So Much Love Read online

  Catherine shifts back on the rug, trying to get the soft part of her forearm under his head. The way he’s lying now, the whole weight of his skull is on the knob of her wrist. He has lost so much weight since he was in those basketball-practice videos they showed on Live at Five, but the head is heavy no matter what. There is no such thing as skull fat. Dex should have come down with dinner by now, she thinks, because the light has disappeared. But that could be a storm dimming the window, or cloud cover. Maybe Dex has just put something on the other side of the bushes to block out the sun. He would deprive them of even that, if he thought of it.

  When Catherine first staggered down the stairs into the basement, she could barely see Donny in the flickering fluorescent light. He was just a silhouette of thick, wavy hair standing in clumps and spikes—he was no one to her, neither friend nor enemy. Donny was skinny even then.

  Ever since Dex grabbed her, Catherine had known what was happening to her. She had tried not to know, but Donny’s presence confirmed her terrifying theory. Taken. Kidnapped, and not for any ransom or reason. Just taken, to be kept.

  When Dex beckoned her across the parking lot, dusk was falling and he just looked like a contractor in dusty steel-toed boots on his way home in an old van. He was sitting on the floor of the van, feet sticking out through the open back door. There was a map in his lap, a tube of Pringles beside him. He was a big guy, muscular and overalled, but he came off as placid and confused in the parking lot, just asking for directions to a building supply store in Turgrove. Why would he be so far off the highway, if he was heading for Turgrove, a distant suburb? She hadn’t questioned it, had been tired from her shift, eager to help and to catch the bus, and get to Grey, dinner with Evan and Angie, her evening, her life.

  It wasn’t even late, or fully night, there were other cars moving around the parking lot. How did it happen? How did she allow it to happen? He waited for her to get close, then spent a few minutes asking dumb questions, getting east and west mixed up, making her lean over to see the map, before he hooked an arm behind her knees, and pressed his palm over her lips. There was something terrible in his hand, a rag that had been soaked in a gummy liquid, she couldn’t place the sweet rancid smell. But even before she passed out, she never screamed. Not even one little whimper until hours later. She doesn’t know why she didn’t scream.

  She woke up in a shadowy garage, her legs bent awkwardly underneath her. Dex had opened the door to the van and was yanking her out by the armpits. She was slick with sweat and she could smell it from inside her open coat, thick and swampy, mixed in with the smell of dirt and motor oil. When Dex picked her up she tried to fight, but her limbs were just starting to respond. They fluttered limp and aimless. When he put her down, her legs were still weak and her face was wet with tears and drool and she wasn’t sure; anything could have happened in the van. He hadn’t struck her yet that she knew of, but what did she know; she didn’t even know how long she’d been unconscious.

  There is a gap here—she remained conscious, she hasn’t forgotten, she just dances away from the memory, like fingers brushed against burnt skin. And then she’s pushed, staggering down the stairs into the basement. Dex had been holding her wrists in his giant hand and when he shoved her down the stairs she was startled to realize she was free, or at least unbound. She had been struggling so violently and was still so doped, she had somehow imagined in her panic that there were ropes or chains on her, not just Dex’s grip. She heard a sharp gasp, someone breathing at the other end of the room, a cough that sounded male. The first hit didn’t fell her, but the second made her reel and then the floor just seemed safer anyway, so firm and cold. She crouched; she cowered. She didn’t know Donny was weeping for her, pressed against the painted cement wall. She didn’t know he was waiting to comfort her, as soon as Dex turned the lock in the basement door.

  Now they sit together in the dark and she knows him well enough to stroke his face while she holds his head in her lap. His skin is cool and tacky with the sort of thick sweat you get with a fever. Donny’s been dying for a couple days—there’s a wheeze in his chest that could be pneumonia or a punctured lung. Neither of them have any idea what the problem is. She leans down close to where his face looms pale—it must be evening, the light through the high, tiny barred basement window is fading. “Are you hot?”

  He twists his head and she feels his hair grating on her thigh. He says something, but she doesn’t catch words.

  “Not hot?”

