Bats or Swallows (5 page)

They ended their trip on Ocracoke Island, a skinny, tiny island on the southern tip of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They took a ferry from the mainland at six thirty in the morning. Nikki’s favourite picture from the trip was one that she took of Thomas on that ferry. He’s standing on the main deck wearing tattered army shorts and a black t-shirt. In the background you can see a little girl, blurry. You can’t tell in the picture, but the girl spent most of the ferry ride outside playing with the seagulls trailing the boat. She stood with her arms on her hips, put a cracker in her mouth and jutted out her chin, stubborn and brave. The birds swooped down and snatched the crackers straight out of her mouth. The gulls were fast, like military planes the way they dived down so quickly, and the girl, maybe nine years old, never flinched.
There were wild horses on Ocracoke Island. Nikki expected to be greeted by them running gloriously free, but the harbour was dotted only with little cottages and boats. It was quaint and pretty, but everything was too expensive. They managed to track down a campsite by the beach and there was a deep, sandy path that connected their tent to the ocean.
They never saw any wild horses. They drove to a lookout they read about in the guidebook and climbed three steps to a wooden platform for a better view. There were a few horses in the distance, small, stubby creatures, and they stood in a line, heads dipped into feed buckets. Their tails flicked the flies away, but otherwise they were motionless and lethargic in the mid-afternoon heat.
These days the horses are maintained by Ocracoke’s agricultural society
. They’d skipped that line in the guidebook.
“Do you know Houyhnhnm?” Nikki asked Thomas.
“What the hell is that?”
“A language, from
Gulliver’s Travels.”
“I don’t know any languages from
Gulliver’s Travels
, Nik. I don’t know French and I took it for eight years.”
“Gulliver meets these horses and it turns out they speak to each other in a special language. He lives with them and learns it. In Houyhnhnm the horses don’t have a word for ‘lie.’”
“Why not?”
“They’re so noble they don’t even understand the concept of lying. They just never did it.”
Thomas got uncomfortable. He thought she was leading him back to a conversation about the girl he’d slept with. They’d spoken about it one more time, the day after her birthday. They walked along the boardwalk at the beach and talked about it calmly, and they held hands and she told him again that it was okay. She meant it more than the night before. Afterwards they’d driven to Savannah where he doted on her, buying pecan candy, cold bottles of water, a big straw hat. She hadn’t meant to bring it up again in Ocracoke, had just been reminded about Houyhnhnm while looking at the horses. People always talked about the part where Gulliver lives with the tiny people or the giants, but not the horses, and it was her favourite part.

When Thomas and Nikki returned to Toronto three weeks later, it wasn’t as hot anymore. They had lunch together one more time before going to their separate apartments. When their drinks arrived, Nikki started crying. She kept dissolving into tears as they ate, but she insisted on staying. Thomas put down his fork and petted her hand. “Are you mad at me?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
Nikki wasn’t angry and she wasn’t sad, but she couldn’t stop crying. Or, she was both of those things and more. Mostly she felt stripped of the protective cocoon of travelling. Far away from home nothing fazed her, but now that she was back she felt somehow betrayed by real life. By Thomas too for bringing her back to it.
It was like the confusion she’d felt after running into the sheet of glass in her studio. She remembered being utterly perplexed by how the air had suddenly solidified, how it had hardened and slapped her so hard she bled. A friend of hers who worked on the other side of the room said she’d exclaimed, “What the fuck,” when it happened, but she didn’t remember saying that or anything at all.
“I don’t know,” she said to Thomas. “I’m overtired.”

People asked,
what did you see on your trip, what did you do
? Nikki hesitated before answering. They didn’t do much really: they drove and they talked and they looked at things. They went entire stretches without talking. This wasn’t the answer people expected, so she’d describe the exact shade of red of a Red Velvet cake instead. Rusty brownish red, the bloom of a drop of blood in a cup of buttermilk. Nikki still has the journal she kept on the trip, but she never flips through it, although sometimes she’s envious of the girl who wrote only little phrases, tiny summaries lit up by the glow of those heat-blurred days.

