The beginning was bad. The start of the new year, New Year's Eve. To everyone else it seemed like a miracle that the world hadn't come to an end. It was the year 2000 and everything, Y2K, but all those news reports that told us we should be stockpiling bottled water and canned food turned out to be just another fake scare. The computers figured it all out, and there we were, the same place we'd been in 1999. Only I didn't have a grandmother anymore.
She died during our big family New Year's Eve party. It was awful. While every other person in the world with a television was watching a ball drop and kissing each other and blowing their noisemakers, we were watching Grandma get loaded onto a stretcher in the living room. It was a heart attack, they said, the paramedics in their cargo pants. But she didn't go clutching her chest and moaning and making a big scene. She was graceful, like always, and then she was gone.
We rode to the hospital through streets crowded with people who were, miraculously, all still alive. And Grandma died two days later.
It was a horrible way to start the new year. With the woman who'd pretty much raised me gone, I was in a really bad place. Which is a phrase I've heard so many times that I know it's a cliché, but when your sadness becomes such a constant, heavy part of your life—this blanket laid over top of everything else that smothers anything good so that you're totally blocked off from every other person in the world—your sadness is the bad place. And you can't remember it ever being another way.
I couldn't remember how safe and secure I felt when I was with Grandma. How everything I said seemed important when she was the one listening to me. I couldn't remember the slow, dawning smile that would take over her face when she found me standing on her doorstep, come to visit, to play cards and eat Swiss cheese and avocado on crackers.
I couldn't remember the wonderful things she told me I was: smart and kind and beautiful. All I could think of was that I would never feel her arms—strong, and then weaker as she got older and so did I—wrapped around me again, breathing in her sweet smell of peppermint and Yardley's Lavender.
I had a week or so from the end of the world until school started again. Mom was channeling her grief over her mother's death into work and funeral planning, and Dad was in the middle of some big trade or merger or whatever and was home even less than usual. I don't get my parents' marriage at all. They've been together forever—they met when they were in university—but they have absolutely nothing in common, apart from being superhumanly driven in their careers. I asked my mom once, in a weirdly candid moment after she'd had a couple of glasses of wine, how she knew that Dad was the one when he proposed to her the summer after they graduated. She told me that she didn't, that she had just hoped for the best. What does that say about hope, about anything?
So I was alone in the house, pretty much just crying and reading Grandma's old books and trying to keep some part of her alive inside of me. In four days I read almost everything Alice Munro had ever written. She was Grandma's favourite; her short stories were these perfect little pearl worlds that lured me out of my own head for the few hours that I gave myself over to them completely. I fell asleep more than once face down in Grandma's old hardcover copy of Munro's Selected Stories, long after the words had stopped making sense.
I remembered, vividly, visiting Grandma at her old house—the one she lived in with my grandpa, who died before I was born; the one she lived in before she moved into the old folks' home when I was fifteen, when Mom wouldn't let her come live with us. She'd play with me all day and she'd never lose her patience the way my parents always seemed to. And when we were finished playing, when I was finally exhausted from our imaginary trips to the Sahara and the Amazon, she'd tell me it was time for our books, and we'd sit together in her living room, me with some dumb Baby Sitter's Club book and her with Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood or Jane Urquhart, with a little glass candy dish filled with scotch mints between us. I'd fill my pockets up with the candies before I left, and she'd pretend not to notice. On the ride home with Mom, or sometimes Dad, I'd stuff the mints into my mouth one by one, trying hard to just suck on them, but giving in and biting down hard, the candies' granular coolness filling my mouth. Those were perfect days. But there wouldn't be any more of those.
I spent an entire afternoon lying in the bathtub, staring at the sink's leaky faucet, willing it to stop dripping. Each drop that landed in the basin with a dull plunk was laughing at me and my desperation to feel like I had control over anything.
The water turned cold around me, but I stayed there, shivering, well into the evening.
By the fifth day, there was nothing edible left in the fridge apart from a stick of unsalted butter and some unmarked leftovers, fuzzy with mould. Apparently Mom and Dad were simply too busy to pick up some groceries—this wasn't exactly a new development, our phone had five different takeout places on speed dial—so I finally had to leave the house. I took Mom's credit card from her purse on the kitchen counter, put on my boots and my coat, and left.
I expected the neighbourhood to look different after spending the better part of a week in voluntary confinement, but the salty sidewalks and snow that barely covered the grey grass looked the same. And it was sunny, really sunny. I couldn't believe how bright it was, the sun stung my eyes. I tucked my head down and stared at the sidewalk and my feet as I resignedly put one in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other.
I found my way to the grocery store and loaded up a basket with whatever packages I recognized: the cereal Dad likes when he's around the house long enough to eat breakfast, the crackers Mom buys when she's expecting guests, the peanut butter I brought to school every day with honey or banana or strawberry jam between slices of white bread with the crusts cut off when I was a kid. I wanted anything familiar.
