Swallow Read online

  Aubrey had stayed home to finish a paper for another class. I’d taken the same seat near the back.

  “Well, you know, with creativity comes madness. Look at van Gogh. Sliced off his own ear.” Patrick took off his glasses to clean them, and I could see the weird mottled grey of his eyes. His chosen artist had gone blind in his old age, his paintings becoming more and more impressionistic.

  The whole project made my skull ache, reminding me of all the crazy in my family. My sobbing grandmother setting the kitchen on fire, my loony mom yelling at telemarketers, my disappearing Dad. “I need a break from it,” I said. “I don’t even want to think about this project.”

  “You know what?” Patrick said. “I could use a break, too. Do you want to have dinner with me on Friday?”

  I didn’t realize what he meant at first. When I didn’t respond, he added, “I promise I won’t talk about the paper.”

  “Oh!” I said, “Oh, yeah, okay, sure.”

  &When I returned to Calgary after Carly’s funeral, I sat at my computer, scrolling through pictures I’d saved on my hard drive of Carly, pictures of the two of us together before I’d moved, and then pictures she’d sent me of her and Ryan. Between how many photos she’d emailed me, and how Patrick preferred to be behind a camera versus in front of it, I had more pictures of Carly’s relationship than my own.

  Carly’s seventeenth birthday, the two of us at a Jays game, Carly’s hair in pigtails under her ball cap.

  Carly posing in front of the Christmas tree, wearing the new jeans I’d bought her.

  Carly in Calgary, holding a squirming Kipling under the armpits. A self-portrait of Ryan and Carly, around which Carly had photo-edited a pink heart. Underneath it, she’d typed “4 Ever!”

  Sleep became blotchy with intrusive dreams.

  She grinned. Dimpled cheeks, Pigtailed hair. Fingers outstretched, the flaming orange of Cheetos dust on her fingers. She’d gotten into the pantry. Mom was going to kill me.

  Carly! Carly!

  My chest, my lungs compacted. My eyes wide, pupils distended in the dark, drowning in my duvet cover. I struggled to breathe. My heart flipped over, searing, in a frying pan.

  & After my last day of seventh grade, Aubrey and I got permission to take the subway to Eaton Centre to spend our allowance. Aubrey’s mom met us there, bought us veggie dogs, and drove us home. I’d purchased a new Ace of Base cassette and planned to spend the afternoon listening to the songs I hadn’t yet heard on the radio, provided Carly would relinquish her beloved Raffi tape, which she should have outgrown.

  When I got home, I let myself into the apartment to find Papi and Carly playing Go Fish. Papi still walked Carly home from school, but Mom had called in sick that morning, having dragged herself around the apartment for several days. She’d asked me to get Carly ready for school, and I’d done so, rushing to get it over with, telling Carly to shut up and hurry. Still, Carly sang the entire time I tried to brush the tangles out of her hair, and I’d had the tune to “Bananaphone” in my head all day. Mom got up only to brew a pot of coffee, then took a mug of it back to bed with her. I filled my own mug with the dark brew when she wasn’t looking, took a gulp. I almost choked, coughing the hot liquid from my throat.

  “This song drives me bananas!” Carly exclaimed, as I ushered her out the door.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked Papi.

  “Um, do you have any. . .fives?” Carly asked. She held her Garfield cards splayed too far forward; Papi could easily see them.

  “Your mother went on vacation,” Papi said. “I’m going to stay with you for a little while.”

  Vacation? She’d barely woken up that morning. I set my bag down on the floor beside me and kicked off my shoes.

  “Vacation where?” I asked.

  Papi’s words sounded well articulated, intentional. He tilted his head towards Carly while speaking. “Mexico. She’ll be back in a week or so.”

  I clenched my jaw. “Mexico?”

  “We baked a cake!” Carly announced. “I licked the beaters.” She hummed the opening verse to “Bananaphone.”

  “Car — cut it out!” I snapped.

  “A chocolate cake!” Papi said, loudly. “Right, Carly?”

  “Can we eat it now?” Carly asked, “Can we, can we, can we?”

  “What do you think, Darcy?” Papi asked.

