Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By Bridget Wadden

Nadia comes to stay, and that is good. It is a good thing. She brushes her teeth next to me, and she eats what I eat so there are never extra dishes, and if there are, she washes them. These are good things, and we do them together. I work, and she doesn’t. When I’m home, we lounge around and go on walks. It is summer with no AC. We sweat onto every surface we touch.

Most people who know the general goings on of my life ask me “How’s it going living with Nadia?” The more I hear it, the more I’m reminded that most people, good friends, keep tabs open in their brains about what’s happening in the lives of their loved ones, and they remember to check the tabs regularly rather than just leaving them there, unopened and threatening. Today, the person who asks me the question is Irina. She wears thick eyeliner and keeps her hair pulled up in a way that looks like it’s coming loose, but I know that she spends half an hour pulling out just the right pieces every morning, and keeps a picture of Helena Bonham Carter in the corner of her bathroom mirror. We became friends the first day I started working at the drugstore. It was orientation, and she fell asleep on my shoulder in the back row while our manager talked about how the customer is always right. Today, we’re spending the morning stocking shelves together, and right now we are on razors and deodorants.

“It’s good. I mean, it’s okay.”

“Just okay?”

“No, it’s fine. It’s good. We knew it’d be an adjustment to be in the same apartment, and it’s so small that there was barely enough room for me when I was alone.”

“So it’s a space thing?”

“That’s part of it, for sure. But it’s also just a bit weird? We’ve hardly seen each other since she moved to Calgary. It’s like we’re relearning how to be around each other.”

“Well that’ll happen when you barely see each other for years. Being childhood friends doesn’t make you immune to awkwardness.”

“I guess. Plus, I know this is shitty to say, but the beauty of having separate rooms is that you can get a break from each other when you need it.”

“Hey, what did I say to you not four weeks ago?”

“I know, okay? You told me this would get old fast, and I get it. But she needs me right now. And I need to be there for her.”

“Alright. I understand.”

“As if.”

“I mean I don’t agree with it, but I do get it. And I think it’s good of you to show up for her like this. Better late than never, right?”

I twinge a little when she says that. She’s right, I haven’t always been a good friend to Nadia. I don’t like being reminded of it.

A mother walks between us as her daughter trails behind. She shoves her perfumed hand right in front of my face to reach for the something on the shelves I’m stocking. She smells like fake flowers and thick, too-sweet syrup.

“See, honey? It’s not embarrassing to buy yourself razors. Nobody cares that you’re starting to shave. They only care if you don’t. Right?” She looks at me with big eyes.

It takes me a second to catch her clue, and I turn to give the young girl an awkward nod and a grin. The poor kid curls her face into her chest and flushes bright red.“Thank you,” the mother squints at my nametag, “Lucy.”

She doesn’t look me in the face, and shuttles her daughter towards another aisle, saying “Good, now it’s time to get you some concealer.”

Irina hides her laugh until the pair are gone. I join her, muffling the sound with my hand.

“I can’t deal with this fucking job anymore,” I say.

“HA! Pay up.”

“Shit. I forgot.”

“Uh huh. Have fun taking a walk on your break, dumbass.”

Irina and I found ourselves complaining about our job so often that we made a game of it: first one to say how much they hate it here owes the other a pack of cigarettes from the corner store during their break. Until now, we’d made it to six days of no complaints.

By the time Irina has finished gloating, I’m done with the razors section and have to wait for her to shuffle deodorants in place before we move on to body wash and lotions. On my break I go to buy her prize, and the cashier looks pointedly at his watch while I transfer the cost of the pack from savings to chequing. I feel my chest get tighter when the transaction is approved. The cashier clears his throat even though there is no one behind me.

✦ ✦ ✦

When I get home, Nadia is crying again, this time in the bath. I walk to her and sit on the edge of the tub. I dip my hand in the water and it’s cold; I brush some hair away from her face, and it’s nearly dry. She hugs her knees to her chest, and the water only comes halfway up her shins.

