Aftershock Page 17

  You’re no good to me in jail, or . . .

  His silence like a grim punchline.

  You don’t like me, she thought. Not like this.

  As he rifled through the baskets, throwing anything stronger than vitamin C in the garbage, he said, You’re like a sister to me, Jules. I’m gonna help you get through this. His voice was muffled and he didn’t turn around. Jules turned her suitcase up on its wheels and rolled it out of the room. Drew said something else, but she could no longer hear him.

  Chloe’s room was across the hall. She paused outside it, drawn. For the first time in living memory, it was the cleanest room in the house. As tidy as a cell, a sharp-cornered bedspread, the desk holding only lamp, laptop and framed picture. Suddenly needing to see her daughter’s face, Jules crossed to the photo and picked it up. Chloe and that terrible Jill, printed right off Chloe’s ink-jet printer, the two of them grinning devilishly, the camera obviously a cellphone held at the end of Chloe’s arm. She recognized the background as the view of the city from the park along the escarpment edge. Something about the looks on their faces tugged at her, something just a little more familiar than it should have been. She didn’t want to recognize in the face of her daughter the same thing she was just starting to recognize in herself—that glazed-over, dazed-out, empty-eyed— But no, Chloe didn’t look empty. She looked . . . elsewhere. Dislocated.

  She put the picture down and wondered, not for the first time, how much dope Chloe smoked, and what else she might do. She’d tried to broach the subject exactly once, last spring, and had been met with a sarcastic, Really? We’re going to talk about drug use? Embarrassed, Jules had let it drop.

  But the memory made her wonder what else she might find in her daughter’s room.

  If it was freakishly clean, it was hardly by accident. One of the worst battles during Chloe’s last weeks at home had been about the state of her room. Battles in which, Jules could now admit, she’d made some tactical errors.

  When she’d said, I might have house guests while you’re away, you know, all she’d meant was she wanted the room left tidy. She didn’t want to have to clean up after her daughter, or to make the housekeeping service dust around her things. But she could have said it differently.

  What she probably shouldn’t have said next was, Just get all your crap out of sight, I don’t want to have to look at it. Meaning, of course, but possibly failing to convey, that she didn’t know how long Chloe would be gone, and every object on display would only remind her of that absence.

  But what she definitely should have stopped herself from doing was throwing the dismissive gesture at the trophy shelf as she said “your crap”: this was the lit match, spiralling end over end to land on the powder keg.

  Predictably, Chloe’s face had frozen, then swollen, then erupted into a torrent of obscenities that started with a “Jeezusfucking-christ,” included a “youfuckingbitch,” and ended with an “everagainyoufuckingcunt” and a slammed door. In the hour that followed, Jules heard crashing and banging and broken glass, and loud, inarticulate grunting. She’d called to the closed door, Aren’t you a bit old for a temper tantrum? And retired to her room with a drink and a book to wait it out.

  Looking around now, she had to admit that however painful the process, the results were impressive. A single bookshelf held a top row of barely cracked math textbooks and five other shelves of well-ordered science fiction. The upper surface, previously an irritating rubble heap of teenage debris, was perfectly bare.

  Which begged the question: where was all her crap? And did she leave behind anything interesting that couldn’t, for example, be transported across borders? Jules started opening desk drawers. Pens and pins, little notepads and old pairs of earphones. Stray homemade DVDs, an old cellphone, an empty bottle of caffeine pills. Getting warmer, she thought. She opened the first of the two big file drawers and heard bottles rattling.

  Uh-huh. Now we’re talking. She remembered her own teenage years as full of subterfuge and the constant need to evade her mother’s bloodhound-like sense for nearby alcohol.

  But what she found, behind an old pair of hockey gloves, was not booze or empty bottles, but a small rack of test tubes and a stack of glass beakers nested into each other. Disappointed, Jules slid the drawer closed.

