Come See About Me (5 page)

If a cashier
smiled at me when I went to buy groceries, they were doing it by dragging me
into the here and now with them—a place and time where Bastien no longer
existed. All I wanted was to be left alone, but instead Pina was forcing me to
beg for a job I didn’t care about.

“Do you really
think this is what you want right now?” Pina asked with a level gaze.

“Yes,” I lied.
“Just give me another chance. You won’t be sorry.”

She sighed, her
two front teeth gnawing on her bottom lip. “Okay, Leah.” Pina forced a smile,
possibly aware that we were both only postponing the inevitable.

I was on time
for all my shifts for a week and then, on a Sunday afternoon, I stalled during
breakfast and couldn’t get myself moving again. I turned the TV on to
Coronation
Street
and lay on the couch. When the phone rang hours later I knew I was
sealing my fate but didn’t pick up, forcing Pina to fire me over the answering
machine.

A few days later
Reid called, having wrangled my number from her, but I didn’t call him back
either. By then the only people receiving any return phone calls from me were
my parents. I was vague with them, usually muttering about how busy and tired I
was. Having no connections to any of the people I knew in Toronto, they
accepted my version of events, a version in which I was understandably sad and
uncommunicative but staying on top of things. “You really should think about
coming home for the summer,” my mother pressed. “Why stay in Toronto and pay
rent if you don’t have to?”

My parents
hadn’t wanted me to stay in Toronto the previous summer either. It took them
awhile to adjust to the reality that I was living with a member of the opposite
sex, having a grown-up relationship.

“There’s my job,
Mom,” I countered. “If I gave that up I probably wouldn’t get it back in the
fall.”

I could hear my
mother pouting over the phone line. “They’d take you back, I bet. And you’d
find another job here. Besides, you won’t be able to afford to keep that
apartment yourself.”

“I know,” I told
her. “I’ll look for a new one. Things are too hectic for me to worry about it
right now but I’ll get on that after classes are finished. There are always
people looking to share. It shouldn’t be hard to find somebody.”

We all know the
rights things to say, if we have to, but doing them is something else. I did
nothing.
Nothing
. And then Bastien’s mother began pestering me about
sending the rest of his things home. His parents had taken a few items of his clothing
home with him in January but left the majority of his things undisturbed.
“There’s no rush,” Bastien’s mother told me over the phone, “but I’ve priced a
company that will ship some boxes. You keep what you want, Leah—whatever he
would want you to have—but I know you’ll be moving soon.”

No, I wouldn’t.
I kept buying time from everyone, avoiding the phone, slowly draining my bank
account of what remained from my student loan. Yunhee smothered her frustration
with me in concern and passed on the names of friends and acquaintances that
were looking for roommates. She’d been sharing a small two-bedroom condo near
Front Street with a girl named Vishaya (whose parents had bought the place
specifically to supply her with a decent place to live while she went to
university) since the beginning of second year. Etienne called and left a
message saying there was a room going in the house he shared and that I was the
first person he’d thought of.

When I didn’t
call him back he got in touch with Yunhee and the two of them came to my
apartment to confront me. Earlier that afternoon my grades had arrived in the
mail along with a separate letter informing me that I’d been placed on academic
probation, and Yunhee nosily grabbed both printouts from my coffee table. Somehow
I’d scraped by with Ds in two classes—Abnormal Psychology and The Graphic
Novel. The rest I’d outright failed. Yunhee flapped the papers in front of me
and said, “You have to appeal this. You have extenuating circumstances. I’m
sure they’d be able to do something.”

I’d never told
Yunhee about losing my job; I knew she’d have lectured me about that too.

“It doesn’t
matter,” I insisted. “I’m not going back this fall.”

“Not going
back?” Her eyes bulged. “What are you going to do? Did your parents convince you
to go home?”

“No. I’m not
going home either. I’m staying here.”

Etienne, who’d
just been watching and listening up to that point, said, “So you’re not
moving?”

“Not yet. Not
now. I can’t.” I focused on Armstrong across the room, running a zillion miles
an hour in his wheel. “I can’t leave this place.”

