Bats or Swallows (3 page)

Try this: place your palm close to someone else’s. Your hands should face each other, but not touch. Feel the heat radiate between the two of you. If you’re lucky the warmth will be palpable. Comforting. Do you know what’s happening? Your auras are conversing. A homeless man in Toronto taught this trick to Hannah a few days before she moved to Montreal. She’d given him a loonie, and then he walked beside her for the next block. She didn’t want to be rude, so she spoke to him and uncomfortably held her hand close to his, and in the end she was happy for the tip. It was a good icebreaker at parties and she was going to need icebreakers soon. She quickly learned that some palms were hotter than others, some conversations stronger.
She met Eric a month after she moved and he countered with his own parlour trick, which was that he could read palms, or at least knew the names of the lines. They stood in a dark corner at the back of a bar and she offered him her hand. He pointed out the lines.
Your life line cups your thumb. The head line cuts across your palm. And,
he said pressing down gently,
your heart line is the one that curves up by your fingers.

Hannah is surprised but not surprised that she can’t find a pregnancy test at the dep around the corner from her apartment. She has relied on this store for so many essentials: cheap wine, toilet paper, the occasional onion fished out from the dirty bin by the cash register. A pregnancy test is probably pushing it. It’s mid-March and it’s snowing outside, the millionth snowstorm of her first Montreal winter, and she reluctantly heads towards the nearest pharmacy four blocks away. She plucks a test from the harshly lit aisles and returns home, cold and wet and shivery.
Hannah pees on the stick and it turns pink. She’s surprised but not surprised when she learns that pink means positive. (Does it also mean that the baby will be a girl? She reads the package and feels dumb when, obviously, it doesn’t.)
Hannah paces around her apartment in her pyjamas, holds the stick and calculates. Nine months from now will be January, which means the baby will be a Capricorn. A friend had once offered to do her astrological chart, but she turned her down, so Hannah’s only grasping at astrological clues. She’s a Cancer and she knows that Capricorns don’t mesh well with Cancers. Maybe astrology doesn’t apply to mothers and their children?
Eric is an Aries. Hannah knows this because he’d mentioned that he and a friend were going to throw a joint birthday party at the beginning of April. After the third time they’d slept together, he didn’t call for eight days, and then when they finally did talk, they didn’t have much to say to each other. Cancers aren’t supposed to be compatible with Aries either. Maybe astrology was right, maybe the indicators were staring her plain in the face: the stars were misaligned from the very beginning.

Hannah wakes up early the next morning and goes to work. Even before she’s taken off her coat and unwound her scarf, Dominique, who works in the cubicle next to hers, says, “You don’t look very happy today.” Hannah keeps her toque on and complains about how cold it is outside.
They work quietly until a window pops up on her screen reminding her that there’s going to be a baby shower for their coworker, Sylvie, at lunch. Hannah wants to skip it, but Dominique waits for her before leaving.
“There’s going to be cake,” she says, her voice sing-songy and sweet, and Hannah can’t say no.
The department congregates in the cafeteria. Everyone lingers and takes turns touching Sylvie’s belly.
“His foot’s right here,” Sylvie says and holds Dominique’s hand to it.
“I can feel it!” Dominique says. “Hannah, check this!”
Hannah shook Sylvie’s hand when she first transferred to the office, but they’ve never hugged, hardly talked, and a touch like this seems too intimate for people who are practically strangers, so she does it gingerly, awkwardly. She probes the area for a knot of tissue, a baby’s foot pressing against his mother’s insides, but everything is smooth, curved round, like a globe or a medicine ball.
“Oops,” Sylvie says. “He moved. He’s hiding from you.”
Hannah backs up and helps herself to the grocery store cake, and when the baby starts to kick again, she holds up the plastic plate to show that her hands are full.
Back at her desk, she picks up the phone to call Eric. He doesn’t answer so she leaves him a message, a neutral one. He calls back within ten minutes, but when she sees his name on her caller ID she ignores it. She listens to the message before going home for the evening and in it he reminds her of his birthday party. This weekend.
You can bring a friend if you want.

