Every Little Piece of Me Read online

  “I don’t know, Ava. I swear to you I don’t.”

  As they walked toward the van, she thought about that night when she and Antonio drove to Mahone Bay, how stupid she had been to think she could keep any moments to herself. All her moments were public property. They always would be. Those people in the lobby, with their phones and their cameras and their questions—they were a reminder that everything about her belonged to the world. And the world could take it all from her whenever it wanted.

  * * *

  —

  When they got back to the B&B, the lights were all off. Antonio offered to stay, but Ava told him to leave. She would be fine being alone. She was always fine being alone.

  All she wanted to do was sleep, but whenever she shut her eyes she saw crowds of people grabbing at her, pulling at her clothes, her hair, her skin, until she was nothing but meat and bones stumbling along. So she got up and went downstairs to make some tea.

  When she walked into the kitchen, there was someone already there. Antonio, sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, reams of call sheets spread out on the table in front of him.

  He raised his head when Ava came in. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave you alone.”

  Slowly, Ava moved toward him. Among the papers she saw a picture of her dads, standing on the porch of the B&B, waving to some unseen guest coming up the driveway. She pushed everything aside and climbed up and over the kitchen table, propelled forward by some momentum she didn’t understand or know how to stop. Her foot kicked over the salt shaker, and as she pressed her mouth against Antonio’s, she heard every grain as loud as a firework as they showered down onto the floor.

  Everything disappeared, silence radiating out from a single point of stillness. There were no thoughts in her head. There was no salt on the floor under their feet, no call sheets, no kitchen table, no room around them, no sad old B&B, no cameras.

  There was nothing except the kiss.

  Then Antonio pulled away, and instantly everything came flooding back—the thoughts, the room, all of it—and Ava buckled under its weight.

  “Ava,” said Antonio, finally.

  “I’m not sorry,” she said, at the same time. She had paper stuck to her knees, grains of salt embedded between her toes. It was as if everything were breaking all around her.

  “Ava,” Antonio said again. And then again, and again, like he was trying to learn how to say it. Ava, Ava, Ava until she worried her head might explode with all the Avas she was trying to keep hold of.

  “Shh,” she said, but he kept on repeating her name. They weren’t touching, but their bodies were so close together that she could feel the vibrations of his diaphragm as he breathed in and out. Antonio, she thought, but couldn’t say, couldn’t connect the name with any sort of meaning, and instead she wondered, vaguely, if she was going to throw up.

  “Ava. Ava. Ava.”

  She kissed him again just to shut him up.

  This time, his hands found the space between her shoulder blades and her hands found the back of his neck and his hands found the low hill of her belly and her hands found the length of his thighs, and then a flurry of belt buckles and bra straps and buttons and zippers and cotton and denim and skin, and then they were on the table and he was inside her and it wasn’t beautiful or tender or passionate or anything that she ever imagined it would be. It was sad and desperate and brutal and catastrophic. And she never wanted it to end.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” Antonio said when it was over, smoothing her hair and brushing crumbs off her bare clavicle. “It’s going to be okay.” But he looked like he was staring down the barrel of a gun.

  Ava didn’t believe him. Not for a second.

  ChatterFuel

  Style

  July 3, 2014

  4 Reasons You Want Ava Hart’s Hair

  The Television Star’s New Cropped Do is the Look of the Summer

  By Stella Stewart

  1. It’s Super Cute: Ava might just have been coming off a near-drowning when those pics that broke the internet were snapped, but daaaaaaamn girl.

  2. It’s Low Maintenance: The struggle is real! We all think we’re rocking beachy waves when in reality what we have is more like a bird’s nest. With short hair, you can swim all you want and still come out looking surfer-girl chic.

  3. It’s Easy to DIY: No doubt Ava had a team of stylists strategically designing her signature haphazard look. But you can get the same effect with a pair of kitchen shears for a fraction of the cost!

  4. Everyone’s Doing It: You don’t want to be the only girl at the club who’s still tying her hair back in that tired old messy bun, do you?

