Bats or Swallows (7 page)

M
Y FATHER DROWNED IN THE AEGEAN SEA,
fifty nautical miles northeast of the port of the Piraeus. When it happened, my mother and I were at home in Toronto. It was early evening in Greece, afternoon for us, and I was at school when my mother found out. She didn’t tell me right away. After class I went to swim practice and then I walked home and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. I can hardly believe I didn’t notice anything was wrong. That evening our phone kept ringing and I only saw my mother in passing, but I was always pleasantly weary after swim practice and associated the lingering smell of chlorine and shampoo with a kind of deep, sweet exhaustion, so I ignored the phone calls, didn’t say goodnight and fell asleep early.
My
mother, in those few hours after she found out there’d been an accident, hoped that a sailor in a passing ship would find my father and pull him on-board. At the very least she thought he could’ve been clinging to a piece of driftwood or a mermaid, anything, treading water and waiting to be rescued. Her hope finally waned, and at dawn she woke me up. She didn’t bother getting me out of bed, and I was still lying on my side when she knelt down and rested her head on the mattress close to mine. I sat up, bleary-eyed, and looked around my room. Yellow-grey morning light filtering through the curtains, my mother on her knees at my bed, my bathing suit a damp lump on the floor from where I’d discarded it the night before.
Sometimes
I wonder about those twenty-four hours, how it was possible that I could’ve lived through them without sensing some kind of overarching and fundamental change. Wasn’t there a strong breeze or a sudden, quick rainstorm? Did I bite my tongue or feel my ears ring? I couldn’t remember anything out of the ordinary. I mean I was thirteen when it happened. My father was in Greece taking care of some family business; it didn’t occur to me to pay attention to cosmic signs to make sure he was okay. Afterwards I imagined that on the day he died, his ghost must’ve flown through our hallways, waved his hands in my face and tried to tell me that something was wrong. The electromagnetic forces in our house must have been off the charts, and I didn’t even notice. When I got older I stopped believing in ghosts, but I still stubbornly berated myself for not figuring it out sooner on my own.
Hugo
was the first person I told about this residual guilt, but it wasn’t until years later. He said he’d felt the same way when his sister was killed and I felt a surge of love for him when he told me this, grateful that he understood, that he didn’t tell me that my guilt was misplaced.

I
met Hugo on a melty, early winter afternoon soon after I’d moved to Montreal to attend university. There had been a snowstorm in November, but most of the snow had melted, so I was sitting at a lone picnic table in Parc Lafontaine wearing fingerless gloves, trying to ignore the cold seeping through my jeans and into my bones. I had my journal open, but instead of writing I was doodling a picture of the man-made pond in the middle of the park. It had been drained, but the skating rink wasn’t yet set up for the season, so it was just a big, gravelly basin.
Hugo
looked over my shoulder. “Isn’t it too cold to draw outside?”
My
fingers were bright pink from the wind and my nose was running. “Not really,” I said.
“Are
you an artist or something?”
I
shook my head. “I’m Zoe.”
He
walked away, but returned a few minutes later holding two small stones.
“You
should use these to weigh down the corners of the pages.” He handed them to me and they were round and heavy for their size, like overripe lemons, still warm from his hands.
On
our first date I took the bus to his apartment and instead of going anywhere we sat in his living room and drank a bottle of wine. We got drunk quickly, and he turned sweet and started calling me a rotation of names. Baby, honey, darling, but with the G dropped and a Southern accent.
Darlin
’. I was Zoe only once and that was when we were in bed, his eyes first closed and later open. He said my name and then he came and we fell asleep tangled up, damp and sticky.
I
woke up in the middle of the night, his lanky body sprawled out beside mine. Hugo was tall and skinny, six foot five, all bowed legs and noodly arms, more than a foot taller than me. His curly hair billowed around his head like a golden halo. He was snoring and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went to the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet half expecting to find a stockpile of pills, but instead of drugs, I found hair products. Aerosol cans of hairspray. Pump bottles of two different kinds of gel. I opened a jar of moulding mud and smoothed its creamy contents onto my own hair. It smelled like flowers, like a manufactured spring breeze. I looked at myself in the mirror and my cheeks were flushed and my hair looked shiny, not in a greasy way, but in a styled, pretty way.