It’s a relief to think of time in terms of distance, not growth. Hannah’s driving to Toronto for the weekend and each hour that passes is another 120 kilometres. Before getting the abortion, she worried that for every minute that ticked by, the thing inside of her became more real. More defined. What was a cluster of cells one hour bloomed into an embryo the next and, if she waited another night, might be a fetus by daybreak. With a nose. Or maybe little feet that kicked. She knew it didn’t work that way, that the chronology was more drawn out, but her pants seemed tighter.
The abortion didn’t hurt the way Hannah was afraid it would and, either way, overriding the pain was a feeling of deep, exhausting relief. The trip to Toronto was a week later and because it coincided with her grandfather’s birthday, she was hesitant to cancel. Her hormones were still out of whack and she cried in the car. Once. She’d taken a detour from the monotony of the highway and was driving on a stretch outside of Kingston that passed through the Thousand Islands. It gave way to a more gentle and scenic view, the St. Lawrence hugging the curve of the road. She’d visited the area one summer, stayed with a childhood friend who had a cottage on one of the tiny islands. She remembers the two of them pushing a canoe into the water, her oar slicing through the calm, clear river.
In the early spring the scenery is desolate. The water is grey-white and icy and the solitary houses on the small islands shuttered and empty. As she merges back on to the 401, she snuffles, stops crying, takes a big, gulping breath. But it was a good kind of cry. Things could’ve turned out so much worse.

Hannah was nineteen years old at the end of 1999, working at a grocery store when she wasn’t in school. People would come in and buy ten-pound sacks of flour, flats of water bottles and dozens of double D batteries, all in preparation for Y2K and the possibility of ultimate world destruction. These were people who’d read a sidebar in the newspaper about what items to have on hand in an emergency and wanted to stock up, but sometimes they would also get the crazies, people who gripped her arm desperately and wheezed, “Where’s the bottled water? I want
all of it
.” There was something vaguely prophetic about their hysteria and sometimes Hannah would even find herself in a minor panic.
New Year’s Eve approached and Hannah thought that if the world ended, she wouldn’t be surprised. It would make sense if it did. Still, she didn’t make special plans for this potential last day of Earth. On December 31st she sat in her boyfriend’s basement apartment with a few of their friends. They drank wine and she doesn’t remember what they talked about. When midnight struck, she squeezed her eyes shut and wondered if anything would be different when she opened them again. But everything was fine! The world didn’t fall apart; the computers kept running. They toasted each other, drank more wine, went to bed by three. She got the feeling that they were disappointed that nothing more spectacular had happened.
While in Toronto, Hannah visits this ex-boyfriend briefly. He has a new place, no longer a mouldy basement, now a postage-stamp sized condo downtown, all granite and glass. If the apocalypse loomed again, she wouldn’t choose to spend it with him, but she’s feeling nostalgic and decides that an hour while she’s visiting the city is fair.
He asks her how she’s doing, but he asks with a certain inflection—“how are you
doing
?”—as if he’s genuinely concerned, like maybe he suspects something’s wrong. Hannah keeps looking at herself in the mirror and wondering if she looks different. She’s worried that her eyes look older or sad or that, even if she looks the same, maybe her palms give off less heat after such a cold winter.
As they’re talking, it starts raining and Hannah pauses to listen to it beat against his windows. The thought of rain is appealing and she hopes the weather is the same in Montreal. Rain would melt the snow, clean the streets.
“I’m good.” She says it confidently and he believes her, which is satisfying enough. Maybe “good” isn’t the right word to describe how she feels, but while she’s sitting there she realizes that she does feel differently than she has in a long time. She feels impermeable.

When Hannah leaves her ex-boyfriend’s condo, she sees a rainbow stretching somewhere in the distance towards the lake. She stands underneath an awning and stares at it. The colours are blurred and faint, but it’s definitely a rainbow.
Logically, rationally and scientifically, she knows that a rainbow is just the reflection of light on water droplets. But she knows lots of things. She also knows that palm reading is a fluke and astrology can be interpreted any way one wants. She knows that she can’t read minds and people can’t read hers, and that the end of the world will probably not happen on the day everyone is predicting. Most of all she knows that life just
happens
and that there isn’t an overarching, sensible pattern to it, but it doesn’t mean that she can’t believe in signs or look to them for guidance.
The rainbow, Hannah decides, as she walks to the subway, is a good sign. She’s not sure what else it could be.