  I dropped my backpack at my feet. “Sure.”

  When Carly darted up and towards the fridge, scattering her cards on the floor, I said quietly to Papi, “She’s coming back, right? She has to come back. She can’t leave Carly.”

  “She’s coming back,” he said. “I promise you.”

  In my bedroom, I crossed the day off my dry erase calendar, X’d out the happy words, LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!

  What day would I die? Each year, I passed it, over and over, unaware of the anniversary of my death. Maybe I would die young. Maybe a car would hit me on the way to the bus stop before I even graduated high school. Maybe I would get cancer. Or a rare mystery illness that no one could diagnose until it was too late. Maybe it was the anniversary of my death, right then. Maybe —

  Carly bounded into my room, her mouth smeared with chocolate. “Come! I cut you a ginormous piece!”

  &Carly’s proclamation that she had “good news” that last Valentine’s Day distracted me all morning. While teaching Geography, I listed Austria as one of the continents. Freya Nichol’s hand shot up. “Ms. Nolan, don’t you mean Australia?

  ” “Right!” I said, a little too loudly. “You caught my trick! Good job, Freya!” The kids were eager to fill the baskets we’d made earlier in the week with their red and pink paper valentines.

  On my recess break, I got Carly’s voicemail the first time I called, and then the second time. Where the hell was she? Why wasn’t she answering? Was she okay?

  She picked up the third time, while I had a mouth full of carrot.

  “Hey,” she said, so nonchalant. So nonchalant? What the fuck? I swallowed too quickly, the carrot rough in my throat.

  “Hey,” I said. “So what’s your good news?”

  “Okay,” she said, “okay, so. . .you won’t believe it.” She seemed to be stalling, purposely, for dramatic effect. “I’m gonna be a model.”

  “What?” I crunched hard on another carrot.

  “A model! There’s this guy in the art department at U of T, photography department, I mean. A friend of Heather in my class, and he’s doing this project on nudes, right?”

  “Wait, wait — ” My brain struggled to catch up. “You want to be a nude model?”

  “Kinda! It’s not pornography, it’s art. And it’s tasteful. Like, with my hands covering my nipples and stuff like that.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “I think it’s a cool idea, his project, he says it’s about like, fatalism or some jibber-jabber.”

  “You’re going to pose naked for this guy? Is he your age?”

  “Couple years older. Twenty-five or something. He always wears hats, isn’t that funny? Every time I see him, he’s wearing a hat. Maybe it’s some sort of political statement.”

  I noticed Conor in the doorway to the staff room, and he held up a student’s file, reminding me that we’d agreed to conference about a bullying incident between two Grade Six boys. I held up one finger at him. He grinned and held up two fingers back at me, a peace sign.

  “Car — ” I said, interrupting her. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, but I actually have to run to a meeting, can we talk about this later?”

  “Sure,” she said, “I’m going to go have drinks with this guy. He said he might be able to get the studio so we can do the shoot this afternoon.”

  “You don’t drink!”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I know, relax, I’ll have a Red Bull. Maybe go for a quick run, get rid of some water weight. God I hate running.”

  “You’re not fat,” I said. “We’ll talk about this later, okay? Make sure this project of his is legit. Maybe you
should talk to me again before you take any pictures. This guy could be a creep. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t — ”

  “Heather!” Talking to someone else, already one step ahead. “I’ll be there in a sec! Thanks, Darce, talk to you later!”

  &During our mother’s “vacation,” Papi rented a car and took us on a surprise field trip. Carly often fell asleep on car rides, but this time I fell asleep in the back seat to the low drone of Papi humming along with a cassette tape of classical music. When I woke up, the music skidded along, fast and foreboding.

  Papi had set up a makeshift bed on our couch, and when I awoke to go to the bathroom, his presence reminded me of our mother’s absence like a slap. I wanted her back. I didn’t want her back. Papi slept flat on his back, rigid and still, like a corpse in a coffin.

  “I’m sorry, did the music wake you?” Papi asked, making a left turn.

  My shoulder ached from where I’d jammed it against the window to nap. “I’m fine.”

