My fingers slip blindly through the sharp leaves until I find a woody stalk and yank. This time watching the bloom bob above the others as I tear it from the earth. It looks so skinny against the night with its flower now above me. I toss it. I grab for another stalk, yank. Hear the screen door clatter. Sam isn’t watching anymore. After the first few, I work methodically along the perimeter of the porch. Pulling, grunting, piling a waste of orange fakery in the night. I am sweaty. Without the soft fluency of flowers along the edge of it, the porch is stark.
I go into the kitchen and it beckons me to my family. The dishes in the drying rack and the photos on the fridge all clustered in the way that is ours. I take the cognac from the cabinet and the clink of the bottle in the snifter is nice. The night bites at my conscience still. On the porch step, I sip the gold in a circle of light that makes the dark darker. I can make out the neighbour’s house. She’s so old. We never see her. She has a clothesline she hangs no clothes on. She has a sink next to her back door. No porch. No patio. No chair. I wonder what the sink is for. She’s alone but the house is bigger than ours. It’s two stories, whereas ours is what’s called one and a half. The hinges on the screen door screech. Claire is in the doorway. Her features are mostly mine: round eyes, round cheeks, dainty little nostrils, and a tender underbite. They’re all in disarray. Her nose quivers. Her lips are pressed. Looking at her face is like considering my own in the mirror when I’ve let myself down.
“Maman.”
“Oui bébé.”
“Je m’excuse.”
“I’m not mad anymore,” I say, staring into the night. The porch slats creak as she comes over to me. She sits a hip’s width away.
“Why?”
“It makes me sad to be angry at you.”
“Why?”
“At other people, I can enjoy being mad, but not at you and Daddy.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you, and I’m responsible for you.”
“Like how, that one weekend, I was responsible for Lola.”
“No. That was symbolic. I signed the form. If anything happened to that hamster, it was my fault.”
“What’s symbolic?”
“It’s how a picture of something isn’t the same as the real thing. You just had a picture of responsibility.”
“What am I responsible for?”
“Nothing,” I say, and Claire’s face falls. “That’s not true, actually, you’re responsible for yourself. Me, you, and Daddy we’re all responsible for you.”
“But I’m not responsible for you.”
“No, that’s the best thing about mothers. That’s why you can always be mad at your mother.” I say. Claire looks a little scared, but when I start laughing she laughs too, and she scoots closer to me. That’s what’s wrong with Minneapolis, and all the other places before it, there’s only Sam and Claire, no family, no friends, no co-workers, the only people I know are people I’m responsible for. There’s no one to hate or even dislike for a moment. It’s no wonder I find myself hating her or him, or both of them. But as long as I hold onto my curiosity, I’m not around the bend yet. That’s what Maman always said when we were kids about the old ladies in the neighbourhood, that so long as they were still gossiping they were compos mentis.
“What are you doing out here?”
“I was gardening. Do you like it?
“It’s scary. Like a swamp. I like it,” Claire says, in a whisper that respects the destruction I’ve wrought. It reminds me of how Maman would stay up all night making curtains or reupholstering the furniture. I’d wake up to pee and the living room would be a mess of torn fabrics and stuffing, and she’d be as absorbed as a child at play using Papa’s nail gun. Then a floorboard would creak underfoot, and she’d startle to see me standing there. As if she couldn’t quite place me.
“What are you looking at?” Claire asks.
“Oh,” I stammer. “The neighbour’s house. What do you think her sink is for?”
“It has paint cans in it. Old paint cans.”
“You went over there?”
“I’ve been to all the yards. T’es pas fâchée?”
I ask, “Why did you go over there?”
“I like secrets,” she whispers, her eyes sparkling.
“Do you want me to tell you one?” I ask. Claire nods soberly. “My mother thought I was ugly.”
“She did?” Claire asks. But in saying it, in calling her my mother, naming her formally in relation to myself, rather than Maman, the air is suddenly dense with the ghost-grey weight of her. Under the flood lights, the long shadows on the slats of the porch change quickly with the breeze.
“It wasn’t something she said. It was this look she had.” When I put my arm around Claire her shoulders collapse against my ribs. I can feel her breath in my own body. I remember the way Maman got thinner and thinner while her veins and the walls of her heart grew thicker and thicker until you could almost see it beating in her chest. Since she died, visions of her enfeebled body occasionally startle me, as if I’ve really seen her out of the corner of my eye. It hurts me that she’s stuck in my mind in that condition. If she were still here she’d tell me to give my pain to the Lord. That he can do more with pain than with happiness. Maybe she was right. Or maybe she hoarded her sorrows until she was swollen with them. It wasn’t her fault. There was nowhere for her to put them. Claire sticks her thumb in her mouth, regressing in a moment of stress, and I gently take it out. Normally, if I oppose her on even the smallest thing she will insist. But she simply pretends it didn’t happen. With Claire’s weight on me, but her eyes cast at the sky or closed, I can’t tell, I can say the kind of thing that I can’t under her gaze.
“Don’t keep any secrets that make you feel angry or scared. Tell me, or tell daddy, we’ll keep them for you,” I say. Claire rights her posture and turns her face to me.
“Even if I broke the law?” Claire asks, her face is gentle like mine, pretty in an unextraordinary way, with a gaze that’s sometimes too firm, like mine, to suit her soft features. Maybe, Maman didn’t think I was ugly. Maybe it was only the terror of recognition. “Even if I stole something? Even if I hurt someone on accident, or on purpose?” She whispers, cowed by the thought but following it in the guileless way a musician follows a chord progression to its resolution.
I laugh with all the buoyancy of the cognac I’ve drunk, but stop when I feel Claire’s gaze flick over me with worry. “You’re not going to hurt someone on purpose. But tell me, tu me le dis, if you do.”
If You Start Breathing
Thea Lim
It’s the day after Chuck’s funeral, the first day that there’s nothing to do with him, or for him. Louise’s left arm and left leg are on the floor and the rest of her body is embedded in Ben. Ben has been camping out in his parents’ living room since Chuck, his dad, got sick, sleeping on a leather couch with undetachable cushions the colour of bricks. When Louise stays over, there is only enough space if they get into strict cuddle formation and don’t move all night.
She extracts herself bone by bone, replacing her shape with bedding so that he doesn’t topple to the floor. There is a red imprint on her right thigh where the flesh got pushed the wrong way and then just had to deal with it. By the icy light coming through the curtains, she checks her old, decrepit cell phone, its screen attached by strips of duct tape that leave sticky scum on her fingers. Ben and his family are still in that period when it’s socially acceptable to miss work and ignore the phone. Louise gets some slack by proximity, but she’s only a new girlfriend and her phone brims with work emails and missed calls from her mother, with whom she has been having a polite argument all week. Louise’s mother wanted Louise to come home this weekend. Chuck’s funeral is on Saturday, Louise told her. Come home on Sunday, her mother texted. I can’t just up and leave, Louise replied, that would be hurtful. Why do you care about these people you just met you don’t even know them, her mother said. To win the argument Louise wrote, Of course I’ll be there why wouldn’t I be.