IT WAS AN INDIAN SUMMER DAY. I KNEW THAT IT was the last one that we were going to have. It was a late Saturday afternoon and the baby still, still, still hadn’t been born. I was sitting on a hideous old red couch with burgundy flowers on it, which had been left out on a sidewalk near my building. I had pulled a dress on over my belly and the seams had ripped a bit around the zipper. But I was wearing a green coat that I’d buttoned up, so it didn’t matter.
Next to me was a grocery bag with a head of lettuce. I don’t know what I intended to do with it. Maybe put it in the refrigerator and just let it rot. I hadn’t eaten because, frankly, I had been too lazy to make anything for dinner. I was thinking of ordering a bowl of seafood soup for dinner from the hole-in-the-wall Chinese joint. That was my favourite. But there would be octopus tentacles in it and I had heard somewhere that pregnant women weren’t supposed to eat sea creatures. Maybe the baby would turn out blue from the octopus’s ink.
I saw people who I knew, but they crossed to the other side of the street. Maybe they thought that I was going to start talking to them about all my problems and they’d already had enough of them on the news. Or maybe they figured that the Tremblays were such bad luck that they didn’t want to be anywhere near me.
I was waiting for someone who I didn’t actually believe was going to show up. She had never come to see me in my whole life before. I felt like Linus when he was waiting for the Great Pumpkin to come. I decided to sit there and wait for her and pretend that that wasn’t what I was actually doing. There’s no way that I wanted her to come over to my apartment. I didn’t want to be inside, alone with her. I just felt safer on the street corner with all the strangers around for protection.
There she was.
She got out of a car that she’d parked half a block up from where I was sitting. She was wearing a dark blue suit and was carrying a little box in her hand. She probably knocked a lot of the car salesmen dead while wearing that suit. I couldn’t bring myself to stand up; I just stared. She came right over and stood in front of me. She was thirty-five but she looked older. Maybe it was just her style though. Here, no one really dressed like an adult. You might see a sixty-five-year-old wearing a tank top and a pair of Converse sneakers. She smiled and tilted her head in a gentle way that made me feel less self-conscious.
“Do you remember this street?” I asked. “Does it surprise you that we’re in the same spot as where you dropped us off?”
“It’s colourful here!”
She sat down lightly on the nasty old couch. She sat up straight, more than a touch uncomfortable. She had spent her whole life being told where there were germs, what things were dirty, where to sit and where not to sit. I had never really had those instructions, and yet here I was, as fit as a fiddle. I was impervious to germs. I was a survivor. The cooties on this couch were the least of my worries.
My heart was beating in a funny way the closer she got to me. I felt like one of those alley cats that you put your hand out to pet. You know that they want to come close and let you pet them but you know that they are too terrified. I used to play a Petula Clark record and pretend it was my mother singing. I would imagine her singing in the kitchen as she washed the bits of hardened egg off the utensils.
I was afraid to even move a single inch because I might accidentally touch her. If we did touch, it would mean things that we didn’t mean it to mean. I didn’t want to give her the wrong idea. I didn’t want her to think that I wanted her to be my mother, if she didn’t want to be my mother. I was like some absolutely terrified teenager on a first date.
Every time my eyes met hers, they instinctively looked away. Like when you cross glances with someone who is sitting across from you on the bus. She looked across the street. She squinted as if there was someone that she knew on the other side, which of course was impossible. There was no way that anyone she knew would be in the neighbourhood.
“I hear that you’re going to be going to university,” Noëlle said. “That’s a beautiful idea. That’s great.”
My family never asked me anything about this. They had totally forgotten that I was going to university the next semester. They didn’t get that it led to other things. She was proud of the right accomplishments. I paused, still wary of everything I said.
Generally, two people who are that awkward get up and bid adieu. We had to weather the strangeness, hoping that it would eventually pass, like a rainstorm. I needed her. Nicolas and I needed more people in our life. We just weren’t enough for one another. What else could I do? Put an ad in the newspaper asking for mothers and siblings and cousins? How many incredibly awkward things were we going to say to one another before we would be able to talk about the latest episode of La Petite Vie?
“What are your children like?” I asked.
I really couldn’t begin to consider them siblings. I mean, I had no idea whatsoever what a mother was, but I had very grand ideas about what a sibling was. It was somebody who hung out with you in the womb, took baths with you, shared your breakfast, stole your socks, accidentally broke your nose and sometimes had the same dreams as you at night.
“They’re very small still. Julie likes dancing. She takes a lot of lessons. I’m not quite sure what Marcel’s skill is yet.”
My half-brother. My half-sister. Could they possibly add up to even one? They seemed so odd and hapless to me. Poor Fishstick and Dumont! I started laughing a little.
“I don’t talk to my parents anymore,” Noëlle said shyly. “They wanted to make me feel guilty about my mistakes. I don’t want you to feel that way about me. I want to try and be a part of your lives.”
I was shocked by how happy her saying that made me feel. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much the anxiety of not having a mother had occupied a place in my brain. Because now that the weight of it was gone, I almost felt light-headed.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t come to the funeral. I didn’t think that it was the right time. After I heard that Nicolas was in prison and that your husband had died, I knew I couldn’t stay away any longer. I felt I was responsible somehow. So I told my husband about you two.”
“Your husband must have been weirded out by it all.”
