Transits Page 6

  Andy grips the cool bar of the cart. The birthmark, how could he not remember that? It was the colour of red grapes. It would have a finer texture than the rest of her skin.

  Trying to retrieve information from his memory bank is like trying to catch a fly with his fist.

  His shift ends at midnight, and Andy chooses to run back to his mother's. He does not run regularly, only sometimes when his muscles feel clenched and in need of release. Tonight it is really his mind that feels clenched, around the present. He runs over the white lines dividing parking spaces, past the signs and arrows. At this hour, all the stoplights blink yellow. He runs through a crosswalk and approaches a corner where two stores stand side by side: second-hand books and second-hand clothes. Déjà Vu, reads the sign on the clothing store. Lila owns this store. She used to leave handmade fliers by the mailboxes in their building. Andy is startled when he thinks he sees Lila standing in the display window, but as he passes it is only a featureless mannequin, sporting a blonde wig and polka-dotted dress.

  Lila in grade two, in a jumper and pigtails. The picture snaps into Andy's consciousness suddenly and neatly. She sang to herself, the bear went over the mountaainnn… to see what he could see. Seven-year-old Andy swung his velcroed feet, annoyed, concentrating on colouring a sky. He wanted to finish before the bell, but his wrist was getting sore.

  Andy is on his mother's lawn and he can't breathe, so he stops abruptly, gulping in the mossy air. It's like he has just flipped open one of his mother's fat photo albums and there he is, naked in the tub, or eating cake with his fists, some scene he has never tried to remember before. What about running past Lila's store had allowed his mind to scan backwards?

  The next morning, Andy looks at himself, impressionistic in the wavy reflection of the toaster. The heels of his mother's slippers swat the hexagons on the kitchen tile.

  “I almost forgot!” She is waving a manila envelope. “This came for you.” She hands him a letter opener with a mallard duck on the end.

  Andy slices open the envelope. A typed letter and some forms.

  “Anything interesting?” his mother asks. The ends of her sentences curl hopefully.

  He skims. It's from his landlord. He reads: “Dear Mr… fire caused on first of July two thousand and two by an internal error…blah blah, you should be eligible for insurance… etc.”

  “Well, that's marvelous news.” The skin around his mother's eyes crinkles, more than it once did, when she smiles. “I wonder what he means by internal error? The oil furnace, I'll bet. The girl down the way was saying how her sister had a problem with hers.”

  Andy's heartbeat quickens as he begins to read the forms. They are going to make him face his shot memory. FIRE PROOF OF LOSS, is the title. A loss occurred on the ___ day of ___, 20___, at ___ A/PM, caused by ____________. Next, there is a table. He is meant to fill in each item he lost, its cash value, and add up a total loss or damage at the end. He tries to think in the way the insurance people must want him to. He didn't own any expensive technology. The hospital had computers he could use if he wanted. His stereo was ten years old. He had a sizable CD collection. How could he prove he'd lost what he said he did? What if he claimed to have owned a hot tub, a pony, and three diamond rings? How would they know otherwise?

  To enter Lila's store, he has to step through a curtain of clicking beads. Circular racks groan reluctantly as customers muscle them around. A border of faded record sleeves frames the walls. A teenage girl, whose tattoos spill out from her sleeveless blouse, releases a hat from a hook near the ceiling while an elderly lady waits, clutching her purse.

  The girl lowers the pole and turns. “Can I help you?” she asks Andy. The question strikes him as a deep one. He shakes his head to clear it.

  “Is Lila here?”

  The girl gestures towards a doorway blocked by hanging fabric. A handwritten, safety-pinned sign reads: Staff only. The old woman has lifted the hat from the pole and fondles it greedily.

  He lifts a corner of the fabric. Lila holds a hose attached to what looks like a vacuum cleaner, but instead of sucking it breathes clouds of steam. The room is filled with several large piles of clothing: a garbage dump of polyester and plaid, ruffles and pleats.

  “Andy?” Lila says. “Are you OK?”

  Andy notices the mattress and pillow pushed into the corner of the room. “You're sleeping here?”

