Bone and Bread (21 page)

Driving back to Evan's, four litres of paint stowed in the back and two new flashlights at my feet, I wonder aloud who Quinn's friend could be. “I'm positive I've never seen her before,” I say. “And Quinn went out of his way not to tell me her name.”

“You remind me of my mother,” says Evan, and before I can verbalize my horror, he clarifies, “I mean your shameless curiosity about your son's business.” He's amused.

“You think I should leave him alone.”

“Not exactly. But he's grown. He's entitled to keep his own secrets. Just as you keep yours.”

When I get home, I look for Quinn, intent for a moment on telling him about Evan. Evan has volunteered to drive Sadhana's things from Montreal if I ever finish packing them, and if I take him up on his offer, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to avoid introducing him to Quinn. It will be a relief to tell him about the affair. And after all, it is not even really an affair, since Evan and I are both single, and Quinn, I decide as I unlock the door, will probably not even find it interesting. He has known me to date a few men in the past, but after the first bungled romance he witnessed, he seems to assume that a breakup is not only a likelihood but an inevitability, liable to strike before any relationship of mine can cause him much personal inconvenience. A bit insulting, from my point of view, but I can see the self-preservation at work in his belief and have no better reason to object.

I call out for him as I slam the door shut and kick off my sandals, but there is no response.
How he must hate that
— this is the thought that occurs to me in the space of silence of him not answering. His mother hallooing for him the second she walks in the door. Do I always do this? I try to remember. I hope I am not needy. Children are supposed to need their parents, not the other way around.

No sign of Quinn's knapsack, but there is a pile of mail, the tidy white envelopes of bills splayed uniformly on the counter. He's here. There is a message still flashing on the machine. When I press Play, Libby's powerful, lilting voice comes blaring out of the speaker. Someone has turned the volume all the way up, and I hasten to turn it down.

“Hi, Beena, it's me again. Just wanted to say it was nice meeting you and I'd like to do it again soon. Hope everything went okay at the apartment.” In the pause, I can hear the slight squeak of the machine's worn cassette tape. “Give me a call the next time you're in town and we'll have a nice chat.” She ends on a bright note, though the promise of another meeting makes me anxious, reminding me of Libby's café tears.

I press the button to delete the message. If Quinn heard her leave it, the flashing light means he didn't bother to listen twice. Even if he did, I suppose, she didn't mention anything about Sadhana.

I find him in the backyard, kneeling on the grass, surrounded by wood and scattered papers, and the full assortment of our tool collection ranged along the edge of the deck. I squeeze onto the step, planting my feet to the left of a plastic tub of nails.

“Hey, Ma.” He sits back on his heels and straightens his glasses. Then he pushes some wood out from directly behind him and sits right down on the grass, stretching his legs.

“Hi,” I say, pleased that I rate a break. “What's all this?”

“I'm building a dolly. Trying to build.”

“What for?”

“For a friend. A friend who needs it to help film something.” The girl, it has to be the girl. That business about the wiring just a lie, like my flashlights.

“I see.” I look out over the assembled materials with an eye for the stated project, but it isn't clear how it's going to come together. Then I spot some red wheels poking up out of the grass. “Oh, your skateboard,” I say, pointing.

“Yeah, well, I don't really use it much ever.”

“You know, you weren't that bad.” He gave it a try the summer he turned eleven. One weekend when she was visiting, Sadhana bought him a deck and we walked him over to the remotest parking lot we could think of so he could practice out of sight of the other kids on our street, a few of whom were already alarmingly advanced. We stood around — Sadhana chugging club soda while I sipped a milkshake — and tried not to look involved. He got to the point where he could roll along just fine, if a bit stiffly, but I never saw him try his luck against a curb.

“I sucked,” he says. “But whatever.”

“I love the sound of a skateboard coming down the street.”

“Want to try before I sacrifice it for the dolly?”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

I leave him to it, but I pop my head out later, remembering my plan to tell him about Evan.

