Holding Still for as Long as Possible (26 page)

I sat down on the bed next to Amy, put my hand on her naked thigh. I looked closely at her and saw the rage she held in her shoulders, in every muscle.

“Promise me you'll never stop being my best friend,” I said gently. I couldn't stop the urge to cry.

Amy placed a hand on each of my shoulders. I thought for a moment about what would happen if she snapped my neck. I felt all the vulnerable points on my body, every artery close to the skin, every possible instant death.

But Amy was looking into my eyes, and the animosity in her own faded. “Josh, you'll always be my family
.”

She put her hand to my heart and pressed it, and I felt the warmth of skin against bone. She curled her right leg around my torso, lowering her body until she was straddling me. We kissed with open mouths. This was the last time we would have sex. We both knew it.

It was at times mechanical and familiar, and at others filled with a passion we hadn't felt in years. It was monumental and totally normal at the same time.

Amy knew what I needed — for her to grab the back of my neck and look at me in the right way, like:
You fucking worm.
From me, Amy needed more than a regular recipe — she needed ambience and pretense and the right kind of gaze and adoration.

Today, at a certain point, I just stopped trying. She seemed relieved. She slapped my cheek playfully, a little harder than she should have. “You're always so easy,” she said. Her words sounded like an accusation, but she said them in a fake, singsong, nice-girl voice.

“You know I'll always love you, right?”

“Sure, sure,” she said.

“Do you want to get back together?” I ventured. In that moment I could see us together a year from now, these last few months an odd blip.

“I don't know. Sometimes. Do you?” she asked softly.

“Yeah.”

“Well, for now, I think sleeping together was a huge mistake.”

“Maybe.”

“And I think you should move out.”

This was the first time Amy had said anything so definite, the first time she'd sounded certain.

“Okay.”

I fidgeted, turned on my back and stretched out, noting that I'd worn socks the whole time we were having sex. Amy hated sex with socks. She too noted this, and sighed, desire once again thwarted. And once again I was something she didn't really like any more, but was incredibly attached to.

I walked downstairs to the kitchen and selected one of the heavy rock glasses from the drainer. This had always been Amy's house, despite her repeated urging for me to put up posters or photos, make it mine. There were her appliances from Williams-Sonoma, her silver pepper grinder, stone mortar and pestle, careful list of typed emergency numbers on the fridge, fixed with a magnet that read
Art Matters
. I'd arrived in this city in a car I had driven from Guelph, carrying my cat and all of my belongings in four boxes, plus a garbage bag of clothes. The car had died in Amy's driveway and had to be towed away. I had liked Amy's aesthetic, so I hadn't bothered changing anything.

I drank two glasses of filtered water, poured another, and selected a tiny piece of lemon from the saucer of carefully sliced wedges wrapped in cellophane in the fridge. Squeezed and dropped. I watched the lemon slice floating soft and bloated in the glass. Amy's cloudy sophisticated influence embodied. I drank.

There were only three things of mine in the kitchen — a case of Guinness in the fridge, a box of Minute Rice in the cupboard ( Amy thought anything other than whole-grain unwise ), and a row of chocolate pudding cups.

“Have you always eaten like a teenager?”
Amy had asked me the first time we went grocery shopping together. Her green plastic basket had been filled with quinoa, kale, apple-cider vinegar, and rice milk. Mine held canned beef stew, salami, Kraft Dinner, margarine. “I mean, you're studying to become paramedic,” Amy had said. “Shouldn't you be conscious of your health?”

“I've noticed the medics I've met on training are notoriously unhealthy.” I'd shrugged. “We don't sleep properly. We drink too much coffee.”

I walked back into the bedroom and sat on the bed, which Amy had made in my brief absence. She turned to look at me, and I closed my eyes in a long blink, the way I used to. I'd been doing it again lately — the blink — since we'd broken up. I closed my eyes emphatically, hoping the gesture translated to Amy how uncomfortable I was. She didn't appear to notice.

For a few minutes I watched her sitting at her nightstand, applying peach-scented Kiss My Face moisturizer, lining her eyes in black. She pushed two gold hoops into her earlobes. She had new lines around her eyes. Her arms were so thin. I thought of Billy's curves, how soft her skin was.

