Things Withered (25 page)

Her mind would wander to terrible places. It was the exhaustion. She would think of the forest floor, of the life cycles of bacteria and bugs that reclaimed what fell, for its own. The relentlessness of nature’s mood. Of Hilary, slowly dissolving into the woods. The forest was uncompromising.

She tried to clean.

The vacuum was sitting in the middle of the bedroom. It was still plugged in, although Shara had given up trying to keep up with the dirt that seemed to come out of nowhere: soil and twigs and bits of wood rot and leaves. Everywhere. Dragged in, she supposed. But from where? It was always just there.

She would just get it vacuumed and there would be more.

She was losing it.

Look at me, Shara,
Hilary had said.

Scrapbook moment
:
her mother called them into the living room for a family meeting. She said the words as though “family meeting” had been something they’d done always, since their early days of red-checkered-family-picnic-Frisbee-throwing-sing-a-longs. Proof that there’d never been anything like that was in the way the three children sat three abreast on the Montauk while their parents roamed or sat, alternately, the blocking like an Agatha Christie play at the summer theatre.

Things have taken a turn
their mother said and she continued in a convoluted, complex series of non-sequiturs, talking one minute about Shara’s car insurance and the next about the kitchen cabinets being loose and then to their father’s recent bad luck.

Your father’s had some bad luck.

Her younger sister Cherie, beside Shara on the sofa, whispered
did you PVR Apprentice?
just as her father spoke for the first time, smoking nervously beside their mother’s chair.

I’ve lost my job
he said. Her mother cried.

Shara leaned into her sister and said
No. I forgot.

Things are going to have to change around here
her father said. And they sat like that for a few minutes more, the three kids on the sofa, their dad standing, their mother crying.

Scrapbook moment, as Mrs. Peale would say.

Who wouldn’t be stressed after that? The rest of the story came out in dribs and drabs as her grandmother used to say, before giving them $500 for their birthday
you’re getting your inheritance in dribs and drabs
ha ha ha.

Three of the six cars were sold, the kids were to share one. Their housekeeper disappeared. The pool went uncleaned. The paper stopped.

There was no money for school. When she finally got the nerve to ask about school her mother threw up her hands and screeched
school? School? I knew you would come at me with school I’m not dealing with this right now can’t you see I’m upset—

It might all have been all right if not for Hilary throwing it all in her face.
You can stay with me at the apartment.

She was not a charity case. She was the smart one.

Shara belched and wiped spittle off her lips with a tissue. She peeked at it. Yellow-grey matter, with substance and weight. She balled the tissue up and tossed it towards the waste basket by the desk. It missed and landed on the floor.

She sucked up the fluid that seemed to continually pool under her tongue. It was foul, tasting as it smelled, like the shore of Lake Winnipeg in August when everyone was going home.

Doctors Google, Wiki and Yahoo mentioned stress frequently. But also everything else.

The Mac was open on the desk, with numerous opened tabs featuring her symptoms.

With all the mucus

(what she decided was mucus, in spite of its odd colour and texture)

—smell—

because of that
, it could be a flu or cold. She did not cough, but her throat and mouth stung with the taste of it. It could be gastrointestinal bugs like a flu or a tapeworm or her period, especially with the bloating.

It could be cancer, of the esophagus, pancreas, lungs, or stomach.

Excessive belching was caused by so very many things.

Clammy, cold hands and feet also had a variety of causes.

(moss no one mentioned moss)

The patches of bubbling flesh that seemed to have sprung up in the last few hours, was a mystery. When she touched them, the flesh was warm, where everywhere else she was cold; and there was something like a pulse beat under there, but not steady. Writhing. Living.

She pulled a sweat shirt on over her jeans to cover up as much of her skin as possible. She was pale. Very pale. She looked
unwell.
Very very
unwell.

Just before leaving the apartment to meet Donald, she did two things. She closed the lid on the Mac (a tiny bit of blood could still be seen in the seam, if you were looking).

