Bone and Bread (31 page)

It amazed me that Sadhana could still take things personally after all these years of my working to prop up her recovery. Every relapse was like a train on a collision course, and there was nothing I wouldn't throw in front of it to try to slow it down. Even Quinn.

“He's not stupid,” I said. “He's going to figure it out eventually.”

Sadhana had screamed at him, it turned out, flying into a rage she'd been ashamed of when she saw how it frightened him. But she had apologized with humble sincerity, as well as with a new Nintendo game. After that he seemed to hold me exclusively accountable for the whole incident, as did she.

Both of them were ambivalent about recovery if it meant she would be going back to Montreal, back to her regular life.

We lasted two weeks in family therapy. It was Andrew who urged us to go, and Quinn was excited. After Sadhana's outburst, we had to explain to him the nature of her illness.

Both Sadhana and I still had memories of the group sessions from her teenage hospitalization. At those, we'd sit sullen and silent until prodded by the facilitator, but once provoked, we'd dominate the rest of the session with our sniping. With ten years of maturation under my belt, I thought I would be better equipped to handle myself, but everything about group therapy still worked to provoke me.

“Make her stop rolling her eyes,” said Sadhana to Melinda, our new facilitator. It was as if we were sixteen and fourteen all over again.

“I'm not,” I said. “Stop being paranoid.”

“You are. You're doing it right now.”

Melinda inclined a shoulder and rotated slightly to face me, clipboard held tight to her chest. “You were. But maybe you didn't realize.”

“Give me a break.”

“Mom,” said Quinn. “You were. Just listen.”

He was only ten going on eleven. I had to remind myself of this, or I wouldn't believe it.

Sadhana said, “Bee, stop trying to have the last word.”

It was all I could do to stop myself from making a face.

My sister got sentimental about candy bars after we went back to therapy, and Melinda regarded it as a breakthrough.

“A Mars bar,” Sadhana said one day in group. “I haven't had one of those in ages.”

I could picture a Mars bar, the black packaging and the red-lettered logo. I associated them with older people for some reason I couldn't pinpoint. “I don't know that I've ever had one,” I said. “Are they good?”

Melinda, who always got exasperated by unhelpful remarks from family members, shot me a look to be quiet. Quinn looked like he was thinking about telling me the same thing.

“Oh no?” said Melinda to Sadhana. Everyone else was acting as though I hadn't spoken. “When was the last time you remember having one?”

“When our mother had to go to the hospital,” said Sadhana. “The night she died.” She was looking at the floor, where she was drawing an arc around her chair leg with the toe of her black flat. “I got it out of the vending machine.”

“What else?”

“Well, we weren't allowed to have candy normally, but we were so hungry and we'd been there for hours. I remember it was the best thing I had ever tasted, and I felt so guilty that I cried when I was finished.”

“What did you feel guilty about?”

“Breaking the rules. And being glad about it.”

“You saw it as a betrayal of your mother's values.”

Sadhana nodded. “Maybe.” She talked at length about unwrapping it, the crinkle of the paper and the smooth brown form of the bar, which made me smirk. And about the first bite, how she expected it to be heavy but it was light, how it melted on her tongue. I couldn't stand listening to her. She was talking as though she loved food, like she wanted to do more esoteric things to the Mars bar than just eat it.

“And was that the first time you purged?” asked Melinda. She thought she was really on to something. I tried not to show on my face that it was pointless to waste time on purging when Sadhana had mostly given that up years ago — after her first time in the hospital, when someone had explained how bad it was for her teeth. Throwing up was something she only tended to do at the beginning of a relapse.

“No, no. Nothing like that. I couldn't even have told you how many calories were in it then. All that came later. I wasn't sick then.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Quinn, intent, as though tangents about hospitals and candy could really fix anything.

“What about Wunderbar?” I said, keeping my eyes away from Melinda. “That's a good one. When's the last time you had one of those?”

Melinda believed in the healing power of journals, and she encouraged all of us, even those of us who were not sick, to start keeping one. I stiffened at the first mention of the idea. The sting of Sadhana's original diary was a memory that had not lost much of its potency.

Sadhana raised her hand to speak. “I've been keeping a diary for a long time,” she said. “It helps.”

“Good.” Melinda was encouraging. “It's a safe place to be honest with yourself, isn't it?” Sadhana agreed.

I put my hand up.

“Yes, Beena?”

“Well, here's my sister, who has been pouring her heart out to diaries almost daily for, what, ten years? Eleven?” I looked to Sadhana for confirmation and she nodded. “Okay, eleven years, and she is not one bit better because of them.”

“I'm not suggesting a diary is going to make anyone better — ”

“In fact, eleven years is about how long she has had this disease. What do you make of that? Coincidence?”

Discomfort settled over the group like a wool blanket, and Quinn was fairly writhing.

“I think it would make sense if the events precipitating Sadhana's illness might also have sparked other changes in her life. Including the need to start keeping a journal.”

Bella, another one of the starving girls, chimed in. “Yeah, maybe she didn't have anyone she could confide in.”

Until she spoke, and I heard the rest of the group's murmured agreement, I hadn't realized how very thoroughly I was disliked.

