MEANDER

the river flows in sweeping meanders

After four days I realised that this time no one knew where Hetty was—not Rick, not Elaine, not anyone who lived at Marjorie with us, not me. We had a house dinner and Dill cooked and no one ate very much, and we talked about what Hetty had been like lately and what we could do when she came back again, and it felt a little bit okay for a while and then bad again after everyone went on with their nights and I was alone at the kitchen table with Whitney below me. She seemed to know something was wrong and kept kissing my legs with her tiny mouth, but I didn’t feel better because of it; I felt as if I was useless.

I could hear the muffled bawl of the wind outside and wondered if Hetty was ploughing through it to somewhere or if she was safe and warm. I was beginning to understand what the winter would be like—short of breath, desolate, washed out. The fall was lush and invigorating, but it was coming to an end.

The next morning Hetty still wasn’t beside me, and when I texted Elaine her reply was the same as it had been for days: No word here. I put the phone down and heaved myself up to dress for work, deciding what to wear through the murk in my head. It rang as I scuffled through my clothes drawer and my heart lifted—if it was Hetty I would love her and thank her and help her come home with my kindness. I promised myself this as I went to answer it.

It was Faith. I heard my voice when I said hello, soft and not a question, just a statement. I heard Faith reply the same way.

I had missed her, and told her with my insides stammering. She told me she’d missed me too. She asked me how I was and I told her I would tell her when I saw her and then I asked if I could see her and she said of course.

We agreed to meet that afternoon in the place that I thought of as the mini-amphitheatre, to the side of the Ontario College of Art and Design building, where older people in bright loose outfits did tai chi in the mornings and later students sat smoking after class. It had sloped edges and what could be a stage at the centre. It was near Cafe Art Song, and Faith was planning to spend the day taking photographs of people outside the small, old-fashioned mall across the road.

When I arrived at work my mind was full of Faith and Hetty, and I was glad we were busy. There were a few groups of students from a high school nearby who had spent the morning at the art gallery and needed lunch, and they stayed for almost two hours: one harried teacher and fifteen young people. Then we had a few small groups of older couples who wanted coffee and cake, and the rest of the day passed quickly.

After I’d finished my shift, I saw there was no word from Hetty but Elaine had tried to call me. I knew I should call her back, that if she was calling and not texting there must be news, but I wanted to hold out and see Faith first. It was busy on Dundas Street and the sky was yellow where it wasn’t grey-blue. I loved it like that.

I saw Faith waiting at the edge of the mini-amphitheatre before she saw me. She was sitting and watching a mother and child playing near her, and she was smiling. Faith didn’t scroll through her phone when she was out in the world. She liked to take in what was happening around her. I had noticed this and told her I knew it about her. She had been surprised, and genuinely interested to know that this was rare. Most of the people my age I saw around Toronto and Melbourne had their eyes turned down and their hand holding their phones so they could see the screens, despite the glare of the sun they weren’t acknowledging, or the beginning of the dusk they wouldn’t witness. Faith wasn’t like other people.

Before I got to her she looked over and saw me. She smiled even more and I could see she really was glad. I felt sick with relief.

‘Ness,’ she said when I had joined her and we were hugging. She breathed it into my hair and my ear, and it was so instantly mollifying I realised just how much I had needed her these past few weeks.

‘Oh,’ was all I could say for a while, and we stayed close together until I wondered if I was suffocating her and moved away.

She looked excited: flushed cheeks and wisps of hair blowing up against her face. It felt wonderful to be near her again after time apart, and I hoped I didn’t look too tired or dirty. I smiled too, letting the breeze that circled us do its dance. It was important to just be there with Faith, and I tried to let go of my worry about Hetty.

‘How are you?’ Faith asked me, her eyes searching.

‘I’m good. I missed you. I’m okay. But how are you?’

I wanted to say nothing or not very much and just have our eyes looking at each other, but too many words stumbled out. It was so strange to see her after all the thoughts I’d had about her since last time. She seemed hyper-real somehow, and my palms were lightly sweating.

Before she could answer I spoke again. ‘I like your coat.’

She was wearing a loose dark-red trench coat made of a soft, brushed fabric. It made her look even smaller than she usually did, as if she was hiding. I wanted to rub the material against my cheek, my neck.

