Everything Was Good-Bye (7 page)

Cupping my hand around my ear, I pressed my body close to the door just like Harj had taught me to. “Be strong,” my mother said. “Think of your son. He needs his father.” Serena did not seem to answer. I wondered why she still sought my mother’s counsel—the advice never changed. Perhaps that was what she wanted: Affirmation. Validation. Acceptance. How easily we confused these things with love.

I rushed into my room when I heard their voices draw closer. A moment later Serena was in my doorway, her face pale as she looked in on me. She was transparent, barely a fraction of her former self. I waited for her to say something, but she just stood there in a daze, eyelids drooping,
leaning against the wall as if she were holding the house up. Hollow-eyed, she stared out at nothing just as we all did—with blindness and longing.

1.4

J
ust before third period, I grabbed my Walkman and backpack and hurried across the parking lot, squinting through intermittent raindrops. I turned the music up, matching my steps to the rhythm of “Personal Jesus,” navigating past the smoke pit and huddled fringe groups who hung out by the portables. “Feeling unknown… .” I replayed it until I was offschool grounds and on my way to Liam’s house. He had missed school before, but never for this long. Last time it had been a week, but even then he’d dropped a postcard in my locker—his way of saying “see you soon.” Liam was always buying old photographs and postcards from thrift stores and he occasionally passed some on to me. Once when we were reading the back of 1960s’ vacation postcards, I told him that it was sad to buy other people’s memories; he reminded me that he was the only person who wanted them. He made collages out of them, adding in new pictures that he had taken, until you couldn’t tell new from old. My favourite was simply a collection of postmarks pasted and overlapped on photographs of corner stores, stop-lights, park benches, street corners and empty beaches. He called it “Wish You Were Here.”

I trampled through his overgrown front lawn, past the unkempt flower beds that hinted at better days, and up the steps to the front door. The stoop was littered with local newspapers, junk mail and cigarette butts that hadn’t made it to the tinfoil ashtray on the railing. I knocked and knelt
down to pick up the mail and was sorting it into a neat stack when Liam answered.

He pulled my headphones off. “Miss me?”

“Just curious where you’ve been.” I handed him the pile of junk mail, trying not to bite my lip on the lie. By now he knew all my tells.

The house smelled likestale smoke and wet dogs, like the cheap motels my mother cleaned. I followed him up a few stairs and down a dingy, green-carpeted hallway adorned with a “Jesus loves you” embroidered wall hanging and fading family photos. I stared into the placid smiles and sol-emn eyes, pausing at a photo of a four-year-old Liam blowing out birthday candles, his mother smiling at his side.

“Do you miss her?” I asked.

“What’s to miss? I barely knew her.” He went quiet for a minute and stared at the pictures. I reached for his hand but he moved away before I could hold it. “She lives in Saskatchewan with a guy named Chuck.” He laughed that painful laugh that I had initially misinterpreted as satisfaction. “Can you believe that? Chuck, what a name… Chuck rhymes with
fuck.”
He walked farther down the hallway. “This is my room,” he said, pushing the door open. The walls were covered in vintage art and rock ’n’ roll posters tacked and taped in place, one overlapping the next. His photographs were thumbtacked all over his closet door. There was even one of me. I had my hands up in a don’t-take-my-picture way, but you could still see I was smiling. His bed was unmade and showed no signs of ever having been made, his mahogany dresser and nightstand were missing handles and he had a milk crate full of records beside a 1970s’ sideboard-style stereo. Books were balanced in piles on the threadbare carpet, and between the Prousts and Emersons were mounds of clothing. His room was like a flea market—a crowded thrift store at best.

I picked up one of his cameras and looked at him through the lens. “So… where have you been lately? Are you sick?”

“Yeah,” he said and reached for the camera to show me where the shutter release was. I clicked off a few frames.” Well, I mean, no. Not really.”

He sighed and pushed his hair away from his eyes, only to have it slip back. “You know, I’m just sick of school, so I’m taking a break. A sabbatical, so to speak.”

“What does your dad think about that?” I asked.

“He’s hardly around.” He picked up another camera and took my picture taking his picture. “That’ll be a neat one,” he said, taking another.