“But…” Yunhee
and Etienne swapped guarded looks. “Can you
afford
to stay here? I
thought money was an issue.”

“I’m going to
work more hours at the museum,” I lied. “I’ve already fixed it up with Pina.”

Yunhee couldn’t
keep the surprise out of her face, but Etienne, after a moment, said maybe it
was good for me to take a break after such a life-changing loss. I was already
tired of talking to them and of the way they were making me lie, and when
Yunhee asked me to go out to dinner with them I complained that I hadn’t slept
well last night and was too tired.

“Okay, so we’ll
just order pizza in then,” she said, not giving up.

They stayed
until David Letterman came on and then each of them hugged me goodbye. “We
should do this again soon,” Yunhee said. “And you have to start picking up the
damn phone.”

“I know,” I told
her. “I know.”

Some people
don’t let go easily. If I was in Yunhee’s place I probably would’ve been
persistent too, but I wished she’d be more like Iliana and fade into the
background.

From then on I
burrowed harder, letting knocks at my door go unanswered too. I went out for
groceries from time to time, kept the apartment clean and played with
Armstrong, but otherwise kept to myself.

Bastien and I
(mostly Bastien) had been working on a graphic novel when he died. With his
heavy schoolwork load, he hadn’t been able to devote as much time to it as he
would’ve liked. He’d planned to really put a push on it this summer and finish
the story and at least ten sample pages, enough to put together submission
packages for Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, Slave Labor, Top Shelf and Drawn and
Quarterly

Titled
Johnny
Yang, Merman at Large
,
the graphic novel was the comedic story of
fifteen-year-old Johnny Yang, who is struck by lightning while swimming in his
backyard pool and subsequently turns into a merman every time it rains. For
days on end I immersed myself in Bastien’s rough sketches and plot notes. The
story itself was roughly half written (I’d made contributions here and there,
suggesting, among other things, Johnny’s mortal embarrassment at becoming a
merperson, which he thought of as a very feminine state of being) but Bastien
had only finished inking the first four pages.

I was leafing
through the pages one afternoon, more in Bastien’s fantasy world than my own
reality, when there was a rap at the door. I glanced slyly up through the tiny
family room window and caught sight of a cab, and then my mother. My mother in
Toronto, on my doorstep, without warning.

My heart sank,
then raced and sank afresh. I was wearing the plaid pajama bottoms I’d slept
in, and my hair, which I hadn’t washed in three days (although it only took one
to get oily), was lanker than my mother ever would have seen it. I sprinted for
the shower, splashed soap and shampoo onto my body and dragged my razor across
my legs and armpits with such velocity that my right ankle instantly begin to
bleed.

When I stepped
out of the shower again, less than three minutes later, my phone was ringing
off the hook. I slapped a Band-Aid on my ankle, wrapped a towel around myself
and headed up to the door. Mom was sitting on the front stoop, her cell phone
pressed to her ear and her wheeled carry-on bag in front of her. She turned and
saw me just as I opened my mouth to speak.

“I was in the
shower,” I told her. “I thought I heard the door. What are you doing here?”

My mother
frowned, probably afraid that I was constantly running for the door in a state
of undress. Her dyed blond hair (mostly gray underneath) used to be the same
shade of brown-shot-through-with-auburn as mine. She thought the blond made her
look younger, and it did, but it also made it hard to tell her apart from the
thousands upon thousands of other middle-aged white woman who’d dyed their bobbed
hair blond for the same reason. From a distance I wouldn’t have been able to
recognize her as my mother. She could’ve just as easily been a professor from
school or my local pharmacist.

“I called on
your birthday,” my mom said. “And so many times after. You never called back.
Your father and I have been so worried. I even tried the museum and couldn’t
catch you there.” Her chin was beginning to wobble, like this might end in
tears, and I retreated inside, beckoning her to follow. “You never tell me what’s
going on,” she continued. “I feel like I can never
reach
you. Why
haven’t you been in touch with us?”

