The Withdrawal Method (5 page)

Before he moves inside, his voice comes singing through the silence. "You want to come in, or will you wait there until the shops open tomorrow morning?"

Taking my shoes off inside Mauricio's front door, I don't give an excuse, just act like he's invited me over - and here I am. The place is immaculate, smelling vaguely of omelettes. He doesn't say anything, just hangs his coat and pushes his way through saloon-style doors into the kitchen, whatever he's just bought in his hand.

"Do you want mate?" he asks. "It is like tea. I am making some."

"Sure," I say, and go sit down on the folded futon in the living room - which, I realize, is also his bedroom. The futon is his bed.

While Mauricio clanks around in the kitchen, I look around. Everywhere are musical instruments: guitars, a banjo, little hand-held drums, a keyboard propped in the corner. The only decoration on the walls is a watercolour painting tacked above the futon. Two M-shaped birds flap over a zigzag mountain range snowcapped in white; the perfect red half-circle of a setting sun washes the page in stripes: fuchsia, gold, crimson. It's a terrible painting, something the mother of a proud but untalented child might display only out of parental obligation.

After a while Mauricio emerges from the kitchen carrying a silver tray. On it is a clay teapot and a single, ornately designed, egg-shaped cup with a silver wand sticking out of it. Mauricio sits down cross-legged on the floor and places the tray on the coffee table between us. Without saying anything, he pours hot water slowly into the cup.

"Aren't you having any?" I ask him.

"Yes," he says, and then sits back. "We must let it brew."

A minute passes, maybe two. I watch the steam rise from the cup. Then he takes it in his hands. "At home we would have loose mate," he says. "Here are only teabags."

I watch as he takes a sip from the wand - it's apparently a straw. He sips, then sips again. I wonder if he's going to leave me any. I guess he sees my face, because he laughs. "You have never taken mate before," he says.

"No, I guess not."

"It is like a ceremony. I take the first cup to make sure it is okay for the guest. Maybe it is strange. But, you know, you are away from home and these things become important."

He fills the cup again with hot water and passes it to me. "Do you want sugar?"

I shake my head and put my lips on the straw. The taste is bitter and smoky - somewhere between green tea and eating a cigarette - but not unpleasant. I sip again. There's not much in the little egg-shaped cup, and soon I'm done. "Thanks," I say, placing the cup back on the tray. "This is the life, eh? Couple of dudes, sharing a pot of tea."

Mauricio's looking at me in a funny way. I avoid his eyes. He sighs, so long and heavy that it feels as though he's doing it for both of us, then fills the cup a second time and passes it to me, saying, "You did not come in to see her today." From his tone - not reproachful or accusatory, more restrained - it's obvious that he saw me at the hospital.

"Yeah, I was at work. I've got the day off tomorrow so I'll go by then."

"She thought you were coming. Everyone did." Mauricio pauses for a moment, and when he speaks the words are slow and direct. "But Lee is so strong, isn't she? You of all people must know that."

I don't have an answer for him, so I twist to have a look at the painting above the futon, all Ms and Vs. When I turn back his eyes are trained on me like a pair of high beams. "How did it go?" I ask. "Today, I mean. With the surgery."

"Good. She is doing fine." He gestures at the painting. "This was by my sister. She died in a car accident. I take it everywhere I go."

"Oh," I say. I take a sip from the metal straw. The taste is mellower now, more potable. "That's sad about your sister."

,,of course, she was very small; it is very sad. It has been four years, but still I think of her every day. It is nice to have something of her with me, you know? Some memory. And I like to have a painting because I can think of her making it, putting herself into it. Art is the opposite of death because it is always alive. No?"

Jesus, is he really saying this? But, whatever, I nod. "Yeah, it sure is."

"And what about you?" he asks. "What will you do, after?"

"After what? After Lee's ... gone?"

"Yes."

I think.

"I will go back to Argentina," he says.

"You will?"

"Yes," he says, and nods. "Unless you need me here."

"Mauricio, just go home."

I catch myself and look over. Kneeling there on the other side of the coffee table, his mouth hangs half open as though he's about to say something. But then he closes it.

"I mean," I add, "you've already done so much. We're really grateful. But you must have your own life to get back to."

