Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (31 page)

It floored me. Almost like the moment when I first saw Rosie’s locker. Her life was not mine. Her life was elsewhere.

Karen scampered down to the beach like a multicoloured rabbit. She called me to join her, but I stayed where I was, on the porch, looking down. Soon she was with the others, splashing and swimming and playing catch. The silver Frisbee spun through the air like a mad bird. Mad with desire and despair. I stared at Rosie and the raisin boy, waiting for something to happen.

“Joan.” Your voice startled me. You were always startling me, weren’t you, Anthony?

“Oh! Hi.”

You were standing slightly behind me, holding a pillow and an empty cement bag. Your worn knapsack was slung diagonally over your shoulder, just as it had been when you arrived. I may have vaguely wondered what you were planning to do with the large bag, but I didn’t say anything. My thoughts were elsewhere.

“So, Joan of Arc, how are you this morning? Or afternoon, rather.”

“We have visitors,” I said.

“So I see.”

“They’re from the town.”

“Oh yes, the town. I remember that little town. I was a frequent visitor there. Callously deserting the cosy family circle. What are you staring at?”

“Rosie.”

“The ever-elusive Rosie. Well, Joan, the universe beckons.” I thought you meant Rosie.

“Yes,” I said absently.

“How I long for love and light. Good night, sweet princess.” You kissed my neck, stroked my cheek with your warm hand. Then you went away, into the forest.

Our guests were playing Frisbee in the lake. Rosie and Glenn had slipped back into the water, and they were all shrieking and laughing. They must have heard the sound of a gunshot, but they didn’t take any notice, and neither did I. The sound was distant and muffled and could have been anything.

But Patrick heard it and he came running out, pale and wild. “Where’s Tony?” he asked.

“I don’t know. He was here a second ago. I think he went that way.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t remember. What is it?”

“Nothing. I’m going to look for him.” And he, too, disappeared into the forest.

I headed down to the water and said, “Hey guys, do you want pizza? We have some in the freezer.”

“Pizza—groovy.”

So we all came back to the house and sat around drinking and eating. I watched Rosie. Her bits of broken French were like sparkles she threw in the air—everyone tried to catch them. She fit right in; she’d fit in anywhere. Glenn sat on the carpet with his legs apart and she sat in the space between his legs, leaning back against him, reborn.

It must have been close to six when our visitors left. Glenn and Rosie held each other as if Glenn were going off to war.

“Oh, Maya, I’m in love!” Rosie said as soon as they were gone. “Did you see him? What do you think? His name’s Glenn.”

“He seems nice.”

“I always wondered, maybe there was something wrong with me, or maybe I just didn’t know what love was, or maybe what I felt really was love, and there isn’t anything more—but there is. This is totally different. I can’t wait to see him again. He’s coming
tomorrow and he’s going to take me for a drive. He’s from Toronto—his mother’s French, though. His mother and Jean-Pierre’s mother are sisters. He loves music, he plays the flute—he goes to a really small school called Seed—it’s alternative, for smart kids who are interested in art or philosophy … Seed stands for Sharing Experience Something Something—there aren’t any rules, even for attendance. I love him so much, I can hardly think about anything else … Where are the guys?”

“They’ve gone into the woods, I think. First Anthony, then Patrick went looking for him—I guess they’re having a heart to heart.”

“When did they go?”

“Ages ago. Before the pizza.”

“That’s weird. We’d better go find them—they might be lost. Maybe we should take a whistle or something.”

“They can’t be lost. The forest just goes around the lake.”

Like Hansel and Gretel we entered the dark forest. Spruce needles scratched our arms as we brushed them aside. “Patrick! Tony!” Rosie called.

“I’m here.” It was Patrick’s voice, close by.

We found him sitting against a tree, blank and frozen. As frozen as a block of ice or a statue in a city square. But his eyes were red; he’d been crying, and the tears had streaked his face. A weeping statue.

