Transits Page 4

  The girl smiling at me from the newspaper page was pretty, and I detected keen intelligence in her eyes. The brother was uncommonly handsome, with finely etched eyebrows and a strong jaw. Both parents were good looking, though the father was fleshy with a soft chin. The article went on to enumerate the contributions that each had made to their community. I had never met any of these people, and yet I sensed a general diminishment, as if the quality of my own life was sure to suffer as a consequence of these four deaths. I felt silly as tears came into my eyes and overflowed on to my cheeks, and I quickly wiped them away. I had come to the cafeteria for coffee, which I had finished a while ago, but I remained seated, staring at the same page, the four photos. Then, before I could lower the paper and fold it up, a colleague from my department, Paula, with whom I had not spoken since the accident, joined me.

  “I can barely stand to think about it,” she said as she took a seat across from me. “It's so terrible.”

  I laid the paper flat on the table, still open to the page I had been reading. “So did you know her? Was she in any of your classes?”

  Paula nodded and sipped her coffee. “I had her in all three of my classes. So you can imagine what it's been like. It's impossible to look around the room and not think about her. And this picture,” she tapped the newspaper where it lay, “doesn't do her justice. She was beautiful. Radiant. You couldn't help noticing her. But… You know how some women carry their beauty differently than others? Well Anitra was beautiful in a way that was sophisticated without being flashy. Or maybe what I mean is that she was casual about it, like it wasn't important to her. She didn't build a persona around the way she looked. She let her actions do that for her.”

  “Are you going to the memorial service?”

  “I think we're all supposed to go. Isn't that how you read the announcement?”

  I shrugged. “I'm not sure. I didn't think it was mandatory. And since I didn't know her…”

  “I think you should come. You're new and it would be a good idea for you to be seen there with the rest of us.”

  I nodded and looked at the newspaper again. The moment I saw Anitra's picture my throat tightened and tears surged back into my eyes. I felt ridiculous, but Paula didn't say anything as I wiped them away. She reached across the table and turned the paper so the photograph was facing her. I watched as she regarded the dead girl's image. A faint smile appeared on her lips.

  “The worst part of it for me is that just before Anitra left she handed in the next assignment, a week early. Now that they're all in I'm going to have to mark them. It seems pointless, but I suppose I should give her a grade.”

  “After you finish the marking what are you going to do with it?”

  She looked at me. “I don't know.”

  “There must be somebody around here,” I suggested. “A relative who's taking care of their things.”

  Paula shrugged. “I spoke to the dean. He doesn't know of anyone. She didn't live on campus, but she had a locker. He suggested putting everything in a box and taking it to their house.”

  “Where did they live?”

  “I'm not sure. Somewhere in the city.”

  I nodded.

  “So,” she said, standing up. “Will we be seeing you at the memorial service?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Just remember, it's a gesture, not a commitment.” She smiled.

  “So, I'll see you later then.”

  After she left I chanced another look at the photograph. I sensed Anitra's eyes on me. People die all the time, unexpectedly, unjustly. There was no point trying to find a reason. It just happened. It was no different than dropping a pencil on the floor or catching a stranger's eye in a crowd. If Anitra Siddiqui and her family had not been on that plane, it still would have crashed. There was no pattern, no plan. Enter one door and you end up in a new country with an education and a good job. Enter another and you spend your whole life hungry, cold, and ignorant. It wasn't fair, it wasn't just, and it made no sense.

  The service was held in the campus chapel. I arrived just as it was getting underway, and I was glad I'd followed Paula's advice, for if I had not come I would have been alone in my absence. Classes had been cancelled and every office on campus was shut for the occasion. All the seats were occupied, and the rest of the space was filled with people standing. I was at the very back, against the wall. I could see little of the proceedings from this distance. A priest spoke briefly about God's plan, but since it was a nondenominational service other people were invited to speak as well. The college president said a few words, and he was followed by at least a dozen of Anitra's friends. After about twenty minutes it became very warm, and I had to take off my jacket. At the end someone strummed a guitar and sang, but I couldn't make out the words. I looked for Paula as we began filing out, but I didn't see her.