  Mags

  July 2014

  “Downtown”

  How to make tea in a palliative care ward: fill the kettle with water from the plastic jugs on the counter, because the tap water is undrinkable. Legionnaires’ disease, they tell you. Don’t ask what that is—you don’t want to know. Search the cupboard for the one teapot he likes, with the cherry blossoms and the crack along the side. If it’s dirty, wash it. It is the only teapot in the ward he would drink from, before. Drop in two teabags. Take the milk from the fridge and pour it into the little milk pitcher. Think about his voice. Think about it so hard your brain hurts with the force of it. Think about it so hard that you never, ever forget it.

  Make up a tray with teacups, teapot, milk pitcher, and sugar bowl: all chipped. Wait for the water to boil. Listen to Petula Clark singing “Downtown” on the radio and try to remember if he ever sang it to you, sitting on the dirty rug at midnight, candles and incense burning on the windowsill behind him. Know that he never did—that wasn’t the kind of song he would have sung—but try to remember it anyway. Don’t cry. Look out the window instead, at the little people walking around on the sidewalk seven storeys below, the sun on their bare arms. Downtown, where all the lights are bright. Remember that it is summer, even though the ward is cold. Remember that you haven’t been outside in four days. Remember that he hasn’t been outside in twenty-three.

  When the kettle boils, pour the water into the teapot. Lift the tray gently and carry it down the hall, slowly. One foot in front of the other. Elbows at your sides to control the shaking. Be careful to keep your eyes focused straight ahead, away from any of the other rooms, from any other faces. Pour tea for yourself. Drink one cup, two cups, four cups. Fill every grieving hole with tea. Pour tea for him. Make sure to put the milk in first. Take a swab from the jar, the swab meant to moisten his mouth, that he will suck on reflexively like an infant sucking on a nipple. Dip the swab in the tea and blow on it, taking care it is not too hot, then run the tip gently across his gums. Watch his cracked mouth moving, watch the way the stubble on his upper lip bends as his skin crinkles up and down, up and down. Remember that this is the only thing you have left of him: the slow trickle of saliva, the faintest shadow of life.

  * * *

  Mags and Sam were married on a Thursday night, on the harbour-facing patio of a seafood restaurant called The Fish Hook, on the Gin Harbour waterfront. Even though it was June it was still cold, as it always was on the coast, and the guests all shivered under propane heaters, waiting for Mags to make her entrance.

  They had been living in Toronto for almost a year but decided to get married in Nova Scotia. “It’s where all our memories are,” he said, and Mags didn’t argue, even though the last thing she cared about was the past. She wanted to be in the moment, she wanted the present. She wanted now. Of course, what she really wanted was the future, but by then she knew they weren’t going to get it.

  “No one gets married on a Thursday,” Emiko said. But she came anyway, placing a white fur stole that had belonged to her own mother around Mags’s shoulders, and watched from inside the restaurant as Paul and Zac walked Mags across the patio. Sam’s parents were in Borneo, so they didn’t even bother to tell them about the wedding. There were other people there—old friends fr
om high school, maybe one or two people from the record label. But Mags couldn’t remember any of that. All she remembered was Sam, bald from the chemo and red-cheeked and awkward, standing at the end of the patio, the lights from the boats in the harbour sparkling on the rippled surface of the water, a gentle rain drizzling down from the sky.

  Later, they ate figs wrapped in prosciutto, slurped cold oysters right from the shell, drank champagne. Mags danced with Paul and then Zac, and Emiko made a speech about how Mags had told her on the first day they met that she was going to marry Sam, which made Mags cry even though she knew it wasn’t true. It was all perfect, easy, relaxed. Mags wondered what she had been afraid of.

