So Much Love Read online

  When I find myself standing across the street from the house, I wish I’d driven, so I would have somewhere to sit and think for a moment. Standing still on the sidewalk is a strange thing to do—dog walkers and schoolchildren appraise me as they pass, but since I’m still bank-tidy in my pantsuit and hairspray, they keep moving.

  I don’t come over often. Even when Catherine was still here and everything was fine, I didn’t, though it’s only twenty minutes away and a charming little house with a flower border and some kind of pink stone tiles on the steps. In the living room are crowded bookshelves and a lovely blue couch. Catherine would always make me a cup of tea and put a plate of cookies in front of me when I visited. She made me feel like a guest, and I hated it. When I was—when I am with Catherine, I like to be the mother. I prefer to see her at my table, eating my cookies.

  I hate approaching their red-painted front door when I know she’s not behind it—that knowledge keeps me glued to the sidewalk, staring at the house like a spurned girlfriend. Grey and I tried alternating our Wednesday nights between their house and my apartment, but now he comes to my place every time. He seems not to mind—I told him it was easier for me and he didn’t ask easier how? The answer to that unasked question is that it’s easier to pretend I still have someone to mother if I’m cooking him spaghetti or putting the cookies in front of him. Then we watch an inane TV show about people buying houses. I can’t believe he likes it, much less that Catherine does, but I humour him. I like to see him point out the stylist she likes best just for the sake of hearing her name.

  Catherine did love house-hunting, and she loved this house. When they decided to buy a place together, she was still living with me, and she’d wander into the living room with her laptop a dozen times a night, murmuring, “What do you think of this place, Mom?” She liked to talk about square-footage, lathe-and-plaster walls, “good bones,” finished basements. Once, I urged her to go see a listing I liked—pretty garden, wide driveway—and she gently chided me: “Mom, this is a strange layout. You see, the upstairs bathroom isn’t accessible from the hall. You have to go through the master bedroom. Awkward.” “But it’s just the two of you—what does it matter?” “Well, for now it is.” My heart thudded with impossible surprise—of course I’d thought of grandchildren, but I hadn’t dared to hope. Catherine never said a word to me about having kids before or since. But this sweet little three-bedroom house with its sunny fenced yard is the fruit of all that gleeful labour, and I always imagine it bursting with skateboards and puppies and science projects and tutus. My hands shake in horror at how much I’ve lost.

  It’s cold, nowhere near the nice part of spring. The yard looks grim, the grass wet and dead, the flowerbeds only mud heaps. When I see a curtain twitch in the kitchen window, I finally cross the street and climb the stairs.

  “Sue. Hey, it’s good to see you.” He’s surprised that I’ve shown up unannounced, but we are long past the point of asking each other questions about how we’re coping. Catherine would be pleased, I think miserably, that the awkwardness between me and Grey has finally dissolved. His hug is brief but satisfying—his meaty shoulders are so different from the slender, sweatered ones of my colleagues.

  We’ve seen each other every week since she’s been gone, but in my mind, Grey is always how he looked the first few days: wild-eyed, unshaven, dirty hair pushed up in spikes around his bald patch, a nervous hand covering his mouth. I have been remembering him that way even though he pulled himself together, physically at least, very quickly, much faster than I did. Today, like most days, he wears a hoodie and jeans, but his hair is combed, his beard neatly trimmed.

  “C’mon in,” he says, but I am already trailing him down the hall. The living room is tidy, or at least not visibly chaotic. He’s either vacuumed recently or he has been avoiding this room. I’ve never known a man like Grey—devoted, beaming to see his wife walking toward him. Someone who vacuums.

  “Can you stay?” He waves his hands idly by his sides. “I mean, did you come for a visit, or… ”

  I nod and smile, or try to smile, while unwinding my scarf. “Sure, that would be great, if you aren’t busy?”

  “Absolutely. Let me put the kettle on, and get us something to eat.”

  “Oh, no, don’t trouble yourself… ”

  He shrugs and disappears into the kitchen, the words “No bother” drifting behind him. I sit down on the couch that Catherine so loved. The first thing they bought new, together, once they had the house. It is stiff to sit on, but elegant, and such a bright, happy blue.

