Bats or Swallows (9 page)

At the restaurant, I’m nervous and the squeeze of muscles in my shoulders makes me think of the baby even more.
“We’re getting wine,” Pen says. “I need it. Work today was awful, and yoga didn’t help.”
“I would drink,” I say. “But I shouldn’t.”
“How come?” Pen studies the menu and doesn’t see my expression.
“Well…” My voice drifts off and Pen puts down the menu. I tug at my hair.
“Oh my god, you’re pregnant?”
I nod and feel tears coming on. They bubble up in Penelope’s eyes as well and soon we’re both crying at the table.
“I’m so happy for you,” Penelope says and grabs my hand. I’m so relieved to hear her say this, happy that she didn’t flinch. The waiter comes to take our orders and we laugh at how silly we look, mussed up from yoga class, streaky faced, but he doesn’t seem surprised, like he sees this kind of thing all the time.
Later when we’re slurping our noodle bowls and talking about maternity clothes, Pen’s cell phone rings. It’s Kelly, who lives in Vancouver now.
“What’s up?” Pen twirls noodles around her chopsticks and listens to her sister. “I’m having dinner with Sara. I have lots to tell you. Big news.” She gives me an excited kick under the table. “Not
my
good news. Listen, I’ll call you later.”
Often, not all the time, but enough that I’ve noticed the timing, soon after our yoga class Kelly will call Pen out of the blue. Unprovoked. Like, “I just thought of you; I wanted to say hello.” I’ve already asked Penelope about whether or not they have a psychic connection, but I ask her again at the restaurant after she puts her phone away. She makes a face. She’s been asked this millions of times in her life.
“Nope,” she says, but then tells me something she hasn’t mentioned before. “Sometimes it works like a tin can telephone. Usually it’s just a pair of rusty cans and some frayed rope, but every so often I can hear Kelly on the other end. Or she can hear me. I don’t know if it’s a psychic connection or like, a kitchen sink science experiment that works by fluke. It’s probably just coincidence.”
“Probably,” I say, but I’m not really sure. We finish eating and leave the restaurant.
“It’s too early to tell if it’s a girl or a boy, right?” Pen asks while we’re walking.
“I have a feeling it might be a girl. It’s just a hunch.”
Pen hugs me and tells me again how happy she is for me.
“You’ll get pregnant soon too,” I say. “I know it.”
She pokes me in the belly. “Don’t feel guilty.”
We separate and as I walk to my bus stop I think of her and Kelly. It must be the meditation that does it, that clears the air and prompts Kelly to call so regularly after class. I wonder if I can steal their trick to get Audrey to call me.
My bus arrives. I sit up straight in the seat and resolve to think about Audrey while I’m meditating, not fleetingly, but purposefully. I will count Audrey’s freckles while Pen stares at the stars on the beach. I start practicing right there on the bus, chanting Audrey’s name in my head, concentrating on turning my thoughts into a radio wave and fortifying whatever weakened connection exists between my sister and me.
I’m sorry, I miss you, I’m sorry, I miss you, call me, call me, call me.
If I do it right, if I’m lucky, maybe the atoms in the air will align themselves correctly, pull themselves taut like a telephone wire so that my message will reach her clearly without interference.

"M
Y TEETH," FRANCES SAID,
“They fall out of my mouth when I speak.” It was the beginning of summer and she was telling me about a dream she’d had the night before. “They’re falling and I keep spitting them out like they’re cherry pits, but no one says anything about it. You were there, and you ignored it, but I think you kicked a tooth away when it landed too close to your foot. You were barefoot. I was too, even though we were on Yonge Street? Somewhere downtown, anyway. I don’t think anything’s wrong until I take a deep breath, and it feels like I’m eating something minty, you know, really fresh? So I find a mirror and see my gums, empty. And then I panic and wake up.”
Dreaming of tooth loss can be a symbol of death or sudden monetary windfall. Frances was worried.
“Maybe you’ll win the lottery?” I suggested.
“No, I think someone’s going to die. I’ve always thought I was psychic.” Frances laughed when she said this, not taking herself seriously.
When I was in the sixth grade my friends and I wanted to know who was the most psychic in our class. This was before we knew anything about odds or statistics, so we made cards with symbols on them: squares, triangles, hearts, circles. One person would select a card and concentrate on the symbol while the rest of us would try to read their minds. We kept score of who guessed the most correctly, and in the end I was the most psychic, but that was mostly because I’d been responsible for cutting the cards and had cut them unevenly. After a few rounds I could tell what they were by their shape.
“Quick, what am I thinking?” I asked.
“You’re wondering who’s going to die.”
“Sorry, lady,” I told her. “Try again.”
A few days later I left Frances a voice mail.
Hey, last night I had a dream too. I’m wearing a necklace made of teeth, human teeth, and some have roots. I show the necklace to people, you’re one of them, as if they’re a string of pearls.
My boyfriend Nathan had just given me a pair of pearl earrings, these small creamy globes with dull gold backings. They’d belonged to his grandmother. The pearls reminded me of overripe berries, the way they look solid, but how even the gentlest squeeze will crush them, make the juice gush out. Nathan explained that a pearl is calcium carbonate fused together with a compound called conchiolin. Molluscs produce it as a response to irritating objects in their shells. When he wasn’t looking, I bit into an earring, almost surprised by the resistance against my teeth.

