her grandmother had left her and her sister Judith a little money. Lily had sequestered hers in a savings account at a different bank from the one she and Max used. Waiting to decide what to do with it, she'd fantasized about a baby grand, about trips to Barcelona and Venice, but nothing had felt pressing enough to dislodge the money. It was a life raft stowed, waiting for the right need to arise.

“You need to put your money to work for you,” Becket told Lily and the dozen other people at the seminar. They were all older than she, most in their sixties. Becket was her age, her colouring, her height, but solid not lanky. When he gripped her hand, their eyes seemed to slide into each other, and she had to look away.

“Our technology fund is growing like wildfire,” he said. “It showed a thirty-percent increase last year, and this year has almost doubled so far. This is an opportunity you don't want to miss.”

“It's too risky for us,” said an owl-eyed woman whose husband sat nodding his head.

“If you can't tolerate much risk, we have a nice dividend fund, mostly blue-chip companies. Your money won't grow as quickly, but you can't go wrong with it. The longer you hold it, the better it gets.”

Lily wanted to hold him tight against her chest, firmly in her hand. I can't go wrong, she thought, transferring her money to Becket's investment company, one half into the dividend fund, the other into the swelling technology fund. When he shook her hand, she kept her eyes fixed on his until he asked her to lunch—Chinese food and beer. She joked about the cheapness of the meal.

“You're not a big client,” he said. “Just an attractive one.”

“How attractive?” Lily drank her Tsing Tao straight from the bottle, lips lingering on the glass edge.

He gripped her hand for the third time then, but didn't let go.

She never doubted the rightness of her and Becket back then. It was 1999. The tech fund was soaring, the dividend fund chugging along. Millennial anxiety made it seem okay, necessary even, to grab whatever you could get. Their third lunch spilled over into his condo two blocks from the refurbished diner where they'd eaten. His fingers were tough but smooth on her skin, as if he had no prints to leave.

When Max pulled her close the next morning, his sandpaper hands startled her. She was confounded by the excitement she felt at the contrast, as if Becket's smooth fingers were the bass line needed to make Max's tenor sing.

A fan hums behind Patti, shifting the heavy air of the diner. Even at two in the afternoon, all the booths are full, leaving a small table at the back where she waits for her lunch. When Jeff glides through the door, she opens her mouth to call to him, but the clatter and buzz of the diner and the distance between the two of them discourage her from really trying to make herself heard. Instead she watches him take a seat at the counter and stare at the familiar menu as if he's never seen it before. The waitress's approach seems to startle him, but he still manages to give her the self-conscious half smile that used to make Patti want to kiss the corners of his mouth.

He looks towards and away from the teenaged girls drinking coffee beside him. Patti can feel him notice their silky hair, the soft skin of their bare shoulders, their exposed lower backs where their
T
-shirts ride up from low-slung capris. Can feel it like the point of a very sharp knife dragged across her belly, making her breath shallow and the soles of her feet go numb.

She blushes at the thought that someone she knows might see her sitting here alone at the back of the diner while Jeff sits with the two girls at the counter. How strange that person would find it. The person she thinks of is her thesis advisor, Evelyn, a second-wave feminist for whom Patti strives to maintain a persona of independence, ambition, and control. How would Evelyn interpret her behaviour, her choice not to reveal her presence, to spy on Jeff like a neurotic housewife?

The waitress brings her an open-faced turkey sandwich glistening with brown gravy. She forgets about Jeff as she eats and is genuinely surprised to see him walking towards her on his way to the washroom.

“Didn't you see me come in?” he asks.

She refuses to lie, having promised herself that she will never be like her mother, inventing stories for her father about what things cost, how she'd spent her day, how the kids were doing at school, always smoothing out the wrinkles.

“So why sit here by yourself?”

“I didn't think you wanted me.”

“Of course I'd want you,” he says.

She licks the gravy from her fork.

He jiggles one heel against the floor. “Just a minute. I have to pee.”

When he returns, he sits opposite Patti, who has finished her sandwich and ordered dessert. The waitress brings him an omelet and coffee while Patti notices the other diners, secure in their booths—old couples as silent as she and Jeff, young couples laughing and flirting, a single older woman in an elegant straw hat, her back to Patti. The angle of the hat suggests that the woman is enjoying herself. Her shoulders look relaxed and easy inside her cotton blouse, as if they've shed some long burden they'll never take up again. Patti thinks about the giant Buddhas, the elation the rebels must have felt when those old stones shifted and fell.

“How are you feeling?” Jeff asks.

“Tired and hot.”

“Were you able to do any work?”

She stares at him—his face damp with sweat, his forehead creased, as it always is when his back is aching. It's been weeks since he last asked how she was. She discovers the anger rolled tight under her breastbone. “I think you should move out.”

Jeff gazes at his empty plate. “How would you manage?”

“The way I'm managing now. If you don't want this baby, and you don't want me, what are you hanging around for?”

“I do want you, but you're not making it easy.”

“You don't want the baby. And that's how I come now. We're a package.”

His thick hair is stuck to his forehead, unbudged by the air from the fan. “I don't know. Maybe it will be fine, and I'll feel fatherly. I don't know. Right now I can't imagine it.” He reaches for the back of his neck.

The waitress brings Patti's rice pudding, which she consumes slowly, Jeff watching. She doesn't look at him until she's done.

“Are you coming?” she asks.

“Later,” he says.

