Next Year, for Sure Read online

  And that’s when the anger hits. Why does Sharon get to say what is wise and unwise? Because she’s getting married? Because she owns a condo? Because her life is so figured out?

  Here’s some trivia:

  Where was Kyle when Sharon had her final ultrasound?

  What was he doing there?

  What was the first thing he said when Kathryn reached him on the phone?

  What was the second thing?

  How many days did it take Kyle to get home?

  How soon was he back at work?

  How many nights did he sleep in front of the TV while Sharon lay alone in a bed that hurt her?

  What did Kyle say to Chris in confidence?

  What did Kyle mean by “reasonable”?

  There. Is that ten?

  —

  In the morning, Kathryn is packed and ready before anyone else is awake. She waits on the couch in her jacket and reads Villette.

  The sun inches up and settles in the sky. Occasionally, Kathryn hears groans and bodies turning in beds, but it could be hours before the others are fully up.

  She feels clean, like the anger has burned off in the night and left nothing but clear, open space. She feels sad, too, for Sharon this morning. These people are Sharon’s friends now—some random co-workers and the woman from across the hall. Shouldn’t there be a childhood friend here, someone who remembers Sharon figure skating to Whitney Houston? Maybe an old dorm-mate with stories of Sharon’s sexual naïveté, her giggly crush on Ani DiFranco. Kathryn is the only person here who knew Sharon when she was still figuring out how to be Sharon, and Kathryn can already feel herself being cropped out of that picture.

  But at least Sharon has someone at her bachelorette party. Who would be at Kathryn’s, if she and Chris ever got married? Emily, probably. Kathryn doesn’t even have dumb co-workers to invite, or some busybody neighbour.

  Kathryn did have friends in university, good friends, Kim and Camille and Tami, who liked her, but Geoffrey had pruned those friendships back and back until the roots were starved and dying. And Kathryn had let him do it. Kim and Tami had come to Kathryn and said, Don’t you see what’s happening?, and they made her see it, but Kathryn didn’t know how to fix it, didn’t know how to make everyone happy.

  She’d had a friend, too, at the trailer park, Natalie, who’d moved there when Kathryn was fifteen. They became best friends that same day. They’d lain on their backs in the sun-scorched grass behind the electrical box and held their pee for as long as they could, and then when Kathryn said, Now, they let it go and the hot wetness bloomed out and soaked into their denim, and Kathryn said, Now we’ll be friends forever.

  But then they weren’t friends forever, because Kathryn got away. She got herself on that Greyhound and never wrote or called or even thought about it. She did what she had to do to survive, maybe like Sharon’s doing now.

  DECEMBER

  CHAPTER 11

  This Wordless Thing

  One thing Chris likes about kissing Emily is this: it’s calming. When they’re kissing, he doesn’t wonder whether Emily likes him the way he likes her. He doesn’t worry that they’re just friends who might dissolve into less. When they’re kissing, they are something.

  He’s kissing her now in a parking lot. Or she’s kissing him, which is how it usually works. Chris hasn’t figured out how to make it happen himself—she’s constantly in motion—so he waits, like his grandma used to wait for hummingbirds, standing by her kitchen window, patient, smiling, alert.

  Soon they will have to go back to the party. Just a couple more hours, Emily has promised. What Chris would like is a small empty room with just the two of them. It’s almost never just the two of them. And this is the other thing he likes about kissing Emily. No one comes up and introduces themselves—another best friend, another old roommate. No one pulls Emily aside to tell her exciting news. Everyone leaves them alone when they’re kissing. Sometimes people whistle or clap, which is when Chris likes them the best.

  —

  Back inside, Chris turns it on again, the part of him that does enjoy being here. These actually are remarkable people, Emily’s friends. At a party last week, Chris met a lost legend of underground film, rumoured on websites to be dead, but standing there in the line for beer. They talked for an hour about a final, unfinished film and the agony of living with footage that no one will ever see.

