Bone and Bread (37 page)

The day of the big move of Sadhana's belongings, Evan runs a fever. I get up at eight to meet him at my sister's apartment. The night before, I'd reserved a parking spot outside the building, using two of Sadhana's kitchen chairs spaced out along the street with a length of masking tape running between them.

“You're sick,” I tell him when he arrives. His sluggish descent from the truck is accompanied by the slightest of groans, and his hands on my back are hot paddles.

“It's not nice to tell a man he looks like shit before he's even had a cup of coffee,” he says. He turns his head and rubs an arm across his shining forehead.

“Let's postpone it.”

“We can't. This is my only weekend off before the lease is up.”

“I know.”

Quinn comes a few minutes later, hair still wet from the shower, and puts the chairs up on the sidewalk while Evan parks the truck. The pitch of Quinn's overt resentment seems to be lower than it was on the drive to Gatineau, unless it's just too early for him to have turned it up to full force. Or maybe his anger is wearing out, like a shirt that's been through the wash too many times, letting the real Quinn show through bit by bit. Courtesy by way of exhaustion.

“Where's your uncle?” asks Evan, checking the rear-view mirror as he shuts off the engine.

“Coming,” I say. “He's probably just checking in at the store.”

Upstairs, Sadhana's apartment strikes me again with its warm silence, its thick-as-a-fog emptiness, and the faint somnolent hum that makes me want to curl up in her bed. I poll Evan on its palpable morbidity while Quinn is in the bathroom.

“It's the humidity,” he says. “That's all.” He rubs the small of my back.

“You're one to talk. You're hot as a grill. Sit down.”

Uncle arrives with a minimum of fanfare. When I introduce him to Evan, he surprises me by reaching out his hand, which Evan declines with a wave at his sweating face, which at this point most closely resembles melting tallow.

“Don't want to get you sick, sir, if I can help it.”

We fall into a rhythm in which I drag the smallest boxes to the top of the stairs, then Quinn ferries them down the stairs and passes them off to Uncle. My uncle works the truck bed like a game of Sudoku whose emergent solution is apparent only to him, arranging the boxes in an ever-­shifting puzzle to maximize the space. Evan readies what he can of the remaining larger boxes and furniture pieces in line near the door.

In the end, what we thought would take two trips can be managed in only one. My sister's whole life in fifteen cubic feet. I scoop up the mail and drop it into my purse along with the keys.

“One final cleaning and I'm done,” I say. “I'll come back tomorrow.”

“Is all this going to fit in your house?” says Uncle.

“Uncle, I'm sorry. Did you want anything? I didn't even think of it.”

He shakes his head no, then mentions the larger left­over furniture. “Whatever we can't sell, I'll give away to my employees.”

Evan calls to me from the driver's seat, already buckled in. “Let's go before I pass out.”

“Why not let Quinn drive? He passed his test. He has his licence now.”

Evan shakes his head no. The rattle seems to pass down his body and I see the muscles of his right leg jumping.

“I wish I could offer,” I say. Neither Mama nor I ever learned how to drive.

“It's okay. Let's just go.”

Uncle seems ashamed of us both for letting a sick man drive, but he looks on with approval as Evan holds one hand up in a wave before driving away.

The drive is uneventful. I sit squeezed in the middle as Quinn listens to his iPod and Evan drives one-handed with desperate concentration. When we arrive in Ottawa, Evan's roommates meet us at my house and make short work of the unloading, while I go down to Ned's Diner to pick up an order of six Quinn sandwich specials.

When everything has been unloaded and his roommates have left, Evan accompanies me down to the basement to point out which boxes have gone where. He motions from the far corner near the water heater to the space below the stairs.

“We started piling it there, and we tried to keep it in the back third of the room, but it didn't quite work out. The last of it stops here.” He points to the area near the skates and toboggans.

The place is a reliquary now, a storehouse filled nearly to the brim. If clutter really reflects a scattered mind, mine is beyond saving. Haphazard, clogged. Disturbingly fixated on the past.

“There's too much,” I say, sinking into one of Sadhana's armchairs. “I don't know what I'm going to do with all this.”

Evan leans onto a sturdy tower of boxes just higher than his waist. His fever seems to have broken, though I noticed him popping a couple of Tylenol mid-morning. He puts up his elbows. “Leave it here probably.” His tone is light.

“Thank you again, by the way. And thank your roommates for me.”

“Sure. It was no problem. It took less than an hour to unload it.”

Evan cocks his head as we hear a footfall upstairs. Quinn out of his room, likely prowling for a snack while I'm still feeling full from lunch. “So is that it?” says Evan. “Are you finished?”

“Finished?”

“Yes, as in done. Packed up. Finished.”

“Not quite. I have to make one more trip to the city to clean the apartment.”

