Bats or Swallows (8 page)

Maybe
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Hugo never ended up meeting my mother. Not only shouldn’t I have been surprised, but I also should’ve known, guessed it from his original reaction, just as I should’ve known that the image I held of him had more in common with his paintings than real life. Unlike the first explosion of love, the unravelling was slow, a leak that I constantly scrambled to patch up.
My
mother arrived, and I met her at her hotel. After we’d dropped off her bags, we went out into the city, walking to the restaurant I’d chosen for us. We settled in and ordered drinks, and twenty minutes later Hugo hadn’t appeared. My mother suggested we order anyway, that he could order separately later, but by the time our food had arrived, I knew he wasn’t going to come.
“Something
must’ve happened,” I told my mom. I used a pay phone out front and called, but he didn’t answer.
I
spent the rest of the day with my mother, and she only asked about Hugo one more time and then changed the subject. She asked me if I wanted to stay with her that night in the other bed in her hotel room, but I needed time alone. It was such a minor thing—a missed dinner date—but it was the first time I’d felt betrayed by Hugo. I hugged my mother goodnight and told her I’d come over in the morning.
I
wasn’t ready to go home yet and wasn’t even sure what counted as home. I didn’t want to go to the dorm and see Susie and most of my things were at Hugo’s. My mother had given me one of her hotel keys so I had access to the entire building. I took the elevator to the basement, but there was nothing there, so I went to the top and found the pool and gym. The change room was humid and empty and there was a tall stack of folded towels by the door. I picked one up and quickly decided to go swimming. I hadn’t been in months, and felt like doing something that would tire me out. I could go in my underwear; no one would know.
I
jumped into the deep end, both arms straight in the air. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that although he knew how to swim, something about moving from Greece to Canada made him forget. He said he couldn’t imagine swimming in a pool or a lake and that even the ocean was different from the sea. When I was younger, I was terrified that I would jump into a pool and it would be the day I forgot how to swim too, but of course it never happened. He was teasing me. When I bobbed back up to the surface I rubbed my eyes and flipped on my back. The pool had a domed white ceiling with a skylight on one end. It was getting dark outside and the skylight was a rectangle of grey among all the white. I floated.
Swimming
is one of those things best learned when you’re young. Foreign languages too. You pick up these skills without realizing you’re doing anything special or complex. My parents insisted on swimming lessons, but I never learned Greek. My mother didn’t speak it and my father only spoke it with his family who still lived in Greece. I’d hear him on the phone enough to get accustomed to the lilt of the language, but it wasn’t until after he died that I decided I wanted to learn myself, as if it would bring me closer to him. I sat down with a book called
Learn Greek in Three Months
, but fell behind when it took me over a week to learn and memorize the alphabet. For hours I would sit and practice writing out the letters, learn the new symbols.
In
Greek, there are two letters that make the O sound. There’s omicron, which looks like the English O, and there’s omega, which, in lowercase, looks like a little rounded W. Usually the omega will come at the end of the word, while the omicron will be the O buried in the middle, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule. In my name, Zoe, the O in the middle is omega, not omicron. It’s spelled zita, omega, ita. Ζωη. I remember being satisfied that my short name had two alphabet endings: the English zed and the Greek omega.
After
my father died, I would sometimes find my mother crying. The first time I caught her was in the kitchen at breakfast, and I had no idea what to say, so I asked her what was wrong, even though I knew.
“Zoe,”
she said. “Do you know that your name means life?” I shook my head. “Your father picked it. Your grandmother was so mad when he didn’t name you after her. He’d promised he was going to.”
“I
didn’t know that,” I said. But I did. My father loved this story, and would tell it to me often. Normally I’d cut him off, bored by my familiarity with the anecdote, but this time, my mother telling me the story and looking so sad, I pretended I didn’t know, that it was the first time I’d ever heard it.
In
the pool, I closed my eyes and wondered if I could fall asleep like this, in the water, on my back. I probably could. Maybe I could spend the night here, my mother asleep upstairs in her hotel room, Hugo in his apartment, Susie with the dorm room to herself for the hundredth night in a row. The water was warm. At that moment, it seemed inconceivable that anyone could die like this. Bodies float. You don’t even have to try too hard; your body fat does it for you. I imagined my father floating in the sea on his back and looking up at the sky. Maybe in his last moments he didn’t struggle or choke; maybe he was just carried away.