Hugo
told me about his sister the next morning. Marie had been kicked in the head by a horse at a sugar shack when she was eight years old. She’d been on a school trip and the kids were fooling around while they waited for their hayride. Marie was tough, a tomboy, and she’d decided she wanted to ride a horse on her own when no one was looking. She approached one from behind, tried to swing herself up, but it got spooked and somehow kicked her in the forehead. She died from the impact.
Hugo,
sixteen at the time, had been at school writing a history test. He hadn’t studied and spent most of the class trying to peek at the answers of the girl beside him, but she noticed and blocked her paper. Instead of muddling through the remaining questions on his own he just sat there and looked out the window. He said it was snowing, so he watched the tumbling flakes and, right before the class ended, he was called to the principal’s office. He thought he was getting in trouble for cheating.
When
Hugo brought up Marie, he had no idea about my father. He told me about her because, he said, he’d gotten a good vibe from me the day he saw me at the park. Hugo was interested in energy and described people according to it the same way someone might point out a hair colour or height. He said my energy was warm and gentle and because of it he could confide in me easily.
I
rarely spoke about my father, and one of the things I liked about leaving home for university was that no one knew anything about my background. My father drowned when a sudden storm blew over the small sailboat he’d only recently learned how to sail. He hadn’t even told us that he was learning to sail while he was on what was supposed to be a month-long trip to Greece. It was the kind of story that was easy to spread, students sitting idly in the cafeteria, eating pizza and talking about the weirdest things closest to their real lives. My story was weird and real, and it was my defining characteristic. For years, people would see my picture in the yearbook and remember me only as that girl: the one with the father, the dead one.
As
much as I hated to admit it, my father’s death had gone on to shape my life in a permanent and irreversible way, altering my personality. It was an important part of me and laying beside Hugo, I was overcome with a desire for him to know my important parts, every single one of them. So I started by telling him about my dad.
“That’s
so horrible,” Hugo said, his forehead resting on my arm, his hair tickling me.
The
existence of these accidents in our lives, the sudden violence of them, bonded us. I skipped my classes and we spent the rest of the morning together, sometimes drifting off to sleep, sometimes awake and talking, and after that day I rarely slept in my own bed in residence at school.
I
never believed in love at first sight, but I did believe in love as a leaping flame, a freshly struck match. When it came I assumed it came suddenly. Or rather, I started believing this once I met Hugo. I was sure that what I felt for him wasn’t infatuation or naivety or desperation. It was simply a beginning.

Hugo
was a few years older than me and wasn’t working. He painted, though. Sometimes he’d sell a painting, sometimes he’d work at a café or sometimes his parents would give him money, but he didn’t spend a lot. He’d lived in the same apartment since he was eighteen and the rent had barely increased over the years, so it was still very cheap. It was a studio, long and skinny, the sleeping area on one end, the kitchen in the middle, and a living room at the front. When I’d come over, we’d hang out in the living room, the only room that got direct sunlight, and he’d show me the progress he’d made on a painting. I’d decided to get an English degree, but was having trouble concentrating on my classes. I was mostly interested in writing poems, so instead of studying, I would take out my notebook and write while Hugo painted, the two of us working in a steady, quiet rhythm. I loved these afternoons with Hugo. The hardwood floors gleamed in the sunlight and it was beautiful to sit there on a cold winter afternoon, the two of us talking about the meaning of his paintings or me shyly reading aloud my poetry, our socked feet pressing against the slick floors.
All
of my poems were about love, which by default meant they were about Hugo. I was going through an e.e. cummings phase, so I wrote about bodies a lot and used too many parentheses. I always wanted Hugo to paint me, but he was painting trees that winter. Their energies, he said. His paintings were mainly abstract, rusty hues of paint scraped into swirls with stiff brushes or pallets, and they would dry into glossy, textured pieces that I would touch lightly afterwards to feel their bumpiness, exactly what you’re not allowed to do in an art gallery. When I couldn’t think of anything to write I’d look at his assembly of paints. I decided that if I were to paint him I’d use only yellows and oranges and reds. A fiery sunset, a flaming prairie.

Since
starting school I hadn’t made many friends and after I met Hugo, I didn’t pursue the few I’d made. My roommate Susie was nice, and we’d gotten drunk together our first week at a bar with a bunch of other students from our residence drinking the worst watered-down beer. That evening I saw my undergraduate life clearly: going to class, trudging to the library during snowstorms, drinking the same watery beer with these new friends, staying up all night to write a paper or to exchange drunken sloppy opinions. I didn’t mind my single bed, the shared bathrooms, the lack of privacy. I’d moved to Montreal craving something different and transformative, and at first I thought the experience of attending university would be enough, but then I met Hugo and realized that love was even better. His apartment was warm and easy to escape to. Whenever I went to my dorm to get clothes, Susie would be out. We started communicating through notes after I came by and found one folded on my pillow.
