Chapter 8
I'm standing in Ethan Morin's kitchen in an oversized T-shirt and socks with holes in both heels, eating barbecue chips out of a bag I found behind the rice cooker.
The kitchen light is off. The apartment is quiet.
I'm not performing for anyone, which is how I know I've run out of whatever I was running on.
The day was long. They're all long now — the days have a new shape that I didn't agree to, a shape that involves being two people at once in a space that wasn't designed for either of them.
During the day I answer Derek's emails (revision six — he now wants the font in something called Playfair Display and I don't have the energy to explain why that's a bad idea for a brunch menu).
I make meals that look right and taste like apologies.
I consult my phone under the counter to double-check the boiling time because suddenly I'm second-guessing something as simple as pasta and I can't let him see me spiral.
I do Ethan's physiotherapy exercises with him — holding the resistance band, counting the reps, saying "good, one more" in a voice that sounds like I've done this before, when what I'm actually thinking is please don't make that face, that face where you're in pain and pretending you're not, because it does something to me that I can't afford right now.
But today was different, because in the afternoon, my mother called.
Not about anything urgent — or rather, about something she'd been calling not urgent for three weeks, which in her vocabulary means it's been bothering her every day but she doesn't want to impose.
The kitchen faucet. Dripping. "只是滴水而已" — just dripping — said in the tone that means I've put a bowl under it and I'm emptying the bowl twice a day and I will do this for the rest of my life rather than ask someone.
I recognize that tone. I should. I learned it from her.
"I'll come look at it," I said, already knowing I had no idea what to do with a dripping faucet. My skill set includes kerning, color theory, and the ability to explain to a restaurant owner why his font choice is wrong. Plumbing is not in the portfolio.
Ethan was on the couch. He'd been reading — or pretending to read — a magazine about outdoor adventure that I'd bought him from the dépanneur because he'd been staring at the ceiling too much and I thought he needed something to stare at that didn't have a crack in it. He put the magazine down.
"What kind of faucet?"
"What?"
"Your mom's faucet. Single handle or two?"
I couldn't remember. He asked me to take a photo when I got there. I said okay and left.
My mother's apartment is twenty-five minutes by métro.
She lives in a 4⒈／⒉ in C?te-des-Neiges that she's had since before I started school — the same apartment she moved into when she and my father first came to Montreal, when she was twenty-six and had a degree from a good university in China and the belief that starting over in a new country would be the brave kind of hard, not the slow kind.
My father went back eleven years later. She stayed.
For me, she said, but I think also because going back would have meant admitting the brave kind of hard had won.
She works as an accountant now. Has for fifteen years.
She's precise, reliable, and speaks about her job how you'd speak about a piece of furniture — it's there, it functions, it doesn't need to be discussed.
The superintendent in her building fixes things eventually if you ask three times, and my mother has never once asked because asking would mean admitting something in her apartment isn't perfect.
She opened the door and looked at me the way she always does — a scan, top to bottom, three seconds. Hair. Coat. Face.
"你瘦了," she said. You've lost weight.
"I haven't."
"你看起来很累。" You look tired.
"我没有。" I'm not.
She stepped back to let me in. The apartment smelled like the rice cooker and the jasmine soap she buys in bulk from the Asian grocery at Plaza C?te-des-Neiges.
Everything was in its place — the shoes lined up by the door, the plastic mat under the shoes, the framed photos on the shelf arranged by date with the frames all the same distance apart.
My mother's apartment looks like a showroom.
It has always looked like a showroom. When I was seven, I knocked over a picture frame and she didn't yell — she just picked it up, realigned it with the others, and wiped the glass with her sleeve, and the silence in which she did this was louder than any yelling would have been.
I learned early: the surface tells people what you want them to believe. If the surface is right, nobody asks what's underneath.
The faucet was in the kitchen. It dripped every four seconds — I counted, because that's what I do — a small, persistent percussion that must have been driving her quietly insane for three weeks while she smiled and called it not urgent.
I crouched under the sink. Took a photo. Sent it to Ethan.