Nikki’s legs and arms were scarred up by mosquito bites for the rest of the summer. She got them at the very end of the trip on Ocracoke Island. They’d fallen asleep naked, and the mosquitoes had ignored Thomas and gone straight for her. They’d left the tent flap open a crack for air, and when she woke up in the middle of the night, her body hummed with itchiness, worse than when she had chicken pox as a child. The itchiness was more like a presence than a sensation; it hovered an inch above her skin, hot and throbbing. She wrapped herself in a sheet and when she woke up in the morning it clung to her, dotted with bright red spots of clotted blood. She’d thrown off the sheet and ran straight into the ocean, kicking up sand behind her. The water was freezing and frothy and angry. She sat down and listened to the foam fizz as the waves retreated.
At that point on the island the currents were powerful enough to be riptides. There was a sign with a diagram of the beach that charted out the anatomy of the surrounding ocean and Nikki copied it into her journal. According to the diagram Nikki was sitting in the groin of a riptide. It wasn’t a bad thing. You’re safe sitting in the groin because you’re tucked in snug between the tides.
Thomas followed close behind and sat down. They sat for a long time while Nikki waited for her itchiness to subside. The sun climbed higher and coloured their shoulders and the apples of their cheeks.
Nikki also learned from the sign that if you’re too weak to swim out of a riptide, you should just float on your back and allow the riptide to carry you away from shore until you’re beyond the pull of the current. Fighting against it is what sucks you under. Once you’re out in the distance, you can wave or yell for help, find a safe way back. She wrote that down too.

W
HEN I MET NICK,
I thought he was nice. A little dumb, but nice, and he didn’t go to my high school, which was the most important thing. He came over while my parents were out and I played him “Country Feedback” on my guitar. As I fumbled between E minor and G, he leaned over and kissed me. The top of my mouth, underneath my nose. He missed. Nick’s mouth tasted like toothpaste, and that night as I brushed my teeth, I got dizzy just thinking about it.
Nick was cute; he had these cheekbones. My aunt Lydia had a soft spot for paintings of Jesus, the airbrushed kind with photorealistic details. The strangest, my favourite, was of Jesus before the crucifixion. It’s a close-up of his face. His eyes are rolled heavenwards and thin dribbles of blood are sluicing down his forehead, pooling in the gaunt hollows under his eyes and spilling over his cheekbones. Those cheekbones were as sharp as a supermodel’s and when I was sixteen I was jealous of their definition, even if it was the blood drawn by a crown of thorns that emphasized them. Nick had cheekbones like the painting, like Jesus.
I kept falling for guys who looked like Jesus: long, wavy brown hair, too skinny. Hippies. After describing Nick to my best friend, Laura, she said, “Again with the Jesus guys, Esther?” I didn’t know what she meant and when she pointed out the common thread between Nick and the last two guys I’d claimed to be in love with, I realized that I had a
type
and that type was Son of God.

My mother and Aunt Lydia immigrated to Canada from the Philippines when they were in their twenties. They left behind two other sisters, three brothers and their parents. They’d intended on returning, but then they both got married in Canada and stayed put, making up for their absences at family gatherings with gifts of money. I’d never met these relatives, but I knew their birthdays by the trips I’d take with my mother to a small store downtown that specialized in Filipino foods and had a counter in the back where she could wire money to her family, quickly and cheaply.
Lydia married another Filipino immigrant from her church, but my father was Irish, part of a family that had lived in Canada since the eighteen hundreds. They met at their first jobs: Mom was a secretary in the admissions department of the school Dad was teaching at. She was the first non-Anglo-Saxon to marry into his family.
After my mother and Lydia got married, their lives took divergent paths. The most obvious impact on me was that Lydia’s children (three of them) went to Catholic school while I (an only child) went to an all girls’, secular private school. My father was an atheist and my mother said she believed, but not enough to go to church and definitely not enough to get me baptized and confirmed. When I was a baby Lydia took this as a personal insult, some kind of forsaking of their shared childhood, but eventually the rift was mended. Whenever we visited, Lydia pushed bowls of pancit and adobo and lumpia my way, hoping that if she couldn’t get through to me spiritually, she could at least physically stuff me with heritage.