Are you still alive? I haven’t seen you in days.
My
classes in my first semester were all introductory level and there were so many people in them that it was hard to strike up a conversation. I’d take a seat at the back of the lecture hall and be the first to slip out. Hugo’s friends were mainly Francophone and because I didn’t speak much French, I would often stay home to study when he saw them. I got used to us as a self-contained unit and couldn’t visualize us in the company of others. I sometimes wondered what we looked like together. I’d catch glimpses of our reflections in his front window at night, and we were maybe ridiculous—he was so much taller than me, and his hair was always so messy, despite the hair products—but the strangeness was also what made us special.
I’d
mentioned Hugo to my mother over Christmas when I’d gone home for the holidays, but she didn’t know many details about him and I didn’t have any pictures to show her, but I’d brought one of his paintings as a substitute. “It’s interesting,” she’d said, but I couldn’t tell if she’d actually liked it.
It
wasn’t until a few weeks after Christmas that I got the chance to prove to someone that Hugo was a real person. My mother told me she was going to visit me in Montreal for the weekend, her first visit since driving me in the fall.
“I
want you to meet my mother,” I said to Hugo that night.
“Sure.”
He was sitting on the couch reading a magazine.
“She’s
visiting this weekend. I told her about you.”
“Oh,”
he said.
Hugo
wasn’t close to his parents. My mother and I had naturally gravitated to each other after my father’s death, but Hugo distanced himself from his parents, who, unable to cope with the sprawling mess of grief associated with Marie’s death, became crazy in a way that pushed Hugo away from them. They’d decided that if they answered two fundamental questions, they would somehow get over their sadness. What concerned them most was whether or not Marie was safe and happy in the afterworld and what had they done to deserve her death. They shopped around for opinions. For their first question they found a medium who, with the help of one of Marie’s unwashed t-shirts, fell into a trance as she attempted to make contact with her in the realm of the spirits. Hugo imitated the medium’s voice for me—low and reedy and definitely otherwordly. Marie was fine, she told them.
For
their second question, they settled on religion and concluded that the cost of their sins had been too great. Less than a year after Marie died, they sat Hugo down and confessed their sins to him. Affairs they’d had, money stolen from jobs. His father urged him to confess his sins too, but Hugo couldn’t speak. He wracked his brain and couldn’t remember anything he’d ever done wrong in his life. What did anyone do to deserve anything? Fat tears rolled down his parents’ cheeks as they spilled their secrets and Hugo just sat there, silent. It occurred to him that his parents could do whatever they wanted and maybe they’d get goodness, but they could just as easily get fluky tragedy. It didn’t matter. After he moved out, he hardly talked to his parents again and he told me that other people’s parents made him feel uncomfortable too.
“I
don’t know, babe,” he said. “Maybe it’s too soon.”
“What
do you mean?”
“We
just started seeing each other. Let’s take it easy.”
I’d
assumed that this step was a natural part of the trajectory of our relationship. We’d been together for over a month, and although I knew it wasn’t a long time, it felt more substantial than that. When I wasn’t with Hugo, the yearning I felt for him was overwhelming, a rumble in my belly, something gnawing and impossible to brush away. I’d never felt that way about anyone else. Hugo looked up from the magazine and saw my disappointment.
“Fine,”
he said. “I’ll meet her.”
As
much as I loved every bit of Hugo and told myself I didn’t care what my mother thought of him, I cut his hair the day before she arrived, just a trim because it was frizzing out into clown wig territory. We were by the window and he kept his eyes closed as I cut the shaggier parts. My hair was a bit longer than his, and I would use his mousse to scrunch it up into curls. They came out more like frizzy waves, but there was something vaguely comforting about matching my boyfriend, or at least trying to.
“What
if I don’t want to meet her?” he asked.
“Why
wouldn’t you?”
“Adults
make me uncomfortable.”
“You’re
an adult,” I said to him. “And it’s really important to me.”
“Is
that a threat?”
When
we were done, he swept the hair off the floor. Later I picked up a lock he’d missed. I recalled my high school geometry class, using a compass to draw perfect circles. His hair in my hand curled just like a Fibonacci spiral, the kind of perfection you find only in nature.