And she brushed red leaves off the bed. They were everywhere. Like the flies.

Dancing in her head over and over, on a loop:
Look at me, Shar.

Donald slipped an elasticized yellow band around her wrist and shouted over the music into her ear
we missed the first set
but he was grinning when he took her hand and they ploughed through the crowd, all of them eyes forward, heads bouncing, some of them fingers snapping like jazz daddies. The noise was overwhelming/distracting/a blessing, even when a bad thought or two popped up in her head, like thinking how much the bass line sounded like the noise of the Mac making contact with Hil’s skull—

—it was fleeting though and Donald’s enthusiasm made her both tired and happy. He leaned into her and said something loudly into her ear, but the music covered it up. He laughed, his face close to hers. In the lull between the chorus and verse she heard him shout
the drummer used to go to McGill
his face solemn just briefly at this bit of abutment, then he smiled down at her as he started mouthing the words to the song along with most everyone in the crowd. Shara didn’t know the words, but tried the chorus

(throat feeling in pieces with every vibrato)

and felt herself grinning like a madman.

He’d picked her up outside the apartment, getting out to open the door for her and as he came around the car she was embarrassed for her thick jeans and heavy sweatshirt
RTSD Science Camp Counselor 2008
. He wore his other jacket, with the unfashionable narrow lapels and looked handsome.

He seemed shy opening her door and waiting until she got inside.

In the parking lot of A Building where the First Days concert was—jazz, he said it would be like Dizzy Gillespie, except Dizzy was dead like so many people lately—he didn’t get out right away but instead touched her hair
I had a crush on you last year. You don’t remember. You hardly looked at me, but we talked about plants.

I remember
she said, surprised that she did.

I asked you about belladonna—
he laughed.
I was trying to be flip and cool but you said belladonna is an example of god’s hand in nature—poison, but that its taste gave you fair warning. I liked that.

(why didn’t you say something last year)

I bet you get the Canadian Shield Award.

Then the car went quiet. He thought she was embarrassed and he tried to make a joke—

But in fact that feeling was back, the unrealized point, a missed message, some kind of impending trip to the Dean. But he touched her hair then and said
what happened to your head—

The room pulsed like the itching-moving-writhing that seemed to be her body now, inside, in her organs, under her flesh, under her hair. It was distracting and she couldn’t get on top of the

Look at me, Shar—

bad memory of the dream. Seemed so real. Hilary’s eyes, boring into her
look at me
and she wouldn’t couldn’t didn’t.

Did she? It was hard, now, to remember. She struggled to do that and then Donald was beside her. He took her hand and held it. His hand was warm and hers was so cold. He squeezed it with affection and—

There was a brief moment of clarity when she turned and looked up into his face and thought
big deal about money I can do this

But seconds later his grin faded. He let go of her. Backed away, surprised.

She stared too
what?

And the music thumped around them and he raised his hand between them—turned it palm out to show, to see.

He shrieked into the pounding, musical air—and jerked his hand, shaking it, shaking something off—his face twisting into disgust, mouth a grimace, as bits of something scattered around him.

A piece of whatever it was hit the back of a girl in front of them, her blonde hair pulled into a neat tail. The thing stuck there. Lights flashed as people walked back and forth through the stage lights shining from the back of the club and Shara leaned in to peer at what Donald had shaken off his hand.

He shouted something but she couldn’t hear it.

The thing on the back of the girl’s sweater was a sphinx, a non-sequitur, enigma, puzzlement, poser, entirely illogical.

It was a finger.

She looked down at her hand, in the dark where bodies blocked most of the murky light from the ceiling anyway and turned it over and over and it seemed that maybe—

Some of her hand . . . invisible in the dark. Or gone.

Look at me, Shara.

No one would have heard her scream, not over the music, they were too close to the speakers, but Donald saw her face, the expression and he reached out to her, grabbing her around the arms and just squeezing like you would if you were wanting to help to

—see god’s hand in nature—

And through the jersey of her grey sweatshirt, through his fingers, seeped some kind of fluid and she felt a kind of collapse inside herself, inside her arms, to the bone inside her chest. And Donald screamed.

