Kareela
We step into the crowded restaurant, where photos of the city’s finest line the walls. The underground venue, about halfway between campus and the harbor, is one of Thomas’s favorites. A place for “bros,” Jasmine would say. I do a quick scan, see that mine is the only nonwhite face in the crowd—though there may be others, behind a divider or the uncertainty of hair or a hat. It’s been a decade since leaving Toronto, and this division still shocks me. I’d heard Halifax was diverse, been excited, and it is, and it isn’t. In one part of the city, mine could be the only Black face in a whole evening. Then in another, the palest one in the crowd.
We continue past tables. A sprinkling of undergrads dot the place, but it’s mostly people our age and older, grad students and a smattering of those who’ve put their schooling days behind them and are working their way up in their chosen professions or flitting from one to another, desperate—but never letting on that’s the case—to find their calling.
“T-Dog!”
A guy Thomas has known since elementary raises an arm, shouting above the crowd, waving us over.
I nod to the group: the men with their polo shirts, tight tees, or button-downs, their chiseled arms and soft middles; the women with long straight hair, unblemished skin, and smiles, half of them making themselves less to make their men seem more.
As we sit, I’m asked how I am. I smile and nod, return the expected pleasantries, and try to recall if I’ve ever felt truly comfortable with this group. They laud Thomas for his paramedics course, call him a hero. One of the best. A girl sighs wistfully at the mention of Thomas’s career change. “I just want to find what brings me joy,” she says. “My parents don’t get it. They said if I don’t choose a ‘career path’ soon”—she does the air quotes—“they’re going to make me pay rent.”
“Waah-waah,” replies one of the guys, laughing, and I can’t help but think how young they seem. Half of them still live with their parents. I moved out at seventeen, came here, took extra courses during the school year and all through summer, graduating a year and a half early because I didn’t want to rely on my mother and father. Because when you’re grown, shouldn’t you act it?
The bro who called us over wraps his arm around his girlfriend and pulls her close. “We weren’t planning to announce tonight, but since almost everyone is here…” His girlfriend, no, fiancée, shoots out her hand in a way that seems practiced, the glittering diamonds so bright, so obvious, it seems impossible no one has noticed them before.
“We haven’t made it social media public yet,” she says as the women closest to her yank for her hand and examine the ring, oohing and aahing. “So this is in the strictest confidence.”
There are congratulations, mine included, as Thomas wraps his arm around me, pleased, I can tell, thinking somehow this will help, show me we’re not too young, that the world isn’t so shitty. But the thought of a ring like that on my finger, Thomas boasting that I’m his, makes me desperate for air.
With his friends all around us, the uncertainties that started scraping at my mind months ago seem more pronounced than ever. I slip out of the booth and stride past the tables, feeling as if I’m slipping and sliding between two realities, never fully belonging in either. I thrust my back against the bathroom wall, thoughts of that ring, this baby, what Carson asked of me at his dinner table, whether Thomas and I make enough sense to even try to make it work, and of Gran, slamming against me.
For some reason, it’s Gran that looms largest, not only her eyes going, but eventually her mind, her heart. All the questions I never asked seem to surge, along with what she revealed anyway, intricacies of her own life—the joys and trials—handing them to me like ripe tropic fruit: full and juicy and delightfully foreign from the life I was living.
I return to the day she told me of my grandfather. Oh he nuh me husban,” she said, “nuh in de way yuh t’ink. She leaned back, the dishcloth she’d been wiping across the counter twisting between her fingers, a dreamy girl’s glow on her face. Me wanted it all.” She smiled. “De weddin, godmotha and godfathas, de procession all through de village. De cakes. De booth and de songs. De sprinkled rum—all de evil spirits sent away to have dem own revelry.” She sighed. “But me eldest, she showed too soon for all dat. And me had me own house, yuh see? Me parents already in de ground. So yuh grandfatha, he just move right in. Then out and in, out and in, until out for good, to get a proper wife, proper family.
I spin to the sink, then stare at my face in the mirror, trying to see what Gran always saw—her girl, her granbaby, perfek, just as she is —and realize I never asked how she felt about it: the father of her children coming and going, never marrying her, then marrying someone else. Taking her son, stealing him, as Gran’s tone implied.
Despite everything she’s been through, she was there for me, and the answer that’s been thrumming through me all day, that I couldn’t let myself fully articulate, even in my thoughts, settles on me, so clear, so obvious, it seems ridiculous that I ever tried to deny it. It’s my turn to be there for her: I’m taking Gran in. I close my eyes, the moment of expansion in my womb taking this instant to pulse and settle, pulse and settle.