“Aren’t you worried that he’ll find out?”

“No, not really. Besides, he wouldn’t even care.”

I nodded. Part of me wanted to ask him why, but our relationship was built on not knowing.

I put the camera down and walked across the room to look out the window at the backyard. It was littered with rubbish: car parts, rusty bicycles, a dilapidated 1970s’ swing set, a Mr. Turtle pool filled with rainwater and leaves, and an old German shepherd who appeared equally defeated. I looked away, not wanting to see my reflection in the neglect. Liam was sitting with legs outstretched on the bed, flipping through an encyclopedia. A stack of them teetered on the floor nearby.

“Did you rob the library or something?”

“Funny,” he said flatly. “I picked them up from the Sally Ann; this is my education in lieu of school. I’m already on
D.”

“Wow,” I said, matching his tone.

“Did you know that dinosaurs only get a few pages? Millions of years ruling the earth and they get a few measly pages.”

I picked up the newspaper that was on his bed and unfolded it to the crossword. “Well, I guess humans should only get a then.”

“I was thinking a footnote, if we’re lucky.”

He picked up volume
E,
opened it and started reading. His lips mouthed the words like tiny breaths. I sat down next to him, pulled out the pencil that I’d used to tie up my hair, and shook the knot loose just like the girls on all the shampoo commercials did.

I worked away at the puzzle for an hour, aware of how close we were sitting to each other, aware that he had looked up from his encyclopedia several times and traced the line of my leg to the hem of my “Blondie” miniskirt. I was sure I had seen a picture of Debbie Harry wearing a similar
black-and-white-striped skirt, or maybe I’d seen it on tv. I couldn’t remember; I was just a kid when my sisters had huddled around the tv set watching her sing “Heart of Glass” on
American Bandstand
. We always watched
AB
on Saturday mornings and
Solid Gold
in the evenings. When other kids were going to piano, ballet or soccer practice on Saturday mornings, I was taking the bus downtown to a&b Sound, Zulu Records and Odyssey Imports.

I walked over to Liam’s stereo and pulled a record from the yellow Dairyland crate.
“Platinum Blonde?”

“I just liked the one song.”

“Doesn’t Really Matter?” I asked, as I put the album back and picked up Simple Minds.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I have the record too, only mine is autographed.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. They were signing records at a&b. My sister and I lined up for three hours to meet them.”

“So what were they like?”

“Short.”

“I guess that’s why they have big hair,” he said, smiling. “Napoleon complex meets Vidal Sassoon.”

I laughed as I pulled the Simple Minds record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable and lowered the needle on “Don’t You Forget About Me.”

“She should have ended up with Bender?”

“Huh?”

“In
The Breakfast Club
—Molly Ringwald, she should have stayed with Bender.”

“
The Breakfast Club?
Was that the one with the quintessential dweeb named Duckie?”

“No, that was
Pretty in Pink
.”

“Seen one John Hughes movie, seen them all.”

“That’s not true. They’re kind of different.”

“How? They’re all about white suburban kids with no real problems, except for that Ally Sheedy character in
The Breakfast Club
. She’s morbid, a bit like you.”

“I’m not morbid,” I said, flopping down next to him on the bed.

He picked up the paper and handed it to me. “I saw you reading the obituaries.”

“I glanced at them… what’s wrong with that? The paper is filled with stories about life and death. I was just reading the abbreviated versions.”

“So, Miss Morbid, have you spent time on what you want your obit to say?”

I folded the paper. “No—but I know what I
don’t
want it to say.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I don’t want it to use the phrase ‘survived by.’ It’s such a euphemism. Why not just list the people who were left behind rather than say that the deceased was
survived by
. I can’t imagine you actually survive the loss of a love, you just bear it, and you just go on until you become someone else so you can forget who you were … how you were.”

“Do you think that’s what your mom did?” Liam turned towards me, propping himself on his elbow. He waited in my silence, both of us staring at each other as if we were playing a game of chicken, waiting to see which of us would give in. Me. Always me. I tossed the newspaper onto the floor and walked back to the window. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“Darwin,” he answered.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, my grandmother got him for me when I was in Grade 10 as some kind of compensation for making me go to Holy Trinity.”

