Exodos

Sylvie had been away close on two years when Mum died.

It wasn’t exactly out of the blue, still it came as a shock. She’d been doing so well, was getting movement back in her right side, had regained enough control to scratch a child’s scrawl of her name on the handful of Christmas cards she sent out each year. But the summer was a hot one—on some days well into the forties—and maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was something else, but a week after New Year’s she had another stroke. I rode with her in the ambulance, held her hand under the blanket, under the straps. All those tubes and wires… The oxygen pump gasped. Machines beeped. Her hand went limp. She was dead before we even made it to the hospital.

The funeral was small, depressing. Only a handful of people came: Mum’s sister Geraldine and her husband; the caregiver who’d helped me with Mum since her first stroke; Christophe. It was held at the North Blackworth Crematorium, over on the other side of the highway. The gardens were nice enough, I suppose, but the church seemed phony, with its cheap curtains and rows of uncomfortable chairs. Even the flowers looked plastic. The priest said all kinds of rubbish about Mum, a whole load of made-up rubbish about what a good Christian she was, though Mum never believed any of that hoo-ha. There was something so pitiful about the coffin, trundling back through the curtain, and the music, tinny and grating through the small, dusty speakers.

I wore a black suit I’d picked up at Vinnies. It was extra, extra large, but sat funny on me even still; pinched in places, bagged in others. It didn’t look funereal so much as criminal. With my hair slicked back and down I looked like a bouncer, or a hoodlum from a gangster movie. It was so uncomfortable, I kept shifting and shuffling about, making the chair creak. I could feel sweat soaking into the underarms of the new white shirt.

I gave the eulogy. It was me that knew Mum best, but still it wasn’t all that good. I didn’t know what to say and just felt daft, stood at the front of that echoey room, almost empty. How could you sum up a life—a whole life—with just a few words? How could you even try? No one knew her better than me, but even I only knew her from the outside. Who could say what was underneath, what luminous ghost struggled beneath those layers of flesh, the body that resisted her control and had been for so many years her enemy.

Everyone came back to the house after. I’d bought wine and crackers and cheese. Geraldine poked around the house looking for things to steal, sore that Mum had left it all to me. She got drunk and snide, speaking down to me in her cruel and whiny voice as if I were a child.

“Whatever happened to you, Georgina?” Geraldine slurred, her eyes fogged and droopy. “You were such a pretty little thing. Always a bit on the chubby side, I’ll grant. But you had such a smile. So pretty. Whatever happened?”

“Come on, Geraldine,” said her husband, whose name I could never remember, Grant or Gary or Greg. “Leave her alone.”

“You leave her alone,” spat the drunken old witch. “What happened, girl? Just look at you. Like a brick shit-house and all dressed up like a fucking bloke. What must your mum have thought, you growing up into a bloody great—”

“That’ll do,” said Greg or Gary or Grant, and he and Christophe took her, one to an arm, and pulled her toward the door. “Let’s get you in the car.”

“Thank you, George,” he said over his shoulder. “Sorry about your mum. She was a good sort.”

That night, after I’d cleaned away the empty bottles, the paper cups and plates and all the detritus of the wake, I sat in my undies looking down at the old tobacco tin, at my treasures all laid out on the edge of the bath. I must have sat like that an hour or more, just staring down at them glinting there, before I picked them up one by one and packed them away.

•

Sylvie hardly came back at all that summer. Christophe got a postcard to say that she and Dane had gone to the Great Barrier Reef, some kind of diving adventure holiday. It didn’t sound like the sort of thing Sylvie would have been into. When she finally returned at the end of the summer, she was so happy it was absurd. She was almost unrecognizable.

I was in the attic when she bounded up the creaking stairs, swanning round the place like she owned it. I was preoccupied, wrapped up in Mum being gone, in sorting out her estate—Geraldine was contesting the Will, trying to get her hands on the house. I had a lot on my plate at the shop, too, and didn’t have time for this new Sylvie, with her cardboard cut-out joie de vivre and patchwork of self-help economics and popular psychology. Who even was this person? I felt I didn’t know her at all.

“You look smart,” she said, sidling toward me through stacks of unpriced furniture with a poise that made me hate her.

