Bats or Swallows (4 page)

The
next time I saw Maggie she was outside behind the row of sheds setting up a tripod.
“Hey
April,” she asked. “Can I take your picture?”
“Me?”
“It
would be great if I got photos of the people who work here,” she said. “You don’t have to if you’re not comfortable.”
But
I agreed, flattered that she wanted to use me in her thesis. She directed me to look up at the sky. I threw my head back and as I waited for her to take my picture, I noticed how big the sky was out here. There weren’t any tall buildings to block the sky’s hugeness, no houses either. This surprised me the way you’re surprised when you discover something obvious: of
course
the sky was bigger out here, of
course
it would be this beautiful. As Maggie fiddled with the camera, I stared at the wisps of clouds and blue sky, its beauty set inside a grid of power lines.
I
mentioned the photos to Daniel, and he told me that Maggie had taken his photo too.
“What
are you doing in your photo?” I asked.
“Watering
the flowers.”
This
made me laugh. I wasn’t sure if he was lying.
“I
look like the little girl in that Renoir painting.”
“Renoir?”
“April,”
Daniel said. “I have so much to teach you.”
I
let him use my computer to find an image of it online. The painting was of a smiling little girl holding a watering can, all dreamy brush strokes and shades of pastel.
“Were
you wearing a dress too?” I asked.
Of
course,” he said. “Anything for art.”
Later
that afternoon things were slow, so when Daniel was about to leave to get Frosties, I decided I’d go with him. I was still feeling high off the photo shoot with Maggie that morning.
Daniel
was surprised when I ran up behind him. The walk was longer than I expected and blades of crab grass scratched my ankles.
“I
can’t believe you do this every day,” I complained. “It’s so hot out. My head is overheating, feel it.” He placed his palm on the top of my head. I had dark hair and in the summer it soaked up heat if I wasn’t wearing a hat.
“Jesus,
you’re burning up.”
I
reached up and touched his head too, pressing my fingers into his sandy coloured short hair. It was much cooler than mine. We kept walking and for a few moments he kept his hand on my head, protecting it from the sun.
Daniel
and I decided not to tell anyone about Maggie. We knew that if she got in trouble, her whole project would be ruined. He and Greta would sometimes come over for dinner and there would be no talk of art students or photography. Every so often my parents or Greta asked us about work at the warehouse. “It’s not so bad,” I would say and Daniel would agree and then we would smile at each other quickly. I savoured the secret between us, proof of our strengthening bond.

