Watching you without me, p.11
Watching You Without Me, page 11
I took a step toward the window and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. It had a small shelf installed below it, a shelf that had always held, as far as I could remember, scrub brushes and special laundry products like Shout for getting out tough stains. But the shelf didn’t have that stuff anymore. Instead, it held a small array of framed family photographs.
I’d seen these pictures before. They were snapshots Irene had taken and stuck into miniature frames at various points over the years. The house was full of such pictures. For as long as I could remember, Irene’s end tables and shelves had always been littered with these small, framed, concentrated hits of memory. But I’d never seen them in the laundry room before. I picked each of them up in turn to get a good look. Grandma Gillis holding me as a baby while toddler Kelli looked on from our mother’s lap. Then one of me at sixteen, dressed for a formal dance and looking sort of inappropriately sexy. I was wearing a low-cut dress that I bought for myself at the mall as a kind of punishment of my mother because she had been too busy to shop for it with me. I remembered being surprised by the resigned way she had accepted this punishment at the time — she sighed, dutifully took my picture, gave me a shawl to “keep warm,” and that had been the extent of it. But what I could not remember her ever doing was framing this photo and leaving it out on display. The last time I saw it, it had been tucked safely away in a photo album chronicling my teen years.
Then there was a photo of Irene alone that I had seen many times before — she used to keep it by her bed — Irene in her forties, around the age I was now, standing up in front of her choir at midnight Mass, hair curled, earrings twinkling, warbling the solo. She was backgrounded by a wall of lit candles and her mouth was wide with song. Her eyes sparkled heavenward and it was a beautiful, triumphant portrait — one of those photographs that were so rare in the days before digital, where, as if by magic, you were captured precisely as you’d always hoped to see yourself.
And finally there was a fourth, lone photograph, of Kelli sitting on her stool, looking out the window. It had been taken about twenty years ago, and thirty-year-old Kelli sat in precisely the same posture and attitude with which she had sat on that stool every day since. She weighed less then. Her hair was more blond than silvery, and her shoulders had less of a hunch to them. But the essential Kelli hadn’t changed.
My eyes shifted back and forth between the photographs as the light hummed overhead. But the humming didn’t reassure me anymore. Seeing the pictures in this new context made them seem alien. Here was Irene looking perfect, here was me looking a way I never looked, here was Kelli looking, as always, like Kelli. Why would Irene have plucked these particular photos from the album, the end tables, the knick-knack shelves, and placed them here? They were lined up side by side, in a bit of a semi-circle. Place a candle before them and you’d have a shrine.
14
Even though I had cut back on home care at maybe the stupidest time possible — the time when things were genuinely about to get busy after weeks of numbness and inertia — I was slowly starting to realize that I was doing ok. I didn’t feel nearly as oppressed and put upon as I had during those endless post-funeral days, when the care workers dutifully arrived to take Kelli down for baths — and out for walks, in Trevor’s case — and therefore off my hands for an hour or so every afternoon. That brief, daily reprieve was a freedom I had, at the time, insisted to myself I needed. But now I didn’t seem to need that freedom after all. Why, I wondered, had I placed such stock in it for so long? In being alone, unhindered? Hadn’t I had my fill of unhindered solitude these past few years? It turned out that I had.
I was entering a new phase. Instead of feeling burdened by my role as Kelli’s keeper, now I felt energized and dynamic. Kelli was a problem to be daily grappled with, and every day that I grappled with her — to whatever degree of success — gave me a sense of purpose and accomplishment. For one thing, I started taking Kelli everywhere with me, the way my mother used to do — wrestling her into her jacket and prodding her into her shoes and nagging her into the car to come with me on errands and anything else I felt like doing. Kelli and I went to the bank. We went grocery shopping. We met Jessica for coffee to sign paperwork for the sale of the house. When we were feeling cooped up, we drove down to the waterfront and rode the commuter ferry across the harbour and back. When we didn’t feel like cooking, we took ourselves out to Boston Pizza, or down the hill to the Brass Rail — a favourite special-occasions restaurant of my mother’s — where you could order a slab of pan-fried haddock so large it hung off either side of the plate.
These outings didn’t always go a hundred percent smoothly — I’m thinking in particular of the moment in the grocery store when the button on Kelli’s pants went flying after she bent over to pick up an avocado I’d unknowingly nudged out of the bin. As she straightened, the pants slid to her ankles and, me being distracted by the grocery list, Kelli determined that the best thing to do was step out of them and continue on her way. I was learning to take this sort of thing in stride. People staring was not the end of the world. Teenagers pulling out their phones and managers approaching to ask if they could “help” were easily dispatched, especially once I learned to apply my mother’s ice-queen imperiousness — a persona she reserved especially for this kind of incident. As a kid, I called it my mother’s “good-day-to-you-sir” because everything she uttered in that tone sounded like it should be followed up by those five words. Now I found myself rocking a frosty good-day-to-you-sir all my own (“Put the phone away right now, young man. I’m not going to tell you again”). I had rolled my eyes whenever she affected it back when I was growing up — I’d found it so theatrical and needlessly bitchy. But now I saw it was a secret weapon.
