Come See About Me (6 page)

My mother went
out to the grocery store to buy me soup and by the time she’d returned I’d
fallen asleep again, exhausted by my recent efforts to be Leah-like. While I
was sleeping the phone rang and my mother answered it and had a revealing
conversation with Yunhee. When I crept into the kitchen an hour later my mom
was stirring a pot of minestrone soup, looking a million miles away.

She flinched
when she saw me. “I spoke to your friend,” she said, turning the burner down
and leaving the wooden spoon sitting in the pot. “When I mentioned about your
birthday she seemed confused and said she hadn’t seen you in weeks.”

I slumped
against the counter and dropped my gaze, feeling genuinely nauseous.

“Why would you
lie?” my mom asked in a pained voice. “Yunhee says she’s been so worried about
you—that you never return her calls, never see her or your other friends, and
that you say you’re not going back to school in the fall.”

I wondered if
Yunhee had told my mother about my grades too. Thank God I’d never confided in
her about being fired.

“I’m not,” I
whispered. My mother would know sooner or later anyway; I’d just hoped it would
be later. “I need a break. I can’t…” I squeezed my eyelids together and thought
of Bastien. I’d made him tomato soup last November when he’d had a vicious cold
that made it impossible to breathe through his nose. He said everything tasted
bland but that at least the hot soup felt good on his throat. The congestion
had made his voice deeper. I kind of liked the way it sounded—like a version of
him I’d never met before, an alternate universe Bastien. “I can’t just go on
like nothing’s changed.”

My mother shook
her head, a tiny bead of sweat on her chin from standing over the hot stove.
“No one expects that. But you have to keep moving forward with your life. It
doesn’t stop because he’s gone.”

I smiled
bitterly.

It had stopped.
For me, it had. This wasn’t real life anymore. It couldn’t be real life without
him.

“I don’t want to
pretend for you,” I admitted, my fingers curving around the counter behind me.
“I don’t want to pretend that I feel better than I do and that I’m like some
battery operated toy that keeps doing what it was designed to do no matter
what. Maybe that’s how you think life should be—this nonstop marathon where we
all keep walking despite the people we love dropping next to us—but that’s not
how I feel.”

“Honey.” My
mother’s face was long. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. You don’t have to
pretend
.
I know you miss him. But you can’t push people away. We all care about you—your
father and I and your friends. That hasn’t changed. We still want to be part of
your life.”

“Mom…” I
stopped, no words left on my tongue to protest.

“I hate to think
of you so far from us—thousands of miles away—living on your own this way, and
now thinking of not returning to school in September. It doesn’t have to be
this way.
Come back home with me, Leah
.” Her eyes were so earnest that
the old Leah would’ve been swayed by them and gotten on the plane with her. “We
can pack up your things, take what we can carry with us and have the rest of
them shipped.”

“No.” My voice
was flat. “I’m not leaving. This is where we lived together. This is where he’d
be if he was still alive.”

“And he’s not,
Leah,” she said. “Don’t you think he’d want you to be somewhere that you had a
proper support system? Do you think he’d want you holed up in this apartment
alone? Because that doesn’t sound like Bastien to me.”

“Right,” I
snapped. “Because you knew him so well. You never wanted me living with him in
the first place—no wonder you don’t get it.” I clasped the counter tighter. “By
support system you mean, what? Therapy? Drugs? Something to make me
smile
?”
I tore into the word like it was profane.

“You’re not
thinking clearly,” my mother countered. “No one’s saying you have to forget,
but…” She dragged her fingers wearily into her hairline. “It doesn’t have to be
this hard either, Leah. You can let people make it easier. There’s nothing
wrong with that. Being with other people, talking to someone about your
feelings, that doesn’t make the love you have for Bastien any less.”

I shook my head
like she didn’t know what she was talking about. “I’m going back to bed,” I
muttered. “Forget the soup. Or eat it yourself, whatever.”

She followed me
out of the kitchen and along the hall to the bedroom. “Listen,” she began. “I
don’t want to—”

But I didn’t let
her finish. I swung on my heel and said, “I’m not going home with you. If
that’s why you’re here, to try to talk me into it, you might as well fly back
now because it’s not going to happen.”

