Chapter 34 Noelle
34 Noelle
“How was your date?” Avery asks as soon as I enter the apartment. She pauses the TV. It looks like she’s watching some kind of action movie, and a man is frozen midleap.
“Good.” I take off my jacket. I tried to brush off as much snow as I could before I entered the building to minimize the mess. “Good, but weird.”
I’d been on many first dates with Cam—including at the same izakaya—but never one in winter. It was fun, though disorienting. In fact, at the end I was so mixed up that I told him about the time I got sprayed by a skunk, which doesn’t seem like great first-date conversation. But he asked if he could see me again, so it couldn’t have gone too badly.
A second date. We’ve never had a proper second date before.
“At one point,” I say, “we walked by Mel Lastman Square, and he mentioned the night market. I had to restrain myself from telling him about all the times we’d been there and all the bulgogi poutine he’d eaten.”
It’s not like a woman over thirty needs more problems with dating, but here I am, struggling not to talk about all the times we hung out on June 20.
“How was your evening?” I ask Avery.
“Oh, not too exciting.” She gestures to the TV, then the bowl on the coffee table. There are a few chips at the bottom.
I open my mouth to ask how she’s feeling about the demise of her relationship. Then I close it, not sure if she’d want to talk about this now and not sure how best to be a friend.
After Saturday comes Sunday. Such a basic idea—the end of one day and the beginning of another—yet I’m still not used to it.
Avery is running some errands, and I turn my focus to cleaning. The Lunar New Year is coming up, and I’ve been conditioned to start the New Year with a clean apartment. It doesn’t feel right otherwise. And cleaning is more enjoyable than it was before, because it’s still exciting that my apartment doesn’t reset itself each night. In the loop, there was simply no point in mopping the floor, for example.
Sometimes, the Lunar New Year feels like a do-over. A chance to restart the year in late January or mid-February and actually stick to those resolutions. But this time, I missed January 1, so it’s the only start to the year I have.
What did the alternate version of me do? Did I stay home and watch a movie, eating popcorn and drinking wine at midnight?
That seems most likely. There are no pictures from that night on my phone.
It occurs to me that I could look at my viewing activity on Netflix, check if I was watching something there on New Year’s Eve. But it doesn’t seem important compared to the other things I’ve missed.
As I pull down the curtains and take them to the laundry room for their twice-a-year clean, my mind turns to the dumpling woman. Where is she now? Is she still selling magic dumplings? What made her choose me and Avery?
I return to my apartment, and before I start cleaning the fridge, I do a quick search. My previous attempts to find her were unsuccessful, but maybe something has appeared online in the last several months.
However, I still don’t have any great search terms, since her booth didn’t have a name, and I can’t find anything.
Hmph. Maybe I’ll just have to accept that I’ll never understand what happened, but that doesn’t sit well with me. I like understanding things.
My thoughts drift to Cam, and I wonder if he experienced déjà vu yesterday. He didn’t mention it to me, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t feel it.
After taking the curtains out of the washing machine, I look at my phone. There’s a text, and I feel like I summoned Cam by thinking about him.
CAM: Again, just wanted to let you know that I had a great time last night. I won’t be able to do next Saturday, but I’m free on Sunday, if you’re interested.
Telling me that he had a good time last night? It’s not something he used to be able to do. I read the words again and again, feeling almost giddy.
Then the worries set in.
I have no experience navigating our relationship once it gets to this point. And before Cam, I hadn’t dated in years. I met Dave in university, and dating was different then.
I set my phone on the TV stand and continue cleaning, my thoughts whirring.
This feels real in a way that it didn’t before. It’s scary, but I don’t want to completely hide from life, like I did for years. It’s worth it, right?
Maybe I should make that one of my resolutions: Don’t hide from life and strong emotions. I’m not sure it’s a great resolution—it’s rather vague—but it feels important.
Another important resolution: Get a new job.
To be honest, I’m rather glad that Cam is busy on Valentine’s Day. The holiday has always seemed a touch too corny for me. Though maybe I came to feel that way because in high school, I got precisely zero Valentine-grams. It was better to say I didn’t care than to be hurt.
Besides, what do you do on Valentine’s Day when you only officially started dating the weekend before?
So, yeah, I don’t mind.
The afternoon of February 14, Avery is cleaning the washroom and I’m taking a break after mopping when I get a text.
CAM: What do heiresses like to do for Valentine’s Day?
ME: Drink bottles of Dom Pérignon from all our admirers.
ME: Or mop our kitchen floors. One of the two.
He sends a selection of emojis that I ought to find cheesy, but instead, they delight me.
On February 15, I take a while getting ready, beginning with a shower. I shave things that I usually only bother to shave in the summer, even if I don’t intend to sleep with Cam tonight. I also wash my hair, managing not to absently pour too much shampoo. It took several days to adjust to my pixie cut. Though I’d gotten this haircut before, it had never actually stuck around, but now, my hair stays short and I love it.
At Avery’s suggestion, I wear one of her dark blouses. It’s lower-cut than anything I own, and it’s certainly not something I’d wear to the office, but I like the way it looks, and I also appreciate her help with my makeup.