T
HERE'S A SEGMENT OF THE POPULATION
that even when forced will not throw out their useless and worthless belongings. My parents got rich by capitalizing on this sentimental weakness. They started by renting out 5×10 foot cubes that could be filled with detritus and stored in a warehouse, We Store, out of sight and out of mind. They opened another warehouse with more storage options and as the condo industry boomed, their business flourished. They now own a series of We Stores scattered around the Greater Toronto Area, all of them close to capacity and stuffed to the gills with—despite their owners’ claims—crap. Sometimes an expensive piece of antique furniture will come in for storage, something that can’t possibly match its owner’s new seven hundred square foot minimalist condo, but in general We Store houses garage sale fare—stained couches, plastic bags of greying stuffed animals, boxes of mismatched cutlery—everything packed carefully and precisely, as if their owners were historians preserving the most valuable of artifacts.
During
high school I spent my summers working in reception at the warehouse in Mississauga, a half-hour drive from our home in Toronto. This particular We Store was wedged between the highway and a vast field that hadn’t yet been developed into an industrial park or subdivision. At dusk if I stood at the edge of the parking lot with my back to the warehouse and the highway, I could almost trick myself into thinking I was in the country, that hum of crickets and mosquitoes, all that overgrown former farmland bleached pale green and yellow from the summer sun. And there were animals too, small ones, raccoons and skunks and foxes, that would emerge from the field and nose their way towards the garbage bins. The unlucky ones would wander off and get slammed by cars that took the highway exit too quickly. We were the closest building, so the corpses often got tossed on our property, glassy-eyed and bloody, their fur still soft. My father once found a dead deer behind the garbage bins. It must have dragged itself over, looking for a place to die with dignity.
The
summer I was seventeen, my older sister Greta asked our parents to get her boyfriend a job at one of the warehouses. Daniel was about to start a master’s degree in art history and the gallery he was supposed to work at closed at the last minute. He needed the money, so my father hired him and placed him as the assistant to our full-time facilities manager, Gord. Daniel was stationed in Mississauga with me.
On
his first day at We Store there was mass carnage: an entire family of raccoons, two big ones and two little ones, done in by a transport truck. Their bodies were splayed across the parking lot, and I had to swerve to avoid them when I pulled in that morning. Daniel arrived soon afterwards.
“Hey April,”
he said when he saw me. “It’s pretty gross out there.” I knew one of his responsibilities would be to clean it up, but I waited for Gord to break the news to him.
“How
exactly do I get rid of them?” Daniel asked. He tried to be cheerful about it. “I wasn’t told this job required a rabies shot.”
Gord
held out a pair of gloves and a garbage bag and handed them over. “It was a full moon last night; we always get casualties on full moons. A few weeks ago it was skunks. Where the hell do skunks come from?”
“I’ve
never really thought about it,” Daniel said.
“It’s
too bad the racoons landed in the parking lot. If they get killed in the street the city will take care of them.”
“Maybe
I can ask them nicely.”
“You’ll
have to clean the bodies quick before they start to rot. And do the babies first; they bother the customers.”
“I’m
sorry,” I said to Daniel from where I sat at reception. He snapped on the gloves and headed outside.

