Remission
by Mary Thaler
Leah sat behind the counter of the café looking at her phone while Melike rummaged through their work cubbies.
“Do you want all these flyers?” Melike called, all earnestness, as if Leah somehow didn’t know the tidying was a pretext and that Melike was hoping to find another of her sketchbooks. The one glimpse she’d gotten, the week Leah started working here, had touched off endless curiosity. What were those weird-looking pencil figures? Were they from a TV show? Anyway, what classes was Leah taking at the Künsthochschule?
“Throw it all out,” Leah said, her eyes glued to the rows of email subject lines, the one from her sister Becky in bolded text, unread. MOM’S TEST RESULTS, it threatened her.
“Even this?”
When Becky was small, she used to curl her whole body around a toy to keep her older sisters from prying it out of her grasp. It must mean something to her to possess this piece of news, something the others didn’t—her eagerness was obvious, even in this handful of words.
“Leah. Even this?”
Leah wrenched her eyes upward to the photo Melike held, and saw an image of herself lying on a grey carpet, her eyes closed. Resting on her stomach was a baby.
Melike’s eyes shone. “Is it yours?” she asked.
Leah didn’t often dwell on the passage of time, but somehow the sight of her own teenage body, sharp-angled collarbones and elbows poking out of a sports bra, smote her with the eight years since it was taken. She tried not to react as she said, “My nephew.”
Melike nodded, as if, in her mental file, she already had a place prepared for this grudging fact. She said, “You would be pretty young to be a mother.”
***
Leah was twenty-four. She knew that was young when she was clutching a wineglass during a student exhibition, listening to upperclassmen gossip about department chairs and representations of the erotic, but suddenly, in the middle of trying to figure out what to do with her crumb-filled napkin, she would think about Dylan, and know that she wasn’t young at all.
She’d lived here longer now than anywhere since leaving Canada, long enough to let the crest of terror fade to an easy background. She’d started out with a dozen schemes for saving money, including buying the cheapest possible phone plan, and since her mother still had no internet in their apartment, they didn’t talk for months. Some afternoons, Leah didn’t need to make a single choice except whether to sit on a cold park bench or in her bare apartment, where she made herself draw for at least an hour before letting herself take out the bread and margarine for supper. She got used to waking, stiff and sour-mouthed on the sofa bed, and flipping open her sketchbook to find pages filled with strange shapes like attenuated limbs or strangling runners flowering beneath fever-mottled skin.
Something happened in March, the way a pain that isn’t new suddenly turns intolerable. Of all the rational ways Leah could have reacted to it, she found an actual public telephone in a grimy train station alcove and listened to her call hiss and click its way across the Atlantic. Tilting her head so her tears would trickle through her sinuses, she searched for inconsequential details to share with her mother, a stage scenery of foot-bridges and canals where grebes dove into the black water. Her mother told her that Sam, her sister, had a new telemarketing job.
“Well that’s good,” Leah said, breathing so steadily she was almost in a trance. “That’s good for her and the baby.”
“I don’t know,” her mother said. “She wants the money to go out at night. Your sister Becky called her last week and some man picked up the phone.”
Six time zones and an ocean away, Leah leaned her forehead against the phone box and let it wash over her: Sam’s latest outrage flowing seamlessly into a pharmacist who’d been insolent to Becky and the petty mind-games of neighbours whose names Leah had forgotten.
Unable to get a word in edgewise, she was equally safe from self-betrayal. Her mother needn’t know that she’d missed so many classes she was about to lose her scholarship, that she didn’t know what she was doing here. She’d been special, once, among the country kids who attended her high school. They knew she was going somewhere. Perhaps she’d fooled them, or let them fool her.
She fumbled coins into the telephone slot, losing track of the last one until the money ran out on her mother’s voice.
***
“You’re growing more abstract,” the instructor had said, picking up Leah’s sketch for the end-of-year mural project. “More angular in style. It’s good. You’re moving toward a purity of emotion that I think could be breathtaking.” But she frowned a little as she spoke.
Leah couldn’t help noticing this kind of minute signal, growing up as she did in a family where every grievance could be voiced except the real poison root. She’d had to learn not to see or respond. Anything else would destroy you.
The instructor set down the sketch. “I guess my question is... Who’s your audience? If art is connection, one person reaching to another, then who’s behind the page?”
Leah scuffed her feet and glanced at the clock.
