The Book of Living and Dying Page 2

  As Sarah stepped from the curb, an exquisite rust-coloured leaf floated down, illuminated by the streetlights. It lifted on the wind and danced invitingly in front of her like a small kite. Quercus alba. “White oak,” she said to herself. She had learned the Latin names from one of her teachers at school, the foreign sound of the words soothing her when she couldn’t sleep after the sickness came. She had books at home, books she had made herself, cataloguing the leaves and the names of the trees that had released them, their varied personalities, the subtleties of design, the details. She had focused her mind and discovered a whole world that she had never considered before, opening up, calling her in. It gave her a sense of belonging when everything else had abandoned her—including her mother, who didn’t seem to care what she did any more. Didn’t care about her marks in school or who she hung around with or how late she stayed out—or if she even came home at all. Her mother didn’t care about anything, it seemed, except coffee and cigarettes.

  The ethereal leaf dipped and bobbed. Sarah followed as it floated toward the library, pulsing lightly, like a butterfly, only to flutter away again as she went to catch it. Twirling in the air, the leaf slipped behind the wall of the library and was gone. The wall stood in shadow. Just the kind of place a ghost would like to haunt. “Don’t be silly,” Sarah muttered. Taking a sharp breath, she walked quickly around the cor ner and then stopped, peering through the dark. Was that the leaf, just under the bushes? The moisture dripped off the cedars as she knelt on the ground, stretching out her hand. She turned her head slightly to increase her reach and caught the figure of a man watching her from the shadows.

  Sarah shouted as she fell back, one arm clutching the guitar, heels skidding against the wet grass. Trying to right herself so she could run, she recognized the man as Michael Mort and laughed with embarrassed relief. “Oh my God! You scared me!”

  Michael stood, half shrouded in darkness, the light from the street lamps dancing across his face in strange patterns with the movement of the leaves in the trees. From where Sarah was standing, it looked like he was changing rapidly, his image flickering and throbbing as if captured on old celluloid film. He looked older than seventeen in that light. Much older. His jaw was sharp and angular, punctuated at the chin with a coal-black goatee. His lips were full and curved, his black hair streaming over his shoulders and down the back of his trench coat. He was beautiful, she thought—almost too beautiful. The kind of dark and brooding good looks that earned him sideways glances from girls harbouring secret lust, too timid to risk his thinly veiled disdain. He was different, and wanted to make sure that everyone was aware of it with his aloof and disaffected manner. Sarah felt the pull of attraction, despite her better judgment. He could be the devil for all she knew. What had Donna said, about him stalking her? She held John’s guitar a little tighter.

  “What are you doing back here?” she demanded.

  “Just hanging out,” he said. He shifted his knapsack on his shoulder. The knapsack was covered in pins, with names of older bands that Sarah had only heard of from John. Black Flag, Flipper, Reagan Youth, 7Seconds, Minor Threat, Dag Nasty, The Exploited, Hüsker Dü. There was something dangling from his fingers, too. It was the leaf.

  “I was looking for that,” she said.

  Michael held the leaf up, inspecting it indifferently before offering it to her. “Take it,” he said, stepping from the shadows.

  Their fingers touched briefly as a gust of wind plucked the leaf from Michael’s fingers and carried it up into the night.

  “Oh!” Sarah cried. She quickly collected herself and regarded him with mild chagrin. “I collect leaves,” she shyly confessed. “Pretty dumb, huh?”

  Michael looked back at her, unflinching. He didn’t shift his eyes or look at his feet when he talked to her like so many other guys she knew. It made her nervous and excited just to stand next to him.

  “I collect comics,” he said, his tone friendlier. “How dumb is that?”

  They laughed with the surprise of spontaneous fellowship and she noticed for the first time that his irises were completely black. They stared at each other, the laughter trickling away, until only their smiles were left. Her heart fluttered in her chest like a bird scrambling inside a box and she found herself wondering what it would be like to press her mouth against his lips, to taste him. As she considered this, a voice called her name from across the street.

