Episodiae

At the end of that summer, Sylvie left for university; not down in the city, as I’d hoped, but out of state. Saying goodbye hollowed me out inside.

I was going to go too, to uni that is—I had the grades, had put in applications. But Mum got really sick, a stroke that paralyzed her all down the right side, left her face droopy and slack. Her words came out like she’d just been to the dentist. There was no way she could take care of herself and no one else to take care of her, so I stayed home, got a job nearby.

I got a job, in fact, working with Sylvie’s dad in the antique shop. I’d wanted to work at the library but, even though I’d been sorting books at school since forever, you needed a degree to apply; even if I’d had the degree, the mountains had just the one library and they weren’t hiring. But working for Christophe was okay. The pay wasn’t great, but he was kind to me and in my lunch breaks I could walk home to check on Mum. On the caregiver’s day off, I wheeled her in to sit with me in the shop, just for the change of scene.

Christophe knew I wasn’t so into the front-of-house stuff, so he gave me free rein to work in the back rooms, or up in the attic, sorting through all the objects. He let me bring some order to that whimsical chaos. I spent long afternoons grouping artifacts, cataloging them, pricing. The attic had a skylight I’d never noticed when I’d been there with Sylvie, and murky daylight streamed through it, onto ancient leather sofas and teak cabinets, onto andirons and ottomans. Sometimes it rained and the attic became an eerie gray space, blanketed by the sounds of pelting water, of streaming gutters. When it rained I thought of Sylvie and ached.

Christophe was a quiet, gentle man. I think he liked me because I was Sylvie’s friend. He trusted me to just get on and do my thing, while he craned over the heavy leather desk near the front of the shop, worrying away at his notes, with one or another fusty leather-bound book spread open in front of him. On the desk, beside the antique till and the photo of Sophie’s mum, was a bust of some old guy. I’d thought it was Christophe, as it looked so much like him—the sad eyes, the almost smile, the full beard and lank long hair—but it turned out to be a plaster replica of a real sculpture from ancient Greece. That desk was forever strewn with loose papers, each one blackened with Christophe’s illegible scrawl. For the better part of every working day he sat stooped over that desk, his eyebrows bundled, finger tracing the lines of figures in whichever bygone tome, ignoring the dingaling of the bell on the rare occasions a customer did come in.

But we got on well enough, I suppose. Perhaps because, no matter how different we were, we always had that one thing in common—we both missed Sylvie, both felt her absence like a ragged hole.

Sylvie’s mum—where she was, what had happened to her—never came up. Sylvie had never spoken of her, except in the vaguest terms. I assumed she had died, but neither Sylvie nor Christophe ever told me one way or the other. The only trace of her seemed to be that sad-looking black-and-white photo on the edge of Christophe’s desk.

I spent most of my time at the shop in the attic, but at lunchtime Christophe would head out. He’d shuffle all the papers into a bundle and use a stack of books as a paperweight to hold them in place. He’d roll himself a cigarette and stroll off down the main street, trailing plumes of foul-smelling smoke. Every day, he took his lunch at the same café, smoked one cigarette on the way there, another on the way back. While he was out, I’d sit at the desk. The chair was a wood and leather swivel job, uncomfortably small. Squeezing myself into it, inhaling the fug of stale tobacco and old paper, made me feel like I was someone else, a ghost inside a stranger’s body.

Other times, I’d wander round the shop, remembering the stories Sylvie had told me about the objects there. I’d brush my fingers against them as she had, or pick them up from where they lay, cradling them against the meat of my palm. But they never spoke to me. All I felt was cool porcelain, burnished metal, polished wood. They were what they were, what my eyes told me they were. Never more, never less. The only ghost that ever spoke to me was the ghost of Sylvie, the sadness that came to me whenever I was reminded of her, as I always was. I couldn’t escape her memory and I wanted it that way, to be always surrounded by her, by the things she had touched and known. To keep that pain forever keen.

•

I didn’t think back often to that night. Not on purpose anyway. It surfaced sometimes, as cruel memories often will, unexpected and with force. Those flashes, when they came, were worst when I was home, awake and alone after putting Mum to bed. At the shop, it was different. I felt . . . protected somehow. Perhaps because, there, my thoughts were forever on Sylvie, so when I flashed back to that night and Tommy standing over me, the memory was always of her, silhouetted in the alley, the boys running in fear, the black shadows coiling around her. I remembered how she had taken care of me, rode with me in the ambulance, how she told the paramedic I was her sister. She sat with me late into that night, long after exhaustion and whatever they’d given me for the pain had dragged me into sleep.