Eventually
I got cold and annoyed in the pool, so I got out of the water and shimmied back into my clothes, wringing out my wet bra and underwear and stuffing them at the bottom of my bag. I took the bus to Hugo’s, let myself in and hoped that he wouldn’t be home either. But there he was, working on a painting, and he didn’t apologize for not coming.
Hugo
and I didn’t break up until weeks later, but after the weekend my mother visited, things weren’t the same. I was still staying at his place, but not as often, and sometimes he would outright ask me to leave. Finally, one afternoon as I sat on his couch watching him paint, he stopped, sat down next to me and told me that he thought it would be better for us if we didn’t stay together.
“What?”
I asked. When Marie was struck by the horse, she didn’t die right away. She was still breathing when the ambulance arrived and kept breathing for a few hours more. The doctors couldn’t control the swelling of her brain and one by one her organs started shutting down. When Hugo broke up with me, I thought first of little Marie lying in the hospital, her life slowly extinguishing. We’d talked so much about her and I wanted to keep talking about her.
“I’m
sorry, Zoe,” he said and gently patted the top of my head. “I think we need time apart. Things happened so quickly.”
I
understood what he was saying. I had become aware of it while I waited for him with my mother, but the problem was that I felt like I had too much love for him, that it had somehow exploded into a poofy atomic bomb mushroom cloud when I wasn’t looking.

When
I made it back to my dorm room, I was sheepish and heartbroken. Susie was there and I saw a fleeting look of irritation when she saw me slink in, but when I started crying she softened. I’d almost forgotten the way people treat you when something bad has happened. Tentatively. She took me out and we drank slightly better beer and for a few hours we played the role of girlfriends, laughing and close. She hugged me when I cried again when we walked home.
“What
are you going to do now?” Susie asked softly from her bed after we’d returned, as if it wasn’t an option to return permanently to our shared room anymore. She didn’t mean it as if she were kicking me out, but she’d also gotten used to me being away so much.
“Maybe
or a few days,” I said.
I
had classes in the morning, but the thought of leaving was suddenly appealing, so I simply left. I left a note for Susie on her bed. I’d misread the bus schedule and arrived at the station three hours early. Hugo’s was the only number I had memorized, so I called him while I waited. We hadn’t spoken since I’d left his apartment, but I knew he would show up if I told him what I was doing, maybe not out of love, but out of curiosity. It wasn’t like he had any other obligations, anyway. He came a half-hour later, his hair stuffed into a toque. Soft grey. I knit it for him for Christmas. It was lumpy and loose and when I held it in my hands I felt like I was holding the discarded skin of a baby elephant.
We
sat next to each other and he put his hand on my knee and for the next three hours we drank coffee and talked. When it came time for me to board the bus, I swung on my backpack. It was heavy and threw me off balance.
“You
can call me whenever,” he said.
“Thanks,”
I said and turned and walked on to the bus. I didn’t believe him. I took a window seat that didn’t face in his direction, so even though I looked, I never saw him lope away. I thought about it, though, how his body curved over, the way he tucked in his chin and jammed his hands into his pockets. He walked like he was aerodynamic and as I thought about his walk, I wondered if anyone would ever study the way I walked the way I studied him.
I
don’t remember much about the last time Hugo and I had sex, just what happened afterwards. He fell asleep and I rolled on top of him. When he slept he’d curl into a ball, the smallest shape he could make, and I’d reach over and hold him. It was most effective if I just smothered him with my body, slipping my arms and legs into the floppy loops of his limbs, the way you’re supposed to warm a person with hypothermia. Skin on skin. I loved the feeling of his breathing beneath me, a steady, comforting whoosh. That night I climbed on top of his sleeping body, and his hair got caught in my mouth and instead of disturbing our position, I just blew it away, working the hairs out slowly with my tongue. I wanted to say something embarrassing like, “You’re the first person I’ve ever loved,” but I didn’t, and even if I had, I imagined the words would’ve gotten jumbled up in his curls or shot haphazardly into the black depths of the bedroom.