My father called at 3:15 in the morning. I remember waking up and looking at the clock. “Janey?” He said my name twice. My little brother, Peter, had been in a car accident. I listened to my father, but also zoned out as I sat on my couch and looked at the outlines of frames hanging on my wall. I’d left a window open, so I hugged my bare legs. And then I put some clothes on, took my car keys and drove to the hospital.

Things I’ve made wishes on: dandelion fluff, white horses in fields, lost eyelashes, time (11:11, for example). As a teenager, I heard stories about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France. People would travel from all over the world to visit the site to be healed. I heard that if you prayed a certain prayer series to the Lady of Lourdes over nine days, something good would happen. When I recited the prayers in bed I felt a twinge of guilt for diluting the prayers of those more deserving of grace—the sick, the crippled, the elderly—but I kept at it anyway. On the tenth day, I went to school and got a good grade on a biology exam, and we got let out of last period early and I had a good hair day. It was completely banal, no miracles, but still fantastic.
When my brother had his accident, I was stubborn about my wishes and prayers. I thought—
if this is going to happen, it’s going to happen
. It wasn’t that I was angry, but that I felt useless. A wish was a puff of air; it was nothing. My mother wasn’t religious, but she prayed and then she stopped because she said that whenever she resorted to prayer, something bad happened anyway. It didn’t mean that God wasn’t listening, it just meant that whenever one becomes that solemn it’s because something serious has happened, something big and often irreversible. We stayed quiet, but that didn’t change anything either.

Peter was coming home from a night out. He was driving our parents’ car and it got a flat tire. He tried to change it himself, but the jack didn’t work properly. He walked out into the street to flag down some help. There were only a few lights and he rushed into traffic too quickly. The driver he was trying to stop didn’t expect him to be there. It happened very fast, the driver said, and it was so dark out.

I don’t remember the last conversation Peter and I had. I think we talked about the summer, what we were up to. He’d just graduated from high school and was living at home before going to school in the fall. But I did get a postcard from him a few days after the accident. I couldn’t believe it when I recognized his almost illegible handwriting in my mailbox, but then I realized that it was because he had addressed the postcard to the wrong apartment. It made its way to my mailbox weeks after he’d actually written it. It was from Vancouver, where he’d gone with some friends after graduating. He wrote,
How many vegans does it take to change a light bulb? Don’t bother asking them, vegans can’t change anything
, and then he described a hot dog he had eaten. Peter had gone through a political phase in his senior year and started eating vegan. I guess he’d changed his mind on his trip. It was a stupid joke. I didn’t know what else to do with the postcard, so I tacked it up on my fridge.

