Swallow Page 4

  I, on the other hand, only needed to screw up once, shame and guilt emblazoned on my cheeks and in the crevices of my brain.

  &I often wondered whether anything significant would happen to me that very day, years into the future. If, perhaps, a lazy, August 25th would someday be my wedding day. If on January 31st I might give birth to my firstborn son.

  One September 1st, I lay inverted on my bed, head where my feet should be, listening to the blurry noise of Carly playing in the bathtub, and wondered if, in five years, it would be the day I would move out on my own. When I sat up, all the blood rushed to my head.

  February 15th, 2005, exactly two years before Carly died, Patrick and I celebrated Valentine’s Day together, a day late, because he had a paper due by five that night and insisted that he needed the entire week prior to prepare. On the fourteenth, I brought him Earl Grey green tea and started rubbing his neck at the computer while he worked, hoping he’d take a break.

  “What kind of professor gives an assignment over Valentine’s Day?” I teased. “I bet he’s divorced.”

  Patrick wriggled away from my touch. “Darcy, stop. You know, the whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”

  On February 15th, we made basil and seafood pasta together, quietly, the bubbling water threatening to spill. Patrick reached past me for the dial and turned the heat down, brushing my arm. On the way back, he lingered for just a moment, gave me a slight smile.

  We went to a yoga class later that night, an activity neither of us had tried, but which Patrick read helped alleviate stress. My stomach felt full from all the carbohydrates. The room temperature inched higher from the sweat and exertion of our contorted bodies. Patrick kept his eyes shut beside me. I hung upside down in a bridge position, my wrists burning, listening to the instructor’s voice telling me to pull my tailbone in and breathe slow, deep breaths. My head hanging between my arms, I could see out through the window onto the street, a Coors Light billboard, crusted with snow. How romantic.

  At home, we took a simultaneous shower and made unsteady love up against the slippery tiled wall. I pulled myself closer in towards his hips for balance. He stepped backwards, pushing me towards the spray.

  Afterwards, Patrick said, “I’m going to do the dishes.”

  He traced his path in wet footprints leading away from me.

  &Back in Calgary, after leaving Carly to fend for herself in Ryan’s absence, I dreamed of her vomiting her insides, retching her esophagus, her mangled intestines. She coughed her heart into her hands.

  Wet. Wet on my hands, my face — I awoke, hot and fumbling in the dark. My hands felt sticky; I fumbled for the lamp. Blood, almost black, on my hands, my pyjamas, my mattress.

  I put my hand to my face, tasted salt. A bloody nose. I sat up, pinched my nostrils shut, coughed blood from my mouth, from what felt like my lungs. Kipling pounced up beside me on the bed, her meows curling up at the ends, like questions. Are you okay? What’s wrong? I pushed her away with my elbow. I’d had less than three hours’ sleep in the last two days, and a class field trip only four and a half hours away. My suitcase lay in the middle of the floor, not yet unpacked, clothes and makeup strewn about. I hadn’t washed my sheets, and had fallen asleep on my bare futon mattress, covered only with a thin quilt.

  I stumbled through the clutter to the bathroom, tripping on Kipling as I went, her wide pupils glossy in the dark.

  That winter, the air hung dry and stale, the lifeless brown grass smashed flat under the snow. I could blame my puffy, bloodshot eyes on allergies, but then, allergies in January? I blinked, unaccustomed to the dark, and fumbled for the shower knob, held a washcloth to my nose, waited for the water to warm up.

  The water pooled at my feet, ribboned with blood and tears, swirling towards the drain.

  I lay in bed, unable to sleep, for an hour, then phoned Aubrey. I knew that she would be lacing her sneakers for her ritual morning run through downtown Toronto, through construction zones, breathing in the dust, the fumes, the icy smog irritating her scrawny asthmatic lungs. Slow suicide. She liked the bustle of street vendors setting up their stands, two-T-shirts-for-two-dollars. She ran even when the temperatures dipped below minus-twenty.