My
relationship with Hugo lasted only three months, barely the length of a single winter. I felt kind of illuminated by the feeling of love even if it was over, like I was shrouded in a thin, lacy veil. It made me see things differently. Hugo’s apartment was in a house that was over a hundred years old and when I first started staying there, I would lay awake at night and listen to the erratic banging in the pipes. The sounds made me think of poltergeists or restless spirits and at first I was afraid, but then, eventually, I relaxed. I didn’t believe in that stuff anyway. I reminded myself of this as the bus pulled away, that I had nothing to be afraid of. This bloom of courage didn’t come from Hugo, but at first, and for a while afterwards, I thought it did.

W
HEN PEN MEDITATES,
she doesn’t immediately slip into a state of thoughtlessness. She needs to first transport her inner self elsewhere. She tells me that she always ends up in the same place: a beach, nighttime. She’s never been to this beach, but she can imagine it clearly. She’s standing barefoot in the cool, white sand and there are tall outlines of reeds swaying in the breeze. She’s surrounded by salty, inky darkness. She peers up towards the sky and stares, and this is when the real meditation starts, I guess, as she pictures herself straining at the sky, the scattered universe.
We’re sitting in yoga class and I steal her trick. I try conjuring her beach. But I get distracted. Do I imagine a beach by the ocean? Or a lake? I haven’t spent much time near the ocean, but I imagine that its vastness must be powerful, more conducive to spiritual enlightenment. What does salty air feel like? Is it like a smoggy day in the city? Heavy like the air after a rainstorm? I open my eyes and look around the room. Pen’s sitting in front of me and I can see the even, gentle heave of her breath. She’s counting stars.
Pen’s level of concentration reminds me of my older sister Audrey as a child reading curled up in the big chair in the living room. I would do everything I could to distract her, but she’d remain perfectly absorbed in her book. Sometimes I climbed up on her chair, pressed my knees against her thighs and stuck my face in hers. I stared at her freckles and counted them out loud.
Uno, dos, tres
. I’d picked up some Spanish from a television show and wanted to show off. Audrey would get annoyed and shove me away, but it wouldn’t be until I counted to twenty or higher, some number that I didn’t know in Spanish. Once, she pushed me so violently that I cracked my head against the coffee table and it took four stitches to close it up. When she was older she smeared cream on her face, a skin lightener, to remove the freckles. But they never went away, and in the summer multiplied into big blotches. Her freckles were the most gorgeous things and she hated them.

I started joining Penelope at yoga when I turned thirty. I thought I should exercise as I got older, but couldn’t bring myself to go to the gym and had fooled myself into believing that yoga would be easier and kinder to my body. I was surprised when I left that first class with achy muscles, insecure about the inability of my body to fold itself over. When had I lost my flexibility?
The class always kicked off with a five-minute meditation session that made me more tense than relaxed. Five minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but once we were sitting there, the silence pressing against me, the minutes would stretch out slowly, like sticky, dripping honey. The part I liked most was shivasana at the end when the teacher would turn off the lights and we would lie on our mats in the dark. It was more like naptime than anything else.
Then I got pregnant and decided to keep attending class, hoping that yoga would foster a calm atmosphere for the baby. When I’m there I imagine that for an hour-and-a-half the fetus gets the chance to float in a serene salty bath, like I’m sending it off to the spa.
I haven’t told Penelope I’m pregnant. I told our yoga teacher because I wanted to make sure it was safe for the baby, but I asked her not to mention it. “I won’t say a word, Sara,” she said to me. I could never remember our teacher’s name and I couldn’t believe she remembered mine. Then she smiled such a kind, trusting smile that it made me hate her a little.
Pen and her husband have been trying to have a baby for a long time. They wanted children when my husband and I were still preoccupied with student loans and starting careers and figuring out what to do with our lives. The thing about pregnancy is that you spend so much of your life trying to avoid it that it feels like a slap in the face when it doesn’t happen right away. I assumed it would take me as long as Penelope, or at least three or four months, but after the first few weeks of seriously trying, I knew something in my body had changed.