Back at the table, I ignore Thomas’s questioning look. I smile, laugh, eat. The woman with the ring turns to me. “You have to join us at the club next weekend.” She flashes the ring, her fingers flickering. “To celebrate. Just us girls.” Something about the word have , although I know that’s not how she means it, makes me hold back a cringe. Because last time I went— just us girls —was fun, until I realized I was a statement, a showpiece, like a high-end purse or earrings, to flash in the crowd. They emphasized my name to each new person they showed me off to—pressing me forward, hands on my shoulders, almost petting— Ka-ree-la. As if without this emphasized enunciation, no one would possibly understand.
“Maybe.” I smile. “Work’s been so busy. And I’ve been dealing with some family stuff.”
She nods, clearly disappointed, but polite enough not to pry.
If Mom were here—back when she still took the time to notice these things—she’d nudge me: Fit in. Be liked . Tell me these were the friends to have, friends who were safe, not even considering the particular dangers they bring. The way all the little offenses, unintended or not, made existence so weighted.
The party breaks up, with talk of work and courses tomorrow. Although dinner has taken at least an hour longer than expected, I insist on the harbor, because, at last, I’m ready to talk. Thomas and I head toward the water, hand in hand, the city buzzing around us. And it takes me back to the first time we walked here, fingers linked, high on the giddiness of falling in love, of feeling, at last, we’d found our someone.
Two girls, their hair a mess of blond ringlets, tackle the harbor walk’s painted obstacle course with such intensity you’d think a gold medal was waiting at the finish line. Across the splashed rocks, people sway in orange-roped hammocks. The food court, shut down for the night, is eerie with its silence, and it’s only as we near the submarine playground, the few lingering laughs of children traveling on the breeze, that I turn to Thomas. But before I can speak—
“Were you okay back there?”
“Huh?” After finally resolving to spit my decision out, I’m thrown.
“In the restaurant. You were in the bathroom for a while. Was it nausea again, or…” He hesitates. “You seemed pretty rigid about the engagement.”
I look away from him, try to sync my breathing to the lapping waves.
“It wasn’t nausea.”
He waits. “Karee—”
“I’m taking Gran in.” I throw the words out like an attack, though this isn’t what I intended. His hand tightens around mine, and I shift my head, see his jaw has tightened, too.
“What do you—”
“I can’t have her in a home,” I say, my voice softer now. Kinder. “She’s my family. She’s—” Her face in my mind’s eye, that smile, that touch, as she holds my head in her hands, kisses my forehead, gives me the love my parents stopped being able to give. “I won’t have her stuck with strangers. So I’m taking her in.”
Thomas draws me to the wooden stage, the children’s laughter still sounding in our ears. “This was a shock”—he sits, hands in his pockets, and I settle beside him—“learning about your Gran like that. You might just need time to process.”
I breathe in the faint hint of salt, breathe out my resolve.
“Table this for a few days,” he says. “Maybe let her move into a home. A great one, and she may love it. It may be the best thing for—”
“She left her life, her friends, her country to take care of me. To raise me, when my parents were too grief-stricken and broken to do it.”
“Our apartment’s too—”
My hands shake, but my voice is firm. “I’m taking her in.”
He’s silent as he looks at me. My statement is unfair. Is not the way to make decisions in a relationship. Because if this is a relationship, this shouldn’t be my decision to make. Not on my own.
“You’re not sure if you want a baby”—tension throbs in his voice—“if that’s too much responsibility, if we’re ready for it, and yet.” He pauses. “Have you even thought about what taking her in could entail? What kind of responsibility that is?”
“It’s an entirely different situation.” And it is, and isn’t. But Gran exists. Gran is here, now. “I need to do this.” I keep my gaze locked on his, knowing this choice I’m making may inadvertently lead to a host of others. “I’m going to do this.”
His nostrils flare. “You told me we’d table the baby conversation.” His hands reach for mine. “I’m telling you we’ll table this. No decisions tonight.”
He isn’t asking me a question, so there’s no need to answer—and those fissures, I can almost hear the cracks and groans. At a loud hoot of excitement and fear, we turn our faces toward the harbor’s most iconic sculpture—a 3.6-meter steel-and-concrete wave. A child, breaking the rules, scrambles to the top. If she took a few steps too far, she would have taken a potentially deadly fall to the ground. But the girl turns and slides down the way she came, squealing before running back up. I wince. “It’s not that dangerous,” Thomas says, hardly veiled annoyance in his voice.
But it could be.