***
Leah still hadn’t read Becky’s email, but she put her phone away and removed a tray of mugs from the dishwasher. Melike was taping the photo above the cash register.
“You look so different,” she said. “I mean—you’re asleep! I figured you only ever slept in the six hours between the closing shift and opening again.”
Melike had never witnessed Leah dozing in the back of Art History class. When she was tired, German became unstuck in her mind, the vowels softening like cardboard in the rain.
“I can put those away if you want to finish what you were doing,” Melike said, but Leah waved her off. The trays were heavy, and she knew Melike struggled with them.
“So how old is your nephew?”
“Eight.”
“He’s in Canada?”
“Mm.”
“You’re so lucky. I’m dying to be an aunt.”
The photo didn’t show much, but every sliver of colour or texture opened aching rooms in Leah’s memory. The dingy carpet under her conjured the entire living room where they’d sat, at their mother’s behest, to have Sam’s “decision” explained to them, a speech which grew increasingly circumstantial and involved. Blame was placed on school-mandated sex ed, music, and midriff-baring hems. Their mother had never stopped believing that she could protect her daughters from their bodies, even as her own betrayed her with its dwindling weight and unaccountable fevers.
At the photo’s edge, barely visible, was the stained couch where Becky had sat, sneaking wounded glances toward Sam’s stomach. And out of frame, at the kitchen table, was Leah, lending no more than half an ear as the recriminations grew more tearful. Her pen already tracing a flotilla of steep waves.
***
Within a week after his birth, Becky thought Dylan was the most adorable baby in the whole world. She put booties on his feet and a woolly hat on his head and walked him up and down the hallway outside their apartment so that his Grandma could nap after her chemo. When Dylan got fussy, Becky took him into the washroom.
“Don’t do that for your sister,” their mother yelled from her bedroom. “You let his Mom change his diaper for him.”
Sam was talking to someone on her phone. She was mad about being interrupted. Both Dylan and Becky started to cry.
The front door opened and Leah came in, setting down the bag with her soccer cleats. She’d gotten a ride home with a friend’s parent, the way she did every Tuesday, and just like every Tuesday, when Leah’s hand was on the car door handle, the parent asked:
“When are we going to have tea and cookies again?”
“Maybe next time,” Leah said, the way she’d been instructed. “Mom’s pretty sick this week.”
It wasn’t untrue and, as Leah’s mother said, it was only until Sam and Dylan moved to the city. They couldn’t keep people from hearing what had happened, but there was no reason to be sneered at in their own house.
Leah peeled off her sweaty jersey and went into the bathroom, where Sam was finishing up the new diaper. Sam rubbed her nose on Dylan’s stomach and he sputtered proto-laughter. She looked up at Leah.
Leah often got fed up with Sam’s drama, but even on the worst days she knew her sister hadn’t had it easy. Sam was thinner, with darker colouring than her sisters—probably took after Mr. Perfect who turned out to be such a you-know-what, and the perfect older brother he’d taken away with him. Becky and Leah’s father had been a different species of trouble, though dead now, and safe from reproach.
In the chain of family resemblances, Leah recognized that she would be a dead end. She planned on it. But some prompting made her put out her arms for Sam to hand over Dylan. Leah took him into the living-room. As soon as she sat on the floor, the last energy from soccer practice drained out of her.
Becky sat on the sofa chair, sniffling. She could see Sam on the phone again in the kitchen, but Leah wouldn’t be told to give Dylan back to her, because Leah was never told anything. She just got things, art supplies and new soccer shoes, and her own bedroom, year after year.
Dylan gave a breathy sigh.
Sam also was aware of the injustice she and Becky faced. The method she’d found of protest was so drastic that Becky could only watch in numbed awe. But Becky was beginning to have an inkling that in this contest, it wasn’t defiance that mattered, but perseverance.
She was beginning to have an inkling she would win.
***
The email still said, MOM’S TEST RESULTS.
“I saw you took another split shift on the weekend,” Melike was saying. “You ought to tell Jonas that when he schedules those, he still has to respect the laws about number of hours.” She chewed her lip while Leah seemed not to hear. “Even if—that is...”
Melike didn’t want to hint, by the word or gesture, that Leah’s working situation was irregular. Melike didn’t care about that. She knew about being a foreigner, not because she was born elsewhere—she wasn’t—but her dark, wavy hair and Turkish surname meant her documents would always receive extra scrutiny, her presence at a bus-stop or on the train would draw half-wary glances.
