Come See About Me (22 page)

Liam swings his
legs under the bench and slopes his head closer to mine as he adds, “If we do
that I’m going to want more than coffee, and maybe you will too. And if we do
it we won’t be happy about it and if we
don’t
do it we won’t be happy
about it.”

I suspect he’s
right. But I don’t want to believe that. “So that’s it—we can’t even have
coffee again?”

His chin drops
as he looks away. “I’ve already repeated a lot of my past mistakes and that’s
not what I want this to turn into. You know what I’m doing over here—I was
honest with you from the beginning. And anyway, Leah, you have a lot of your
own baggage you need to sort through. I don’t think this is the best thing for
either of us. I thought, from the sound of your note, that you understood
that.”

“I did.” I press
my thumbs together in my lap. “I do. But when you came by today I started
thinking it might be okay that we just hang out.” It would’ve been easier to
put what happened between us behind me if he’d never come into the shop again.
He should have stayed away.

Liam shakes his
head. “It’s not. I’m sorry if that’s what you thought. I do like you. I just
can’t do this right now.”

Neither can I.
It doesn’t seem right that he’s the one turning me down when my reason not to
see him would be as good, if not better, than his reason for not wanting to see
me.

“Okay, I get
it,” I snap, uncrossing my ankles and preparing to get up. Why prolong this?

“Leah, don’t be
that way.” Liam’s eyes ping apologetically back to me. “What do you want me to
say? I’m being as honest with you as I can.”

“Don’t worry
about it,” I say with a harshness that makes it clear I don’t mean it. On my
feet now, I stare down at him. Liam’s got what looks like a day’s worth of
stubble on his face and he’s frowning hard, like I’m being unnecessarily tough
on him. “Thanks again for the cookies,” I add with a note of finality. “I tried
some last night and you’re right—they’re really good.” I stomp off across the
square and into the traffic, never once turning back, anger supplanting my
feelings of regret and the lingering gnawing hunger for him that I’ve been
trying not to admit to myself.

Anger’s
preferable to guilt, easier to deal with, so maybe I should whip Liam off
another thank-you note. As I stride into O’Keefe’s with that sour thought in my
head, Kevin takes one look at me and decides to keep quiet for a full ten
minutes, until I’ve started to cool down. It’s a good thing, too, because any
further inquiries about Liam would not have been looked upon kindly.

This is far from the worst week
I’ve ever had but I’m sick of my own problems. Since last Sunday I feel like
I’ve been walking around with a pebble in my shoe that I can’t get rid of, no
matter what I do. The feeling ebbs and flows but never entirely disappears. It
will
,
I’m sure. Hopefully sooner rather than later, but in the meantime I could use a
distraction, and Saturday night, after my shift, I call my mother collect,
keeping my tone light so she won’t suspect there’s anything out of the ordinary
going on.

Being my mother
she suspects anyway, but I say, “No, really, everything’s fine. I was just
missing you and Dad. So what’s new there? Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

I listen to my
mother talk about her garden, her job and her friends and their families. Then
she tries to pin me down about my Christmas visit and because I spoke to Marta
about it before she left work yesterday I’m able to say, “I need either a
really late flight on the twenty-third or an early one on Christmas Eve.”
O’Keefe’s, like practically everything else, will be closed on Christmas Day,
which falls on a Sunday this year, and Marta’s planning on shutting up the shop
at about two o’clock on Christmas Eve so I don’t feel too badly about leaving
her in the lurch that day. Marta even told me I could have the twenty-third
off, but I don’t want to feel like I’m taking advantage of her.

“And I need to
be back on the thirtieth for work,” I add.

“That’s just six
days,” my mom bristles. “We were hoping you’d be home for longer than that.”

“I practically
just got this job, Mom. As it is I’m taking Christmas Eve off. I don’t want to
leave Marta short-staffed. I’m really her only employee and I feel like she did
me a favor by hiring me in the first place.”