Despite the heat hanging heavy in the apartment, she shivers. I look away while I wrap her in atowel, though when she’s calmed down Nadia asks me if I remember how we used to take baths together all the time when we were younger. I say yes, sort of. I say I remember her curly hair and the fairy dolls we’d play with. For dinner I make more beans and rice with broccoli while Nadia sits on the couch, still wrapped in the towel.

She stares into space, and when I place her bowl in front of her she looks up at me like I’ve woken her from a nap. She smiles and it is real and kind. She thanks me for cooking, and for serving her, and for letting her stay. She thanks me three more times the rest of the night, right up until she goes to bed.

“Goodnight,” she tells me, “and thank you again for dinner. For all of it. I love you so much. Goodnight.”

Nadia is good at sleeping next to a person. For the past two years she has done it every night. She stays to her side, the way she never did when we were little, when we sprawled out on her bed with our short limbs, each of us hungry for more of the blanket. She snores lightly these days, not loud enough to wake me. She lets me climb in and shuffle around to get comfortable when I am finally ready for sleep, some two hours after her. Sometimes in the mornings she tells me that I spoke in the middle of the night, words I have no memory of saying and whose place I cannot figure out in whatever dreams I remember from the night before. These little phrases of mine are funny to us, and we stop making breakfast to laugh until one of us says we might pee.

Later, I wonder why I needed to yell at four in the morning. I wonder why I asked “what the fuck is this?

What the fuck?” into thin air.

In the morning I make oatmeal, and Nadia takes a call from her mom in my room while I cook. They call most days now. Caroline worries about her daughter, though she tells me all the time—asking Nadia to bring me the phone—that she’s so grateful I’ve taken our sweet girl in during this hard time. She says ‘our’ like that. Like I’m Nadia’s mother, too.

Sometimes I feel like I am, but not in a bad way, really. It’s the same way as when Nadia and I were little, and she’d make crazy decisions even though I told her not to so we wouldn’t get in trouble. When she cut her hair with zig-zag craft scissors and Caroline yelled and took us to the kids’ salon to get it fixed, Nadia sat in a chair made to look like a fire engine, and I sat in the ball pit they kept in the corner. The hairdresser cut off so much hair that Nadia got called a boy at school for a month, and she cried every day while I sat beside her, rubbing her back and not knowing what to say.

Caroline loved Nadia’s ex-boyfriend. She bought him better Christmas presents than Nadia did, and would drop hints like pianos about engagement rings and babies at every holiday dinner he came to. She pretended not to hear when he chastised Nadia in the kitchen for things she said at the table, like mentioning that he refused to get a dog with her, or that she had paid their rent the month before because he didn’t get a promotion at work.

Nadia comes out of my room before I get the chance to knock on the door. Her eyes are red and she looks as though the call with her mother has made her smaller.

“Breakfast’s ready.”

“Thank you so much. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Don’t worry. It’s oatmeal again, sorry.”

“Hey, I love oatmeal.”

We contort ourselves to both fit on the loveseat couch in the living room. Sun streaks through the window, and the breeze rustles the curtains.

✦ ✦ ✦

“Had a nice long smoke on my balcony this morning with my shiny new cigarettes,” Irina tells me as we check off inventory in the back room.

“You really expect me to believe they’re still new after you’ve had them for a whole day? You?”

“Well the five I have left are shiny and new, so that’s basically the same thing.”

I tell Irina to cover me while I text Nadia, in case one of our managers comes roving around the corner with a speech about being ‘emotionally present on the job’.

I write: hi love. have you made it outside today? it’s rly pretty out xo

“You’re worried about her?” Irina asks, her back to me as she blocks me from the view of the nearest security camera.

“I just don’t want her to spend the day rotting until she has another meltdown.”

“That does kind of put you in the position of taking care of her.”

Yes, exactly. I don’t say that, though.

“It’s more that it hurts to see her in that state. It’s bad when she gets like that, like, really bad.”

My phone dings and I rush to put it on vibrate.

i haven’t:( i think today is an inside day can’t wait to hang tn though! have a good shift ❤

Irina hears me sigh. “Bad?”

“Bad.”

“Shit, Jeanie’s coming, put it away.”“Lucy! Irina!” Jeanie, our manager, calls to us in her sing-song voice as she approaches with a tight smile and wide, startled eyes.

