Kathleen is woken a few hours before dawn. This happens sometimes, not nearly as much as it used to, but she lives with it. Una breathes her awake, the girl broiling there (not there) in the dark, asking her, as ever, to keep up her end of an intricate bargain. Seconds later, Kathleen falls back to sleep, curled tightly into her blanket, content.
And in the morning, she is up with the sun. She gets dressed in her work clothes—old jeans and a long-sleeved, collared shirt to protect her neck—and goes into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. Her head feels tight and thumpy. She uncaps an erasable black marker pen, which rests on its own magnetic shelf at the top corner of the fridge door, and changes the number that has been written there, directly onto the door of the fridge, for twenty-two years. She changes the number from 7967 to 7968.
Seven thousand, nine hundred and sixty-eight days since Una disappeared. Since Kathleen knew where on earth her daughter was. She will repeat this routine tomorrow and the day after that, until the day she no longer has to.
Seeing Yannick yesterday wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be; the pressure in her head today has nothing to do with him. It’s all tooth. He’s aged more than she was expecting. Always kept his hair cut short, but he’s let it grow out, and now wears it tied back. Thin on top and mostly silver with a few dark strays, curled into a snug ponytail at the base of his neck, like a sleeping mouse. He was staring at some book when she came into the coffee shop but, then, he always was. He wears glasses now, and they were balanced at the tip of his nose, defying gravity. Sitting there with his legs spread under the table, like the world is a game he invented and the rules are all his own. Still broad across the shoulders. Strong and wiry. Kathleen always felt bigger than him. Her hands, her feet, her thighs. Bulkier. More dense. But he was always much, much larger than his physical size. Took up more space than a body should. Just like Una.
When Yannick sat across from Kathleen yesterday, she noticed a white scar, buried in the deep crow’s feet fanning out from the corner of his left eye. It resembled a bird’s wing, or a leaf, lifting upwards, so he looked like he was smiling even when he wasn’t. She’s never seen this scar before but knows she gave it to him.
Yannick, for the record, is not the only man Kathleen has ever loved. Okay, maybe she fell for him as soon as she saw him, his black hair buzzed neat and tidy. Flecks of white paint on his neck, on his smooth arms. And those ropes men get? Those veins that wrap around their arms? He had those. He was the foreman of the crew her dad had hired to paint their house and he slayed her without even trying.
And he rode a motorcycle. Whatever.
After him, there were others. There was Stevo, who owned the fleet of chip trucks. Real head for business that guy. A joker too, an absolute goof. But he wanted to have a baby with Kathleen, and she already had the only child she wanted, so that was the end of Stevo.
And maybe five years later there was Larry, originally from Prince Edward Island. It was Larry who first got her interested in growing flowers, and she’s always thanked him for that. She liked Larry, and possibly would have stayed with him, but he moved back to Prince Edward Island.
The men Kathleen cared for after Yannick were very different from Yannick. They had to be. Over the years there were fleeting encounters with sex, sparse and not always satisfying, but not always not (satisfying) either. Running her flower business, she came into contact with new people from time to time, it happened like that. Opportunities cropped up. Her friend Julius was always encouraging her to create more opportunities but…She was a single mother in her forties, her fifties, and now her sixties, living in a small town. She’s done.
Yannick, though, he is dust. Visible only in a certain light, inevitable. As soon as you vacuum it up or wipe it away, it’s back. Pull a couch away from the wall and there it is, collected in the corners, thick and furry. Open the curtains to the sunlight and there it is, drifting and flashing in the air. Clap a pillow and watch it rise. Yannick has a way of settling into her nooks and crannies. He always has.
Cosmos today for harvest. About two hours’ work. When she’s done, the stems stashed safely in buckets of water in the refrigeration shed, ready to be collected by her delivery guy later today, she still has some time to kill before her tooth extraction.