“I'm going to Roxy's party tonight by myself,” she said, eventually. “You can come if you want to, but I think we should stop habitually moving around the world together. We should be independent.” She paused to open her mouth slightly and run a creamy oval of brownish lipstick over her lips. She pursed them together, pressed her pinky into the cupid's bow of her upper lip, and blotted with a tissue. “Change needs to be solid. Certain.”

“But I like the time we spend together. Why does everything have to be so regimented and inorganic?”

“Because nothing will change unless we force it to.”

“That's a harsh way to look at life.”

Amy shrugged as if to say,
I'm tired of your theories.

“What happened to your camp boyfriend?” I knew his name. Jason. I just liked making him sound like a child.

“Nothing. We decided it's been too long and we live too far apart.” Amy shrugged, pulled her red and white socks up to her knees, and stuffed her feet into a pair of red Converse sneakers. “Find somewhere to live, Josh. It's that simple. Look on Craigslist, sleep on Roxy's couch, sleep in Billy's bed for all I care. Just let me have my space.”

“You know Billy doesn't want a relationship. She rarely lets me sleep in her bed. You don't have to worry about being replaced in that sort of way.”

“You are so arrogant.”

Despite these words, Amy looked relieved. I could see through her. I continued reassuring her, as if I hadn't registered the insult. Maybe I
was
arrogant. Maybe I was the most selfish person on earth. “And Jenny, well, you know. She's twenty. She's just a friend, you know? Plus, she's a medic. It could never be anything serious. Medics can't date each other. We're too crazy.”

Amy didn't laugh.

“Is Maria coming tonight?” I tried to speak lightly, to not betray more than casual interest.

Amy got up and walked towards the door. “No, Billy and Maria are trying to give each other respectful space in social situations these days.” She fidgeted with her socks again.

“Huh. It looks like it could rain. You might want to take your slicker.”

Amy's eyes narrowed at my pragmatism. She grabbed her raincoat and left. I could hear that she hadn't locked the door behind her.

I went to the living room and stood at the front window, watching Amy walk down the street. I had a feeling like thirst that I knew wasn't thirst, but I drank another glass of water anyway.

I was looking forward to Roxy's birthday party. I hadn't seen Billy in a few days. I was working 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. tonight, but would likely book off at 1 a.m. so that I could make the last hour of the party. I promised myself:
I will be on my best behaviour. I'll be honest
. Perhaps it would be the night for all of us to shift back into ourselves, to stop freaking out, to realize how lucky we were.

Well
,
at least I'm not the dog-faced girl
. That's what Billy said whenever she had a bad day. She had a photo from a tabloid pasted on her fridge that showed a girl born with a dog-face. It served her as a reminder that things weren't so bad
.

At least I'm not the dog-faced boy
, I texted her.

That night, I spent the last two hours of my shift at St. Joe's, holding my patient's hand on the stretcher while we waited for a bed. She was 105 years old. If she'd had any kids, they were probably dead by now. I wondered,
What must it feel to be h
er?
She was lucid until her fever got high. I didn't know why I kept holding her hand. It felt sort of peaceful, watching her breath fog the oxygen mask. She gripped my hand every once in a while, and opened her eyes, startled. Then she calmed down when she looked at me. I smiled, and she faded away again.

When my patient got a bed, I turned on my phone. It was nearly 2 a.m. Dispatch finally said 10-19. I had three texts.

Amy:
Why Aren't You At Roxy's Party? Thought you were booking off early. Come before we run out of tequila.

Billy:
Amy and I are getting loaded together. Can you believe it? You better show up soon, handsome
.

Amy:
Where are you? I'm sorry about earlier.

Back at the station, Jenny came out of the change room. “I'm way too hyped to go to bed. Want to hang out?”

“Well, it's my best buddy's birthday. You want to come?” As soon as I said the words I wanted to take them back. Already Billy and Amy were at the party — why add to the drama? But it was too late. Jenny was totally into it.

“I could use a drink,” she said.

Our first drink was poured from a flask because we had missed last call. Roxy was loaded, Amy and Billy were nowhere to be seen, and Roxy had no idea where they had gone. Jenny put her hand on my thigh. She had a small, still-healing tattoo of a maple leaf on the inside of her right wrist.