Mauricio just lies down, right there on the floor. He doesn't say anything.

I finish what's left in the cup, slurping up the last few drops a little too loudly. Then the room descends back into silence. Mauricio seems to be meditating, or sleeping, his eyes closed, body supine. Meanwhile - and maybe it's the mate - I'm feeling anxious and buzzy. I find myself having to consciously stop my feet from tapping.

After a while, I say, "Well, it's pretty late," and Mauricio jerks to his feet as though he's forgotten I'm there. He walks me to the door, holds it open as I make my way outside. With me standing in the street and him in his apartment, we shake hands, right over the doorstep. It becomes one of those extended shakes - held there, unmoving - that feel like they're going to end with the other guy pulling you in for a hug. Mauricio's face is tired and drawn. I wonder if I look the same way.

"See you at the hospital," I say.

"Hopefully," he says and lets go of my hand to close the door.

OUTSIDE IT'S STARTED raining. Just a light drizzle. I pull my hood up as I make my way back down Mauricio's alleyway, over a few blocks to the subway station to take a train home. Before I head underground, I check for messages on my phone. None.

Using the touchpad, I skip idly through the names, watching Giselle's materialize at the bottom of the screen and slide up, line by line, and then disappear. I stop on the one that says Lee (hospital). I call.

She answers quickly, her voice hoarse.

"Hey," I say. "It's me."

"Hey."

"How you feeling?"

"Tired. I was sort of sleeping." She coughs. "It's late."

"Sorry," I say. "I just wanted to know how the Gamma Knife went."

"Tests back tomorrow."

"I'll call in sick and come in."

"It'll be early. Too early for you. Just go to work and come later." She coughs again.

"No, I want to come in the morning. What time do you get test results?"

"Fuck, Pasha, I don't know. Just come whenever you want."

"I'll come in the morning, okay? First thing."

"Sure, whenever you want."

"Okay." I pause. "Love you."

"Yeah," she says, and hangs up.

AT HOME I DON'T bother with the lights, just track mud through the house in the dark and plop down on the couch in the living room with my shoes on, hair wet. I sit there for a while, the streetlight outside filtering in through the window. On the TV's blank silver face is my own reflection, trapped and distorted somewhere inside the glass. The rain patters away on the roof.

Above the TV in a cabinet are Lee's DVDS, dozens of them in alphabetized stacks. Surrounding them on either side are shelves of our books. Wouldn't it be nice to write your life into one of those? To take everything and filter it into something charming and sweet, take your struggles and make them fun? You could reinvent yourself as someone hapless and amusing, someone whose missteps are enjoyable, not simply wrong. Just slip out of who you are and repackage it all into something new.

I sit there for a few minutes, thinking in the dark.

After a while I get up from the couch and move down the hall, past the bathroom to our bedroom. I turn the closet light on, push my way through the clothes hanging on either side, and, from way in the back, dig out a box. It's stuffed so full of junk that the cardboard is splitting up the sides. I pull out fistfuls of letters, cassette tapes, birthday cards, bills, postcards, receipts - here's one for a pizza delivered two years ago, in case we ever feel like returning it.

A few layers down I find an inch-thick stack of pictures, most of them self-taken of me and Lee, our grinning faces slightly skewed and off-centre in each one. But I'm not browsing; I'm not interested in nostalgia. The photos I pile on the floor of the closet with everything else. What I'm looking for is very specific. I know it's in here; two Christmases ago I got the thing as a gift from Lee's mom and came home laughing. "What does she think I am, a twelve-year-old girl?" I said, cramming it into the box. "Well, you know," Lee said. "Maybe she thought you'd get inspired."

Amid a clutter of business cards and empty envelopes, I find it: the archetype of a journal, leather-bound and severe. Resisting the urge to blow dust from its cover, I leave everything on the floor and make my way with it back into the bedroom. There's a pen on the bedside table, a remnant of when Lee used to do her crossword puzzles before going to sleep. I sit down on my bed with it and the book, turn on the reading lamp, and sit there for a moment.

It isn't long before I figure out what to write.

