The Sky Is Falling (38 page)

Joe Jr. had not come in vain. There was at least one tattoo, a murky blue peace dove on Sonia's forearm, probably done with a Bic. She never used to wear jewellery except for the little cross, but now, as I let go of the flowers so I could hug her, two bulky silver medallions on leather thongs dug into my chest. Both her ears were fringed with rings. Then
she
reared up behind Sonia, glaring now. How ironic, I thought. But what else could Sonia be but gay, after two decades in exclusively female company? Well, there would have been guards, psychiatrists, case workers, but I couldn't bear to think about them.

The hug went on and on, as I had imagined it would, but it smelled less like spring. This was how I knew my heart was safe where it was: when I pulled back and introduced my son, who had picked the flowers off the floor, and he shook her hand so politely. When the expected angina attack did not occur. How perfectly Tolstoy had nailed the girl-crush, but I couldn't see it at that time, just as I couldn't tell who the tears were for that had sprung in Sonia's eyes.

“This is Brenda,” Sonia said before Brenda actually snarled. Sonia put her arms around her and, blushing, Brenda pulled away and stalked off.

“Come in. I'll make tea,” Sonia said, and we followed her down the hall. She seemed all right, I thought then. You couldn't tell.

She led us to a kitchen smelling of garbage that needed taking out, where Brenda was already lurking. Joe Jr. stood by, the embarrassment of the bouquet still in his hands. Sonia relieved him of it, gestured for us to sit at the little table, then began lifting dirty dishes out of the sink onto the counter, the flowers held in the crook of one arm, the way in a different life she might have multi-tasked with a baby on her hip.

“Do you want tea, hon?”

“Tea?” Brenda said from the open fridge. She held up a can of beer to me. “Does he want one?”

I said, “He's fifteen,” and Sonia turned and looked at him again. “Give him a Coke,” she said.

Brenda did, sitting down hard on her chair. Until that moment I'd thought she was older than Sonia, than us, but now I realized that, despite her experienced face, she was younger by quite a bit, young enough anyway for fits of petulance. Among the clutter on the table were rolling papers, a pouch of tobacco. Brenda got busy assembling a cigarette while Joe Jr. watched, wrists pressed primly between his knees when he wasn't drinking from the can. Sonia put the flowers in the sink. People around here, they didn't own cars and they didn't own vases.

“So you're married,” she said.

“Technically.”

There were only three chairs at the table I noticed then and stood. Sonia waved me back. She filled the kettle and put it on. “What does he do?”

“My husband? He's a doctor.”

“What about you?”

“I freelance as a copy editor.”

“Ah.”

The angel of silence has flown over us
, Chekhov wrote, but it was not like that. Silence dropped, like that old iron curtain. I had expected some things to be difficult to talk about, things that maybe Sonia wouldn't want me to bring up, but I hadn't foreseen how excruciating it would be to have an ordinary conversation, the routine back and forth of two reacquainting friends. How to reciprocate her questions? Her life had stopped while mine had carried on these twenty years. I couldn't ask what she worked at. What Brenda did. Who Brenda was. How they'd met. Even asking how she'd been seemed grotesquely insensitive. (I was afraid to ask.) Meanwhile, Sonia searched the cupboards for teabags. Then, as though she perceived my distress and wanted to spare me from it, she asked over her shoulder, “Do you still speak Russian?”

“God, no. I never finished that degree. Words still come though. Now and then.”

“All the time,” Joe Jr. said. “It can be annoying.”

Sonia smiled. “How's that?”

“Like I'm talking to her and, apropos of nothing, she says something completely incomprehensible.” Sonia thought that was hilarious. She laughed and laughed and Joe Jr. turned as red as the can in his hand.

“I actually didn't go back to school until about five years ago,” I said.

“I finished too,” Sonia said. “I finished in prison.”

Joe Jr. perked up at the word while I recoiled. But I did manage to say, truthfully, “That's wonderful, Sonia. You were born a teacher. I always thought so.” Brenda, listening to all this but feigning not to as she tongued the seam of her rollie, gave herself away with a grunt.

“What?” Sonia asked her.

“Nothing.”

“Go and smoke your cigarette, you ingrate.”

Brenda put it behind her ear and stubbornly started on another. Joe Jr. was looking around vaguely now, bored so soon, but cigarettes apparently held some interest for him and he asked, “Can I try?”

“Are you allowed?”

He was insulted, as she had intended him to be; he conveyed this to me in a glance. Then Brenda pushed the pouch of Drum over and started issuing instructions. He was probably doubly offended, but he played along and I felt proud. We watched him struggle with the filmy paper and when the kettle sounded off, it seemed difficult for Sonia to look away. Joe Jr. handed Brenda what I hoped was a novice effort. “Looks like a tampon,” she said. I was afraid she'd invite him to smoke it just to make trouble, but she didn't. She stood. “I'll go give myself cancer now.”

“You do that, hon,” Sonia said, passing me my tea and slipping into Brenda's vacated chair. “What do you like to do, Joey?”

He turned bashful. “Play music.”

“He's in a punk band with his dad,” I said.

She kept looking at him, and after a minute I could tell Joe Jr. was starting to feel weirded out. He got that Maria look, that someone's-been-messing-in-my-underwear-drawer look. “What happened to Pascal?” I came right out and asked.

It took her so long to tear her eyes away from Joe Jr. that I wondered if she'd heard my question. “I'm the last person who would know,” she finally said.

“Can we talk about what happened?”

“Isn't that why you came?”

“I wanted to see you, too, Sonia.”

“Ask me anything you want. I'll answer if I can.”

“Why, Sonia? Why did you say you had anything to do with it? You didn't. I know you didn't.”