  “I love classical music,” Carly chirped. Carly awoke from naps fully recharged, sundrenched. “Papi, make the radio do the bumblebee song again.”

  “Ah!” Papi glanced over his shoulder and smiled at us. “Rimsky-Korsakov, ‘Flight of the Bumblebee.’ Coming up.” He hit rewind, and the tape deck purred.

  When we arrived, my stomach growled. Carly happily munched on the peanut butter granola bars Papi had packed, getting crumbs everywhere, but the drive had made me motion sick. When I stood up out of the car, I bent over for a moment, hands to my thighs, trying to settle my stomach.

  “Birdie!” Carly shrieked. I cringed. She sounded like a toddler.

  We were in Mississauga, I discovered, at a wildlife veterinary clinic. It had a large bird painted on the outside. Carly flitted back and forth from Papi to the clinic entrance. I dragged my feet along the gravel path. Seriously? A wildlife veterinary clinic? I shuffled inside. “Cool, Carly, huh?” I gave her the widest smile I could.

  Inside, a chubby woman wearing pale blue scrubs came over and gave Papi a squishy hug. She looked to be probably ten or so years younger than him, and had round, ruddy cheeks. She should have been a baker, I thought. She had a small multicoloured bird appliquéd to the pocket of her shirt.

  Carly stood up on her tiptoes. “I like your bird.”

  The lady grinned. “Did you know lots of female birds are brown or grey? It’s the male birds that are all pretty and colourful. It’s so that they can attract a mate.” She smiled at Papi. “So this bird would probably be a boy.”

  “This is my friend Laura,” Papi said. “Laura is the veterinarian here.”

  Laura took Carly to another part of the clinic to visit a chipmunk with a cloudy eye. Carly put her face right up to his cage. I wandered off on my own, drawn to a small cage at the back of the main room. In it, a small bird was huddled by itself in the corner, its slick black beak tucked into its chest, masking its reddish throat. It had a long, dark back. Its eyes flickered open and closed, open and closed.

  “It’s a swallow,” Papi said. I hadn’t realized he was behind me. “A barn swallow.”

  “It looks sad,” I said.

  “Maybe. It’s probably recovering from being sick.” He squatted down a bit to become eye level with the bird, which perched on one of the lowest rungs of the cage. “Did you know, Darcy, that swallows mate for life?”

  I didn’t say anything. The swallow rustled its feathers for a moment, settling.

  “Maybe you’ve seen people with tattoos of swallows before. It actually dates back to sailors, who often had to go away for long journeys. Swallows symbolized hope for their safe return home, back to those they loved. And if someone didn’t survive, if a person drowned at sea, legend said that swallows would find the person’s soul and carry it up to Heaven.”

  “That’s depressing,” I said, not looking at Papi. The bird seemed to agree with me, tucking further into itself, as though it wanted to dissolve. It looked nothing like the perky, winking bird stitched onto Laura’s pocket. If swallows mated for life, where was its partner? Would it mourn forever, like Papi? What happened when part of you was gone for good?

  “I’m hungry,” I said. “I’m going out to the car to get a snack.”

  &When we got back to Calgary after Carly’s funeral, Patrick began coming over every day around six PM, letting himself in. Oftentimes, he found me still in bed, having lain awake all night and then finally passed out, exhausted, at dawn. Those days, he would crawl in beside me, his chest to my back, his arms around me like a cocoon. A little boy in kindergarten at St. Sebastian had been diagnosed with autism, and we’d had a staff meeting about the disorder to increase awareness, during which his teacher had demonstrated how the boy liked to be hugged; the deep pressure calmed him. With Patrick pressed up beside me, the pressure on my lungs released, the air letting out slowly, like a hissing balloon.

  He came over one day, at the end of the second week, with a casserole dish smelling strongly of onions. I had actually slept somewhat the night before. The small pocket of energy that afforded me had resulted in all my towels being washed and folded.

  “I had leftovers,” he said.

  Patrick had leftovers? “Did you make this?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Where do you want me to put it?” He held it out. I seemed to have missed him learning how to cook. I wanted to cry, not knowing if it was because of how foreign he suddenly seemed, or because of the giant onion stink. I took it and thought, Never take food from a stranger.