  It was Peter. He jogged over to where they stood, glanced at Michael, then turned his back to him, addressing Sarah as though Michael weren’t there. “You walking home?”

  Sarah opened her mouth to answer, but said nothing. She didn’t want to go off with Peter and spend the next half hour dodging his advances. She wanted to stay in the half-formed light beside the library and learn more about Michael. “I’m okay, Peter,” she said.

  “I don’t mind walking you home. I go that way anyway. You know that.”

  Sarah looked over at Michael. He had a bemused smirk on his face, waiting for her answer. Peter waited too.

  “I’m okay, Peter, really. I’ve got some stuff to do.”

  Peter nodded. “Yeah, sure.” He glared at Michael as he turned to leave, took a few steps, then turned around again. “Don’t forget the party at my place. You don’t want to miss it.” He pointed his finger at Sarah like a pistol and cocked his thumb.

  Sarah winced inside. She hated when he did that. “Sure, great. Thanks.” She watched him go, willed him to leave faster, the sound of his green Keds growing fainter as they squeaked against the wet pavement in the distance. Michael was watching her. “Don’t ask,” she said.

  He held his hands innocently in the air. “Hey, it’s none of my business who you go out with.”

  “Oh, God, please.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “He won’t leave me alone.”

  “Like moths to a flame,” Michael said.

  Was he making fun of her? She looked at him, expecting him to make a joke of it. But he wasn’t laughing. He was just staring intently back at her with his dark eyes. She tried to grasp something clever to say but came up empty-handed. Now she was the one examining her feet.

  “What I really want to know,” he said, rescuing her from her awkwardness, “is what kind of music you play on that guitar.”

  Relieved to change the subject, Sarah dismissed her interest with a laugh, talking rapidly. “It’s my brother’s guitar—John. He was amazing. I’m not very good. I just fool around a bit because I can’t stand the idea of his guitar just sitting around not being played.” She stopped, wondering if she should explain. She never talked about this stuff with anyone. Sadness made people uncomfortable, she discovered, especially if it went on too long. She felt suddenly naked, balancing on a very steep cliff, toes stuck dangerously over the edge. It would be so easy to just tell him, to free herself from the burden of it. Holding her breath for a moment, she spoke the word at last. “Cancer.” It tumbled out as she surrendered to the moment, relinquishing control. It felt so good to let go.

  Michael nodded. He didn’t take his eyes from her, or fidget, the way other people did when she talked like this. He didn’t try to comfort her with words, or some story about a relative who had died in a similar way. Instead, he looked back at her, with simple honesty and genuine emotion. She felt the band begin to loosen around her heart, the air rushing into her lungs as though for the first time. Should she tell him about John’s ghost, too? Was it too soon for that kind of intimacy?

  “Do you want to see his guitar?” she asked.

  He held the guitar with reverence, admiring the finish. “A Fender Strat. It’s beautiful.”

  Sarah couldn’t help beaming. “You know it?”

  “Know it? It’s vintage. This is a piece of history.” Michael strummed the strings lightly, fingering a few chords before handing it back to her. “I can’t wait to hear you play.”

  “You’ll have to wait a while,” she said, placing the guitar gently in its case. “I just started. I’m pretty brutal. I�
�m better at collecting leaves,” she added, smiling.

  “Hey, let me walk you home,” he offered brightly, as if it were an original idea. “I don’t want your old man to get worried.”

  Sarah snapped the guitar case shut. Her “old man.” She’d tell Michael about him some other time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sarah lay in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. There’d been a noise outside her bedroom door. A soft sound, like a sigh. Too terrified to move, she listened intently and waited, expecting John to appear beside the bed again. She wanted to turn on the light but was afraid to expose her hand from beneath the safety of the blankets, so she just lay there, begging him silently to stay away, choosing her thoughts carefully so as not to incur his wrath. Who knew what ghosts were capable of? She had no doubt that he could read her mind. Anything that could come back from the dead had to be able to do that. She tried to control her breathing but it was noisy and quick. Loud enough to wake the dead. No, no, don’t think that.

