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Jazz had put her mascara on and fluttered her eyelashes experimentally. She put an arm around Adriana's shoulders. “Peter again?” she asked, eyes shining with sympathy. Adriana hated that, she didn't want Jazz's pity. Yes, Peter again. She could barely stand to say his name.

Jazz touched her hand, lightly. “Sorry,” she said. “Give me a call later, eh?” Jazz's backpack was right outside the bathroom door. She never ate breakfast at Adriana's house, and liked to be gone before Mr. Song got up, with his plaid slippers and awkward handshakes.

Even Jazz didn't know that Adriana skipped a good number of classes last year. She remembered the first one. Sitting in a café, stirring her milky tea around and around with a spoon, she looked up at the clock and realized her stats class had started five minutes before. Her hand went limp. She'd never missed a class before except when she was ill. The next couple of days she was diligent about getting to her classes on time, sitting near the front and ignoring everything around her except the professor—but she could feel her resolve crumbling. The weakness had tentacles that spread through her chest, as though something were growing inside her. The next week, she went to only one of her classes, first year English. It was held in a cavernous room with two hundred students crammed into little wooden seats. The sound of students talking and laughing echoed around her. The professor shuffled his papers and cleared his throat. She didn't know why she was there.

Despite her absences, Adriana passed the year—a year in which she gradually came apart at the seams, after breaking up with her boyfriend, Peter, who never even called her anymore. After their fight he phoned her maybe once every couple weeks, seemingly to test the waters. But one day, tired of waiting for his call, she phoned him and left a teary message. He never called again, and a month later she saw him walking across campus, with a girl she didn't recognize beside him.

It was stunning, how hurt she was. The same night, she lay in bed, trying to remember what the girl looked like. From far away, it seemed she had auburn hair and a pale face. Adriana couldn't get more of a fix on her than that. She wondered if it were someone she knew, if Peter had known her when he was still going out with Adriana. It sent knives through her to think that he might have liked this girl before he'd broken up with her. What if they were in the same class together? Had he smiled at her first?

Over the summer, Adriana had been working at a fabric store with a flock of motherly, middle-aged women and taking a course in Russian history, which was full of unhealthy young men and women, with fingers stained by tobacco and serious obsessions with Dostoyevsky and Nabokov. Among them, she had felt stifled by melancholy and torpor. At home, she had had crying jags which seemed to come out of nowhere, and passed as quickly as a thunder shower. There were moments of frantic energy and hysterical laughter over nearly nothing, then the inevitable crash. Jazz put Adriana's head in her lap and caressed her hair. “He's gone, buttercup,” was all she said.

Despite everything, Adriana had quietly decided that in September she would continue working part time at the fabric store as a cashier, and take just two courses, during the mornings, to get them over with. She told Jazz but not her father, because she feared he would have too many questions. She could see his face, pained and concerned, as she tried to explain her motives. “I just need a break, Dad,” was all she could think of, and that answer would simply raise other questions in her father's mind. A break from what? Wasn't the summer enough?

And even this, this compromise with herself, she hadn't been able to live up to. She had gone to the very first day of classes and no more, and the fabric store had let her go at summer's end, her supervisor telling her firmly and politely that she needed to “take care of herself” and that the store could not afford to let her do that on its dime. Adriana came home from that meeting and sat at the kitchen table, the future yawning before her like a wasteland, grey and terrible. She fingered the paring knife that her father had left that morning on a plate with a spiral of orange peel. She felt like that, like something has been stripped from her.

Mr. Song was an engineer, and expected his daughters to be educated, and productive. Adriana had tried. But it was as if her head was locked in a deep sea diving helmet, which nothing could penetrate.

Chapter 3

After Jazz left, Adriana went back to bed. She gazed up at the wallpaper. There were big, dusty roses on it. Her mother's choice, no doubt, though she never asked her father about it. On a small desk by the window, the same one she'd had since childhood, there was a large textbook, open to two black and white photos of the human brain—one whole and perfect, the other partially dissected with black lines spiking from it like a sea urchin, neatly labelled.