  The week before that, a man in a fedora led partygoers in twos and threes through a series of abandoned tunnels beneath the city. The man told stories that may or may not have been true, and Chris felt lucky and grateful, either way, simply to be in this world.

  And then there’s Emily. Watching Emily be in the world. Watching Emily be loved, hugged, and picked up off her feet. So Chris switches it on, like a neon sign that says OPEN, and when he is introduced to someone, he asks sincere questions and reveals some true version of himself and does not immediately find an excuse to slip away. When he is pulled on stage as part of an improv sketch, he goes willingly, and when someone in the audience shouts BALLERINA! and another voice, at the same moment, yells CHEWBACCA!, Chris executes a series of slow arabesques he hasn’t done since he was eight years old, all while gargling and bleating and yowling like a lovesick wookiee. And he feels more alive than he can remember ever being, though he would give it all up to be alone with Emily in her room, where tonight he will sleep over for the first time.

  —

  Kathryn says they’re going to have sex tonight, he and Emily, but they’re not. Chris is fairly certain. Kathryn has been predicting this imminent sex for weeks now, since before the kissing started. Because if I start seeing someone, she says, you better know I’m going to have sex with them.

  Chris has imagined having sex with Emily. Certain aspects are appealing. He does desperately want to know everything about her, not just her stories and the beautiful working of her brain, but her smells, her taste, and what she looks like everywhere. He wants also to have something with Emily that is secret and entirely theirs. And they’d be good at it, too, he can tell. But when Chris watches it play out in his mind, when he puts himself in that scene, their bodies being good to each other, he feels the cold shadow of retribution moving across the bed. Doom. The ruinous end of everything as it is.

  So Chris resolves not to have sex with Emily. He wants what they have now to go on forever. Or not exactly what they have now. He wants more, but not too much. Not enough to awaken the gods.

  —

  Impossibly, the party is only gaining momentum. At midnight, while Chris and Emily are finding their coats, there are still people arriving, from where, Chris cannot imagine. He and Emily have to push against the current of them to get out the door. You’re going the wrong way, someone offers, and people laugh.

  They’re getting a ride tonight with Paolo, whose tiny hatchback is already overflowing with bodies. Everyone insists there is room. Chris and Emily are squeezed into the front seat, with Emily on his lap. He can smell her goodness coming through the other smells in the car.

  Paolo drives faster than Chris would like. The rain has started again and small droplets are wiggling their way across the windshield without wipers.

  Paolo is leaving the party early, he says, because he has to be at work at five tomorrow morning. He is a veterinary assistant. Chris looks at the dashboard clock and does the math in his head. He wishes Emily had a seatbelt. He locks his arms around her, though he knows this doesn’t really work in a crash.

  There is some confusion about where everyone is going and the best way to get there. It makes Chris tired. He can’t think at this velocity. So when the traffic congeals around them and then slows to a stop-start crawl, Chris is relieved. He has not yet noticed the lights, red and blue, red and white, flashing. He is too busy watching the taillights of the car in front of them and pressing his foot down where the brake would be.

  Probably an accident, someone is saying.

  When Chris sees the bicycle lying on t
he asphalt, bent and broken, the first thing he discerns is that it is not Kathryn’s. Kathryn is at home, asleep by now. She was already in her pyjamas when Chris kissed her goodbye. And then Chris sees the cyclist, upright, intact, talking to a cop. And the driver, standing by his car, alive. Everyone is alive.

  Paolo’s car creeps past the wreckage and everyone is quiet. Then Emily says, Paolo, could you drop us off first? Just like that, she makes it happen. How he admires her.

  —

  The lights are on at Ahimsa. Kendra and Miriam are sitting at the kitchen table, Moss leaning against the counter. Chris has the idea that they’ve been waiting here all these hours to deliver some dire news, but instead they ask how was the party, who was there, was it fun. Moss has his thumb closed in a book, like he is waiting to be alone again. You get the feeling whenever Moss is in a room with people that he was there alone and then other people showed up.