  “You okay?” she asked, and Kipling leapt up onto my chest, kneading at my ribcage. “I’m just about to leave. I have an early group meeting this morning.” Aubrey’s in-progress master’s degree in International Relations meant only a few more years before she left to travel the globe. The Calgary-Toronto distance had diluted our communication. Additional distance would only exacerbate the problem.

  “Don’t go running, talk to me instead.” I meant it casually, but it came out needy, beseeching.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nosebleed.”

  “Don’t tilt your head back.”

  I sighed. “It’s stopped. There’s blood all over my bed, though.”

  “That sucks. Just throw your sheets in the wash while you’re at work.”

  “I didn’t have sheets on it. I’ve barely unpacked. It’s pathetic. There’s blood all over the mattress. I don’t know how to get it out.”

  Aubrey sounded annoyed. “Eh, cut your losses. It’s a futon, right? Futon mattresses are, like, seventy bucks or something.”

  “Yeah, and since teaching is so lucrative. . .maybe I’ll try to scrub it out later. I think I have baking soda in the fridge. I can prop it up in the bathtub.”

  “Not worth it.” I heard the door of her apartment open.

  “I’m worried about Carly,” I blurted.

  “You’re always worried about Carly.”

  “I know, but it’s Carly. I don’t like her being alone.”

  “She’s not alone. She has friends. And I’m here. Do you want me to check in on her?”

  Just what I wanted her to say. “Yeah. I would appreciate that, thanks.”

  “Okay, gotta go. I’ll call her on my lunch break, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

  “Hey by the way — ”

  “What?”

  “My lungs are in the clear. The sky is really blue this morning.”

  &The week before Carly died, I ventured out in minus-twenty-seven degrees to a birthday party at one of Calgary’s cowboy-themed nightclubs for one of the student teachers at my school. While I was getting ready, the power went out. I did my makeup by the light of a flashlight held under my chin, as though telling ghost stories by the campfire. I’d started my period that morning, the cramps nudging in on a dream in which I stood on a stool in Papi’s kitchen folding onions into perogies. I fumbled for Tylenol in the medicine cabinet.

  I arrived early, before any of the other guests. The thumping bass shook the floor and spread up through my feet. I perched on a stool and sucked listlessly at a Pepsi, watching the door.

  When my refill had been reduced to melting ice and still no one had shown up, I went to the doorway and peered out. A long line had formed, patrons huddling on the spot, shifting from one high heel to the other to stay warm. I spotted the birthday girl about three quarters of the way to the back of the line, but couldn’t get her attention.

  I went back to my perch and pulled out my phone to send Carly a text message, but couldn’t get any reception. I picked aimlessly at a scab on the knuckle of my right thumb. It didn’t make sense — the empty dance floor, the people outside getting frostbite.

  Across the bar, a couple, their bodies close and flirty, stepped back a few paces and into a patch of light from one of the hanging fixtures above the bar. The shape and lines of the male’s back looked exactly like Patrick’s. I held my breath. The strident bass vibrated the speakers; I couldn’t feel my heart beating. He turned then, his cheekbones and chin and hairline not at all the same.

  Patrick would never go to a cowboy bar.

  And Christ! We’d broken up over a year ago!

  I went out the back exit and crossed the parking lot.

  In my apartment, the power had come back on, blazing the bulb
s of my overhead lights and lamps. My alarm clock flashed at me, perpetually 12:00. I hadn’t closed the closet door properly. Kipling had climbed the ledges and knocked all the contents to the floor, pill bottles and shampoos. In what had probably been ecstatic feline glee, she’d shredded my last three rolls of toilet paper. She rubbed up against my leg, purring without shame. She still had some white flakes static stuck to her fur.

  The cramps twisted my insides again, the Tylenol wearing off. My insides felt bruised. I restacked the bottles on the shelf, shoved the major bits of toilet paper into a garbage bag, and climbed into bed still in my jeans and tank top and hormones. Before turning my phone off, I typed to Carly: Quite possibly worst day in a long time.

  &While my sister was dying I was conjugating French verbs. Conjugating.

  French.

  Verbs.

