Swallow Read online

  “What’s that?” Carly came up behind me, looked over my shoulder.

  “A baby bird.” It looked like a wet little rat. It shuddered.

  “How come he’s not flying?”

  “Because he probably fell from up in the tree. He’s very sick.”

  Carly’s mouth opened into a little O. “He’s sick?”

  “He fell a long way and hurt himself.”

  “Wake up, birdie,” Carly said, and reached out.

  I grabbed her hand. “Don’t touch him, he has germs.”

  “I need to fix him.” She struggled against me. “He’s sick. Fix him, Dossy.”

  “I can’t fix him. We better just leave him alone.”

  Aubrey came over to see what was going on. “What’s that?”

  Carly writhed. “Fix him, Dossy! You have to fix him.”

  The baby bird twitched.

  Aubrey leaned in. “I think it’s going to die.”

  Carly’s eyes widened. “DIE?”

  I shoved Aubrey with my elbow. “It’s not going to die, Car. Let’s just leave it alone so it can rest and get better. You want to go to the swings?”

  Aubrey shook her head. “It’s totally going to die. We have to put it out of its misery. Look — it’s suffering.”

  “Fix him!” Carly begged.

  I had no idea when the baby bird had fallen, or how long it had lain there, broken, in the dirt. Its thin skin stretched translucent over its bones. Its eyes bulged. The sun seemed to be slowly baking it from the outside in. Blood welled up under its skin that hadn’t quite broken through to the surface, red-black like the cherries we’d eaten earlier in the day that had stained my fingers. What did it feel like to die? Did the bird know already? How soon before it would turn to nothing?

  “Put it out of its misery,” Aubrey urged.

  Carly snuffled.

  I clenched my jaw. “YOU put it out of its misery.”

  Aubrey squirmed. “It’s suffering! Look at it!”

  “Fix him! Fix him!” Carly blubbered. I could hear my sister wailing, almost as though the baby bird was her heart, outside her body, struggling to beat. Carly hated anything in pain. She collected fallen leaves from the side of the road and tried to nurse them back to health. A few weeks prior, she’d gotten a good hard spanking from our mother for using an entire box of Band-Aids to patch up her beloved Raccoon, who’d taken a tumble from the top bunk, from my bed, where I’d forbidden Carly from playing.

  Aubrey and Carly would not shut up.

  It’s suffering! It’s suffering!

  Squatted beside the bird, I tried to tune them out, curling into myself like an egg, elbows on my knees, hands up over my ears. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  Aubrey thought she was so tough. Yeah, right. When I opened my eyes, she had her hands over her face.

  “It’s suffering!” Her voice had taken on a repetitive, whining quality. “It’s suffering!”

  “Aubrey!” I grabbed her wrists. “Take Carly over there. Carly, go with Aubrey so I can fix the bird.”

  Aubrey took a few steps backwards. “You’re not going to fix it, it’s dying!”

  “Shut up!” I screamed. “Just take her.”

  Aubrey took Carly by the wrist and dragged her away from the tree. I looked down at the bird. It didn’t move. Maybe it had already died. I bent in towards it, and, as I did, it twitched again, a little spasm shuddering through its body.

  I stood back up. Then, quickly, so that I couldn’t change my mind, brought my foot down hard on the spot where the baby bird lay, felt its body crunch under my sneaker. Even though my hands covered my ears, I heard it scream. The bird, or maybe Carly.

  I stood there, my sneaker crushing the fragile, broken body of the bird. Now it had to be dead. I took my foot away, knelt down beside the tree and began scooping up dirt, dumping it over the bird without looking at it.

  There — just a mound of dirt. I let my breath out, all at once. I slid my shoe along the grass — again, again. It didn’t feel clean. My hands were black with cherry dye and soil. I brushed them off on my jeans. Still, the bits under my fingernails would not go away.

  &During my relationship with Patrick, I relished shopping for Valentine’s Day cards. Buying Valentine’s cards — me, the late bloomer, who, when we lived together, still woke up surprised to be in our bed, in our apartment. Patrick often headed out in the mornings before me, leaving just the faint laundry detergent gingerbread scent of him, and his imprint in the sheets. After we split up, I woke and expected him to be there, then had to remember. Just as I’d gotten used to him, he’d gone.