  Does anyone want tea? Emily says and of course some do. She puts on the kettle. She puts on bossa nova, loud enough to be heard over the creaking water, and she dances so slightly in that way she has where you can’t tell which parts of her body are in motion.

  How long can it take, a cup of tea? Chris is trying to pace himself, to gauge how many minutes, how many conversational turns until they are alone. Something inside him is rubbing against something else, wearing.

  He sits at the table. They’re talking about something now, but Chris can’t tell what. He remembers a day, he must have been five or six and visiting his grandparents, when his grandfather took Chris down to the basement and showed him how to crush empty beer cans with a bench vise. He taught him how to turn the crank arms slowly, almost silently, making it last a minute or more. Grampa said, Anytime you don’t want to be upstairs anymore, you can come down here. And he showed Chris where to find the empties, in giant lawn-and-leaf bags under the stairs. It would take days to crush them all.

  You doing okay? Emily asks. She is beside him now at the table, her hands resting on her cup for warmth.

  I think it’s past my bedtime, Chris says and is then mortified that this has been spoken out loud. But I’m good, he says. Just catching my second wind.

  You poor guy, Emily says. And with that face he loves, she stands, pulls him to his feet, and takes him away, their goodnights trailing behind them. He thinks about her tea, undrunk and cooling on the table as they climb the stairs to her room and he knows that it has begun. The compromises have begun.

  —

  In Emily’s room, Chris does get his second wind. There is so much to see and learn. He has been imagining this place since the day she said, Hi, I’m Emily. He has pictured the room spare and minimal, like a Trappist cell, or sensual with white Christmas lights and pillows. What he has not pictured is simply her and everything about her in drifts on the floor, a stratigraphic record of her every day. It is fantastic.

  Emily finds a path to the bed and tumbles in. She groans happily. She assures her bed that they will never be apart again. Chris lingers across the room in a small clearing by the door. He watches Emily luxuriating in exhaustion, surrounded by her life. He wants all this right now, and he doesn’t understand how he got it. You shouldn’t get everything you want, right?

  Where are you, Emily says, eyes closed and smiling. Her hand reaches out into the air between them.

  —

  There’s no word for this, Chris thinks, for what they’re doing, this lying in bed fully clothed, and touching one another gently in slow sleepy arcs, the flat of her hand moving across his t-shirt, up his arm, along the underside of his jaw. Sometimes she half opens her eyes, and when she closes them again, they roll back slightly like she is fainting or going under.

  There is no word, but Chris is trying to find a word, because he will need to characterize this for Kathryn in the morning. She’ll want to know: sex or not sex. Actually, Kathryn has delineated three categories.

  □ kissing

  □ making out

  □ sex

  But surely there is another.

  Emily’s hand has found a bare stretch of skin where Chris’s shirt has ridden up slightly. She is mapping its boundaries with her fingertips. It seems clear that Chris could touch her anywhere right now and that this moment could fork into one of two directions. But this is nice, just this, this wordless thing, with the rain drumming down outside. So he touches her cheek, her ear, her stomach.

  But at the same time he thinks, What is sex even? Where does sex start and this other thing end? If Chris held Emily all night, spooned and nuzzled her like this in the clothes they walked around in, no one would say it was sex. But if they were in their underwear? If they were naked? Is some fabric really what makes the difference? The whole concept suddenly makes no sense.

  —

  They might do this all night, in or out of clothes, if not for a quiet knock at Emily’s door. It’s Moss, looking uncomfortable and somewhat tender, for Moss. There’s someone to see you, Moss says. And behind him there’s Kathryn, wrecked.

  Emily is the first on her feet, pulling Kathryn into the room and into her arms. Chris is only a second behind, stunned, standing beside them now, not sure what to do with his arms or face, except to nod reassuringly to Moss, relieve him of his duty, and ease the door of Emily’s room closed.

  I’m so sorry, Kathryn is saying. For a while, that’s all she gets out between sobs, that she is sorry.