‘Thank you,’ she said, pulling at the two parts of the collar, bringing it in towards her clavicle. ‘It’s from the Leslieville Value Village.’

‘Ah. Because no one but you would understand this red,’ I said, and pulled her to me again to kiss her forehead. I felt shy around her despite how brief the break between us had been, and I wanted to touch her and kiss her somewhere dim and private.

I pulled away from her and looked at her face, still pink, still shining. ‘Can we go back to yours?’

She shook her head quickly, firmly, and I felt everything inside me drop. I shouldn’t have asked. It was too much. She had never planned to sleep with me again, just wanted to make sure I was okay—to be friends, or something horrific like that.

I heard her sigh slightly. ‘Not today,’ she said. Her eyes were sad.

‘Of course, of course—sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No. It’s okay. I just can’t yet.’

‘Of course. You don’t have to explain—’

She took me by my shoulders with her small hands, lightly. ‘I want to, Ness. But I need to know that I can without feeling anxious again.’

‘Anxious?’

I waited and watched her but she didn’t say anything. She was looking at her hands now, and I didn’t want to disturb her.

Around us, people sat or stood against the circle of the amphitheatre. The mother and child had left. There were students a little way around. Two girls, both wearing thick-heeled boots, both smoking long thin cigarettes. I could smell clove in the air.

Finally, Faith looked up at me again. ‘Anxious about Hetty.’

She looked so worried, standing there. I felt a wave of something roll through my body, almost like nostalgia. Hetty. Faith’s idea of Hetty, as a beautiful tall creature dripping with other people’s tears. Swimming the length of a pool filled with blood in a bikini. I wished she knew Hetty the way I did. Knew the pool was actually full of rainwater. She would one day, if I could just behave myself.

‘Oh, Faith. Please don’t be anxious about Hetty—’

She was shaking her head and looking at her hands again. I needed to stop saying Hetty’s name. This wasn’t about her—or maybe it was, but I wanted that part to be over.

‘I understand, though. I do,’ I said.

She looked up and smiled.

‘Will we stake out the Korean supermarket for Margaret, then?’

She nodded and laughed, a peal against the dusk that had arrived around us. I took her hand and we turned and started up towards Bloor Street. The sky was pink now, edged with purple.

On Bloor we took a streetcar along to Koreatown. The supermarket was lit up against the dark of the sky, and we walked inside and took a basket each so we could move through the aisles and wait for her without looking like we weren’t planning to buy anything.

I chose a box of biscuit sticks tipped with pink frosting, the front depicting a panda with a smile and a strawberry hat, and gave it to Faith. She solemnly placed it in her basket and nodded, making us both laugh. No one noticed us; the supermarket was big enough. There was a delicate, tinkly song playing on the speakers and the air was crisp.

I was happy to be there, physically and mentally separate from my worries about Hetty. There, under the fluorescent lighting, with tiny Faith in her soft coat, I felt happy and silly. We wouldn’t see Margaret Atwood, because those kinds of things didn’t happen to me, and what would she be buying at this time of the night? I imagined she would have had an early dinner of vegetables and legumes, and would now be writing at her desk, a sprawling mahogany one, maybe with a view of a tree, maybe with a cup of something. No one seemed to shop at this hour, aside from older men who had forgotten to eat. I watched one shuffle past us, his sandals barely lifting off the linoleum floor for each step.

In the noodle aisle we kissed, and Faith moved her hand under my jumper and then my T-shirt to find my stomach skin. I still felt like I became a glow-worm when she touched me. It was delicious and overwhelming, and I wanted to ask if we could go outside and stand beside a shopfront in the dark so we could kiss more and touch more away from the gleam.

I didn’t say anything. I could feel Faith’s body poised to jump away from me if I pushed too hard. She was springy in her shoulders and her eyes were bright.

In my basket I had white kimchi and a box of tissues decorated with a watercolour painting of a river edged with trees. Faith had the strawberry sticks and three grape sodas—for her family, she said, who liked to sip at them when Faith visited and they watched home videos together. I told her that my family had never made any home videos, and she told me I was lucky. I told her I wondered what it might be like to see yourself as a child, moving and talking and playing. Faith said it wasn’t all that special; that it was dissociative, and that’s why her parents loved it.