I’d taken to wearing a suit every day, ever since Mum’s funeral. Mostly second-hand numbers I picked up in thrift stores and flea markets, adjusted to my size by Mrs. Nguyen round the corner. It felt right, but I was still self-conscious.

I grunted, gave a nod, pretending not to look up from the French sorcière mirror I was turning over and over in my hands. My fingertips began to sweat.

“It suits you,” she said. “Very . . . contained.”

“How was your trip?” I asked without looking up. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to be making small talk like this, pretending. I didn’t want to hear about Dane. The attic felt stuffy, the collar of my shirt too tight.

“Wonderful,” she said in an affected drawl that didn’t suit her. “I’ve never seen an ocean so blue. And turtles. Turtles and rays and so many brightly colored fish, I couldn’t begin to name them all. It was magnificent.”

As she talked, she twirled slowly, taking in the many shelves of objects, some I had already sorted, with paper price tags dangling by a thread, others yet to be appraised, languishing in boxes and tea chests, stacked one upon the other against the attic wall.

“Yes, it was splendid. And most wonderful of all was who we met while we were out there. A chance in a million. You’ll simply never believe it.”

I made a noise, investing as much effort as my level of interest would allow, all the while buffing at the convex mirror in my hands, wiping away the dust from the carved wooden leaves surrounding it.

Sylvie had stopped beside an unrestored dresser, leaned forward to examine a porcelain figurine, a sleeping nude in a bed of flowers. “Yes,” she said. “The most wonderful doctor. Swiss, I think, or maybe Austrian. A specialist.”

I saw her reach for the figurine. Her fingers opened to receive it and I looked up from what I was doing, the mirror forgotten in my hands.

“A specialist?” The words came out, but it was as if they had nowhere to go; they hung there between us like a frozen breath.

“An expert,” she said and reached until her fingers were so close they might almost have brushed the nude. “Someone qualified to deal with my little . . . problem.”

She hesitated and her fingers drew back.

I was so stunned, I didn’t know what to say. There was something in her eyes, then, like the old sadness, a glimmer of something real and true and alive. The Sylvie I used to know.

There was something else, too, in the look she gave me. Fear, perhaps. Or despair. For a moment it seemed she might collapse, sobbing into my lap, plead with me to rescue her.

But then she forced a smile and the mask came down, and she turned and left the attic without another word.

•

The next year, Sylvie didn’t come back at all. Christophe went out of state for her graduation, left me in charge of the shop. When he returned, he looked older somehow. Weighed down. Sylvie wasn’t coming home.

That was the year I got my brown belt. I was training every day then, pounding the bag in the back room. All that exercise had changed me. It’s not that I’d lost weight or anything, but I was solid; when I washed the sweat from myself in the shower back home, the water coursed over scars stretched tight with muscle.

Boz joined the dojo that year. He did a double take to see me, demonstrating moves with the sensei, training the white belts. When it came to his turn, he looked this way and that, trying to catch the eye of any other trainer. But there was only me. He looked straight-up petrified when I beckoned him with a gesture of my hand. I thought it would be weird, him being there, but it wasn’t. I hardly ever thought of that night anymore. When I grabbed him by the collars, rolled him back and over, came down on top of him with my knees pinning his arms, it was strictly professional. The anger just wasn’t there.

Darren was doing well, I’d heard. Assistant manager at the local Office Works. Someone told me he and Tansy Rimer were together now, that he’d bought her a sparkly ring. “Next there’ll be wedding bells,” they’d said and I shrugged. Signing the papers down at the local council wasn’t exactly “wedding bells.” And what did I care about those old bullies, when school already seemed so long ago, like the distant past.

Things were harder for Tommy. I saw him one time, crossing the highway over by the old courthouse, looking scrawny as a chicken. He was sucking on a cigarette so hard it caved his cheeks in, waiting at the lights with a girl no more than sixteen. She had sunken eyes and her mascara was black and smeared and made her look like a skeleton; a skeleton in black leggings and pink Ugg boots. While Tommy smoked, walking just in front of her, the skeleton girl pushed the stroller. Tommy was yelling something at the girl. The baby screamed and screamed.