  There’s a long pause, then a whisper: “Cold.”

  “Here, I’ll—” She’ll what, exactly? There aren’t a lot of options. If the overhead light were working, she could find the blanket, but so little of the twilight penetrates the basement that it’s a hopeless plan at this hour. It couldn’t have gone far, but if one of them was wrapped in it when they went to the toilet bucket in the far corner and then threw it off—it could take hours to find. Sometimes Donny can find it by feel, but Catherine always loses track of what sections of the floor she’s touched and has to start over. And Donny would be left alone while she searched. Instead, Catherine lowers her torso and squirms down to lie alongside Donny without letting go of him. She wants to be face to face: that way she can keep him warm, rest, and still feel him breathing, being alive.

  Despite her careful manoeuvres, she accidentally drops his head sideways onto the floor. He lolls awkwardly and doesn’t whimper as his nose grinds into the cement. He is too silent. If he has died without her realizing, if she doesn’t get to say any kind of goodbye—that can’t happen. When she finally positions the length of her body beside him, she leans her face toward his to see if his eyes have opened.

  Ever since the last fluorescent tube in the ceiling fixture blew out a day or two ago, they’ve only had the dirt-encrusted window for light. Some sun does come through, but just a glimmer, striped by the security bars and the branches of the hedge.

  But now night is falling and it’s goddamn dark and Donny’s face is all jut and shadow, and she has trouble making out if his eyes are open even with her cheek pressed to his. Then he says, “Cat,” and she slumps with relief.

  “Yeah, Don, I’m here. I’m here. What do you need?”

  It could be a sigh, or just his usual raspy breathing. “I don’t know. No. I don’t feel good.”

  Some of the shadows are bruises, she knows. Dex took Donny upstairs early in the week and she could hear the blows falling. When Dex comes downstairs empty-handed, that’s what happens—if he isn’t bringing them supplies, he’s wanting something, someone.

  She can hear Donny’s voice again, softer now, just breath shaped into words. There are no other sounds in the house, not even the TV. It has been like this for a while, she can’t tell how long but longer than usual. Is Dex gone? Did he leave them? Could something have happened to him? When she strikes out against his chest or arms, he feels as solid and unbreakable as granite, but anyone could slip in the shower, bang his head, lapse into unconsciousness, drown in three inches of water, not be found for weeks in his sealed-up house. She knows there is no way out for her without Dex somehow allowing it. Even with Donny whispering against her face, she is still thinking about the ways out for her.

  He is saying something rhythmic, not conversation but a chant. “ ‘Why, look you now…how unworthy a thing you make of…me! You would play upon me…you would seem to know my stops…you would pluck out the heart of my…mystery…’ ” He keeps pausing to wheeze and gasp, but Catherine knows he is reciting Hamlet again. He was not studying that when Dex took him—his grade twelve class had finished it the previous semester, but he’d memorized big chunks for the exam and it stuck with him. In return, Catherine offered him all the Julianna Ohlin poems she could remember from working on her essay for Professor Altaris’s poetry class. At first she tried to describe them—the bit about a stray dog finding half a doughnut in the grass, the sad moment when the truck tire crushes a tomato—there were lots of great little images that made Do
nny smile and nod, or at least gave them something to talk about for a while. She found she knew a lot of the poems off by heart—stanza after stanza of Ohlin’s work unspooling rhythmically from her mouth, sometimes catching her by surprise. She wasn’t sure she was getting the poems right. She had always found her memory to be more faulty than it seemed, convinced she’d gotten all the groceries when she was missing half. Had she invented some of the lines? They sounded right, so it didn’t really matter if they were hers or Julianna’s. Anything Donny and Catherine remember, think or imagine, they’ve said to each other so many times now that the stories and poems and lines and anecdotes belong to them both equally. Everything is shared.