The hammering breaks off into swearing, a string of expletives defaming our substandard Vise-Grips.

“How's it going?”

“Can you just leave me alone for five minutes?” This rolls out on the same exasperated stream as the cursing, and I decide to ignore it.

“I could call somebody,” I offer. “I know someone with a lot of tools. Better ones.”

He tosses the hammer on the grass and shrugs. “Sure, if you want.”

“It's someone I'd like you to meet, actually.” I step out onto the deck. “Someone I've been seeing.”

Quinn ducks his head and kicks at the grass in the area where the hammer landed. He waves his hand in a dismissal. “Let's do it another time then, eh?”

“Why?”

“Because, okay? Because I'm busy. I want to finish this.”

“But he can help.”

“Whoever he is, I don't need his help.” He looks up at me when I don't respond, and says, with an adult kind of firmness that takes me aback, “Another time. I'm going over to Chris's for dinner.” Chris is an old friend of his whose parents I know, though it has been a while since Quinn has mentioned him. I wonder if my son is telling me the truth.

Next I see him hauling the whole mess into the shed, which he unlocks with a key from his key ring. He seems to have permanently appropriated it from the hooks by the back door, where all the extra keys and a couple of miscellaneous padlocks are kept hanging.

“Am I too needy?” I call out.

“What?” He backs out of the shed to cock his ear.

“Am I too needy?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Forget I asked.”

He says nothing, but I can tell from his face that he is already trying.

Later, in the back of Evan's truck, the blanket is chafing.

“We've had better ideas,” I say.

“What are you talking about?” says Evan. “This is the only way to judge how much room there is, by using your body as a yardstick.”

“You're the yardstick,” I say. My hand is below his belt.

“Hardy har har.”

I push gently on his chest and he rolls off me.

We're parked in Evan's driveway, alongside the grey stucco house he shares with three university students from northern Ontario. The sun is just beginning to slip below the roof of the garage, and the shifting leaves of the maple filter the light in quicksilver flashes that run along the battered eavestroughing. The drone from the Queensway has petered out, and apart from its scattered rumblings the street is quiet.

Evan is talkative tonight. Over a supper of spaghetti and meatballs, he navigated a conversation with me and his roommates, steering it from either shore of computer gaming or the remaining available storage space in my basement, where it was likely to founder. Instead, we spoke of Freud, of composting, of the impending obsolescence of my laptop — Don gave it six months, Brett a year. Nick declared it already dead, pretending to groan as I handed it to him to look at. He said, “You know these things are supposed to be portable, right?” But there wasn't much time to linger over a discussion. In their house of four young men, supper is cutthroat, the only dinner bell the cook shouting, “Wolfpack!” in tribute to the fast ravishment to follow. As with most meals here, Evan seemed focused on civilizing the conversation while never drawing out the time spent at the table. I can tell he worries that when I see him with his roommates I will think he is too young. It used to be that every time I came over, he would say he was planning on moving out.

“So, do you think one trip will do it?”

We came out here with the camping blanket under the pretext of estimating how much of Sadhana's stuff would fit in Evan's truck. I can feel the heat of the sun-baked metal coming up through the wool.

“Hard to say. I'm not good at visualizing. How much will this baby hold?”

“A lot, I'd wager.” He inches back until the top of his head is at the cab, his feet pointing to the garage. He flattens one palm and brings his arm up against the side of the truck bed, squinting. “I'd guess this was, oh, about four point five feet by six point five, with a depth of eighteen inches. Packed tight, about fifteen cubic feet of volume.”

“I'm not falling for that. You knew all along.”

“Could be. Would you prefer a figure in standard two-cube boxes?”

“I don't have standard boxes. I'm eclectic.”

Evan eases onto his side to look at me. “So how did it go?” After a moment, when I don't answer, he says, “But all packed up, right?”

“Just about. A little bit left to do.”

“That's good,” says Evan, lying back down. I follow his eyes up to the sky, cobalt now, with cirrus clouds moving south.

