Bone and Bread (22 page)

“They're up front about this?”

“More or less. It's all doublespeak when they talk to the press, of course. But I've skimmed through their platform in the original language. The French version is a little bit more explicit.”

“It's hard to believe they're so popular.”

“Is it? Maybe it is.” Libby sighs. “I'm surprised you haven't heard more about them. Sadie mentioned you guys used to know one of the candidates.”

“She said that?”

“Your old boyfriend, wasn't it? Or hers?”

“He wasn't my boyfriend.” It comes out definitive. Automatic. “Or hers.”

“I'm sorry.” For a moment, it sounds like tears are strangling her voice. “I didn't mean to upset you.”

“I'm not upset.” Her overreaction moderates my own. “I'm surprised Sadhana mentioned him to you, that's all.”

“She —” Libby pauses. “Well, he just came up. Maybe you don't know he's made it a bit of a personal crusade to get a family deported that Sadhana was trying to help.”

“I saw him on the news.” I close my eyes for a second, remembering. Those lips, that brow. The luscious black curls. A spell when we were teenagers, the thrall of his beauty has burgeoned into a kind of glamour. A face to put on posters. “And the refugee family.”

“They miss her too, you know,” says Libby. “The Essaids. I went to see them and they told me.”

I let my head come to rest on the pillow. “Let's get together in a few days. I'll be back in Montreal.”

“I'll be waiting.” Her tone is a strange mix of jokey and solemn. “We never did have our talk.”

I hang up. Sadhana's computer, when I pull it towards me, is almost hot to the touch. The churning seems to be slowing, and after one long moment the search box shrinks to show the list of findings. There is just one result, in a document titled
EMAIL DRAFTS
, dated November eighth. I click it open.

Ravi, you might not remember me. I'm Beena's sister. You might not remember your son either, but he is an incredible young man you don't deserve to get to know. But that's what he wants. Call me tomorrow or I'll call you. And I have a feeling you really don't want me to leave a message.

She was not better. For a long time she was only worse.

The third time Sadhana came home from the hospital, Uncle said, “I hope you have learned your lesson now. You had better not try anything like that again.”

Sadhana overturned her bowl and fled from the table.

Uncle glared at me as Sadhana's untouched supper oozed out over the tablecloth. “If your sister dies of this, it will be her own fault.” He handed me his napkin to clean it up, which was as close as he'd ever come to an apology.

After Quinn was born, I did not return to high school, finishing instead by correspondence. This suited Uncle, who viewed it as fitting that I should continue to hide myself and my shame from the world. Due to her illness, Sadhana fell behind in her studies, which added to her hopelessness. In the evenings, she babysat while I attended night classes at the university. Most nights when I got home from school, she would be writing in her diary or watching Quinn sleep, her textbooks untouched on the kitchen table.

“You're never going to graduate this way,” I said.

“I'm never going to graduate anyway.”

“Yes, you are. Now get cracking while I make us some supper.”

It was because of Sadhana that I learned to cook. I'd more or less stopped around when Mama died, and just after that was when Sadhana started poring over cookbooks. But afterwards, when she got out of the hospital for the first time, she told me it would be easier for her to eat if she spent less time thinking about food. So I shopped and cooked and put a plate down in front of her and talked her ear off until she'd eaten enough to leave the table. I got used to the sight of her crying and chewing, silently, as I made my efforts to distract her. I tried to plan meals for when Quinn was napping so my attention wouldn't be divided. Later, Quinn and I both learned to pace our eating, chewing and swallowing with a geological slowness.

Sadhana couldn't eat if anyone was watching her, and yet someone had to be there or she wouldn't eat at all. What turned out to work best was a stream of chatter at the table. I'd save up stories from the headlines, nothing too newsy or off-putting, and begin my recitation as soon as I put the food down on the table. The three-legged dog that learned to skateboard, or the giant boa constrictor that got loose inside a mall in Toronto. It was important that the stories have a happy ending.