I got in line behind an elderly woman with three bananas and a carton of milk. I wanted to tell her that she could take the short line, the express lane, but she was wearing a red wool coat like Grandma's and my face got all tight like it does right before I'm about to cry and instead I ducked back into the frozen food aisle, took a package of blueberry frozen waffles out of the freezer and read the ingredients list line by line.
By the time I was finished, the woman in the red coat had paid for her food and left the store. I lined up again, paid with Mom's Visa and started walking back home. At Brunswick and Bloor I rested my bags on the sidewalk. As I was about to cross to the north side of the street, I paused, picked up my bags and waddled into Book City instead. I blocked the doorway, coming in with all the groceries, and a young couple with a baby in a stroller looked annoyed, waiting for me to get out of their way. The security gates went off as I walked through them, and while I struggled to get out of the way and explain that I wasn't stealing anything, one of my bags split open and a box of Life cereal and two bags of barbeque chips hit the floor. One of the girls behind the cash gave me a pitying look and came around to help me clean up the mess, saying, "Don't worry about it, it happens!" while she got me a new bag and helped stash my stuff behind the counter.
I mumbled "Thank you," trying to hide my eyes as my face started getting tight again, and walked toward the back of the store, stopping at the kids section.
I spent a long time there, just browsing, trying to remember books I'd loved when I was little. I sat on a stool by the picture books reading Robert Munsch for a while, but then a little boy came by, holding his dad's hand. They saw me sitting there, crying quietly and turning the pages too fast, and then the little boy started crying and his dad looked totally helpless, so I got up to leave, fast. I'd just pushed the door open to go when the girl who'd helped me out before yelled,
"Hey, don't forget your groceries!" I turned around, my face completely red and still trying to hide the fact that I'd been crying, and noticed that someone had dropped a bill on the ground. I picked it up.
Red, a fifty dollar bill.
Not wanting to draw attention to myself, I passed it off to the clerk who'd been nice to me.
"I found this on the ground," I said, "over there by the door. Did you maybe drop it from the till or something?"
"Oh, wow," she said. "No, I don't think so." She held the money up in the air and called out, "Did anybody lose a fifty?"
A few people who were looking at the shelves nearby chuckled. "Geez," someone said, "I wish I had fifty bucks to lose."
"Looks like it's yours now," the girl said. "Must be your lucky day."
"I really don't think I should take it."
A man standing behind me spoke up. "Take it," he said. "Do something good."
The clerk passed me my groceries over the counter, then handed the bill back to me. "He's right," she said, "you could do a lot of good with that money."
I made a weak smile, then folded the bill and put it in my coat pocket. "Sure," I said, "something good. I'll try."
***
When I got home Mom was in the kitchen, on the phone with one of her producers. She kept on talking, while I put away the groceries. When I finally managed to get the freezer door to close—stuffed as it was with ice cream, waffles, mac and cheese, and curly fries—she hung up.
"Thanks, honey," she said. "What a big help. So... helpful."
"Yeah, it's no problem. I mean, we still have to eat, right?
I used your card, by the way. Here you go," I said, handing her the Visa.
"Terrific. Great. Yes. Of course. We still have to..." she was talking in her not-all-there way.
"What?" I said, trying to snap her out of it.
"Huh? Oh. Dinner, we need to have dinner. I was hoping we could all eat together tonight."
"Is Dad coming home early?"
"I'm still waiting to hear from him. If his meeting's on tonight or not. We could still eat, though. The two of us. We could eat."
"I'm not really hungry," I said, my stomach gurgling to the contrary.
"Really? Oh. I can't go grocery shopping without getting ravenous. That's why I hate supermarkets. They make everything look so good. It's too hard. Too hard to pass up the Oreos." As if that was why she never went shopping.
"I already ate," I said. "I ate before I went out. I'm not hungry now."
"Oh. All right. If you're not hungry, you're not hungry. We'll have to do dinner together another time. Sometime soon, okay?"
"Sure, whatever. I'm going up to my room."
"Okay, honey. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. We've picked a date for the funeral. It's going to be next Saturday. Do you want to... to work on something to say? It would be nice if you said something. Or read something. You could read from one of your grandma's old books. She would have liked that, I think."
"Sure, maybe." My feet started to itch. "I'll work on it. Can I go now?"
"You don't feel like watching TV? We could watch something together. Or a movie. We could go rent... something."
She had the worst taste in movies and she always, always cried at the end.
I wanted to say yes. No, that's not true. I knew that I should say yes, that a good daughter would. That in the TV-movie version of my life, my mom and I would find some stupid way to bond and we'd cling to each other through the hard times—through times like this. I knew that I should have said yes. But I couldn't. Her sad eyes were completely repulsive. They reminded me too much of mine.
"No," I said, "I'm pretty tired."
"Oh. Okay. Sure. We'll talk later. Good night, honey."
"Night, Mom."
I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, lay down on top of my covers, and tried to ignore the empty feeling in my stomach and that it was only six o'clock. Eventually, I slept.