  I’d taught the kids an inane song, to the tune of “The Ants Go Marching,” to practice the past tense. Passé composé. While they sang, I sucked at the rim of my dwindling black coffee. The song seemed to run its nails down the chalkboard, but my French consisted only of a few nouns and phrases I remembered from my own elementary school education. This necessitated following the curriculum manual — songs and all.

  “J’ai, tu as, il a, elle a, nous avons, vous avez.” I could barely concentrate over the singing.

  Leila Brewer raised her hand, mid-chorus. “Ms. Nolan, I have to leave to go to my dentist appointment.”

  I nodded. My coffee tasted gritty.

  “Répétez!”

  I wondered if the song would actually serve the purpose of helping them remember the verbs, or whether they would simply be haunted by it, years later, whenever they thought back to sixth grade.

  &Shopping for Valentine’s Day cards when Carly called, I took my place at the checkout, my arms full with her card and other toiletries, shampoo bottles and tampons.

  “Darce — he called.”

  Our recent conversations hadn’t centered on any other he. Still, I said, “Ryan?”

  The clerk scanned my items. I scrambled for my debit card.

  “Yeah,” Carly said.

  “You don’t sound happy.”

  “Well, because, yesterday, everything was fine, we were talking, and I mentioned maybe we should get together sometime and have coffee, or something, because you know we haven’t seen each other since he moved out, and he was sort of like, maybe, and he asked how the apartment was, but he called it our apartment. Like, our apartment, you know? I kinda felt like — ”

  “Car, hold on, hold on.” I put the phone down on the counter and punched in my PIN . When I picked it up again, she hadn’t stopped talking.

  “ — he doesn’t even think it’s possible! Like, how can you love someone so much and then just. . .not?”

  I chose my words. “I don’t think it’s that he doesn’t love you — ”

  “If he loves me, why did he leave? Why does he want to talk one day and then think it’s a bad idea the next day? Patrick didn’t do that, right?”

  “Well, with Patrick, things were — I mean, I stopped talking to him after he broke up with me, right? I’m the one who didn’t answer his calls.”

  “I wish you could just make him come back. Talk to him or something, I dunno. I just wish it would all stop, you know! All of it.”

  I crumpled the receipt in my fist. I had at least two hours of lesson planning that I’d wanted to finish in time to make it to a monthly dessert date set up by my former university classmates. I’d missed the last two. “I know, Hun. Do you want to have a sister’s date tonight? We could watch the same TV show and talk about it during the commercials. Whatever show you want.”

  “Yeah. No. I think. . .I think maybe I’ll just. . .sleep.”

  “How about I call you in the morning? You can tell me all the details.”

  “Talking doesn’t fix anything.”

  “I’m calling you anyway.”

  She sighed, long and deep. “Bye, Darce.”

  Outside, I put my bags down on the step and watched the cars circle around the icy parking lot. The cold seeped through my jeans.

  He answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Ryan.”

  “Hey, Darcy.” He paused, possibly trying to gauge my level of anger, wondering if I wanted to, perhaps, knee him in his unmentionables on my sister’s behalf, or some equally sadistic equivalent. “Is everything okay?”

  “Ryan,” I said, “I need you to listen to me, okay?”

  “Okay. . .”

  “I need you to stop talking to her. It’s hurting her too much. You don’t want this for her, this back and forth. You have to just stop calling her, stop answering her phone calls, her emails, even if she keeps trying and keeps trying. Do you want her back?”

  “I. . .It’s more complicated than that. Like, this whole thing is so messed up. I didn’t mean for. . .I miss her. A lot.”

  “Do you want her back?” I repeated.

  In the silence, I thought he’d hung up.

  Finally, “I can’t right now.”

  “Then you have to let her go. Okay? You’re killing her.” My fingers had gone white, numb around the phone.

  Ryan’s response was quiet. “Okay.”

  I exhaled fog into the surrounding air.

  &The ants go marching ten by ten, hurrah, hurrah

  The ants go marching ten by ten, hurrah, hurrah

  The ants go marching ten by ten,

  The little one stops to say “The end”

  And they all go marching down to the ground

  to get out of the rain.

  &How many people knew my sister was gone before I knew?