  I hear the clank of the kettle and the whir of the microwave. He comes back with a plate of soggy-looking muffins. “I defrosted these. So many people brought stuff—at the beginning. I don’t know what they thought I’d do with twenty-four muffins.”

  He sits down heavily in the complex Ikea chair I gave them, all curved wood bars and flat cushions. I took Catherine shopping when she was moving from my home to this one, and asked what she wanted as a housewarming gift—that chair is what she chose. Somehow, in her mind, it went with the new blue couch. I couldn’t imagine why she liked it; she felt so far from me then, crouching in the store’s fluorescent glare, cooing over that ugly chair. In that moment, we were probably as distant as we’ve ever been because I could not understand why she loved Grey either—the chair was probably just a metaphor. I liked him fine, but back then I couldn’t see what there was to love about this awkwardly boyish but actually much older man. Catherine was inscrutable in her passion for him, and for the silly chair. I understand him now; perhaps one day I’ll get the chair too.

  For now Grey seems terribly uncomfortable perched in it. Of course, it might not be the chair.

  “How are you, Grey?”

  “Oh, well, you know—okay, I guess. I have a lot of muffins. Work’s been easy on me since I went back. You’re back this week too, right? At least it’s something to do, right?”

  I nod, surprised that he remembered. “Yes, it’s good to be back. Bought a new mascara for the occasion. Everyone was kind.”

  He smiles tightly. “Your eyelashes do look nice.”

  “Do you…have you heard anything new?”

  He shakes his head slowly. “You?”

  “Oh, no. Well, I’m sure they’d call you first.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know what to do anymore. I feel I should be doing something. Like how can I just watch TV and eat salad or whatever. In the evenings and stuff. I should be—I should be… ”

  “What?” I lean toward him—I want to know what I should be doing too.

  “Out, I guess. Going out, talking to people, looking…It’s ridiculous, I know. But I feel like I should still be looking for her.”

  “I’m sure the police are doing everything, well, everything there is to do.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know.” He pushes his palms down his thighs like he is sluicing off dirty water. “I trust them, I just don’t have anything else to do. I feel bad watching the shows she liked. She hated when I watched stuff without her. I’ve been reading a lot, but… ”

  “Me too. Poetry mainly, things she likes. That Julianna Ohlin, the writer who lived around here.”

  “Oh, yeah. I just finished one of hers. Sometimes the Door Sticks—that one?”

  I nod a little.

  “She was really engrossed in that one right before…Then after she was gone, I searched all over and couldn’t find it. Maybe she had it with her, I dunno. I had to get my assistant to order me a copy.”

  “Oh, she left it at my place, actually,” I say. “It’s not bad. I like the one—I like the poem where the speaker is standing at the bus stop and it’s just coming on dawn—that one with the bird?”

  “I think it’s called ‘Service Disruption.’ ” Grey picks up a muffin and carefully chews off one side. “I like that one. It’s funny—the gullwing arcing like the socket of a headlamp. I don’t completely get it, but I get why Catherine liked her. Ohlin.”

&nb
sp; “When she was first—first gone, I didn’t sleep. Not really at all. I just read the books that were lying around, and she’d left that one on my couch. I read some of those poems over and over. Now they feel, I don’t know, important. Connected with her. I just keep reading them.”

  “I know, right? Everything feels like a message. Like the last text she sent me, saying she’d see me soon? Or the clothes she had in the laundry when she disappeared. I didn’t do laundry for almost two weeks, but then I ran out of underwear and when I dumped everything out there were little red panties at the bottom.” He suddenly stands—I can’t tell if he’s just embarrassed that he said the word panties to his mother-in-law or if it’s something else.

  “Do you sleep, Grey? Are you getting enough sleep? Or any?”

  I see his shoulders hunch up and down in his neat shirt, but he lowers himself back beside me. “Oh, some, I guess. It’s weird. I lived alone for so long before Catherine and never really minded it. Now, I mean, of course I miss her—I love her. But also the bed feels so huge and awkward. There’s no one there to keep the blankets from all lumping up on my side.”