  In the days following the service, life on the campus resumed its scheduled routine. But there were differences. My students all seemed nervous and depressed, and it was difficult to get discussions going in class. An article on Anitra appeared in the college's weekly publication, and someone took the photo that had appeared in the newspaper, enlarged it to poster size, wrote her birth and death dates at the bottom, and taped it to the wall in the lobby of the main administration building.

  Something Paula said had stayed with me as well, about the school removing Anitra's belongings from her locker and sending them to her house. The same day as our conversation I looked up Dr. Siddiqui's name in the telephone directory and found the address. But I was not familiar with the neighbourhood and the name of the street meant nothing to me. I bought a street map and put it in the glove box of my car. Then, one evening after my last class was finished, I drove to the suburb where the Siddiquis had lived.

  I parked down the street and approached the house on foot. The evening had turned cool and there were not many people about. Across the street a group of boys was tossing a football. A dog was with them. Their shouts echoed sharply and the dog ran after the air born football, barking as if at an intruder, but none of them took notice of me.

  I was surprised to see the Siddiqui house was not special at all and was rather typical of the neighbourhood. The façade was mostly clapboard painted white with brick facing along the bottom. A few flowering shrubs had been planted beneath the living-room window. The house was perched at the top of a slight incline and the lawn rolled gently down to street level. A blue Hyundai was parked in the driveway. The house was dark. The walkway and front steps were littered with carnations and roses and a large wreath — about five feet across — had been laid in the middle of the grass. After more than a week these memorial tokens were beginning to show their age, and the air smelled of decay.

  I approached the front door, stepping among the rotting flowers, to read the notes that people had left. A few of these had been rendered illegible by recent rainfall, but others were preserved in plastic. “To my best friend, killed tragically, rest in peace,” I read, with no clue to which of the Siddiquis it referred. Other notes conveyed similar sentiments, some addressed to the whole family, some to individual members.

  After reading the notes, I waited for someone to come along and demand what I was doing here. There didn't seem to be any reason to stay, but I put off my departure more than once. As the minutes went by I felt a sense of liberation, as if I had established a right to be on the property. To kill time, I gathered some of the fresher flowers into a small bouquet and propped it against the railing. I peered through the window of the front door, but in the gathering dark could not make out any detail. Across the street the boys were still throwing the football back and forth, but their numbers had dwindled and the dog was gone. Otherwise the street and sidewalks were empty.

  I crossed the lawn to the side of the house and followed a concrete path around to the back. There was a fence, but the gate opened when I tried it, revealing an intricately landscaped and spacious back yard filled with bushes, beds of plants and varieti
es of dwarf evergreens. A portion of the yard had been levelled and laid with brick to make a patio, where they kept the outdoor furniture and a portable barbecue. The fence was about seven feet high and closed in the yard on all sides.

  All was quiet except for the distant drone of television voices and the occasional rumble of a car passing in the street. I sat in one of the plastic lawn chairs. The sky dimmed and grew dark as I watched, and everywhere shadows deepened and objects lost their definition. In a short time stars became visible overhead. I heard voices from somewhere beyond the fence, a man and a woman talking. The conversation was desultory, filled with pauses. I could not make out any of the words, and yet from the tone I could tell it was not an argument or even a discussion of some topic in particular. It was as if each spoke simply to hear the voice of the other and be comforted by it. One let drop a comment, and after a moment the other picked it up. I imagined a married couple seated beneath the light of a lamp, the wife knitting, the husband reading a book, beside them an open window. Perhaps the television was on with the sound turned down.