And then the
smell.

And no one heard him over the music, but around them people twisted toward her, their bodies swivelling in mid-writhe, pretty young faces usually smooth, tortured into grimaces, jerking away from the swollen, sweet-hot, molten stench and over the music there was a collected sound of surprise and repulsion.

When Donald turned away from her in revulsion, Shara pushed her way through the crowd, each and every one of whom turned to look—not at her, but at whatever that horrible—

—smell—

was.

Shara plodded through the parking lot from Building A, screaming, each step a kind of splatting sound, the soft squelch of snails pummelled with rocks, of stepping on Basidiomycota, passing First Days celebrants, most of them already drunk, most of them hardly seeing her, not caring. No one noticed her wake.

The keys were just where she’d left them.

The dream had been so vivid. The scents of the last of the periwinkle, of all the summer dying on the stem, on the vine, shrinking, dying, seeping, melting into rich soil. It was pernicious, that smell.

It filled Hil’s car.

Slowly as the student buildings and campus gave way to town, gave way to blank fields and car repair shops and wooden estates, hidden, marked only by reflective numbers on posts, gave way to vast fields of scrub and empty, neatly tilled fall-hardened earth gave way to a twisting gravel road.

And if it was light even on the horizon, she would be able to see a geographical anomaly, a copse of
morus rubra
.

Hilary hadn’t even known that.

Shara, now so much closer to the earth, felt that she could smell them.

Red Mulberry. They were poisonous.

I work just as hard as you do.

Her pretty, pretty face, always so pretty, grinned and she thought it was funny—she was teasing even if Shara wasn’t in the mood for teasing and she said

Maybe I’m the smart one, too.

The moon made everything grey but the leaves of the mulberry were distinctive. She parked and got out of the car. Hilary’s car.

And from the road, she peered into the woods, at the figure that stood through a break, and in a clearing, about a hundred metres away. Her skin was pale and soft, a slight tan from tennis camp. There would a perfectly shaped, dark mole in the direct centre between her shoulders. Her hair swept over it most of the time; her eyes were blue.

And she was still the pretty one.

Shara walked towards her, every step wet and near collapse.

Halfway, she could sense Hilary’s vitality. Her life.

The two girls stood together under the trees.

“Look at me, Shara,” Hilary said.

Shara did. And
saw
.

Shara’s reflection lay dead on the soft damp forest floor, and must have for the whole week that had passed. Her flesh was mottled and grey, still bloated slightly through the middle, but internally collapsing into the ground, soft with fallen leaves and twigs and green moss and damp with body fluid.

Hilary stood over her.

“It’s about balance,” she said. “Now you’re dead and I’m alive.”

The two girls met eyes. Brains and cranial fluid seeped from Shara’s head onto the leaves, her body torpid, flesh pallid and as cool as the ground cover. Just faintly she could smell the moss under her rotting, ending self.

When Hilary got to the apartment, she did two things: she opened the window and shooed out some curious flies. Then she called her dad. She didn’t know
what
could have become of Shara. She was such a smart girl.

While the phone rang, she flipped through mail she picked up on the way in.

The Canadian Shield Award for Botany
was announced and Hilary did not win. The award was announced and then poor Shara’s body was found, in the forest, making it all the more poignant.

Shara’s paper won. Reclamation on the Forest Floor in the Canadian Shield.

Hilary was the pretty one.

She erased the history from the Mac. It was nothing she would ever need:

Google

“symptoms” + “rotting flesh”

(with apologies to Stephen King)

Maria is silent as she wipes down the walls in my kitchen. I don’t actually watch her do this, I just know that it’s her job for the morning: the walls in the kitchen. When I pass through my gleaming hallway, through the living room that smells gently of lemon oil and flowers and into the kitchen—the dishes hiding behind cupboard doors, or in the dishwasher—I smile. She thinks it is at her, and I suppose sometimes it is. But honestly, when I pour my coffee from the gleaming pot, into a brilliant white cup, atop my uncluttered countertop, I know exactly what it’s for.