When I awoke, bound and aching, with broken nose, broken ribs, everywhere as stiff and sore as if I’d tumbled down the mountain, Sylvie was gone and two police officers were in the room. The woman sat erect in the visitor’s chair, her hat on the table next to the water jug and tumbler, her hands resting discreetly against a black leather pad in her lap. Behind her stood the man, hat on, with hands behind his back, as stiff as a soldier. When she saw I was awake, the woman turned to the man, who nodded, left the room without a word and closed the door behind him.

She turned back to me and smiled. “Now it’s just us girls,” she said and I bristled. The interview went downhill from there.

Maybe because I was groggy from all the drugs, or cranky from the dully blooming pain, but everything about Constable ‘Call me Tanya’ Bale irked me. I suppose she was just doing her job, trying to be sympathetic, to put me at ease. But, instead, she came across as patronizing, overfamiliar, calling me again and again by my hated name. At one point I got so angry that I clenched my teeth and the fractures in my skull flared. When I turned away with tears in my eyes, she thought I was reliving the trauma or something, told me there was nothing to be afraid of, that I was safe here. I just wanted her gone.

“It was dark,” I said. “It happened so fast. I didn’t get a good look at any of them.”

She gave me a look brimming with disappointment, angry almost. Like I was the one at fault.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Georgina,” she said. The smile she gave me was so pinched it looked as if she was actually biting her tongue, having to hold in what she really thought of me, what she really wanted to say.

When Sylvie came by again that afternoon, she’d brought grapes and we both laughed. I was too sore to eat, but she perched on the edge of the chair beside the bed, eating grape after grape. She talked to me through mouthfuls with her lips pushed forward in a funny pout, her eyes wide and excitable. I’d never seen her so lively. Her hand resting on mine looked so tiny and white, like a porcelain doll’s. But at one point, as if to emphasize what she was saying, she squeezed my hand so hard I gasped. She laughed, but it wasn’t mean or awkward. When she laughed at me, the look she gave me, I felt that she knew me, knew me, in a way that no one else ever had, or had ever even tried to.

“How did you know?” I asked. “How did you know to come, where to find me?”

“They told me,” she said. And though I didn’t understand, I didn’t press it further.

•

In that first year Sylvie was away, I started going to a mixed martial arts class. The dojo was a ten-minute walk from the shop, just across the train tracks in North Blackworth. Every Monday and Thursday, I’d walk straight from work to wrap myself in a gi and tie on the white belt.

I felt ridiculous at first. Lumbering around the mat, sweating my clothes dark throwing punches and kicks—one two three four five six seven eight nine ten, now swap. Then holding the pads for someone better than me to throw punches and kicks at. Being flung this way and that, feeling the room shake whenever I fell. But I persisted. I realized I didn’t care what anyone thought, that I wanted this. I’d weather the teasing and the whispered jokes and always being picked last—though the sensei cut all of that short quick enough, doling out push-ups left and right. I liked how the training made me feel, the way it burned and exhausted my limbs, punished my body, brought it back in line. I trained because I wanted to. It had nothing to do with what had happened that night.

I thought often of Tommy standing over me, folding open that wicked looking knife. Every time I remembered it, I’d start to sweat and my heart would pound just the same as it did right there in the alley. But it made no sense to me, this fear. I knew all too clearly just how it would feel, that knife, as it sliced. In my own hands I would not have feared it, would have treasured it, even, made a special place for it in my secret tin. It wasn’t the knife I feared, or the pain. I wasn’t even afraid of Tommy, not really. It was the helplessness. The lack of control.

In those first months, as I threw myself more deeply into the training, I took the old tin out from its hiding place less and less, the need for my treasures receding like a hunger now sated.

•

Sylvie came home every holiday, back to the mountains. The weeks before she returned were always tense for me and Christophe, as though both of us were fighting to contain our excitement. I’d spend long hours in the attic, half-sprawled on the leather couch, fingering the doodads on an old charm bracelet, or toying with a dark wooden puzzle box, needing something to do with my hands while I stared through the skylight, eyes drawn to the blanket of thick gray, or the passage of lone puffs of cloud in an otherwise unspoiled blue. Whenever I came downstairs to the shop, I’d find Christophe bumbling, his notes forgotten, sorting through piles of books he’d already priced, or rolling cigarettes to tuck behind his ear, only to find one already there. We never snapped at each other, but we were both out of sorts, like the heaviness in summer before a storm breaks.

When she did return, it was so awkward, Christophe could barely contain himself and Sylvie seemed overwhelmed. I hung back, not wanting to put myself in the picture, no matter how desperate I was to be close to Sylvie, to feel her fingers brush my arm.