He drops one hand into his pocket. “And what was her girlfriend like?”

“Nice. Interesting.”

“Interesting how?”

“Good question.” I feel exhausted rather than evasive at the prospect of describing Libby, her impetuousness and strange sensitivities, but there's no way to convey this to Evan. And even in the midst of my odd interactions with her, there is something intangibly familiar about Libby. “I'm not sure how to explain.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe it just hurts that Sadhana thought she needed to keep her a secret.”

Evan nods. “So I want to help you finish.” He stands straight and stretches his legs. I grab his arm to pull myself up. I feel in the back pocket of his jeans until he starts to laugh, and I fish out his car keys.

“In that case, come and watch me scrub the floor. You can help me fill the bucket.”

It's more of a joke than an invitation, but I see him weighing it. Moving Sadhana's things was a task where Evan's help was essential. He might be checking to see if I can lean on him when things are less dire.

“I'll come if you really want me there.” He cups my face and kisses me once on the cheek, as if to show his restraint. “If you really need me, I'll do whatever you want.”

Having Evan in Uncle's apartment throws off the scale of everything. I look at him and bump my shin on a coffee table that has been in the same spot for more than thirty years. I see his shoulder next to my ear and catch my hip against the side of the fridge.

“It's cozy,” he says, his fingers on the door frame of my old bedroom. He ducks his head a little to come in.

He is here now in the place where I grew up, where all the best and the worst things in my life happened, and he is handsome and he is my boyfriend and he is saying it is cozy. I sit down on my bed as lightly as I can, as noncommittal as a sit-down can be, with my fingertips gripping the covers, the balls of my feet pressing into the rug. How to countenance such a word. Cozy.

“Less now than before,” I say. “We took a lot of stuff away when we moved out.”

He sits down on the edge of Sadhana's bed. He can sit down only one kind of way, comfortably and definitely and with his legs spread out in a V that manages through the pitch of the angle to be at once masculine but still polite. The angle is about thirty-five degrees. I love that he cannot equivocate with his rear end. If he told a lie, his whole body would become the polygraph, all blinks and jerks and quivers.

“You can't stay here, you know.”

“I know. Quinn's here.”

“Even if he wasn't.”

“Okay.” He has arrived almost without warning, after first saying he couldn't make it. Quinn and I caught an afternoon bus, then Evan called from the road to tell me he'd changed his mind: he missed me and was coming to visit, whether I liked it or not. So far I'm not sure. I'm not used to someone looking out for me. Looking so closely.

He says, “I like picturing you here as a little girl. Hair in pigtails.”

“Braids.”

“Okay, braids. Either way, cute, I bet.” He gets up. “Are there pictures up anywhere?”

I pull him back by his sleeve. “No.”

“You're lying.”

“I told you we took everything.”

He shakes his head as though still convinced I'm not telling the truth and gets up to take the measure of the room, crossing it in two steps. Two beds, two nightstands, two desks. One formerly hotly contested and overstuffed closet.

“I knew it,” he says, spotting a shelf with high school yearbooks. “The goods.” He reaches out for one with a wicked flourish, ignoring me as I try to bat his hand away.

The shelf houses a motley and incomplete collection, one that neither Sadhana nor I cared to take away with us when we left. There is my own shortfall of yearbooks from when I dropped out at sixteen next to Sadhana's staggered volumes, each missing year a reminder of months of struggle with her illness. Anything from that time after Mama died is like an evil talisman. I haven't opened one since we moved away. Some of the books, I remember, have mean epithets or sly digs scrawled in them by classmates who knew us mainly by reputation. A yearbook being passed around was like a spinning bottle, in that there was no telling where it might end up. The comments in mine were for the most part unremarkable apart from some fat jokes, but I recall a number of block-­lettered exhortations to
EAT!
across Sadhana's pages, and some stick-figure drawings that were supposed to be likenesses. It is possible there were not that many unkind students at our school, but those few have had a long and upsetting reach through their offhand graffiti.

“Give it.”

“I'm sorry,” says Evan. “But come on. I bet you look cute. A little peek? I'm still trying to figure you out.”

“I'm not a puzzle,” I say, grabbing the yearbook from him. Unexpected tears spring to my eyes. “There's nothing to figure out.”

He sits down next to me on the end of my sister's old bed. He touches my shoulder and pulls the yearbook out of my grasp, tossing it back onto the pillows.

“I'm sorry. Really. I don't know what I was thinking.”

He's watching for a sign that the crisis has passed. That attentive, forbearing look that never fails to prompt my own guilt and unease.

“You're waiting for me to get over it,” I say with a slow carefulness, “but I might never get over it.”

“Okay.”

“And you're fine with that.”

He puts his hand on my knee. “Yes. But I think you will.”