She tells us about the importance of efficiency. She tilts her head to one side, then the other, back and forth as she speaks until it feels like I’m watching a tennis match. She walks away with anxious little steps to find another employee to bother.

Irina looks at me with the same exhausted repulsion I feel.

“Go on, say it. I want my free cigarettes this time,” I tell her.

“Not a chance.”

It’s still light out when I get home. Nadia is sitting in bed, staring straight ahead at the door to my closet. She’s wearing the same sleep shorts and top she had on when I left this morning. It takes half an hour to get a response out of her. I manage to move her into the living room to sit on the couch instead, so I can see her while I make soup with whatever wilting vegetables I find in the fridge. She and I are used to this routine now, it’s been going on since she arrived almost a month ago. Heat coats me as I stand over the stove.

When I hand her a bowl, she thanks me with such sincerity that I wonder for a second whether she was able to talk the whole time and was simply being dramatic. But when I see her eyes, I tell myself to shut the fuck up, because what a mean and useless thought. I have known Nadia our entire lives, and as she sits on my couch with a bowl of soup between her hands, I have never seen her look so acutely terrified, like an animal that knows it’s being hunted.

She gets through half of her bowl before devolving into suffocating sobs. She says she can’t do this, she misses being with her boyfriend, she doesn’t know how to be alone, she doesn’t know how to take care of herself. I stop eating to hold her head in my hands, and then in my lap while I smooth her hair against her face, which is all wet with tears. I remind her that she left for a reason—she wasn’t happy, she wasn’t fulfilled. I remind her, too, that he could be mean. That he undermined her in conversation and made her feel stupid around her friends.

“You didn’t know him. You only met him once, and that was a hard time for him,” she says, but the words come out weak.

I don’t have any response to that. I don’t have a way to tell her that I didn’t mean to disappear from her life right when she got into a relationship she shouldn’t have been in. Neither of us likes to bring up my absence, and we’ve never fought about it. She left Toronto for Calgary, I stayed, she came to visit once, I never went to her, she texted me often, I hardly responded.

That’s just what happened. It’s so simple to go through it with myself and know that I was the problem. And yet just thinking about it, I want to lift Nadia off of me and crawl under the couch to cry as hard as her.

By the time we finish our soup, it is pitch black outside and I need to be awake in six hours. The soup is cold. I tell Nadia to get some rest, and I clean the dishes and put away the leftovers.

✦ ✦ ✦

“Do you think I could come to yours for a bit tonight?” I ask Irina. We’re stocking again, and it’s the five-o’clock rush. Customers with no spatial awareness bump into us over and over again.

“Sure, after work?”

“Yeah, just for a couple hours.”

“Ah.”

“What, is that not ok?”“No it’s totally fine. We’ll make dinner.”

“Cool, thanks.”

“The ‘ah’ was just me realizing why you’re asking.”

I don’t respond.

“You know, Lucy darling, I don’t know if you know this, but you don’t actually have to house, nfeed, and financially support your friend through this whole breakup.”

“I’m not totally financially supporting her.”

“You’re telling me you can afford to keep paying for two people’s worth of groceries?”

I don’t reply.

“That’s what I’m saying. You’re not evil for needing some peace. You are a good friend, okay?

And I can say that, as your friend.”

“Well yeah, but that’s cause we see each other every day. Once one of us quits, I’ll take a month to reply to texts, and we’ll pretty much never call, cause I’ll keep forgetting to suggest a time that works for both our schedules.”

Irina stops shelving baby formula for a second, and looks at me with a confused sort of frown.

“Well that’s something to look forward to. Thanks for that.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. That sounded shitty.”

“Obviously it sounded shitty, you just called me a work friend.”

“But we did meet at work. And we are friends.”

“That is so different from work friends! A work friend is the woman who works in your shared cubicle and sneezes all the time, but you’ve seen her cry about her marriage so you invite her to your birthday party out of pity.”

