the power button, then yanked the plug out of the wall and picked it up, ignoring their whining.
“Sleep. Now. I don’t care if it’s the weekend, it’s way too late for this.”
I stowed the radio in Mom’s closet, stripped to my undershirt and boxers and climbed onto the couch, so hungry for sleep that I was drooling, like Johnny in the car. Ten hours of stocking groceries is a dog’s work—I was exhausted—yet I felt weirdly wired, as if I had just heard a favourite song I hadn’t heard for a while.
Was that it? The familiar song of envy and resentment and adoration and excitement of having Johnny back in town? A song I’d heard my whole life in fits and starts, as she flew around for work. She’d missed her birthday (mine too), the anniversary of our meeting, my high school graduation; she’d missed so much.
I’d last seen her at Christmas, and barely at that. I had picked at my plate of caviar and lox while she and Rutger yelled about lecture dates, and all the other party guests, of whom I knew not one well enough to talk to, danced and drank and exchanged presents and air-kissed each other and talked about prions and gravity lensing. At the end of the night Johnny got the caterers to make a package of treats for the kids and that was it. I didn’t even get to say goodbye before I left, and she was gone before the new year.
When you miss someone, the best thing is to wait it out till it fades; but the ache had not gone away in half a year, not even lessened. We’d tried to keep in touch—there had been a few phone calls, always her to me. I never knew where she was and could never have afforded to call so far away anyway.
Each time I had imagined her lying on a huge hotel bed, all white sheets and gilt angels, like in a movie, with a decorated porcelain phone, bare feet, unironed dress, her short blonde hair sticking up like feathers, the Coliseum or a medieval castle outside her window. But I never asked if it was true. Too embarrassing.
Nothing new, she always said, yawning down the line. She was tired, the churches were beautiful, Rutger was being ten pounds of crap in a five-pound bag, how do people get married and spend all their time together without murdering each other? Someone had tried to photograph her in the shower in Berlin, her mother had suggested suing the hotel, she had gone to the Eiffel Tower, she didn’t throw up, she threw up at the bottom, when she came back she was definitely working on motion sickness drugs, forget cancer or malaria, she had bought two geneticists and a geophysicist and would now splash out more cash on English lessons and facilities for her new people, like putting fresh paint and a spoiler on a used car; the purpose of science, after all, was to make more money to buy more science.
“Your nothing new is waaaay different from my nothing new,” I told her.
“New is relative,” she said. “Like so many other things. You don’t know how big a figure is without a scale bar.”
“All I can say is, it sure is quiet around here. I can actually hear myself think.”
“Ha ha, and then another ha ha,” she said. “I was gonna send you a postcard, but now all you get is my unending loathing.”
“I had that already.”
“Now you get all of it. Except what I still need for that piece of shit in Berlin.”
“God yes. Fucking pervert. I mean who tries to photograph a seventeen year-old in the shower. Sue his scrotum off.”
“Oh my God you said a bad word.”
“Scrotum is not a bad word and I still want a postcard.”
Shouting down the wires, as if we had been standing right there, laughing at each other the way we always did, like donkeys, all our teeth out. Six months. We had never been apart for so long. And I could never tell her how lonely I’d been, for fear of embarrassing us both. The world wanted so much from her; how could I make any more demands?
CHAPTER TWO
SHE WAS ON the front page of the Globe and Mail the next morning. SHE’S DONE IT AGAIN: Prodigy’s New Dementia Drug.
I skimmed the article in the break room at work. Designed it herself, Alzheimer’s and other conditions, five years of testing, Dr. Hans Pfenzc