  “I’ve lived alone as long as you’ve lived with Catherine, and I half expect I always will. But alone is just a lot of space for your thoughts. If your thoughts are good, being alone is no big deal. Since she’s been gone, my thoughts are…I look forward to our Wednesdays so much, Grey.”

  “Me too. You have so many good stories about her.” His jaw trembles slightly around the muffin he is gnawing on.

  The tears flood my eyes, quiver a moment, and then spill, filtering through my stiff black eyelashes. A blush creeps up my neck, and I hurry to wipe my face with the back of my hand. When my eyes clear, though, I see Grey is weeping too, glassy tears streaking silently down his chin, but his only action is to gently pat me on the shoulder before pouring us more tea.

  “You do too, Grey, you do. I love the stories you tell about her. That one where she got the Great Dane to jump in her lap when you guys were camping.”

  He chuckles, a bit hiccupy. “She’s a funny girl, all right.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to enrol her in French immersion?”

  He sniffs and picks up his cup. “No, tell me.” His eyes are still wet, and so are mine, but for once feel I can ignore the tears, and the fact that we both know I’ve told this story so many times before. This is the place to weep for Catherine, for as long as we want.

  Before (Some Things)

  The sushi place is in a strip mall behind another strip mall—Catherine couldn’t even see it from the road, though it has a fluttering yellow Grand Opening banner, dimpled with snow and hung crookedly across the window.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even like cooked fish all that much.”

  “Sure you do,” Grey says. “You like shrimp and stuff.”

  Grey is already out of the car and pressing the lock remote just as she pulls the door handle to get out too. She cocks her head and looks at him through the windshield until he laughs and hits unlock. As she steps out of the car, the wind flips the banner over backwards—a sound like thunder in a grade-school play. The lot is full of slush puddles that will not be kind to her new brown suede boots, which are soft and slouchy with a low round heel. She is a waitress every day but Tuesdays and Wednesdays, in a restaurant much nicer than this, so she’s vain today in her frivolous shoes—she really doesn’t want them to get wet.

  “Shrimp is shellfish. That’s not like fish-fish, right?”

  He takes her arm to steady her as she steps wide over a puddle. “This place has shrimp. You’ll like it. You’ll see.”

  It’s warmer inside, if humid. There is a narrow lobby between the two sets of glass doors, a space heater blasting, the only ornament a bulletin board advertising local babysitters with feathered paper tabs at the bottom. Catherine immediately zeroes in on the missing person poster for Donny Zimmerman, the high-school senior who went missing in February. Each poster is different—she’s seen at least a dozen around town, and there’s always a few new details, another photo. She pictures his mom tirelessly making poster after poster, every time adding some new piece of information or better picture to bring him home. This one has a colour photo of him surrounded by green grass and soccer balls, and mentions that he’s six-foot-one and one hundred and eighty pounds, allergic to soy. Some of the other posters she’s seen mention a birthmark on his shin, chestnut brown hair, the kind of shoes he was wearing. Catherine already knows most of this; she knows a lot about Donny Zimmerman for someone she has never met. She can’t help reading all the articles in the paper and being drawn to the posters: that big-toothed smile, that heartbreakingly young face. She wants him to be found, to go back to playing sports and driving his snazzy car, but he’s been gone close to five weeks—the posters are getting ratty and some have been taken down.

  Grey and Catherine are seated in a cushionless booth with a view of their car through the window. There’s a narrow white vase on the table holding a single orange carnation. Catherine pokes at a petal—real. She nods, satisfied, but Grey isn’t paying attention.

  Catherine studies him as he studies the menu: the grit of stubble along his jaw, the bare patch on top of his head, wider every year. He is so serious, bending over the list of entrées, she smiles.

  “What?”

  “What do I know about sushi? You can order.”

  “I’m not an expert or anything. Just pick something that sounds good.”

