Come See About Me (15 page)

The blond guy’s
friend keeps checking me out from under his heavy eyelids, maybe figuring that
if his friend has a chance with Katie he has a chance with me. I sense that
Katie is aware of this also—and aware that I don’t like it but that I’m trying
to be helpful for her. She steps closer to me so our hips are touching and
squeezes my arm. “We need to go,” she tells the guys apologetically. “It’s
late.”

“It’s not so
late,” the blond guy counters as he checks his watch. “I was hoping we could
get some food or drinks or whatever. Talk about the show some more.”

“We could go to
Fran’s,” the guy with the heavy eyelids suggests. “Share some nachos.”

Fran’s never
closes. It’s the best place to go in the city if you don’t want to do much but
at the same time aren’t ready to go home yet. The menu’s half decent, but even
if I was hungry I wouldn’t want to share nachos with these guys like I’m some
girl one of them could hook up with after a concert.

“Our friend’s
sick,” I say. “We should go check on her.”

Katie backs me
up. “We really should.” Her eyes zero in on the blond guy, edging me and his
friend out of the picture. “But maybe next time you come into the city…”

A look of
disappointment flickers across the guy’s face, a look that says he thought
Katie would be easier. “Um, yeah, we can do that,” he says, pulling his cell
phone from his pocket and slipping it into her hand. “Give me your number.”

While she’s
keying the digits in the other guy turns his attention to me. He takes one look
at the aloofness that’s spread across my face like a second skin and sighs.
He’s not even going home with a number tonight.

After we say
goodbye and begin our journey down Yonge Street, I half expect Katie to
complain that she really wanted to go for nachos, but she doesn’t mention
Fran’s or the guys. She talks about the new songs The Vintage Savages played
and how she thought they started off too low-key but finished strong.

I know the
concert didn’t happen to me in the same engrossing way it happened to her—they
never did and now even less so—but I thought the band sounded good and I tell her
that and thank her for the ticket. “I’m glad you could come,” she says. “We
shouldn’t wait so long to get together again.”

“We shouldn’t,”
I agree. It’s not precisely what I mean but if I tell her the truth—that it was
nice to see her and Yunhee again but that it reminded me why I don’t fit in my
old life anymore—she’ll probably feel like I’m pushing her away. And that’s not
my intent.

The push
occurred last January and it wasn’t anything I did. It’s just something that
happened and will never stop, a domino effect cascading out ahead of me for the
rest of my life.

Having caught the last train back
to Oakville after checking on Yunhee, I sleep late again. When Abigail calls in
the afternoon to check on the house, and me, I keep her on the phone for longer
than usual, telling her about my job with Marta, my upcoming root canal and the
work her neighbors across the street have been doing to their property. “You
won’t recognize it when you see it next,” I say. “It looks like they’re pulling
the entire house down.” I want to ask about Alrick and how she’s gone on with
her life without him, but the right words don’t come. She’s never mentioned any
other men. Maybe that door is closed for good.

I’ve felt
strange in my skin since the concert; not any more melancholy than usual, just
different. The other times I was with Yunhee and Katie I was too deep inside a
grief bubble to really notice anyone else, but this last time I could see more
clearly, and that clarity of vision made me feel like
Alice in Wonderland
,
out of step with the peculiar world around me. I don’t feel like that in
Oakville as much, but maybe that’s because I never really go anywhere or speak
to anyone my age. No one confides in me about hook-ups or asks for my cell
phone number when what they really want is something else.

After I get off
the phone with Abigail I don’t know what to do with my contemplative mood.
There’s a restless edge to it that won’t let me be.

While I’m
deciding how to occupy myself, I pull some of Bastien’s boxes away from the
wall in the back room to form an exercise rectangle for Armstrong. Fenced in by
the boxes, he won’t need his plastic exercise ball. Bastien used to erect
similar temporary enclosures for him from time to time so Armstrong could
experience the world outside his cage or ball without us losing track of him.
One evening Bastien even stacked boxes on a portion of our shared driveway and
we sat outside in patio chairs to supervise the world’s greatest hamster. The
second we saw a cat prowl onto the neighbor’s lawn we realized we’d put
Armstrong at risk. Bastien was up and scooping Armstrong into his hands with
super hero speed. With Armstrong safe, the two of us stared at each other in
alarm, our expressions asking
how could we have failed to foresee the
obvious threats of the outside world
?