The bar was emptying out, but Roxy knew the bartender. He locked us in, and we kept drinking. Roxy brought three shots of Jägermeister to our table by the front window and suggested we play a game called The Milton Shot.

“Okay, so you take a shot and right after you swallow, the person to the right slaps you hard across the face.”

“This is what it's like to hang out with artists,” I said to Jenny.

She smiled as if she was game.

Roxy placed her hand lightly under my jaw, stroking it affectionately, and handed me my shot. “Ready? Shoot it!” Roxy slapped me hard.

I felt odd about slapping Jenny when it was her turn, but she laughed, and then she slapped me harder than I'd ever dare reciprocate. We slammed down the glass cylinders still hot from the industrial dishwasher. People stared.

Our faces were like rare steaks. Roxy took a Polaroid. In the photo there was a shadow of someone to the side, spilling a drink. I was grinning, half-lidded. When I looked at the photo, my cheeks burned under their already red and purple flush.

“Why didn't those girls say goodbye?” Roxy asked, swallowing more dark green liquid. “It's my fucking birthday! I'm a quarter of a century! Woo-hoo!” She slammed the shot glass down.

I went to the bathroom and sent Billy a text.
Why didn't you wait for me? I'm here, and I miss you.

Book Four

[ Life 4 ]

May 16, 2006.

3:06:12 a.m. Delta unconscious, F, 25, cyclist struck, possible head injury.
3:06:12 a.m. Delta semi-conscious, F, 25, disoriented, possible leg injury; made call.

You never know how much time you have, right? Think about it now. Feel a little sick? Run your tongue along the roof of your mouth. This is all you are. Cells meeting cells.

Two young women, both twenty-five, bike down Kensington Avenue. One wears a pink vintage cocktail dress and sits astride the gold-glitter banana seat of a child-sized
BMX
. The other has longer legs, wears slouching red and white striped knee-socks and an over-sized yellow raincoat with the hood pulled up over her helmet. Red curls escape onto her neck.

They both grip the handles of their bicycles. It's raining warm and steady.

Towards the beginning of the night, they'd decided to own up. They were each in love — falling in and falling out — with the same person. They'd done the logical thing, and turned their palms towards each other, danced with stomachs touching, admitted defeat, and in that sweet moment of shared humility, bought each other seven shots of tequila. The seventh on the house. The last three lemon slices poised between their teeth; tributaries of Windsor salt licked along the wrist, then crossing the jugular, and eventually nestling in the valley between their pushed-up breasts.

They had gravitated towards each other slowly. Yellow Raincoat thinking:
Keep your enemies closer
. Pink Dress:
I want to live without fear
. Pink Dress would say it like that. She's not afraid to be earnest, but can always make fun of herself.

Now they yell confessions of affection to each other as they pedal unevenly.

“You're so smart!” one calls out.

“You're so pretty!” is the other's response.

They are both smart and pretty, yet prone to requiring validation. What they really mean is:
It's a relief to know you're a real person and I don't have to hate you.

They slow approaching Dundas Street, which, for a major street downtown, feels empty. The housing project on the south side of the street appears abandoned, the security lamps blinking a yellow smudge in the stream of rain. Smiling at each other, the young women bike west, fingers curling lightly over their brakes, pumping, pressing.

Normally both girls would hide under an awning in this kind of weather, lock up their bikes and jump in a cab. But the rain is warm and suits the mood. Heat lightning erupts in the distance, brief blankets of chemical-candy blue, as they round the upward curve in front of Toronto Western Hospital. They pause at a red where Dundas meets Bathurst. The streetcar ambling past is a defeated wet insect.

Yellow Raincoat nods at a paramedic who runs across the intersection with a tray of coffees, swearing under his breath. He says her name with a smile of recognition.

Pink Dress sees herself up ahead, body crushed by the transport truck now gaining ground behind them. In a blink, the vision is gone. The truck passes by without incident. This happens a lot to Pink Dress. While biking, she frequently hears an involuntary incantation:
Time's up. Time's up. Time's up.
She has visions of her death: large objects crushing her limbs; two arms flailing as she plummets from the
TD
Bank Tower, sudden immolation by her own struck match, a knife slicing a check mark across her cheek before the killer plunges it into her rib cage. The images fade but continue to shake her. She blames the meditative state brought on by bicycling, the repetition of pedal up and pedal down, the continuous click and shove. But she is drunk and there is only
NOW
, and
Now
is the fucking
thing,
m
an!
In this instance of enhanced lightness, Pink Dress recognizes how ridiculous it is to live anxiously. Her unwillingness to
let g
o! live a little!
is but one item in a list of many bad habits, appearing after cigarettes but before inappropriate honesty and ill-advised one-night stands.