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  “Okay. Well, you’ll have it for later. You look skinny. I’m worried about you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Okay,” I mumbled. We looked at each other before he took the dish back from me, as if he recognized his responsibility in keeping up the momentum. Like a metronome; he moved and I moved, matching his pace. I didn’t know how else to function. Patrick put the casserole in the fridge. He settled on the futon, reached for the remote. “Do you want to watch a movie or something?”

  Do I?

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Patrick’s brow creased. “What’s what?”

  “This.” I couldn’t explain. I thought of Carly trying to converse with Papi in Polish, his native language. He tried to teach her, but she remembered only a very limited repertoire of words. Hello, my name is. Witam, mam na imi.

  “Okay,” Patrick said. “Come here. It’s okay. What are you confused about?”

  I stood still in the kitchen. “Us.” I motioned at the space between the two of us, “This. Are we? I mean. . .”

  “Darce. . .” He let out a long exhalation. “I don’t think now is the time to really be talking about this, do you? I mean, you’ve got enough on your plate with. . .with. . .what your sister. . .did.”

  What your sister did. As though she voluntarily wrote Aubrey’s number down on a slip of paper, tucked it and her ID into her pocket, walked out of her apartment, turned left at the end of her street, walked north, walked down the stairs into the subway tunnel, slipped her token into the slot, pushed the revolving doors, walked to the platform, paced the platform a few times, listened for the rumble of the train, laid her jacket on the floor, and jumped. As though I had nothing to do with it.

  &Our mother came back from her “vacation” skinnier than she had been, and more agitated, restless. She began to drink coffee out of a clear water bottle, straight and black. Her tongue took on a perpetual brown sheen. In the months prior, she’d been sluggish, exhausted. After returning, she moved nervously around the apartment, picking at the skin at the creases of her elbows, tearing paper and napkins into shreds, cleaning invisible spots on the walls and the carpet. She started yelling at customer service agents again, over the phone. But she could keep up with Carly better than before, taking her for long walks up and down Bloor Street, repetitively pushing her on the swings at the park. After tagging along for one or two jaunts, I gave up.

  I lay on my top bunk with the ghetto bla
ster loud enough so that I couldn’t hear my thoughts anymore. She didn’t explain where she’d been, and though I wasn’t buying the vacation story, I didn’t ask. She didn’t have the money to jet off to Mexico with a friend. And, on top of that, she didn’t have any friends close enough to jet off to Mexico with. When Aubrey’s mother had gone to Las Vegas with a girlfriend for her birthday one year, my mother had called her a “rich bitch.”

  I didn’t know where she’d gone, but I knew why. To get away from her kids. Sure, Carly was a handful, always singing and shrieking and crying and dancing, climbing and clamouring for attention. But what was wrong with me?

  My mother also joined a book club that met every Thursday night. I hadn’t seen my mother read a book except for Goodnight Moon and Green Eggs and Ham. She’d finished high school, but barely. The book club was just another excuse. Where was she going now?

  I would not like them

  here or there.

  I would not like them anywhere.

  Aubrey had gone with her parents to their cabin in Haliburton for an entire month — half our summer vacation. I wrote her a letter the week she left, splurging on pink stationary and a purple ink pen. Aubrey’s letters would make my month of babysitting Carly more bearable. I listened for the postman outside our door, sorting through the mail that came through our slot, waiting for Aubrey’s reply. Nothing.

  Aubrey returned berry brown and bursting with confessions about having kissed a boy a whole year older than us who also spent his summer at his parents’ cabin. “The first kiss was kind of weird,” she told me, “but it definitely got better with practice.” I hoped she wouldn’t meet anyone she wanted to kiss during the school year. I didn’t want to lose her again.

  Aubrey didn’t, but my mother did: Richard the Dick. Not much taller than my mother, Dick was bald, and had a beer gut and excessive eyebrows. He wore the same faded black T-shirt with a pinkish bleach stain on the seam every time I saw him and drove a burnt red 1987 Buick LeSabre. He called Carly “squirt,” liked to catch her and rub his fist on the top of her head. “Knuckle sandwich!”