  So, I was at the drug store shopping for a Valentine’s Day card for Carly. Five weeks before, I’d left her, alone in Toronto, in the apartment she’d shared with Ryan until he’d broken up with her and moved out. I’d spent my entire Christmas vacation in Toronto with her, my holidays on the hand-me-down futon I’d given her when I moved to Calgary. We shared the same lifeless furniture and, apparently, the same susceptibility to rejection. Just over a year earlier, I’d packed my own belongings and moved out of Patrick’s apartment.

  When I told Carly I needed to pack for my return flight, she begged me to stay another week. It cost me over two hundred dollars to change the flight, and I dreaded arriving home to the prep work I thought I’d have a whole week to complete. I flew a red-eye, arriving with just enough time to take a cab back to my apartment, shower, change, and drive to work, bleary at the prospect of seven sleepless hours with twenty-nine sixth-graders. The edges of my sloppy bun still wet from the shower hung frozen at the back of my neck.

  In the drug store, I opened a card that played music, a series of single notes, like bells. One year for Halloween, Carly found a card that, when opened, played a witch’s cackle over and over. This she taped open to the back wall of my closet, behind my clothes, so that when I came home, I could not find the location of the laugh. I tore apart my room, the sound eventually mingling with Carly’s own laughter.

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fantasize about Patrick showing up at my apartment, at my gym, in the staff room. He would see me first, unaware, otherwise occupied, my hair falling in my eyes. Doing something charming, perhaps a little childish — a rim of latte foam on my upper lip, or humming along to my headphones, or reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my sixth-graders and doing the voices. He would tell me he’d made a big mistake. That he missed me.

  Sometimes, I used my membership card at the grocery store, which was under Patrick’s name, and paid in cash, just to hear the clerk say, “Have a good afternoon, Mrs. Linam.”

  But I couldn’t speak these words aloud — especially not to Carly. I was the big sister.

  &Over the weeks I spent in Toronto, Carly seemed to get smaller and more childlike, if that was even possible. Waking up beside her felt oddly familiar, the way she, a year earlier, woke up beside me, her pyjamas askew, a smile stretching the big globe cheeks she disdained so much. She’d played Michael Jackson and tried to get me to dance to “Thriller.” She hadn’t even been born when Thriller hit the shelves. But her zombie impression and off-key solo made me laugh. She baked double chocolate cookies but forgot to take them out of the oven. That they burned a little on the bottom reminded me of our haphazard, blackened childhood dinners. Felt like home.

  But I didn’t know how to be upbeat and silly for her. Practical, I could do: ordering food, vacuuming up accumulated dust, keeping her busy. I let her sleep in the mornings, creeping out of bed and brewing coffee, her apartment dim, the early December sky grey and thick. On the third day, still clumsy with sleep, I stepped on one of the Christmas bulbs she had snaked around the apartment floor’s perimeter. It shattered under my foot. I sat on the edge of the tub and picked bits of coloured glass out of my heel. Still, she slept.

  On New Year’s Eve, I picked through the remnants of food in her fridge and ordered sushi. Carly, wandering aimlessly around the kitchen, gave up and crawled back into bed before the delivery ma
n arrived. We ate, propped up with pillows, but she remained listless, could barely get her mouth around the maki. She dismembered the pieces, peeling salmon and tuna away from rice, poking avocado and cucumber out of the bellies of rolls with her chopsticks. I couldn’t tell how much she’d eaten. She fell asleep before the countdown. I read The Globe and Mail in bed with her, the newsprint smudging my fingers. Patrick loved The Globe and Mail. With a few minutes left until midnight, I climbed out of bed, took one of Carly’s throw blankets and stepped out onto the balcony. A fine sheen of fresh snow frosted the wire net that kept pigeons from landing. I stood outside in the cold, waiting for the moment to pass, before going back inside.