  She knows so much about him—the love of English class, the way his voice seems deeper when he sobs, every movie he can remember watching, how far he went with his first girlfriend. Only girlfriend, now, she realizes. “ ‘…you would sound me from…my lowest note to the top of my compass…’ ” The wheezing is getting worse, and his voice is fainter. She leans in and tries to shush him, tells him to rest, but he just keeps going: “ ‘…and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ…’ ” He is losing the tone, the appropriate cheerful rage that he usually brings to these lines. He has taught Catherine the whole play; he doesn’t seem to have any trouble explaining why characters acted the way they did. She imagines him sitting beside her in Professor Altaris’s class, nodding at the lectures, sharing notes on meter, discussing close readings, borrowing books. He was supposed to graduate this spring—he could be in classes with her at the university in the fall. Except they are locked in a basement and Donny is delirious.

  “Donny.” He doesn’t pause. “Donny!” She shakes him gently and his face tightens in pain; even in the dim light she can see the harsh creases at the corners of his mouth.

  “Hey, Cat. Hey.”

  “How do you feel? How’s your…breathing?” She doesn’t even know what to ask.

  “It hurts. I dunno. Did you call Kyla?”

  She has to stop and think. She knows all the major characters in Donny’s life, former life, but she can’t imagine interacting with any of them. They are only characters to her, in the story Donny keeps telling. Kyla is his girlfriend. Yes. Catherine is so tired that it takes a long time for her to realize that Donny’s question makes no sense. If she could have called anyone, she would have called everyone, months ago. They would no longer be here if she could have called anyone, ever, even once.

  “This one time, at school, I was supposed to meet Ky after…and walk home with her.”

  “Yeah?” Suddenly he is speaking so easily, the words tumbling. This should be a good thing, but Catherine isn’t sure it is.

  “ ’Cept I had this English quiz, right? And…for some reason I bombed it, just couldn’t answer one damn question. And it was on…Hamlet, and I love Hamlet…It was crazy, not knowing those answers—like having a stroke. And then, I handed in this—” his breath catches in his throat, a high-pitched hiccup.

  Catherine loves Donny in the fierce way of love that has no other outlet. And because he has been so kind to her, ever since her first day in this place, giving her sections of his orange when she ate hers too fast. And because he is a sweet kid with an A average who never cheated on his girlfriend, and he doesn’t deserve to die in a basement with a stranger he has never seen in good light.

  But most deeply, Catherine loves Donny because he keeps her from being alone.

  Catherine has never been alone, not really. She met Grey when she was twenty. That year she was taking her third university class, English literature since the beginning of time, and working the dinner shift in a strip-mall restaurant on the edge of the city. She had a few good friends, plus her mom was always there, and then she had Grey too. They met in the emergency room after a slosh from the deep fryer scalded her left arm. Sitting in the basement, she struggles to focus on that incandescent moment when her eyes first met the man she would marry. At first, the whole memory is pain—a hot blur of it. But when she thinks for a while, and there’s nothing else for her to do but think, she begins to pull out the individual filaments, isolate the luminous moments within the pain.

  That scalding felt exactly like the bone-deep fire she would’ve suspected, and even after all the Tylenol she had in her purse, her mind was just a blaring red veil. For a long time—she doesn’t know how long—she sat in the slick vinyl chair of St. Anne’s Hospital ER, clutching her arm wrapped in a dishcloth she was increasingly certain was not even clean. That’s the centrepiece of the memory: how her body felt perched in that uncomfortable chair with her healthy right arm reaching across her body to brace the pulsing pain of the left one. She has saved this description of the agony all these years because there was no space for it on the intake form.

  The restaurant manager, not very interested in her injury but vaguely afraid of lawsuits, had sent another waitress with her to the hospital. Aimee bought Ringolos from the vending machine, and then ate them one by one off her pinky finger, sitting hip to hip with Catherine, staring straight ahead. Catherine was sweating under her hair, woozy from the pain, convinced microbes were invading her body from the thick beige cotton dishtowel, but she still would’ve liked a Ringolo. To have at least been offered a Ringolo. A burn victim should have privileges and, in the fuss, she’d left her bag at the restaurant. Finally she just asked.

  “Hey, can I have a couple of those?”

  Aimee stared at her as if she were something dripped on her dress. It wasn’t that nice a dress—the staff at Betty’s had leeway with what they wore, but Aimee always wore black shapeless things. Catherine shrugged. “I don’t have any change.”

