Chapter 14 #2
‘Seriously, let’s stop talking about him,’ she says, her words slurring a little as the waiter arrives with a fresh bottle. A small part of me wants to tell her that I’ve already shared a moment with Ted, on the street in London.
‘Sounds like he might be fam—’
Naomi interrupts with more force than is necessary. ‘What about you? Brothers and sisters?’
‘No, just me and Mum,’ I tell her. There’s a flicker of darkness as soon as I think of the times when it wasn’t just me and Mum.
‘So do you work on the website full-time? Helping people on their grief?’ I ask.
‘Well, I was a teacher until a few years ago,’ she says. I nod ‘huh, right’, as though I don’t already know all of this. ‘It just got too hard to go back in there after everything, you know?’
‘I do know,’ I say. She bats back more tears. This is becoming a very teary afternoon.
‘Anyway, I want to know more about you!’ she says shrilly, blotting her eyes with two fingers. ‘What’s going on in London? Was there a guy? Is Luna’s dad in the picture?’
I haven’t thought this far ahead. Impulsively, I decide on a blank slate.
‘There was, but there isn’t any more,’ I tell her.
‘That’s hard, hey,’ she agrees.
‘I was thinking of trying to find a room for rent in Toronto, to stay in for a few months,’ I explain. ‘Maybe in the Bathurst Street area.’ Naomi doesn’t let on that she has any connection to the street. ‘I’m a writer and I need quiet somewhere to work during the days.’
‘A writer? Wow, that’s cool. What are you working on?’
‘I’m trying to write something about what happened. With … Luna. A grief thing, I think. I just need the space for that.’
I can hear Naomi’s throat as she takes another slug of wine.
‘I’ll just put something up on Facebook, a notice,’ I say.
‘I got rid of my Facebook,’ Naomi replies. ‘I just couldn’t stand to see everyone else’s normal life on there, you know?’
I nod. I already know you’re no longer on Facebook. I squirm a little as I think how I know, to the exact day, when she quit Facebook.
Naomi squeals and smacks the table, having a thunderbolt thought. ‘Oh my God, come stay with me!’
It’s disquieting how easily and readily Naomi has come to this conclusion, with virtually no massaging on my part.
We’ve been sitting here for less than forty-five minutes.
After all, I could be absolutely anyone.
I suspect that letting her drain half my glass of wine without putting up a protest has somehow made me Good People.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ I say. ‘I’m sure you need your privacy. ’
‘No, no! God, no, I literally have no need for privacy whatsoever. I have plenty of space. So much space. Too much: it needs to be filled, and I could absolutely use the company. Really, you’d be doing me a favour.’
I make a sort of reluctant face, as though I’m considering whether this is too weird, too spontaneous.
‘Look, you can throw me a couple bucks every week if it makes you feel better,’ Naomi offers. Pure loneliness bleeds from her and I feel the impulse to hug her. ‘I mean, I could be like a patron of the arts!’ she continues.
I already envisage the perfect scenario: meeting Ted by chance, in his own sister’s house. A writer who has come to stay with her from London. As set-ups go, it truly could not get any better than that.
I hold my glass up to toast Naomi. ‘My very own de’ Medici. I love it. And thanks so much, I appreciate this.’
‘So, it’s settled.’
‘Well, for a little while at least, until I get my sea legs,’ I half lie.
I arrive at Naomi’s house in a cab a day later.
It’s on the sort of street that is only ever seen in very glossy rom-coms with middle-aged characters.
The street has got serious kerb appeal: picket fences, SUVs every which way, expansive lawns that keep the neighbours further than arm’s reach.
The house makes me think instantly of the mums in Stoke Newington, packed tightly together in their redbrick terraces, and how they could only aspire to having a house like this.
It’s the size of a regional fecking airport.
The kitchen ceiling must be three metres high at least, and boasts a kitchen island so long that it could feasibly be used for track and field events.
Nothing about this says “teacher salary”.
Off the kitchen is a playroom, a blurry explosion of pink and purple plastic that hasn’t been organized or tidied.
As I stand surveying the toys, Naomi creeps up behind me, takes me by the shoulder and leads me wordlessly to a girl’s bedroom, which also happens to have a sofa and a desk in it.
Save for the stripped bed, the room has been left exactly the way it was, many years ago.
