Bone and Bread (29 page)

Sadhana tugged me out with her to the balcony. There was a manic verve to her as she introduced me to friend after friend. I stood dumbly at her side, a poor magician's assistant, watching the eyes of her audience flicker over to me at the intro, then, after a moment, flicker back. There was no keeping the attention from Sadhana. And I was no better that night, for I wanted to talk to her and no one else.

“I'm cold,” I said.

She pulled on the sleeve of my cotton shirt, as though about to suggest that I put on a coat, but a girl popped out her head to coax Sadhana back inside, to help resolve a burning question on the chronology of abstract expressionist painters.

“Pollock calls,” said my sister. “Be right back.”

I felt awkward on the balcony, so I went inside and sat on one of several chairs set up along the wall near the bathroom. I hoped to catch sight of her friends in the knitting group whom I'd met before, as Sadhana had mentioned they were coming.

Then Pete appeared and gestured with his drink towards the bathroom door. “It's unoccupied at the moment,” he said. “Hope you haven't been waiting this whole time.”

I shook my head, and he sat down. I was glad of the company. I was susceptible to the kind of mild solitude that deepened into its own dread entity, a psychic blot keeping others at bay.

“You're watching her,” he said. He was looking through the crowd, as I was, as Sadhana filled glasses and laughed and stopped to cast the deciding vote on what would go next in the CD player. Then she was in conversation with the flapper girl again, raising and lowering herself on her tiptoes as she spoke and listened in turn.

“Yes,” I said.

“You worry.”

“Yes.” I looked over at him, wondering how much he knew about Sadhana, of the myriad reasons for worry, or if the remark was just intuition or even small talk.

He slid his hips forward in the chair until his head was level with my own, his legs sprawling out before us. “Hey, is that your son in the closet?” He was laughing now.

“Yes. So?” I felt my cheeks flush and stepped across the room to the pantry door, which was an inch or two ajar. Peering in, I could see Quinn, fast asleep on his stomach in his usual pose: one leg drawn partway up, as though drowsiness had overcome some other sudden venture. His mouth was open as he slept, his hand still resting on the flashlight.

“He's fine,” I said, returning. “Asleep.”

“Sure. Kids can sleep through anything.” He shook his head, patting the seat of the chair I'd been sitting on. “I didn't mean anything. I like that you brought him along. He gave me the opportunity of proving I could tell the difference between the smell of artificial apple and artificial grape. He's a cute kid.” Pete looked at me in a sidelong way, as though with intentions just as oblique of offering some inept praise for my genes.

“He is, yeah.” When comments about Quinn came to me dressed as compliments, I felt a moral urge to deflect them. It was one thing when he was a toddler, busy and clever and calm, when I was worn out and liked to think I ought to be praised. But the bigger he got, the more convinced I became that I was merely lucky. If people wanted to congratulate me on my luck, then I could only agree with them.

Then, without any warning, or maybe with the kind of look he had been giving me all night but that I suddenly chose to understand, Pete turned his face to mine and we kissed. His beard scratched my face, but his mouth was loose and wet, and I gave myself over to it.

Around noon, Quinn woke me by tugging on my sleeve. I'd passed out on the couch during the last wave of departures, around the time the birds got started. Pete had finally left after a very long session of kissing, followed by a stark, whispered entreaty to relocate somewhere more private, and, at the very last, a good half-hour during which I locked myself in the bathroom, crying in a stupid way for having been seen kissing a man who was nice enough but whom I didn't want, not even a little. I came out after his quiet tapping had subsided and found I had shed my invisibility, instead registering among the guests the signs of a general acceptance. Whether it was because the evening had passed its peak or because in my public tryst I had established myself as an integral player — the party's requisite figure of inebriation and humiliation — people nodded at me, addressed me, and I felt my anxiousness ebbing into congeniality. I spent the rest of the night in the living room, chatting a little with anyone who happened to come in. Two of the knitting women, Rhiannon and Anne-Marie, had turned up after another party, and I'd surprised us all by remembering their names.

Quinn waited as I sat up, wiping the side of my cheek, which was moist with drool. The living room was a minefield of empty glasses and bottles, red cocktail napkins dropped here and there like spatters of blood. As I moved I caught a whiff of some leftover rye in a plastic cup and felt sick. It was the wrong place to have brought my son.