“Oh my god, okay. How about this: I promise that even if I’m terrible at responding to messages, and if one day we don’t talk for a month because we’re both incredibly busy and successful people, that I will still invite you to my birthday party. Not because we’ve seen each other cry, but because I would rather not have a party at all than to have one without you there.”

She eyes me with a squint. “Fine. Better. You can come over tonight.”

“You already said yes to that.”

“Yeah but then you were being mean so I took it back in my head. But now it’s fine again.”

“That’s fair.”

“I know.”

After work I text Nadia that I’ll be home late. I lie and say I got pulled into taking a double. She says she’ll miss me, which means that she’s curled up somewhere needing me to wipe tears away with my thumbs. I feel guilty at first, but then Irina and I make a stir fry together and watch Jason Bourne to turn our brains off. It works. She lets me smoke the last cigarette in the pack I bought her. On the walk home, I feel like I can breathe easily for the first time in weeks.

The day’s heat has cooled off, and I take side-streets lined with trees and big fancy houses with ornate balconies and flowers in their front yards. When I get to my own street, I sit on the stoop outside of my apartment for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of university students bar-hopping nearby, and watching a soft breeze blow through the weeds poking up from between cracks in the pavement. Inside, Nadia is asleep. Her dinner dishes are done and the counters are wiped down. I wash my face and quietly crawl into bed beside her so she doesn’t wake up and ask me about my night, and so I don’t have to ask about hers.

✦ ✦ ✦

Over the next couple weeks, Nadia gets worse and I see her less. I go to Irina’s after work two nights the first week, and three the second. One Saturday, I tell Nadia I picked up an extra shift and then spend the entire day with Irina instead. We do pretty much nothing. I go with her on errands, and we smoke and talk and sometimes we have wine. I like the way her apartment is less cramped than mine, and we can lie on her couch in silence for hours without one of us crying or needing comfort from the other. When I think these things to myself, I feel my whole body go stiff with shame. I think about texting Nadia that I can’t wait to see her, but I don’t.

On the days I come home after work, she’s no different than before, besides being more excited than usual to see me. But the excitement is marred by the crying, or the numbness, or whatever state she’s in that I am left to fix.

She continues to thank me—for food, for letting her stay, for telling her everything is going to be okay. I stop responding to her thank yous. I don’t know what else there is for me to say.

After a shift, Irina and I lie on her couch and nap through most of The Matrix while it plays on her computer. When I wake up it’s dark out, and I hear cicadas in the trees outside the window. I check my phone to see that it’s almost ten, and Nadia has left me three voicemails. I have texts from her asking when I’ll be home, and whether I’m alright. I try to reply to them but I’m too tired of every conversation of ours to start another. I wake Irina up to say goodbye, and walk home in the cool summer night air.

At home I don’t notice anything different, because the dishes are done like usual and the lights are off. It isn’t until I turn on the hallway light to my room that I see Nadia isn’t in bed. I look in the living room and the bathroom again—nothing.

Her suitcase is gone from the floor of my room, and the bed is made. I call her name out a couple times for some reason, as though she’ll pop out from around a corner.

I remember the voicemails and start playing them. The first one is just her asking my ETA again, except it sounds like she’d been crying. In the second one, she says she called her ex-boyfriend.

When I hear that, I sit on the bed with my feet on the floor, unable to think. I stare at the dresser the way Nadia so often did, and the street lamp outside my window extends a ray of soggy yellow light across the floor of my room. I listen to her voice, which sounds thick with the microphone’s static, as she tells me that her boyfriend said he’s really sorry, and that he cried when she called him. He told her he’ll take her back. How he managed to make her feel honored by his acceptance when he was the one in tears, I’ll never know.

I let my voicemail go automatically to the third message. There’s background noise of people and things moving about, and sometimes I hear the sound of a voice over an intercom.