  She glanced at the bottle of aspirin on the milk crate beside her bed. As if on cue, the faint pulse of a headache began to work its way up the back of her neck. Her eyes flickered around the room. If she reached her hand out for the aspirin bottle, would he grab it? She couldn’t take that chance. Her thoughts hopscotched from childhood images of John to demonic ghosts circling her bed. Forcing good thoughts to the forefront, she attempted to subdue her fear, to trick the ghost into thinking that she wasn’t afraid. Her temples throbbed as the pain crept up to its usual spot across her brow. She squeezed her eyes shut and quickly opened them again, then shot her hand out and plucked the aspirin bottle from the crate. Snapping her hand back under the covers, she waited. Nothing happened. She was okay.

  Sarah clicked on the light, swallowed a couple aspirins, then got up and walked over to her dresser. From the bottom drawer she produced an old shoebox and two red plastic binders marked “Photos.” Sitting with one foot tucked beneath her on the bed, she began flipping through one of the binders. She always looked at them in the same order. Chronologically. Except for the photos she kept in the box, the ones of the family before she came along. She kept them separate, because there was something about them that seemed to warrant it. Her father was in all of those early pictures—handsome, several years older than her mother. Holding John as an infant, as a toddler, playing ball with his son. The house neater, well appointed, her mother’s near-frantic expressions of joy. All of this seemed to change when Sarah was born, seven years after John. The atmosphere in the house cooling, a shabbiness settling like frost over everything, her father’s slow migration out of the camera’s view.

  Turning the page, Sarah stopped to study a Christmas photo. It showed her and John beaming in front of the tree, the doll she had received that year slumped in a small wooden chair off to one side. John wearing a cowboy outfit, the holster slung low over his hips, hat tilted back. In the background, her mother sat with one arm draped across her knees, hair covered in the requisite kerchief, skin as pale as the soles of her new terrycloth slippers, her gaze trained on some vanishing point in the distance. And then her father, outside the frame for the most part, only his legs visible from his favourite chair, the accompanying black glass ashtray on its brass stand, the ever-present tumbler of scotch clasped in one hand, poised. The alcohol that had infused every part of their life, tolerated by her mother like an embarrassing relative. Had he ever loved any of them? Always justifying his road warrior lifestyle with some delusion of “hitting it big,” of “landing the big fish,” the perfect opportunity just waiting to be capitalized on, the promise of better things to come. His sudden rushes of exuberance, the attempts at affection, her mother’s refusal, pushing him away in the kitchen: Leave me alone! And Sarah’s guilty voyeurism, watching through the kitchen window from her spot among the bergamot. Why wouldn’t she give daddy another chance? But, no, no, no, eighteen miserable years for what? And later his dedication to the job turned out to be a front, a pantomime, masking his true desire to be free. Her mother’s silent hatred filling the house, the dishes clattering out accusations in the sink. Craven.

  John was the brave one, with his attempted escape from the joyless carousel of family life until the illness pulled him back in. Sarah felt the familiar ache resonating in her chest, the warm buzz reaching her cheeks as the clouds of grief gathered. Would the hole in her heart ever heal? She had filled it with anything she could find—the cold fist of anger, the liquid drip of sorrow, the anesthetizing patch of drugs and alcohol—but still the hole whistled and gaped, refusing to mend. Tears blurred her vision as she looked at the photos. Their Christmases were more obligations than celebrations, a vestigial ritual upheld by weary parents. It had been worse at the hospital, though.

  Most of the patients on the west wing’s third floor hadn’t a clue that it was Christmas. The rest made shrines of the few cards they received, the occasional installation punctuated by a blood-red poinsettia, which the nurses often confiscated. In the sterile and controlled world of chronic care, a poinsettia was a potentially lethal object, believed to harbour enough poison to kill a curious forager. Visiting hours would not be extended despite the season and the two-visitor rule would not be bent. This was not a concern for most of the visitors.