She puts an egg on to boil and opens her laptop at the kitchen table. Not a lot of traffic on the Find Una Facebook page but she still checks the comments every week, because you just never know. Each new message that appears, each blessed one, is like a heartbeat blip on a hospital monitor. She used to get messages from people all over Canada, and from the States, too. There was a time, early on, when she was hearing from folks in places she couldn’t have pointed out on a map. Places like Burma, Moldova, Croatia, Uzbekistan. Una’s friends sometimes post messages on the page too, sharing pictures of their children blowing out birthday candles or winning trophies or whatever. Look at our lives, the pictures say. See the way time passes for us.
Kathleen displays her appreciation with hearts and smiley faces. The instructor on the webinar she took, Growing Your Social Media Presence, said you have to interact with every post.
Every now and again Julius gets on her case. He tells her she is wasting her time on Facebook. He pooh-poohs the number she tracks on her fridge. What she doesn’t explain to him—because self-justification is for the birds—is that sometimes, for her, the world feels as if it’s made of glass. The glass is thin and pocked with air bubbles. It’s webbed with hairline cracks. It’s fragile. This is about maintenance.
When Una was very little, even when she wasn’t little, even when she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, she used to climb into Kathleen’s bed in the middle of the night and curl her body into Kathleen’s. Press her cold feet against her shins. She would never stay—Una never stayed anywhere for long—and after she left to go back to her own room, Kathleen would feel her there still. Her child in her bed.
Now when Una visits in those hours before dawn, she is asking Kathleen to keep checking the Facebook page because if she doesn’t, one of the cracks in the glass will split. If Kathleen doesn’t respond to every message, even the long shots from Uzbekistan, or tally up the number on the fridge every day, or throw the party every year, one of the glass bubbles will explode. Each bubble and crack will set off the next until the world is nothing but a pile of fine sand.
You can’t explain things like this to people.
Anyhow. There aren’t any new posts on the Facebook page so she toggles over to email. She’s got a message from Yannick’s eldest boy Sunny saying, oh, I’m glad you and Dad are talking again, and oh, I think it’s about time you made up, and oh, you have to go west with him, he can’t do it alone.
She tries not to be angry at Sunny. He’s a nincompoop, always has been, but he means well. She’s pissed at Yannick, though. It’s clear he’s told Sunny what’s going on, about the call from the coroner’s office out west, and that he’s serious about doing this thousands-of-kilometres drive for nothing. For absolutely nothing.
She closes her laptop and looks around the kitchen, the same kitchen where Una once came to her and said: ‘Mom, I’ve been thinking I need to get out of here. I might move.’
Kathleen asked her why. Why did she think she needed to move? Kathleen was pulling a macaroni casserole out of the oven and singed the inside of her wrist.
Una didn’t say anything but tucked her hair behind her ears. That unforgettable hair. Thick and long, dark brown. The soft hair at the temples was ashy, almost grey. The ends, in summer, turned that same ashy grey. Tie Una’s hair up in a scarf, or a twist or a braid, and it just tumbles out. Too thick and slippery and abundant to be contained. Just like her father. Too abundant to be contained.
Kathleen asked her a second time why she was thinking of moving and Una looked out of the window, the same window Kathleen is looking out of now. It was winter then, the day Una announced she was moving away. The view outside was blank and flat. The light on Una’s face was pearly blue.
Kathleen asked Una if she was moving away because of Oliver Hanratty, her on-again/ off-again boyfriend of many years. ‘Never let a man run you out of a place,’ Kathleen told her daughter, and sucked the rising welt on her wrist.
‘I just have a feeling,’ Una said. ‘I want to go.’
‘Go where? Where do you want to go?’
‘I was thinking maybe Vancouver Island.’ Una said this very coolly, in a tone that suggested the thinking maybe part was over. Decision made.
‘Why on earth go there?’ Kathleen said. ‘What’s even out there? Jesus, you cannot get further away from home than that.’ She went on: ‘We don’t even know anybody out west. All your friends are here. Me. Your dad. What does your dad say? I bet he’s heartbroken,’ Kathleen said. ‘I bet he’s broken in his big, dumb heart.’