With
Maggie spending her days at We Store, work took on a different rhythm. My days of answering the telephone or stuffing envelopes were punctuated not only by the occasional art lecture from Daniel, but by visits with Maggie as well. She was discreet, but often stopped by reception to say hello. She invited me over for a drink once, and after I sat down took a bottle of lemonade out of the bar fridge she’d plugged into the corner of the shed. She had a laptop propped up on the table and would spend hours in there typing. Daniel liked talking to Maggie too, and sometimes I would see them hanging out behind her shed. Occasionally I would join them, but in general we socialized in pairs: me and Daniel, me and Maggie, or Maggie and Daniel.
One
day I drove to Wendy’s to buy the Frosties, and I even picked one up for Maggie, whose car I’d seen in the parking lot. It was a hot day and I welcomed the cool blast of air conditioning. When I returned I couldn’t find Daniel, so I knocked on Maggie’s shed first and waited for her to answer. Daniel was there with her, sitting on the couch. “Good timing,” I said, walked in and perched on the edge of the coffee table holding the tray of cups. “It’s so hot in here. I don’t know how you can get any work done. You’ll need this.”
Maggie
took her Frosty first. Daniel didn’t look at me when I passed his over.
“Are
you okay?” I asked him. “You look weird.”
His
cheeks were rosy and sweaty from the heat. Maggie laughed and Daniel smiled at her, but it wasn’t the wry smile he gave me when we joked around at reception; it was more private. There was something about the smile that reminded me of my previous summer. I remembered Phillip and me inside the suffocating storage cubes, the privacy they afforded. We could close the door behind us and it was like we had stepped into a vacuum; no one had any idea where we were or what we were doing. A minute or an hour would pass and nothing would change, not even the shadows.
I
walked back to reception and for the first time I wondered if Maggie and Daniel were doing the same thing. It hadn’t occurred to me earlier, and I didn’t think they could be, but I wasn’t sure. When Daniel came by my desk later that afternoon, I was still unsettled.
“Is
something going on between you and Maggie?” I asked. It just came out.
“Listen,”
he said. “Don’t tell Greta about any of this.”
“What’s
that supposed to mean?”
“Let
me talk to her, okay, April? It’s complicated.” He talked to me like I was a child or a little sister. I felt my eyes well up and I looked down at my keyboard.
“I
can’t believe it.” I said.
“Hey,”
he said. “It’ll be okay.” He briefly touched the top of my head, like he had that day out in the sun. I hadn’t accompanied him on his walks since then. I was waiting for him to ask me first, as if it would be more appropriate that way, but he never did. I sometimes found myself feeling embarrassed for hoping that he would ask and then for thinking that if I invited myself it could be construed as inappropriate. What was inappropriate about it? I shook his hand away.
Maybe
this was the real reason we didn’t talk about Maggie around Greta. It had nothing to do with putting her thesis project in jeopardy or because Daniel and I shared a secret. It was, I suppose, because he had his own secret. I added up the clues: Daniel’s art lectures had tapered off and were sloppy as he meandered through Surrealism. Recently I was the one making the Frosty runs. Daniel no longer had any lulls in his days.
“I
have work to do,” I said to him.
I
couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed anything between Maggie and Daniel sooner. That Daniel could be cheating on Greta was beyond me, not an event I had planned on working into my theory of why I was still there at We Store. Did this count as something bad for me or just for Greta? More for Greta, but I still felt gutted, my cheeks hot with shame or anger, I wasn’t sure which.
I
saw the fallacy of my theory. I wasn’t chipping away at my lifetime supply of tedium. I was being cushioned by it. Boredom bred boredom, and even worse, made you accustomed to it. The previous summer I had had Phillip to distract me, and this summer I had Daniel for awhile, but now that I suspected something going on between him and Maggie, all I had was a glaring reminder of my own naivety.
I
shut off the computer and went outside for air. I leaned against my car and sipped the remains of the Frosty. It was warm by then, liquefied and sickly syrupy. I faced away from the storage sheds and thought about what I was going to do.
Before
I did anything definitive—told Gord about Maggie, told Greta about Daniel, told my parents that I was going to quit—or worse, before I did absolutely nothing, I looked up at the sky, still big, still blue. I could see the moon, its white, craggy outline far off in the horizon. I forgot you could sometimes see the moon in the daytime. It wasn’t a full moon, but it was almost there.
I
thought of the animals living out in the field, all those doomed rodents, invisible until they were found dead on the side of the road or smeared on our parking lot. I hoped that they would come out that night in a moonlit stupor and sacrifice themselves so that Daniel would be forced to scrub the guts and hearts and bones from the asphalt in the sweltering, suburban summer heat. If this happened, my theory could possibly be redeemed. I felt good thinking and hoping for it, standing there, my legs burning against the side of my car while I clutched that dripping milkshake.

Thomas picked Nikki up from the subway station. It was late afternoon and she was standing out front with her sunglasses on, clutching her bags, ready. She threw her things into the back seat of his car and jumped into the front. They’d saved up some money and were going on vacation. Skipping town.
Thomas drove until just before Windsor where they stopped at a Tim Hortons so Nikki could take the wheel. He said he got nervous at the border, that customs officers were nicer to girls anyway. The traffic was bad heading into Detroit and Nikki got nervous on the bridge. She didn’t drive often, and they were so high up, only a frothy brown strip of water separating the two cities below them. When they crossed into Michigan there was construction on the highways and half the time they were forced to drive on the shoulder, on the rumble strips—those grooves on the side of the highway that are there to remind you when you’re veering off course.
They drove until midnight. When they were too tired to go any further, they pulled off at the next exit. Piqua, Ohio. The pamphlet Nikki grabbed from the motel lobby advertised only churches, a dozen of them. She hadn’t expected that many for what seemed like a small town, and she took this as a sign that they were in a different country, that this was the kind of thing that separated Canada from the United States. She was so eager to feel far away that she kept grasping at signs that things were different. This was something.
It took ten minutes for the owner of the motel to wake up and when they got their room, they noticed a tiny hole drilled just above the headboard facing the full-length mirror. It reminded Nikki of a news segment she’d seen about motels installing video cameras, filming their customers having sex and then distributing the footage on the Internet. She stuffed a wad of toilet paper into the hole.
Nikki ran out to get her toothbrush from the car and noticed a cornfield backing onto the parking lot. There were little clouds of fireflies darting around in crazy circles. She would’ve gone closer to look at them, but the cornfield looked ominous and huge, darker than the sky, like it could swallow her whole.
In the morning they followed the state line, entered Kentucky, dipped into Indiana. They drove through a county called Little Switzerland that was all lush, rolling hills and A-frame houses. They bought coffee from a general store and drank it in the parking lot. Nikki suggested they just stop here, buy an A-frame and settle forever. They leaned against the car, breathed, squinted at the hills, but didn’t stay.
When they got to Nashville it was dark. Their motel was cornered in-between two highways, one to Memphis and one to Knoxville. They sat on the steps, their backs to the road, and shared a cigarette.
“I’m going to write a poem about this.” Thomas said. He dropped the cigarette. The tip glowed. “And I never write poetry.”
Nikki leaned against him and looked up. “I know what you mean.”