I met Nick through my cousin, Mary. We were the same age, but by the time we entered high school had very little in common. We spent time together out of familial obligation and nostalgia for our childhood friendship, but judged each other in the passive-aggressive way only possible between relatives. She kept inviting me to her Catholic school parties because she was “concerned” that I wasn’t meeting enough guys since I went to an all girls’ school. While it was true that my life lacked daily male interaction, I managed to maintain a healthy stock of unattainable crushes. I usually turned Mary down, but one evening after a particularly passionate harangue, I surprised both of us and agreed to go to one of her stupid parties.
I regretted my decision as soon as we arrived. Mary and her friends ignored me while I stood around and tried to look casual. I was relieved when I noticed Nick holding a beer and looking at a bookcase by himself. I walked over and saw that he’d pulled out
The Great Gatsby
. I’d written an essay for my English class on the use of eye imagery in the book, about how eyes were the windows to the soul and how Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s eyes on the billboard overlooking West and East Egg were like the paintings of Jesus Lydia displayed in her house: all knowing, wise, judgmental. I thought the essay was cheesy, but my teacher liked it so much that she read it aloud to the class. She didn’t say who wrote it until the end, but later Laura said she knew it was me after the first paragraph, that she’d recognized my writing style. So, I told Nick,
The Great Gatsby
was special to me. “Cool,” Nick said. He had soft brown eyes. “I’ll read it.”
After the party I told Mary that I liked Nick and she wrinkled her nose.
“His hair is gross,” she said. “It’s always greasy. I bet it smells.”
“It doesn’t, and he’s cute.” I countered.
“Esther,” she said. “Sometimes you’re so
white
.” In the past few months Mary had taken to pointing this out, my whiteness, always witheringly, an accusation more than an observation. She said it when I talked about boys, when she flipped through my CD collection or when she analyzed my wardrobe. It made me wince and I never had a retaliation.
But I am white
, I said to her in my head, weakly.
Half, anyway
. According to Mary, Filipino tastes tended towards Filipino, Korean and black guys (no specific nationality provided). Italian too, and they didn’t count as being “white.” Her taxonomy of boys confused me. When I mentioned it to Laura she didn’t understand either.
“Maybe it’s because you’re white,” I pointed out.
She shook her head. “It’s because I’m not racist. I don’t believe in labels. I don’t judge people by the colour of their skin.”
“I don’t think Mary’s racist,” I said, but I wasn’t sure how to prove this. I suspected, however, that Mary’s judgement of me had less to do with racism than Laura thought.
“Well, then she’s just dumb.”
I didn’t have an answer for that either.

Mary said she’d talk to Nick and a few days later he called. I answered the phone and couldn’t believe it when I heard his voice on the other end. The thrill of something unfamiliar. But wait, not a thing, a
boy
, a stranger, someone who lived on the other side of town, even. I knew my parents had plans on Saturday night and so, feeling bold, I invited him over.
I wanted to call Laura and tell her what happened, but she’d been acting strange recently. She would skip lunch without me or wouldn’t return my phone calls. Even her sarcasm made me feel wounded more often than it made me laugh, so, wanting to preserve my enthusiasm, I kept the news to myself until I saw her at school the next day.
It was one of the first warm days of spring and we walked together outside, our sweaters tied around our waists.
“Can you believe he’s coming over?” I asked. “We don’t even know each other.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” she said. “He’s a teenaged boy and you, a teenaged girl, have invited him to an empty house. He would be an idiot not to go.”
I got the feeling that she was implying I was an idiot for being so excited about it, but I was still proud of myself, puffed-up from what I thought was an act of bravery.