‘I’m stagnating here,’ Una said.
Kathleen felt utterly bamboozled by this: Una never stayed doing any one thing long enough to know what stagnation felt like. She’d tried university but dropped out. She wasn’t academic and never went to class. All Una took from her university experience was a D in Psych 101 and a year’s worth of student loan. Her next endeavour was waitressing at a Greek restaurant in Toronto, but she quit that within a few months. After that, it was a car rental place, which she loathed, complaining that she got headaches because everything in the office, including the T-shirt she was obliged to wear, was yellow.
‘You’re not trying hard enough,’ Kathleen said. ‘You never stick it out.’
‘You say that every time.’
‘It’s true every time.’
‘Harsh.’
‘That’s the game,’ Kathleen said. ‘Doing stuff you don’t want to do. Get used to it.’
‘I’m lost,’ Una said.
‘Life can feel that way.’
‘I can’t explain it better than that,’ Una said. She went over to where Kathleen stood in front of the oven, with the casserole now cooling on the side. She plucked a piece of macaroni from the edge of the glass dish, the macaroni gilded with cheese and crispy brown at the edges, and crunched it. She put her arms around Kathleen’s waist and coaxed her into a slow dance, chewing, enchanting her mother.
‘You’ll visit,’ Una said. Her eyes, the colour of rich earth.
‘Just tell me why you have to go so far away.’
‘It’s only down the road.’
‘No point in me going way the hell out there to visit. You’ll be back. You’ll change your mind like you always do and you’ll be back.’
‘Have a little faith.’
‘I go on experience.’
‘Promise you’ll visit.’
Kathleen shook her head, tried to twist away but her daughter held her tighter. Una: small and deceptively strong.
Before going to her dentist appointment, Kathleen swings by Julius’s place with his blood-pressure medication. He is perfectly capable of picking up his medication by himself, but his driving is becoming a bit iffy, and she likes doing these small things for her friend.
She hasn’t told him about the coroner calling her, slapping her with the news that bones have been discovered and they could be Una’s (and that this news has brought Yannick back). Julius has a freakish sense of intuition, and if he knows too much, he will have all kinds of sensible things to say. The party is tomorrow and she doesn’t have time to listen to all the sensible things he will have to say.
Julius may well be the only person in Kathleen’s life who doesn’t irritate her. She met him a lifetime ago, when she was working the checkout at the IDA pharmacy and he was the new manager, just moved up from Toronto. He’s the kind of person who looks you straight in the eye when he speaks to you, even if you’ve just met him. He’s full of fancy talk, and he giggles at the worst times, like when people are upset or dissatisfied, which didn’t go down well for him as the manager of the only drugstore in town.
Julius moved into town after some sort of mid-life crisis and quitting a career in law, and bought a farmhouse just outside Bobcaygeon on a farm that was, with much public resentment, being sold off in chunks after the death of the patriarch—an infamous local family feud. Being a Torontonian in small-town Ontario, and having scooped up this piece of land for next to nothing, automatically pitched Julius into a whole bunch of people’s bad books, people who’d already chosen sides within the inheritance dispute. It was ridiculous and it was petty, and it attracted her to his friendship immediately.
Another endearing thing about Julius is that he’s a very odd-looking man. His head is too big for his body; he has the proportions of a baby. As he gets older, into his eighties, this is only becoming more pronounced. His snow-white hair grows in a thatch that he combs into a kind of puff, straight up from his wide forehead.
And no one could accuse Julius of not loving his seven very pretty acres of land. He keeps chickens and wild guinea pigs, which he lets wander freely through the white birch and hazel trees behind his house. He grows tomatoes and squash, has an eye for what blooms together well.
This morning, Kathleen finds Julius at the back end of his property, spraying his Alaska roses with toxic store-bought chemicals that (if she’s told him once) she’s told him a thousand times not to use. He’s dressed in crisp, midnight-blue Levi’s that rise almost to his sternum, and an Edmonton Oilers’ cap that barely fits over his hair.