But something wasn’t right. The first days back she seemed a different person. Her posture was somehow changed, her eyes were more searching, less dreamy. She had an accent that wasn’t her own. Even the things she talked about seemed alien, not things that my Sylvie would be interested in. It never lasted though. That excitement, that alienness, was like a skin she wore, a kind of protective armor that fell away in scales the longer she was home. She was never truly herself until she’d spent time alone in the attic.

That first holiday, I came in for work, climbed the creaky stairs to find Sylvie perched on the edge of the chair she’d sat on that night, as we’d waited for our clothes to dry. Her head was drooped, hair hanging like a chestnut waterfall. She looked up when I came in and I saw her eyes were ringed with red. She smiled; and it was the smile I knew, alive with deep sadness. Resting on her lap was the silver-framed photograph of her mother. As I lowered myself into the couch across from her, she lifted her fingers from the frame, as though breaking a silent and invisible connection. She placed the photograph on the dresser beside her, face down. From that moment until the next term began, she was entirely herself.

Each time the holidays rolled around and Sylvie returned, I found it harder and harder to bear that armored Sylvie, the Sylvie of the first days who was not the person I knew and who kept me at a distance. I grew impatient with her, wanted the change to be instantaneous, for her to be herself from the first moment I saw her. I conspired to get her into the attic sooner and sooner after she arrived, grew frustrated when she resisted. It was like she didn’t want to be herself. Like she didn’t want to be my friend.

Whenever she was away, I longed for her return, but when she was back, it hurt so much I couldn’t bear it. I was so happy to be near her, to hear her voice bubbling, to pretend to her and myself that I wasn’t falling into the deep wide black of her eyes. And yet, the closer we were and the happier I felt, the more painful it was, the more unbearable, as though her proximity was the very thing that separated us, that drove her further from me. The Sylvie I pined for in her absence was always herself, always the Sylvie I needed her to be. In my dreams and longing, I could imagine us together, forever entwined, an intimacy tinged with beautiful sadness. I imagined her fingers brushing my arms, tracing the scars along my belly and breasts, my own hands, huge against her slightness, marking the shapes of her delicate body. I imagined us laying together in the attic with the rain hammering against the skylight, falling in sheets from the overflowing drainpipes.

But the Sylvie that returned each time, though more beautiful than the faceless porcelain doll of my fantasies, was more complicated, more troubled, more distant. When I was with her, my hands lay in my lap, balled into fists so tight that my knuckles ached. At night, after Mum was tucked up in bed, I’d shut myself in the bathroom, pull back that loose tile. I’d carve into my body another line in the epic poem of my heart’s pain, of my weightless ghost imprisoned within its mountain of flesh.

As the summer neared, I vowed to myself for the millionth time that I would tell her what was in my heart. I imagined her rejection over and over, believing that the pain of it could not compare to the pain I already felt, living the lie of her friend but nothing more. And for the millionth time I would rage at myself, at my selfishness, my stupidity, at the longing that, if released, would surely tear apart everything that meant anything to me. So I went back and forth, talking myself in and out of baring my soul to her, of risking everything on a chance to make her mine.

But that summer, when Sylvie returned, she was not alone.

•

I disliked Dane from the moment Sylvie introduced him. He exuded a kind of bombastic confidence, a blusterous positivity I couldn’t stand and couldn’t believe in.

Dane was a business major, studying financial economics. He was two years ahead of Sylvie and a full two heads taller, with an iron-backed erectness that I resented immediately. I was taller still, of course, or would have been if I’d ever stood straight. But no one was allowed to be better than Dane, in anything—he had to be the best and brightest, the most successful, the most buff. Dane spent two hours every morning at the gym, lived off protein supplements and muesli bars and drank milk in such quantities it nauseated me.

When he first came into the shop, Dane swaggered over to the display cases, cast an appraising eye over their contents and picked from a nearby table an ornate French Empire bronze urn, gilded with ormolu. He turned it over in his hands, oblivious to Christophe’s sharp intake of breath, weighing it like a piece of meat in a butcher’s shop. “This worth much?” he said. Continuing his audit of the shop’s gross value, he perused his way over to the shelves on the far wall, row upon row of books from other centuries, with spines of fabric and leather embossed with gold leaf. He turned back to Christophe and called, “You got any biographies? I only read biographies.”

I could see Christophe was as much taken aback by this visitor as I was. When the offered hand was shaken vigorously by Dane, I saw the older man wince behind a forced smile. I knew he was wondering how long he was expected to endure the presence of this unwanted guest.

Sylvie was entirely out of sorts, not herself at all. Beside Dane, she stood sheepishly, awkward in her own body in a way I’d never seen. She laughed too hard at Dane’s dull jokes and giggled like a child whenever he pulled her toward him with those possessive hands. I couldn’t get a second alone with her. Dane was always there. I had to follow her to the toilet to have even one word in private.