BIG CITY GIRLS

NORMALLY ALEX LIKED snow days, when the county buses couldn't make it past RR #2 and school was cancelled. But today Alex and Ginny's mom had invited Ginny's friends over to their house, their house on the quiet empty road with no name with nothing else around, not even cows. The girls were fifth graders, Alex was seven; there were four of them and one of him. When it was just him and his sister, they called each other Dirk - Hi there Dirk, How you doing Dirk. But the one time Alex had called her Dirk around her friends Ginny pretended he wasn't even there.

From the back door of Ginny and Alex's house the snow stretched along the yard to the fence, across the fields, all the way to the wall of trees at the edge of the woods. Then it was the woods and the woods were black and went forever. A girl named Althea had gone in there back in the fall and never come out. She was home-schooled and no one the kids from the county school knew, not really. Althea had either been taken by someone or got lost, it wasn't clear. At one point her footprints just disappeared.

Because of Althea, Ginny and Alex had instructions not under any circumstances to leave the yard - today, the snow day, or any day. Who knows who's out there? Alex's mom said, gesturing toward the woods. Stay where I can see you.

Ginny also had instructions to include her brother, so she and her friends let him help build a snow fort. They put him in charge of rolling up snowballs around the yard, which he did, channelling muddy stripes into the lawn and then dumping his snowballs for Karen and Heather to add to the walls of the fort. Ginny was the packer. Shayna watched.

When the fort was done Alex went to crawl inside but Shayna blocked the entrance. Pretending her breath was cigarette smoke she explained that if the walls collapsed someone would need to go alert the rescue crew, and Alex should be that someone. So he wasn't allowed in the fort; he had to stay on guard outside.

Alex was left alone with nothing but a view of the fields piled high with white and perfect and boring all the way to the woods. He tried breathing smoke the way Shayna had, tilting his head back and blasting it upward. The cloud puffed up and evaporated quickly into the sky. It had snowed through the night and stopped that morning but still the sky was low, the grey splitting finally in cracks of blue.

Turning back to the fort Alex pictured the avalanche of it coming down and wondered who the rescue crew was. Was it his father? His father was at work. His mom was upstairs with sherry and Guiding Light. Alex wiped snot from his nose with the back of his mitten and laid his hand on the fort. Gently he tested the wall. It seemed solid enough. The girls were quiet. What was going on?

After a while they came out and stood with Alex looking around the yard for something to do. Shayna pointed to the woods. I don't believe it's too dangerous, she said. When my sisters were our age they played hide-and-seek in there all the time.

No one had a reply to that, which worried Alex. We're not supposed to, he said, and Ginny shot him a quick, sharp look. Everyone stood around not saying anything, gazing off at the black thatch of trees across the field. What was Shayna going to do? The silence and waiting made the air seem icier, whistling up under Alex's toque and needling its way into his ears. But then Shayna just said, Oh, whatever-so it was time to go inside.

The girls followed Shayna and Alex followed the girls into the mudroom. It smelled of laundry. Everyone piled their coats and snowpants onto the washer-dryer and left their Duckies in a grey-brown puddle in a heap on the floor, beside the empty spot where Alex's father's workboots sat at night and two rusty foot-shaped blotches marked the tiles like bloodstains. The room was warm except near the door, where winter light streamed in white through a small window. The window was like a sheet of ice. Outside it was the winter.

In the kitchen Ginny got out the peanut butter and they all went into the den licking spoons. Alex and Ginny sat on the couch, Heather and Karen lay on the floor, and Shayna lounged in Alex's father's chair with her legs draped up over the back of it, head upside down, hair hanging over the footrest. The straps of her overalls slipped to the sides and between them two nubs poked out of her shirt. They made Alex's stomach churn in a gurgling, snaky way. He buried his face into one of the couch cushions and screamed as loud as he could. When he turned back flushed and blinking, the girls were looking at him strangely. What, it's fun, he said.

The den was a brown room; there was a fireplace with fake logs you ignited with a switch. Ginny turned on the fire and brought out Clue. Alex made a grab for Professor Plum. He was always Professor Plum and Ginny was always Miss Scarlet - although this time Shayna took Miss Scarlet and Ginny had to be Colonel Mustard, who was the colour of diarrhea.