I close my eyes. But I don't fall asleep either.
8
2 AM CHIPS
1:47 AM on a Tuesday.
I'm standing in Ethan Morin's kitchen in an oversized T-shirt and socks with holes in both heels, eating barbecue chips out of a bag I found behind the rice cooker. The kitchen light is off. The apartment is quiet. I'm not performing for anyone, which is how I know I've run out of whatever I was running on.
The day was long.They're all long now — the days have a new shape that I didn't agree to, a shape that involves being two people at once in a space that wasn't designed for either of them. During the day I answer Derek's emails (revision six — he now wants the font in something calledPlayfair Displayand I don't have the energy to explain why that's a bad idea for a brunch menu). I make meals that look right and taste like apologies. I consult my phone under the counter to double-check the boiling time because suddenly I'm second-guessing something as simple as pasta and I can't let him see me spiral. I do Ethan's physiotherapy exercises with him — holding the resistance band, counting the reps, saying "good, one more" in a voicethat sounds like I've done this before, when what I'm actually thinking isplease don't make that face, that face where you're in pain and pretending you're not, because it does something to me that I can't afford right now.
But today was different, because in the afternoon, my mother called.
Not about anything urgent— or rather, about something she'd been callingnot urgentfor three weeks, which in her vocabulary means it's been bothering her every day but she doesn't want to impose. The kitchen faucet. Dripping. "??????" —just dripping— said in the tone that meansI've put a bowl under it and I'm emptying the bowl twice a day and I will do this for the rest of my life rather than ask someone.
I recognize that tone. I should. I learned it from her.
"I'll come look at it," I said, already knowing I had no idea what to do with a dripping faucet. My skill set includes kerning, color theory, and the ability to explain to a restaurant owner why his font choice is wrong. Plumbing is not in the portfolio.
Ethan was on the couch. He'd been reading — or pretending to read — a magazine about outdoor adventure that I'd bought him from the dépanneur because he'd been staring at the ceiling too much and I thought he needed something to stare at that didn't have a crack in it. He put the magazine down.
"What kind of faucet?"
"What?"
"Your mom's faucet. Single handle or two?"
I couldn't remember. He asked me to take a photo when I got there. I said okay and left.
My mother'sapartment is twenty-five minutes by métro. She lives in a 4½ in Côte-des-Neiges that she's had since before Istarted school — the same apartment she moved into when she and my father first came to Montreal, when she was twenty-six and had a degree from a good university in China and the belief that starting over in a new country would be the brave kind of hard, not the slow kind. My father went back eleven years later. She stayed. For me, she said, but I think also because going back would have meant admitting the brave kind of hard had won.
She works as an accountant now. Has for fifteen years. She's precise, reliable, and speaks about her job how you'd speak about a piece of furniture — it's there, it functions, it doesn't need to be discussed. The superintendent in her building fixes things eventually if you ask three times, and my mother has never once asked because asking would mean admitting something in her apartment isn't perfect.
She opened the door and looked at me the way she always does — a scan, top to bottom, three seconds. Hair. Coat. Face.
"???," she said.You've lost weight.
"I haven't."
"???????"You look tired.
"????"I'm not.
She stepped back to let me in. The apartment smelled like the rice cooker and the jasmine soap she buys in bulk from the Asian grocery at Plaza Côte-des-Neiges. Everything was in its place — the shoes lined up by the door, the plastic mat under the shoes, the framed photos on the shelf arranged by date with the frames all the same distance apart. My mother's apartment looks like a showroom. It has always looked like a showroom. When I was seven, I knocked over a picture frame and she didn't yell — she just picked it up, realigned it with the others, and wiped the glass with her sleeve, and the silence in which she did this was louder than any yelling would have been.
I learned early: the surface tells people what you want them to believe. If the surface is right, nobody asks what's underneath.
The faucet was in the kitchen. It dripped every four seconds — I counted, because that's what I do — a small, persistent percussion that must have been driving her quietly insane for three weeks while she smiled and called itnot urgent.
I crouched under the sink. Took a photo. Sent it to Ethan.
He called back in thirty seconds.
The first thingI noticed was his voice.
Not what he said — what hesoundedlike. Because the Ethan I'd been living with for the past few days — the one on the couch, the one with the half-sentences and the deflecting jokes and the guard that clicks shut like a latch — was gone. In his place was someone else. Someone whose voice was low and level and completely unhurried, a voice that tells you where to put your hands and when to turn and what to expect next.
The radio voice. The one J-S described in the hospital corridor.Same cadence. Like he's reading you directions to the dépanneur.I'd heard it described. I'd never heard it aimed at me.