  The second big file drawer stuck, and thinking it was locked, she gave an exasperated tug, which opened it a crack and revealed the jangle of junk inside. She rattled it open a few more inches: a twist of metal and wood, little brass hockey players and swimmers falling at all angles, feet rooted to inert blocks.

  She closed the drawer abruptly. Or she tried to, but some of the trophies had shifted and something caught at the back. She jiggled it some and heard internal clunks as multiple objects fell. She shook the drawer harder. No dice. Slammed it repeatedly, and heard the sound of glued trophy parts cracking apart.

  Oh, not good.

  But still it wouldn’t close. She pulled the drawer all the way out, set it on the floor and reached into the empty space to pull out whatever was blocking it.

  It was a small book with a tiny lock, and a little metal box.

  The diary made her feel oddly exposed, confronted with yet another piece of evidence about how little she knew her daughter. Tangible proof of a whole other, inner life. And a paper diary, no less, when kids of her generation were barely taught to write cursive. Chloe could be so fucking old school. It was like she researched how to be anachronistic.

  The metal box, though, made sense with the Chloe she knew. Drugs or private mementoes, she guessed. Her hands shaking lightly, she lifted the lid, glimpsed rolling papers—

  That better not be what I think it is.

  Jules slammed the box shut. She hadn’t even heard Farzan come up the stairs. He stood at the door, head tilted, hands on hips, pained look moving between her face and the box, assessing the state of emergency. Extended a hand: Jules handed him the box, which he opened.

  Like mother, like daughter, eh Jules?

  She in fact felt a distance from Chloe so abrupt and extreme she could hardly bear it. She flung herself out the door, trying to sound unbothered. You’re done down there?

  Downstairs, Farzan had tidied the living room and cleaned the kitchen. Hung up her coats. Vanquished the dirty laundry. Neutralized the stench. She could hear him talking to Drew upstairs but didn’t bother trying to make out the words. She sat at the kitchen table and turned the locked diary over and over in her hands.

  She really didn’t know why she’d taken it. But she had it now.

  A sticker on the front said in a jiggly-lettered font: i can’t sleep. One corner of the cover had been bent back, pages underneath bunched and torn, probably damage from the drawer slamming on it. She poked at the pages with her finger, trying to read their contents, but all she could manage was a word or two per page: terrible, amazing, cool. Bitch. Physics. Sleep.

  She heard the sibilant whisper of plastic bags as Drew and Farzan came down the stairs. Drew appeared in the kitchen door, his face inflamed, slow rivulets of sweat from sideburn to jowl. He took a moment to look not just at Jules but around her, at her hands and feet, the bench beside her, the table in front of her. Blinked at the diary and dismissed it.

  Ready?

  Jules took a deep breath and followed him out. It seemed, she realized, like they were waiting for her, somehow. Like she was having some kind of tantrum and they were the tolerant parents, letting her kick and scream her frustration out until she just wound back down to compliancy. She wished they would stop being so fucking patient, because she knew she would ultimately disappoint them.

  Help.

  The worst thing was the therapy. The Crown attorney had recommended a court-recognized program, and Marc and Drew had concurred.

  Jules told them to go file that under plan B.

  Instead, the following Thursday, after ten days of decreasing dosages, increasing boredom, mounting irritability and diminishing patience (in general as well as with
Farzan, who never left the house, and with Declan, the gatekeeper to comfort), Jules was back in the ugly brown office of Dr. Morrow, who was asking her yet another very stupid question.

  Would you say you’re depressed?

  Jules stood at the window, stared out at the leafless trees, the low grey clouds that threatened early snow. Well, not that early. It was the first of December. Winter was just so fucking long.

  I’m still taking the Celexa, if that’s what you mean.

  The problem was, she hated the tedium of breaking in a new shrink. They always read too much drama into the details. Until they got to know her and realized that she was fine, she hadn’t been broken by her quote unquote difficult upbringing, there were no demons there to exorcise, it was just an unkempt apartment and the dark pull of her mother’s resignation, and anyway, she had hauled herself out of there, had put herself through three degrees, borne two children, survived the postpartum depression, the baby dying, the divorce, the complicated daughter, all of it, and she was Fine. Everybody needed medicine sometimes.

