Come See About Me (9 page)

I plop down on
his vacated bit of bench, next to a woman of about forty who is busy texting on
her phone and chewing her lip. She seems aggravated, sad maybe. The sun’s
hanging low in the sky, throwing a dappled golden light in the space between
shadows. Tonight there are no geese in the water, only seagulls. I watch them
bob along the dark blue waves as people parade by on the path with their dogs.
A skittish Chihuahua glances anxiously in my direction as it passes.

Bastien used to
point out the sort of dog he hoped to have one day (he singled out so many
different sizes and varieties that I can’t remember them all) and when I see
the shivering Chihuahua I think,
Not one of those
,
Bastien
,
too
fragile for the outside world
. A gust of wind could carry that dog away and
it knows it. No wonder girls carry them in purses; you’d be afraid to set it
down lest a squirrel pick a fight with it.

Being near the
water sometimes makes me think of Johnny Yang, who gets a swooshy feeling in
his stomach whenever it’s about to rain and then knows he must find water to
immerse himself in straight away. At the point where Bastien left the story,
Johnny, who has learned to carry an extra stash of clothes with him everywhere
in a waterproof bag, is emerging from a neighbor’s above-ground pool (the
closest water source he could locate near his school) following a brief
drizzle.

If I could
concentrate, maybe I could do something about finishing the story. The words,
at least. But who am I kidding; the longest thing I’ve written in months is
three paragraphs to Bastien’s mother to thank her for the photographs. She
struck me as the kind of person who would appreciate a note rather than an
email (and anyway, I don’t have the patience to deal with the Internet anymore)
and I suppose I was right about that because she wrote me back and said she was
glad to hear I’d be staying with Abigail and that she wanted me to keep in
touch and come see her when I’m home at Christmas.

I refuse to
think about Christmas the same way I refuse to think about a lot of things.
Better to think about
Johnny Yang
and the past, when Bastien was still
with me. I open Bastien’s copy of
The Handmaid’s Tale
again and can’t
help feeling that either it, or Bastien, wherever he is, is reading my mind
because the first thing I see is: “I said there was more than one way of living
with your head in the sand…”

I laugh out loud
and the bearded old man next to me (the woman had moved on without me noticing)
glances surreptitiously my way, like he doesn’t want to provoke me if I’m in
the process of become unhinged. I wish there was someone to share my private
joke with. Yunhee would understand but I’ve only called her once since moving
and getting in touch with her again would mean facing inquiries about when we
can get together.

At dusk I begin
to walk back home again, and when I arrive I find Abigail sitting on the
neighbor’s porch with them. Though they have wicker chairs and a small oval
table out front I’ve never noticed them sitting there, only spotted one or the
other of them coming and going or opening their rear sliding door to let their
cat in. “Here she is now,” one of the neighbor ladies announces as I near the
house. The two of them look a bit alike so I assume they’re related; either
mother and daughter or possibly sisters.

“Hi.” I wave at
them and Abigail. “Nice night, huh?”

The older
neighbor nods warmly. “Early fall is my favorite time of year.”

Abigail points
to an unoccupied fourth chair. “Have a seat if you like.” I hesitate, wondering
how long they’ll expect me to stay and whether there will be many questions.
“This is Leah,” Abigail adds for the neighbors’ benefit before focusing her
attention on me again. “Leah, this is Deirdre and Marta.”

I extend my
right hand to both of them in turn. “Nice to meet you.” The brevity of the
introduction signals that Deirdre and Marta already know who I am and makes me
wonder precisely what Abigail’s told them.

“Please join
us,” Marta, the younger of the neighbors, prompts. “We were just talking about how
there didn’t seem to have been as great a variety of birds in the area this
summer. I only saw one goldfinch at our feeder all summer.”

I pull up a
chair, feeling like I’ve waited too long to excuse myself; I don’t want to be
rude to anyone Abigail is friendly with.

“I don’t know
much about birds,” I say. I’d recognize robins, blue jays, cardinals and
sparrows, but beyond that I have no idea. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a
goldfinch.”

“I have a book,”
Marta announces. “Let me show you what they look like.”

