Come See About Me (2 page)

Having lost her
husband, Abigail understands about needing time and space more than most
people, but even then there’s likely a line between accepting my sadness and
rejecting it as something crossing the border into clinical. There’s a cultural
level of acceptable grief that I’m on the wrong side of.

Sometimes I
wonder how Bastien would’ve lived with my loss. Maybe he’d be better at losing
me than I am at losing him. Or maybe he’d be ensconced here at his aunt
Abigail’s house along with Armstrong, in hiding from a life that had taken a
permanent wrong turn.

I just
think
all the time. About him. Us. The days and nights we shared in our old
apartment. The smell of soap on his skin and how still, peaceful and
self-contained he appeared when he didn’t realize anyone was watching him. I
was amazed, when I’d see that expression of perfect calm slip over his
features, that I was the one sharing his life. How could I possibly be that
lucky? And then it would strike me as utterly ridiculous that I’d failed to
truly notice him in all the years we were in high school together in Burnaby.
We could’ve had more years together, even if there was a fixed end date. I
should’ve noticed him sooner.

The sun beats
down on my flaking nose as I head down Douglas Avenue, squinting against the
white-hot glare because, as well as forgetting sunscreen, I’ve left my
sunglasses behind. My cloth shopping bags too. By the time I reach Lakeshore
Road my forehead is beaded with sweat. It’s even more humid than I’d realized
and if I don’t cool down within the next thirty seconds my armpits will be wet
too. Closer to the square, there’s a café I’ve popped into a few times over the
summer. A place to sit down and soak up the air conditioning. Downtown Oakville
is littered with restaurants, cafés, coffee shops and ice cream parlors, but I
keep gravitating to the same few places: the lake, the fruit market, and The
Cunning Café. On a couple of occasions, when I’ve needed to use the bathroom,
I’ve dropped into the library too. In the past I could have spent hours there,
but now it seems about as useful as your average cat might find a symphony,
filled as it is with materials I’m unable to concentrate on.

I slip past the
fruit market in favor of cool air and head for The Cunning Café. The décor is
vaguely Mediterranean but not trying too hard to be hip. The first time I
walked through the door I wondered if Bastien had ever been inside. I thought
he would’ve appreciated the homey atmosphere, and began to construct a
narrative in which I’d met up with him here after one of his classes at
Sheridan College. I imagined what he would order—the meat cannelloni maybe, or
veal Parmigiana. A curry chicken wrap if he wasn’t too hungry.

The only things
I’ve ordered here have been sandwiches or bagels. I could order one now since I
still haven’t eaten but my stomach isn’t interested.
You should have
something
,
I lecture silently.
Between the heat and not having bitten into any calories
yet today, you don’t want to pass out.

I don’t feel
faint but one evening at the end of July everything started to go dark for me
while in the cleaning products aisle of the supermarket. Only a moment earlier
I’d been steady on my feet.

I remember
thinking, when I fell against the shelving unit and sent a jug of laundry
detergent flying, that Bastien would’ve been angry at me for neglecting myself.
He made me twinge with guilt from the grave. I can’t keep going on with my life
as though it doesn’t matter that he’s gone, but I can stay alive for him. That
I can do. Eat and drink every day. Sleep. Breathe. Watch TV. Watch the waves.

I pick up a tray
and select a bottle of lime soda from the fridge beside the counter. Then I
peer over the head of the blond woman behind the counter to read the menu.
There’s only one guy in front of me in line and he’s biting his lip as he scans
the menu too, the blond woman smiling patiently at an indecision she must
witness a hundred times a day.

“Is the chicken
curry wrap very spicy?” he ventures. I’m not good with accents but I can detect
a jaunty sort of twang in his voice that I assume is English or Scottish,
because Abigail mentioned, when she first came to pick me up and get me settled
in Oakville, that there were a lot of English and Scottish people in the area.

“Medium-spicy,”
the woman clarifies, raising her hand in a so-so motion. “If you’re looking for
super-hot it won’t qualify, but it’s tasty.”

I’ve decided on
the egg salad but the guy’s still perusing his menu options, thinking it all
over, and the woman’s eyes flick over to me. “I like your shirt,” she says.