  But deep down, she knew. Four days later, instead of sitting on a plane to San Francisco for their honeymoon, she was sitting in the emergency waiting room at the hospital. Waiting, because that’s what you did in waiting rooms. Waiting for your turn, for news, for answers. Waiting to see if you are going to be okay. In those rooms you were healthy and not healthy at the same time, illness and wellness existing inside you simultaneously. Plus, the coffee was terrible. Back in Toronto, Mags always brought her own to the hospital, in a travel mug that said Oshawa Public Library on it. She had no idea where the mug came from. She didn’t even know anyone who lived in Oshawa. But here in Halifax, she had been unprepared. She had thought that maybe, just maybe, she could leave her hospital mug at home.

  She tried to make a joke of it to the woman sitting next to her, tiny and blurry-edged, her eyes on the television mounted on the wall playing Frozen on repeat. “Tastes like it was made with harbour water,” Mags said, swirling the coffee in the paper cup. “I’m surprised there’s not a used tampon floating in it.”

  The woman turned to her. “Did you say something?” she said.

  “The coffee,” said Mags. She threw back the last gulp, trying to swallow it down without tasting it. “Never mind.”

  Mags had come to understand that people in hospital waiting rooms either didn’t want to talk about the reason they were there, or it was all they wanted to talk about. The people who wanted to talk, Mags thought of as dilettantes, dabblers in the world of tragedy. People for whom the whole journey from triage to discharge was just a story to tell later over dinner and drinks. She’d smile and listen to them talk about how they sprained their ankle chasing their dog, or how their wife got food poisoning at a company picnic because someone left the mayo out of the cooler, or how their kid got a concussion jumping off the couch pretending to be Superman, and she wished she had a similar story to tell. Wished for earaches, wished for urinary tract infections, wished for fingers slammed in car doors.

  And then there were the people like her. The ones who brought their own travel mugs full of coffee. The ones who always had extra phone chargers and granola bars tucked in their purses. The ones who knew exactly which door to walk through, which nurse to talk to, how much change they would need to pay for parking. They didn’t ask you how you got there or who you were waiting for. Instead, they showed you cute dog memes on their phones and recapped their favourite television shows, went on long diatribes about how terrible the mayor was, got into lengthy debates about fashion trends. There was no talk of vacation plans or upcoming birthdays or photos of kids or grandkids or puppies. There was often no past and there was certainly no future. There was just this room, this chair, this person you would never see again, two people scrabbling against each other for some tiny fragment of humanity.

  When the nurse finally called her into the room, she found Sam and the doctor locked in an argument. “We need to admit him,” the doctor said as she walked in.

  “No,” Sam said. “We’re going home.”

  “You’re not well enough to travel.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Mags knew she should stay out of it. She gazed out the window at the parking lot below, trying to block out the voices by letting herself be mesmerized by the cars circling around and around, the lift and fall of the gate at the entrance, the doctor and Sam a mere low drone in the background. It wasn’t until the droning stopped that she snapped out of it, blinking her eyes in confusion at the doctor standing at the foot of the bed, eyes on his clipboard, Sam nowhere to be seen.

  “It’s a side effect of the drugs,” the doctor said without looking up. “Another reason he shouldn’t be travelling.” Mags stared at him uncomprehendingly. The doctor sighed. “You’d have to strap him into a diaper. Aren’t you even paying attention?”

  From behind the closed bathroom door, Mags heard Sam moan. She shut her eyes and briefly, ever so briefly, wished for another life. She could be a cage fighter, maybe, or a nun. She could rescue sea turtles in South America. She could work at the bank and marry a man named Todd who took great pride in his lawn. Anyone other than this woman, sitting in a hospital room, listening to her husband of four days noisily evacuating his bowels three feet away from her while a condescending medical resident wearing a Wu-Tang T-shirt under his white coat glared at her judgmentally.

  “It’s his call,” Mags said, rubbing her tired eyes. “If he wants to leave, we leave.”

  “I want to leave,” she heard Sam call feebly from behind the bathroom door.

  The doctor sighed again and scrawled out a prescription. “Loperamide. It’ll slow it down. And for god’s sake, tell him to see his oncologist when he gets back to Toronto.” He dropped the paper on the bed and walked out, shaking his head.