Evan says, “I remember going with my mother to help my aunt pack up my cousin's room.” Evan's cousin Lissa, I know, killed herself by drinking insecticide when they were teenagers, apparently over a guy, a shaggy-haired boy who dumped her on their three-month anniversary. It is Evan's brush with tragedy, his reference point for unassailable grief. There was a frantic drive and then a helicopter, an airlift to the nearest hospital, and he's told me that he cannot erase the image of his aunt and uncle, each holding one of Lissa's cold hands and filled with superlative and already futile hope as the paramedics kept her heart beating with epinephrine. He wasn't there, but he overheard his parents talking about it.

Now Evan's own chest rises and falls in an emptying breath. His eyes flicker shut, and when he opens them again to the growing night, I think I see a whole prairie of sky looking out of his blue eyes. The depth and solidity of winterized pain.

“This was only years later that my aunt could bring herself to touch her things,” he says. “On the advice of her psychiatrist. In the end, my mom and I went over and did everything while my aunt baked peach and rhubarb pies downstairs.”

“That must have been hard on you and your mother.”

“It was. But it made it easier, knowing we could help like that. And some of it was nice, actually. Remembering Lissa. I'd stopped thinking about her for so long. I was in university by the time we did this.” He smiles. “She was so goofy. When we were kids, we used to do musicals at Christmas, and she always tried to teach me this pretend tap dance and get furious when I couldn't figure out what the hell she was doing.”

“That sounds funny.”

“It was. If you ever make it to Saskatchewan, you can see the videos.” He gives me a quick glance.

“I'd like that.” I let my eyes close, and I can feel Evan's fingers tracing the rise and fall of my hip. “What happened to the guy?”

“What guy?”

“The guy. The guy she was in love with.”

“Oh. I don't know. You mean, you wonder what effect it had on him?”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder.” Evan sits up and pushes himself down past the tailgate. He holds out his hand to help me out, and the cool touch of his palms on the surface of my warm skin makes me feel both steadied and fevered. “But I hope he didn't let it ruin his life.”

At home, I open my bedroom window and hold my face to the screen to feel the kiss of the cool air on my cheek. But almost nothing stirs. It is a hot summer night like the ones of my childhood. It reminds me of the slowness of being young, of all the time I spent longing to be older and for the happiness that would come from being free. And later, the time I spent waiting for Ravi. The lies I told myself in the meantime.

Leaving the window open, I slip into bed with Sadhana's laptop, enter my son's name, and continue going through my sister's files. Libby and Sadhana beam out at me again from the screen as I perform a search of the hard drive.
FIND: RAVI.
While the computer dredges its contents in a rapid, scrolling cycle, I dial Libby's cellphone number.

Her voice is languid, as soft as tissue falling.

“Did I disturb you?” I shake my hair out of my eyes.

“Beena. You called.” She sounds glad, even surprised.

“I said I would, didn't I?” Even as I utter the words, I'm certain I made no such promise. I rush on. “Actually, I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“What do you know about Quebec First? Or Mouvement Québec, in French?”

“Ah.” Libby lets out her breath slowly. “The province's freshly minted fascists.”

“That bad?”

“Worse. And already popular. Goes to show what money and novelty will get you. Have you been to their website?”

“Not yet.” I look over at Sadhana's laptop, but it is still hurdling through my last request. The fan is whirring now.

“It's depressingly flashy,” says Libby. There is a creak as of worn springs, as if she is in bed, too. “If the party gets votes at the rates they're polling at, there's going to be a new player in town after the upcoming election. Or so I've heard.”

“So what's their angle?”

“You mean, what are they all about?” I make a small sound of assent and Libby continues. “Well, their platform is anti-immigration, or at least half of it is. They're careful, though, to have a fair number of candidates of colour, all with acceptable Quebec pedigrees and perfect French.” The volume of her voice, which has been rising over the course of her explanation, drops back down. “The other half is tax cuts for corporations and privatization of medical services.”