Emily intended on being more consistent with how she felt when she saw him next, more consequent. “You can't possibly be that naive,” she'd said at one point. “I can't believe,” her face in her hands, “that I'm actually sitting here with someone who could
think
something like that.” Then, “You, my friend, are positively Neolithic. The year is 1999. Join us. Please.” He had no idea how to respond, and seldom did. Instead he fished for compliments; there must have been
something
appealing about him. She gave him doubtful looks, sniggered randomly throughout the evening, as if to a string of amusing punchlines that rose from the occasion like gags from an improv, and when prompted to share these private jokes, she eluded the question, changed the subject, asked him to order another bottle. Which he did, perplexed, grasping at straws and ordering the second-to-last entry on the wine list, trying to impress, trying to get a handle on her, on the situation, on his complete powerlessness in it. Luckily the sex was great.
She insisted they not call “whatever it was they were doing”
dating
. They were doing what they were doing, she told him, and whatever it was, it didn't need a name. They met mostly on weekends, ate out, went to the first non-Hollywood films that Cedric had seen in his life, and even ushered in the new millennium together, in a bar on the rooftop of the Westin, getting drunk on a Mondavi and watching the fireworks while he checked his cell for messages every four minutes, worried about the imminent
Y2K
computer crash. She told him he should lighten up, that a little cataclysm would do the world good.
Emily continued to date other people, and if she slept with one of them, she made sure to tell him about it, often the next day, casually, adding that honesty was one of her few principles, and one she wasn't about to compromise in order to placate his soaring little ego. Then, in April, she made a sudden and capricious decision to cut off contact with him. She deleted his emails and answering machine messages for three weeks, after which he showed up at her doorstep uninvited, catching her with a bad book and bored to atrophy. She agreed to get some dinner with him, then went back to his place, where, in the morning, he'd said he was glad to have her back. She rolled out of bed and into her shoes, saying nothing.
It wasn't sitting well with her. There were days she felt horrible about the way things were going, even guilty. As well as days where she noticed him looking worse for wear, physically; he was dishevelled, stubbled cheeks, forehead blanched and lined with glistening pink folds. He smelled of addled sweat, amoeba-shaped blotches starching the armpits of his dress shirts. He sometimes said he would do anything she wanted him to. Anything, he would listlessly reinforce, staring so intently into her retinas that he seemed to be looking past her, emptily, emptied. She found him pathetic, saw him as a kind of addict, who was addictedâin the way, she believed, all addicts wereâto his own destruction. And that was something she didn't want a role in, or implicated responsibility for. In fact the only thing she wanted was to ease him down gently, mercifully, to leave him behind, intact, just as he was before. Without so much as a trace that she'd been there.
Contrary to what everyone thought, Emily really was a compassionate woman, sensitive, perhaps even overly so. She'd never understood how others managed not to see her in that light. Sure she was outspoken, called a spade a spade, but that didn't make her any less sympathetic; it only made her humanity seem a bit askance, as if it were projecting itself at an angle that was, in comparison to everyone else, somewhat obtuse. Beneath that, however, she was one of the most sensitive people she'd ever met.
She remembers the night on Twyn Rivers Drive, in her first year of university, nineteen and driving her parents' car through a blind and moonless dark, two thumbs of light gliding over the road ahead of her, feeling their way along the mottles of the asphalt like brail. One of Emily's best friends lived on the city limits while her boyfriend at the time was in Pickering, just beyond it. A back road connected the two, passing through the city's largest natural area, the Rouge Valley, with its birch and hemlock stands, its migratory birds and swamps. And as Emily made the habit of never visiting one house without at least dropping by the other, she came to know the road quite well, had memorized its sequence of steep hills, blind corners, and single-lane bridges. She knew the straightaways where she could sink her foot low, knew the worst of the potholes, the places where you had to stray onto the other side of the road to miss them. There was very little traffic to worry about.