As soon as I’ve
completed Armstrong’s exercise quad and he’s manically exploring his new turf,
I disappear into the living room, turn the TV on to a home makeover program,
and begin a letter to Bastien’s mother. It’s not as if I’m her daughter-in-law,
so maybe I’m overstepping some boundary in writing to tell her how I am, but I
crave communication with someone who misses Bastien as much as I do, and that’s
easier done on paper than over the phone, where I would feel awkward and likely
cut the conversation short.

I ruin the
letter from the very beginning by writing “Dear Mrs. Powell” when Bastien’s
mother asked me, the time she flew out to Toronto after the accident and again
at the funeral, to call her Joyce. I rip up my lined page and start afresh.

Dear Joyce,

I know that we don’t know
each other very well but I thought you might be interested to hear how things
are going for me in Oakville. I still have some of Bastien’s things here and I
hope you don’t mind. Not many things, mostly some clothes and a few old
notebooks. I don’t know if you’re aware that he was working on a graphic novel
when he died. He told me that he used to make his own short comic books when he
was a kid and I wish I’d thought to ask you whether there were still any at
home with you that I could look at. The time wouldn’t have been right anyway. I
just feel…

I stop and tap
my pen against my thigh, thinking through rest of the sentence in my head because
it might be too strange—obsessive—even for Bastien’s mother:
…like there
must be thousands of pieces of evidence of his existence scattered around here,
Toronto, Burnaby and anywhere else he’s ever been that I want to gather up and
hold on to.

I
press pen to paper again and continue:

I just feel…
Maybe when I’m home visiting my
parents at Christmas you’d like to see the graphic novel pages he finished.

I don’t intend to stay in Burnaby after Christmas.
Oakville feels like the right place for me at the moment. Surprisingly even
more so than Toronto. I’m so grateful to Abigail for giving me the opportunity
to stay here and I hope that she allows me to continue to…

I cross off the last half of that
final sentence. I don’t want my letter to come off sounding like a thinly
veiled plea that I hope she’ll pass on to her sister. What I want Bastien’s
mother to know is that I haven’t stopped missing him and I won’t.

I’m living that
truth every day but can’t translate it into words in a way that won’t sound
self-congratulatory and/or psychologically unsound. My hand lies motionless on
the page. This isn’t working. I shouldn’t try to articulate important feelings
while in an
Alice in Wonderland
frame of mind; I’ll only end up worrying
people. I’ll have to write Bastien’s mother some other time, when my brain’s
feeling more disciplined.

But now what? I
consider stepping next door, rapping on the door and asking to borrow Marta’s
bird book in the hope that she or Deirdre is feeling chatty and will invite me in
to sit on their restored Victorian furniture. I’m on my feet to do it, scooting
into the back room to relocate Armstrong to his cage, when a lightning bolt
strikes:
Johnny Yang, Merman at Large
. Maybe what Johnny needs is
another world to tempt him. He already feels like he doesn’t belong in this one
but right now he doesn’t have an alternative. I can offer him one. Make him
choose in the end.

I flip
feverishly through Bastien’s
Johnny Yang
drawings, notes and completed
pages, scrawling notes on my own paper. If I do this, it will have to be in a
way that’s true to Bastien’s original vision—more laughter and adventure than
love story. What would make Bastien laugh? What if the undersea world Bastien
discovers is full of merpeople who over the centuries have grown stupid and
lazy and now do nothing but frolic, procreate and belch. Enchantingly beautiful
and horrifyingly dumb, they want Johnny to stay with them, but only if he
promises to forget his knowledge of the world. Day by day, as Johnny
procrastinates about making a decision, they grow more indolent and so does he,
all the science, geography and mathematics he learned at school beginning to
slip away from him.

I used to lose
myself in essays on human evolution, primatology and linguistics, but for the
next several days it’s adolescent, reluctant part-time mermaid Johnny Yang that
absorbs my attention when I’m not working at O’Keefe’s. My drawing skills are
non-existent so I use written descriptions or stick figures as placeholders.
But for the most part I concentrate on the story and dialogue. I haven’t
written a story since high school English class and possibly what I’m coming up
with isn’t any good, but I like it. More importantly, I think Bastien would
like it too.