Every night I trained. Every night I came home to the empty house. My days were all about the shop. I’d learned a fair bit about antiques in the time I’d been working there, enough for me to drive out in Christophe’s old van in search of new treasures, touring the antique fairs and estate sales. I always came back with something good, sometimes with a haul. In between times, I’d built us a website, started buying and selling pieces online. I worked every day of the week.

I’d moved into Mum’s bedroom with the built-in wardrobe and was stocking it slowly but surely with quality vintage garments. I started picking them up when I did my weekday rounds of the markets. Suits my size weren’t easy to come by, but I’d found a few beauties on my travels: double-breasted flannel, deep navy worsted, and my weekend favorite, Harris Tweed. Half the wardrobe hung with crisp shirts in muted colors, cut to exactly my size by Mrs. Nguyen’s expert hands.

Christophe still sat each day at the front desk, still had his smoke and his stroll. Only now, we’d close up the shop for lunch and walk down the street together: Christophe, puffing at his disgusting roll-up; me, balling and releasing my fists, feeling all that caged power. We’d sit side by side in the dim café Christophe had come to every day since he first moved to town with Sylvie. We’d eat without speaking, at peace in the hubbub of others’ conversations. In the years we’d been working together, I’d grown to love him in the way of an uncle or a father. A quiet way that grew out of our long, shared silences, from the many hundreds of hours watching him potter through his routine, pining for Sylvie in his own fashion, much as I pined for her in mine. We always had that, the unspoken bond between us, the love of our lives that had rejected us both.

On his desk still sat the ancient till, the fake marble bust, and beside them the silver-framed photograph. But there was another picture on the desk now, in a delicate marquetry frame of pale and dark wood—a black-and-white portrait of Sylvie. It was taken the year before she went to university. Her smile was crooked. Her eyes wide and filled with sadness.

•

I’d given up all hope of seeing Sylvie again, resigned myself to the choice she’d made, her life with Dane and the person she’d become. The rawness of my love had scabbed and healed over. All that remained was the scar. And the nagging, persistent itch buried too deep to be relieved.

But then the postcard arrived from Switzerland. The photo showed peaks of white capped mountains in the background, rolling verdant hills and a lake as blue and still as polished glass. In the foreground, two girls in traditional Swiss dress sat beside each other on the meadow. Both girls were looking straight at the camera, their eyes the same brilliant blue as the lake.

I stood for a long time staring at that picture, not daring to turn over the card to see what was written on the back. My heart trembled in its cage of meat and bone.

Darling G,

I saw this card and thought of you. Two girls at the lake (but no rain this time). I hope father is treating you well. I’ll be home this summer to see you both. I have such wonderful news!

Your S

My legs went so limp I had to sit down at the kitchen table. I read and re-read those words, trying to make sense of them.

Darling G . . . Your S

It had been years since Sylvie wrote to me, even a few words, and never with such intimacy. It made me so excited I thought I’d be sick. I could hardly sleep that night for thinking of it, what it might mean.

Each morning, when I woke, the postcard was the first thing I reached for. When I dressed to go to the shop, I tucked it into the inside pocket of that morning’s suit, holding it close to my breast, to my pounding heart. When I got home each evening, when I changed for training, I slipped it from the pocket, read it again, before propping it against the bedroom mirror. In bed, I read it one last time, fell asleep with it under my pillow, my fingers brushing the place where she had, at last, revealed the secrets of her heart.

Your S

I had forgotten entirely what she told me in the attic, didn’t make the connection—the significance of Switzerland. I had forgotten all about the “specialist.” I was so consumed by the flame that postcard had ignited that I imagined “wonderful news” could mean only one thing: that Sylvie had finished with Dane and was coming home.

To me.

•

The morning of Sylvie’s arrival, I wore my best suit: a vintage Kiton cashmere, with wide lapels and a Glen check. It had cost a fortune, but that seemed a small price for how I felt inside it, how well it hung against my now-muscular form. I’d sat up half the night polishing a pair of brown-and-white two-tone wingtips that gleamed on my feet. I slicked my hair, checked my reflection in the mirror. I had never in my life looked so entirely like myself.