We’d been wandering the aisles for half an hour, and even the man stocking the shelves who had seemed almost asleep was watching us now. We needed to give up and leave, but I didn’t want to be the one to suggest it.

Faith looked up at me from where we stood in front of the frozen shrimp. ‘I guess we should go?’

I nodded, and took her hand to hold it carefully. She seemed disappointed, though I had been sure we’d both expected nothing. She had an optimism that was unruly, Faith. It wandered out in front of her and tripped her up sometimes.

‘I hope one day I see her,’ Faith said quietly as we walked towards the front of the store where we would pay for our pink sticks and our purple bubbles, and our white kimchi streaked with red.

There was a woman in line for the cash register. She had on a purple-and-green woollen hat—a toque, not a beanie, I reminded myself—and a long scarf of the same yarn that she had wrapped around herself. It wasn’t so cold that night, and I wondered why she was bundled as if it was icy or stormy.

There was nowhere to put our things yet—the woman was buying a large amount of kimchi and blood-red gochujang paste, and she had set them up in two neat rows that filled the length of the conveyer belt. The man who had been shelving was now at the cash register. I watched the delicate fingers of the woman making sure each tall tub of kimchi didn’t fall as the conveyer belt trundled and the man beeped each container against the scanner. Her hands were thin and veined with blue.

I felt Faith nudge me from behind and I turned. Her eyes were big, and she pulled me slightly back with her hand.

‘It’s her!’ she whispered into the side of me, so I could barely hear it.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘It’s her.’

I turned back and saw that Faith was right: it was Margaret Atwood. I noticed now the sprigs of hair that curled up and out from under her hat. They were white and grey. She turned as if she knew we were watching her, and smiled with the whole of her face, shaped like an elf’s, with a pointed, cheeky twinkle. I felt my arm hairs stand and smiled back, as broadly as I could, to show her I loved her and that Faith did too.

I wondered if Faith would say something to her, and whether she would regret it if she didn’t, and smiled again as the woman who was Margaret Atwood moved one of the plastic separators to the end and placed it down behind her kimchi so that we could begin placing our items behind hers. I saw Faith move by my side and then heard her voice, higher than usual.

‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but, um, are you Margaret Atwood?’ she asked, with a small laugh at the end. I turned to watch her and saw she was wringing her hands.

The woman smiled that peaked smile again and nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I am,’ she said, and moved one hand to take Faith’s.

They held on—not shaking, not moving at all, just one small hand wrapped close around another—and then let go. It was as if they knew each other faintly, or had meant to meet there and exchange something.

‘I love your books. Thank you.’

Margaret Atwood nodded. ‘Do you write?’ she asked Faith.

Faith reddened slightly and shook her head. ‘Oh, no—no—not like you. I just read!’

Margaret Atwood laughed, and moved to turn back towards the checkout, where the man was waiting for her to pay, so bored and tired now that he was leaning on his elbows.

‘Reading is the important part.’

‘Yes,’ we answered at the same time, nodding enthusiastically, though I was not really a reader and never would be. The glow that circled Margaret Atwood’s face had disappeared when she turned; we looked at each other, Faith and I, with open mouths. We watched her pay and pick up her three canvas bags full of pickled cabbage and chilli. She turned once more to face us, the man behind the counter sighing.

‘Take care,’ she said, and walked out. She was small in the dark of the night outside the supermarket and she turned right as we watched, towards her house in the Annex, in her pixie shoes.

‘Oh my god!’ Faith said, her voice loud again. ‘I can’t believe we saw her!’

‘Was that real?’ I said, and put a hand over my mouth.

That night we said goodbye at College and Shaw. Faith skipped there, yelling out to no one that she had just met the love of her life, Margaret Atwood, and telling me she could now die happy.

When she slowed down and snuggled into the side of me, my arm around her shoulder, she told me she didn’t think I should come stay the night, but wanted to see me again soon, and asked if that was all right. We kissed briefly as a pack of teenagers in costumes walked past us shouting, and told each other we would text.

It was cold walking the rest of the way home to Marjorie on my own. I huffed my warm breath into my jacket and wondered again where Hetty was.