Yellow Raincoat isn't one to dwell on things she can't control. She pushes her mortality aside like crumbs from a dirty counter, concentrating on the wiped white sparkle, her slight reflection. She has held the hand of a dying person.
So what. We're all going someday
. It's like a hemline around her skirt, unnoticed with no loose threads. She was practically married to a paramedic. You can get used to almost anything if it happens every day.

If you were watching from the air, you might think the two women look like children, aimlessly playing, circling in figure eights, teasing. From the ground you might notice their directionless eyes, gnawed nicotine fingers. If they lifted their arms, you might be tempted to rub your fingers against the soft underarm stubble caused by cheap pink razors bought in haste at the twenty-four-hour Shoppers Drug Mart before a date.

If you looked even closer, you'd see that Yellow Raincoat has softer skin, blemish-free from careful hydration. Pink Dress has overlapping scars on her forearms and a face pursed from years of worry. You might guess by their fashion, the way they articulate sentences, that they each have half a Cultural Studies degree, or maybe they study fine arts. They definitely have the first independently released Arcade Fire
CD
, a subscription to
Bitch
magazine, and they know the names of all the Broken Social Scene side-project bands. They give almost believable tarot card readings, can shoot whiskey straight without wincing. They believe in ghosts, but consider themselves rational. They own multiple Noam Chomsky books and have read at least one. They are from the generation that had e-mail addresses like [email protected] by Grade Four and took cell phones on their first dates. They aren't used to being unreachable.

If you were close to them, you would smell lemon and tequila, sweat mixed with lavender oil, desperation fading.

The bartender at the Red Room had tried to cut them off after midnight with a good-natured, “Haven't you had enough?”

“Never, ever enough!” Pink Dress had yelled.

They were cute, harmless drunks, so the bartender kept pouring. Pink Dress could stop his breath with a wink. Yellow Raincoat was the kind of girl who wouldn't speak to him if she didn't have to, and there she was. Leaning in, lips pursed with possibility, chewing on her straw in a way she thought was seductive. The look would be pornographically repulsive in a brightly lit room or an afternoon park, but was totally commonplace in the bar, sexy under soft lighting.

Yellow Raincoat pulls her knee-socks up. Gravity and weakening elastic push them towards her ankles. She pulls them up again. Pink Dress runs a finger under her bra strap, which is forming an angry red horizon across the middle of her back. Both women's lips are slick and glossy, both wear mascara that is hardened and purposeful.

Earlier, they were revellers attending their friend Roxy's twenty-fifth birthday party, appreciative drunks in a room dotted with off-duty bartenders and waitresses. Both Pink Dress and Yellow Raincoat were there for Roxy. They loved her. But they were too consumed with themselves to keep their eye on the birthday girl for longer than the requisite drunken singsong while Roxy extinguished a flimsy candle ( later used as a projectile ) plunged into a Chinese bun from the bakery next door.

Even with the fresh air and the aerobic push and pump of their biking, the girls are last-call dizzy, lemon drop and tequila shooters smearing their glossy red lips. They are singing a song that was playing at the bar. The chorus states emphatically that the singer, like perhaps all women, would be better off without a man.

A man yells, “
Some
people actually want to sleep!” and slams his second-floor window, catching the tip of his baby finger, which swells up, a flower budding. His wife tells him to get back into bed. She had woken with a jolt to a bad premonition.

The young women coast. Their wheels turn and turn, and the low friction propels them forward on their simple machines. They hum. The street remains quiet, the Portuguese cafés, the veterinary office, and trinket shops all locked tight. A guard dog shackled inside the lumberyard at Manning Street barks half-heartedly. The 7-Eleven is swollen with stoned late-night snackers and homeless people camped beside the air pumps.

