Authors: C. K. Kelly Martin
“I can’t. Either
I have bad dreams, or I wake up every hour, or I get confused and don’t know
where I am when I open my eyes.” I rub my cheeks with my thumb and forefinger.
Every time I see this guy something’s wrong with me and I wish we’d met under
better circumstances, maybe years from now, so that we could just laugh and
flirt and be something more carefree than this.
“Do you have a
hot water bottle?” Liam asks.
“There might be
one somewhere. Why?”
“When I was a
kid my mum would tuck a hot water bottle into bed with me if I felt sick and
couldn’t sleep,” he explains as he stretches his feet out in front of him so
that one of his shoes rests against a leg of the coffee table. “My sister used
to get terrible cramps in her calves when she was pregnant and used one almost
every night. She said she had to go back to using it for a bit after the baby
was born because she didn’t realize how much stress it’d released. I’ve been
known to lie down with one myself when I’ve had a bad day.”
Maybe I’ll take
a look around later, see if Abigail happens to have one in her bedroom, but I
don’t want Liam to go yet. He barely just got here. “You’re an uncle,” I note.
“Do you have any pictures on you?”
Liam dips into
his back pocket for his wallet and slides out a photo of a young dark-haired
girl, her long braids partially hidden under a baseball cap. It hardly seems
possible but her eyes are bluer than Liam’s.
“She’s
absolutely gorgeous,” I declare. “How old is she?”
Liam grins
proudly as he gazes at the photo in my hand. “She turned five in July.”
“And what’s her
name?”
Liam bites down
on his still growing smile. “She’s a real tomboy and likes people to call her
Jack, but her given name’s Jacqueline.”
“Jack.” I smile
too, my eyes clinging to the photograph of Liam’s niece. “That’s adorable. It
suits her, I think.”
“It does,” he
agrees. “I always make sure to call her Jack. It drives my sister mad. She’s
constantly trying to convince my niece to at least settle for Jackie,
but”—Liam’s eyes crinkle up—“she’s a stubborn one when she wants to be, and it
has to be Jack. She won’t answer to anything else.”
I hand him back
the photograph, which he slips into his wallet again. “So are they in
Dublin—your sister and your niece?”
“My family’s all
in Dublin. My parents, my sister and my…” He catches himself and swallows the
next thing on his lips, shaking his head like he’s rejecting the unsaid words.
“They’re all in Dublin,” he repeats. “My sister, Alison, and her husband have a
cupcake shop in Temple Bar. A mad successful one that’s always running them off
their feet. My parents are both teachers, which was a pain in the arse growing
up, as you can imagine.”
Liam asks me
about my parents, and I tell him a bit about my mom’s work at the law firm and
my dad’s part-time job with the city. Then I talk some more about growing up on
the west coast, the terrible rainy winter months when you begin to wonder if
sunshine’s just a dream you had once. And then, when summer comes and the
clouds begin to disappear, everyone scrambles outside on their bikes, inline
skates and skateboards and the atmosphere of the place entirely changes, making
you wonder if there’s any place in the world you’d rather be.
Liam laughs and
says the B.C. rain sounds a lot like how it is at home but that he’s never
actually minded the rain. “You sound homesick when you talk about the west,” he
observes.
“I never think I
am until I’m talking about it. I like it out here too. Downtown Vancouver feels
much smaller than Toronto. In Toronto there’s always something happening. The
pace is faster and there’s a real big city vibe.”
“Not much of
that in Oakville, though.”
“No,” I agree.
“Oakville wasn’t part of the plan. That just happened.”
Life on Mars
is still unfolding in front of us and periodically, as we continue to speak,
Liam motions to the screen and sums up the action. I don’t sense myself falling
asleep but the next thing I know I’m opening my eyes, lifting my head off
Liam’s shoulder.
We haven’t been
this close since the night at the pier almost two weeks ago, and for a second
the yearning I felt for Liam that night sparks inside me. His eyes are closed,
and his breath is both heavy and steady. I almost reach out to smooth my
fingers against his face. That first day I saw him at the café, the afternoon
Liam glanced down at my T-shirt, I must have noticed he was attractive, yet I
don’t remember thinking about it. The time I hurt my ankle and he walked me to
a bench, I did notice, but with complete emotional and physical detachment, the
way someone who has no desire to sit down registers the presence of a chair.