  A few minutes later, Sam emerged, pale and sweaty in his hoodie and jeans. “Thanks. I was running out of steam.”

  “Don’t think this means I’m on your side about this, because I’m not.” Mags picked up the prescription and folded it, matching the edges up precisely. “But I took this vow, for better or for worse or whatever, and so here we are.” She put the paper in her pocket. “Just know, though, that this is definitely the ‘worse’ part.”

  “Jesus,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling the sleeves of his hoodie down over his hands. “You think I wanted this to happen? You think I’m happy about being stuck here when we’re supposed to be driving down the California coastline in our rented convertible?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Well, what then?”

  “Why can’t you just do what the doctors tell you? Why can’t you rest and take care of yourself? Why do you have to be so stubborn?”

  “I don’t know, okay? I really don’t know.” They sat in silence for a moment. “I met a famous person,” he said eventually. “She’s in the next room. I helped her cut her hair.”

  “I guess you can cross that off your bucket list.”

  Sam pulled his knees up to his chest, revealing the outlines of his bony ankles through his fraying white sports socks. She was suddenly overcome with the desire to cradle those delicate bones in her hands, to protect them—and at the same time, she wanted to break them, to snap them between her fingers. She was angry at their delicacy, at their quivering fragility, at their inability to do their job. These bones that had given up on being bones.

  She cleared her throat. “What do you want to do now?”

  As if he could read her thoughts, Sam cupped his hands around his ankles. “Be better,” he said. “I just want to be better.”

  After they left the hospital they drove around through the darkest hours of the night, not talking, not wanting to go back to their hotel, but not having anywhere else to go. Eventually, they ended up at Lawrencetown Beach, where Mags parked next to the stairs to the boardwalk.

  The beach was deserted, a brisk offshore wind keeping the early morning surfers at home in bed. Sam walked to the edge of the water and was gazing out to the east, where the light had turned a deep crimson, the glow of the sunrise bleeding away from the horizon and up into the night sky. It made Mags think of the sunrises of her childhood, when Karolina would have to get up while it was still dark out to catch the bus to work. She always tried to be quiet, but Mags would wake up anyway, sitting on the edge of the
bed, watching her brush her long hair, wrapping it around and around itself in a long rope and knotting it at the back of her head. Mags remembered how happy she felt on those mornings, being too young to understand how difficult their life was. There was only her mother’s hair and the sunrise, everything so beautiful and happy and idyllic.

  This sunrise felt nothing like that. Mags stared out at the red morning sky and she could see only fire, everywhere fire.

  She took a few steps forward into the break, the frigid, foamy water circling her ankles. Then she turned around and pulled Sam’s face to hers, trying to drag him back into the present, back from the edge of whatever black hole he was staring into. As he looked into her eyes, his face brightened.

  “Remember when we came here after the Marquee show?” he asked.

  “Of course.” It hadn’t been how she imagined losing her virginity. The cold, the wind, the sand everywhere. Racing the sunrise for the last few moments of darkness. One eye on the lookout for an early morning dog-walker, or a fisherman offshore with a good pair of binoculars. What she had imagined: the weight of Sam’s body on hers, belonging to her, only her. What it felt like to have someone inside her beyond a few curious straying fingers, pushing her open, tearing his way in, breaking her. The pain, sure. The things she already knew, the softness of his lips, the shape of his hipbones, the way she had to angle her body to keep them from hurting her. The pressure of his fingertips on her shoulders. The smell of his breath. The way he held her after he came, stroking her back, saying her name. The peace she felt, then.

  The sadness, though, that was unexpected, like a slow burn through to the deepest layer of her skin. Because it was over. Because it could never be everything she wanted it to be.

  She had thought that sadness would go away, would dissipate through all the nights they spent together, the talking and the touching, fighting and fucking, crying and laughing and tearing at each other’s skin. But it never really did. It was as though the more you got to know someone, the more you realized you could never know them at all.