Losing It (45 page)

“I know you feel bitter,” he said after a time. “But please don’t abandon me. I will be lost and worthless without you.”

“You mean if I divorce you over this, the whole world’s going to know for sure.”

Another silence, and Julia felt as if she’d ground her heel into his wound, but she couldn’t help it. She felt as if she’d been wounded, too.

He said, “Julia, try to be reasonable. That’s not what I meant. And anyway I don’t care about the whole world.” His voice was finally rising with a sense of purpose. “I care about you and Matthew.” He fell silent again.

“It’s going to take time for me to absorb all this and figure out where we are,” Julia said at last.

“Yes. Yes!” he agreed.

“All right then.” She suddenly felt how cold her hands were, how uncomfortable it was on the perch. “All right,” she said again, as much for herself as for him. What’s next? “Bob, I’m going to go across the street to ask Ray to call an ambulance,” she said.

“Good. Thank you.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. I’m just – I seem to be bleeding a little more than I thought.”

“Oh, Bob! Hang on!” she said and turned quickly to go. Her legs were stiff and she felt shaky, cold to the core. She started to run. Snow filled the air now, was melting on the ground. She pounded along the driveway and across the quiet street, forced herself to focus on getting to Ray’s door.

39

B
ob suddenly felt flushed, as if some block in the radiator pipes had given way and now he was wrapped in liquid warmth. Yet it wasn’t liquid, turned as in a dream to heated sand, to something he loved – that was it, the warmth of familiarity, as if he had walked back into his childhood home, miraculously restored, unseen and yet preserved all these decades later.

It was brown – not the home, which he couldn’t visualize so much as sense somehow in his blood and bones – the feeling was brown, was comfortable, soothing. And she was there, so close now he had a hard time seeing her; she was out of focus, a blur of brownish skin. She’d been lying in the sun, that was why she was so warm and brown. He saw her in a vague way, her nose, the curve of her eyelids, the haze of her hair. His eyes were so close he was conscious of the shadow of the end of his own nose, would pull away in a moment to see her better. But it was fine too to breathe together like this.

How long had it been? He couldn’t remember, but it felt like centuries, slow accumulations of time, of not recognizing each other. “Hello, you,” he said tenderly, but she didn’t reply – didn’t look quite at him, but didn’t look away either. Their
bodies were very close. Of course, they’d been making love, they were still immersed, it was hard to know where the one ended and the other began. That was an important part of the feeling, Bob thought, this comfortable, easy joy of knowing, of not really being separate.
And so you are this and we did that
.

She turned then, rolled like an ocean wave, and they were quiet spoons in the soft, warm sand. Her hair smelled of salt and wind, of sweet sweat, of the remnants of desire. She closed her eyes and Bob could feel her almost immediately settling into sleep, the way that she did, holding his hand over her breast, which was as perfect as it was ordinary. It was as familiar as his own body, might have belonged to him at another time, he thought. They’d been together, possibly even been one another in different ages. The idea seemed quite natural, something known but sometimes forgotten, the way that so many important things are forgotten in the mists of living.

“Stay with me here,” he murmured, trying to make it into a little song, something that might slip through, last somehow. “Stay with me here.”

In a moment she was on her feet, was brushing the sand off her perfect, her ordinary body, and walking away. He propped himself on one elbow to watch her, and she knew, so let herself sway a bit more than she would have all alone. It was this dance they did. He thought of calling out her name but stayed silent, watched her instead as she waded into the water, not slowing for the first bite of the waves, not speeding up either to put distance between them.

He wanted to see her face. He knew who she was, of course he did, her hair fluttering now in the breeze, golden brown, down her backside. But he wanted to see her, to memorize her; he wasn’t sure how long it would be until he saw her again. Turn, turn, he thought. He held his breath, waiting.

She paused, dipped her shoulder as if to do it then, to plunge, but straightened instead and turned to meet his gaze. His smile was reflex, was out of the cage before he could withdraw it. Something was wrong. Her hair was quite dark now, a trick of the light perhaps, but black, actually, and her face, her eyes … her eyes wouldn’t meet his, one went this way and the other was …

Then she disappeared without a ripple. The water betrayed nothing, no churning of strong legs and feet, no trailing bubbles. He stood then and watched, but the sand, the water, the sun were all harsh as glittering diamonds, and the wind told him nothing. He ran to the edge of the water, felt the splash on his legs as he ploughed forward – cold, but not impossible. A wave hit and he fell, was soaked now, taken by surprise by the saltiness. He tried to gain his feet but where were they? It was hard to know where the beach was, the sky, the world had turned to a turmoil of pounding surf. He spat out a mouthful of water, coughed.

He kicked his legs – what should have been his legs – felt himself rolling, sinking, changing. The whole world was pulled inside out like an animal being skinned. He felt the corkscrewing, yearning tug of the air, scanned feverishly to find where he’d last seen her …

There she was in the corner of the room – it was a room, a grey box with a bed and a window, a table, a clock – she was sitting up in the gloom and he could see her
from inside
. That was the bizarre thing, how normal it felt, to look out through the eyes of Sienna Chu and to think: that man slumped in the corner chair with the balding head, the wisps of black hair, snoring in Chinese – that must be my father. And that woman in the cot next to me, curled in her sweater, the wild white mane, pale complexion – there is my mother. He saw the room from outside and from within her, as if he had stolen into her
mind, was tiptoeing around as a burglar might in a sleeping house in the minutes before dawn.