It was all this running around that probably kept Kelli from noticing she was no longer being taken for her walks two days a week. Or if she did notice, she didn’t complain about it to me. Kelli was wonderfully low maintenance during this period — except for her bouts of wakefulness, which lately had developed a new wrinkle. Every so often, I realized, after a couple of restful, undisturbed nights, Kelli would get up without waking me. Which sounds like it should have been great, but those were the occasions it turned out I had to watch out for. Because Kelli seemed to be moving stuff. One morning I got up and the kitchen chairs were all over the place — one in the doorway of the kitchen, one turned facing away from the table, another in the living room. Another time I got up and found the blue recycling bin my mother always kept in a corner of the kitchen on its side at the top of the stairs.
“You can’t put stuff there, Kell,” I told her. “One of us could trip.”
“Trip fall down,” acknowledged Kelli.
“That’s right,” I said. “Don’t move stuff around when you get up, ok? It’s just going to make you more awake.”
“Don’t move stuff, no,” Kelli agreed. But it kept happening. One afternoon I opened the hallway closet and found everything on the floor. All the coats and jackets had been pulled off their hangers.
The strangest thing about all this was that it seemed so uncharacteristically energetic of Kelli. In her waking hours, Kelli never even roused herself to so much as open the closet door, let alone rifle through the coats or rearrange furniture. Could it be, I wondered, that she was sleepwalking? And, in sleepwalking, was she a completely different kind of Kelli?
I decided not to worry about it. Whatever was prodding her out of bed those nights didn’t seem to cast a shadow on Kelli’s daylight hours and that was all that mattered. She was cheerful and easygoing company lately, seeming to enjoy all our errand running, not to mention the treats I bought her afterwards for being good — and she liked seeing Jessica. Getting her off her stool and into the car wasn’t nearly the pitched battle it used to be. It occurred to me that maybe keeping Kelli busy had been the key to keeping Kelli happy and compliant this whole time. I’ll admit it. I was starting to think I had a real handle on things. Right up until the afternoon that Jessica took us condo shopping.
* * *
They were always tickled in equal measure to see one another. When I first reintroduced them, Kelli remembered Jessica at once — or not quite at once, but as soon as Jessica reminded her of a game they used to play together. “Kelli,” she had said, “Do you remember Round and Round the Garden?” And Kelli, who hadn’t yet made eye contact, but who’d been smiling to herself and rocking slightly to the sound of Jessica’s pleasing voice, had abruptly stuck out one pudgy hand, palm facing up.
Jessica took the hand in both of hers and started marching two glossy fingernails across my sister’s palm, incanting: “Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear . . . One step, two step . . . tickle under there!” At which point Jessica pretended to tickle Kelli under the armpit — remembering or perhaps intuiting that Kelli wasn’t crazy about abrupt or intimate touching.
Kelli’s smile grew big and she erupted in heh-heh-hehs. And then she spoke the words: Jenny Mad-tall. Which, I only remembered now, had been her pronunciation of Jessie’s name back when we were all children together.
So that was how the afternoon began — like all our other Jessica-rendezvous, starting with some kind of elaborate coffee confection for Kelli, one or two games of Round and Round punctuated by multiple eruptions of heh-heh-heh (especially once all that sugar and caffeine hit Kelli’s bloodstream), which always got Jessica and me chuckling too. Good feelings all around. So I had no reason to anticipate Kelli giving me any trouble during the condo hunt, and she didn’t — not for the first couple of viewings anyway. She gamely accompanied us into one generic, freshly painted living space after another, annoyed if there were too many stairs, or by the fact that there wasn’t any place to sit down once we got there, but otherwise agreeable, strolling from room to room with us and even offering opinions when they were solicited.
“Think you’d like to live here, Kelli?”
“Live here,” said Kelli.
“This would work for us ok, don’t you think?”
Kelli glanced with disapproval at the empty kitchen. “Eat,” she remarked.
“No, there’s nothing here to eat yet, is there? But we can fix that if we have to.”
“Fix that,” agreed Kelli.
The mood shifted when it came time to check out a couple of high-rises. I’d forgotten Kelli had an issue with elevators. Kelli did not often have occasion to ride an elevator — usually only when my mother took her for various medical or dental appointments. She would if she had to, but she would never do so happily, and she would always be vocal about her feelings. I remember being driven crazy by my mother’s patience with Kelli on those occasions, how she stood, holding the door open, even as other people, strangers, entered and stared daggers at her and Kelli, wondering what the holdup was. But my mother just stood there, holding the door, calling sweetly to Kelli as Kelli paced and muttered and shook her stubborn head.
Getting her in hadn’t been a problem. At that point in the afternoon, it felt as if Kelli would’ve followed Jessica over a ledge. But the moment the elevator started to move, all Kelli’s disinclination came flooding back. “Agh!” she yelled as we began to lurch upward. “Brok-en! Floor brok-en!”
“It’s just an elevator,” I told her. “You’ve been in elevators before, Kelli.”
“El-vaer,” said Kelli, the way someone else might say “maggots” or “sex offender.”
Jessica glanced over at us. “She ok?”