  “Yeah. For now. Where are you?”

  “At my mom's.”

  “Oh, good. That's good.” Lila steps in high-heeled sandals around a rack on wheels, stroking each individual jellybean-coloured cashmere sweater with the nozzle of the hose.

  There is a pause before Lila continues. “It's just such a heartbreaking kind of luck, isn't it? No one was hurt, but I have a hard time thinking about some of the stuff I'll never see again.”

  “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Really?” Lila drops her voice into a mysterious tone. “Andy… are you trying to tell me you need a three-piece vintage suit?”

  Andy is growing frustrated with his own confusion. Does he need a suit? Surely not. Clothes. He lost a lot of clothes. He's been wearing the same outfit since the fire: jeans, sneakers, plaid shirt, white socks, black cotton boxer-briefs. He has washed these things in his mother's monstrous machine a few times. Well, at least once. The longer he wears the same clothes, the softer they become, the more they take on his shape. He knows his mother wants to say something about this, but she doesn't.

  “This is going to sound strange,” he says.

  Lila's hose pauses in mid-air, puffing.

  “I've been having trouble remembering stuff. Since the fire. It's like I try to dig something out of my memory, and I can't reach it.”

  “Do you write a lot down?” Lila's response is immediate, diagnostic, as if she is a doctor of strangeness.

  Andy thinks of his coil-bound dayplanner and its clear boxes. All his drawings. “Yes.”

  “Because I had this diary. Completely handwritten, nothing saved on a computer. I'm a fool. Anyway, I know it's gone. Up in smoke and all that. But I have this weird feeling that somebody has it. Someone may as well have ripped me up into bits and scattered little pieces of me all over the city. I have this paranoid feeling that everyone knows all my stupid little secrets.” It had never occurred to Andy that Lila might be a person with secrets.

  It's the fur collar on top of a pile that sends him back. Andy is sure he has seen a girl, a modern dancer, wear that exact piece. She stood in his kitchen during a party. Going to get another drink, his limbs felt pleasantly watery, and he focused on the squiggling lines etched into the surface of the refrigerator, like an unlabeled map. The modern dancer was talking to him about Ecuador, shaking the ice cubes in her glass, and her fur collar smelled like lavender and Andy was filled to the brim with ideas. He did not want to sleep with her. He just wanted the suggestion of her limbs making arcs in the air. He wanted to take that image and run.

  “Andy?” Lila is repeating his name. He is not sure how many times she has said it.

  “This place makes me remember things for some reason,” he says.

  “I don't think I've even seen you in here before.”

  “I know.” He points to a green fedora. “Like that hat. I think my father may have worn one like it. But he died when I was little. So maybe I've seen pictures?”

  “Everyone gets that in here. Everyone says certain dresses smell like their grandmother. But how can everyone's grandmother smell the same? It's the mothballs or something. I don't know. My grandmother smelled like Vicks and plum sauce. Andy, do you realize how long we shared a wall while we lived in that building?”

  Andy looks at her. Thinks of the sound of Lila clomping around on those heels of hers. Flimsy walls. Shoebox diorama. “In grade four, you made a shoebox diorama of the pioneers,” he says. “Is that right?”

  “Hmm…”

  “There was a log cabin made out of cut up cigars?”

  “Oh ye
ah!” Lila nods, hands on her hips. “I totally forgot about that. My dad wasn't too happy about those cigars!”

  “It was a good diorama.”

  “Thank you.”

  Andy feels suddenly awkward, standing in Lila's bedroom. Like he is one of the people clutching one of the lost pages of her diary. He doesn't know her at all.

  “I have to go.”

  Lila picks up the fedora and hands it to him. “Take this. Maybe it will help?”

  “Oh. Thanks.” Andy holds it. “Good luck.”

  “Right.”

  Andy casts a glance behind him as he leaves. He wonders whether a floodgate has been released that will continue on its own, or if he will have to keep returning to Déjà Vu for his fix.

