Everything Was Good-Bye (27 page)

“How long will you be staying with us?”

I dismissed him with a shake of the head. “I’m not sure.”

He smiled, clicked a few keys on his computer and handed me a key, pointing to the elevators, reminding me of the amenities—the fine dining, the swimming pool, the spa. I nodded, rushing him along.

I drew the curtains shut and lay on the bed as if it were an island and I was stranded and content that I’d washed up on its shore, that the tide had released me from its ebb and flow. I stayed there for hours, observing the subtleties of light, the gradual blue darkness, ignoring the occasional thought to call home. Home. It was a mocking word, as small as a kind gesture and as large as an ocean. I whispered it, trying it on, wrapping it around me as I cocooned. I thought of my baby nestled deep inside my body, lying in the dark of me—defenceless, only the size of a bean; pink
gelatinous matter, tissue and blood, I thought of the laminated pictures of fetal development posted in the doctor’s office. By now my baby had eyes, ears, the beginnings of limbs; paper-thin, see-through skin; and a brain that was developing, making connections. “When will she dream?” I’d asked the doctor.

“She? You think it’s a girl do you?” The doctor was listening for a heart-beat but gave up, saying it was too early to hear.

“Dreaming. Not for a few more months.”

Ever since then I’d been wondering what she would dream of. If she would see me there; if when I slept, she and I would meet in the dark sub-conscious, in that lonely space of Sufis and saints where wisdom is something a child sees through a crack in the door before it’s closed and the meaning of what was there is lost.

I closed my eyes and pulled the covers up. My body ached in the after-math of the previous night. Bruises made visible and ugly by each passing hour, phantom pains taking their shape, marking territory, branding. I hated him for it, and yet every time I felt the pain or caught sight of a bruise, I was grateful for the reminder. I wouldn’t go back.

I woke with the panicked sensation of not knowing where I was. My eyes startled open, blinking hard, adjusting to the flat morning light before my thoughts organized it all into some non-sequential order—last night, the night before, years before, falling back into me as if they had existed outside of me, orbiting when I slept until the gravity of my wakefulness pulled them all back in.

I stayed in the hotel room for days, ordering in minimal room service— Premium Plus crackers and orange juice with no pulp. I couldn’t keep much down. I watched the daytime drama of soap operas, sometimes without the sound, just so my eyes had something to follow, something to keep them from welling up and spilling over the brim. When my phone rang, I didn’t answer it. Sunny would have called my mother or Serena to say I’d left, to tell them to go and find me as if I were some dog to be rounded up. Each time it rang, I stared at it, listening to the rings, waiting for it to click over
to voice mail. Sometimes I listened to the messages—my mother’s faraway voice, searching, bent with worry and fear. “Come home. Just come home.” I closed my eyes, trying to find my way back, my way forward. I didn’t call her. It was better to just disappear, to fall away, to leave her with her questions rather than give her the truth of what I’d done.

It was Kal who found me. He’d tried every hotel, called in favours, asked around at my office until someone told him where I was. When I opened the door to let him in, he stared at my face with a pained expression that was both guilty and sad, the exact way he looked as a child when we’d broken my mother’s favourite vase and were confronted with her loss.

“It’s okay,” I told him.

He walked around the room, and fingered the drapes aside. A tri-angular shard of sun cut across the bed. He turned, dropped his hand, and the light disappeared. I hadn’t noticed before he’d arrived that the room smelled stale, like warm sheets and sleeplessness, like the sick and unattended. I asked him to open the window and collected the crumpled tissues on the nightstand and threw them into the trash. He watched me stack the room-service plates in neat and clattering piles. “How long are you planning on doing this?” he asked.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Well, how long are you planning on
not
doing this then?”

I climbed back into bed. “Why are you here?”

“You’re not going back to him, are you?”

I shook my head and bit my lip, cracking the scab that had formed over the split. I bit down harder to stop the bleeding. “No.”

“When are you going to tell your mom about the baby?”

“He told you?”

“Yeah. He asked me to find you.”

“So that’s why you’re here?”