As Marta excuses
herself to get the bird book, Deirdre leans across the oval table towards me
and says, “You don’t know what you’ve let yourself in for now. You could be
poring over pictures all night.”

I smile but I
hope not.

Marta emerges
from the house half a minute later with a windbreaker and a guide book thicker
than
The Holy Bible
. “You were looking cold,” Marta says, handing
Deirdre the windbreaker and me the book. “Oh, let me find a goldfinch photo for
you,” she adds absently. “They’re the prettiest things.”

I surrender the
book again as Deirdre comments, “They’re her favorite.”

Marta presents
the book to me open on a page displaying the goldfinch. The bird’s sitting on a
branch in profile, most of its body a strikingly brilliant yellow but its wing
and the portion of its head nearest the beak as black as a country night. “It’s
lovely,” I say truthfully.

“That’s the
male,” Marta explains. “The female’s more of a yellowish green. But their
appearance varies during the year.”

“You mean the
male and female birds don’t look the same?”

Marta gives me a
patient look, like a teacher often gives a child. “Mostly males are brighter
and more colorful—especially during breeding season—to attract the females. But
the females are often larger.”

She
sounds
like a teacher too, a good one. I begin to feel nearly enthusiastic as she
flips through the guide book pointing out male and female examples of different
types of birds. “I’m just showing you ones you might see in Southern Ontario,”
she tells me. “That way you can look for live examples.”

I have no
inkling what Abigail and Deirdre are talking about—I spend all my time
listening to Marta impart her knowledge of birds. When I tell her I’ve been
watching the geese down at the lake she tells me that by the early twentieth
century the Canada Goose had almost completely disappeared from Southern
Ontario. “The government and conservationists successfully reintroduced them
and now there are so many that some people consider them pests.”

“Pests?” How can
something that flies with such grace be considered a pest?

“They can be
pretty aggressive at times but mostly I think people don’t like the geese
droppings and the bacteria that comes along with them. Personally, I think the
Canada Goose is beautiful.”

“Me too,” I agree.

Marta says I can
borrow her book if I’m interested in learning more about birds. I thank her but
say that I haven’t been reading much lately. I motion to
The Handmaid’s Tale
on the table. “I think I’ll still be reading that for a while.”

“One of my favorites,”
Marta says approvingly.

“Yeah, I know
it’s, like, a modern classic. I just haven’t had a head for concentrating
lately.” I suppose I’m still yearning to share my private joke with someone and
I poke one of my fingers through a buttonhole on my cardigan and debate how
much to confide. “I keep picking it up and reading little bits at a time, and
it’s weird; some of the things I’m coming across seem like personal messages.”

“That’s probably
true of all the best books,” Marta declares. “And Margaret, she’s a genius.”

I nod. You can’t
make it through high school without reading at least one Margaret Atwood novel.
“Like today,” I continue breathlessly, “today I read this part about there
being more than one way of living with your head in the sand and it felt like
it was put there just for me. I hadn’t even read the paragraphs that came
before that. Those words, they were just so specific.”

Marta’s
unblinking eyes shimmer in the moonlight. “A bit ironic. If you were really
living with your head in the sand, would that really resonate with you?”

I see what she
means. I’m
unsuccessfully
living with my head in the sand. Maybe I
shouldn’t find that funny, but I do. A bitter smile jumps to my lips.

“I won’t tell
you my favorite part until I know you’ve finished the book,” she adds.

A few minutes
later Abigail and I excuse ourselves. She has to get up early for work and I’m
tired, but I’ve decided I like Marta. I used to really like learning things.
Bastien and I were both nerds that way.

If Bastien were here
I’d ask him if he knew what a goldfinch looks like and what happens next in
Johnny
Yang, Merman at Large
. I can’t stop asking him questions, hoping for
answers that will never come:
Bastien, is it really wrong to want to live
with your head in the sand?

The night before Abigail leaves
we go to a movie, a thriller where no one’s telling the truth and a string of
beautiful people end up dead. It’s the first movie I’ve been to in months, and
I jump in my seat a lot but manage to follow most of the plot twists. In the
morning Abigail returns her rental car and then catches a cab to the airport.
I’m relieved to have the place to myself again and stay inside curled up in
front of the TV for the entire day.