Beside him we saw your feet and trousered legs. You’d removed your shoes, for some reason. Maybe you thought someone would want them, or maybe you weren’t thinking, and you did what people do when they get ready for bed. Black socks tenderly covered your feet, and the bottom cuffs of your suit fell gently on your ankles. The rest of you had vanished—where? It took me a few moments to piece it all together, like some sort of brain-teaser in a quiz book—lampshade or profile? You’d pulled the empty cement bag over your body, you’d hidden your upper body inside it. A quivering cluster of white trilliums with fairy petals breathed softly on the ground beside you.

“What’s going on?” I asked, hoping this was some new way of getting high. But another part of me already knew that you had shot yourself and that what you’d had in your knapsack was a gun.

“He’s dead. Oh, Patrick—I’m so sorry,” Rosie said. She went over and put her arms around Patrick. The girl and the statue, by Hans Christian Andersen.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I just talked to him. He’s perfectly fine. Tony?” I crouched down and touched your leg, but your leg had turned to stone, just like Patrick’s body. The entire forest was enchanted—our turn would come next.

“How could he do this to Mom?” Patrick shook his head, his breathing uneven. “How could he do this to her?”

“What’s he done?” And it was strange, because I was screaming but not making a sound.

“He’s shot himself. Didn’t you hear the shot? Didn’t you hear?”

“Who talked to him last?” Rosie asked.

“I did,” I said. I was right about the spell, because I, too, was stiffening, as if an invisible metal beam rising from the ground had attached itself to my body. The beams were everywhere, covered with evil-smelling tar. “He said—I can’t remember what he said. I’m sure he’s just playing a joke on us. Let’s take this stupid bag off.”

“I already looked inside,” Patrick said. “Don’t look.”

“Where’s his knapsack?” I asked. I was very confused.

“Inside the bag,” Patrick said. “He planned everything. The pillow, the gun … he planned it. He used the pillow to muffle the sound.”

“It’s cold,” I said. “I hear something, is that a squirrel? Oh yes, up there.”

“How will I tell her?” Patrick said. “After what she went through—”

There was a long silence.

Then someone said what we were all thinking: “Maybe we don’t have to tell her.”

“We can bury him here. And we’ll say he went away.”

“To India.”

“To a monastery.”

“To be a hermit.”

“And once a year Patrick can go to India and send a postcard from him.”

“No, a letter.”

“Will she know from the handwriting?”

“I can do his handwriting. He was always changing it, anyhow.”

“It won’t be as bad, if she thinks he’s somewhere.”

“If she knew, she wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

“At least she’ll think he’s happy. It’s better than nothing.”

“We’ll have to dig a hole.”

“Yes, right,” Patrick said. “Let’s bury him.”

Patrick told us it was illegal to bury a body and not report a death. He said we had to keep it a secret, that if we told someone, it would inevitably get out, because people always reveal secrets that aren’t theirs. Then his mother would find out and we’d be charged with committing a crime. Even if we had lovers, he said, or got married, we had to promise not to tell.

He remembered that there had once been a flower garden by the side of the house. He thought that would be the best place to bury Anthony because the top layer of rocks had been cleared. He said the hole had to be deep so animals wouldn’t dig the corpse out. I’d never thought of that, of animals digging up human corpses, and that this was why you had to bury bodies six feet underground. It would be impossible to do manually, he said—we’d hit granite—but we could probably manage to dig three or four feet down, and we could cover the grave with a mound of earth and rocks. And we’d plant a tree in the centre, so the mound wouldn’t look strange.

Patrick said he had rope in the trunk of his car. Rosie and I went into the house while Patrick watched over you. We pulled a quilt
out of the linen chest, a white quilt covered with green and blue leaves. We found the rope and brought it back with the quilt. We wrapped your half-hidden body in the green and blue shroud and then bound you with rope like Inuit cargo. Patrick made a special knot and we tried to drag you out of the forest.

You’d think people brought together by some dire mission would feel close, connected—rescue workers in a war zone, for example—but it isn’t like that. The magnitude of what you have to do weighs you down, the nerve and stamina needed to overcome horror—these things narrow your focus, and there’s nothing left for communion with the person at the other end of the stretcher or running with you through the flames. All our energies were concentrated on getting through the task; and we recoiled from the task, and from everyone and everything involved in it.

