The Sky Is Falling (26 page)

She tapped on Pete's door and, placing her little shell ear against it, listened. “Pete?” She opened the door. Immediately a sickroom smell hit us—fetid and sour. Three days weren't enough to starve, but maybe he did other drugs besides pot. Maybe he'd overdosed. Two towels on the curtain rod shut out most of the light so it took a moment for our eyes to adjust. Sonia went over to the foamie and knelt. “Pete? We're so worried about you.” She lay beside him and motioned to me to come too. I set the pizza box on the floor and went and knelt on the other side of him.

Sonia: “Pete? We miss you. We love you. You have to talk about it. You have to let your feelings out. Belinda hurt you, didn't she? You love her.”

He turned onto his back. I saw grease-darkened hair, dry lips bleeding in the cracks. He smelled, not just of B.O., of something rotten. Now he was ordinary, like us. I didn't want to see him ungilded like that.

Sonia brushed his face with the ends of her hair. She painted his eyelids and cheeks. He stopped her hand and blindly guided the hair into his mouth. “We love you, we love you,” she whispered and I hated him and wanted to be him at the same time. I wanted her to whisper those words to me.

Turgenev's Bazarov had reached this same stalemate, I remembered—love or principle? It killed him, but it didn't kill Pete. He sat up and spat Sonia's hair out. “What day is it?”

“Friday,” she told him, staring at the miracle of his rising.

“Fuck. My sister's coming.”

The next morning when he came down, he seemed himself again, though somewhat gaunt. He'd showered and it was hard to believe that terrible smell could ever have come from him. “You're back,” Dieter said with a tinge of something in his voice. “When are we going to Seattle?”

Pete was obviously starving. He took a mixing bowl from the cupboard and filled it with all the granola in the jar. After jiggling each milk carton in the fridge to ascertain which was the fullest, he doused his cereal.

“Pete?”

“I don't know. My sister's coming for a few days. After that.” He didn't join Dieter and Pascal at the table, but bowed over the bowl on the counter, feeding himself with a wooden spoon.

Dieter: “I didn't know you had a sister.”

“Do you have a sister?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. My life is completely altered.”

Dieter coloured. My toast popped and I raced to scrape margarine across it and get out. Pascal, I noticed, was drawing Pete in his book.

“Guess what?” Dieter said as I moved off with my plate. “This is weird. Pascal and I are from the same town.”

Pascal: “Esterhazy.”

“He didn't know what a dyke was,” Dieter added. “I had to tell him.”

Pascal put a hand over his embarrassed face. Dieter was watching Pete, waiting for a reaction. Pete straightened and, from where he stood at the counter several paces away, threw the bowl he had been eating from into the sink. It crashed onto all the undone dishes and, from the sound of it, more than one thing shattered.

We didn't meet the sister immediately. Pete kept her away in whatever hotel she was staying at. All along we'd thought he'd severed his family ties, but now we realized he just didn't talk about that part of his life. He was ashamed. He switched cooking nights with me and begged off both the potluck and the meeting.

“You won't be at the meeting?” I asked.

If he'd told me he was joining the army, I would have been less shocked.

It was a spiritless affair without him, first because the planned scouting trip to Seattle that hadn't happened left an unfillable hole in the agenda and, second, because now it was obvious how much Pete's dynamism motivated us, even during his silences, even when he lay back in the beanbag and furiously pumped his ankle, beating out the dwindling minutes of our lives while we argued over petty details and bruised feelings. We always felt judged, but now we realized we deserved it. Our efforts were half-hearted. We were weak.

In “My Life—A Provincial's Story,” Misail's sister is saddled with the ludicrous name of Cleopatra by their egomaniacal father. A sickly, lachrymose sender of notes at the beginning of the story, she strives to reconcile father and son, visiting Misail secretly so as not to provoke their father's wrath, begging him to change his ways for the sake of their dead mother.

“Zed, this is my sister Dede,” Pete said when I came into the kitchen. I'd noticed her shoes when I came in, loafers with two bright American pennies glinting in their leather slots. Now she was perched on a chair with her argyled feet twined around a rung, afraid of coming into contact with the floor, I could tell. She stared right at me. I encountered Dedes all the time on campus, a type that possessed not only dewy prettiness, but unnerving psychic powers; instantly they knew I was irrelevant.

“Hi,” I said.

She turned her tight smile over to Pete, who was at the counter opening cans. He was the more striking of the two, but that didn't mean she was in any way flawed. Maybe her jaw was a little too large. It didn't seem as though she'd shed a tear her entire life.

“When did you learn to cook, Peter?” she asked.

“It's easy. Why don't you help?”

“What should I do?”

“You can chop the garlic.”

“My fingers will smell. Zed's a funny name.”

I looked up from where I was making myself a snack. “It's Jane actually. Only Pete calls me that.”

She smiled. “He calls me Pea.”

“Are you visiting for long?”

“Just a few days. I'm checking out UBC.”

Pete set the can opener down too loudly then up-ended the beans into the colander in the sink. They made a sucking sound as gravity pulled them from the can. “Where are you studying now?” I asked her.

“We have Grade Thirteen in Ontario. Do I have to?” Pete passed her the garlic and, putting the heel of his hand to the side of her head, he gave her a little shove, which she seemed to like.

At supper Dede told us, “Oh, I'll live in residence for sure.” Her eyes made a rapid blue sweep of the kitchen before coming to rest on the contents of her plate and, apparently finding them as disgusting, her lips pursed, as though on a drawstring. Dieter, who was sitting across from her at the table, chewed and smiled with an expression of delighted horror. “I'm thinking of majoring in English,” Dede said. “Or maybe French.”