“I'm hungry,” he said. “And bored.” He had a way of conveying his needs as plain facts, a kind of reportage that wasn't petulant, and when I already felt guilty, it was more effective than a tantrum. He had put his shoes and coat on, his hair still mussed into odd peaks along the back of his head.

I lifted my hands to smooth my hair and reached out to do Quinn's. Then I blinked and rubbed at the corners of my eyes. Sleep's markers and remainders.

“Eye crud,” said Quinn, nodding. “Let's go.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll just grab our stuff.”

The door to Sadhana's bedroom was closed, though it had been open around the time I fell asleep, the bed a court full of stragglers as Sadhana sat tucked up by the pillows with her particular friend, the flapper girl. Wafts of cigarettes and marijuana floated out of the room, followed by clouds of spicy incense. When I'd first begun to doze, I found myself in a dream of Mama in our old apartment, lighting patchouli-­fragranced joss sticks over a shallow bowl of sand.

With Quinn behind me, zipping and unzipping the pouch on his knapsack, I knocked lightly on Sadhana's door, then, hearing nothing, opened it. Sprawled on top of her mauve comforter was the man with blond dreadlocks, wearing only a pair of boxer briefs, his long hair spread out like fibres of thick cable all untwined across the spread of his muscled back. Sadhana lay next to him on her side, facing him in her sleep under the covers. I stared for a minute at my sister with this beautiful man, then tiptoed in and gathered up all our things. As I stepped away from the closet door, I caught my breath at the sight of a bare ankle on the floor, and tracking with my eyes up along a pale leg, I found it belonged to the nude flapper girl, asleep in a nest of throw cushions just to the side of the bed. The flapper dress, I noticed, hung from a padded hanger looped around the closet door handle, the brilliance of its turquoise sequins muted in the darkness created by Sadhana's double-lined canvas curtains.

I closed the door behind me, then donned all my layers, shouldering my large knapsack. As we left, Quinn said, “Are we going home now? Should we say bye to Auntie?”

“She's asleep,” I said. “We'll talk to her later.”

Sadhana claimed it wasn't about the guy, but it was. That time, anyway. Unless her assertion was some kind of acknowledgement that that time was linked to all the previous times, and to the fundamental adolescent unhappiness that had gummed up the works of the rest of her life.

After three unanswered messages followed by one breezy and unconvincing call from Sadhana to solicit advice about the best brand of rice cooker, I picked Quinn up from school on a Friday afternoon with a knapsack straining each shoulder and ran with him to catch the four o'clock bus. He unzipped his bag when we got on board and was dismayed to find I'd packed only half the Lego he wanted.

“Where's the booster? I need the booster rockets if I'm going to play Space-Time Continuum.” This was a game Sadhana had helped invent years earlier, to my continued frustration, in which a woman and a young boy travelled back to the past to meddle with history, with the noble aim of creating a future with the most possible candy. The sound they made as they leapt through time had to be provided by their human counterparts and sounded something like a drill crossed with a siren.

“You'll make do. And I think you left some Lego there last time, anyway.”

“Not the booster.”

“Well, you'll have to pretend.” It came out sharper than I intended, and Quinn gave me a semi-fearful look.

“Oh, don't be so dramatic.” And then he was mad, too, and played on his Game Boy with his back half-turned to me for the next hour, until he got tired and fell asleep against my shoulder.

When he woke up, he jolted upright. “What if she's not there?” he asked.

“We've got keys, remember?” The deep weariness I felt whenever Quinn showed his practical side was rivalled only by the tiredness I felt when I tried to beat him to the punch.

She didn't answer the door when I rang the bell, and after I used the key to let us in, she didn't get up to greet us, just turned her face to the doorway and blinked in our direction. I turned on a couple of lights after taking off my shoes and went down the hall to her room. Quinn followed.

“Hey,” I said. “We missed you, so we came for a visit. I hope that's okay.”

“Hey,” she said, and it came out in a half-croak, in the voice of someone who hadn't spoken in hours.

Quinn stared.

“Hi, Q.”

“Hi.”

“Honey, go sit in the other room for a little while. Auntie Sadhana's not feeling well.”

So Quinn amused himself with Lego in the living room, while I let Sadhana do a poor job of pretending she was okay. I sat down at the bottom of her bed. In the light coming in behind me from the hall, I could see that her room was spotless, her bed made up so tightly that her weight on top of the covers barely creased them.