  This is what the medical examiner told me, afterwards.

  Moments before jumping, she’d spread her jean jacket on the platform floor. In the frenzied aftermath, the first policeman on the scene picked up her coat and found her wallet in the front pocket. I imagine the horror of the passengers, having barely registered my yellow-haired chubby-cheeked baby sister pacing along the rim of the subway platform. One witness said she’d seen Carly pacing, but no one else corroborated this, probably too absorbed in their bleary morning Starbucks dreams, waiting for the rush of the train along its tracks.

  She had no cash in her wallet; just her student ID and Aubrey’s phone number on the back of a Tim Hortons receipt, which meant she’d planned it ahead of time, wanted me to know in the gentlest way possible, as though any way could possibly be gentle.

  The police got my contact information from Aubrey, who insisted I had to hear it from someone in person. My cell phone was lost at the bottom of my purse. When I didn’t answer, they’d tried the phone number for St. Sebastian, dug through the paperwork I’d filled out back when I’d taken the job. To contact in-case-of-emergency: Patrick Linam.

  11:34 AM, minutes after recess. Carly had texted me at 7:03 Calgary time, during my second snooze. I’d mistaken the vibration of my phone for my alarm, reached over and turned it face down without reading her message, which I discovered during recess:

  always blur

  I wrote her back, Sorry missed ur msg this morning — what?

  In my classroom, I heard a faint buzzing. The kids settled into their desks, a mess of giggles and pencils and energy leftover from recess. The radiator, maybe. It sounded like a fly. A February fly? I clapped my hands twice, then three times, our classroom code to get settled and pay attention. The class clapped back, out of synch. The buzzing stopped. And at the door, the principal, with Patrick to his right, knocked.

  There was an old lady who swallowed a spider

  that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her

  she swallowed the spider to catch the fly

  I don’t know why she swallowed a fly

  Perhaps she’ll die

  &You wake up, and your sister is dead.

  The blankets are twisted around you, clammy, and your sister is dead, and he is beside you but not beside you, a
way in the bed, pillows between your bodies.

  Your sister is dead.

  When he left you, you stood naked in front of the mirror for a long time, until you barely recognized yourself. Across the bed, you barely recognize him, the disjointed puzzle parts of him you can see. A freckled arm whose constellations you once had memorized, a foot broken free from the covers.

  And it comes to you, then, the flash of her ankle, her bony foot. Pink ink. A balloon, the string dangling around her heel.

  Oh god.

  He stirs.

  &One weekend after I’d moved to Calgary, I flew back to Toronto for the holiday. Carly and I went to see a chick flick. I hadn’t seen a romantic comedy since moving to Calgary, since Patrick insisted on only watching movies that stimulated him mentally. Carly discussed chick flicks with seriousness, as though debating one of Shakespeare’s plays. “Do you think it’s realistic that the main character would actually sleep with her sister’s boyfriend?”

  She’d started taking fine arts classes at a community college, chipping away at her program part-time while working. She kept asking to borrow money so she could buy gesso or India ink. I chipped in when I could afford it, thrilled she’d squeaked out a high school diploma, that she’d actually been accepted to a college — any college, even if I couldn’t imagine how she’d actually find meaningful employment given the courses she’d enrolled in.

  Her career goals changed daily. That morning, she mused aloud about the possibility of being a tattoo artist, but then wondered whether she could handle all the needles. She had to take an English class and begged me to write her papers for her so that she could at least pass. I’d edited all her high school papers, too — tried to teach her how to properly use commas, how to avoid sentence fragments, how to write an opening statement, a concluding paragraph.

  “This is boring,” she’d say, when I tried to tutor her. “Can’t you just write it for me? You stole all the good genes. You get to be the smart one. You get to be the skinny one. So you owe me.” But, during her first college course, she’d received an A-plus on an art project, a collage of a raven on which she’d dyed seagull and pigeon feathers black and glued them one at a time into a ferocious, three-dimensional wing that stood two inches off the page. The first A she’d ever gotten. She hadn’t seemed that into art when she’d taken it in high school. Who knew? My baby sister — full of secrets.