The dingaling of the bell, as I pushed open the door to the shop, was so cheerful that morning, so filled with the promise of a lifetime’s hopes realized at last. Christophe greeted me with a nod as I entered. He looked exhausted, leaning on the edge of his desk as though he’d aged overnight. His brow was wrinkled, mouth pinched, his expression strained. I pulled a face, began to ask him what was the matter, but before I could speak, I heard footsteps pattering down the wooden stairs and there was Sylvie.

I smoothed back my hair from its parting, stood into my full height.

“George,” she said, crossing the floor. “You look . . . incredible. It’s been too long.”

She looked more beautiful than I had ever remembered. Her dark hair spilled like feathers around her bare shoulders and down the back of a cream A-line frock. Her mouth, when she spoke, was so small, so perfect, like a ripe raspberry. My body was going haywire at the sight of her, melting and exploding and dissolving and electric all at once. I could already imagine the feel of her pressed against me, wrinkling the lines of my suit.

As she glided toward me between the stacked bookshelves, past the wall of softly ticking clocks, the glass display case of Victorian wind-up toys and through the labyrinth of restored antique furniture, her fingers brushed the objects. Her hands made lithe motions, almost dancing, just as they had in the attic of my memory, when she had tasted the ghosts of each object’s past with her feather-light touch. It was Sylvie as I had always remembered her.

Only it wasn’t.

The movements were the same, the gestures identical. But her face, her eyes. The attention she held on me was entirely wrong, the smile fixed and meaningless. And her eyes. Her eyes did not waver. The lids did not once flutter.

She embraced me and I stiffened. Every nerve ending aflame. Wanting to give everything to her, but knowing this was not Sylvie.

“I’m so glad you’re here, my darling,” she said. “It’s so wonderful. So perfect.”

There came a sound of thunder from above, heavy boots on hollow wood. Dane burst into the room.

“There you are,” he said. “And about time.”

“Oh George,” said Sylvie and beamed at me with perfect artifice.

“Sylvie and I—” said Dane.

My heart was convulsing with such force I thought the buttons on my shirt would split.

“Sylvie’s going to be my wife.”

Christophe turned to me, his eyes clouded with pain.

•

The day was interminable. Sylvie and Dane invited us to lunch to celebrate their “wonderful” news. Christophe closed the shop for the afternoon.

We drove all together in Dane’s Lexus, up the mountain to Le Sommet, a stuffily pretentious restaurant on the view side of the mountains’ most expensive hotel. Known by locals to be overpriced, understaffed and overrated, the place was kept alive by romantic city weekenders and the endless busloads of Asian tourists. It reminded me in many ways of Dane—showy and characterless, its surface glamor barely concealing a mania for acquisition and wealth.

Dane spared no expense. A window seat, the set menu, a bottle of Krug waiting in a bucket of ice. The pop of the cork, the tinkle of the glasses, the spritzing effervescence of the bubbles, all assaulted me with their refinement. Each sip was like poison. Dane blathered on and on. Sylvie showed off her ring, beamed vapidly. Christophe sat rigid, forking up that posh food with awkward movements, washing it all down with far too much wine. I was too stunned to speak. I didn’t know what to do with myself, didn’t understand what I was doing there.

We were the only patrons in the restaurant that afternoon. Just us, the waiter and the in-house performer. The empty room echoed with overloud ballads played on a grand piano so shiny-white it looked cheap—Elton John, Neil Diamond, Engelbert Humperdinck.

The afternoon wore on with no hope of an end. I watched Sylvie from across the table—her facile expression, her learned gestures—my heart as dull and heavy as a punching bag. I played and replayed our last moments in the shop together. Christophe had gone upstairs for his coat and Dane was bringing the car around. Sylvie and I stood by the front desk. I hadn’t known what to say, couldn’t bear to open myself to this Sylvie I didn’t recognize or understand. I stood stiffly, fists balled.

She was talking at me, a shower of sparkly patter that I registered only as sound. As she spoke, she moved things around on the desk, picking them up, putting them down. She turned the silver-framed photograph toward her, lifted it from the desk and looked for a long time at the picture of her mother, fingering the pattern of grooves around the edge of the frame.