“What's going on?” I asked. “Is it something to do with that guy with the dreadlocks?” On the phone, she'd mentioned him a few times, but only by the awful moniker of Mr. Wonderful. Now she was drinking green tea under two afghans and her eyes had a blank look that I knew meant she was both cold and tired. It was her look of retreat.

She shook her head and leaned back against the wall in a slump that seemed equal parts standoffishness and exhaustion.

“It's happening again, isn't it?” I said. “Back to the races.”

This was during one of my periods of bare insecurity, when she could dismantle me with even the beginnings of an arch look. It got to be that my concern was befrilled with as much gloss and scorn as a pageant contestant, and considerably less grace.

“No,” she said. “It's not.”

I was annoyed that she couldn't even rouse herself to offer a vigorous denial.

“No? So why are we sitting here in the dark listening to Nico?”

“I like Nico.”

We sat there in the semi-dark, and I traced my finger along the seams of her comforter. It was a kind of standing staring contest I had with Sadhana, where losing meant being the one to cry first. We were like soldiers in a war against sentiment, with no idea why we'd enlisted. Over the music, I could hear the sounds of Quinn narrating a Lego adventure at top volume in the living room, likely for our benefit.

“I don't see the purpose in lying to me, of all people,” I said at length. Then after a pause, I pressed again. “It's something to do with what's-his-face, isn't it?”

She flinched.

“I mean the guy,” I said. “You never told me his name.”

“Jack.” Sadhana closed her eyes. “No. He's seeing someone else now, though. Exclusively.”

“I'm sorry.”

She shook her head and jerked up one shoulder in a curt shrug. “Please don't,” she said. “It's not. It's not what you think. It isn't anything.”

I got up and walked over to the window. The curtains smelled like cigarette smoke and lavender. I pulled them apart and Sadhana sighed.

“I was keeping them closed for a reason,” she said. “I have a headache.” She added, “I think I ate something that disagreed with me.”

“Don't even try to pretend you've been eating properly.”

“Fine, then.” This was as close to an admission of her illness as I was likely to get anymore. I'd attack and she'd agree in the manner of someone conceding a point in an argument only because she could not be bothered to do otherwise.

“Take it easy on me, Beena,” said Sadhana. “Okay?” Her plea took me aback. It was unlike Sadhana to accord herself mercy, let alone ask for it.

I imagined that at first it felt like slipping back into an old coat, shabby but comforting, all folds and worn patches. The swaddling effect it could throw over your whole life, like the way a bad breakup would send me to a stack of Agatha Christie novels and chocolate mint ice cream. A pattern reassuring in its very sameness, even if it offered only temporary relief. I wondered if she was as scared as I was.

“Get up,” I said. “You're scaring Quinn.”

At the table, I was regretting having forced her up, as her face was drawn, and Quinn kept putting down his spoon and shooting little looks over at her that she either ignored or didn't notice. The oatmeal was watery, and the cream and maple syrup I'd poured in as enticements only pooled in swirls around one another. Quinn used his spoon to stir and stir. I tasted mine and found it sweet and clumpy. I let the lumps roll over my tongue, as if I were savouring them.

“I think we should all change our names,” said Sadhana.

“What?” I said.

“To what?” said Quinn.

“To whatever we want. To whatever suits us.”

I frowned, but Quinn was intrigued. “Last names, too?”

“Sure.” Sadhana turned to me. “Don't you remember Mama told us we could change our names if we wanted? When we turned eighteen?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. Of course you do. As I recall, you were obsessed with the idea. You had a list, a long list.”

I did have a list once. She had a memory like river rock, my sister. Our history had worn her down, written itself on her.

“Maybe I did, at that.”

“They were all very glamorous names,” Sadhana told Quinn. “Gwendolyn. Ariel. Susannah.” Quinn smirked. “Oh, and Pilar.”

“I thought you liked that one. You had a list, too, didn't you?”

“Oh, very likely.” She shrugged.

“But you thought it was a stupid idea back then,” I remembered, and it came out accusatory.

“Well, what if I did?” Sadhana was laughing now, not her genuine laugh but her cocktail one. Light, tinkly amusement. “You have to admit it was a bit ludicrous. Although I have a much better sense of where she was coming from now. Initiation rites, self-transformation. Magical names. Mama seemed nutty, but she always knew what she was talking about, didn't she?”