Nikki met Thomas that spring when he was finishing school. He was studying photography and described his latest project to her.
“I’m taking photos of people standing in the financial district surrounded by buildings on a Sunday when there’s no one around. And then I take another picture of them in the same pose, but standing in a field somewhere outside the city.”
“That’s an interesting juxtaposition,” Nikki said to him. She thought he was cute.
“I need more models.”
They met a week later on a Sunday at nine in the morning at the foot of a skyscraper, First Canadian Place. The area outside was empty, not one businessman around, and she could see their wobbly reflections in the shiny dark glass of the buildings. She wore black pants, a black t-shirt and pink flip-flops. Thomas didn’t want the flip-flops in the photo, so she posed barefoot. The cement was cold. He wanted the same light for the second picture, so the next day he picked her up at the same time and they drove out of the city. West and then north. It was strip mall, subdivision, subdivision, strip mall, farm, strip mall, country. They listened to Neil Young and drank Coke he kept in a cooler in the trunk. When he found the field he wanted to photograph, they hopped a barbed wire fence and started walking.
After the pictures they kissed in the field. That spring Toronto was infested with ladybugs, and Nikki saw them everywhere, swarming benches and poles, flying slowly and getting stupidly tangled up in hair or in folds of clothing. After they kissed Nikki forgot all about the infestation and when she looked down and noticed a tiny red ladybug crawling on her big toe she thought,
how special
.
Thomas lived in an apartment off of College Street just east of Dufferin. June kicked off with a heat wave and the two of them spent nights laying naked on his bed, the television on mute in the corner, an electric fan whirring and blowing cool air onto the soles of their feet. It was too hot to be close, but they were giddy enough to have sex anyway, sweaty before they even touched. They drank his roommate’s cold white wine because he always kept a bottle in the fridge while theirs would still be wrapped in the paper bag, forgotten in the corner.
There was something about that summer, the heat. Nikki was twenty-one when it started and twenty-two when it ended and she kept lists of the places where she and Thomas had sex. Mostly his apartment. Once, High Park. After they left she just wrote,
everywhere
.

Nikki’s brother didn’t know she was gone until he called her cell phone a few days later. She and Thomas had made their way to the Smoky Mountains at the edge of Tennessee. Her brother was in Toronto, visiting from out-of-town. Had Nikki forgotten that he was supposed to stay with her that weekend? She had. The reception on her phone was bad so she walked to the only pay phone on site and called him back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m in the Smoky Mountains.”
“What are you talking about?” Her brother was outside her apartment building.
“You didn’t call me before you left.” Nikki said. “You should’ve reminded me.”
“The Smoky Mountains?”
“Tennessee. I’m with Thom.”
“What the hell?” he asked. “Why are you in Tennessee?”
“I’m on vacation. I didn’t tell you I was going?”
“Where am I supposed to stay?”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
When Nikki was younger she dyed her hair hot pink, neon green, black with streaks of grey and many other shades in-between. The frequent variations in colour gave people the impression that she did things without thinking or that she was indecisive, but they were wrong. She was a brunette: if you want pink hair, it takes commitment, patience, bleach kits and latex gloves. When she began art school she grew her hair out to its natural colour after a chunk broke off in her hands, but her reputation for being flaky followed her.
“Nicole,” he said finally. That’s all. He hung up. Nikki started dialling his number again, but stopped herself.