“No. I came to take you home. Your mom, your sisters, everyone’s worried. I told them that I’d come and get you. That I’d make sure you were all right.”
I shook my head. “I can’t.”

“You have to.” He sat on the bed and reached for my hand. “I’ll go with you.”

My mother couldn’t look at me. My face was still swollen, eyes shining blue and purple like the inside of a faded seashell. She didn’t ask me what had happened. Serena made tea, placing it on a silver tray on the table in front of me, handing it to me when I didn’t reach for it on my own. It went cold in the silence. The phone rang, piercing into the quiet, and Serena went to answer it, whispering into the receiver to one of my sisters or maybe to Masi that Kal and I were there. I listened as if she weren’t talking about me, as though I didn’t know what she was going to say next.

My mother sat on the edge of the couch, shadowing my face with her hands, fingertips tracing air.

“What has he done?”

“It’s not what he’s done. It’s what I’ve done.”

She dropped her hands as suddenly as a marionette whose strings had been cut. “What? What could you have done to deserve this?”

I didn’t answer.

“That’s what I thought. You don’t need to protect him. I will call your Mamaji. He will settle this.” She stood up, determined, talking in run-on sentences about what should be done.

“Mom. No. There’s nothing to settle.” I paused, trying to slow my breath, trying to put my thoughts in order, to find an easy way. “I’m not going to work things out… I can’t.”

I looked at Kal. His silence opened a door.

“Mom, I’m pregnant… It’s not his baby.”

Her face fell. The words aged her.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could say.

“What people said… it was true.” She looked at Kal like he was an ac-complice. “And the father—who is he?”

“His name is Liam.”

She refused to look at me, and stared out the window. “Leee-aaaam.” Her voice was quiet and mean. “That same boy. What people said… they were right.” She stared at me in controlled anger, waiting for me to answer. “All this time. You lied… What were you thinking?”

“Mom, I love him.”

She was unmoved, so I told her again, so that this one time there could be no misinterpretation. “Pyaar.”

She stared behind me, looking over my shoulder, somewhere into the past.

“Love? You always believed what you saw on tv, what you read in books… those silly stories… It’s not real, Meena. This,” she said, fisting her heart, “this is what’s real. This is love. A mother’s love for her child, that is real… and now look what you’ve done,” she said, her face crumpled in sobs. “You’ve thrown it away, and for what?”

I placed my hand over my stomach. “For this… Mom, I’m going to have the baby.”

“Alone?” Her voice was pinched in contained sadness.

“You raised us alone.”

“I didn’t do it alone. It wasn’t the same… Your Mamaji, your Masi, I had family.”

“So do I.”

My mother turned to the side, refusing to meet my eyes. “You ask too much. You have always asked too much.”

I stepped back slowly, distancing myself as I’d always done. Kal reached for my hand and whispered “Let’s go.” He said it a few times before I moved, before I made my way outside.

“Go where?” I asked as we drove away from the house and turned off the street.

“You can stay with me for a while.”

“What about Irmila?”

He reached for my hand. “What about her? It’ll be fine.”

I waited in the foyer of their East Vancouver rental while Kal went upstairs to explain my situation to Irmila. They spoke in harsh whispers that tapered at the end. I tried not to listen, instead staring at the walls, which
were adorned with Egyptian prints on papyrus and questionable local art that was as colourful as the neighbourhood residents whose loud voices and reaching eyes penetrated my skin as we’d walked by. “Hey, pretty lady, where you going?” they’d asked. I’d turned around and answered “I don’t know,” and though Kal was right there, his hand in mine, I’d never felt more alone.

3.15

T
he day I packed to move into my own place, Sunny locked himself in the den. He didn’t come out even when I knocked on the door to tell him I was leaving. I leaned my head against the door, listening to the sound of him on the other side. I imagined that he was sitting in his leather chair, staring out the window, the way he often did when he’d been working too many hours.

“Sunny. Please. Open up.”

No answer. Compared to his rage, his silence was unsettling, a har-binger. A few days earlier he’d turned up at Kal’s house, argued with him about my staying there, and called me a bitch and a whore. “And you,” he said pointing his finger in Kal’s face like a madman, “you were supposed to be like my brother.” His face was red, the veins in his neck protruding, so hot and wiry that I thought if I put my hand on them I’d feel his pulse, be able to slow it down. He’d left in an angry rush, speeding away in his car, leaving us with the silent fatigue of him, the perpetual exhaustion of not knowing what to do.