What she remembers best is the floating quiet just before the impact, the way her parents' Chevrolet seemed to be hovering in one place, thick and slow at eighty-three kilometres per hour. The deer had sprung out from nowhere, in a leap that arced to a stop directly in front of her car, the headlights brightening its coat until it was awash with it, glaring white, and sinking just out of her view. Before she could even touch the brakes, a hollow explosion shuddered the car, seemed to lift the wheels from the tarmac.
She pulled over and turned the vehicle off but left the lights on, only one headlight working now, its beam delineating tracers of insects whirling above the ditch. When she stepped outside she noticed that the hood was creased, a fender dented, the grill crushed with pieces missing from its centre, a silver smile with incisors knocked out. Then she heard the sound behind her, the deer on its side in the opposite ditch, running on the spot, kicking at the grass with all four of its legs, two of them broken. She could hear the terror in its breath, the wheezing panic. A hand over her mouth, Emily made her way toward the dying animal, her eyes slowly adjusting to what little light there was from the headlight still intact, pointing in the opposite direction and getting weaker the farther she walked. For reasons she can't understand, she was trying to step quietly, easing onto the sides of her feet. The air smelled of wet leaves. There was a hesitant toad croaking to her right.
Farther along on the pavement, she noticed a spray of black streaks flowering out from the point of impact, a thicker rope of the same colour trailing into the ditch, stringing together the cause with the effect. She saw movement in the grass and approached it until she could make out the deer's form, then the garbled kinks of its limbs, the way its ineffectual kicks were gradually slowing. She watched its eyes as they dimmed, massive and black, the bristles of its lashes fine-drawn and intricate but unblinking. Its mouth cracked open, some dark seeped out. Its tall ears became limp. With a last huff, it ran out of breath, the cold of the ground stiffening its joints, knotting its musculature, progressively stilling its movements. Until it stopped.
Emily's hand was still over her mouth.
She found herself thinking about the span of the deer's life, pictured it grazing on unseen slopes, twitching with attention, raising its head at anomalous sounds, always tentative, cautious, always wild, and living an entire life without having harmed anything but blades of grass. She contemplated whether something's life should be weighed against the damage that that life causes to the world around it. Which led her to an unsettling thought, to one of those notions she would allow herself to think of only once: there were individuals she knewâpeople, human beingsâwhom she would rather see in this animal's place, whom she would rather see die an untimely and unduly death in a ditch somewhere, like this, affecting things so little with their passing as to not even interrupt the amphibian-song in the surrounding grass. But it was a view that was quickly severed, plucked out, and quarantined, leaving her with nothing but a creaking toad and an ungulate that was beyond ever making a sound again.
She lowered her hand from her mouth, turned. Then she was running, to her car, lurching on her sneakers in the illumination from the distant headlight, into her seat, where she slammed the door and locked it shut. She fastened her seatbelt, turned the key in the ignition, took a long look at the dashboard of her parents' 1980 Impala, then slumped over the steering wheel and wept.
When Emily worked up the nerve to tell Cedric that it was finally and definitively over, she'd only found enough courage to do it over the phone. She told him that they'd never exactly been a perfect match, that it was probably time he moved on, found someone better. It was for the best, she promised; he would see that in time. She hurriedly hung up.
Two days later she found the letter in her mailbox, pleading, endorsed with a time and date, his summons to a parley. And one she had to show for. She owed the man that much.
When Cedric emerged from the stairwell he was in a rush that appeared authentic enough, checking the time on his cellphone, narrowly bumping into one of the closed parasols on the patio. She wondered what had set him back, though wasn't about to ask. She intended this to be over quickly, to get to the point, and to cause as little a scene as possible.
“I'm so sorry I'm late,” Cedric said, kissing his hello as if he were in Quebec, something she'd initiated once when he'd tried to sloppily kiss her goodbye on the mouth in public. “I had a noon hour of . . . complications.” He settled into his seat, looked her over. “How are you?” he asked with sincerity.