At some point, we turned to crossword puzzles. Uncle had left one on the table one morning, and Sadhana's gaze drifted over it as I rambled on about the world's largest ball of twine. She put down her fork and reached for a pencil, which I grabbed first.

“I'll read out the clues and fill them in,” I said. And that was our new system. We didn't always have to use it, but from then on we kept a puzzle on hand, just in case.

Eventually, we moved out, leaving Uncle on his own above the bagel shop. It was the summer before I turned nineteen, and we found an apartment together downtown. It was better with just the three of us. Sadhana was still sick and spent another month in the hospital, but before Quinn's fourth birthday she had crossed the stage and accepted her high school diploma. A little too thin still, for her usual grace, and not with the classmates she'd started out with, but recovered and good-humoured and humble enough to thank those teachers, afterwards, who had offered her so much leeway and extra help. The teachers had seen things that Uncle could not; namely, that things such as leeway and extra help were sometimes necessary. For Uncle, a thing either was or it wasn't. We did not tell him about Sadhana's commencement, and he did not show up.

For Quinn's fourth birthday party, we had a cake in the shape of a school bus, which was something from his favourite TV show. Our own birthdays we acknowledged but did not always celebrate. Mama's absence was always between us. The first one we spent in our new apartment, we put Quinn to bed before getting drunk on cheap champagne that had us weeping and recriminatory before midnight. Since then, we had been careful about how fully we dared give ourselves over to the occasion.

Quinn hopped around the kitchen in his birthday fervour. “Is Uncle coming over?” Quinn had the kind of appreciation for Uncle that was made possible only by seeing him very rarely.

“No,” said Sadhana.

“We'll take you to see him at the shop tomorrow.”

“Can he have some cake?” Quinn must have detected some tremor of our dislike, for he always acted as Uncle's advocate in this way.

“Okay, we'll save him some.” I ignored Sadhana, who scowled as she went to the fridge to take out the icing.

For birthday meals, we started with the cake and worked backwards. There was no point in risking satiation. Quinn's intensity of cake focus, after an afternoon spent observing the process, was nearly evangelical. It made me worry how many of Sadhana's food issues might inadvertently be passed along.

He endured our final preparations from where we'd banished him in front of the television, his head swivelling over to keep tabs on our progress. The apartment was small enough that the remote control for the TV could be operated from the kitchen counter. Technically, it was a bachelor, with one large central room where we had our beds in a complicated arrangement with curtain dividers, as well as a mess of oversized cushions, a kitchen table, a desk, and a giant bin that never seemed large enough to contain all of Quinn's toys.

“That's my cake,” said Quinn, when he could sit no longer. He came and stood on his tiptoes by the counter. The icing Sadhana had gotten exactly right: a virulent shade of orangey yellow.

“That's right.”

“Is it almost done? I think it's almost done now.”

“It's done. Go sit at the table.”

Quinn closed his eyes after the cake was set before him and gripped the table with both hands as he began to wish in earnest. I was anxious about having taught him something that, strictly considered, seemed like a lie.

“What are you so worried about?” Sadhana had said, when I told her of my discomfort. “He'll figure it out. Didn't you used to wish for things that could never happen?”

“I did. I wished I could fly. I wasted a lot of wishes on that.”

“Wasted?” Sadhana laughed. “Now you sound like you believe in it, too.”

“I just don't like lying to my kid, that's all.”

The wishing had been allowed to stand, for it was hard to argue with tradition, especially when he was going to other kids' birthday parties. In this, as in so many other things, I found myself trapped by convention. I wondered where Mama had found her resolve.

When Quinn had finished deliberating and had blown out his candles and sucked the icing off each of them one by one, he praised the cake as we began serving it. “Thank you, Mommy. Thank you, Auntie S. For my cake.” He gasped as we cut into it and he remembered it was chocolate.

“You're very welcome.”

Sadhana kissed him on the top of his head. “We love you, Quinny-pie.”