He called back in thirty seconds.
The first thing I noticed was his voice.
Not what he said — what he sounded like.
Because the Ethan I'd been living with for the past few days — the one on the couch, the one with the half-sentences and the deflecting jokes and the guard that clicks shut like a latch — was gone.
In his place was someone else. Someone whose voice was low and level and completely unhurried, a voice that tells you where to put your hands and when to turn and what to expect next.
The radio voice. The one J-S described in the hospital corridor. Same cadence. Like he's reading you directions to the dépanneur. I'd heard it described. I'd never heard it aimed at me.
"Okay," he said. "Under the sink, there should be two shut-off valves. Small handles, round. One for hot, one for cold."
I found them. "They look like they haven't been turned since the building was built."
"Turn the cold one clockwise. Righty-tighty. If it's stuck, wrap a dish towel around it for grip."
I did. It took both hands and some language I'm glad my mother doesn't understand in English. The valve turned. The dripping stopped.
"Good," Ethan said. Same voice. No pause. "Now the connection where the pipe meets the faucet — there'll be a hexagonal nut. See it?"
I saw it. "It's a little wet around the edges."
"That's your drip. It's loose. Tighten it — quarter turn clockwise, no more. If there's teflon tape anywhere in the apartment, white, thin, on a small spool — wrap it around the threads twice before you tighten. It seals the gap."
"妈，家里有这种白色的密封胶带吗？" Mom, do you have that white sealing tape?
My mother opened the drawer under the sink — the one that, in her apartment, contains an organized tray of tools and supplies sorted by size, because of course it does — and produced exactly the spool he described.
I wrapped. I tightened. Ethan waited on the line, patient, unhurried, like he had nowhere in the world to be except on a couch in Villeray guiding a graphic designer through basic plumbing in her mother's kitchen.
"Turn the cold valve back on," he said. "Counter-clockwise. Slowly."
I turned it. The water ran. I stared at the faucet.
No drip.
"水停了!" my mother said from behind me, announcing that the water had stopped with the exact tone of voice she'd use if I'd performed surgery. "你怎么知道的？" How did you know? I held up my phone. "I have help."
"什么 help?" She leaned toward the phone. "是谁?"
She wanted to know what kind of help, and more importantly, who had entered her kitchen through my phone.
"Bonjour, Madame," Ethan said. From the couch. Twenty-five minutes away by métro. His voice — that voice — in my mother's kitchen. I hadn't prepared for that closeness.
"Bonjour," my mother said, in her most careful French. The one she uses when she wants to sound effortless. I know that French. I use that French. We are the same person in different decades and the clarity of this is something I don't want to look at directly.
"The connection was just loose," Ethan said.
Steady. Professional. Like he was talking to someone on the radio, not to a woman he'd never met through a phone propped against a soap dish.
"The tape should hold, but if it starts again, her superintendent can replace the washer inside. Ten-minute job."
"Non, non," my mother said — switching to French for him, as she does when someone outside the family is listening. Her careful French. "C'est correct maintenant. Merci beaucoup." (it's fine now. Thank you very much).
She said this with the same bright finality she uses to end every conversation that threatens to become an imposition.
Don't trouble yourself. It's fine. I'm fine.
Everything is fine. The same words. The same inflection.
The same performance of self-sufficiency I've been running my entire adult life.
I hung up. She put the kettle on — in a way that meant I was staying for tea and there was no discussion — and while the water was heating, without looking at me, she said: "听他说话，是个靠谱的人。"
You can tell from how he talks. He's dependable.
She does it — she identifies the exact thing about a person that I've been circling for weeks, and she does it without seeing his face, without context, from four syllables of French through a phone speaker.
My mother wanted me to stay for dinner — "你等一下，我给你炖点东西" — wait, let me make you something hot — but I told her I had to get back, I had work, I had things to do.
She didn't push. She never pushes. She just nodded and put a box of tea in my bag while I wasn't looking, because that's how she does it — not the thing you asked for, but the thing she decided you needed, slipped in sideways so neither of you has to acknowledge it.