There’s a Harry Potter lampshade, a Justin Bieber poster fraying at the edges, a half-used pot of lip gloss.
It feels unbearably sorrowful. Deep down, I’m not sure I can do this.
But Ted has probably been in this house lots of times, I think to myself.
I have to sit on the thought to save myself from vibrating with excitement.
‘I wouldn’t normally let people stay in this room as it was Elizabeth’s, and I don’t know if you’re OK about it …?’
‘No, I would be honoured, if you are OK with it,’ I say quickly. We seem to have fast-tracked into a sisterly intimacy in no time at all.
‘I know you’ll be all right in here. It has space to write too,’ Naomi says, setting my suitcase gingerly next to the bed. She picks up a swimming trophy, taking a moment to look at it. ‘I’ll move some of this stuff out of here and I’ll get fresh linens organized.’
The house still looks like a busy family home and it is strange, all the space and stillness around us.
‘Towels in here, spare bedding in that closet,’ she goes, pointing at various cupboards and alcoves on the landing. ‘Take anything you need from here, and this is the main bathroom. I’m down the hallway, in there. But first, food!’
Watching Naomi bustle around the kitchen makes me feel as though I’m being mothered, in a way.
I sit at the gigantic island, feeling misty with gladness, as she uncorks a bottle of wine with the flair of a veteran sommelier.
She rustles up fajitas in under fifteen minutes, slinging recommendations about Toronto – where to eat, where to drink, what to see – as she goes.
I’m excited about tapping into the quotidian rhythms of a new city.
This feels like the warmest and sunniest of starts.
‘I met a girl on the plane, Jodie,’ I tell Naomi. ‘She’s nice, so I might check in with her in a week or two. She seems to know a lot about the nightlife around here.’
‘That’s a good person to know!’ Naomi says. ‘What I know about after hours in the city would be a really short conversation. I haven’t gone to a club in years.’
‘Where is a good place to meet boys?’ I ask tentatively. This is a line I haven’t had use for in a very long time, and the thought of it is intoxicating. I’m also letting Naomi know that I am single, the pilot light is on, I am ready to mingle with eligible men, up to and including her kin.
‘Ohhhh, we’re going there, are we?’ She laughs nervously in a way that suggests she hasn’t a single notion about where the men are.
‘God, David and I got together so young,’ she says.
‘We were like nineteen. First week of college. There was no time for the whole experimenting thing. We were so normal, it was kind of ridiculous.’
For a minute I forget about Ted. Or rather, he recedes closer to the back of my mind.
But then I have a warming thought, of Ted and me visiting here as a couple and enjoying Naomi’s hospitality, once I’ve actually met him.
His arm around my waist as we pull up to the forty-foot kitchen island. Shabbat dinners on Friday nights.
‘I can’t believe I met the One through my step-sister,’ I can hear Ted telling a reporter. ‘You really do find these things when you least expect it.’
Naomi’s question pulls me out of my dreamy, duvet-like reverie.
‘Are you still in touch with the guy, your ex?’ Naomi wants to know. ‘The father?’
Be sane, be normal, be cool. ‘We’ve stayed friends, but agreed to stay out of each other’s way, for a while at least. It’s for the best.’
‘That’s so sad. But I can totally understand how something like that could tear a couple apart,’ says Naomi. ‘I definitely lost a few friendships after the automobile collision, you know?’
I am outraged that others would pile yet more misery on this woman in her lowest hour.
Who are these people that head for the doorway during the worst time of your life?
‘People are dicks,’ I say emphatically. I start to feel a real protectiveness towards Naomi.
‘How can that even be a thing, genuinely?’ I finally say.
‘Who throws a mate away over something like this?’
‘Right?’ Naomi says. ‘Anyway, fuck ’em. Fuck every last one of them.’
After dinner, we settle on her porch with its rocking chairs and peeling white floorboards as the sun sets over the street, dappled sunlight from a perfect Canadian autumn all over us.
This is as happy as I’ve felt in a while, until Naomi begins weeping quietly over her glass of wine. At first, she tries to stop the tears, but the effort becomes too much and she lets go with some heaving, convulsing sobs. She reaches out to my hand for support in a way that alarms me.