Lily hasn't been out of the house in days. It's been even longer since she's driven her car, a '97 Volvo station wagon. Now that she doesn't need it to drive Beth and Emma, it sits in the ramshackle garage behind the house for weeks at a time. Their house is so close to shops and the subway that she hardly needs a car. The last time she took it out was to buy bulk packages of toilet paper and laundry detergent. But now she's discovered Internet shopping.

She doesn't exactly lie to Max about this new activity, but she doesn't tell him about it either, and he hasn't mentioned the empty courier boxes. He's overseeing three kitchen renos and the construction of a sushi restaurant, and Evan, his boss and business partner, has just promised to build a spa for a small in-town hotel.

Most nights, Max and Lily sit silent over a late dinner of scrambled eggs, or he grabs a burger between worksites, arriving home to find her soaking in the tub while Leonard Cohen's baritone rumbles like an earthquake through the house, and another courier box lies flattened in the recycle bin.

This afternoon when the doorbell rings, Lily knows it will be more stuff—pants or shoes she'll have to return because they don't fit, embroidered silk pillows, yoga blocks, low-mercury canned tuna, new and used books, so many books she can't read them all, so many she's had to order a bamboo shelf to stack them on.

“Sign here,” the courier says.

Lily signs, accepting the white cardboard box. Inside layers of paper rest black stretch capris and a purple
T
-shirt with “Namaste” printed on the back in small white letters. Over the years, she has signed up for various summer activities—art workshops like the one their neighbour Jeff is teaching, a hiking group, a theatre club, yoga this year—but her attendance has never been good.

Summers stall and stagnate without the regular work of teaching, Max always extra busy, and now her daughters gone too. Last summer they were home: Emma scooped ice cream a few blocks away while Beth answered the phone in Max's office. Still Lily hadn't seen much of them, since they'd spent most of their free time with friends, but there had been moments—midnight tea in the kitchen with Emma confiding her doubts about going away to Halifax, a Sunday afternoon watching
The Wizard of Oz
with Beth, who'd stretched out on the couch, resting her head on Lily's lap.

Lily hasn't been to yoga in three weeks, but she could go this afternoon. The studio is just a ten-minute walk up the street. Maybe a shower will give her the momentum she needs.

The warm water softens her pent shoulders, the gripped muscles of her scalp. As her jaw drops, tears mix with the water running down her face. She has missed two periods, hardly sleeps, has lost her appetite for food and sex, is losing herself, becoming someone else, someone older, old. But her usually thin body feels more solid, and she's developed a small belly, which refuses to disappear even when she forgets to eat. It sits in front of her like a Buddha, ready to lead or accompany her somewhere. She places a hand on it. It is tender and tough. I love you, she says, to no one at all, an old habit. But who does she love? And what does it mean? How will it help her? I need help, she tells the showerhead.

“You need to see a doctor,” Max had said.

She'd promised to make an appointment, but that was last week. She won't take hormones so what's the point? It's 2003. The latest research on
HRT
has shown that it increases the risk of heart disease, and having had to visit both her parents in the cardiac ward over the past few years, Lily has a rational fear of heart failure.

She has already ordered ginseng, black cohosh, and chaste tree berry from the Internet, but they don't seem to be working, except that she feels very chaste since she is too listless, and Max too busy, for sex. Maybe her yoga teacher knows something that will help. Lily has paid for ten classes, but has only been to one. They did four rounds of sun salutation, then balanced on their tailbones in the boat, which set every muscle in her body quivering. While the others stayed in the pose, she let her head, shoulders, and legs drop. The teacher's repeated mantra, “Everything depends on the strength of your core,” made Lily feel undisciplined and weak.

Patti is relieved to turn onto her shady street. The heat is a noisome burden like her desire for Jeff. If she didn't have this life inside her, these hormones making her weepy and vulnerable, she could be happy alone, writing her dissertation. But the larger the baby grows, the smaller she feels—a tiny woman with a belly out to there. Staring down at its unavoidable roundness, she doesn't notice the sparrows in the lilac bush until they flash in front of her. They seem to have burst from her belly like blackbirds from a pie. Just two years ago, she'd run a marathon, training with a group of runners who met in the ravine. Pure muscle and movement, she'd felt in control, invincible, her mind and senses invigorated. Now she is Thumbelina dodging the sharp beaks of birds.

After their first few meetings, Lily and Becket switched from Fridays to Saturdays because Becket could no longer spare time from the office.

One Saturday, Lily crawled out of bed, searching for a snack. She unearthed a red delicious from the pile of grapefruits in the fridge drawer, but it tasted pulpy. She threw it into the garbage under the sink. She'd told Max she was going to the movies with a friend and might stay out for an early dinner after the matinée. Now she felt the first tug of guilt as if a string had been looped and knotted around the muscle joining her neck and shoulders, trussing her like the Cornish hens she used to roast Saturday nights when Beth and Emma still went to bed early, allowing her and Max a peaceful late dinner. Now that they were in their teens, Friday and Saturday nights had become about driving them to friends' houses, dances, or the movies, then watching videos and drinking black tea until it was time to fetch them home again.

Lily held out both hands as if weighing on one the new and delicious thrill of eating pizza in bed with Becket, and on the other the known but heady pleasure of listening to her daughters gossip with their friends in the car, revealing secrets she would not otherwise hear, as the girls teased Beth about her crush on the drama teacher or Emma about her first kiss.