“Yes.”
“Did he, like, shout, even though he’s not the type of guy who shouts?”
“Yes. But it was normal for him to be upset, for a while.”
I don’t know how I had the audacity to ask all these nosy questions. But I sort of liked that her absolutely ordinary family was having all sorts of reactions to us. I liked that they were upset. I always imagined them smiling, the way that they did in the photographs on the fridge. I liked that Nicolas and I were causing them to throw plates around their kitchen and slam doors.
“I’m sorry I pushed you away the last time. I want to be in your lives,” Noëlle said.
Almost all the important things in our lives are expressed in such simple and unceremonious terms. Maybe all the best sentiments are tacky. She handed me the box she had with her.
“I picked a little treat up for you on the way. It’s silly.”
I opened up the box and saw a tiny cake inside that was covered in coconut sprinkles and had a rose made out of frosting on top. It was exactly what I wanted to eat. I took it out greedily and bit into it.
I felt sort of guilty about sitting here and getting along somewhat with Noëlle. It was Nicolas who had instigated all this. He was the one who had sought her out. But now here I was, the one who was getting to have a relationship with her.
“Are you going to see Nicolas?” I asked with my mouth full.
“I’m going to visit tomorrow. I talked to him on the phone already.”
She looked for a moment as if she was going to move a lock of hair away from my forehead, but she didn’t have the courage.
“It’s not your job to worry about him, Nouschka.”
She would talk to Nicolas. She would be Nicolas’s friend. There was someone else who had offered to take care of Nicolas for me. I just sat for a moment, wiping the icing off my mouth with a little paper napkin that she took out of her pocket. A peaceful feeling was coming over me. That was it. That was how mothers calmed children down. Nicolas and I had always been in a constant state of agitation. Mothers took your problems from you and fretted about them for you, even if there was no reason on earth why they should, even if you had done everything to create your own mess.
A homeless man sat on the other side of the couch. I thought that she might be disgusted with him, but instead she just smiled at him. There was a button missing on my jacket. It had popped off when I had pulled on it too hard, trying to cover up my belly. Noëlle pointed to it.
“You need a new button.” As she almost touched the spot where the button should go, a chill went through my body.
“You know,” Noëlle continued, “there were times when I put my hands on my belly and I just knew that the two of you were special and that you were miracles. My parents had told me that I shouldn’t feel any attachment at all, because I had to give you both away. But I lay in bed and whispered that I loved you and that you would be capable of anything.”
The homeless man next to Noëlle gently put his hand on her back, on the beautiful blue jacket.
“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” the man said. “Because I have my shit and you have your shit. And everybody has their shit. But that doesn’t mean we can’t come together at the end.”
Noëlle flinched. Then the man stood up and took my hand in both of his and shook it before walking away. I felt no aversion to him; with his plastic bag filled with newspaper clippings, his two scarves, and rubber bands around his wrist, he was one of my people. She was the one who weirded me out. I was over-analyzing her actions and couldn’t even begin to think about her touching me. But that was suddenly okay. It was still sort of sweet in its own way.
“Did you used to make up stories about Nicolas and me?” I asked.
A grin spread almost involuntarily on her face and she blushed. She looked impressed and sort of delighted that I knew about this. After all, it was from both her and Étienne that I had inherited the desire to tell stories.
“I used to imagine that I found a suitcase as I was walking home. I opened the suitcase and I saw two babies wrapped up in clothes and underwear and laughing. There was a Montréal address on the label. So then I closed the suitcase and brought it there. I knew that it wasn’t possible to keep you. You did not belong to me.” She paused. “I was fourteen. I had to invent stories to understand what had happened.”
In Québec the church was always on the lookout for storytellers. The priests carefully read the essays written by children to choose which ones were right for the cloth. They didn’t look for piety or essays about Jesus or Santa Claus or anything like that. They looked for the ones who wrote about strange things, for the ones who questioned religion.
Like a boy who wrote a story about how he looked at his reflection in the mirror and discovered that it was no longer doing what he wanted it to do. It was sticking its tongue out at him and it smiled when the boy frowned.
Or one who wrote about taking a hot bath and then being shrunk. In the tale, he went to live in the walls with the cockroaches. They played dominoes all day long and he discovered that he quite liked being vermin.
A young girl revealed that she drank a bottle of invisibility potion. But nothing changed for her and she realized that she had been invisible all along. She should have just saved the money that she had given to the drugstore clerk.
The church had to get these children on their side. If they didn’t, they would end up becoming philosophers and writing existential tracts that would try and kill God. A certain kind of modernist novel was going to make the church irrelevant.
The priests went to collect these children. They had them pack their little suitcases immediately. They would barely have time to say goodbye to their eight or nine brothers and sisters. They shouted adieu to their fat grandfather in his underwear, who waved back with his hand whose pinky was missing from frostbite.
They left behind their tiny houses with all the mice in the walls. They would not be writing about these rooms. They would not be finding any metaphors that would convey what their lives were like. There would be no stories set in these Québécois houses. The children were to give lectures and sermons instead.
It might seem like the easier way to get rid of a poet would be to just take him out to the backyard, have him kneel between the cans with tomato plants in them and put a bullet in his brain. But they knew from history that it doesn’t work to kill a writer. Every time you shoot a poet, a dozen new ones are born. It’s like plucking a grey hair.