“I’ve
never been spoiled,” Greta said to Mom that night. She’d driven over from the apartment she shared with Daniel downtown. The three of us had dinner together while Dad worked late.
“Okay,”
Mom said.
“I
mean, I’ve never bothered you and Dad for anything extravagant or crazy, right? Neither has April. We just weren’t raised like that.”
“Sure,”
Mom looked at me and I shrugged.
“So,
I know it was a lot asking you to give Daniel a job at the last minute, but I don’t know why you had to give him
that
job.”
“Yes.”
“Is
it that bad, April?” Mom and Greta turned and stared at me.
“Kind of,”
I said. “He spent the morning scrubbing roadkill off the parking lot.”
“See,
it’s a shitty job. I’m sorry, but it is.”
“Isn’t
art working with your hands?”
“Mom,
he’s studying art history. He doesn’t
use his hands
.”
“He
can quit if he doesn’t like it.”
“Can
you talk to Dad about it?”
Mom
agreed to, but even if she did, Daniel’s position didn’t change. He didn’t quit in protest either. He showed up every morning on time and did whatever Gord told him to do, although I got the feeling he stuck it out to prove a point to either Greta or my parents.
Daniel
was more useful, or at least sturdier than Phillip, last summer’s maintenance assistant. Phillip’s mother worked in accounting and had pulled some strings to get him on-board. He was nineteen, geeky and awkward, and his parents were worried that he spent too much time in front of the computer. They encouraged a summer foray into manual labour thinking it would be a good character building experience, if not a muscle building one. Phillip and I were the youngest people at the warehouse and became friends when Gord asked me to show him where to find the lawn mower. Phillip’s clumsiness pained him. “I just can’t stand to look at his face again today,” Gord said, not even apologetically. Whenever Gord became too fed up, Phillip would lay low and sit with me in reception. One afternoon we snuck away to an empty storage room to smoke a joint he’d supposedly brought to work.
“So,
where is it?” I asked. I’d smoked pot once, but hadn’t inhaled properly and only felt a keen awareness of my own sobriety. I was excited to smoke up with him and knew that I wouldn’t be embarrassed if I coughed too much or said something dumb. Phillip squirmed and admitted he didn’t have one. “I just wanted to get you alone,” he said looking down. His skinniness made me feel fierce and so I leaned over and kissed him and we made out on the cold, concrete floor, the sickly fluorescent lights betraying the real summer sun outside. After that we used his keys to open storage cubes and make out behind stacks of boxes or on plastic covered couches. No one ever caught us.
Phillip
was fired before the summer even ended when he knocked over a jug of paint solvent. The chemicals seeped under the door of a storage locker and corroded a chunk of a rattan chair. He called me at reception a few times after he left, but outside the confines of the warehouse he lost his sheen.

I’d
only been working a week when Daniel started, but I already hated being there. I dealt with customers occasionally, but I resented them, annoyed by the fact that they chose to spend money to keep their ugly, cheap belongings when they could donate them or simply throw them out. I imagined that all of those useless, unused items languishing in row after row of storage lockers weighed heavy on the world, that we were saddling it with too much unnecessary burden. There had to be some kind of physical impact; I worried we would throw the earth off its orbit.
I
was going to quit. I practiced the speech I would give to my parents while I sat at reception, staring at the phone and wondering when it would ring. It was a moral stance, I would tell them. Not that I found them or their business immoral (I was grateful for what their entrepreneurship had provided our family), but I didn’t want to willingly participate in the perpetuation of blind consumption. Or something. I chickened out. Greta had also worked at We Store in high school and had emerged unscathed. Finally, to appease myself, I developed a theory. I rationalized that I was entitled to specific amounts of things in my life, that there was a finite limit to love and good fortune. By the same logic, the more I chipped away at the bad stuff, the less I would have to endure in the future. This is how I felt about my boredom at We Store: if I could get it out of the way—the tedium of an office job—there would be more room left in the rest of my life for something more exciting, more vibrant. I tried to derive a kind of pleasure from the mindless work, a satisfaction of paying my dues. I typed letters, I answered phones and felt efficient and purposefully bored.
Then
Daniel started working and things got more interesting. He and Greta had been dating for two years, but I knew him only as an extension of my sister. My awareness of him was coloured entirely by his relationship to her and it was strange talking to him at We Store as if he was a real person, not just a character in my sister’s life.
Daniel
and I talked a lot because neither of us had much to do. We knew we were only there thanks to nepotism; I doubt Dad would have hired strangers to do our jobs if we left. After the first week of consistent conversation, I was surprised by how much I liked Daniel. He was funny in a way I had never noticed before, and smart.
Daniel
took walks whenever there was a lull in his day. He would cut through the field towards the closest strip mall. I would see him sometimes emerge from the tall grass, swatting away mosquitoes, carrying two chocolate Frosties from Wendy’s—one for him, one for me. Everyone else drove to the strip mall. “It’s exercise,” he said.
Daniel
also lectured me about art, practice for his future career as an art history professor. He explained chronologically, skipping from Rococo to Romanticism. “It’s not so bad working here,” he once told me. “I’m going through a Cubist phase anyway.”