Cam made reservations at a restaurant we’ve never been to together, and when I looked it up, it was obvious why: the grand opening was only three months ago. I order chicken with a pomegranate-walnut sauce, and we split an appetizer. When he tells me that he likes karaoke, I refrain from making any comments about what I’ve heard him sing in the past—or the Matchbox Twenty tribute band. He does, however, tell me about it during our post-dinner chai, and I force myself to look surprised, while on the inside, I add this to the collection of stuff I know about him that I’m supposed to know about him. Not to be confused with the stuff I know that he’s not aware I know. I don’t want him to think that I was stalking him, nor do I want to use my extra knowledge to convince him of our connection; I want the relationship to unfold naturally.
But, god, this is messy.
“Is something wrong?” he asks.
I school my face into a smile. I really am happy to be with him, on our second date—I yearned for one of these for so long, and now it’s finally here. I’m on bench seating, a couple of colorful pillows behind me. There’s a cozy warmth to this restaurant. It’s a nice place for a date.
Except I used to be trapped in a time loop, and I can’t tell you about it.
Or could I? I told him before, and he believed me.
But it’s different now. I can no longer “prove” the time loop by predicting the future, and if he doesn’t believe me, it’s not like he’ll forget overnight. Best to keep my mouth shut.
Still, it bothers me, our secret past sitting like a lump in my stomach.
I shake my head. “I was just thinking of all the things I have to do before the Lunar New Year.”
“Will you see your family tomorrow night?”
I nod. “You?”
“Yeah. We’ll go to my aunt’s. It’ll be weird, though, without my grandma. She passed away at the beginning of January.”
“I’m so sorry, Cam,” I say immediately.
His smile slips. “Lots of people lose all their grandparents before their midthirties. She lived a long life and witnessed a dizzying number of changes…”
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be sad, and I know holidays can be tough. The first big holiday after someone dies—yes, I remember.” I reach across the table and squeeze his hand.
“She wasn’t at Christmas either,” he says. “I went to see her the next day at the hospital. She was very sick. At the last Lunar New Year, she insisted I bring some of our beer so she could try it.”
His grandma would have died just over a month ago, while I was living another June 20. Maybe that’s why he didn’t give me his number—it had something to do with his grief. He hadn’t been in the mood to put himself out there, which I can understand.
“What did she think?” I ask.
“She didn’t like it, but she said the can looked nice.”
I laugh but sober quickly; I can tell he’s preparing to say something serious.
“I got along better with her than my mom and dad.” He looks down. “My parents favored my brother—his grades were always a little better than mine—and they weren’t thrilled with the whole brewery thing, of course. I used to try to please them, but I’ve mostly managed to let it go. I’ll never fully get their approval, and that’s okay. I can live with it.”
“Cam…”
“My grandma wasn’t disappointed in me. It felt like she understood me better than anyone else in my family. I’m not sure why.” He wipes his eyes and chuckles. “Sorry. This is a little heavy for a second date.”
“No, no,” I say quickly. “It’s fine.” He’s never told me any of this before. I guess it wasn’t something he felt the need to talk about on June 20. I’m glad he’s opening up to me, even if I’m annoyed with his parents for not appreciating him.
I squeeze his hand, and he holds on for a moment before withdrawing.
“What about you?” he asks. “Do you have any grandparents left?”
“No, and I never knew my mother’s parents. They weren’t good people, so I was told, and she didn’t talk to them anymore. When I was little, I didn’t understand, but later, I trusted her judgment. My father’s parents—we saw them regularly, and they lived with us for a while. The language barrier was a bit awkward, though. My dad was always playing translator because my grandparents weren’t fluent in English.”
Even then, he didn’t translate everything. I think there were things he didn’t fully understand himself. His Chinese isn’t perfect; though it was his first language, he’s more comfortable speaking English. As a child, there were years when he refused to speak Chinese. A few white kids at school had made fun of him, and the mother of a friend from Hong Kong had criticized how he spoke—she considered his Chinese low-class.
In addition to my dad’s issues with the language, I suspect there was a little censoring going on too. Perhaps he didn’t approve of everything his mom and dad wanted to say to us.
But I knew my paternal grandparents and loved them.
Most people in my family gravitated to the humanities, but I was the one who’d rather write a math test than an essay, and my grandfather seemed more like me. He was quick with numbers. He wanted his children and grandchildren to get an education because he’d never had the chance himself.
“Where did your father grow up?” Cam asks.
“Here. My grandparents were from southern China. They left…” I make some vague gesture that’s supposed to mean “Communist Revolution.” The specifics of why they came to Canada were never discussed with me. I’m not sure how much my father even knows. “What about your family?” I know the answer to this question, but I ask it anyway.
“They left Taiwan in the eighties.”
“Have you been?”
“A couple of times, but not in a while.”
I look around and suddenly realize that there aren’t many people left. The restaurant is supposed to close in five minutes.
“We should get the bill,” I say.
This time, when he tries to pay, I let him.
Once again, we kiss before we get on the subway. The kiss is achingly familiar, and I wonder if it’s familiar to him too. There’s a part of me that thinks it must be, however foolish that seems, and I can’t help longing for him to recall our past.
My feelings are a complicated mess of joy, sadness, and confusion.
A new year, a new start, is exactly what I need.