  After a while the voices of the man and woman faded into silence. Somewhere close by a dog barked. This suburban back yard was such a great distance from northern India, I wondered how often Dr. Siddiqui had come outside and, looking up at the stars as I was doing now, wondered about the path that had brought him here and all the other paths he could have followed. It seemed inconceivable that I could inhabit this space at this moment. But the Siddiquis had died and I was sitting in a lawn chair in their back yard. It could not possibly mean anything. And yet I felt that somehow it did.

  Catechism

  by Sue Carter Flinn

  By her calculations, Lily committed one of the biggest sins ever on record. A sin, she estimated, that was only one baby step away from nailing Jesus to the cross. Lily killed a priest.

  Lily had never met Father Patrick, but she knew everything about him. That he liked Lily's grandmother's meat lasagna and would often take thirds uninvited, that he sulked after losing at cribbage, and that as soon as heavenly possible after Sunday mass, he secretly removed his collar and scratched his eczema spots with the sharp edge of a small metal crucifix.

  She knew this to be a fact because her grandmother told her so. Nana Margaret told her something new about Father Paddy, as she called him, every Friday night when she came to pick up Lily for the weekend. It was only supposed to be one time, so that her parents could spend her dad's 30th birthday “with the grown-ups” as Lily's mom explained, but it seemed that lately, there was a grown-up excuse every weekend.

  The first time was a surprise party. Lily was sworn to secrecy, but the good kind. She knew the difference; she learned—hands folded neatly—why lying was wrong in Saturday morning catechism classes. She learned that Catholics suffered through catechism during Saturday morning cartoons, but Protestants and Anglicans went to Sunday school, which she imagined involved better snacks and more singing. At catechism they took turns reading from a small textbook with two rosy-cheeked children picking daisies on the cover. With the scrawl of a permanent marker, someone had drawn a moustache and a goatee on the little girl, a sin of a much smaller sort.

  More than anything, Lily loved the stories of saints. Secretly she adored Saint Francis; fantasized brushing his companion fox's crimson tail, and feeding the birds every morning after a breakfast of hot chocolate and homemade waffles. She imagined that he lived in a house like the seven dwarves, tiny and neat, a charming reprieve from the murky darkness of an overgrown forest.

  During the party, Lily's mom moved the Toyota and the push-lawn-mower out of the garage to make room for a dance floor and a gift table, which, Lily pointed out, was really two TV trays covered in a paper tablecloth left over from her ninth birthday party. It had a clown with a vacant grin and stubby legs standing on top of a cake, translucent grease stains pockmarking his rotund body. Lily helped blow up tiny bags of balloons, breaking the Scotch tape with her teeth when her mom wasn't looking, affixing them to cases of beer and tool racks in off-kilter sunburst patterns. Sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor, her mom picked out Burton Cummings and Elton John records, removing the Abba that her father always threatened to drive over.

  “Why can't I stay?” Lily moaned. Her mother leaned back and chucked her under the chin.

  “I told you it's for grown-ups, honey. We'll have a family night at Mother's Pizza when you come home. I promise.”

  Lily speculated that her eviction had something to do with the time that Bill, the neighbour from two doors down who let Lily stroke the head of a bear he dragged back from a hunting trip, once bet her ten dollars that she couldn't eat an entire package of lime flavoured bar mix. Never one to turn down a bet, or ten dollars, Lily threw up spaghetti and garlic bread behind Bill's new black leather and chrome bar.

  A frantic honking sound interrupted Lily's self pity. “C'mon along darlin', let's get rolling,” Margaret, Lily's grandmother, called in her singsong voice. Margaret had only been driving for two years, a necessity after the police had charged Lily's grandfather with drinking and driving after his car smashed headfirst into a electric pole outside of Mac's Milk, knocking out power in the neighbourhood for several hours. It was also about this time that Lily's mom stopped talking to her parents, and Nana Margaret started honking the horn when she picked up Lily.

  Margaret had developed an emotional bond with the car that surpassed that of her long, suffering marriage. Lily's grandfather, who previously grumbled about “those damn broad drivers,” accepted the affair when he realized drinking was more pleasurable with someone to take him home at the end of the night. Margaret didn't mind; she loved the novelty and power, dressing her hair up in flowery scarves, and honking that horn, just to listen to the sound that she alone controlled.