Nikki’s grandfather had been a sign painter in Poland before immigrating to Canada and as an homage to him, she bought huge sheets of glass wholesale and painted on them. She’d found a book of church signs at a thrift store and taught herself how to hand-letter a sign by painting out slogans included in the book. They said things like, SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE or HOW DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY? SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING? She’d spend hours planning and then painting a single word, making sure the slant of the A’s were at the perfect angle, that the O’s were symmetric.
When Thomas and Nikki drove to the field for their second photo shoot, she told him about her project. Thomas said that the best church signs were in the States, especially in the South. That afternoon they made plans to take a roadtrip together. They could look for the craziest church signs for her to paint and he could take pictures. They high-fived, but Nikki wasn’t sure if they were really serious about it.
The next time they spoke, he called while she was working late at her studio. She’d been so absorbed in the act of painting a Z that she forgot she’d hung another piece of glass from the ceiling. When she bolted across the room to answer her phone, she smashed headfirst into it. The sheet shattered into pieces, cut her cheek and gave her a swollen lip. She pressed her hand to the top of her head and discovered another cut on her scalp. The bright red blood on her fingertips reminded her of how she’d dyed her hair fire engine red for her high school prom.
Nikki had stitches the first time she and Thomas slept together. She bowed her head and showed them to him and he touched the wound gingerly, felt the raised railroad of dark thread.

Nikki turned twenty-two while they drove between Athens and Savannah. She had spotty cell phone coverage and kept missing calls from people who didn’t know she was away or, if they knew, were fuzzy on the details.
Her brother called. “Are you okay?” he asked in his voice mail message. “What are you doing in the Smoky Mountains anyway?”
She hadn’t spoken to him since the conversation at the campsite and by the time she heard from him, the mountains, their dampness and trees and green, seemed long ago. He must’ve been imagining her camping, fresh-faced and roughing it, while in reality she and Thomas had left that campsite quickly, annoyed by loud families staying near them. Instead of finding other places to camp, they kept sleeping in shoddy motels across Georgia. They thought they would camp more, but hadn’t anticipated the sheer heat of a Southern summer and spent more time than expected sussing out cheap, air conditioned lodging.
Thomas and Nikki stepped out of the car to buy fruit from a roadside stand. The heat was so astounding that Nikki gasped. She ate an unwashed warm peach and threw the pit onto the road. They had a bottle of Maker’s Mark, the seal unbroken, its red wax melted and smeared all over the top like congealed blood. Before getting back into the car Thomas poured some bourbon in a plastic cup and Nikki drank most of it quickly.
“Happy birthday to me,” she sang.
Thomas took her face in his hands and squeezed her cheeks. She could smell the bourbon and peaches between them. They stared at each other and he kissed her nose. He hadn’t shaved since they left and the scruff of his beard scraped against her skin.

On their roadtrip, Nikki wanted to keep records of what they did, but she couldn’t bring herself to write full paragraphs in her journal, so she’d scrawl certain words:
catfish, rain on the windshields, wet socks
. Sometimes more than that. A description of the crabs on the beach at night, maybe, or how the Spanish moss that hung in lazy drapes from the trees in Savannah was used to stuff pillows.
She didn’t write anything concrete about her days, no real narrative, and she definitely didn’t write about the rest of her birthday, how they’d stayed in a motel in Tybee Beach outside of Savannah because they couldn’t afford anything in town. They’d walked to the beach with the rest of the Maker’s Mark. Thomas finished it off too quickly and told her that he’d slept with someone a few days before they’d left for their trip. Twice, actually.
“Why’d you do that?” Nikki asked. Her stomach hurt.
“I don’t know,” he said. He sat with his legs apart, his head hanging between them, heavy. She thought of a scene they’d witnessed on their first night in Nashville on Music Row: a woman, drunk and stumbling, crying, trailing after a man and saying,
you broke my heart, you broke my heart
. A country song.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” Thomas said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Nikki meant it and then a second later she didn’t, but he’d already pounced on her forgiveness and wrapped his arms around her in a hug. He engulfed her. They rocked back and forth and then he threw up in a garbage can. Nikki stood by close as he clutched the sticky sides of the can and vomited a day’s worth of bourbon and peaches.

On their trip Thomas didn’t take many pictures and Nikki forgot to write down most of the church signs they passed. It was hard to think about art on vacation, and, truthfully, the signs she had in her thrift store book were better. The one sign she liked the most said, WHAT IF YOU DIDN’T BELIEVE IN ME AND THEN IT TURNED OUT I EXISTED. It wasn’t clever or funny or a quotation from the Bible and it wasn’t even grammatically correct. It was just a threat. It would be scarier, she thought, if she painted the opposite: if you did believe and then he didn’t exist. It was better to not believe and be pleasantly surprised at the end.