Saturday arrived and I spent the day anxious and jumpy. I was starting to doubt that it had been a good idea to invite Nick over. I tried calling Laura for a pep talk, but her mother told me she wasn’t home, so I called Mary instead and she answered right away.
“Why are you nervous?” she asked. “You don’t have to sleep with him if you don’t want to.”
“That’s not why I’m nervous,” I said, wishing Laura had been there.
“So you are going to sleep with him?”
I laughed at Mary’s interest in my sex life, but now I had the additional worry that Nick was expecting it as well. As my parents prepared to go out for the evening, I went to their bedroom to see my mother. She was putting on makeup.
My mother was born breech and there’s a Filipino superstition that says breech babies have the ability to be healers. Whenever my aunt had a bad headache or a cold, she called my mother. Mom always rolled her eyes, but she would still drive over to see what she could do to help. My father got a kick out of it too and at night I often found him sitting on the floor, my mother on the couch above him scratching his balding head while they watched television. “Maybe your mother can make my hair grow back,” he’d say, his eyes half- closed like a dog. I was sceptical of these so-called powers, but sometimes when I had cramps, I would lie in bed and she would rub the small of my back. The warmth of her touch was maybe not healing, but it was soothing. Before Nick came over I craved that kind of comfort.
“Going to have a quiet night?” she asked.
I nodded. “What time will you be home?”
“Not late.”
I worried that Nick would still be here when they returned. As I fretted, Mom walked past me in a cloud of perfume.
But when Nick arrived, I relaxed. We went to my bedroom and he was the one who noticed the guitar first. He asked me to play him a song.
Laura and I learned how to play guitar together the summer before. We met our teacher waiting at a radio station to get free tickets to a concert. He was behind us in line and overheard us talking about how we wanted to learn to play guitar and said he could teach us. We didn’t think twice about accepting his invitation and every Thursday afternoon after that we gave excuses to our parents and met him for lessons. Sometimes they were at his place, a dark, skinny row house he shared with two gay men, but when the weather was nice we’d go to a nearby park. The three of us would sit cross-legged on the grass while Laura and I took turns playing his second guitar. At the time he was the most interesting person we’d ever met. We talked about inviting him to parties and laughed at how everyone would freak-out. As the summer wore on, his quirks became annoying. He was twenty-four, nine years older, and we weren’t sure why he was spending time with us. We broke up with him at the next lesson telling him we’d learned everything we needed to know and wouldn’t be coming back. He looked upset, embarrassed, but we ignored it and left. Together we’re powerful like that.
When I played the guitar for Nick, it was the first time I’d played for someone outside of those guitar lessons. Nick was very attentive. He was quiet and leaned in to listen to me sing. And then we kissed, and I know I said it was sloppy, but it was also sweet.
Laura called me that night, late.
“How was it?” she asked.
“It was fun.”
“That’s great, Esther,” she said, but I couldn’t tell if she meant it. Either way, that night I fell asleep content. I thought about Nick and wondered if he was going to somehow factor into my life. I wondered if he would count.
At school Laura kept distancing herself from me. We’d known each other for years, but had only become best friends after bonding in an English class over our taste in music. I wasn’t used to not talking to her multiple times a day. A school week passed, then a weekend, and we had barely spoken to each other.
One day my calculus class ended early and I made my way to the cafeteria to meet other friends for lunch. You could take a shortcut through the parking lot to get from one end of the school to the other, and I ran into Laura there.
“Hey,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” she asked me.
“Aren’t you?”
“They let us out early.” She was holding a copy of
King Lear
and a green notebook we had bought together a few weeks ago. I had a purple one.
“Are you coming to lunch?”
She shook her head.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” she said.
“Laura, what’s going on?”
“Nothing, why?”
“Why aren’t you telling me anything these days?”
“I don’t have much to say.” She left me standing there, baffled. I’d been angry about her behaviour all week, but at that moment I was confused. Sad. I thought of the time we’d walked away from our guitar teacher, how easy it’d been for us to turn our backs on someone we’d admired so fiercely at first. I didn’t like that power used against me. I’d never been dumped, not by a boy or a friend, and when I sat down on the steps to steady myself, I was surprised when my eyes spilled over with tears. I cried just a bit, and then I went to lunch and hoped that no one would notice my shaky hands, my red eyes.
That afternoon I couldn’t concentrate in class and so I wrote Laura a letter. It was six pages. I asked her if everything was alright and if she was mad at me and told her that she could talk to me about anything.
I miss you
, I wrote. I stuffed it into her locker at the end of the day and went home.
A few days later there was a reply from her in my locker. It was just as long as mine, on yellow, legal-sized paper. She was fine, she said. The letter was chatty and friendly and then, somewhere in the middle she wrote,
I had a dream and in the dream I kissed you
. I’d never had a dream like this about Laura, but I wasn’t surprised when I saw it in her letter. I read it over a second time and tried to figure out how it made me feel. It didn’t disgust me and it didn’t scare me. It affected me and I didn’t know what to do with that feeling. On a certain level, I understood, even if I didn’t have an adequate response.