When I find
myself falling asleep on the couch I figure it’s time for me to take
Armstrong’s wheel out of his cage again and crawl into bed, but as soon as I
get there I’m wide awake. When we moved in together it took me at least a month
to get used to sleeping with Bastien beside me every night, but learning to
sleep without him has been trickier. Often I’m so exhausted that I drop off
with no trouble and then sleep with such profound depth that it feels more like
a coma than rest. Other times, like now, there’s no point in continuing to try
because panic’s sparking through my body, making my mind speed.

You’d think I’d
just found out he was dead. It’s like my cells are in shock all over again.

I go out to the
back room, where Etienne stacked some of the boxes of Bastien’s things, and
tear one open. Bastien’s charcoal spring jacket is at the top. With the kind of
weather we’re having lately I could almost start wearing it out. His frame
wasn’t really that much bigger than mine—it wouldn’t look so weird on me—but I
wouldn’t want it to lose any of its Bastien-ness. For that reason, I don’t wear
any of his clothes, not even the T-shirts or hoodies I used to borrow from him
before he died.

Underneath the
jacket are a bundle of sealed “Engraving Art” kits which I don’t remember
seeing, let alone putting in the box. Maybe Yunhee packed them, or maybe I was
in such a daze at the time that they slipped my mind. “For ages 8 to 88,” the
packages declare. Attached to them is a yellow post-it note on which Bastien
has scrawled, “Mr. D’s.” Bastien was doing volunteer stints at the school near
our apartment every couple of weeks, teaching kids stuff like papier-mâché,
origami and printmaking. “Mr. D” would be a reference to Mr. Dubonnet, the
teacher Bastien was coordinating with on the afterschool program.

I slice into one
of the kits with my fingernail and examine the faint illustration on the black
preprinted board—a hummingbird pointing its long beak into a flower. There’s a
scraping tool along with the board and it seems all you have to do to achieve a
shimmering copper foil image of the hummingbird is scrape along the guide
lines. I take a handful of the kits (each of them picturing a different animal)
into the kitchen with me and begin scraping to reveal the shining silver,
copper or gold foil images beneath. It takes me until dawn to finish the first
two—the hummingbird and then a panda. I’m no artist but they look pretty
enough, just like the pictures on the covers.

The effort wears
me out enough to sleep and I lie on the living room couch for just over four hours
before waking up and realizing I never put Armstrong’s wheel back and he must
have been driven insane with desire for it all night long. There’s not a lot he
can do to distract himself—no engraving art kits designed for rodents, no
hamster soap operas, sports or reality TV to help him kill time.

But it’s too
late now. He’ll be fast asleep and it’s best not to disturb him. I go upstairs
and stare at him in his cage, wishing he were awake so I could pick him up and
handle him a little. He really is a sweet little thing that rarely bites, even
in the beginning before he was tamed. I wish we’d bought a dog too, before
Bastien died. He wanted one so badly and believed there’d be lots of time for
that later.

I imagine
walking the dog we never had down by the lake. In my head it’s brown and
vaguely terrier-like, sort of like one of the ones that lived next door in
Toronto. My mind’s starting to race again like it did last night. I’m spiky and
sad at the same time. The two emotions don’t work well together. It feels like
walking around with lit sparklers poked underneath my skin. It hurts, burns,
buzzes like electricity and won’t stop because every bit of me knows how much I
need him, and still he’s never coming back.

I need to
exhaust the energy somehow. Run. Climb. Fight.

Something.

I can’t sit here
with the feeling a minute longer.

I turn my back
to Armstrong’s cage, jump into my clothes and running shoes and scramble
outside. I start out jogging but that’s not enough to dim the sparklers; soon
I’m all-out running the same as if I was being chased. My lungs aren’t used to
the level of activity; it’s not long before I’m gasping for breath, but that
only makes me run harder. Why not push myself past the limit? What’s the worst
thing that could happen? I sprint down Allan Street and head for the lake,
turning on to Robinson, zigzagging my way south to avoid foot traffic as much
as possible. I don’t want to slow down but I’m out of oxygen. Struggling like a
fish out of water.