  It is obvious to Chris that someone should say, Sorry for what? What could she possibly have to be sorry about? But Emily is the one holding her and Emily doesn’t ask. Emily doesn’t ask and Emily doesn’t say it’s going to be okay or let it all out. Emily just holds her. Chris wishes he could be the one holding Kathryn and knowing just what not to say. Comforting Kathryn is normally his job. They stand there, the three of them, while the feelings come and go.

  I thought I could do this, Kathryn says into Emily’s shoulder and Chris thinks: You shouldn’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this. We can go home right now. But Emily keeps holding her. And when Kathryn emerges from the worst of it, Emily guides her to the edge of the bed, it’s really the only place, and they sit and talk.

  —

  I don’t care about the sex, Kathryn is saying. Insisting, really. Though when she hears that it hasn’t happened, she seems more frustrated than indifferent. God, she says, I keep bracing myself and bracing myself.

  But it’s really not about the sex, Kathryn says. It’s the little words you’ll make up afterward to talk about it. That’s what was keeping me awake—lying there in bed thinking about how you were over here coming up with your own way of talking about things. And me being on the outside of that, she says, her voice tightening up again.

  They sit with that problem for a while and it feels insurmountable, the secret language of couples, until Kathryn, to Chris’s surprise, begins to speak their own language out loud.

  Like easy monkeys and shy gorillas, she says (two different types of Kathryn’s orgasms). Oh my god, yes, Emily says, when Kathryn explains the difference. And slushy and butterful (the state of being too full—of beverage or food, respectively—to have sex). And a signal check (just foreplay, purposely to no end). And the kitchen phoenix (any unscheduled sex outside of the bedroom).

  Chris feels painfully exposed by all this. But then, here are his two favourite people in the world sitting in bed and laughing, not crying, about sex. And not just sex but everything: 63 squidoo (taking turns freaking out about a problem, so there’s always one person to make the other feel taken care of); torso time (blow-by-blow debriefing about each other’s day, canonically while hugging); and the phrase Would you bring me a glass of ketchup? (a gentle request to have the bathroom to oneself).

  And when you wake up in the morning, Kathryn says, someone asks, Must we be potatoes? And the other person says, We must be potatoes. And that means it’s time to really get up.

  Emily loves this. Why potatoes? she asks. But neither Chris nor Kathryn can remember why
potatoes. They’ve been speaking this language for nine years.

  —

  They’re lying down by now, the three of them, in Emily’s double bed. A flickering of giddy relief is catching at Chris, a sense of having escaped something. He cannot imagine life without these two people, and here they both are, everyone alive.

  I’m wondering, Emily says, should we take sex off the table?

  Kathryn declaims again that it isn’t about the sex, and Emily says, But maybe it is a little.

  Kathryn appears to consider this. She squints up at the ceiling for what feels to Chris like a long time.

  And what then, Kathryn says, you’d just be wishing you could have sex, but not doing it?

  Emily says, I’m not sure Chris wishes to.

  They’re all three looking up at the ceiling now. Chris knows it is his turn to say something. He can feel the question pressing down on him like a weather system.

  Yeah, I don’t know, Chris says. He cannot at this moment picture sex with anyone. But he knows, too, that an hour ago the thought of staying in his clothes felt arbitrary and perverse. Do you? he says.

  I like sex, Emily says, but I don’t have to have it with everyone.

  Chris wonders who would she have it with, then? With the Other Chris, who pulls into town unannounced and breaks her heart all over? The not-dead filmmaker? The guy with the tunnels? The thought of Emily having sex with other people, but not with him, never with him, makes something unexpected and alien burble up inside of Chris. He can feel himself shutting down and, to his great shame, he pretends now to be falling asleep.

  —

  He is for a long time in limbo between stupor and sleep. Kathryn and Emily talk quietly to each other and he half listens, in and out. They’re not talking about him anymore, or any of this. They’re talking about Emily’s brother, who is back home again and doing better. They’re talking about Sharon, who only calls now when she knows that Kathryn will be out, and leaves business-like messages about flowers and cutlery. They’re talking about Brazil and how Emily has always wanted to go, and how she should go, but why she can’t.