Or is it only grief that makes the world fall away, makes its arrangements impenetrable? Rosie rubbed my back as we struggled with the rope, but the gesture didn’t translate into anything other than mechanical pressure on a part of my body. And then there was Patrick, radiating devastation like a natural force, like a hurricane coming our way, and it made us take cover inside ourselves.

They say that memory clings to times of dread. I became aware of a clicking in my brain, the kind people with photographic memories must experience all the time, because it was like the click of a camera shutter. My mind was doing something it had never done before and hasn’t done since: it was seeing everything twice, once to observe and once to memorize and store, and I can recall the smallest detail—the angle of the rope, the number of times we twisted it around Anthony’s body, the trilliums nearby, white trilliums that had sprung up by miracle in this forest, cascading in all their wondrous splendour, vain and oblivious and generous. I remember being certain, in a hallucinatory flash, that Anthony had moved and then, a few seconds later, that a raven was watching us.

We worked in silence. It wasn’t anything new, bodies and corpses and graves, not really; they had always been a part of our lives, the frayed hand-me-downs we inherited from our parents. Only dragging Anthony’s body was difficult because he’d grown so heavy and there were brambles in the way. When we reached the house, we laid him down on the back lawn and covered him with a sheet of tarp we found under the porch, in case anyone came. If someone did happen to come, we’d say we’d decided to plant some trees. We took turns, though Patrick did most of the digging and Rosie and I only helped when he stopped to rest. The ground was hard, and farther down it was full of complicated stones. We had to find the edges of the stones so we could pull them out. I know exactly how many stones there were—their shape, their curves, the way the dank earth clung to them when they emerged reluctantly from their tombs and lay on the grass as if stunned because they’d been buried for thousands or maybe millions of years.

The exertion made us thirsty, and we drank the soda water our visitors had brought. Patrick’s physical strength, the ease with which he lifted large rocks, dug at hard earth—I’d had a glimpse of it when he carried Rosie. He hid that strength, had no use for it.

We hit granite three or four feet in, as Patrick had predicted. And now we had to lower Anthony inside. We sat on the lawn to gather courage. It makes no difference, what you do to a dead body, everyone knows that, but the suffocation seems ruthless, a treacherous discarding. Rosie reached out, took my hand. I shook her off and said, “I’ll get more soda.”

Patrick followed me inside and asked if there was any beer left. All I could find was a half-finished bottle on the counter. I offered it to Patrick but he said, “I’m not that desperate.”

The sun was setting. We couldn’t put it off any longer; it would be even harder, burying Anthony in the dark. We went back out and Patrick wondered whether we ought to remove the cement bag, to help with decomposition. We weren’t sure. We talked about it, and in the end we decided to leave the bag but remove the quilt. In
the failing light we sliced the rope with a knife and the quilt unravelled and the cement bag crept up Anthony’s body. Patrick half-retched and we were afraid he’d pass out but he didn’t.

We lowered Anthony inside and covered him with earth. “Poor Tony,” Rosie said. “Poor Tony.” But I told myself that she was merely producing from her storehouse another morsel of solicitude; I told myself that her selflessness was an absence of self, and it allowed her to stand apart, untouched and unharmed.

His rage depleted by exhaustion, Patrick sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll try to find potting soil—I think I saw some outside the nursery.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said. “Rosie, you’d better stay here, keep an eye on things.”

She was afraid of staying alone, I knew she was afraid, but everything had changed. Heartlessness is contagious, that’s what Anthony didn’t take into account. It’s catching, and I’d caught it from him. And Rosie, whom I thought I’d shield forever, was now at the mercy of mine.

She nodded and I avoided her eyes, the sad eyes that all this time I’d seen and not seen.

In the car Patrick said, “We used to talk about what if. What if you went blind, would you kill yourself? What if you had to choose between killing yourself and killing an innocent person? And then about how we’d do it, if we had no choice, if there was a nuclear war and it was better to die fast.”

He rubbed his eyes with his left hand as he drove, the way men do, without thinking, without tears. A mime of misery.

It was dark by the time we reached the town. Everything was closed, and the nursery lot was fenced in by wire netting, but in the light of a streetlamp we could make out large bags of earth and a row of potted firs near the wall. The gate was unlocked; it was only a question of tracking down the owner.
Go dig my grave, make it wide and deep—