‘Acephates, Julius,’ she says, pushing a low-hanging hazel branch out of her way. ‘You know better.’
‘Something has to kill me eventually,’ he says. ‘That other concoction you recommended is entirely ineffectual.’
She’s told him that the safest and cheapest way to kill aphids is to use a mixture of ten parts water to one part castile soap. ‘Persistence, you bugger,’ she says, ‘is the only way to get results.’
He soaks a tightly rolled bud that squirms with feisty green aphids. ‘You got my drugs?’ he says.
‘Right here.’ She shakes the paper bag at him.
‘Leave it there,’ he says, pointing with his pink knobbled elbow at a metal garden table.
‘You’re not even wearing gloves,’ she says, and sighs.
He stops mid-spray, still aiming the bottle at the rose bush, and looks at her. ‘There’s something wrong with you,’ he says.
‘It’s my tooth.’ She rubs her jaw, for effect.
‘No,’ he says, and returns his attention to the roses. ‘There’s something else.’
‘I let it go for too long,’ she says. ‘In fact, I’ve got an appointment. I can’t stay for any of your chit-chat.’
He looks at her again, divining.
‘Extraction,’ she says.
‘Come again?’
‘I’m going in for an extraction.’
‘You’d better hop along, then,’ he says.
‘Do you need me to pick you up tomorrow?’ she asks. ‘For the party?’
‘Heavens, no, I’ll drive myself,’ he says. ‘You’ll be bitchy and short-tempered.’
‘I will not.’
‘You will,’ he says. ‘Happens every year.’ He sprays three short bursts of poison at the rose.
The dental office is on the ground floor of a red-brick house at the corner of Maldern and Eastwood Streets, right in the east end. The house is what you might call Old Ontario. Wraparound porch and Canadian flag dangling from a flagpole mounted under the porch overhang. Lilac trees in the front yard. The dentist lives in the house with her family, which Kathleen believes consists of a husband and a pair of daughters who’ve flown the coop. Kathleen only half listens when people speak about their lives, about how their children are getting on. She likes her dentist, though, as much as one can. The woman moved over from England decades ago and Kathleen feels more comfortable with people who come from other places.
Kathleen arrives early, thinking she’ll have a little time to browse out-of-date magazines, calm her nerves, before being called to the chair. But barely a few minutes after checking in with the receptionist she finds herself seated in the shiny white reclining seat. There’s a new addition to the room: a television screen mounted on the ceiling above the chair. The dentist asks Kathleen what she would like to watch during the procedure and Kathleen replies that she would rather the television stayed off.
The dentist explains the procedure: the anaesthetic; the possibility that the tooth may crumble during extraction, facilitating the need for a little unpleasant digging, which could take some time; the fact that Kathleen has, according to the X-ray, unusually long roots; aftercare (no smoking, no spitting, no foods with small seeds or sharp corners).
The anaesthetic syringe, which the dentist holds in one gloved hand a few inches from Kathleen’s face, is a short, precise needle. The dental assistant, a face Kathleen doesn’t recognize—and a feline, untrustworthy face at that—fastens a stiff paper napkin around Kathleen’s neck with an alligator clip and hands her a pair of clear plastic glasses.
‘Do you have any questions?’ the dentist asks.
‘What do you know about teeth and DNA?’ Kathleen asks.
The dentist looks surprised. Kathleen feels a little surprised. She hadn’t planned on asking anything like this. The dentist sits back on her stool, still holding the syringe aloft. ‘In what context?’ she asks.
‘Can you identify a person by the DNA in their teeth?’
‘I believe teeth provide very good DNA samples,’ the dentist says.
‘Like, you could use DNA from a tooth as comparison?’ Kathleen says.
‘If you had another source to compare it to, yes.’
‘Right.’
‘I saw it on CSI,’ the dentist says.
‘You saw it on TV?’