The brain was such an armoured thing, solid and impenetrable—but in the end, just as vulnerable to human curiosity and exploitation as the moon or the ocean. Adriana was used to staring at this picture, trying to differentiate the hippocampus from the surrounding tissue. It amazed her that brain scientists had been able to pinpoint that it was the hippocampus, which lay curled in the brain in the shape of a sea horse, that was the seat of memory. Without it, Adriana thought, life would cease to have meaning.

Adriana wondered if there was something wrong with her hippocampus. Lately she remembered the past with agonizing clarity but had a difficult time recalling whether she had eaten breakfast or had a shower. The days seemed to blur into one as though they'd all been spun in a blender.

Adriana was 11 years old, when her mother, Viera, wrathful as a hurricane, died and left the Song family in her wake. Adriana remembered sitting at her desk staring at the roses on her wallpaper, clutching her ears so she wouldn't hear Beth's insistent cries, and Aunt Penny's hushed but urgent tones as she tried to comfort the baby and her grieving brother at the same time. Then one day Penny and the baby were gone and it was just Adriana and her father in a house so quiet it could have been a tomb.

Not long after, back in Toronto, Penny met a Chinese widower whose own children were grown and who could appreciate Penny's well-aged, motherly beauty. He died two years ago, leaving Penny the house in downtown Toronto; still, for much of her childhood, Beth had a ready-made surrogate family. Mr. Song, who had agonized over letting Beth go, was thankful but grief-stricken all over again when he heard Beth had called Penny's husband “baba.” Adriana heard him get up in the middle of the night to sit at the kitchen table, and the muffled thump of a bottle against the tabletop. This went on for a week and a half and then one night her father slept through the night, the sound of his snores from the next room as reassuring to Adriana's ears as the blanket she slept under.

Closing her eyes, Adriana willed herself to get up, folding the bedcovers aside neatly as she always had, the way her mother taught her. She'd slip her feet into her mother's old slippers, stand and stretch, and cough on the swirling dust motes disturbed when she raised the blind. She'd look out the window at the dry, late summer grass in the backyard, punctuated by a dead maple tree whose upswept crown was leafless and brittle. Her father had said several times, absently, that he must get someone to cut it down for firewood, but Adriana knew he had forgotten, and the maple would stand there all winter. That was as far as she got. Something about that tree stopped her in her tracks, and she never got beyond it to imagine what came next.

Adriana wanted to hang on to sleep for just a little longer, since she had once again failed to find her way out of bed. And because she knew that when she opened her eyes, her mother would be standing in the doorway, glaring at her.

 

It was a long time before Adriana woke up again and went to the kitchen. Her father must have left for work when she'd still been fast asleep. What had he thought about her skipping class? He'd been too meek to force her awake.

She ate breakfast the way she liked it, by herself with the radio on, a huge mug of coffee in her hand. She imagined her mother seated across from her, a cigarette between two languid fingers, blowing smoke in Adriana's face. Adriana wondered what she'd tell her father. That she couldn't see the path ahead of her? That it frightened her that she didn't know what tomorrow looked like, what came next? Then there was her mother, arms crossed, smiling wickedly. What does come next?

Adriana's mother turned blurry at the edges, her face stern, matter of fact. Adriana felt weak. There she was, having followed Adriana around all these years, commenting on her messy handwriting, her unorthodox haircuts, and her penchant for chaos. Adriana had always looked hurriedly away, corrected her mistakes and made her bed the way her mother taught her. She had never asked her mother a pointed question, like,
Why did you leave me? Why did you die when I still needed you?

Adriana was afraid to ask. She was afraid to chase the last of her mother away, when that was all she had of her. Suddenly, she felt quite empty, as though a valve had been opened, and all the things that filled her up had drained away. Adriana had felt this way before, like a yawning cavern had opened inside her. She went back to bed, curled in on herself, hugging a pillow to her chest. The phone rang several times but she ignored it. She was asleep when it rang again at lunchtime and in the mid-afternoon.