Four days after the funeral I went camping. I wanted to go somewhere that felt and looked different, somewhere rural and dusty. When I told this to Nathan he said, “Definitely, let’s do it. I’ll find us a place to stay.”
“I mean I want to go right now.”
Nathan paused. “
Now
now?”
I nodded, and I meant it. He could tell I was serious and by the time we gathered our things and figured out a game plan, it was late in the afternoon. He drove us to Georgian Bay and we arrived after dark. I don’t know how he found us a campsite on such short notice, but he did. He set up the tent in the dark as I sat at the picnic table and shone the flashlight in his direction. I wasn’t very helpful, so he took the flashlight himself, and I kept sitting there, digging my fingernails into the damp wood.
In the morning we rented a small motorboat. It cost thirty dollars for the day, and before we left they gave us a map of the area, a photocopied piece of paper with little squiggly island shapes sprinkled throughout. I squinted at the map and directed the boat and tried to match up the landscape with the hand drawn scrawls. We wanted to swim, but not at the public beaches, so we settled on an empty-looking cottage perched on top of a small island made up of massive, flat slabs of granite. We anchored the boat and jumped into the water.
We had sex on the rocks outside the cottage. It reminded me of what Ted Hughes wrote about the first time he slept with Sylvia Plath:
you were slim and lithe and smooth as a fish
. It was like that. Nice. It was the bathing suit, I think, the swimming, the fresh air. And then I stretched out, stomach down with my cheek on the rock, which was warm from the heat of the day. I breathed and closed my eyes and thought about how things petrified, how when molluscs were upset they produced pearls, and how if I just lay here maybe things would harden into something good.
I didn’t get up for a long time, and Nathan swam back to the boat to grab our towels. He held them above his head as he treaded back and then covered me with them. Later he forced me to get up, practically dragged me to the boat, and we chugged back to the campsite, me in the front, refusing to wear the life jacket, my t-shirt or shorts. We left before it got dark because I was feeling too far away from the world, even though that’s what I’d wanted in the first place. Nathan took down the tent while I sat in the car, still wearing my bathing suit underneath my clothes.
The camping trip was an example of how after my brother died, I’d come up with plans, with ideas. Ways To Feel Better. They would make so much sense at the time, and then, suddenly, stop. Nathan humoured me, but even he sometimes gave up. I didn’t recognize this pattern until long afterwards, even after it had been suggested to me by others, and so I would simply cling to my ideas, whatever they were, white-knuckled, and no one would be able to shake me of them.

One evening at the end of the summer I went over to Frances’ house. She’d been away, taking some classes abroad, and I hadn’t seen her since the time we’d talked about her dream about the teeth. Her roommates weren’t home and we sat in the backyard. There were black birds flying high above us, shooting around in circles, squeaking. Their high-pitched squeals made me think they were bats, but Frances said, no, they were swallows.
Squeak, squeak
. Despite the squeak, definitely, swallows. Sailors used to think that swallows would pull them to safety if they were drowning and if that didn’t work, they would carry their souls to heaven. They would get tattoos of swallows as talismans. The birds were darting around us, small and quick. You would need hundreds of them to swoop down and lift you up.
Frances had something like a talisman too, a tattoo on the inside of her wrist. An initial, her own. It was small, and unless you knew it was there you might think it was just a birthmark or an errant splotch of ink. She didn’t mean the tattoo in a narcissistic way. She meant it as a symbol that in the end, throughout your life, you always have yourself to rely on. I noticed it when she’d hugged me. I took her arm and looked at it closely. She hadn’t mentioned it. She was sheepish. “I was kind of drunk when I got it. In Berlin. I could’ve chosen something much worse.”
The ink was bluey purple and the letter was delicate. Peter had mentioned that he wanted a tattoo once, and had been planning to get one in the fall, was saving money for it.
“Are you okay?” she asked when I didn’t say anything else after a few minutes.
I was having problems clearing my mind. I felt coated in a layer of wax paper. Crinkly, opaque. I felt like those scrambler rides at amusement parks, the ones that spin you into dozens of little circles, and just when you’re getting used to the velocity of the swings, you’re dropped.
“Here, let me show you something.” Frances was taking yoga and she wanted to teach me what she’d learned.
“I’m not good at the breathing stuff,” I said. “Or Sanskrit.”
She made me get up anyway. We took off our shoes. She showed me how to bring the bottom of my right foot to the inner part of my left thigh, so that my right leg was jutting out to the side, like a flamingo. This was the tree pose. After you steady yourself on your leg, your root, you lift up your arms and branch out. And then you keep your balance. The trick to staying up is to focus on a single fixed spot. I stared straight ahead at the top of the tree across the yard, ignoring Frances’s swaying profile beside me and the squeaks of the swallows above. I kept my arms stretched out and I curled my toes. I didn’t stay up for very long.
“It’s harder than it looks, isn’t it?” she asked as I steadied myself and grunted. I just wanted to stand still. It seemed unfair that I couldn’t do this simple move. When my foot touched the ground, I lifted it again, and then again.
For those few seconds I would think only of keeping my balance. When it worked, when I stayed up, I felt good. My rooted leg was strong and with my arms above my head my body looked streamlined, graceful. I got the idea that if I kept standing on one leg and looking up, if I kept focused and if I practiced this pose, maybe, eventually, I could train the rest of my body to stay focused enough to produce something beautiful, something permanent and solid.