‘I just miss them so much,’ she seethes, getting more and more worked up. ‘I can never, ever get used to it, and I don’t want to. Like some days I can hardly breathe. I could drive my fucking hand through the hollow in my heart.’
She takes a fortifying breath, exhaling with a shudder. I am way out of my depth, but oh, how I want to make things somehow better.
‘You know, in the week after the accident, I cried so hard that I literally burst the blood vessels in my eyes? I looked like something out of a horror movie. My eyes were literally red in their sockets for about four months. The only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is knowing that the girls would want me to keep going. That is truly the only thing. Otherwise …’
‘I know,’ I tell her, holding my hands back out for her to hold. She takes them gladly, readily.
‘I know you know, sweetie,’ she replies. ‘I … just never wanted to have the kind of life that made everyone else so grateful for theirs,’ she adds, nodding at me as though to invite me into agreement.
I have an unwelcome and fairly inappropriate thought, given the circumstances.
What if Ted were to come around the corner and happen upon this scene?
Me, lit flatteringly in the dusky November light, being his step-sister’s strength and confidante.
I keep an eye on the corner of the street, hoping against hope that he will somehow materialize.
Later that night, through a white wine haze, I check my emails and notice that Johnny has ignored my request to keep clear and has emailed forty-eight times since I left.
The subject headers start as ‘WTF?’, ‘Scotland???’ and ‘ESTHER FFS’, before moving into something more malevolent: ‘I Can’t Believe You’.
‘Mortgage to be fucking paid???’ ‘Are you bloody serious?’ Just as I told him I would, I delete every last one without opening them.
The ceiling feels as if it’s coming down on me, but I picture myself pushing its boundary away, holding it on my shoulders.
For the most fleeting of moments, I try to imagine what Johnny is feeling – helplessness?
Frustration? Anger? He might just hate me.
And yet what is wrong with taking some time out when you need it?
I’ve told him that I need time to myself.
What more does he want? I am numb with the effort of trying not to think about it.
After a while I let it all go, like releasing a balloon into the sky. What’s done here is done.
Back on our wedding day, and unbeknownst to each other, we both ran away from the reception to our hotel room upstairs for a breather at the exact same time. Overwhelmed and euphoric, we looked at each other, barely believing we had hitched our lives to each other’s.
It was the first time our families had ever been in the same room together, and that in itself probably should never have happened.
My mum and stepfather Patrick were determined to make the most out of the hotel, combing the corridors for housekeeping carts and, by extension, batches of shampoo, shower caps and UHT milk.
Johnny’s parents call him Jonathan, and are the only ones to call him that.
Every time Evelyn trills ‘Jonathan’, images of church fetes and bake sales and country fairs leap to mind.
Johnny’s parents are Home Counties and solid and good and decent in a way that is frankly suspicious.
They adore Johnny with the dedication and fervour of parents to an only child, which, incidentally, he isn’t.
He has a brother, Seb, who was put on this earth solely to be a dick.
The type who will pour curry sauce on bananas and eat that while everyone else is sitting down to Sunday roast, just because.
Anything to furnish himself with a personality.
Anyway, ‘Jonathan’, by comparison, looks positively saintly to his parents.
The man could shit right into their laps and they’d simply say, ‘Oh, Jonathan, wonderful. We’ve needed to sort the garden compost for a while. ’
But even they had a hard time absolving us for this wedding reception and, specifically, my mother and stepfather’s part in it.
‘Don’t see this for what it isn’t,’ my mum had drunkenly spat earlier during the reception while Patrick propped up the bar, being arrogant and hateful to everyone.
He’d just thrown a mushroom vol-au-vent at a waiter, complaining about how shit the food he wasn’t paying for was.
‘All you are doing right now is promising to do the washing up alongside another person for the foreseeable future anyway. No need to have a massive party for it.’
‘Let’s never fight, ever,’ I say to Johnny in our hotel room, emphatically. Every cell within me vibrates with determination about this.
‘Tell you what,’ Johnny says, his voice loosened by champagne. ‘If we’re ever getting into a horrible fight, let’s have a code word that means we should stop immediately. It has to remind us of this exact moment when everything was just right.’
‘Like a safe word? How about “mushroom vol-au-vent”?’ I suggest.
‘Perfect.’ Johnny laughs. ‘Oh yes, that’s the one.’