Mom’s head drooped
a little in defeat. “At least don’t make up your mind about going back to
school yet. That’s three and a half months away. Who knows what frame of mind
you might be in then. And this apartment…” She tossed up her hands to motion
around her. “You’d be so much better off sharing with one of your friends
rather than being alone this way.”

“Alone is what I
want,” I told her, and it felt like this most truthful thing I’d said so far.
“Why aren’t I allowed to want that? Why does what you and what everyone else
wants get to be more important?”

Because I was
not myself. Because I was in too much pain to be objective. Because I didn’t go
out anymore and didn’t talk anymore. Didn’t care whether the sun was shining or
if the city was being flooded with rain.

My mother
debated with me on and off until the morning she left. Her arguments would’ve
had even more strength if she knew I’d been fired and had flunked most of my
classes, but I still wouldn’t have listened. What I was doing didn’t feel like
a choice.

In between
debate periods (although the debate was mostly on my mother’s side—I refused to
say much more on the subject) my mother would slip into nurturing mode,
offering to make me soup or toast and bring me beverages. There were
moments—when I was lying on the couch under a blanket (supposedly still
suffering from stomach flu) and my mother was sitting quietly in the wingchair
closest to it, the two of us focused on some mindless TV show—that having her
in Toronto was some comfort. Why couldn’t she let me lie there as long as I
wanted? Why was it okay for me to curl up in a ball with a physical sickness
but not with a broken heart?

I thought my
mother might make a scene on the morning she was due to leave, stand tearfully
in my doorway and beg me to come with her as the cab driver stared determinedly
in the opposite direction. I braced myself for the possibility, but it never
happened. Having lost the argument I’d refused to fully engage in with her, my
mother chose to tuck her deepest anxieties about me away and maintain outer
calm. Only in the final few seconds in my driveway, once the driver had loaded
her suitcase into the trunk, did she say, “Don’t keep me guessing about how
you’re doing. I can’t stand it. And you know, if you change your mind about
anything your father and I will be there.”

“I know, Mom,” I
said. “Thanks. I’ll be better about keeping in touch.” I hugged her fast,
before she could really get a grip on me, and then jumped back.

My mother had
said, days earlier, that I didn’t have to pretend, but that was as much a lie
as my stomach flu. She wanted me to be okay and even after the doses of truth
I’d let spill during her visit, I humored her by smiling and telling her not to
worry, that I’d be fine.

And by the time
she would’ve reached the Toronto airport I was back in bed, under layers of
blankets, still in my clothes but with the blinds pulled down to keep as much
spring daylight out of the room as possible.

I tried to keep my promise to my
mother. I had call display added to my telephone bill and when my parents’
number came up I answered often enough to keep them from panicking. My mother
would often ask, “Are you seeing your friends?” and I would reply, “I don’t
feel like going out much in the evenings—I have to interact with people all day
when I’m at the museum.”

The more my
mother pestered me about socializing the quieter I became until she’d usually
be forced to change topics. My father asked fewer questions but was also less
capable of carrying the conversation, which meant I spent less time on the
phone with him than with my mom. If there was a national news item—politics,
sports or crime—that I’d happened to catch on TV I’d toss it into the
conversation to give him something to mull over for a few minutes while I
listened.

Bastien and I
could talk all day and never run out of things to say. But when we were quiet,
that was all right too. There was no need to fill up the room with words just
for the sake of it. Bastien has such a steadiness about him that he made a
large percentage of the population seem self-aggrandizing, superficial or like
drama queens in comparison. He even made me feel like a drama queen at times
and after he was gone I sometimes wondered if he would think that of me now.

The thought
would make me want to argue with his memory:
Why don’t you try this, if you
think it’s so damn easy?

Then, in my
mind, he would try to placate me.
It’s okay
, I’d imagine him replying,
you
don’t need to act any differently than you feel, Leah. You know I love you no
matter what.

It’s funny; he
used to sing snatches of that Roy Orbison song for me: “Leah.” Mostly in a
cheesy voice but sometimes sweet. “Here I go, back to sleep and my dreams. And
I'll be with Leah, Leah, Leah.”