  On the fifth floor of the hospital, Andy walks without cargo, on his way to pick up his first cart of the day. A middle-aged woman pushes an elderly man in a wheelchair. The man's forehead shines pink under the fluorescent light, sparse strands of hair combed into neat rows. His legs end before his knees. Brown pants have been hemmed up neatly. It doesn't change his posture at all; from the waist up, he sits the same way as someone with legs would sit. Andy has heard that amputees sometimes feel a phantom limb. He guesses this is not so different from the patients who are always thinking they see cats. Used to the animals prowling their homes, every shadow that flickers in their peripheral vision becomes their own pet. Phantom limbs seem not so different from reaching to push aside hair that has just been cut, or rolling over half-asleep and expecting to thump up against a person who is not in the bed, or thinking every sound is the rattle of a key in the lock belonging to a son who has left home.

  On his break, Andy walks by an office door, ajar. The gold rectangular sign says Dr. Lovely: Optometry. Trying to look like he is supposed to be there, Andy dips into the office and grabs a white note pad and a ballpoint pen from the desk. He finds a vacant chair in the Optometry waiting room, where all the patients have trouble seeing things that are too close or too far away. Some are armed with knitting needles and mixed nuts, while others simply wait. A cylinder of spring water hums in the corner, a giant bubble trembling inside. Andy begins making lines on the page, not sure if he is drawing things he has seen before or is only imagining right now. He is not sure that it matters.

  The midnight run to his mother's is becoming a routine Andy looks forward to. He is worried his fedora might fly off, but pulls it down firmly enough that it stays put. The earth reverberates through his calves, knees, thighs. He can taste the grass.

  He pulls into his mother's driveway with what feels like the speed of a car. A halo of light hangs in the bay window, above the scrubby bushes below it in need of shaping. When Andy turns the doorknob, his mother looks up at him pretending surprise. A book open in her lap, she plays with her white hair girlishly.

  “Mom,” Andy says. “You don't have to wait up.”

  She rises in slow motion from the faded armchair. “I was doing no such thing. You're all out of breath.”

  “I ran.”

  “I see.” His mother totters over to him and her palms, which have the texture of paper, cup his cheeks. Then she reaches up to touch his hat. “Sometimes you remind me so much of someone I used to know.”

  Andy absorbs the shape of her eyebrows, thick, like his. He takes in the details in front of him, old things shining like new.

  Moving

  by Wanda Nolan

  A single concrete step separated the door from the sidewalk of Tess's new apartment. Tufts of yellow grass peeked out of the cracks around it, stiff and dry. Tess turned the key and hauled in bags of groceries. The noon day light fell through the hallway revealing an ocean of dust in its wake.

  A note was stuck to the mirror in the hallway.

  Hey Sis,

  Missed you again.

  There's a surprise for you inside. It needs a little

  work but will do the trick for a while.

  I put the key back in the mail box. You shouldn't have it there!

  Give me a call.

  Peter.

  In the living room, a couch took up the length of the wall. Eighties style with a rounded top and arms. Three cushions barely peeked out from the frame. Only one had its button, the others had holes that gaped open like empty mouths. Tess ran her hand over the brown weave, soft and waxy from years of dirt. She couldn't believe it was the same one. She wondered what tomb her brother had dug it up from.

  The phone rang, emptying the silence from the room.

  “Hey, Tessy, it's Peter.”

  “Hi. How's it going?”

  “Not good. Mom's really angry. You didn't give the moving guys your new address.”

  “Shit. I thought I gave it to them.”

  “Yeah, well, you didn't give it to them, or Mom! She had to send them away.”

  “Is she freaking?”

  “Big time. Call the moving company and see what's going on. And call Mom too. She says it's easier reaching the man in the moon.”

  Tess rolled her eyes. “I've been in and out all morning. Someone left a couple of hang ups on the answering machine. It must have been her.”

  “That sounds about right. Did you see the couch?”

  “Yeah. How did you manage to find it?”

  “My buddy Darrin. He was happy to get rid of it. You know if you had asked, I would have gotten him to pick up your stuff too.”

  “Yeah… but—”

  “Listen Tess. don't worry about Mom, just call her and get things straightened out.”