  And would you say it’s helping?

  What do you think?

  For months she’d been calling the day before to cancel these sessions. She didn’t want to talk. But if she had to see someone, and apparently she did, she might as well avoid going through the goddamned preamble of her whole life story, all over again, with someone else. The downside was, she thought Dr. Morrow was an idiot. She was too young for one thing, maybe thirty, thirty-five at most. She didn’t know anything. How could she possibly. Every session another hour of her life she’d never get back.

  Have you heard from Chloe?

  Jules shook her head. It was cold and bleak outside; four thirty in the afternoon and street lights were blinking on.

  She landed. She’s alive.

  Would you say you’re worried? It’s been . . . ?

  Morrow waited for Jules to complete the thought. Jules took a deep breath and turned from the window. It was starting to snow out there, a few pathetic flakes wandering down from the sky, vanishing before they made it to the ground. She couldn’t bear to watch.

  Couple weeks. She’s with David. I’m sure she’s fine.

  Dr. Morrow was leaning forward in her armchair.

  You see what’s happening here, Jules? This is what you do. Your pattern.

  Jules looked at the wide mouth that was almost smiling, the brow that was just furrowed enough to show that she really cared. Dr. Morrow had the act of concerned shrink perfected, she’d give her that. But she never said anything useful.

  My pattern.

  Mm-hmm, yes, she said, her voice the consistency of molasses. You tell yourself that everything is fine, and then you have to pretend that it is. Imagine the strain that puts on your psyche.

  She’s on the other side of the planet. David’s there.

  But can you admit that you’re worried about her?

  Jules sighed.

  I’m sure she’s fine.

  Dr. Morrow wrote something in her notebook. Jules rubbed her face. She felt puffy and grey, her clothes felt too tight, her back hurt. And in her current state there was nothing she could do about any of it.

  Anyway, Jules, I was only partly talking about Chloe. You’ve lost a child before.

  What’s that got to do with anything?

  Dr. Morrow’s dark eyes opened wide.

  Jules. Sudden infant death is a devastating tragedy. For anyone. Grief like that never goes away.

  She met the shrink’s stare, kept her face slack. She’d heard this before. It didn’t help.

  I’m not here about grief. I’m here about pain.

  Okay. What about David?

  What about him?

  Now they stared at each other, Jules refusing to show any of the thundering emotions ringing between her ears, Dr. Morrow searching her face. Something skittered across the back of her mind. Somehow, the shrink saw it.

  You’re still angry at him.

  He’s an idiot.

  What makes you say that?

  He’s incompetent.

  How so?

  It took him over a week to get home, for fuck’s sake.

  She knew Dr. Morrow was baiting her, didn’t fight the impulse to bait her back with oblique tidbits of revelation. But the shrink surprised her, put it together in less than a heartbeat.

  When the baby died. David was away.

  Finally, Jules sat down in the second armchair, let out a gust of breath as her mind went where she rarely let it, the phone call from the babysitter (the baby stopped breathing), her shortness of breath (she stopped breathing somehow), the panicked sobbing she couldn’t stop until Monica slapped her in the face. Monica, her secretary.

  He was in China. I couldn’t even reach him.

  Two days of frantic phone calls to his editor in Hamilton, to the paper’s office in Shanghai, to a post office somewhere, who the fuck knew where, to a man who possibly recognized David’s name but not any of Jules’s other English words. Forty-eight hours before she heard David’s voice, hours she had spent hysterical, numb, drunk, unconscious.

  Another two days to even get to the nearest airstrip.

  That must have been incredibly difficult, said Morrow.

