Louise works in fundraising at Princess Margaret Hospital, where they hold memorial services in the lobby for people who died upstairs. In November, Louise was watching the bereaved light each other’s candles, tipping the white tapers away from the dark of their coats, when she noticed Ben watching too. He was tall and baby-faced and wearing a pink sweater. As she turned to leave, he whispered, “Do you come here often? I sure hope not.” His dad was in Palliative, on the eleventh floor.
There was something very comforting about Ben, in the way he was neither worried Louise might reject his advances, nor that his dad might soon die. The next week as he undid her buttons in the greying light of Saturday afternoon, he said, “I know we don’t know each other, but we should get married. I’ll never have a better meet-cute with anyone else.” She has only seen him mourn once, after they removed his father’s body from the ward. He knelt on the floor, laid his forehead on the cold metal of the empty bedframe, and wept.
Last night Louise and Ben watched episode after episode of Futurama in silence, and she monitored him carefully for signs of the need to talk, but he stayed quiet. Quiet, even when the whites of his eyes gleamed during an ad for car insurance for retirees, though no tears came. Eventually he fell asleep and when she was sure he was far enough under that the door wouldn’t wake him, she gathered her things and tiptoed to the back door. But when she turned on the light she found his sister Sammy at the kitchen table, trying to shield her crying from the violence of the overhead brightness.
“Jesus Christ, what are you doing?” Sammy said. Louise squeaked apologies all the way across the linoleum, but her winter boots had elaborate laces that took a long time to do up, so she turned off the light and sat there lacing in the dark. Sammy kept sighing, too irritated to cry.
Sammy is an Olympian, a triathlete with an aerodynamic body and a gaze that seems equally efficient, with little focus to spare for Louise. Louise is twenty-eight and even though she wishes she were not the kind of woman who thought like this, Ben seems like something of a final chance. He is gentle, a rare commodity. So his sister’s disdain makes Louise uneasy. It was out of pure nervousness that Louise said, “Sammy, we haven’t talked much, but I wanted to tell you, that if you ever want to talk to someone, I understand what you’re feeling.”
“Oh yeah,” Sammy said, and though Louise couldn’t see her face, she could feel Sammy’s cheek scrunching with scorn.
“My sister died. I’ve lost someone too.”
“Oh yeah,” Sammy said, with different intonation now.
“Yes, it was hard.”
Sammy patted the flat of the tabletop with her hand. Streetlight came in through the skylight. Sammy said, “Ben said that you didn’t have any siblings.”
Horror seeped through Louise.
When they met, Ben asked, as people always regrettably do, if Louise had brothers or sisters, and she had said no. This wasn’t a lie; she’d had a sister, but she didn’t have one. She wasn’t trying to be coy; death is a faux pas. When do you tell someone your sister is dead? Certainly not on a first date. You could try on the second, but what if his father is dying? You can’t say you have lost someone till you have it-gets-better advice.
Louise was trying to say “Ben must have forgotten” or “I told him not to tell anyone” when Sammy said, “Why would Ben lie about you having a sister?”
“He didn’t lie.” She said this too loud for a house full of sleeping people. “I just haven’t told Ben yet. There hasn’t been time.”
“Right.”
“I mean I will tell him,” Louise found herself saying, “I was planning to tell him tomorrow.” This was true. Louise was always planning to tell Ben tomorrow. Now she would stay the night, she would tell him tomorrow.
Tomorrow was the fourth anniversary of Joanne’s death.
“This is uncomfortable,” Sammy said.
It is just after 8 a.m. Exactly four years ago, Louise’s mother called to say Joanne was dead. Louise was in the kitchen with her roommate. She remembers fixing her eyes upon a tomato stain on a chair leg as her mother told her, Joanne was drinking and she must have taken some pills and it was an accident, all in her answering machine voice. Louise remembers how the white of the tomato had dried in a pattern like the spokes of a wheel, and how she’d hung on to the childish thought that tomatoes were wheels, a reference point to keep her steady as the world began to tip.
When it had been Louise’s turn to tell her roommate what had happened, it had come out in the same formal voice. It had been only later that she could have an unscripted reaction, up on the roof as the sun set at 4:30, where it’d been just her and all the crooked little houses of the neighbourhood. Sharing her pain with other people meant that her pain belonged to her less, Joanne belonged to her less. Louise never got better at the etiquette of loss. If anything she got more ungracious and stingy with her feelings. Lovers left her.
Ben’s mother is reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. Joy seems to like Louise. She has already told Louise that it was fortuitous—with stress on each separate syllable—that Ben met Louise at such a difficult time in his life.
“Tea? There’s a muffin. Biscuit?” Joy says.
“I’ll just have something quick. I should be on my way.”
“Stay a while. No rush!”
Joy is already neatly dressed, though her clothes bear the impact of the back of a drawer. Her regular rotation clothes are dirty and no one has done laundry.
Early on Louise tried to do the housework, a way to legitimize her presence. She longed to remain in this bubble of the doing of death, the only space where you were absolved from feeling. But Winston, Sammy’s husband, told her to stop. Stop fussing, he said kindly.
Louise’s anxiety dims. They make cheerful small talk about Joy’s medical practice. Louise stirs her coffee.
“These are nice,” Louise says, straightening the placemats on the table, printed with dancing peppers.
Joy sags. “There’s just so much,” she says.
“Pardon?” Louise missed something.
“You always say sorry to family when a patient dies. But I had no idea how much work death involves. Chuck left so many belongings behind.”
The kitchen door bangs open. Ben comes in, Sammy and Winston behind him.
“Morning,” Joy cries, her heartache put away as fast as it came out.
Winston arranges cookies on a plate and talks in a Yoda voice. Everyone is weirdly jolly, the way people are when severely sleep deprived, or when every possible thing has gone wrong and there’s nothing left to worry about.
Then Sammy says, “There’s no more cream.” She puts both hands around the spent carton that cants weakly on the counter. She gazes down into its spout. “Who finished this?” She turns to them, sharp-shouldered.
Louise covers her mug so Sammy doesn’t see the honeyed tones of her own coffee, coloured by the cream. Winston rummages in the fridge, mostly mysterious Styrofoam and fogged-up Tupperware.