Emily shrugged. “Okay. Fine.” But now that he was there, she felt more uneasy than she had expected and looked around the patio as if for something that she'd misplaced, finding only a nick in the table's surface that begged picking at with her fingernail. She was trying to remember the order of what she wanted to say, the carefully worded sentences that she'd prepared. A policeman's siren started up nearby, gave out two long howls, then ceased.
“Look,” she began, “I wanted to tell you that I'm really . . . sorry about the way things have . . .” But when she met his eyes, Emily cut herself short.
Cedric didn't look right. There was something odd in his smile, something strange in the way he was sitting there.
“You know what, Emily?” He swallowed. “There's no real reason to talk. I know what you're gonna say. I've heard it before, believe me. And I just . . . don't really want to waste this time with words. I think I just wannaâI don't knowâtake it in, I guess. Look at you. I haven't seen you in a long, long time, Em. Ages.”
Emily tried to say something, but he stopped her, holding up his hand like a traffic cop, long-arming the words that were trying to get across without the appropriate signet. The gesture annoyed her, but she strained to let it go, to let him have it, what he was asking for, a minute of quiet. So she sat back and watched the curious grin on his face, watched him fixating on different aspects of her body, on her fingers, her knuckles, her throat, the tiny studs of her earrings, her cheekbones, her breasts held tight beneath her blouse, her too-broad shoulders, her blocky arms, the way her rib cage rose and fell with her breathing, lingering at her wrists, his eyes focusing as if he could see the eight delicate bones that floated beneath the skin there. Until, believing it to be enough, she stood from her chair and placed a hand on his shoulder as she passed. “Take care of yourself.”
Cedric clung on to her hand, smelled it, ran a slow thumb over one of her nails, inspecting the half-moon of a lunula, then looked at another, as if to compare, and finally released his grip. She could feel him watching her until she'd stepped into the stairwell and was out of sight.
At her recital later that afternoon there wasn't much of a turnout, a meagre audience of a few family members and the usual enthusiast couples, sitting in sporadic clumps, elderly and skeptical. There was, however, a husband and wife that kept catching Emily's eye, a Japanese couple who could have been anywhere between the ages of sixty-five and ninety. Neither of them were reading the program, both of them staring forward impartially, at the musicians, or in their direction anyway. The woman's eyes were deeply rimmed with crow's feet, decades of wind and sun folded into her skin, making her expression both wise and sad.
At one point, the woman noticed a piece of lint on her husband's sweater. She reached over and pinched it from the fabric, holding out her hand and rubbing her fingers together until she was sure it had dropped to the floor at her feet, her hand returning to her husband's shoulder to smooth over the spot where the lint had been, once, twice with the flat of her palm, which rolled off and folded neatly into her other hand that was resting on her lap. While she did this, her husband had continued to watch the stage without sentiment, half-staring at Emily as she tightened the horsehair of her bow and turned the page of her sheet music.
She would spend the night thinking of them both, picturing their faces, guessing at the decades spent between them, envisioning the one simple act over and over, unable to sleep.
Finally “hometown” had come to mean only weddings or
funerals, the usual faces mingling around either chairbacks
or tombstones. September this time, yellowing cottonwoods
frothing in the breeze, the hearse an oblong mirror
reflecting rows of satin flowers in plastic vases, dandelions
wilting from tin cans. It's a family plot, paid for in advance, blank
rectangles in the headstones, unengraved but already written
in stone. A Cessna drowned out the eulogy, and after the minister
had to compete with a woodpecker, plocking his way to a grub.
We stand amid wind damage, offerings of leaves untimely plucked
from their branches, grass clippings drifting the fringes of graves,
urns emptied of their Styrofoam-based bouquets, pulped like
confetti that's thrown to hail a new and momentous beginning.
Pedal-switch stepped on, the hydraulic lift lowered the coffin into
its green-carpeted enclave, basement floor in an elevator with no