Then she looked up from the portrait and smiled at me, placed it back on the desk just as she had found it. Her expression—the look in her eyes—had not changed, as though she had felt nothing at that old, familiar contact.

Nothing at all.

•

It was dark when the taxi dropped us back at the shop and a murky fluorescence pooled beneath the streetlights. The temperature had dropped and mist curled in the cab’s blue-white beams. I felt drunk, though I’d hardly sipped at the champagne. I should have gone to training, but went, instead, straight home and locked the door behind me.

All the lights were off and I felt my way up the stairs, shedding clothes as I climbed. The suit jacket fell by the front door in a heap, the tie at the foot of the stairs. The cufflinks plinked and plunked on the risers as the dress shirt sloughed away like an unwanted skin. By the time I reached the bathroom, fumbled for the light switch, I wore only my undies.

I ripped at the loose tile beneath the bath and pulled out the old tobacco tin, laid out all my treasures one by one. They sparkled, brilliant in their sharpness. Each blade sang its own melody—songs of metal and flesh, of the gleaming knife edge between the body’s end and the soul’s beginning. The scars on my arms and chest and thighs chorused in harmony. The vibrations were so intense I felt they might tear me apart.

My hand hovered for what seemed an age, tuning in to the magnetic resonance of each precious treasure, seeking that frequency most in tune with my heart’s own mournful contralto. My fingers closed around the old school compass, the one that had lain in the dark corners of my pencil case since the sixth grade. I savored the coldness of the metal, the weathered black plastic, the savage gleaming point. I pressed down, shuddered as the tip sank into the muscle above my knee, moaned as my hand moved back, dragging the point through thigh flesh, carving a track all the way to my groin. My eyes were filled with tears. My scars buzzed. The cut was ragged and profane, the edges curled back from glistening red meat.

I passed the compass to my left hand.

Choking a sob, I raked the point from my other knee to the cleft of my thigh. The compass fell to the tiles with a clatter. Spots of red gleamed on shining white. The sound of dripping, like a tap not fully closed.

I reached out again for my treasures. My fingers, shaking now, brushed first against the rough hasp of the scalpel, next against the machined grooves of an unsheathed razor blade. It was a decision won by feel. I gripped the scalpel handle, pressed my thumb down on the base, the blade jutting beneath my fist. I lay an arm upon my bloody thigh, palm up. My fingers clenched and unclenched, like a dying spider.

I didn’t press, at first. Instead, I let the point of the scalpel rest against the soft tent of skin between the tendons of my wrist. I didn’t press, just let the weight of the handle sink the blade. When the skin broke, I gasped. My eyes squeezed tears. I clenched my teeth, exhaling with a groan, pushed down. The blade sank so deep it scraped bone. Panting, sobbing, I dragged back and down, pressing and dragging and wailing. And though the muscles around each fissure throbbed and howled and every severed nerve shrieked, it was not enough to draw me away from that deeper pain, the sorrow that no blade could reach because it was not in my body. I shook with sobs.

When I switched the scalpel to my left hand, I could barely close my fist; only my first and little fingers would bend enough to clutch it, and the handle was now so sticky and wet that it slipped and slid. When I tightened my grip, blood waterfalled from the furrow. The groove I cut into my right arm was less deep, but more jagged, took much, much longer to complete. Each beat of my heart made a swirling, whooshing sound, so loud in my ears.

I never did manage to pick up the razor. The scalpel fell, clattered distantly, as though rebounding from the walls of a very deep, very resonant well. I pitched forward from the toilet seat into a spreading pool of myself.

I was gone before my forehead struck the tiles.

•

And then . . .

•

What happened after, I’ve never told anyone. Not even Christophe—who I trust, perhaps, more than anyone else alive. Am I afraid he wouldn’t believe me? I don’t know if I believe myself.

I was neither here nor there, in the bathroom and yet not there at all—somewhere in the nowhere space between all spaces. I felt cold tile beneath me, the press of bare flesh and the grate of bone, the steady pulse as I leaked through all the doorways I had opened in myself. Yet all of that was so distant, so quiet somehow. In amongst it and everywhere was a sweet lightness, an emptiness I was expanding into, that I longed to be a part of.