  Catherine almost opens her folded menu, then doesn’t. “I want you to order for me. Like the olden days. Like you were the head of the family.”

  “Ha! Is this a sexual thing?”

  She grins. She’s only ever unselfconscious about her crooked teeth with Grey.

  “Okay, then—” He starts reading his menu again. “You seem like an eel girl to me, oh, and something with avocado in it, right?” He watches her face for several seconds, then nods. “Right.”

  Behind Grey’s head and slightly to the left is a bobbing pink baby, lofted up and down by a woman in the next booth. The little girl might be more toddler than baby—she has soft feathers of hair bunched into pink elastics on either side of her head, and she’s smiling and making eye contact, just like a real person. Her mother, or whoever the lady holding her is, joggles her up and down. It seems she has comforted the child out of some small tragedy; glassy buds of tears dot her round cheeks, but her mouth is still, her eyes clear. Finally, after a long moment of staring, she smiles wetly at Catherine, her pink tongue exposed between her tiny sugar-white teeth.

  Grey is chatting with the waitress, happily gesturing with the menu—she knows his demeanour without looking away from the baby. As the waitress departs, Grey glances over his shoulder, following the path of Catherine’s gaze. He turns back, smiling too, his tongue in the exact same position as the baby’s.

  —

  After lunch, they go home and Catherine lies on her belly on the couch, reading. Her laptop is on the coffee table, so she can take notes if she twists her whole body off the couch. It’s not comfortable, but it works. The book she’s reading is called Sometimes the Door Sticks, today a poem about a heart beating beside the poet in the night that does nothing but echo her loneliness. Catherine has felt that way a few times, nights she couldn’t sleep after a fight with Grey but still had to lie beside him, watching the rise and fall of his sleeping chest. It feels worse to be upset and not comforted by Grey when he’s right there than to be upset alone. She wonders if she is missing the point of the poem, but Professor Altaris will be happy enough to know she found a meaning; he’s not a dictator about interpretation.

  Grey’s feet thonk-thonk in the hallway above her and then she hears him rustling in the office and sometime after that in the basement. She is working toward a thesis for her essay about how the poetry that makes a reader uncomfortable or vaguely irritated might be challenging a reader’s sense of self. Is that a good thing? She isn’t sure yet. According
to the jacket copy and the Wikipedia entry she read earlier, this poet, Julianna Ohlin, seems to have had a life a lot like Catherine’s, at least up until now. They both waitress, they were both young when they hooked up with their partners, they both liked school and books. But Julianna’s life was harder—she was truly poor instead of mainly okay like Catherine. And she had to move away from her family when she was practically still a kid. And her boyfriend was violent and probably murdered her in the end. And yet she still wrote these poems that Catherine can hold in her hands and mind years later. All Catherine writes are term papers and dinner orders and that’s about it. And yet the girl in the poem about accidentally running over the tomato plant in a truck, drunk, late at night seems like she could be Catherine in another life.

  She flips over onto her back to take a break from the book and rests her laptop on her belly so she can scroll through her news feed. One story is about Donny Zimmerman, only it isn’t really news—just a reminder that he is still gone, people are still upset, the police are still trying. Catherine can’t help but imagine what it must be like to be his father, his mother, his friends from school. A disappearance is different than a death—there’s nowhere to put your grief, exactly. The parents keep appearing on the news, trying to seem composed though they are less and less convincing. She can’t even fathom what the worst-case scenario must be for them, but clearly they have thought it out, in terrifying detail—you can see it in their tight faces, their professional wool coats hanging open despite the cold. She has watched Donny Zimmerman’s elegant parents, bitmapped and jerky on the cbc.ca clip, pleading with anyone who might know anything about where Donny was to contact the police. The intensity with which they spoke to the camera, all the cords in their necks straining, made it clear they didn’t believe he’d run away with a girl or wandered into the woods while wasted and died of hypothermia. There was someone for them to talk to through the screens and lens. They believed he had been taken. Catherine’s mind can’t go that far—the couch is too comfortable; Grey is too close and comforting, his shuffling steps audible in the house even when she can’t see him.