 For the
moment my mother has no choice but to understand. She says she’ll book my
tickets tomorrow and starts gushing about how much she and my father are
looking forward to having me home for the holidays. Every year my grandfather,
on Dad’s side, takes the ferry over from Vancouver Island on December
twenty-third and spends the holidays with us. The Christmas Day dinner
tradition has come to rest with my aunt Ruth. We—Dad, Mom, Grandpa and
I—shuttle over to her house in Abbotsford, where we meet up with my other set
of grandparents. Aunt Ruth’s youngest son got his girlfriend pregnant with
twins in high school two and a half years ago and now he, his girlfriend and
the twins, Carter and Clayton, are living with her and my uncle Jim. Needless
to say Christmas won’t be a quiet affair and normally I like spending the day
in the midst of the hustle and bustle, but this won’t be an ordinary Christmas.
Well-meaning older relatives are bound to be curious about the state of my
emotional well-being and want to know my future plans, while I would rather
ignore the future entirely. Visiting Bastien’s family while home in Burnaby
will be just as important as spending time with my own, and although I want to
see them I’m scared that their pain might make mine worse or that being around
them will trigger a deeper guilt.

Nothing’s what
it should be. It shouldn’t be possible to feel destroyed by your boyfriend’s
death and still want to sleep with someone else. I shouldn’t have been angry
with Liam when he told me we couldn’t see each other either; it should have
come as a relief.

I’m tired of the
ways I don’t make sense, and after I get off the phone I spend the rest of the
night trying to lose myself in Simon and Louise’s British DVDs. Good as they
are they’re not distraction enough, so on Sunday, directly after my shift, I
surprise Yunhee by calling her up and asking if she’s busy on Monday.

“Like, tomorrow
Monday?” she asks.

“I know it’s
really last minute,” I tell her. “I just want to get out of the house for a
while. I’m feeling antsy lately. But if tomorrow’s not good then Tuesday or—”

“Actually, I’m
finished classes at two tomorrow,” she says. “The thing is, I need to find a
birthday present for my sister. If I don’t get it in the mail by Tuesday it’s
going to be late.” Yunhee’s little sister Sumi is in her final year of high
school. In the past mostly when Yunhee brought up her name it was because Sumi
was in trouble with her parents for breaking curfew, skipping classes or
sneaking out at night with one of her parents’ cars. It sounds like she changed
a lot starting in ninth grade. Yunhee once told me that she thought her sister
didn’t want to be a good Korean girl anymore, which in a way she understood.
What she couldn’t comprehend was why Sumi had to take things too far in the
opposite direction.

“I can help you
look for something for your sister,” I offer. “Do you have any ideas?”

Yunhee laughs.
“A Marc Jacobs purse or a Mini Cooper. Anything I could afford she probably
wouldn’t want. I’ve trawled the net looking for something I could have shipped
to her but that wasn’t a raging success. If I can’t find anything tomorrow I’m
going to have to go the gift card route, so seriously, if you want to help me
find something that would be great.”

Yunhee and I
meet at the Eaton Center at two-thirty the next day and spend most of our time
in Sephora, the Apple Store, and flicking through the sales racks of trendy
clothing shops. Anything within Yunhee’s budget isn’t good enough, just like
she pointed out on the phone, and we get worn out and have to stop for bubble
tea.

I tell Yunhee
that my mom’s booking my flight home for Christmas and share that I’m nervous
about facing my extended family, scared that they won’t understand my reaction
to losing Bastien and that I won’t know what to say to his parents.

“Maybe your
grandparents and the rest of your relatives will surprise you,” she says. “They
probably wouldn’t want things to be awkward over Christmas. I bet they keep
their mouths shut about it. I mean, your
parents
won’t, but everyone
else.”

“Not my parents,
no. But I hope you’re right about everybody else.” I slurp my honeydew bubble
tea. “I wish my parents could be cool about it too. Just let me do things by my
own timetable.”

“I don’t know.”
Yunhee shrugs lightly. “Considering they’re the people who
made you
, I
think they’re not doing too bad a job of letting you do your own thing.” Yunhee
licks her lips and pauses like she’s not sure how her next comments will be
received. “You were really scaring them for a while, scaring all of us.
Everybody just wants you to be okay.”

I know that. But
I know it from the other side. The pressure that people heap on you when they
need you to be all right because they don’t know how to handle it if you’re
not. I know how that separates you from them, pushes you out to sea because
that feels like the only option.