  Eight days, in all, before he was home to help her deal with the police, the morgue, the funeral director, Chloe’s school. His parents, taking her away. The days alone in an empty house. Meeting him at the airport, expecting the sight of his face to make it all better, and feeling nothing, nothing but resentment that she’d had to face this alone. As though, in his absence, any affection she’d felt for him had just flickered away, a piece of code no longer relevant.

  She had loved him, once. Not on purpose, but there you have it.

  THROUGH EXAMPLE, SHE had early on come to believe that adulthood was a state of loneliness, that the choice was between being poor and alone, or not poor and alone. She had never dated much, deciding early on that casual sex was as much intimacy as she could handle. She was fully committed to grad school, working and sleeping around on weekends when David started coming into the grad pub where she worked.

  He always sat at a table in the back corner in the afternoon, pecking away on his old laptop, drinking bottomless coffee for hours and hours. Kind of haggard and rumpled in that grad student way she’d come to associate with the arts faculties. The guys Jules studied with wore ties all the time and were intolerably boring and arrogant. But David made her curious. He tended to stare off into space, sometimes for such long stretches that at first she wondered if he was having some kind of mild seizure. Or sleeping with his eyes open. And if he wasn’t, well, that was even more interesting. One afternoon when he was so rapt in thought he seemed catatonic, she wandered back to his corner with a watering can, hoping to inconspicuously peek at his computer screen while she pretended to water the plants by the window beside him. She was pretty much right in front of him when his eyes found her face, and slowly came into focus. She froze, then went into server mode.

  Everything alright? she asked, and gestured at his half-full coffee cup as though offering him a refill.

  He looked at the watering can, then gave her a small smile that was part smirk and said, None for me, thanks.

  Flustered, but wanting to cover her embarrassment, Jules said, Suit yourself, and turned to walk away.

  The plants might want some, though? David said.

  They’re fine, she said over her shoulder, and went back to the bar. She heard him resume the typing he’d abandoned twenty minutes earlier.

  After that, she mostly left him alone. She always felt very aware of his presence and thought it was mutual, that there was tension of some kind between them. But that’s all it was, for many months: every afternoon that Jules worked, he came in, drank nothing but coffee, and they barely spoke.

  Then one evening he came in, sat at the bar and ordered a single malt Scotch, neat. It was so unexpected that Jules just poured it for him in silence, slid it across the bar a
nd waited to see what would happen next. He picked up the glass, swirled it, sniffed it, took a sip and let it sit on his tongue for a few seconds before he swallowed, and then smiled at her. A very warm smile.

  I’m done, he said. As a grad student herself, Jules had a pretty good idea what that meant. When his glass was empty, she poured him another and poured one for herself.

  Congratulations, she said, and they touched rims, making eye contact as they drank.

  As she refilled his glass again, she told him she approved of his choice of celebratory drink. Quality over quantity, she said. I like it. Her entire life she’d watched her mother choose quantity over quality, and this was a welcome juxtaposition.

  He told her he’d finally defended his master’s thesis in English literature after five years of procrastination and waffling and being cajoled through the final stages by his supervisor, and Jules appreciated his self-deprecating candour.

  He asked her what she did besides bartending, and when she started to explain her research in data set management, she had to laugh.

  Your eyes just glazed over.

  They got to arguing about the value of scientific discourse (Jules) and the importance of art for negotiating moral clarity (David).

  They fucked for the first time that night in the women’s bathroom.

  The next day, David brought her a cactus. It’s supposed to be hard to kill, he said, looking unsure of himself. It doesn’t need much water.

  You don’t think I can kill a cactus? she asked him. But she was touched. He asked her to go on a date. Amused by his earnestness, she agreed.

  They had fun—fun in a way she’d never really had as a kid. They went on bike rides. They went to movies. They got drunk on patios. He brought her coffee in bed. They wandered home late on empty streets, feeling on the cusp of something big, a great adventure, an epiphany, a revolution. They felt like a team, and although her heart was as street-tough and well-defended as ever, she found he’d managed to slip through somewhere and get close to it. She felt dangerous. She felt safe.