Because my
Sunday shift at O’Keefe’s starts earlier than the Friday or Saturday ones, I
don’t have a chance to work on the story before I prepare to leave the house at
eleven-twenty in the morning. No clean jeans or other casual pants either; I’ve
fallen behind in washing my laundry. I rifle through my closet and pair my
sleeveless black dress with a maroon knit tunic for warmth and added
casualness. Then I slip on black tights, jam my feet into comfy black ankle
boots, and fly out the door.

This is the
first time I’ll be working solo all day and I want to make sure everything’s in
place before I open the shop to customers. It’s bound to be because Marta and I
tidied the shelves and checked inventory levels just last night after closing,
but I double check anyway. My copy of
The Handmaid’s Tale
is with me, as
usual, and after I’ve counted the float money left in the cash register I
unlock the door, set up the goody display outside and sit on the stool with my
head buried between the pages.

This time I
begin on page one and try to read as if I mean it. Customers come and go. I
recognize a few of the regulars now and one of them, a British South Asian
woman in her late thirties, tells me, as she stands at the counter paying for a
can of custard and package of frozen cheese and onion pasties, that, “The
weather channel says the clouds are going to clear away, giving us a perfect
autumn day. I hope you have a chance to go outside and enjoy it.”

“You too,” I
say. It was overcast and a little on the chilly side when I walked to work
earlier. “Maybe I should drag my stool outside. Get an October tan.”

You can’t go
wrong talking about the weather; there’s some twist to the story every day. It
follows that the nicer the weather is the more people stroll downtown Oakville,
dropping money in cafés and stores, and therefore I don’t have much time to
read
The Handmaid’s Tale
, but I ring in quite a few sales for Marta.
Only once do I temporarily lock the front door so I can nip out for coffee, and
when I return a red-haired woman is waiting for me, eyeing the sign I stuck to
the window: Back in 5.

“Sorry,” I tell
her as I unlock the door. “I’m the only one here today and my caffeine level
was running low.”

The woman
smiles. “I know what that’s like. Half the time coffee’s the only thing that
keeps me up and running around.”

I digest another
two pages of Offred’s story while the woman browses around the shop but am soon
forced to give up on it again. So far I haven’t seen O’Keefe’s crowded the way
the kids’ gift shop at the museum used to get on weekends, but the customers
drift in at a steady pace. At four minutes to five o’clock, when I’m preparing
to close for the day, two women pushing strollers, and with a total of five
young children between them, charge into the store. The two toddlers have arms
like windmills, constantly in motion grabbing for chocolate bars and candies.
One of them rips into a Cadbury Crunch, shoving half of it into his mouth
before his mother can grab him and pull out the other half.

“I told you not
to touch!” the woman screams. “Give that to me.” She tosses the uneaten half on
the ground and glares at me like the boy’s behavior is my fault for deigning to
work in a shop full of tasty things. “How much is that?” she demands.

I quote the
price for her and she whistles through her teeth and combs one of her hands
through her long blond hair. “That’s ludicrous,” she declares. “What a
rip-off!”

“It’s imported
from England,” I explain.

“Whatever.” She
rolls her eyes and stamps over to the counter with her hand in her purse. “Did Will
and Kate make it?”

Naturally. When
they’re not on tour the prince and his wife spend all their time in the
Buckingham Palace kitchen, rolling their naked bodies in chocolate. It’s
amazing the extra dimension of flavor that gives the chocolate.

I smile at the
woman with my mouth, but my eyes aren’t amused. Two of the other kids have
begun to wail and snatch items from the shelves. I try not to be angry at them
and imagine that they’ve missed a crucial nap. Is it possible that if Bastien
and I moved here after graduation and had a family that I’d be the one standing
in O’Keefe’s with semi-feral toddlers? That’s a future alternate reality that
my heart wholly rejects. Bastien and I would never raise brats. If the first
child was a bad seed we’d hold at one and wear him or her down with reasoned
discipline. Our child would never grow into a ten-year-old who would throw
stones at geese.