“I was scared. I thought we were all going to die anyway so I might as well be in prison.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as though giving up her freedom had been as easy as giving up her chair a few minutes ago. She'd always had a self-sacrificing streak and, at that moment, it made me furious.

“Then why did you stay?” I asked her. “You should have got out on parole years ago.”

She got up to pour our tea and bring the mugs over. “It's easy to stay if you want to. You just have to be a bad girl. I don't think I have any jam.” She smiled at Joe Jr.

“You actually wanted to stay?”

“Not really, but other people had to.”

“You mean Pete?”

Sonia glanced behind at Brenda out on the balcony, the hulk of her leaning over the railing, taking in the unscenic view of the facing apartment. She'd probably killed somebody, I realized then. “She couldn't read,” Sonia said. “Can you imagine that? She couldn't read.”

“No,” I said. “I can't.”

Sonia: “Can I talk about her in front of him?”

“Of course.”

Joe Jr. got up anyway. I got the feeling he wanted to stay and listen, but he could take a hint. “Where's the bathroom?”

Sonia told him. As soon as he left the room, she said, “Jane. He's beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“We're going to try to have a baby. Maybe I'm too old.”

“You're not,” I said.

“Brenda can't.” Her lips tightened and she added, “She doesn't mean to be unfriendly.”

“I know.”

“What are you saying about me?” she barked even before she reached the kitchen.

“We're not talking about you. We're talking about us.” Sonia took Brenda's hand, wrapping the meaty arm attached to it around her neck. Brenda just stood there, clearly unconvinced.

“We wanted to save the world,” I told her.

“I wanted to be a saint,” Sonia said.

“You fucking are one!” Brenda burst out and I couldn't tell if she was sincere or ironic. “Sit down,” I told her, though really, I wished she'd go away. She scraped the chair over beside Sonia's, laid her protective arm along the back of it, and, from the way she looked at me across the table, bristly still, I understood how much I'd changed, all the way from a seething Brenda to the kind of woman Brendas detest. A bourgeoise. But I wasn't.
Not
at all!
I wanted to say.

I broached a neutral topic. “How are your parents, Sonia?”

They were going up to Hundred Mile House the very next week. Sonia was dying to see the place again. I told her that my dad eventually forgave me, but for several years we were estranged. “After I had Joe Jr. he decided that maybe, maybe, I wasn't a Communist.”

“Oh, those meetings,” Sonia sighed. “Do you remember? They were endless.”

“Hours. Just to decide whether to put a phone number on a leaflet.”

“We put the phone number on,” Sonia said. “Nobody called! But you know what I loved? I loved when you read to me through the grate. I loved those stories.”

“Do you remember reading
The Cherry Orchard
on the porch?”

Sonia didn't. She didn't remember it at all.

“I think about it every spring when the cherries come out,” I told her. “How Pete appeared out of nowhere and stole the gnome.”

Sonia said, “I remember the gnome.”

There we were, closing in on the subject again, what I wanted to tell her—the only person I thought would really understand. I wished I could have held her hand, but that was impossible now. I said, “I'm sorry I didn't write.”

She shrugged. “Life gets in the way. I was busy too.”

“After I had him—”

Joe Jr. hadn't come back. Sonia peeked around the corner to the living room, touched her ear. “He's listening to his music.”

“I felt terrible about that poor man, the guard.”

She covered her face. “I know.” To Brenda: “It was awful. Awful. It went off in his hands. And poor Timo!”

“Yes. But after Joey was born? It was Pascal I couldn't stop thinking about. What his parents must have gone through. How we—I—.”

“No, me.”

“
We
were partly responsible. Why didn't we just call the police?”

“I wouldn't let you.”

“I could have anyway. And if we'd called the police, would it have made a difference? To what happened to him, I mean. Because, as Joe Jr. gets older, I keep seeing Pascal. I can't talk about this with his father. He's wonderful. A wonderful man, but he doesn't understand.”

“Tell me then,” Sonia said.

“I worry I'll be punished for what I did. That the same thing will happen to Joe Jr. Pascal? Did he—?”

She stared at me with glittery eyes. “Die?”

When I started to cry, Brenda got up from the table. I thought she was disgusted, but she was only getting a dishtowel from the drawer for me to dry my eyes. She dropped it on the table and sat down with a thump. I gathered this was something both of them were used to, hearing confessions, watching breakdowns. Sonia seemed so calm. “Doesn't it haunt you?” I asked.

“Of course. But other people have died.”

At first I took this the wrong way. It sounded callous. When I realized she meant friends, I felt ashamed and sobbed into the towel.

“Poor you, Jane,” she said, and Brenda was big enough to let Sonia reach across the table and squeeze my arms. We made a kind of ladder, hanging onto each another. Then Joe Jr. appeared behind where Sonia and Brenda sat, all wired up, looking desperate. I quickly dried my face. “What was his last name? Do you remember?”

Her eyes slid away from mine.

“I'd like to find out what happened to him,” I said.

Then she noticed Joe Jr. in the doorway behind her and jumped out of the chair so fast it almost tipped over. “You're lucky to have such a wonderful mother,” she said. “She loves you so much.”

Why did she change the subject? To protect Joe Jr. from what we were talking about, or to protect me from finding out? In the awkwardness of the moment, her agitation, the bird-like fluttering of her hands, I sensed it; she was always protecting someone.

All those years ago, I used to wonder what she and Pascal were doing when I wasn't there. Now I know. I have a son almost the same age. He is so charming when he wants to be and, even when he doesn't, he's charming anyway. It's that irresistible combination of boredom and worldliness and utter naïveté. It's all that masturbation.