“I can't believe it took us this long to bond, we are so similar!”
says Yellow Raincoat.

“I feel so attached to you right now!”
says Pink Dress
.

When they kissed earlier in the bar, they were both half-present, well-intentioned, trying to transform absence into substance. They are not compatible kissers — both are used to leading the other participant's tongue. Yellow Raincoat felt Pink Dress's mouth was too small and kept trying to part her lips and get in there. Pink Dress felt Yellow Raincoat was using her tongue too routinely, believes the tongue should be an addition, a timpani drum, not the bassline or the background rhythm. When Pink Dress relented and let Yellow Raincoat direct the kiss, they relaxed into the pattern of lip-to-tongue-to-bite to soft closed-mouth pauses. They were one part enjoying the moment, one part hoping they'd turn their heads and notice someone, a particular someone, walking through the door. Hoping for jealousy, loyalty, sudden rushes of certainty.

“
Everybody is only their own,” says Pink Dress.

Yellow Coat nods. “What an astute observation.”

Pink Dress thinks,
I am so full of shit. That's a song lyric.

The girls try to hold hands, still biking, drunk to the point of bliss that may soon turn sharply into nausea. Yellow Raincoat closes her eyes, takes a breath from her diaphragm like she used to do during singing lessons. She lets go of Pink Dress's hand and lifts her legs off the pedals, points her toes towards the sky, and screams, “Ahh! I'm
so
tired of relationships!”

“Tell me about it!”
says Pink Dress.

One of them doesn't really mean it.

They continue to bike fast along Dundas Street, and make it halfway home before pausing at the north end of Trinity Bellwoods Park. Pink Dress ties the loose string of her strappy sandal while Yellow Raincoat lights a cigarette and stares at Pink Dress, bent over and struggling with gravity
.
“I can't wait to be out of my twenties. I hear the thirties are where it's at. Everything is supposed to feel like less of an emergency,” Yellow Raincoat says.

Pink Dress fears her thirties. “I hope to accomplish something by then,” she says. She pushes one pedal ahead slowly, turning to smile.

Pink Dress swerves first. The city is unusually still. Yellow Raincoat doesn't notice the truck as she follows. All she sees is the pink dress, the strip club sign that is supposed to say baby
dolls
but only says bylls. She notices the bright O! of the full moon above Ossington Avenue. She coasts towards Pink Dress, too drunk to notice the signs, to hear anything but her own blissful interior monologue:
I am going to be okay on my own
!

Later, neighbours will describe the sound for weeks: A truck pushing through a yellow light turning west onto Dundas, the girls assuming they are the most visible people on earth, glowing brightly with purpose, turning south on Ossington. A broken bike light, a single helmet, and two heads. A tired driver, pushing limits the way most people do when they assume there is no consequence. More monumental than the mere vibration of matter, the sound erupts from the mouth of bad timing.

Pink Dress hears an extended note veering off key before she blacks out. Nothing could insulate that sound. The sirens.

Back at the bar, a young man touches his wrist discreetly with two fingers and feels his pulse jump. For no reason, a single tear forms in his right eye, and pauses before rolling down his face. He touches the wetness and expects it to be blood. Inspects it closely in the dim candlelight. Presses his finger to the white of the bar napkin, surprised it doesn't rise red.

There is light and sound and then it all stops, like a sudden drop in temperature that freezes the brain. But Yellow Raincoat can't stop it. She has those extra seconds to feel fear. She tries to get off her bike, but it fuses to her. She braces for impact. She thinks of her mother.

Yellow Raincoat and Pink Dress are both knocked down, knocked out. Pink Dress's bike is thrown in front of the
TD
Bank, red and gold pretzelled, twenty feet from her body.

Yellow Raincoat comes to and touches her helmeted head with the arm she can feel. For a moment, she has no idea where she is. When the sound of the crash stops, before anyone can react, there is a quiet calm in the intersection, the kind of stillness usually felt in the few hours between last call and morning rush hour.

The driver absorbs the scene through the windshield, his body forced forward and then back, his mouth dry. He wills himself to have a heart attack and lie unconscious with the girls, who were only moments ago active agents on bikes and now lie limp on the street, one moving like a broken machine. Then there is the blur of headlights in the rain and the sound of people getting out of cars.