“No,” said Kelli.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“If it’s an issue,” said Jessica, “we can cross the high-rises off the list.”
“No, no,” I said. “That’s gotta be like eighty percent of the buildings. It won’t kill her.”
“Kill her,” said Kelli.
The doors slid open and Kelli flung herself into the hallway.
It just got worse from there. The condo, with its granite countertops, vertiginous view, and energy-efficient fridge, had been looked over, and soon enough it was time to get back in the elevator again. This time, Kelli kicked up a major stink.
“No el-vaer. Not.”
“Kelli,” I said. “You gotta get in.”
“No el-vaer, no!” Kelli stared at the ground and began rocking in place.
“Rocking’s not going to help!” I said, losing my patience. “We’re fifteen stories up! Do you wanna go home?”
“Home,” said Kelli.
“Then you have to get in the elevator.”
I was already in, mashing the button to keep the door open while Jessica stood in the hallway, looking back and forth between Kelli and me.
“Get in,” I said to Jessica.
“Are you sure?” said Jessica.
“We need to show her we’re serious. Come on, Kelli,” I said. “Jessica and I are leaving now. We have to leave.”
Jessica stepped into the elevator with me. Kelli hadn’t raised her head to witness this, but I knew she had registered it. She stood there rocking and whispering furiously to herself, maybe cursing me, maybe psyching herself up.
“Kelli!” I yelled. “Get in here!”
Kelli started yelling back at me, her furious whispering becoming abruptly loud and audible — a lot of nos and el-vaers and homes and Karies and proclamations that Kelli don’t want to, she don’t want to!
“Now!”
“No Karie no Karie no Karie no Karie —”
“Get the fuck in here!”
Without lowering the volume on her protests, Kelli finally lurched into the elevator — and hollered all the way to the ground floor, despite the presence of an apprehensive mother and bug-eyed daughter who had joined us a couple of floors down.
When it came time to see the next condo, Kelli wasn’t budging. I’d had every reason to expect that would be the case, but still it made me furious. The rage that overtook me in the previous building was still simmering as we drove to the next viewing. Jessica could feel it. She suggested a coffee break but I said no, we’d already had enough coffee and we’d already wasted enough time.
I knew I should’ve calmed down by now. A person couldn’t propose to spend her life with someone like my sister and be a grudge-holder. Because the sister in question literally cannot be reasoned with, and the person who is capable of reason needs to grasp that. A person needs to have, therefore — as her mother was always said to have — the patience of a saint. At the very least, a person needs to accept she’ll experience the occasional eruptions of anger, and then, saint-like, let them go.
But I couldn’t let it go. Things had been going so smoothly and Kelli had been such an easygoing delight and the two of us had been moving forward with such momentum and now, just as we were taking our first, shaky, newborn-foal steps into the future, now she digs in her heels? Now the old, familiar Kelli reasserts herself? By old and familiar, what I really meant, I suppose, was adolescent. Kelli’s mulishness had reminded me, viscerally, of our adolescence together — had transported me back into it, it felt like. As Jessica negotiated traffic to the next condo, I sat in the seat beside her, seething with what felt like a downright hormonal wash of irrationality and outrage. Because of course it was ridiculous to get mad at Kelli for being Kelli. I’d known that then as well as I knew it now. But, my angry teenage brain kept shrieking, why does Kelli always have to be so Kelli? My angry teenage brain felt righteous, convinced it had a point. It refused to back down.
“Are you coming, Kelli?” I said. Jessica had parked and the three of us sat tensely in the quiet car.
“Not coming,” said Kelli.
“We’re going to see another condo. Would you like to come with us or not?” My voice, I could hear, was ridiculous. I was spitting out each syllable like a toxin.
“Stay the car,” said Kelli.
“Last chance,” I said. “Jessica and I are going to go look at another place. Do you want us to go without you?”
“Not coming,” said Kelli. Her voice rose. “Not coming, no Karie, not coming, no, Kelli stay the car, Karie, no —”
“Fine!” I yelled.
I got out and slammed the door. Jessica got out a moment later, but kept the door open.
“Will she be ok?”
“She’ll be fine,” I said. “We’ll all be the better for it.”
Jessica bent down to talk to Kelli. “Gonna be ok, Kell?”
Kelli rocked and whispered sullenly to herself for a moment or two. “Car,” she said finally.
“Let her cool off,” I said.
“Let’s all cool off,” said Jessica.
* * *
The individual in question, as the police later described him, was only remarkable, appearance-wise anyway, in his unremarkability. If he had looked explicitly homeless, or mentally ill, or some combination of both — wild-haired, pants on backward, filthy-bearded — Jessica and I might’ve reacted with less confusion. I was angry at myself, afterwards, for my muted instincts, the way my first thought was to assume the man had made some kind of innocent mistake. I was witnessing something wrong, something threatening and out of the ordinary, and my mind had gone immediately to an assumption of safety, of surely everything’s ok. Perhaps the gentleman is confused; perhaps he just needs help. My instincts, I realized, had failed me, and they had failed Kelli. They had simply over-leaped the possibility of real danger in order to scuttle to the side of reassurance. And what kind of instincts were those?