“Hi, it’s me again,” she says. “I’m at the airport now, and my plane’s supposed to start boarding soon but I wanted to leave you a message first so you don’t freak out about where I am when you come home. If you do come home. I’m not sure. Either way. But I’m okay, I’m safe, I promise. I’m so sorry for leaving without telling you first. I didn’t expect to be going so soon, honestly I wasn’t sure that I would be going at all. But I don’t know, I’ve had some more time to think in the past couple weeks, and I think I made a mistake leaving Graham. My mom and I have been talking about it a lot too, and I know you don’t agree with her and that she’s obviously, like, a weird person to go to when it comes to relationships. But she did have a point, I think, when she said that leaving shouldn’t be this hard. Cause it shouldn’t, right? I mean, he and I were together for two years. We spent so much time together, and I know him, like, fully. I don’t know that I’ve ever known anyone as well as I know him.”

She pauses, and I hear suitcases rolling. “Actually, I don’t think that’s true. I think I’ve known you better than him. Better than everyone, really.” I hear her smile; her words are wider and happier. “Do you remember when we tried to make that movie together when we were little? You wrote the script, and I was gonna edit the whole thing, and we got a bunch of our friends to come over so we could do auditions. I actually have no clue how we wrangled so many ten-year-olds to come read our action movie like it was gonna end up in Hollywood. That’s kind of funny to think about. Your friend Chloe was gonna be the villain, I remember that. She said she would do it if she got to wear a cape and a top hat which, like, bold choice honestly, good for her. I wonder how she’s doing these days. Anyways, my point is that I have such vivid memories of us sitting in my room, planning out this insane movie that we never filmed, and just getting so excited to create that world together. We were kind of the same person for most of our lives, I think. That was really special to me, to have that friendship when we were still so young.”

She stops for a second. I feel wetness on my face, and look down to see teardrops on my leg. “I’ve really missed you. I think that’s most of the reason I came to you and not my mom. Also because my mom would have driven me insane within a week. But mostly I wanted to be around you again and feel close to someone the way we did when we were little. I know things are different now, and that’s okay. It’s a bit sad, but it’s okay. I loved being able to wake up next to you again, and eat dinners together. I loved being able to hug you again. I think I overstayed my welcome, though, and I’m really sorry—” her voice cracks and she stops tocompose herself. “I’m really sorry if I was a burden these past six weeks. Cause the last thing I want to do is make your life harder, and I think maybe I did that.”

I can’t breathe very well. My face is hot and salty. “Anyways, I love you a lot. A lot a lot. And if you ever want to come visit Graham and me in Calgary, you don’t even have to ask. I would love to see you there. And I’d love to call more, if you want to. Because I’ve missed your voice. And because I need you. And I want to be a person that you need, too. I know I can’t force that, but I want you to know it anyway.” There’s an announcement on the intercom that I can’t hear. “Okay, that’s my flight. I’ve gotta get in line to board. Thank you again, Lu. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you.”

I sit on the bed until I stop crying, and then I stay there, unmoving, until the sky gets lighter. It’s a hot early morning, and I sweat little pools onto the bed sheets. I don’t have to press my face to them to smell Nadia there. I grab fistfuls of the fabric in my hands. I hear a chime and look at my phone to see a text from her saying she landed safely, and that her boyfriend picked her up. She sends another one that’s just a heart. I know I need to let her know I got her messages, and that I’m glad she’s home safe even though Graham is an asshole and is going to continue being an asshole, and I want to choke him with my bare hands. I want to tell her that I remember the movie too, and that Chloe is doing well—she finally started dating a girl this year, a surprise to absolutely no one—and that I would do anything to be ten again on Nadia’s Hannah Montana bedsheets with her, planning a project we would never finish. I start to cry again at the thought of us so young, and maybe it’s exhaustion that makes me think I’m sitting there with her, ten-year-old her, talking about where we’ll film the fight sequence, car chase, and mega action scenes. Birds start to chirp outside as I stare ahead. I swear I see her face, little and round and framed by dark brown hair that curls up tight around her ears and falls just below her chin. She laughs with me, and later her mom will bring us pretzels as a snack. We draw costumes for the movie on lined paper. I think of her driving back to her apartment in Graham’s passenger seat, and I get the overpowering feeling that the young Nadia I see in front of me is slipping through my fingers.

I finally lie down after turning off my morning alarm and texting my manager to say I’m sick. I tell myself I’ll call Nadia when I wake up. I breathe her in as I lay down, and breathe her out as I sleep.