But I was the
one chasing down dreams. Maybe no one person should be that important that
their absence drains life of meaning, but he was. Day after day and the loss
didn’t get any lighter.

At the beginning
of June, after paying the rent, I realized, not for the first time but with
increased dread, that I only had enough left in my bank account to fund rent
and other expenses through the summer. Come September, when I’d failed to
enroll in classes, making me ineligible for another student loan, I would be
left with only a few hundred dollars. If I was lucky my landlord, Mr. Magella,
would apply my first month’s rent deposit to September and let me stay until
October.

And then what?

I considered
calling Pina at the museum to plead for my old job. I rehearsed the call in my
mind but couldn’t, even in my head, force the conversation to go the way I
wanted. She wouldn’t have me back. I was certain of that. Maybe someday, but
not so soon after I’d disappointed her, and besides, given the chance I’d
likely do it again. I couldn’t see how things would be any different now.

I canceled my
cell plan to save myself the monthly fee and reviewed my mental map of Leaside,
considering all the nearby places I could look for employment—coffee chains,
variety stores, drug stores, restaurants. The more I thought about it the more
exhausted I became.

Bastien’s mother
phoned again to ask about his clothes and other things. Her first message, the
one where she was mostly inquiring about my well-being, was cut off by the
answering machine. The second, left only thirty seconds later as a continuation
of the first, said, “I talked to your mother yesterday and realize packing up
anything could still be too much for you to cope with right now, so I hope you
don’t feel this is too much of a nuisance but I thought I’d send my sister by
to check in on you when she’s in town. And if you happen to have anything of
Bastien’s that she can bring home, you only need to hand it over to her.”

Neither of the
messages mentioned when Bastien’s aunt Abigail would arrive. I listened to them
twice to make sure I hadn’t missed the info but the entire matter slipped my
mind shortly afterwards. There were times, when I’d fall half-asleep on the
couch, that I’d believe Bastien was lying next to me. In the space between
wakefulness and true sleep I could sometimes feel his legs brushing up against
mine, his hand light on my waist, his breath at the back of my neck. I could
even hear his voice but was unable to make out his words.

Countless hours would
slip by this way, with me on the couch or in bed, either thinking of him or
dreaming him back into existence. When I left the apartment, mostly to buy
groceries or other supplies, a tiny bit of me would imagine him waiting back
there on the couch, sketching scenes from
Johnny Yang
. I would arrive
home with my arms full of food and he’d race towards me to gather the cloth
bags, turning the months since his death into a nightmare I’d finally woken up
from.

That’s what
should have happened.

But didn’t.

And then Abigail
called me from Oakville. She and Bastien’s late uncle Alrick had a second home
there. Bastien had gone to visit her a few times while she was in town, and on
another occasion we’d had lunch with her in Toronto’s distillery district. But
I’d actually only met her a total of three times (and one of those times was at
Bastien’s funeral) and didn’t want to see her now. “I’m sorry,” I told her up
front, “I’m not ready to part with any of Bastien’s things yet.”

“I told Joyce I
thought that’s how you might feel,” Abigail said in a matter-of-fact tone. “If
you were ready it would be done already, wouldn’t it?” She didn’t give me an
opportunity to answer. “Don’t you worry about that. We’ll just have a visit,
Leah, you and I. Joyce had some copies of childhood photos of Bastien made for
you that I want to give you.”

I remembered
staring at the memorial collage at the funeral home. There were so many photos
of him that I’d never seen before. Baby Bastien biting into a plush teddy bear
that was nearly the same size as him. Bastien on a two-wheel bike, beaming with
pride into the camera, making me wonder if the photo was a record of the day
he’d learned to ride without training wheels. Skinny Bastien, all legs and
arms, on the ferry from mainland British Columbia to Vancouver Island. Young
Bastien holding a calico kitten in someone’s dazzlingly yellow kitchen. Bold
Bastien with his arm in a sling, raising it up like a badge of courage. A
teenage Bastien I recognized from early high school days wearing a pinstriped
suit and maroon tie on what must have been some formal occasion, his little
brother Jeremy standing next to him with an impish smile.