  As soon as I sat on the bed, Carly jerked up, as though shoved — eyes round, pupils dilated. She coughed and heaved, as though she had too much air in her chest. A panic attack, maybe. A bad dream.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. On my knees, I pulled the blanket around her. She flinched at my touch, or maybe my cold fingers. I could feel her heart through her back, jackrabbit fast. “Take deep breaths.” I breathed loudly in and out, like a labour coach, until her breathing started to slow.

  “Fuck 2007,” she said.

  Her voice sounded like Mom’s.

  & Carly’s early childhood coincided with the children’s television frenzy starring Barney, an anthropomorphized purple dinosaur who never let a show go by without singing his nauseating love anthem. The opening notes to the song frequently made me, then bordering on teenagehood, cover my ears.

  I love you

  You love me

  We’re a happy family

  “Mom, how come you never say ‘I love you’?” Carly asked one day. She was maybe six at the time, sweet and sensitive like a nectarine, her feelings always getting bruised. Our mother busied herself cleaning the windows, rubbing the same streak-free spots over and over.

  Carly said, more emphatically, “Mom, how come you never?”

  Another shot of Windex. “Because.” Our mother often sanitized single sections of the apartment — scrubbing grime from the inside of the oven, vacuuming dust from the folds of the curtains. Single tasks exhausted her, leaving portions of the apartment spic and span and others cluttered and chaotic.

  “But why?”

  “Because!” Mom snapped. “Because moms love their kids. They don’t need to say it. It’s just something you know, like how the sky is blue. I shouldn’t have to tell you.” She yanked the curtains closed.

  The room Carly and I shared frequently mirrored the rest of the apartment, Carly’s half littered with her “peoples,” half-dressed baby dolls and hand-me-down Barbies, their hair combed so much that it stood almost vertically from their heads, like Trolls. She lined them up in rows, the babies disproportionately monstrous compared to the Barbies. There were never quite enough doll clothes to go around. Carly’s Barbies were either bra-burning feminists who didn’t care about whether their hair looked decent, or topless whores who overdid it with the hairspray. I kept all my toys and barrettes in Tupperware bins, quick and easy to clean up and stow away.

  Even our beds angled out of alignment. The top bunk ran lengthwise against our bedroom’s rear wall, but the bottom bunk pointed horizontally out, perpendicular. I’d had to sleep on the bottom bunk for several years, with the top unoccupied, until I became old enough to advance to the top, with Carly taking over the space on the bottom. Carly begged to switch.

  “No switching!” Mom snapped at Carly. “The last thing I need is for you to roll out of bed and crack your head open!” Mom had seen the bed advertised in the building lobby and offered twenty-five bucks for it when Carly aged out of her crib. The ladder had foot holes cut to the contours of basic shapes: square, triangle, circle, diamond. Way too babyish.

  “Dossy?” Carly asked, that night, from the bottom bunk.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is the sky always blue?”

  It took a moment before I figured it out. The sky, seen in parallel stripes through our plastic blinds, was purple black, the colour of a bruise. I thought of sunsets, of snowstorms. Of Mom, furiously scrubbing.

  “Dossy?” It came out all chewed up, the way she’d said my name as a baby, her thumb deeply rooted, obscuring her voice. I could tell this from the top bunk.

  “Yes,” I said, “the sky’s always blue.”

  &Papi had one niece, Frances, the daughter of Tati’s younger sister. Frances, in her forties, had never married or had children. Maybe, I thought, Papi and his relatives had been cursed to live lonely, solitary lives. Though Frances often sent small cards or packages in the mail on special occasions, we never actually met her. She lived in Sudbury and did not like to drive. Her lack of physical presence had Carly convinced she wasn’t real.

  “Then who do you think sends these things?” I asked, dangling a small bundle of chocolate Kisses wrapped in patterned tissue paper in her face. Frances had tied the package with shiny green ribbon, curled the way my teacher had taught me using the open blade of a sharp pair of scissors. I could never get mine into the nice ringlets that adorned Frances’s packages.

  “Do you think she’s kinda like. . .a ghost?” Carly had torn into her package, and had one of the chocolates already dissolving on her tongue.

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s not a ghost.”

  “How do you know?” She reached for another sweet and unwrapped its foil package.