  Christmas was a difficult time for chronic care staffi who silently begrudged the care of patients that offered no hope of healing, Christmas miracles aside. It was much merrier in the obstetrics ward with the bundles of new babies to help ring in the holidays. More than one nurse entered Room 319 smelling mysteriously of alcohol, officious voices grating to a higher than normal pitch.

  New Year’s Eve was even harder to bear. A covert visit had to be arranged. Sneaking by the nurses’ station, past the gaping doorways that lined the hall, “Happy New Year” whispered through the dark, voices hushed so as not to be heard, until the nurse appeared, glaring, in the doorway.

  Sarah snapped the binder shut and gathered up the photos, returning them to the bottom drawer. She wouldn’t think about sad things right now. She wouldn’t think about ghosts or anything else that frightened her either. She would think about Michael. Slipping back beneath the covers, she stared across the room and waited for sleep to come.

  Donna jumped on her as soon as she entered the classroom. “Where were you last night?” She pursed her lips and popped her gum accusingly, narrowing her black-ringed eyes as she rested her oxblood Doc Martens on top of Sarah’s desk.

  Sarah shoved Donna’s feet to the floor. “Do you mind?”

  “I know where you were.”

  “Is that right?” Sarah dug through her knapsack, checking to see if she’d brought the right books to class. “And how do you know that, super sleuth?”

  “Peter told me.”

  “Peter?” Sarah feigned composure. That weasel. Of course he’d told her.

  “Yeah. He said you and Mortimer were right chummy with each other.”

  “Stop calling him that.”

  “So Peter was right, then?”

  There was no hiding now. “Yeah, Peter was right. Michael walked me home, that’s all. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Michael, huh? So now you’re on a first-name basis? That’s how it starts. Did he try to touch you?”

  “Who’s the pervert here, Donna?” Sarah snapped. “Get your kicks somewhere else. God, sometimes you’re so weird.”

  “I can see you’re still feeling sensitive.”

  “That’s right.” Sarah stood up, flung her bag onto her shoulder and marched from the room. She wasn’t swallowing any of Donna’s poison today. The last thing she needed was to be interrogated. Donna was such an idiot sometimes, the way she pushed things. She was a wildcard, a loose cannon, always getting Sarah in trouble, or embarrassing her, or getting her kicked out of places she didn’t want to get kicked out of. She was a liability with her aggressive ways, always going on about something—or nothing. At least it seemed like nothing to Sarah.

  The sunlight w
as blinding as she burst into the alleyway, escaping the sombre atmosphere of the school and the hordes of students crowding to get in. The day was bright and cool. A perfect fall day. A perfect day to skip class. A group of stoners stood smoking in a huddle against the wall. Sarah wondered what it would be like to be stoned that early in the morning. Some kids did it all the time. One guy had even passed out in class once. The school had instated locker inspections immediately after. Good work, Sarah thought as she walked past the group, a cloud of smoke hanging over them like a prophecy. One guy waved her over, offering a toke. She shook her head and smiled politely, continued to walk down the alley before dipping through the bushes to the street. She didn’t know where she should go. The Queen’s, maybe. If it was open. She’d never gone there so early before. Walking briskly, she avoided the eyes of adults, afraid they would wonder why she wasn’t in school. Busybodies.

  When she reached the Queen’s, Sarah looked through the window into the diner. The row of faded green stools stood empty before the melamine counter, the soda fountains dulled from years of fryer grease and use since the fifties. Wooden booths hugged the wall, individual jukeboxes poised at every table. The black-and-white floor tiles were scuffed in a trail down the middle of the shop past the booths toward the washrooms. The whole place was like a postcard from the past, including the owner who slouched over the counter reading the paper, his swollen belly permanently diapered in a stained white apron. Nick the Prick. He hated students, even though they gave him most of his business. Sarah wondered briefly what he would look like naked, his soft white skin jiggling like milk-coloured Jello. Yuck, she thought as she pushed against the door.