“I can’t believe you ever went there.”

“Tell me about it. That’s why I named the dog Darwin. It was my first attempt at religious rebellion.”

“There were more?”

“Yeah, I did whatever I could to get them to kick me out of school.”

“Like?”

He sat up straight and put his encyclopedia down. “Well, for start-ers I quoted Nietzsche and questioned everything. In religious studies, I
pointed out that if Mary Magdalene was a prostitute it was likely that Jesus was a john. In English I wrote an essay called “Jesus, Portrait of a Coloured Man,” arguing that, based on anthropology, Jesus could not have been white.”

“How long before they kicked you out?”

“A whole year. They wanted to save me, that is until they caught me making out with Jennifer Milton in a confession booth… her dad donated tons of money to the school. Needless to say, I was expelled the following week.”

I laughed even though I felt a pang of jealousy in my stomach. “So this Jennifer person, was she your girlfriend?” I sat down next to him, my thigh brushing his.

“No, I’ve never had a steady girlfriend. But there is this girl I like.” His palm grazed my leg. I stared at it, half expecting it to have left a mark.

My voice caught in my throat and rattled out, “Really?” I tried to seem disinterested and flung my legs over the side of the bed, my back to him as I picked up an encyclopedia and flipped through the pages for a few minutes. “You should tell her.”

“I’ve thought about it. But if I told her that I like her then everything may change. I may lose her—I don’t think I could survive that.”

I stopped flipping pages, tentative and almost frightened as I turned towards him. “Yeah, but if you never tell her, you won’t know if she feels the same way.”

He stared at me until the slightest smile formed on his lips. “She’ll know it by what I don’t say.”

I picked up an encyclopedia and lay down on my stomach next to him, both of us quietly flipping through pages, not reading a word.

As I walked home I wondered if the aunties on the street had seen me leave Liam’s house, and if they did, whether they would report back to my mother. My sisters and I referred to them as the Indian Intelligence Association. As members of the iia they were induced by their morals to spend their afternoons looking out windows, gathering gossip and deli-cious
details that they spread through a game of broken telephone. They were a blend of town crier and gossip columnist who spun stories like webs, occasionally devouring victims like my sister Harj.

Two years before, she’d been walking home from the bus stop when a group of dips in a yellow Trans Am followed her home. They’d been following her every day for a week and every day she’d come home in tears, too ashamed to repeat the things they had said. She knew not to turn around, not to pay them any attention, but the sound of their car rolling over the gravel made her skin prick with fear and like animals, they sensed it. It was the only encouragement they needed that day.

They pulled their car up beside her and one of the boys jumped out, grabbing the back of her arm, pulling her against his body, laughing as she begged for him to let her go. The aunties must have watched from behind their sheer living-room draperies, they must have heard her cries, they must have seen the trail of dirt and stones as the car careened away, because when she came home my mother had already been told that my sister had gotten in a car with a group of boys.

Harj tried to explain what had happened, that she had been grabbed, driven to an empty lot… Her words fell back, swallowed in open-mouthed sobs. My mother slapped her. “Stop it! Stop it! Not another word!” she’d yelled. Serena rushed to Harj’s side to save her from more injury. My mother dropped her hand, her eyes full of the questions she saved for God.

Harj, who had studied sociology in university, once told me that we were a natural target for judgments: a family already wounded was easy prey for a community that often turned on itself. She ran away a few months later. Despite my mother’s attempts at reconciliation, she would not return home. Tej and I visited her once, and though we were appalled by the squalor of her Eastside apartment—the mousetraps in the corner, the red-bricked views, the black mildew on thin-paned windows—we said nothing of it. Her roommate, who I later realized was her boyfriend, was sitting on a plastic patio chair by the window, chain-smoking cigarettes. Harj didn’t introduce us; she acted like he wasn’t even there and made us jasmine tea from small green packets she had taken from the Chinese restaurant she worked in. “So how is Mom… Serena… A.J.?” She asked after
everyone, the way we were taught to do, and we summed up family health in small reassuring statements that opened to truthful sighs.