I suppose I’m
scaring Yunhee less now that I’m capable of drinking bubble tea with her and
helping her find her sister a birthday present. But I don’t want to lie to her;
those things don’t signify that I’m okay. “I still feel like nothing, from the
point Bastien died onward can turn out exactly like it should have,” I say,
folding my straw, accordion-like. “I don’t think anything will ever completely
change that. I’m just trying to take things day by day now, you know?” But I
don’t want to drag our time together down and I don’t want it to be all about
me. I release my straw, allowing it to spring back into shape. “So you never
said—is your sister still being a little hellion?”

“I think she’s
in the process of rehabilitating herself.” A smile skips across Yunhee’s lips.
“All the lecturing my parents have done about her grades over the past couple
of years is beginning to sink in. Now that graduation’s on the horizon she’s
realizing she needs to do something with herself aside from party with her
friends.” Yunhee groans and rolls her eyes. “God, I sound old.”

I laugh. “Yup. I
bet you sound exactly like your parents.” I’ve met them a couple of times but
never while they were in lecture mode.

A yearning to
confide in Yunhee about Liam claws up inside me as she continues to lament her
own maturity. I know she wouldn’t judge me for what I’ve done—that she’d
probably even try to convince me to ditch the self-blame—but I can’t get the
words out. They stick in the back of my throat like swallowed nails.

I ask about Chas
instead and Yunhee says, “I really don’t get him. Sometimes we’re great
together—we’ll talk on the phone for hours and he’ll make me laugh, make me
think, all the things you’d want—and others times he’s aloof and distant for no
reason and I wonder why I’m wasting my time with him.”

“That sounds
like a lot of drama,” I say.

“I’m trying not
to let it be.” Yunhee whips up her feet and folds them onto her chair with her
like she’s had a habit of doing ever since I’ve known her. “But sometimes it
is. It pisses me off when we argue because he’s smarter than me and wins even
when he shouldn’t, just because he knows how to construct an argument.”

“He’s not
smarter than you,” I counter because Yunhee is one of the smartest people I
know. “He’s just had more years of school.”

“Yeah, maybe.”
She sips her tea. “I’m thinking about doing law so maybe Chas is good
practice.”

I didn’t know
she’d started thinking about law, but she’s perfect for it and I tell her so.
We finish our tea and throw ourselves back into shopping for Sumi. Finally
Yunhee narrows down her choices to a Little Miss Trouble T-shirt or a karaoke
iPod plug-in. Both of them fall within her budget and are small enough to mail
without adding too much in postal charges to the cost of the gift. I vote for
the T-shirt because it’s more personal. Yunhee buys it and we head back to her
apartment and hang out for another hour and a half before I catch the train
back to Oakville.

My head feels clearer
afterwards, even though I didn’t confide in her. Maybe just knowing Yunhee
would understand is therapeutic. The next day, after picking up as many
groceries as one person can possibly carry to a bus stop, I find I’m even able
to tackle
Johnny Yang
again. I scribble snippets of dialogue down until
about nine o’clock and then watch more British DVDs.

It’s storming
when I go to bed and still storming when I wake up to the sound not of a horny
cat, but of a ringing telephone. I squint blearily at my alarm clock and
register the time as 5:03. A call this early can only be three things
—
a mistake, a crank call or an emergency—and I run for the
nearest phone in Abigail’s bedroom, my mind on my parents. It’s 2:03 in the
morning in British Columbia so they should be home fast asleep, but there’s no
safe time, no safe place.

I stub my toe on
Abigail’s nightstand as I lunge for the phone in the dark. “Hello?” I say,
sucking in the pain.

“Leah, it’s…it’s
Katie,” she stammers. “I have bad news. Yunhee’s in surgery at Toronto General
Hospital. It sounds serious.” Katie’s voice is brittle and threatens to break.
“Vishaya just called to tell me and I’m throwing on my clothes and going to
meet her at the hospital.”

My blood runs
cold, just like when the police showed up on my doorstep last January. Time
stops dead. I cling to the phone in silence. This can’t be happening again.

“Leah?” Katie
prompts. “Leah, I have to go. We’ll be at the hospital if you want to meet us
there.”