I glance
automatically down to remind myself what I threw on before leaving the house.
At the end of last summer I snapped up a bunch of T-shirts on sale at the Yonge
Eglinton Centre. Bastien and I’d been living together for three and a half
months and were having a stupid fight about his mother not liking me because
every time she phoned and I picked up instead she sounded like someone who’d
just discovered a fingernail sliver amongst her nachos. Meanwhile Bastien
refused to admit his mother had anything against me. He kept repeating that she
was just a naturally aloof person and that I shouldn’t take it personally.

I’d only met his
mother three times in person then and didn’t know what she was like with people
aside from her family and closest friends. Later I learned he was right—his
mother had a cold exterior that it took time to chip through—but I didn’t
happen to believe that at the end of last August when we stopped by the Yonge
Eglinton Centre to pick up fresh bedding and food for Armstrong. Bastien
couldn’t handle relationship tension well and wanted me to drop the subject.
When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to oblige he stuffed his hands down
into his pockets, rolled his eyes and said, with a finality that kicked my
irritation up another notch, “You know what, why don’t you take some time to cool
down and I’ll catch up with you later.” He stepped away from me and I let him.

My heart was
beating fast from being angry with him and I stomped off in the opposite
direction, wondering which of us was supposed to buy Armstrong’s supplies and
deciding Bastien should be the one, since he’d ditched me. Then I’d prowled the
mall and ended up with my arms full of T-shirts I didn’t need, one of which I’m
wearing today—emblazoned with the phrase “One Tough Cookie” under a cartoonish
image of an outraged cookie (minus a single bite), shaking its two tiny cookie
fists in the air.

The guy ahead of
me in line follows the blond woman’s gaze to ogle my T-shirt and then looks
swiftly back at the menu as he realizes my chest probably isn’t the most
politically correct place for his eyes to settle.

“Thanks,” I tell
her after what I realize has been an uncomfortably long pause following her
compliment. Like I said, I think about Bastien and us constantly. Part of my
brain still exists in a reality in which he’s alive and we’re living in a
basement apartment together in Toronto.

“Better make it
the corn beef and cheese on Italian bread,” the man says, returning us all to
the matter at hand.

The blond woman
nods. “Toasted?”

“Toasted,” he
confirms, flashing the briefest of smiles.

The woman slices
into a loaf of Italian bread. “I love your accent,” she says. “What part of
Ireland are you from?”

“Dublin.” The
man’s smile reappears, seeming more genuine this time, and their conversation
ambles forward. With nothing further required from me, I drift back behind a
curtain of fog until it’s time to place my order. Once I have my egg salad
sandwich I take a seat near the back door. There aren’t many tables left; I’d
forgotten that it was the weekend.

Chew. Swallow.
Sip lime soda.
Think
.

Neither Bastien
nor I really knew how to cook. We lived on frozen/packaged food and cheap
takeout. I had this idea we could learn to cook together and bought a book of
basic recipes. We tackled chicken quesadillas, teriyaki pork, sweet potatoes,
sticky buns and cabbage rolls and then got bored and rotated the homemade
quesadillas and buns into our diet of otherwise packaged food and takeout.
Bastien was more of a natural in the kitchen than I was and I began to lose
interest first, but the sticky buns were delicious. I can taste the memory of
cinnamon and walnuts even as I swallow bits of egg salad.

The sandwich
itself is fine. Good even. But I can’t finish it. Two-thirds of the way through
digesting another bite becomes impossible so, having cooled off like I’d
intended, I wander down to the lake and sit on a shaded bench. Supervised
children play in the park behind me, shrieking and laughing, but no one’s
bothering the geese. In fact, the geese themselves seem almost militant—not at
all like creatures in need of human protection—as they march out of the lake
and spread strategically out along the grass for a midday snack.

