Six Metres of Pavement. Farzana Doctor
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made toast, ate hers quickly, and came to get Zubi. He followed her into the kitchen to spread butter and jam on his bread. Rehana fed Zubi a bowl of instant baby cereal, while scanning the front-page headlines her husband held up like a shield.
Ismail finished his toast, gathered up his things for work, and impatiently called for Rehana to hurry up. Chalo, Rehana, we are going to be late! I’ll wait for you by the car! He carried Zubi outside, strapped her into her car seat and heard Rehana open her door and settle herself in the passenger seat. While he buckled himself in, she reminded him that they would be changing their routine that morning, dropping her off first so she would get into work on time for a special mandatory meeting that she seemed nervous about.
He pulled in front of Rehana’s building on Bloor Street, and she leaned over to offer him a dry cheek peck. As usual, Zubi had dropped off to sleep as soon as they’d left the house, the car engine and moving wheels her lullaby. Rehana blew sleeping Zubi a kiss and whispered. Bye bye baby! See you later, Zubi! Ismail asked Rehana to grab his briefcase from the back and place it on the front passenger seat so that it would be easier for him to reach later. She didn’t question the request and complied. A car behind honked, protesting their pause in a no-stopping zone and Ismail grumbled another, Chalo, let’s go!
Normally, they would have driven to the daycare first. Rehana would have unlatched Zubi’s seatbelt and carried her inside and by the time they reached the daycare room, Zubi would have been awake enough for goodbyes. But that morning, Rehana could only wave to Zubi from the sidewalk, with Zubi still asleep, snoring quietly in the back seat.
Ismail regretted hurrying Rehana that morning.
And then he drove to work. He circled the already full municipal parking garage, cursing the city’s lack of foresight that led to such insufficient staff parking. He found a free spot on a quiet side street two blocks south. At least this is free, he said to himself, looking on the bright side. He pulled up under a tree that would offer some afternoon shade, grabbed his briefcase, locked the car, and rushed into work.
— * —
Celia 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.
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