Bone and Bread (16 page)

“That must be hard.”

“It isn't easy.” An understatement, though I know now it's not the apartment, but me who's haunted. It will be a matter of throwing myself into the job without pausing to think. I take a long sip of the sangria and, over the rim of the glass, observe Libby looking miserable. I feel a vague pressure to say something. “So how did you meet my sister?”

Libby makes an effort to smile. “Through theatre stuff. I do lighting.”

“For a living?”

She nods. “It's kind of amazing. I did a college diploma in it when I first came here because it was subsidized and it seemed artistic, but now I love it. I get to be around creative people all the time, and my little one, Mouse, is usually able to tag along.”

“Mouse?”

“Christiane, my daughter. Somehow her given name hasn't quite stuck.”

“Ah.” I know so little about this woman, or what she hopes to accomplish by getting to know me. I had imagined a clearer direction to our conversation. “And where were you before Montreal?”

“Hearst,” she says. “Way up north. It's in Ontario, but most of the town is French. It's a small town, so that was an adjustment, but the language thing was an easy transition, anyway.”

“You speak French?”

She nods. “My husband is francophone. My ex.” She shifts in her seat as she crosses one leg over the other. I see the shoes that she mocked on the phone, just regular black canvas sneakers with white laces. “Though he's bad news. A very bad dude, in the end. He's why I left.”

“Good for you.” I have a bizarre moment of envy. Better to be the one who leaves than gets left behind. I wonder what Quinn would think of me if leaving Ravi was a choice I had made for us.

“It's too bad, in a way, because his family is nice. But Mouse is really thriving here. She's seven and a half. Right now she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up. That or a ballerina.” Her fingers drum the edge of the table as her eyes invite me to laugh along with her. I calculate that Libby must have married young, in her early twenties at the latest. “Let me top you up,” she says then, gesturing with the pitcher. I slide my glass across the table. Libby says as she pours, “What was Sadhana like as a little girl?”

I remember Sadhana and me as children, performing a routine in Mama's gypsy skirts, a strange dance-pantomime hybrid we had made up to the song “Penny Lane.” I couldn't stop tripping over my hem, but Sadhana had mastered the knack of keeping the skirt spinning out, away from her toes. Even before she became a perfectionist, she was perfect.

“She was just like you might imagine,” I say. “Fun, graceful. Though maybe less opinionated back then.”

Tears spring to Libby's eyes, and she bows her head in a gesture that seems ancient and marked by grief. In a spontaneous move that takes me by surprise, I cover her hand with mine, but after a moment, she pulls hers away, holding her sleeve up to her eyes. When she takes it down, it is soaked. “I'm sorry. I thought I was ready for this.”

“Oh,” I say, startled. “But,” I hesitate. “Wasn't there something you wanted to tell me?”

She bobs her head in a jerky nod. “Maybe another time?” Her glass clinks against the iron of the table as she sets it down. “Next time.”

“I guess so,” I say. “Yes, if you like.”

“Thanks. I really am sorry about this.” Libby motions for the bill, and once we have paid, she says she has to pick up her daughter from school.

“Mouse is my reason for getting up in the morning,” she says, calmer now as we walk together to the corner. “My absolute all.”

Beside Libby on the sidewalk, I find we are more or less the same height. She strolls with her hands in her pockets and gives me a two-fingered salute when we part ways. “Good luck,” she says, which seems vague.

“You too.”

Then, “Talk to you soon.” And before I can reply, Libby crosses the street as the light turns green and is out of earshot, loping up the hill.

Watching her diminishing figure, I feel myself deflate. Whatever she wants to tell me, I badly want to know. Whatever Sadhana said or did, Libby thinks it important, and my curiosity is piqued even as I anticipate disappointment. I'd never known my sister to confide in other people with any regularity. Beyond the pages of her diary, I'm not sure anyone was truly her confidante.