Later, Adriana awakened to hear the soft sizzle of onions in the wok. Her father was cooking supper. She stood for a moment in the kitchen door, watching him, and feeling hollow as a reed. There was something wrong with her but talk wouldn't help.

Mr. Song didn't hear her standing in the doorway. He was humming something under his breath, at home in the kitchen, with her mother's old apron on. Adriana couldn't believe her father had survived this world, as fragile and goofy as he was. She sat down at the table, soundlessly. Somehow her father knew she was there. Without turning around, he said, “We're having steak, hon. I got a tip today.” Adriana's mind let that turn over. Did engineers get tips? “It's a bonus, really,” he said apologetically. “But it's a small bonus. More like a tip.”

Adriana didn't realize that her father was joking—she barely acknowledged that he had a sense of humour, especially now that her own was so ragged. Her stomach was delicate as a butterfly. “I'm not hungry Dad,” she said, and it was true. She felt weak, but heavy, as though lined by cement. Adriana stood up, dragging her blanket around her, and trailed out of the kitchen. Mr. Song raised his hand with the metal spatula, as though he was about to strike a fly, and watched her go. Then he turned back to the stove, where a pot of rice was bubbling. Out of all the things in his life that had changed, he thought, the bubbling of the rice pot remained the same.

Chapter 4

Mr. Song realized eventually that Adriana had stopped going to class and called in sick to the fabric store one too many times. He'd given up trying to coax her out with things she liked, such as coffee milkshakes, games of Boggle and home movies. At least, he thought she liked those things. She used to. Mr. Song was full of fear, his face shiny with it. She was such a bright little girl, always bursting with something—enthusiasm, a secret, hot dogs. Round-bellied, bubbling with laughter, her short legs carrying her twice as fast as her father wherever she wanted to go. Now she was pale, drawn and melodramatic. He felt something was eating her from inside, and that one day he'd wake up and there would be nothing but a pile of sawdust.

Mr. Song thought about trying to talk to Jazz about Adriana, but he felt too awkward with her to actually have a conversation. Something about the way Jazz looked at him with those cool eyes of hers bothered him. He felt like he never quite measured up, as though Jazz were the parent, and he were the one under scrutiny. He and Jazz never had anything to say to one another, but he was grateful for her friendship with Adriana.

Instead of talking to Jazz, Mr. Song called the helpline one day and had a heart-to-heart with one of the volunteers. Adriana was depressed, he figured. The helpline volunteer told him there were options—the mental health crisis unit, for example—if things got too bad. “You've got to get her to talk to someone,” the woman said. Mr. Song pictured the volunteer as a middle-aged woman, dyed blonde hair, a wad of chewing gum stuck to its wrapper in front of her.

Can you get her to see someone, was where they left it. And no, he couldn't get her to see someone. They barely talked. When he got up the courage to knock on the door of her room, she didn't answer, and when he opened the door, she was sleeping, her face to the wall. She seemed to sleep all the time he was in the house, even when he lay in bed at night, waiting to hear the fridge door open or some other sign that she was alive.

That day, when her father came home from work, he sat on the edge of her bed, his briefcase between his feet. He didn't look at her. “Addy, I need you to talk to someone.” His voice was tremulous. He knew she was asleep, that he was only practicing, but nevertheless his stomach jumped around nervously.

It was the same feeling he used to get when her mother was alive and he had something to say that he knew she wouldn't like. She would look at him with heavy-lidded eyes and laugh a low, throaty laugh that thrilled and terrified him. “Dahling, you're full of shit,” she would say in her Slovak accent. He felt reassured that she didn't disown him, that she allowed him to say his piece, even though he was wrong and she of course was right. Often a day or so later he would discover that she had in fact come around to his point of view. She showed him as much in discreet ways, such as by folding his socks together instead of tubing them, as he had asked, or by changing the bathroom scale to one that measured kilograms instead of just pounds. “I like kilograms,” she said, smiling slyly. “They make me feel slimmer.”