The bathroom was there, but it was not the same. All about me was an odorless black smoke that coiled and curled, tentacles of shadow more real than the echoes of that faraway room. Soft black filaments brushed my cheek, explored the seams in my arms, the scores in my thighs. I was alone and yet I was pressed in, surrounded. I heard whispers, a babel of silence, felt the caresses of fingers that were not there, saw faces in the smoke, or the idea of faces. Some I knew. Others . . .

Mum was there. And so was Gran. And cousin Kylie, who died in the car crash when I was little. They pressed around me, shushing, tutting. They spoke all at once and, though nothing they said made sense, I understood all of it. I tried to speak, to tell them I was fine, how happy I was to see them, but no words came out, only ripples in the swirling black.

There were others, too. So many others. The woman from the photo on Christophe’s desk, she was there. And old women, old men. Women and men in clothes from other times. Top hats. Parasols. Bonnets, moustaches. This was it, I knew. The last I would ever see. I was between worlds and would soon pass over to the next.

And then the ocean of black seemed to part and the murmurs swelled like a wave drawn back over pebbles, like the chittering of a thousand cockroaches. From within the coiling smoke, someone approached. The others peeled back, turning away from the new arrival as though repelled. Coldness crept into me, and a feeling of dread. I recognized the shape, the movements, but something was wrong, somehow . . . incomplete. It was Sylvie, but she had no face.

Sylvie twirled and danced, those old fluid movements now embodied in smoke. But there was no sad smile, no eyes to flutter. Even here, she was no longer my Sylvie. Less than a ghost in a world of ghosts.

I reached for her with hands of black nothing, while the hands of my body, the meat and bone hands, lay sticky and still on the tiles. There rose a pounding, the throb of blood in my ears.

Then the pounding became a drum beneath me, a furious hammering and shouts of my name. Then a smash from downstairs and the tinkling of glass. Then silence.

The black smoke enveloped me and there was nothing.

•

I woke to whiteness. Sheer. Stark. Final. My first thought: So this is how it feels to be dead.

There was a table and a bowl of grapes. Fluorescent lights above, a bluish-white curtain pulled around. Beside my limp hand, a gray cord ended at a box with a red button. My arms felt tight. I couldn’t move my fingers.

Christophe was by my bedside.

“There you are,” he said and his eyes sparkled. “I was afraid you weren’t coming back.”

After the taxi dropped us off from Le Sommet and I had staggered down the street, Christophe had paced around the shop, not knowing what to do with himself. He couldn’t relax, couldn’t concentrate—too tired to be up, too restless to sleep. He fussed with a pile of books, shuffled estate sale knick-knacks from one tea chest to another. Upstairs in the attic, he sprawled on the leather couch, staring at the bare bulb, the shadows on the ceiling. That, he told me, was when he felt the pull.

He stood, half tumbled down the stairs in his haste. He forgot his nightly routine, didn’t lock the shop, left the lights on just as they were. He called an ambulance from the payphone in the street, called them before he even reached my house and found the door locked, the windows dark.

“It was the strangest feeling,” he said. “I don’t know how, but I just knew something was wrong. I knew you were in there and that I’d find you . . . how I found you. The image was already there in my mind.”

I was in the hospital five days, “under observation.” I suppose they worried that I’d try to finish the job. Along with the grapes and a pile of dusty Alistair Macleans from the shop, Christophe had brought me some clothes. The nurse took away my belt. When she came with my meal tray—the meat and two gray veg, the white bread and margarine, the juice box and the cup of pink angel fluff—there was only plastic cutlery. The nurse watched while I ate.

“You would have been dead,” she delighted in telling me, over and over, “if your father hadn’t come home when he did.”

I never corrected her and neither did Christophe. Besides, the doctor told me it was my size that saved me. A smaller person would have bled out long before Christophe had kicked down the door.

Sylvie and Dane had driven back to the capital the day after that awful dinner. Christophe told them I’d been called away, a deceased estate in Wagga. He never told Sylvie what happened, and for that I will love him forever.