Even in the
shade, the heat begins to get to me again after about an hour and I stroll back
up to Lakeshore Road to visit the fruit market and buy bananas and berries for
Armstrong and milk for myself. On the way to the market an old woman in a
medical scooter whizzes by me on the sidewalk, stopping abruptly a few feet in
front of me. She tugs gently at the long gold pashmina draped around her
shoulders. It’s too warm for a shawl—I don’t know how she can stand it—but as I
catch up to her I spy the reason she’s come to a halt. One end of her pashmina
is wedged under the scooter’s rear left wheel.

I stop next to
the woman and attempt to soften my expression as I glance down into her eyes.
“Do you need some help?”

She smiles
ruefully up at me. “I don’t want to roll forward in case I tear it. Do you
think you could try to slip it out?”

I crouch to
examine the situation more closely and begin to work the delicate fabric out
from underneath the wheel, slowly and carefully. At first I suspect it won’t
all come free and that she’ll have to move forward and risk ruining her pretty
pashmina.

“Is there
anything I can do?” a male voice says from above me.

My fingers
reclaim the final section of trapped fabric. “Oh, thank you!” the woman
exclaims, beaming at me. Now that I’m really looking at her I notice she has
arresting green eyes; it’s like staring into the Caribbean ocean and having it
stare back.

“You’re
welcome,” I say, returning her smile. As I stand, I switch my gaze to the man
who’d stopped to help, the very same one who wasn’t interested in a
medium-spicy chicken curry wrap at The Cunning Café earlier in the afternoon.

“She’s got it,”
the woman announces gratefully, and for a fraction of a second I actually feel
something other than loss: a tiny seed of pride. “But thank you both.” She
knots the pashmina around her chest and I turn to continue my journey to the
fruit market. Three seconds later the woman’s speeding ahead of me again on the
sidewalk, waving as she passes.

“Excuse me,” the
man says, sidling up to me. “Could you tell me if there’s a post office around
here?”

I pause to
digest the question. Someone else could probably answer in a snap but it takes
me a moment to remember whether I’m in possession of the information he’s
looking for.

“It won’t be
open today,” I tell him.

“Right, Sunday,”
the guy says, mostly to himself. “I’ll have to go tomorrow then. Can you point
me in the right direction?”

The street
name’s slipped my mind but I tell him about the shop with the post office
counter where I’ve purchased stamps from time to time. It’s only a couple
blocks west from where we’re currently standing—on the north side of one of the
little side streets running just off Lakeshore. “You’ll see a butcher’s on the
corner and there’s an ice cream place down the same street,” I add, pointing in
the general direction.

“Thanks,” he
says, the same brief but polite smile on his lips that I spotted there earlier.
He sets off down the road as though he intends to locate the post office now,
despite me mentioning that it would be closed.

Maybe he just
wants to scout out the location for tomorrow. Just to know. I used to be like
that; always checking Google Maps and the TTC schedule before going someplace
new.

I’d never been
to Oakville before Bastien died. I was majoring in anthropology at the
University of Toronto’s downtown campus while Bastien’s design program was
split between classes at York University in Toronto and Oakville’s Sheridan
College. The only thing I remember him saying about the place is, “It looks
like a nice town—especially near to the lake. Kinda sleepy but with some
breathing room.”

I would never
have thought to come here if it weren’t for Bastien’s aunt Abigail, but when
she offered me someplace to stay and I learned her house was in Oakville,
moving here, at least temporarily, made perfect sense. This was a place Bastien
knew, a place he’d walked and ate and painted and sketched. A place where I
could live inside a trance as much as was humanly possible while still having
to give directions to the local post office and consider necessities like
bananas, berries and milk.

I feel for the
twenty dollar bill I hope is in my pocket (and not another thing that I’ve
failed to remember) and then step from the sticky air hovering over the
sidewalk into the relative coolness of the fruit market.

My best friend throughout most of
high school was Iliana
Lazaroy. She was the vice president of the
student council and passionate about politics. In one of the candid yearbook
photos of Iliana she’s sitting next to the mayor of Burnaby in our high school
auditorium, the two of them in mid-conversation and a magnanimous smile
plastered across Iliana’s face, her keen gaze demonstrating that she’s
listening intently to every word the mayor says. The yearbook committee
captioned the picture “Most Likely to Rule the World,” and they weren’t talking
about the mayor.