  “There’re no such things as ghosts. And if ghosts did exist, they wouldn’t mail chocolate.” I rolled the package around in my palm, thinking I would save it and pack it in my lunch for the next day.

  Carly had chocolate on her upper lip and had started dismantling the foil of her third piece of candy. “I think she is.”

  “All right,” I said, “enjoy the haunted chocolate you just ate.”

  When she started to cry, Mom abandoned the sloppy sandwiches she was assembling. “Why did you do that? Do you think I want to spend my whole night convincing her she’s not going to die in her sleep? Why do you have to be a little bitch?”

  “You always take her side,” I said. “It’s not my fault she’s such a whiny brat.”

  &On my last day in Toronto over Christmas break, it became more imperative to get Carly to perk up. I suggested shopping, which had always cheered her up in the past. Carly loved sparkly earrings and sewed colourful patches onto the butt pockets of her jeans even when there were no rips. She owned a rainbow of vintage purses, a few impulsively purchased from high-end boutiques, others from yard sales.

  She raked her fingers through her hair. “I look like shit, Darce.”

  She did, too. Deep dark moons under her eyes. A scabby nose.

  “I’ll do your makeup,” I offered.

  She shrugged. She had a small rip under one of the armpits of her nightgown, where the seam had started to unravel.

  I painted her eyelids silver-purple, making the blue of her irises stand out. Stage makeup.

  At the grocery store, I stocked the cart with frozen dinners and canned soups and chocolate-covered granola bars: food that required little effort. I bought her a pair of oversized circular wooden earrings, painted yellow, their insides carved out into delicate scrolls. Big and fragile at the same time. On the subway home, I insisted she put them in. Her fingers fumbled with her earlobes, a little shaky.

  Back at the apartment, Carly went to take a shower, and I stocked the groceries into her pantry. Photos of her and Ryan still decorated the fridge, stuck in place with her series of childish magnets: Winnie the Pooh; the loopy M shape of Virgo, her zodiac sign; bright, block letters, the kind we’d had as children. Happy Carly and Happy Ryan watched me unpack two tins of powdered French Vanilla coffee. I turned on my laptop, listening to the drum of the water through the bathroom walls. I ordered the first two seasons of Full House on DVD, to be delivered after I’d left. Maybe it would make her feel some sisterly love in my absence.

  The apartment phone rang. I closed Carly’s laptop and reached for it. I hea
rd her shut the taps off.

  “Hello?” I said.

  An automated voice announced Carly’s overdue DVD rentals.

  Carly asked, somewhat hushed, “Is that Ryan?”

  She had left the shower without washing her face or rinsing off. Her hair clung to her head, greasy with conditioner. Her makeup looked garish.

  “It’s the video store,” I said.

  “Fucking video store.” She pulled her towel tighter around herself. “Leave me alone.”

  &Carly was the kind of child who slid down stairs head first on her stomach, her wrists raw with rug burn. In the house my mother rented with her new husband, we had stairs for the first time, apart from the cement stairwells of our apartment buildings, cold through our sock feet when the elevators broke down and our arms ached balancing the laundry baskets as we marched up from the basement.

  I worried that she would crack her wrists slamming them into the floor when she hit the bottom step — Carly learned through trial and error, trial and error and error and error. I had a few scars, but Carly was a veritable map of injury: marks from scratching chicken pox; from dropping glass; from falling off jungle gyms, from touching a hot stove.

  She often cut her hair short on a whim and then woefully mourned its loss, purchasing lengthening shampoos and intensely rubbing her scalp (while in the shower, while watching television, sometimes annoyingly at the dinner table) to stimulate follicle growth. She would blow her allowance on an expensive sweater, only to spill mayonnaise all down its front, or rip the neck trying to hastily pull it over her head without having undone all the buttons. She fractured her elbow learning how to rollerblade. Six weeks later, having just been given the all clear from her doctor, she merrily knotted the laces on her hand-me-down blades and gave me a thumbs-up. Within half an hour, she’d broken her wrist.

  Twice in high school she slept through her alarm and through a final exam. I began phoning her before tests to ensure she would wake up on time.