  She drove a second hand brown Pinto with toasted leather seats that smelled like ancient cigarette fumes and their old beagle, Brownie. The dog vanished one day while Lily's grandfather was out for a walk in the conservation area that ran alongside their house. He still mourned the dog's loss, although the neighbours, and Lily, collectively let out a sigh of relief that the feral scavenger who destroyed flowers, Barbie dolls, and tormented children, was finally gone for good.

  Lily climbed into the Pinto, put on her seatbelt, and tried breathing out of her mouth to avoid the muggy smell of Brownie. She curled her knees up to her chin, and ran her hands over her shins, brushing the pale blond hairs that covered them in a translucent sheen. Margaret looked over her right shoulder and narrowly missed the garbage can as she pulled out of the driveway. She grabbed a handful of silver hair with one hand, and turned the wheel with the palm of her other.

  “Oh Lily, I have awful news.”

  Lily immediately thought Brownie had returned. “Uh, what is it Nana?”

  “Paddy's sick dear. I'm not sure he's going to make it. Tonight when you say your prayers, you must pray for Father Patrick. Be sure to say a special one to Saint Jude…”

  “Impossible causes?” Lily knew it was bad if she called in Jude, Nana's secret-love saint. Jude found her keys when they were lost under pilled tissues in the bottom of her purse. Jude helped with expensive car repairs. Saint Jude even located Margaret's Pinto on the H-level of a Toronto Eaton Centre parking garage after Margaret had convinced mall security guards that it had been stolen.

  “And don't forget all those poor African children who have nothing to eat. Never, ever forget how lucky you are.” Margaret had recently started corresponding with two African children through a Catholic charity, and would read Lily their monthly letters, hanging their drawings and homemade cards with pineapple shaped magnets from Florida on the fridge alongside hers.

  Lily fought with the jealousy; she even prayed to Mary for it to stop, rubbing her hands over and over against the nubby chenille bedspread in an attempt to burn it out. Envy was a terrible sin, according to the moustached textbook kids.

  That night, after two games of Clue and a chapte
r of Nancy Drew's “The Hidden Staircase,” Lily fell asleep tracing the pattern of the purple violets on the wallpaper, listening to her grandfather hand-roll and chop cigarettes on his laptop machine in the living room. The violets on the wallpaper reminded her of the veil she wore for her First Communion; its trim of tiny satin rosebuds tickled her forehead and made her think of Saint Veronica. According to catechism, Veronica gave Jesus her handkerchief to wipe his face, leaving its holiest of impressions on the cloth. Sometimes when she was bored, Lily would pull the veil out of the tissue paper from its suit-box under her parents' bed, and pretend that her cat, Sam, was Jesus. Although no one had ever told her that pretending a cat was the holy saviour was a sin, she suspected as much, and kept it as her own deliciously private offense.

  “Don't forget to pray for Father Patrick,” her grandmother called in. Lily, too tired, too heavy to kneel again, feeling the weight of her grandfather's beery chili and chocolate cake, made a deal with herself to wake up early and make up for the night prayer. In the morning, she would pray twice for Paddy.

  The next afternoon, as Margaret dropped Lily in front of the house, she called out the car window, “Tell your mom that you need to go to church this week to pray for Paddy.” Lily threw her knapsack over one shoulder and ran in the house. “I'll tell her, I promise!” she yelled, realizing that she forgot her morning prayer. That's three prayers on an IOU, she scolded herself.

  The week was filled with routines fashionable with the first generation of parents who read books on positive parenting. Monday was soccer and hotdogs. Tuesday was Girl Guides. Wednesday a movie at Heather's house. On Thursday, Lily's grandmother called just before she left for her piano lesson. “Father Paddy's taken a turn for the worse. Have you told your mom about going to church to pray?”