I didn’t realize
I’d let my parents’ calls go unanswered for so long. I always meant to check
messages but I’d procrastinate, promising myself I’d check them the next day.
And the following day would turn into the day after that, which had now turned
into my mother flying out from British Columbia to reassure herself that her
only child was alive and well, not sprinting to the door in a towel, not pining
for someone she’d never in this life see again.

I’d forgotten
all about my twentieth birthday too. The phone had been ringing more often than
usual lately. I suppose that—along with my parents’ desperation—explained it.

“What did they
say at the museum?” I asked anxiously. I needed to find out how much my mother
knew.

She shook her
head in bewilderment. “Nothing helpful. It sounded like a young girl on the
phone. She said she’d just started there and didn’t know anyone else’s
schedule. She told me I could call back and speak to her manager, but I didn’t
want to cause any trouble for you at work, make it seem as though…”

As though I
was some kind of emergency situation. Unstable.

Better to hop on
a plane and check on me in person.

I nodded like
she’d done the right thing and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was worrying
you and Dad so much. I’ve been working a lot—forgetting to check messages.” A
drop of water rolled down my neck as I led her downstairs. “And on my birthday,
Yunhee, her roommate and I went out to an all-day dim sum place and then a
movie.” I hadn’t seen Yunhee in weeks; I hadn’t seen anyone I knew in weeks.

“Check your
messages from this past week and you’ll hear an earful of worry,” my mom said,
a layer of frost coating her voice and making me bow my head apologetically.
“Leah.” She planted her hands on my shoulders. “You’re looking so thin. Are you
eating?” She threw her arms around me, crunching my bones.

My clothes had grown
loose so I must’ve already lost weight, but Bastien and I didn’t own a scale.
“I’m fine,” I rasped, hugging her back. “But what are you doing here?” I was
repeating myself, panicking. “You didn’t need to come all this way.”

“What am I
supposed to do when we don’t hear from you?” my mom asked. “I should have come
earlier. Every time we talked on the phone, I could hear in your voice how
unhappy you were.” I winced and folded my arms in front of me, my fingers
(nails bitten to the quick) pinching at towel fibers. “Having to do your course
work after what happened with Bastien—and now, locate a new apartment by
yourself—it’s too much. I want to help. And I wanted to see you.”

She was staying
four days, she said, and during that time we’d do whatever I wanted. She told
me she’d sleep on the couch and, of course, didn’t want to be any trouble. “I
know you have to work at the museum,” she added. “I don’t want to interrupt
your schedule. Just work around me.”

Standing there
in front of my mother, still dripping wet, I racked my brain for the
appropriate way to handle her sudden appearance. I couldn’t tell her I wasn’t
at the museum anymore. She’d see it as further evidence that I needed to go
home with her. And I wasn’t going anywhere. But I didn’t want to fight about
it; I didn’t want her to worry more than she had to.

I said she was
lucky that I happened to have the day off, and later I let her take me out for
a pasta dinner, during which I listened to updates on my father, aunt, uncle
and cousins. As a legal assistant my mother always has a collection of
depressing tales of down and out people to trot out, yet they never seem to
weigh her down. Those stories I heard over dinner too: a woman with previous
prostitution charges fighting for custody of her thirteen-year-old son, two
brothers with gambling addictions who had taken to robbing banks together, an
elderly man with a bad heart who had his house sold from under him as part of
an identity theft scheme. I told my mother she should pick one of the more dramatic
cases and write a book about it (a suggestion she never gets tired of hearing).

“I should,” she
agreed. “I really should. Legal fiction sells like hotcakes, doesn’t it?”

Talkative as she
was, I could feel her heavy stare on me, wanting me to be the Leah I used to
be, or at least some kind of assurance that I would one day be that person
again.

I thought things
would go easier if I obliged her and played the part the best I could, so the
following day I pretended to go to work at the museum. For hours I sat in the
Toronto Reference Library with Bastien’s iPod and
Johnny Yang
sketchbook. I intended to repeat my deceit the day after as well but couldn’t
bring myself to get out of bed on time and then had to fake a case of stomach
flu.