Her diary. It is a recollection to make me stop still. My eyes widen and water in the glare of the afternoon sun, and when I blink, I register something more than a mere physical relief. If I can find it — if she was still writing in it — it might have something to tell me. The truth of what happened in those last few days might be recorded there, or maybe even other, bigger truths. Whether she was sick again, or not. Whether she was happy. Whether she had spent most of her life really wanting to die and was holding off only for my sake. Whether she really did blame me for everything that had gone wrong. For leaving. For Mama.

I plod north towards St. Viateur Street with renewed resolve, the ranks of grey walk-ups on my left with their hand-lettered garden-fence signs reading
Pas de bicyclettes!
seeming like a cartoon backdrop, a small stretch of background spliced together on a reel stretching up to the horizon, a black dog and an old woman frowning into the sun appearing at paced intervals as I pass. Or so it seems. I try to blink away the tiredness. There is something about the angle of the light on the land that gives everything a hallucinatory shimmer. I check the street sign at the corner to make sure I haven't walked too far.

The liquor store surrenders a lucky yield of empty boxes, their former contents enough to flatten a fleet on leave for a week. I carry them as a tower, nestled one in the other, my arms looped beneath, fingers locked like a foothold at the bottom of a cheerleading tower. The top of the pile is about level with my head, and everyone I pass turns to give me a look, some sympathetic, some almost envious, as though my spectacle has reminded them that they ought to begin packing.

Less than three weeks until Moving Day. Mama always said it was the separatists who set things up this way, the lease system, everyone moving on the first of July and too busy to give a crap about Canada. A paraphrase, of course. But that isn't true, though I can no longer remember how it is supposed to have come about. Such a difference here from Ottawa on the first of July, that sea of red and white, the city's mild stuffiness replaced for one day with the brash pride of football hooliganism. It's cheery enough there until the drunkenness of the wee hours, post-fireworks. Here it's just the best day of the year to find a free couch.

At Sadhana's, the afternoon light has already begun to change, and I am struck by how much of the weekend I have already squandered avoiding the task at hand. I hurry up the stairs, then feel a sharp tug on my sleeve and almost stumble. Gripping the boxes, which tip forward but do not spill, I turn slightly to see a young man with a broad smile standing to the left of the staircase.

“Sorry, ma'am,” he says. He has a clipboard and a royal blue bowtie knotted around the collar of a crisp white shirt. “Just trying to get your attention.”

I frown at the cuff of my sleeve with pointed concentration.

“Could you spare a few minutes of your time?”

“No, I don't think so.” I continue up to the landing and close the door on him.
I don't want to give myself time for any more excuses.

I decide to start with the clothes, promising myself to make a dent in the work I need to do before any search for a missing diary. Without allowing myself time to reflect, I throw on a CD of house music, numbingly loud, and toss a few large boxes into the bedroom. The oversized closet has dusty shutter doors that fold up like accordions, a high, cluttered shelf, and one light bulb on a switch. I drag in a chair from the kitchen and flip on the light in the closet. When I get up to shelf level, I count three boxes marked
Photos
, but I decide they can stay for now. I climb down from the chair and set it aside. I daren't touch them anyhow.

I pull down the clothes quickly; no more than one sharp tug per item. A swift look before sending them into a box. No folding. No remembering.

The operation is a blur of colour: wool and linen in gem tones and greys and blacks. Deep dyes and Indian cotton. More handwash-only in the first five minutes than I've owned in my entire life. There are a lot of clothes, and more than a few things I've forgotten she had, things I haven't seen in years. Before long, the box designated for clothes to give away is virtually empty, the other verging on full. A dozen more items I've flung on the bed to make up my mind about later. She liked to wear loose things. It's possible some of them will even fit me.

I start pulling down the hangers themselves, clothes clinging to their wooden shoulders. A span of dresses I deposit wholesale in the box of things to keep, the weight of the wooden hangers compressing the bulk of the pile below. Then a bunch of sweaters and the job is more or less finished. Twenty or thirty hangers still line the crossbar, but I can't imagine a new tenant objecting.