“You were so hard on her,” I said, thinking of Sadhana's entreaty to me in the bedroom. “You were so hard on all of us.”

“Do you really think it hurt Mama's feelings that she raised a skeptical daughter? She wasn't naive, Beena. She accepted people for who they were. She was happy when we questioned her. She didn't set out to raise little clones.”

I didn't say anything, and when Sadhana spoke again, it was with the lilt of conciliation. She had her hand on her spoon as though she were going to pick it up. “What I'm trying to say is that I think at this point I would fare better as a Katie or an Amy or a Liz. Something simple to start over with.”

“How about Jennifer?” asked Quinn. “I like the name Jennifer.”

Sadhana went back to bed after choking down some oatmeal, an exhausting interlude involving tears from both of us, after which Quinn began orbiting me, whining that he was still hungry. I looked in the cupboard and found a package of Fig Newtons and a can of tomato soup. Nothing else.

“Which one?” I asked, holding them both up.

Quinn furrowed his brow and pointed to my left hand holding the cookies.

“Never mind,” I said. “You're getting both.”

After Quinn's snack, which I shared with him, I went into Sadhana's bedroom and sat with her until she woke up.

“Still here?” she said when her eyelids fluttered open. She followed me back into the living room, trailing along some extra blankets. It was only a little after eight and the sun was just starting to sink, but Quinn had taken it upon himself to start closing all the blinds and curtains and turning on the lights. A ritual inherited from visits with Uncle. When he was finished, he went back to the large rug, where he was mustering a fleet of Lego rockets.

I tried to get some news from Sadhana apart from the stuff to do with Jack, which she refused to talk about, but she was stuck in shrugging mode, the marionette strings at her shoulders wielded by a tremulous puppeteer.

“Are you working on any plays right now?”

She shrugged.

“You don't know?” I said. “How can you not know?”

“I auditioned,” she said. “Haven't heard back.”

“What about . . .” I groped for the name of one of her girlfriends in town. “Marie-Josée? How's she? And Rachelle?”

She shrugged again, then said, “Fine.”

“How about work?” I asked. She had a job as a waitress at a Greek restaurant near her apartment, and another as an usher at a French theatre, where she wore a smart black vest and cravat and handed out programs before sitting at the back to watch the plays.

“Quit.” As I opened my mouth again, she said, “Both.”

“What for?”

“Sexual harassment.”

“What?” I asked, aghast. “At both?”

But she was kidding, a dry chuckle catching in her throat. She said, “Actually, I just stopped going.”

She fell asleep then for a while, her head drooping onto the arm of the couch, and I paced through her apartment, trying to stave off panic. I attempted to recall how we'd brought her back before, but without remembering any of the awful details. Quinn had been too young to retain most of the really bad stuff, and the worst of it had been right around when he was born. After the last big relapse, when she was in second-year university, there had been only a couple of slips, a few small precipices where she'd tumbled back into her old habits, but only for a week or two at the most before I'd noticed and forced a confrontation. And once she had come to me herself. A golden coin of hope I'd pocketed to rely on later.

When I announced we were all going home together to Ottawa, Quinn set off such a ruckus about leaving that even Sadhana was surprised and as a result may have scaled back the protest I'd been anticipating she'd make. He stood up and yelled, stamped his feet, and even cried a little before collapsing back onto the rug with sniffles and soggy shirt cuffs.

“Quinn, you are way too old for this,” I said. “Sit up.” To Sadhana, I said, “Just for a little while, okay?” She nodded.

“You know, it's very confusing for me to be moved around so much,” he said with such deliberation and malignant confidence that I immediately suspected a conspiracy with a meddlesome guidance counsellor. Someone who had mistaken my son's quiet gravity for trauma and made special appointments to ask him leading questions about his inadequate single mother.

“Oh, you're confused, are you?” I said. “About what exactly? Where are you getting this?”

Quinn shoved at the black hair falling in his face and looked down to his Lego. He pushed one of the mini-rockets back in line with the others. “Where I belong,” he said. “Who I am.”

“Oh, precious,” said Sadhana, hooting before she started laughing. “Sounds like Quinn's the one who needs therapy. Our kid is having an existential crisis.”

I looked hard at my son, trying to figure out if he knew what he was saying, whether he intended to hurt us or had just hung on to the phrases as a likely bludgeon, sensing their power if not their meaning. I'd discovered children often possessed a knack for this.