Now he hurts to look at; not as much as it hurt to look at him that night on
the pier, but if it weren’t for Yunhee I bet there wouldn’t be much difference
between now and then.
It’s not just
about how Liam looks either. He’s easy to be around, easy to talk to. When I
left that note at his door I sincerely thought it would be better if I didn’t
have to see him again, that the best thing I could do would be to put that
night behind me. My feelings about him now are more complicated and tonight
isn’t the time to begin delving into them.
On TV, Sam, the
cop from the present, is exchanging furious words with his superior officer
back in 1973, and I clutch the remote and inch the volume down so it won’t wake
Liam. Then I glance at my watch, which shows a quarter to three, and slip
upstairs to separate Armstrong from his wheel. I quickly discover there’s no
way to do that without disturbing him since he’s nestled fast asleep inside it,
despite this ordinarily being his most active time. He looks so peaceful,
curled up in the wheel like it’s a king size feather bed, that it makes me
smile to myself and resolve to pay extra attention to him tomorrow.
I leave
Armstrong where he is and head for the bathroom. Once I’ve finished there, I
glide noiselessly down the stairs and into the living room, where Liam’s blinking
sleepily at me from the sofa and saying, “What time is it?”
“Almost three.”
My forehead creases with disappointment at the fact that he’s awake and will
probably tell me he has to leave. He didn’t make me forget about Yunhee,
nothing would, but having him here dulled my anxiety for a while.
Liam rubs his
eyes and sits up straighter on the couch. “Have you been awake long?”
“Just a couple
minutes.”
Liam’s focus
switches to the TV. “I think we’ve missed half the series,” he jokes in a
drowsy voice.
“Looks like it.”
I’m still standing next to the couch because I know he won’t remain seated
there long.
“Did you find
the hot water bottle?” he asks, running one of his hands idly along his jaw
line.
I shake my head.
“I didn’t look.”
Liam tilts his
head and gazes at me with an expression I’m not sure I recognize. “Come here,”
he says quietly, and before I can tell him that nothing can happen tonight he
adds, “I know, Leah.
I know.
Just switch off the lights. You can leave
the TV on if it helps. We’ll try to go back to sleep.”
I flick off the
lamps on either side of the couch and take a seat next to him as he kicks off
his shoes and peels off his sports jacket, tossing it at the nearest armchair,
where it lands in a heap. I can’t believe he intends to stay the whole night.
In that moment I like him so much that the feeling’s more dangerous than
anything that’s happened between us so far.
We arrange
ourselves so that we’re spooning on the couch, Liam behind me with his left arm
draped across my waist like Bastien’s so often used to be. “All right?” he
asks.
“Mmm-hmm.”
Normally I’d never be able to sleep like this, with someone I technically
hardly know stretched out behind me, the length of our bodies touching. But
tonight I know it will help to have him here; it already has. “You?”
“I was half
asleep the moment I lay down,” Liam says, his mouth so close to my ear that he
barely has to whisper.
I reach for the
hand he’s draped over my waist, twining my fingers through his, and my final
thought before I slip back into unconsciousness is of Yunhee and what she
wouldn’t give to hear about tonight.
When I wake up in the morning to
a blue half-light that tells me it’s early, I sense that Liam’s body is missing
behind me. The television’s been turned off too. I listen to the silence for a
moment before stirring and, as I rise, hear it broken by running water in the
kitchen. My right hand, the one I’d tucked under my head last night and was
sleeping on, is in the throes of the worst case of pins and needles I’ve ever
experienced. I can barely move it and, as I begin massaging it with my left
hand, can scarcely feel it either. It’s as though my endodontist broke into the
house in the middle of the night and injected my right hand with Novocain.
I head for the kitchen,
my left hand trying desperately to restore feeling to my right, and see Liam,
in his rumpled white shirt, rinsing a tea cup. He smiles as he looks down at my
hands. “My right hand was dead weight until about a minute ago,” he declares,
flexing his fingers to demonstrate the return of his mastery over his hand.