At least the shoes covering the closet floor won't fit me. Two sizes too small. They can all be packed up for charity. Kneeling on the floor, I pull an empty box alongside me and pitch them all inside, until, leaning back on my heels, I feel the hot prickle of tears and force myself up. I don't know what I was thinking, starting with the clothes. I feel unequal to the task, utterly unprepared. It feels like a violation, more than anything. It takes me back to when we were teenagers. Sadhana yelling at me for borrowing her things without asking. It usually goes the other way, from what I've heard — the older sister tends to do the yelling. But Sadhana never wanted anything of mine.

The diary. Getting up, I check in Sadhana's childhood spot, between the mattress and the box spring, but finding nothing, I sit back down with a sense of disappointment soon yielding either to exhaustion or relief.

The things I used to hide under my bed. Items in heaps so extensive that one peek below the bedskirt and the piles would start shifting, slipping out. The only reason anything stayed hidden was that finding something specific would have been impossible. I used to keep notebooks under there, racy
True Confessions
magazines, the odd piece of clothing Sadhana might have fancied that I wasn't keen to share. There were library books, too, anatomy textbooks I was sure would betray my fascination with sex. To my sister, anyway. The librarian hadn't reacted when I'd checked them out.

I had always assumed Sadhana kept the same sorts of things down there as I did, and one day I violated her bed's implicit sanctity by getting down on my knees to rummage for a missing Beach Boys record. When I pulled up the ruffle of white eyelet lace, I found nothing more than a neat row of shoeboxes. Later, in therapy, Sadhana revealed that they had contained food in an elaborate configuration. Two boxes for uneaten food smuggled away from meals, rotting in a series of knotted plastic bags until she had a chance to sneak them into the garbage. Another two for chocolate and sweets, things she used to binge on until she gave up on eating altogether. I have no idea what I would have made of the contents of those boxes if I'd lifted the lids that day, but I have a feeling that Sadhana would have tried to explain them away, the horror and the strangeness of them, and I would have believed her. However improbable her story.

There is nothing below Sadhana's bed now besides a bit of fluff, though on the opposite side from where I've grasped the dust ruffle and thrust my head under, I see a metallic rectangle on the rug, joined to a cord snaking from the outlet behind the nightstand. My sister's laptop.

The contents, once I turn it on, are password-protected, and I feed the blinking cursor an array of talismanic possibilities. Our birthday. Papa's name,
VISHRAM SINGH
. Mama's name,
KATIE BIRNAM
. Our old address above the shop. Finally, one works.
QUINN
.

The picture on the desktop background is the same photo as the one on the mantelpiece, of Sadhana and a woman I can now identify as Libby. With the photo enlarged, I can see that the mouths of the carousel horses are open, their squared-off teeth huge and askew. Opening the documents folder, I click through the files but find nothing resembling a diary. Everything is well organized, which doesn't surprise me. Most of the documents are in a handful of folders marked “No Borders.” Backgrounders. Media. Strategies. Emails — Drafts to Send.

In “Backgrounders” I open a file named “Bassam Essaid” and see the photo that flashed on the newscast. The same man that Ravi was denouncing as an illegal alien. It follows that, somewhere along the line, Sadhana would have caught wind of Ravi's opposition to Bassam Essaid's refugee claim, not to mention Ravi's political candidacy. I wonder exactly how long my sister was aware of what Quinn's father was up to, and how long she kept herself from mentioning him to me.

The Algerian civil war began in 1991 and claimed at least 150,000 lives before an amnesty in 1999 led many of the rebels to lay down their arms. Some refugee claimants fleeing the war were granted asylum, and some were not, and a ban on deportations to Algeria permitted a number of these refugees to remain in Canada without legal status. But the abatement of violence in that country after the amnesty left a number of these non-status Algerians in limbo after Canada decided Algeria was no longer a danger to its inhabitants. The decision followed closely upon a newly forged political and economic alliance between the then-prime ministers of the two countries.

There isn't a trace of my sister's voice in the document, nor is it the sort of thing that ought to showcase any personal style. It seems unlike her, to disappear into a cause. Yet the volume of work saved on her computer seems to give the lie to whatever prior notion of Sadhana I keep presuming is the real one.