  Aimee tipped the bag toward Catherine, who gingerly unlocked her fingers from around the grimy towel and inserted one possibly also grimy finger slowly into the red foil bag, trying to slot her fingertip into a ring without being able to see them. Aimee rolled her eyes.

  Walking past, a man said cheerfully, “Ringolos are the best!”

  That was Grey, and she would find out within the hour not only his name but also that he had fallen from a low rock wall he’d been climbing for no real reason. His friend Evan had brought him in to have his arm set and, waiting in the chilly waiting room, Grey clutched his arm in the same cross-body hold as Catherine did. As he sat carefully across from her, he nodded at her arms. “Hey, we’re mirror twins.” But they weren’t really, because Grey’s shoulders hung loose, and he chatted with his translucently blond friend about the CP24 weather screen in the corner in a manner that did not suggest he felt the same pain pulses she did. He was older than her, she knew by the flash of skin on the back of his head, but he was bouncy with nervous energy, and he spoke just a bit too loudly, like a boy.

  Aimee sucked barbecue-flavoured dust off her finger, then glanced at her watch. “Okay, I’m gonna go.”

  Catherine crunched down on a thick potato-paste O. It was funny how the pain didn’t fade, or become more tolerable as the night went on. Her arm was still a hot throb, a mini-sun stuck under the filthy dishcloth. She chewed and swallowed. “Go?”

  “Yeah, well, my shift was five to eleven, so Dave’s expecting me? And I gotta get my bus, right? Else I’ll be here all night?”

  The pulse, the scald. What could she really ask of Aimee, who wouldn’t even share her snack foods without prompting? Make her miss the bus? In Iria, that really would waste the whole night. “See you, then.”

  Aimee’s blond head loomed closer. “What did you say? You’re all slurry.”

  “Just—just, good night.”

  Catherine whispers whatever kind, sweet words come into her mind: quiet, calm, soft, relax, okay, love, space, good night, perfect, gentle, eventual, night. Then she recites one of the Ohlin poems she remembers, In the motherly darkness, in the tight warm quiet of night…. Professor Altaris said that poem was about secret anger, about hiding, and something that could not be said, but Catherine doesn’t see that at all. Even now, when sh
e’s so angry for all that she’s lost, for Donny, for all the cuts and bruises on her back and thighs, the poem doesn’t seem angry to her—just comforting. She says it to Donny again, the part about the cat’s cool ears and the swampy smell of home, and then continues through every poem she can remember, giving him the sound of her voice, her words.

  He twists to face her, muttering, “What happened to Julianna? Did she write another book?”

  She often tells Donny facts about the poet too, things she remembered from Professor Altaris’s lecture or the biographical note in the back of her books. Catherine had done a lot of research for her paper, so she knew that Julianna had lived in the west end of Iria when she was a kid, that she’d gone to the same university as Catherine and maybe where Donny would go someday. Catherine struggles with how to talk about the husband, though—usually she just stops at that point, but tonight she is tired. Donny wants the stories to go somewhere good, for Julianna to be happy or at least successful, but she can’t give him that, even though she really wants to. Still he’s asking and she hasn’t eaten or had any water or even peed all day, and she can’t think of anything to do but answer.

  “She had another book, but other people put that together from what they found in her notebooks after she died.”

  “No. How old was she when she died?”

  Shit. Donny is hurting too much. She wanted to tell him beautiful fairy tales, but she can’t lie—she never could. “She died when she was twenty-seven; everyone was pretty certain that her boyfriend murdered her, but it was never proven. He…drove his car off a bridge and killed himself, so it never came to court.”

  Donny’s slender body goes limp against her. “Oh. That’s awful. She seemed—I thought she must have been a good person because the poems are so…kind. How could she have died so young?”

  He’s thinking about whether they will survive down here, or for how much longer; certainly that’s what Catherine is thinking. She suspects he wants Julianna’s story to have a happy ending so that they will have one too. So she keeps trying to patch up the story, make it okay. Okay enough.