I even waited a day before telling my husband, worried that he would be freaked out by how quickly it happened. I was freaked out. So I called Audrey. I hadn’t spoken to her in months, but I thought someone removed from the situation would be the best person to tell first. A sister seemed like a good candidate. I dug up the last phone number I had for her, some small village in Ireland, but I couldn’t figure out how to dial it. I had to look up the country code online. There was a weird international ringtone, like a long beep or Morse code, and then a monotone accented voice told me that the number was out of service.

During shivasana the yoga teacher walks between us and presses down lightly on our shoulders and touches our foreheads. Sometimes the touch makes me stiffen, but this class I like it. Her fingers are warm. I decide that tonight I’ll tell Penelope about the baby. She’d be offended if I waited too long. Our teacher starts speaking again and then the lights go on and we head to the change room in a post-yoga daze.
Penelope and I don’t speak until we’re outside. The cold slaps us, wakes us up. Spring hasn’t quite settled in, but it’s slowly edging out winter and the fresh air is a relief. “Do you want to get dinner?” I ask.
“Sure, why not? We have nothing to eat at home anyway.”
We start walking towards our regular noodle house, our mats slung against our backs.
I knew Penelope’s twin sister Kelly before I knew her. Kelly and I were assigned roommates in our first year of university. Penelope switched to our school halfway through second year and it turned out that we had more in common. When Kelly still lived here, the three of us often went out together. I learned that there’s nothing more powerful than twin girls. Different hair and clothes, but those faces side by side can knock a person flat. And their voices in unison, like angels, something holy or strange. It’s magic, I guess, how an egg can split in the womb and make two girls instead of one.
In my family Audrey managed to get the best genes. The perfect combination of Mom’s face and Dad’s skinniness. The grey eyes, like my grandmother. Her red hair seemed to come out of nowhere, some great-great aunt no one remembers. I got the average genes, a slight chubbiness, brown hair, although sometimes in the sun you can see glints of that red. When my husband and I talked about having children, I imagined my genes mingling with his like they were at a cocktail party waiting to pair off. I silently rooted for the good ones, for that great-great aunt to make a repeat appearance.
It wasn’t until I met Kelly and Penelope that I considered my relationship with Audrey. Even when living in different cities, the twins were close, and they talked or sent emails to each other all the time. Audrey and I, on the other hand, were friendly to each other, but we weren’t friends. She was a few years older than me, but wasn’t the type to dole out advice and I didn’t ask for any either. By the time it occurred to me to regret this, Audrey had moved away. I started sending letters to her first, writing as if we were more familiar with each other than we had been before she left, and was happy when she wrote back to me in kind.

The last time I heard from her, she included a photo of her two-year-old daughter, Jo. It’s a picture of the two of them on some lush green Irish hill, all red-haired and radiant. Jo was lucky to get Audrey’s hair. I don’t know much about Jo’s father other than that he’s an Irishman from her commune named Patrick. Maybe he has red hair too. At the commune they do things like spin their own wool and knit Fair Isle sweaters. They milk cows and churn their own butter and it sounds perfect, except for the fact that it can’t be. Those kinds of things never work out the way they’re supposed to.
That Audrey ended up in a commune in Ireland isn’t entirely surprising. In high school she turned into a hippie. She grew her hair out long, almost the length of her back, wore bell-bottoms and these ugly purple-tinted glasses that I hated more than anything. Sometimes a friend would trace henna outlines on the insides of her hands. She didn’t drink, but she smoked pot, and had a hippie boyfriend named Hayden. He had shiny long blonde hair and blue eyes and I was always too shy to say anything to him when he came over.
Audrey moved away when she was nineteen. She graduated from high school and didn’t have any plans to go to university. She lived at home, idle, but then one day she picked up and left. Despite her pothead tendencies, she’d spent a few summers working at the Dairy Queen at the mall and those saved ice cream earnings funded a plane ticket to Europe. She was going to travel. She cut off all her hair and I didn’t even get the chance to hug her goodbye because her flight to Paris took off while I was in school.