“I hated residence,” said Sonia. “I couldn't connect.”

Dede blinked at her.

“It was so lonely,” she said.

“Oh. I thought you meant the electricity didn't work.”

Dieter laughed, then Pascal laughed.

“You did not,” Pete said.

“I did!”

It was the only thing he'd said since introducing her. He seemed so subdued with her here. I imagined the sobering heart-to-heart the night before, Dede begging him to talk to their father, Pete refusing, saying, “He rapes the earth.” We all ate in silence for a minute except for Dede, who poked. Then she asked us what we did for fun.

“Fun?” I said.

“I play soccer,” Pascal offered when no one else answered. “I like to draw.”

“Are you in Fine Arts?”

Eyes darting, he suddenly bent over his food, heavy brown waves flopping over his plate.

“What about you?” she asked me.

“I was going to major in Slavonic Studies. I'm not so sure now.”

“I'm back to fun now.”

“Oh. I'm studying for exams.”

“That's right. I forgot.”

Dieter was still staring at her. I wasn't sure she'd noticed, but now she met his gaze and smiled as though he were an interesting insect. “What about you, Dede?” he asked. “What do you do for fun?”

Pete stood and took both their plates to the counter.

“I sail. I play field hockey. I party quite a bit.”

“Really?” said Dieter.

Pete squeezed her shoulder. “Smoke?”

“So you do have some!” She got up at once. On the way out to the deck, she pointed to the Ronald Reagan mask. “Cute.”

As soon as they were gone, Dieter said, “Do you believe that?”

“I think she's nice,” said Sonia. She looked at Pascal, who bobbed in agreement.

“Talk about bourgeois.
I sail. I play field hockey. I drink tea in
the afternoon.
”

We could see them through the window, their backs to us as they leaned over the railing, passing the joint back and forth. Dede was talking, administering little jabs to her brother's shoulder. Pete kept shaking his head.

“I'm going out there,” said Dieter gleefully.

“Are you a spy?” I asked.

He pretended to be affronted. “We're going to kick the ball around.” He looked at Pascal.

“Let's go to the beach,” Pascal said. “There's more room.”

“I don't have that much time. My first exam's on Wednesday. Oh, never mind.” Dieter put his plate in the sink and went upstairs.

“I'll go,” Sonia told Pascal just as Pete and Dede came back in, looking much happier than when they went out.

“I'm definitely coming to school here,” Dede told us, beaming. “Mom would be happy about that, wouldn't she?”

Pete collected the remaining plates and carried them to the sink without answering. I'd thought their mother was dead. I already knew Dede was no weepy Cleopatra; I'd been wrong about that too. I wanted to stay and listen, to find out if there was anything I'd been right about, but that would make me a spy.

“Peter,” said Dede. “They think the sun shines out your ass.”

“Fuck.”

“They
do
. Is that supposed to be washing? You're such a pig.”

“It's fine,” he said, swabbing the last plate with the grey cloth and jamming it in the drying rack. “Let's go.”

“Show me your room first.”

“Why?”

“I want to see it.”

They went upstairs. Sonia and Pascal were getting ready to go to the beach. She asked me if I wanted to go too. I did, but I had to study. I had to study, but I said yes. Meanwhile Pete and Dede came back down and we all met up in the hall. Dede was saying, “I just don't see any evil in furniture. What happened to all your stuff?”

“I gave it away.”

“You're too noble for your own good. And the filth? Is that a statement too?”

Pete pointed to her penny loafers placed primly, heel to heel and toe to toe, by the door. “You have
Abraham Lincoln
in your shoes?”

“Can we go to a club?” she asked.

Pascal led us in a zigzag through the avenues, past Gandhi and Mandela streets, until we came to a tree whose pale blossoms formed a perfect canopy. His sketchbook was tucked under his arm, the pen lost somewhere in his hair, but he found it and drew some quick lines without looking at the page. Sonia sidled up to me. “Let's tell him. I didn't want to before. He's so sweet. But it's our responsibility.”

I nodded.

Past Kropotkin Street the trees I'd seen a few weeks earlier were sporting tufts of coppery leaves, their flowers a pretty litter on the ground. Pascal went over and leaned against a trunk. “In Esterhazy we've still got snow.”

“This is our snow,” Sonia told him, pointing to the petals under his white boots.

“It's so beautiful here.”

Sonia gave me the look then went over and took Pascal's arm. Now she was leading him, I only following, and Pascal looked pleased. “It's beautiful and it's in danger,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You've heard about what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”

“You mean the A-bomb?”

“Yes. That was nothing compared to the weapons they've got today. The hydrogen bomb is much more powerful. And the United States has thirty-five thousand of them and a special new weapon called the cruise missile that can't be detected by radar. It's a first-strike weapon. It's meant to start a nuclear war.”

Pascal said, “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Good thing we're on their side!”

“No, no. We can't afford to think that way any more. The Soviet Union has twenty thousand bombs, enough to kill every one of us twenty times. Hiroshima was a beautiful city like this. It was flattened. Thousands of people died the most horrible deaths. But what happened to Hiroshima was a millionth the size of what would happen here if they dropped the bomb.”

Her voice was tremulous, her eyes moist. I felt that panic grip me again. Pascal had turned white. Everything, everything in that season of life was tinged with death. “It could happen at any moment,” I added.

“We don't mean to scare you,” Sonia told Pascal.