“I thought maybe we could catch up tomorrow,” I said. “Just you and me. Go down to the outlet and hang by the lake. Like we used to. The weather’s supposed to be nice.”

“Oh,” she said and puffed out her lips; the expression didn’t suit her at all, made a mannequin of that face once so alive with sadness. “Oh George, you sweet thing. I would love to do that, but I already said I’d spend the morning with Dane.”

I tried not to let the hurt show, pushed it down to smolder deep inside me with all the rest of my anger. But it must have glowed in my eyes or pulled at the corners of my mouth, because Sylvie softened, or seemed too.

“Oh George,” she said and touched my arm with a sympathy that almost passed as sincere. “We will catch up soon, I promise. It’s just this is Dane’s first time here and I want to show him around. And I want him to get to know you too, and for you to know him. I’m sure you’ll get on so well . . .”

The next day was my day off. I was so angry, so burningly jealous of Dane, of the way Sylvie looked at him, his stupid chiseled features, his athlete’s body, his roaming hands and the ease with which they laid claim to Sylvie. It all made me burn so hot I couldn’t bear to be near them. I walked out to the edge of town, out through the forest path and down to the edge of the lake. But before I came to the place where the trees thinned, opened out onto the lake’s muddy banks bristling with rushes, I heard voices. Foolish, girlish giggling. The brash, confident tones of a young man. Sylvie. And Dane.

I followed the tree line round, willing my footfalls to be light, my bulk to disappear. I watched them through the yellow dust of acacia blooms. They lay on the concrete outlet, sun-baking. Dane wore nothing on top and Sylvie’s small white hand brushed his bare chest with gentle strokes. My stomach convulsed. I bit down so hard on the flesh of my finger that my teeth broke the skin.

I trained all afternoon, in the back room of the dojo while classes ran in the hall. I beat at the punchbag, smashing it over and over with fists clenched so tight I felt the bones would break. The bag swung and swung and I pounded and punched, grunting and sweating. By the time I went home to cook dinner for Mum, my body ached all over and my knuckles were raw. But though the pain helped bring me back, helped rein in the disgust that crawled through my flesh like an infection, it did nothing to touch that deep burning rage.

That night, after I’d tucked Mum into bed, I took out my old tobacco tin from its hiding place and shut myself in the bathroom. For the first time in months, I took out my treasures, one by one, and laid them along the edge of the bath, their sharpness glinting in the cool fluorescence.

I closed my eyes and pressed down on the blade, enslaving that chaos of emotion to a single brilliant point of control.

•

Christophe had expected Sylvie to stay until term began, but, after only a few days, Dane left and Sylvie went with him. In the long summer weeks that followed, his lunchtime walks took longer than usual. When he came back, he smelled not only of tobacco smoke but of wine. His eyes were heavy and sad. He let customers talk him into outrageous discounts, as though he had lost all sense of the value of things.

He told me about the day Sylvie left. Dane had been out since early morning, running around the lake, working out at the gym. Sylvie had taken the silver-framed portrait up to the attic. When Dane returned, he found her there, weeping. Christophe heard them, heard Dane yell, “I don’t like things that make you cry.” He snatched the photo from her and in the struggle it fell. The glass inside the frame broke.

“Jesus, Sylvie,” Dane had said. “You’re really bringing me down. This place is bad for you, all this sadness. You need to just let it go, get on with your life.”

I wasn’t working the day they left, so didn’t get to see her or even say goodbye. When I came in on the Monday, she was gone.

•

I hoped that Dane was just a passing thing, a first-year fling that would be over in months. I pictured Sylvie abandoned, her eyes red and raw from tears. I pictured my palm cupping Sylvie’s cheek, my thumb stroking the salty wetness that streaked her face. I imagined the taste of her tears, the feel of her small tongue as it pressed its way into my mouth, parting my lips with earnest, probing movements. I dreamed how it would feel to lie, her small pale body pressed against mine, we two, clothed in nothing but scars and sadness.

Toward the end of summer, I wrote a letter. I wrote everything that was in my heart, my anger, my love, my distrust of Dane. It felt good to put it all down on paper like that, my forefingers aching from holding the pen. But when I read it through, I knew I couldn’t send it. I tried to rewrite it, to make it less raw, less open, less like a great gaping wound that I was baring just for her. But, no matter how I tried, the words wouldn’t come right. To tell it any other way was a lie.

I tore at those pages until they were just tiny scraps, until the pieces covered my bed like the dust of some forgotten, unreclaimable time.