Later that night, I watched her out of the corner of my eye while we ate the lasagna together in front of a movie Quinn and I had checked out of the library. I had served her a large piece, the same size as what I was eating, and she had not protested. Quinn sat between us, and I tried to give the impression both that I was not watching her, so she would be at ease, and also that I was in fact watching, so she wouldn't try to sneak any of her food into the garbage. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a meal without thinking about it. No doubt Sadhana did, too.

She was often skirting the edge of decline. A week or two or four would go by and she would have a kind of lightness that made her seem free of it, and then a bad grade on a paper or a fight with a friend would return her to the sullenness and fatalism of high school. Somewhere along the way, in spite of everything we had suffered, she had lost the ability to accept disappointment.

I watched her carefully. She pushed herself in her studies now, and she pushed herself in her dance classes, which was where she had channelled her athleticism. There was a contradiction in trying to monitor her, for the harder she strived, the more danger I felt her to be in. Sadhana's illness placed her on a teeter-totter where she was sometimes up and sometimes down, but she had not yet taken herself off the ride. I had learned enough to know that the matter of her eating, or not, was always something under consideration. Hers, and, by necessity, mine.

Most of her new friends at university didn't know. She'd shed her friends from high school and spread a story about a rare stomach disorder, an illness that could plausibly keep her
out of classes for a week at a time and wreak havoc with her weight. Or so I gathered in snatches from eavesdropping on her telephone conversations. She'd been keeping her friends away from me for a few weeks, after I'd shared her secret with a man she was seeing.

He was a business major, swaggering and wry, and she was both smitten and overworked, strained by her classes and the kind of self-induced pressure-cooker of perfectionism that could precipitate a relapse. Quinn was at a sleepover, and I'd gone to the library, followed by a late movie, because Sadhana had begged for some alone time in the apartment. The business major and I ran into each other in the kitchen on a late-night snack run as he was arranging apples, grapes, and aged cheddar on a plate. He had a pair of cute, small feet, and a sweaty bare chest swirled with hair. I'd already heard the sick squeak of Mama's old box spring followed by low laughter and then moaning. And now whistling. A Johnny Cash song.

“Hullo,” he'd said. “Here for a snack? Want me to leave out the cheese?”

“Just make sure she eats some.” I took the block of cheddar from him without a thank-you. “And don't jerk her around. My sister doesn't need another trip to the hospital.”

I left him looking puzzled, but it was only a day or two before the seed I'd planted flourished into a bitter-leaved conversation piece. And after he had a talk with my sister about it, he was gone.

The moment I stopped being afraid, it came back. Or it seemed that way. It had been a year of calm, a year of finding our way. We became ourselves more than we had ever been. Sadhana joined an amateur dance troupe and, with arms flung nearly as high as the spotlights, leapt jetés across a scuffed black stage in a piece called
Treeline
. From the audience, the flash of her lean brown hands looked like bats pitching in the air, and I felt like I was part of the lonesome story she conjured from the inclinations and contortions of her own body, as though I had somehow helped nurture her bravery and expressiveness.

She started her second year of university, taking an extra course in literary theory that spawned our meandering evening conversations on deconstruction that had the extra virtue of driving Quinn to bed early. I had finished my degree and was doing a bit of freelance editing, though we were still being frugal with the payments we received from Uncle. It had taken a while, but we had found a domestic rhythm in which the mountains of laundry and dishes that had eluded us for years suddenly evened out into clear plateaus we could see our way across. We divvied up what had to get done, and we did it.

We had just finished ignoring another one of our birthdays when Sadhana declared that she was going to reorganize the shelf with all the spices. I'd grouped them according to usual culinary pairings when we moved in, but Sadhana thought we should go alphabetical. Quinn had gone to bed after his favourite canned ravioli and a chapter of Narnia. We were lingering over white wine and a late-night asparagus risotto, a small treat in silent acknowledgement of the occasion. We were still eating when she jumped to her feet.

“I've been thinking about this forever,” she said, gathering up all the mismatched shakers and bottles. She took down the Mexican spices and the ones for baking, and then she was brandishing the container of hing.

“Should I put this under A for asafoetida or H for hing or M for
merde du diable
?”