washed the breakfast dishes, wiped the counter, and then retreated to her room. While she made her bed, she suppressed the urge to crawl inside the sheets she’d just tucked in. Her efforts were half-hearted, though, and in the end, she permitted herself to settle atop the cover, telling herself she’d only rest a few minutes.
She didn’t hear her daughter pass her door, yelling, “We’re going out now, Mãe. We’ll be back soon.” She didn’t notice when an hour later the front door opened again, and her family returned. But she wasn’t asleep — she was visiting another place, was caught in another time, back at her old house three weeks after José died.
The extended family had left and the other visitors had finally stopped dropping in with condolences. Although they were a comfort at first, she was glad to not have to receive any more pitying glances, or accept another homemade cake or Pyrex casserole dish full of bean stew. She had six different cakes in her fridge: lemon, chocolate, caramel, vanilla, raisin, and marble — her friends loved bringing her useless cakes! She would have liked to throw them all into the compost except that her mother said she liked them. Not that she had eaten any that morning, or the evening before. Celia wanted to take her to the doctor again, but her mother refused and in the end, Celia acquiesced. Grief had stolen away her own appetite, so who was she to argue?
Around six o’clock, Celia put leftover leitão assado in the oven and went to her mother’s bedroom. She drew near to her mother’s bed, softly calling to her, but still she didn’t awaken. She was about to switch off the bedside lamp and leave her mother to her rest, but something stopped her: a woman frugal to her core, her mother wouldn’t have left a light on, unnecessarily, while she napped. She shook her mother’s limp body, checked futilely for a pulse, and felt her own body go numb.
The old woman succumbed to the infection that had been lurking, worming its way in and through her worn-out organs, stealing away her appetite, but greedily craving Nova Era’s lemon meringue, pastéis de nata, and funeral cakes, their sickly sweetness the only thing able to satisfy its lustful and hasty growth.
Celia slumped down against the wall and stared listlessly at her mother’s body. She felt her eyes glaze over, and heard a whoosh of air pass through her skull. Where does the mind travel when there is nothing left to moor it? Celia’s hovered just above her, and then floated up to the ceiling and surveyed the scene: a dresser, a bed, a cross on the wall. Two women wearing matching black outfits, one stock-still, the other barely moving. One with no breath left inside her, the other not seeming to need air. Her mind floated higher, pressed itself against the ceiling. It stayed there, high above the room’s despair, thinking that soon, this house would need to be vacated and sold. From this angle, the idea of leaving was almost a comfort.
The smell of the burning pork roast was not enough to rouse Celia. When the smoke detector began its screaming, she wanted nothing more than to ignore it, to stay put, to allow herself and her mother to be cremated within her home’s walls. She couldn’t say what force made her stand up, stumble down the stairs and toss out the burned roast, Pyrex dish and all, into the backyard. She watched the black smoke billow up and into the sky, a distress signal. When the smoke dissipated, she went to the fridge and dumped each of the funeral cakes into the garbage bin, one at a time.
— * —
Ismail wished there were a secret recipe for moving on. After so many years, he knew that finding one’s way after a tragedy was like hiking an unmarked trail. He’d scramble down steep slopes, the path sometimes washed away by a recent storm. Familiar landmarks were often difficult to spot.
He considered his neighbour-widow’s outward signs of mourning, her black sack-style dresses, which he guessed was very much in vogue with the widows of Little Portugal. He’d seen these dreary dresses on sidewalk racks outside local clothing stores. In a way, he admired the freedom widows had to be in the world without any pressure to look anything but miserable.
Ismail’s remembering was relentless, his mind compelled to venture back, tragedy a kind of homing device for it. And remembering was rarely brief or casual; whenever Ismail travelled back to that terrible summer day when Zubi died, his mind was obsessive, grabbing on with rubber gloved fingers, poking and prodding at every memory fragment with vigour. His mind shone flood lights on these details, neurotically examining each and every minute of that day, searching for something to make sense of what happened.
Why didn’t I look over my shoulder when I parked? Left my briefcase in the back seat? Why did Zubi have to be so quiet that morning? Why couldn’t just one worrisome, sentimental, fatherly thought about my baby have entered my thick skull at some point during that day? Why didn’t my wife call to inquire about the drop-off at daycare? She might have asked me if Zubi cried when I said goodbye. Rehana told me that Zubi often wailed when she walked out the daycare’s doors.
Only when Ismail became utterly exhausted from this mental torture could his mind offer him rest and sweet affections. It led him by the hand to an imaginary world, fabricating a different day with a different outcome. It invented alternative plot twists and divine interventions.
As I left Rehana at work, I hardly thought about the tasks of the day ahead. Instead, I looked at Zubi in the rearview mirror. Something roused her from her sleep and then, suddenly awake, she cried in that way children do — as though shocked and appalled — when they wake up someplace different from where they fell asleep. I spoke to her in a soft voice, “Zubi, did you wake up? Were you sleeping?” When her whimpering started to slow, I sang to her, “I’m a little teapot, short and stout, here is my handle …” With one arm, I did the accompanying arm movements, my hands dancing with the song. This soothed her until she laughed. At the next stoplight I unbuckled my seat belt, found her soother, and popped it into her waiting mouth. Her dark brown eyes looked at me with adoration. The light changed, I turned back to the driving, and pulled up at the daycare. She only cried a little when I said goodbye. Then I watched her for a few minutes from the hallway, peeking through the door’s glass pane. The teacher placed her down on a spongy rubber carpet and gave her brightly coloured plastic rings to play with.
His mind’s favourite time for these mental games was late at night, when all was quiet in the neighbourhood. It happened only after the children were called inside, the neighbours stopped yelling out to one another from their porches and locked their doors, and the murmurings through the shared walls went silent. That’s when Ismail was left all alone with nothing but his remembering brain. Eventually, it would grow tired of the exercise, or alcohol would slow it down, and he could finally fall asleep.
— 8 —
Nearly Naked
Ismail saw Lydia’s mother again, a week after he caught her looking at him from her window. He was on the front porch wearing only a bathrobe, the late autumn winds lapping at his bare legs. He was searching for his Toronto Star, which the delivery guy invariably tossed anywhere but within easy reach from his door. Finally, Ismail discovered it wedged precariously between two porch steps, threatening to fall beneath. He reached down with both hands and yanked the heavy roll out from between the steps.
Unfortunately, the effort left him unarmed against a sudden gust of wind that lifted his terry-cloth robe high above his skinny, goose-pimpled thighs. He pulled the thin fabric around himself with one hand, held onto his beloved paper with the other, and rushed back into the house like a self-conscious schoolgirl. Before closing the screen door, he scanned the street to check that no one had witnessed the spectacle. And there she was, peering at him through the clear glass of the living room window. After their encounter the previous week, Ismail wasn’t terribly surprised to see her there. Their eyes met for a moment, and then his peep-show audience let the curtain fall from her fingers and she disappeared from sight.
Ismail mused about what the widow had seen