At first I assumed she’d return. She came back once for six months and another time for three, and then only when her passport required it. The last time she was here she told us about Patrick, but she didn’t have a picture of him. The next time we heard from her, she was married (eloped on the commune) and we expected them to visit together. Thanksgiving passed, then Christmas and my birthday and her birthday, and still she was gone, no visit planned. My mother tried to convince her to come back, but it never worked. When I got married I hoped she would show up, but by then she was pregnant and said she couldn’t risk the flight overseas.
I could’ve flown to Ireland to visit Audrey myself, but I wanted her to come back to us first. Anyway, she never invited me. Some families can deal with being far-flung. They book plane tickets to each other’s homes, have long-distance plans. Pen and Kelly’s family was like that, all of them situated at different points in North America, and they still managed to get sick of each other, to know everything going on in their lives. In our family no matter how much we missed each other, we weren’t sure what to do about it.
But there were the letters. Not emails because, according to Audrey, the commune was too deep in the countryside. “Not even dial-up?” I’d asked, but she’d ignored the question. Instead of writing to us by the glow of a computer screen, Audrey would sit at her kitchen table with a candle and a stack of stationery.
It’s strange, but this place feels like home to me
, she wrote once.
I know Mom misses me, but I can’t stand the thought of living there anymore. I’m sorry.
Maybe it wasn’t Audrey herself that I missed, just the potential of our relationship, the idea that we could translate our letters to each other into something real and breathing. Still, when I read that letter I wrote back,
it’s not just Mom who misses you
.

The last letter she sent me was right before my thirtieth birthday, a year ago. Unlike previous letters, it was unsettling. The picture of Jo was nice, but everything else was odd.
There were too many loose ends when I left
, she wrote.
I was in denial back then. I was too young and every time I came back to visit I couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. I’m coming to terms with it now. Something about turning 35 (thank you for the birthday card) and getting closer to 40. My therapist has helped a lot. Do you remember Mr. Richards? He was married to our babysitter when we were still living at our first house. My therapist helped uncover some memories I had blocked. Mr. Richards molested me when I was six. Maybe five. I’m sure he didn’t do anything to you. You were too little, just a baby. You probably don’t remember him. I blocked it out, but I always knew deep down.
There wasn’t much more. For a few days I doubted what she’d written. I didn’t know that Audrey had been seeing a therapist. Did communes usually have therapists? I also didn’t remember Mr. Richards or that babysitter. We’d moved and the only babysitter I knew was a woman who’d come to our house and sometimes bake cookies with us.
I asked Mom about Mr. Richards when I saw her next, unsure of whether or not Audrey had mailed her a similar letter. My mother talked about how much she’d appreciated Mrs. Richards for taking care of us when she went back to work. “Mr. Richards? I didn’t know him very well. He was nice enough. How come?”
I didn’t write Audrey back right away. I eventually believed her, but I felt guilty about my initial reaction and I didn’t know what to tell her. Her letter made me feel sick and angry and sad, but mostly I felt futile. Imagine that you’ve done something wrong and would like to atone for it. Imagine that you don’t know what you’ve done wrong, but would like to apologize. That’s how I felt. How could I say anything? I put a response in the mail more than a month later and only briefly acknowledged what she’d written me. She didn’t write back. Mom and Dad got a Christmas card later addressed to all three of us, but there was no return address. The postmark was different from the commune, out of Dublin this time. No news about Patrick, but Jo sent her love.
You need to do things at crucial times. When I told Penelope that I was trying to get pregnant, she foisted fertility literature on me, books that outlined how the menstrual cycle worked. Everything depends on perfect conditions. Our genes don’t mix like elegant rich people at a cocktail party I learned. They don’t
linger
like that. Genes get slammed together, more like sweaty teenagers in a mosh pit, desperate for connection, foregoing tenderness for physical contact. It’s easy to miss your chance.
I know that I should’ve written to Audrey right away. Called her. I choked. I don’t blame her for not giving me her new contact information. I should’ve tried harder to track her down and tell her,
Oh god, I’m so sorry. Fuck Mr. Richards. Come back home.