Order.

Good clean order.

When I smile and she sees me, she smiles back. Her eyes are confused, though, even when she smiles, there is always that hesitation, that furrowing of brow. She speaks no English; I think she is afraid I will speak to her and she will have to try to understand.

I don’t, even though she gives me
this.
This order. For me, that exchange is profound enough to warrant the silence. There should be silence in the face of, a reverence for, this order that she gives—like the Madonna. Maria. It all makes perfect sense.

Without it, I am at sea. Eyes that should be trained on the page roam rooms for loose pens, unopened mail, threads from clothes I don’t remember wearing, curling on carpets like minute snakes. I look for disorder and it disarms me. I must be armed for the page.

Sometimes when she smiles at me, she can’t help it, her eyes drop down to my left hand, and the missing fingers there. Two: the baby finger and my ring finger. I joke—with those who speak English—that I will never have to marry, because I have no ring finger. In certain rooms it will get a laugh. Maria is Spanish, which probably means she’s Catholic. I think she would pity me.

Señora pobre
.

She has no idea, of course, how she came to be here, in my home.

I walk through the house on my way back to my office; it smells of lemon and flowers, not dust and chaos. For that I am truly grateful.

Thank you Father (for they have sinned).

Cortario mis dedos para esto
.
My Spanish is weak. I may be wrong.

I keep my own office. As a result, there is a differing order in there. Books are stacked sometimes on the floor, but neatly, bohemian style, with the titles facing the person who might sit in the soft fat chair in the corner. It’s a good chair for reading and there is a lamp above the right side. I tend to lean right when I read, and I read often. I spend nearly all of my time in my office, venturing out into the rest of the house to eat, check the messages that come infrequently on the machine, get the mail that Maria leaves on the table by the door.

The office smells, too, of old body and books, coffee and gum.

Before Maria it was Concepçión and before that, I forget.
La señora es extrana
. They quit.

My friend John says I should marry Maria. He says that not because he believes I am lonely or want a mate, but because he knows what I truly value. He was a great friend of my ex-husband’s. He knows how the marriage disintegrated and why; he knows how baffled Raymond still is, even now. Years after the divorce, he sees my contentment and wonders. He wonders if I am a lesbian, but only in self-defence.

I am not anything, actually. I am a sensualist of a sort, but not sapphic or libidinous. I crave and lust for order. All around me I need things to stand to reason. Dishes in cupboards, pillows stacked neatly in a fan, magazines spine side out, toilet lids down, bowls white, blouses hung, t-shirt sleeves folded into the back on the seam, CDs in their cases, jazz, rock, blues separated by gender and then date, food behind doors, lids on pots, handles out, teakettle gleaming, teapot stashed, teabags hidden, television hidden, sofa table one inch from the soft back of the cotton sofa, vacuumed daily, vacuum cord wrapped counterclockwise, nose parallel to the back of the closet, broom not touching.

This is why when I found the ad in the back of Epicurean that said, “Anything You Want,” I didn’t hesitate. By then Raymond had screamed himself hoarse and left, but the damage had been done; it would have taken me months to sort through his detritus. It made my heart stop. I couldn’t swallow. This was infinitely easier.

But it was very expensive.
Anything You Want.

The ad said, “Anything you want, fees to be negotiated. Some trade negotiable.”

So three men came one day, one of them was a doctor, and he cut off two of the fingers on my left hand, with my blessing. Maria showed up the next day, the first Maria, and put things to rights. She comes every day in some form and keeps it all right. Order. So I can think.

What do I care? I am not married. I write for a living, I type with four fingers, only, and my thumb presses the space bar.

I hear the vacuum roar in the living room and I smile. Peace floods over me, bleeding into my scalp, pulling my hair tight. Phantom fingers tap the desk while I wait for words.

I write so much better now.