A
large part of my job consisted of printing out and mailing renewal notices. People often lost track of their storage space and treated it as they would a musty basement, forgetting that these spaces were run by people who had their credit card numbers and charged interest. After labelling a new batch of notices, a girl approached my desk and asked for the biggest storage space she could get.
Her
name was Maggie and she was different than our usual customers. She was young, about Greta’s age, and pretty. I took her outside to the back where there was a row of small sheds, all of them lined with identical white vinyl siding and shuttered with orange metal doors. From far away they looked like their own little subdivision, uniformly symmetric, little boxes made of ticky-tacky. There was even a row of flowers planted around the edges. Daniel watered them every day. My father advertised them as “cottages,” but I couldn’t bring myself to call them that. I opened the door and showed her the space.
“This
is 10×30 feet, enough for a three to four bedroom home. You can fit appliances and like, patio furniture in it.”
"Is
there electricity?” she asked.
“Some units
have it. It costs extra.”
“It’s
perfect,” she breathed. “I’ll take it.”
Maggie
returned the next day with a U-Haul. I was curious about what she needed the storage space for. I imagined her as the type who bought around-the-world plane tickets and needed to store her quirky, vintage belongings while she sublet her loft. She had a girlfriend with her and the two of them worked quickly, hauling out boxes and a rolled-up rug. The only item they had trouble with was a couch, dark brown and corduroy. Daniel helped them with that.

I
only worked Wednesday to Friday, relieving the regular receptionist so she could spend extra time with her children. When I returned the following Wednesday I was surprised to see Maggie again. She walked across the parking lot with a cup of coffee. I followed her and noticed that she’d gone into her storage shed and closed the door behind her. After sending out a few renewal notices, I went outside and knocked on her door. She opened it a crack. When she saw me, she opened the door wider and I peeked inside. The entire cube looked like a living room. The couch was pushed along the far wall and a coffee table cut the room in half. The rug, blue and white striped, was rolled out underneath.
“Hey,”
she said. “What’s up?”
“Do
you live here?” I asked.
“Not
exactly.”
“You’re
not allowed to live here.”
“I
know,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m not. Come in. Your name’s April, right? Are you just working here for the summer?”
I
didn’t answer. “I’m not sure what you’re doing.” I said instead, my voice stumbling.
“Will
you get me in trouble if I tell you?” I shook my head. “I’m a photographer primarily, but this is a conceptual art piece. I’m pretending to live here and I’m documenting it. The couch folds out into a bed, but I’ve only spent the night once. It’s creepy here at night, so I’ve been coming mostly during the day.”
Conceptual
art. Daniel hadn’t gotten to that one yet. “What do you mean an art piece? Why?”
“It’s
part of my MFA thesis. I’m not allowed to do this, am I?”
“I
don’t think so,” I said.
“It’s
just for a month. As long as the owner doesn’t find out, I’ll be fine.”
“He
won’t,” I promised, even though she didn’t know the owners were my parents.
“This
place is pretty cozy, isn’t it?”
As
she pointed out more decorating details, Daniel came to the doorway holding my daily Frosty. Maggie had forgotten to close the door all the way and he saw us when he cut through the field.
“Hi?”
He peered into the shed and Maggie suddenly looked nervous.
“Don’t
worry,” I said. “Daniel’s studying art history. He’ll keep quiet.” I felt important as I reassured her, in on something big. I took the cup out of his hand and spooned up some ice cream.