“Good to know
I’ll recover,” I say. I step up close to him and, on impulse, grab the hem of
his shirt with the hand I still have feeling in. “And thanks for staying last
night. I really appreciate it. You’re better than a hot water bottle any day.”
“Well, I should
hope so.” Liam’s eyes fill with mischief. “But I don’t think last night was the
best proof of that.” His left hand skims through my hair and curves gingerly
around the back of my neck, his thumb caressing skin no one gets to see except
when I put my hair into a ponytail.
The corners of
my lips jerk up, my skin warming as he watches me.
Liam slowly
withdraws his hand, takes a step back and adds, “I should go. I just needed to
get some tea into me before I head off. I hope there’s good news about your
friend, Yunhee, soon.” I must have mentioned her name last night, and hearing
it on his lips is another thing that makes me feel like we know each other
better than we really do.
“Thanks,” I say.
I know we haven’t discussed what he said on the phone—the possibility of seeing
each other again. Having him strictly as a friend is one thing, but I don’t
think that’s what he meant and there’s not enough space for Liam and sex in my
head right now. If he wants simple, this certainly isn’t it.
I walk him to
the door and, after he’s slipped back into his sports jacket, plant a kiss on
his cheek.
“You have my
number,” Liam says.
Since I was the one
who called him yesterday, no doubt he now has mine too, but we both know what
he means. He doesn’t plan to call again; it will have to be me.
After I’ve
closed the door behind him, Yunhee springs immediately back to the forefront of
my brain. When we moved in together in first year we created a lot of our own
little rituals. The first was cupcake night on Wednesdays, because our class
schedules happened to make it the toughest day of the week for both of us.
Initially the idea of cupcakes for dinner seemed like a wonderful reward for
getting through my mind-tangling philosophy class, but you can tire of
anything; there’s a reason sugar isn’t a food group. We revised Wednesday
nights to noodle night—with cupcakes, on occasion, for dessert—and Yunhee made the
only official rule, which was that we could never hit the same restaurant two
weeks in a row. The other unsaid rule, that wherever we went for dinner had to
be fairly cheap, we’d internalized by virtue of being students.
Yunhee’s
favorite noodles were
jajangmyeon
, a Korean recipe her mom often made at
home. My favorite all-time noodle dish became lemon spaghetti, which I only had
once because when we tried to go back to the restaurant a month and a half
later it had closed.
We’d stream TV
shows together on one of our laptops and our favorites were
Hoarders
,
golden oldie
Degrassi Junior High
episodes, and
Modern Family
. If
we happened to stay up late enough on Friday or Saturday night for it to
technically be considered the next morning we’d watch kid stuff like
SpongeBob
SquarePants
and
Rugrats
while eating cereal in bed.
Sometimes we had
Wii Sports tournaments with some of the other guys and girls on our floor. And
then there were the other activities that Katie joined us for—the Asian Film
Club movie showings and band gigs. I don’t know where I would have ended up
living if Yunhee hadn’t let me move in with her once her roommate dropped out
and went home to North Bay. I’m sure it all would’ve worked out somehow, but I
can’t imagine that whoever I would’ve lived with would’ve become as good a
friend as Yunhee. And if I’d never lived with her we still would’ve been
friends, but when you share such a small space with someone the process of
getting to know them is mightily accelerated.
Yunhee did
everything she could to stay connected with me after Bastien died, and I’ve
only really come to appreciate that over the last few days, when I’m in danger
of losing her. If—not if,
when
—she’s better I promise I’ll be different,
at least with her.
Meanwhile I have
another promise to fulfill—the one I made to Armstrong last night. It’s early
enough that he’s not asleep yet (maybe this is partially due to the nap he had
last night) and I’m able to scoop him out of his cage and gently cuddle him. I
let him climb on my hands too, and then take him into the bathroom, block the
bathtub drain and set Armstrong inside the tub so I can play with him with no
worries about him running off. This is a trick that a boy of about eight, whom
I met at O’Keefe’s store with his mother, shared with me last Sunday but I’d
forgotten about until this second.