  Tess hung up and blew her bangs away from her face. Her mother wasn't one for the phone. When she was away at school, their conversations never lasted longer than a few minutes. Once her mother had called and said, “Oh, yes, Jack Furlong died yesterday.” And before Tess could recover herself and ask any questions, her mother had hung up.

  The man from the moving company had a Mundy Pond accent. “My, honey, don't you worry about a thing. Larry's the man to solve all your problems.”

  It took her a second to adjust to his familiar manner. She half laughed. “Be careful what you offer.”

  Tess hung up and kicked the couch. She felt like a kid again: barely two weeks back and already in trouble with her mother. The thought of her unpacked bags crept up from her gut. A cab and a credit card could bring her to a place where a phone call was the only thing she'd have to deal with. She shook her head and went outside.

  Peter didn't want her to move to the west end of downtown. It was a lower income area and, according to him, full of “hard tickets.” He went on about the houses, how they were perched on the side of the hill. Many looked like they were slapped together: floors sloped, paper thin walls. A working class shanty that turned into a community. Tess loved. In the evenings people came out. They set up lawn chairs on the sidewalk and had a cup of tea or a beer. Everyone had a nod or a wave. A few words to share.

  The gentrified parts of downtown seemed empty in comparison. You saw more tourists than locals. Especially after six when the residents bunkered themselves safely in their backyards with their privacy fences.

  Tess sat on her step and took in the action of the street. Her new neighbours, the Crawleys, piled out of their home and into their car, giving a backhanded wave as they buckled Maria—plump faced and bawling – into her car seat.

  Overhead measured gusts of wind pushed through the trees, giant breaths rolling across the city and out to sea.

  She got up and went back inside to call her mother. The phone rang three times. Her mother never answered on the first ring. The anticipation of news unnerved her. Any news—good or bad. She just hated getting it.

  “Hi, Mom. How are you doing?”

  “Oh, you've risen from the dead.”

  “Sorry about what happened this morning. I thought I gave him my address. But you don't have to worry, I was able to—”

  “He came here. I didn't know what to tell him. I couldn't get hold of you anywhere.”

  Tess smoothed the cor
d in her hand. “Did you hang up on the an­swering machine this morning?”

  “I certainly wasn't speaking into that contraption.” Tess imagined her mother standing in the kitchen, her grey eyes staring out the window.

  “How do you expect me to know what's going on, then?”

  “By being here in the first place.”

  “Listen, Mom, it's only a bed and a few boxes.”

  Her mother's voice faltered. “I'm sick of all your clutter.”

  “Well Mom, it's all taken care of now. I made a mistake. I said I was sorry. I can't do anything else. Goodbye.” The receiver felt cold in her hand.

  Tess grabbed the scissors on the table. She began pruning the geranium she bought that morning. Her mother taught her how to approach a plant. The directions came like a song: turn and cut, turn and cut. The trick was to make it look balanced, like you never touched it. Tess slid the shrub across the table and peered hard at it. She picked up the clippings and threw them in the garbage.

  The couch was the same one her mother had bought years ago. They got it from the Furlongs, an elderly couple they were distantly related to who lived down the street. Their only relatives in the area. They had been over for tea. She remembered Mrs. Furlong taking her mother's hand and saying, “Lily, my dear, all you need is a change. It's amazing what it will do for your spirits.” Her husband Jack added, “Yes girl, we're selling our chesterfield set and it would look lovely in here.” Tess's eyes had followed her mother's dull gaze around the room. Mrs. Furlong patted her mother's arm, knocking tea on the floor. Three perfect pools of brown liquid formed at their feet. Mrs Furlong checked her shoes, “Yes, my dear, a change is all you need.”

  The moving van pulled up in front of the living room window, casting a shadow across the room. The doorbell rang. A young man stood outside with a bed frame under his arm.

  Tess shuffled behind him and grabbed the other end. “Sorry about the mix up.”

  “Ah, no big deal, it was only a run across town. I didn't even have to go back to the office. Larry called me on my cell and let me know what was happening.” He winked and tapped, with some importance, the phone attached to his belt.