Another family in the group, the Pearsons, ended up talking about Christmas a lot because their extended family didn't get along and the holidays always seemed to bring them to a crisis point, like Mrs. Pearson's binge-drinking of special eggnog, which led to dish smashing or Fiona Pearson's cutting (wilful but cautious, with a butter knife) or little Angie Pearson's beheading of all her plastic dolls, in alphabetical order according to first name. How Mr. Pearson escaped this misery and mania was unclear, though he seemed as wretched as the rest of them in his wrinkled polo shirt, the kind of shirt that shouldn't even be able to wrinkle, as he sat in a red plastic chair alongside them, talking about his feelings and trying to describe his regret about the Christmas Eve argument that led to the destruction of his mother's heirloom crystal gravy boat without resorting to blaming words. This led Melinda to ask us about our family Christmases, which led me into another session of involuntary eye-rolling.

“I'm sorry,” I said, when Sadhana pointed it out again. “But what makes you assume we even celebrate Christmas?” I was fairly sure my sister saw someone else as part of her regular therapy; Melinda knew her only from these family sessions.

Sadhana broke in as Melinda started to look worried, assuring her we had always celebrated it, in spite of not being Christian. “Our mother had a universalist kind of spirit,” said Sadhana. “We celebrated the solstice, the birth of Christ, the hunt, the harvest, Saturnalia, what have you.”

“We have the best Christmases,” said Quinn. “We still do.”

It was true. When Sadhana and I were little, our main celebration with Mama was something of an amalgam of Indian, pagan, and Christian traditions. We even had a special day picked out for it: December seventh, a kind of midpoint between Christmas and when Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, tended to fall.

The Christmases Quinn was remembering were the ones when we baked frozen tourtière and opened presents stacked beneath a hideous gold-tinselled tree we had sworn to use forever, after Quinn picked it out at the drugstore, calling it the “beautiful fairy tree.” Late on Christmas Eve night, we had a huge meal with three desserts, and at midnight we opened presents before going to bed with full stomachs. In the morning, Sadhana and I had mimosas with breakfast, and then we all went to a movie in the afternoon. Quinn had reported that his grade two classmates found this shocking. His teacher kept prompting him to remember when we went to church.

Quinn shared this memory with the group and Melinda asked him to describe to everyone what his favourite part of Christmas was.

“Umm,” he said, pushing his black hair off his forehead. He looked so strangely adult sitting apart from me on a black folding chair. “Being together. All the time.”

Being together had become less of a fond recollection and more of a hard consequence. Sadhana had come, and with the exception of a few brief excursions to Montreal, she had stayed. Like Deana, she returned every time with more and more belongings. Bags of her clothes flowed out of my closet. Her makeup littered the dresser and the shelf in the bathroom. The weather had turned cold, though there was no snow yet. She had been sleeping in my bed with me for more than five months.

Those days she used to get out of bed with the greatest reluctance, as if sleeping were her only pleasure in life. She'd stretch up first one long arm and then the other, like a zombie hearkening to its master, and then, after this showy concession to her alarm clock, she'd let them drop one by one before turning on her side, nuzzling and shrugging her shoulder against the sheet as though tucking herself back in under sleep itself. I took it as a good sign, that she had at least reached a point where she could sleep comfortably, that her body could still give her some satisfaction.

“I need to know you're up before I go in to work,” I said. It was another Saturday shift at the law office, a month after Andrew and I had broken up. We had mutually given up on each other after he acknowledged he was sick of the situation with my sister and I admitted it had no foreseeable end date. But a partner at the firm had taken a particular liking to my style of drafting correspondence, and I had reacted by taking every opportunity to work weekends with him, showing up in the nicest outfits I could manage. It was probably nothing, yet still nice to have something to think about other than the two people who depended on me for every little thing.

“I'm up.” She spoke these words into the pillow.

“I don't want Quinn to get his own breakfast.”

“So you feed him.”

“I'm late.”

“You should wake up earlier. This always happens, and you always get mad.”

By the time I left, Quinn was eating cereal in the kitchen alone, asking me in a stage whisper what Sadhana should eat when she got up.

And then she was better. One week, we weighed her, and she was only a little light, and she was still eating. The next week, she was heavier and cheerier. She packed up her clothes, and before we even realized what was happening, she left. Quinn missed her, but it was manageable. It was calm.

We didn't know how, or why, but mostly it went away. Her illness, or her sadness, if they were in fact different, seemed to dissolve into the other elements of her life, where they were absorbed or transformed.

Quinn and I visited her often in Montreal. She was acting and teaching workshops and helping run the box office of one of the larger theatre companies. When she was low on cash, she waitressed at a couple of upscale restaurants on the Plateau. We went to see all her shows, sometimes more than once.

I made a life, friends. Nothing that could approach the all-consuming intimacy of what I had had with Sadhana, but it was better that way. Quinn kept up in school, almost without trying, it seemed. I had to work to find out what he needed, and it was a challenge to challenge him. Finally, an offhand remark about hockey fuelled an idea about what he might be missing, and with Sadhana's help I encouraged him to join a league geared towards kids who hadn't started playing the country's favourite pastime as wobbly-kneed toddlers. He had always been good on skates, right from our first winter in Ottawa when I took him down to the frozen canal. I walked him over to hockey practice and watched him learn to skate backwards faster than anyone else. It took longer, though, for the stick in his hands to look like it might belong there.

One night not long after he started playing, I came home and found him calmly going through my papers. He was twelve years old.

“What do you think you're doing?”