He tried to poke into her thoughts, as if slowly and silently opening a door in the murk. And immediately he was aware of a strange dust, like eggshell rubbings, or as if she’d spent half a summer grinding pencil shavings into tiny particles then absorbing them into her bloodstream, the lead and the wood together, a soupy glue limping through her body. Alive but dragging, suffocating, like a huge snake that’s eaten a water-buffalo calf and is bloated in the shade, stuffed for weeks now, not wanting to move, unable.

And then it was later. Through Sienna’s eyes he could see half a field out the window. Half a grey field between her father and her mother. The tops of traffic, a bit of a light: grey-red, grey-yellow. He could see her parents’ coats piled on a small chair, and grey flowers balanced on an absurdly small bedside table, and one-third of a doorway and a sliver of hall, fractions of people waiting for an invisible elevator to take them away in clumps.

He hadn’t noticed before, but now great bricks of words lay in rubble in the room: helpless, shattered, dusty, cracked, with broken clinging bits of mortar. Words thrown at moving targets, words stuck together to try to stand up to the winds and rain, words piled in approximations of this and that: this wall will stand for that thing, that act, and over here, this section will be that person, and here is what certain thoughts look like, explanations, and over here a doorway through which we might pass. As if.

Her mother woke up, looked lost, disoriented for a moment, then the whole history of the current disaster booted up in her mind, took over her features, and she said, “Oh sweetie. Is there anything we can get you? What would you like?”

What would I like? What would I like? Here I am inside the mind, the body of Sienna Chu, Bob thought, and the world is unbearably heavy, is sad beyond measure.

“Nothing. Nothing,” he heard Sienna say – a strange version of her voice, heard like this from the inside.

“Ah!” Bob said, and opened his eyes. Julia was there. She looked tired, devastated, vulnerable.

“You’re awake,” she said. She turned to the driver – there was a driver, Bob could see and recognize it all in an instant. There was a driver and an attendant and the lights going by were streetlights. “He’s awake,” Julia said to the ambulance attendant. “Lie down. How do you feel?”

How did he feel?

He couldn’t say. The moment felt crammed beyond belief, as if it could not contain one more ounce of anguish, joy, relief, fear, anticipation.

“Are you all right?” she asked, her face so drained of colour, a portrait of exhaustion.

She ran her hand through her hair in fatigue, smiled for him with such emptiness – or was it concern? He couldn’t tell. He didn’t know. He’d been married to her for seven years, had fathered their child, had loved her forever, and yet still didn’t know the first thing about her.

“Julia -”

“For God’s sake, Bob, just close your eyes,” she said. “Try and rest.”

I’m not going to let you go
. He willed her to say it. He didn’t want to shut his eyes until he heard those words from her.

“We’ll be there soon,” she said. He could feel his heart lying limp on the floor of the ambulance. She turned to look out the windows at the rear, her face blank. And then he felt her hand on his – warm somehow, despite the chill. Her shoulders were
rocking with the vibrations of the vehicle, she was still looking away, but her touch was for him. Suddenly the ambulance slowed down – they’d come to an intersection, maybe – and the siren came on, a doleful, penitent song on the underside of this strange, strange night.

40

E
verybody was there: Trevor, Mary Hoderstrom, Tommy, the nephews, Babs and Dougie and the others, all of them. Mother and Father. Trevor had been late – he was always getting hung up and such. Now he was eating a banana. He was so hungry he was smushing his face down into his flat thing like it was a cigar. Not a cigar, a rollout, a section head. Just smushing. He was older. All of them were. They had brown teeth and there were cows, and the president was always getting shot, over and over, it didn’t matter so much. It was something to do.

Lenore said, “Trevor!” and rapped at his forehead. She wanted him to get his face out of the smushy thing, the ligament. The ointment. He ignored her, as he always did, it was so annoying. She said, “Guests are coming!” and the big one, the Italian, said, “Don’t be such a sissy!” It was so sad, Mary Hoderstrom coming down like that, the way she did, getting so old. She had fluffs of white hair and pink skin underneath, she trembled like she was spraying all the time, Dear Lord this and that. Just mottled. Her tongue went wah-wah, like a cradle-cap, muffing, little bits of prayer came down her lip and leaked onto the rug. She was never like that in school, always very
clever with her things, and such. She was never leaky. But then it changed.

Tommy too looked much older after the accident. He had claws and one eye went this way and the other didn’t. He kept watching the president. This hump on his back. Quasi hoo-hoo. From before. Mary would know. She knew everything, very doctor and all. Lenore said, “Why wouldn’t he want to?” but Mary ignored her. It wasn’t the right question. It was something to do with the accident, the shooting, that terrible divorce. She said, “Well, if you must!” and she meant it, it seemed so sad all of a sudden. Things got that way. The glue fell out and then the wind blew it all down south. Lenore said, “Mup-mup!” and tried to ignore Trevor with the banana, but he was having a terrible time with it. Just mushing. The Italian one said, “It isn’t at all like that!” but she was always that way, big and black, just dribbling.

There were cornflakes outside, they looked so white and silly, Lenore could see them through the bars. It wasn’t such a bad hotel. At least they let everyone stay, and she didn’t know about the tipping – Trevor took care of all that. She was upset about the stinky rooms. She’d tried to talk to the woman, but it just got lunkier every day. Lenore turned to Trevor now and said, “You talk to her! I’ve tried!” but he didn’t say that he would. He was finishing the last of the banana, it was all over his face, he never used to be like that. He was going to ignore it. He’d go away and pretend it was all right.