The dentist shrugs, smiles. ‘Lie back and try to relax.’
Kathleen opens wide and the needle slides into the flesh at the outer base of her gum. It’s painless until the dentist pushes further, into the nerve, and further yet, into what feels like bone.
‘Remember to breathe,’ the dentist whispers, breathing out the word ‘breathe’.
And Kathleen realizes she isn’t breathing, so she closes her eyes and concentrates on that. The needle is pulled, sucked from her gum, and reinserted in another spot. Then injected again into the soft jelly under her tongue. The pain is minor but concentrated, like air whining tightly out of the mouth of a balloon. The anaesthetic tastes like aspirin.
‘Go ahead and rinse,’ the dentist says, and puts her hand on Kathleen’s shoulder and squeezes. This touch is incidental; the woman probably thinks nothing of it, but Kathleen flinches a little, unused to being touched. When the hand is taken away, Kathleen still feels the pressure and aching warmth of her dentist’s capable fingers.
The assistant hands Kathleen a plastic cup of mint-green fluid. Already the side of her face is going cold and a tingle spreads across her skin. Her tongue is also numbing.
‘We’ll wait just a few minutes,’ says the dentist.
Kathleen clumsily gargles, and spits the green mouthwash into the clean white basin swirling with cool water. She wipes a string of spit from her chin and lies back down, and stares deeply into the silvery grey blankness of the television screen. In soft tones, the dentist asks her assistant to retrieve some unknowable instrument and issues other instructions that Kathleen doesn’t understand. Her right eyelid feels heavy, as if it wants to close. Kathleen asks if this is normal.
‘The nerve wraps all around here,’ the dentist says, drawing a line on her face from her mouth, up past her ear and over her eye. ‘Perfectly normal.’
‘I thought maybe you gave me too much.’
‘Nope.’
Kathleen’s right ear is cold and thick. ‘This is funky,’ Kathleen says, without the use of her lower lip.
‘I think we’re ready,’ says the dentist, and positions herself behind Kathleen, looming over her head, close enough that Kathleen can smell the detergent in her white frock and the latex of her gloves. ‘Open wide,’ says the dentist, and prods the middle of Kathleen’s rotten tooth with her pristine metal hook. ‘Any pain?’
‘Nah.’
A tool resembling a ratchet passes across Kathleen’s line of vision as it’s lowered into her mouth.
‘I’m just testing how loose we are,’ the dentist says, clamping the tool onto the errant tooth. She nudges it back and forth a few times and Kathleen settles into however long this is going to take, how unpleasant it is going to be. She is used to settling in and waiting for unpleasant things.
There’s a sucking, a vacuum pull at the base of the jaw, and the dentist nimbly pulls the instrument from Kathleen’s mouth. And there, hovering just above her nose, the bloody root of Kathleen’s tooth. No longer her tooth.
‘Easy,’ says the dentist.
‘That’s it?’
The dentist hands Kathleen a triangle of white gauze and instructs her to stick it in the new gap and leave it there for a few hours.
‘I expected a lot worse,’ Kathleen says, sitting up, relieved. The dental assistant, who, now that it’s all over, looks a little less lynx-ish, unclips the paper napkin from Kathleen’s neck.
‘It can be a lot worse,’ says the dentist.
Kathleen stands at the reception desk to pay what now feels like an exorbitant amount of money for not a lot of work. The dentist stands in the doorway of her examination room and calls the next patient.
‘Are you coming to Una’s party tomorrow?’ Kathleen asks. Her voice is creaky and padded because of the gauze.
‘Oh? Is that tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow, yes. I sent the invites in May?’
The dentist flicks her eyes to the wall. She looks cornered. ‘What time was it again?’ She steps aside to allow the next person to go through to the examination room.
‘Three o’clock.’
The dentist nods.
‘Same as every year.’
‘I’ll try,’ she says, still nodding as she closes the door. She looks like one of those toys people put in the back windows of their cars, those plastic nodding dogs.