Now I knocked again. An offering. An explanation of why. I talked into the door. When he didn’t answer, I left with my belongings packed into the back seat of my car and drove across the bridge into Kitsilano. I’d put a down payment on a Craftsman house with “potential,” which I would come to realize was only a euphemism and real estate term for a
fixer-upper. At first I would call Kal when something needed doing, but one night when the hot-water tank burst and my basement was filled with two inches of water, Irmila suggested I call someone else—“a professional,” she’d said. I hadn’t called him since and eventually he’d stopped calling me. I told myself it was for the best.

Night was the hardest part. The house settled into its bones like an old woman; its moans and whispers kept me up. I sat up in bed and called Serena, who updated me on family happenings. Whenever she said things like “Oh, you should have been there,” she would go quiet afterwards, the silence full of apologies and condolences. “Don’t worry, Mom will come round,” she assured me after one such sequence. I nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see me. “Meena, are you still there?” I told her yes, but that I had to go, and hung up.

I reached for the baby booties I’d started knitting to go with the blanket my mother had sent. I threw the ball of yarn across the bed and consulted the knitting-for-beginners, instructions that I’d torn out of a magazine at the doctor’s office. When we were children, my mother had knitted while we watched television. The click of her knitting needles sounded like the crack of my grandmother’s false teeth, and I flinched each time she crossed the needles in a loop, as if part of me were being caught up in her weave. She always started her knitting session by tossing the loose ball of yarn onto the floor, and within an hour would have collected it in needled rows of tight stitches that amounted to nothing but the satisfaction of repeti-tion. Each night she would look at her stitches and stretch the warp flat, and when she saw me watching would hand me the last unbound stitch and let me unravel the whole thing. To my recollection, she had never finished anything until now. When I received the blanket, I called and thanked her. She asked me how I was feeling and I told her that I was fine, because she deserved that much, even if it was a lie.

Now as I crossed the needles, looping the yarn, I wished she’d taught me how to knit, I wished she’d had the time. After an hour my hands grew tired and I got out of bed and put the knitting away. I looked out
the window. The last few blossoms on the trees rustled, falling in graceful turns, twisting their way down on the edge of a breeze. I traced their path with my eyes. Down the street a car started and crept forward slowly. The window rolled down and the driver leaned out as if he were reading house numbers. I ducked back behind the draperies when I realized it was Sunny. I rarely saw him without the presence of our lawyers, and even then he didn’t look at me. He spoke about me as though I weren’t there, his words a riddling of bullets. “She can have the car; she can have the Chippen-dale chairs—but not the dining room table.” When I’d remind him that I didn’t want anything but the divorce, he would pause, restrain himself and then continue on with his list, cataloguing our life, dividing us up, drawing things out, re-inserting his presence in my life one piece at a time.

After a few minutes, I peeked through the side of the window. He’d parked, switched his engine offand was watching the house, looking up into the lit windows. I picked up the phone as if it were a weapon and put it down only when he drove away. I felt my heart give way, collapse in fear, and I rushed downstairs to check the locks. I slept with the lights on.

When I came home from work the next day a moving truck was parked in my driveway. A crew carried boxes and filed in and out of my house. I shimmied by the men, my growing abdomen scraping by a stack of boxes.

“Excuse me,” I said.

A man in a plaid shirt and ball cap looked up. “You the owner?” I nodded and he thrust a clipboard in my face. “Sign here.”

I signed. “What is all of this? And how did you get in?”

He pointed to Sunny’s name at the top of the requisition form. “He left it unlocked for us.”

“He did? He doesn’t even live here,” I explained.

“Look lady, we just deliver the stuff. Okay. You got questions, you can call the office.”

I nodded and moved out of their way, watching them stack boxes and bubble-wrapped breakables next to a growing mountain of furniture. I picked up the phone and called Sunny. He was calm when I asked him what he thought he was doing.