Denied belonging, Melike saw no choice but to try harder.
Leah opened the email. She read that Becky was fine, and her boyfriend was fine, and that Mom had encouraged Becky to take step aerobics to manage her anxiety. Based on phone calls from collection agencies, they thought Sam was in Montreal again. Becky wished she’d been the one to pick up the phone—she’d have put a flea in their ears.
Melike saw Leah’s neck stiffen with tension, and wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
Becky had convinced the town to pay for Dylan’s soccer. Mom was trying to figure out how to break the news that it would be Aunt Becky taking him to the tournament instead of his mother. Becky had argued there was no need to say anything. Children’s minds are full of video games, math assignments, bicycles. They forget promises, unless they’re reminded.
The after-school crowd started to arrive at the café. Three girls who must have skipped their last period settled into a corner. As she went to take their order Melike turned and said, hurriedly, “Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself. It isn’t like Jonas can fire you. Who else will speak French and English to the tourists and close five nights a week?”
“Yeah,” said Leah, who was finally reading about the hospital visit. It had started poorly, with the doctor insinuating things about Sam, and by the time he took Mom’s blood pressure it was 180 over 110. Mom wished she could see someone else, but how, in this town?
Mom got the results from the blood test.
It was getting so busy that Melike grabbed one of their seldom used pads of paper to jot down drink orders. She tore off a fresh page, then froze. There was a doodle on the sheet underneath.
“Milchkaffee,” Leah said, appearing beside her. Quick as lightning, Melike flipped the page out of sight and passed Leah the frother. She couldn’t risk another look. All she had was her memory of heavy, sparse lines, suggesting but never quite cohering to a face.
On the point of leaving with a plate of ham sandwiches, Leah paused and then said with awkward gentleness, “I’ve been thinking of applying for another internship. In Japan or somewhere like that.”
“You mean—leaving?”
Back when Leah started working at the café, Melike bombarded her with questions about Canada, about five-metre-high snowdrifts and Anne of Green Gables. She’d lobbied to take her to the bar after a closing shift to meet Melike’s friends. She was sure Leah would like them: Yasmin, an oboist and swimming champion; Mehmet, a philosophy student; and Ulrich who, because he was educated and broad-shouldered, needed to meet a girl who didn’t see him as off-the-shelf boyfriend material. But whenever Melike thought she was breaking through, her questions would be thrown back by a wall of plausibly imperfect German.
Melike knew how to try harder, but she’d never learned to win the way Leah and her sisters did, at any cost.
Leah’s feet were aching, as they’d started to do every night she had a shift, but she repeated to herself, Less than five centroblasts per field, and these words from Becky’s email transformed her discomfort, made it reassuring. Grade I centroblasts. Less than five.
Remission of symptoms, remission of sins, remission, if only temporary, of the custody dispute that had been looming over them since Sam moved to Montreal. From a wariness of male interlopers, Dylan’s grandmother had forbidden putting a father’s name on his birth certificate, but the cancer in her body couldn’t be similarly banished, a threat of separation no one could defend against.
Or so Leah gathered. The legal envelopes, like the breakfast beans on toast and the hugs impatiently endured, turned back at the Atlantic coast, and only a child’s Christmas card passed through. Only rumours of a schoolyard fight, a Sports Day ribbon, a photograph.
That’s your Aunt Leah holding you. She loved you the minute you were born.
At last the café emptied, and she and Melike were lifting chairs onto the tables and shaking the broom into the dustbin. Leah pulled on her outdoor boots, cramming her apron into her cubby.
“Listen,” Melike said, desperate. “You need a break. Come for a drink tonight.”
“Maybe once my portfolio is handed in,” Leah said.
“Never mind, forget it.” Melike slammed the register closed and un-taped the photo. “Here.”
Leah tucked it into her pocket, and they plunged outside into the twilight. Remittance of promises, she thought. Leah might still look like the girl in the photo, the one Melike wanted to befriend. But that apartment was gone now, and the baby was an eight-year-old stranger, his eyes and jaw too much like the face in Leah’s mirror.
She held him sometimes, but only in her sleep.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Mary Thaler lives in Quebec City, Canada, where she works as a scientific editor, writer, and zine-maker. Her verse novella, Ulfhildr, was published by Untimely Books, and her short fiction has appeared in literary journals including Orca Literary Journal and The New Quarterly.
Instagram: @mary.thaler