Fiction
Everything was packed: the dishes, the gardening tools, Leslie’s paintbrushes, the kids’ clothes. She said goodbye to the neighbours, her colleagues, the woman who ran the Portuguese bakery on the corner and most of her friends. Tomorrow the movers would come to take away the furniture and what seemed like hundreds of boxes labelled “storage.” They would also take the bikes.
“We can get new bikes in Beijing,” Mark had said. “Everyone uses bikes there.”
“By the thousands, in traffic and smog,” said Leslie. She smiled to show she was okay with it all.
That morning she made pancakes with the single frying pan they hadn’t packed. Emily and Carson did not bicker at the table; instead, they smirked at each other, ate quietly and left to visit some friends. Leslie made herself a cappuccino, cleaned the espresso machine, placed it back in its box and sealed it with packing tape.
Mark put his hands on his hips and looked around the living room at their lives sorted and stacked. “Well, I guess that’s it, then,” he said. And perhaps because Leslie was starting to pace, he suggested they go for a bike ride.
On their matching bikes they pulled out onto on the street, a west-end Toronto boulevard lined with narrow brick houses, German and Japanese cars, fading green lawns and, currently, tulips. Mark, who refused to wear a helmet, went first. Leslie, who always rang her bell, followed.
“The Mortensons have beautiful daffodils, don’t they?” Leslie said.
“What?”
“I said, The Mortensons have beautiful daffodils!”
Mark turned his head to the west, but they had passed the Mortensons’ house a good twenty metres back.
With his arm he signalled left and they turned onto Harbord, where the traffic was light and the bike lanes wide. Leslie maneuvered around a slow-moving man on a bicycle that rattled as the wheels turned, like an antique eggbeater. The dampness of spring hung in the air and on the full, bright trees.
They cycled past the high school Emily went to, a three-storey castle with a squadron of runners in shorts on the track. They passed the laundry mat Leslie was living above when she met Mark twenty years ago, and she remembered how in the evenings when everything else was quiet she could feel the washing machines whirling beneath the floor. When Mark came over they’d eat fish and chips out of greasy paper boxes from the restaurant across the street and after making love they’d wonder if the people in the laundry mat could feel the bed frame rattling above.
They passed the restaurant they’d gone to for dinner the day Leslie booked her first photo exhibit; they gorged themselves on mussels and tiramisu while Leslie talked about postmodernism’s impact on realist photography and Mark stopped her mid-sentence to say she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
A fire truck roared in the distance. Leslie noticed that the windows of an overpriced flower shop where she once bought daisies were covered in brown paper. A closed sign hung on the door. In front of the store, oblivious to the shuttered business and the cyclists wheeling past, a woman in a sundress crouched down beside a boy who was holding something in his small hands that fascinated them both. And almost without thinking, Leslie did the math. She needed the simple calculation to retrace her steps from this moment to the last.
He would be seven now. Almost seven and a half.
When they stopped at a red light, Leslie pulled up close to Mark. Straddling his bike, he turned around and searched her face. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Want to go to the ravine?”
“I’d love to.”
So they headed north, grunting slightly as they pedaled uphill along Christie, watching smugly as another couple walked their bikes on the sidewalk.
Seven. When Emily was seven, she won the golden pencil award for being the best writer in her class, but she dropped the paper certificate it in a puddle after school and when the ink ran she cried for an entire day. When Carson was seven, he wiped out on a skateboard and chipped his front tooth, an experience that led him to abandon his dreams of becoming a skateboarder and instead seek refuge in the safety of comic books. Leslie could not remember being seven, but she pictured herself running snot-nosed through her parents’ backyard, collecting twigs and empty robin’s eggs and anything else nature had left behind for her.
At St. Clair, they turned east toward the ravine. Mark pointed to a new restaurant, a smokehouse they’d read about in the newspaper but never visited. They turned down a sleepy residential street lined with BMWs and million-dollar homes, where they could hear nothing but the sound of their tires on the pavement.
“Did you check with Jim Wong about meeting us at the airport?” Leslie asked.
“I did,” Mark said. “He’ll be there with a driver and our apartment keys. He wants to take us all out for dinner our first night in town.”
“That would be nice,” Leslie said. “What will we have, do you think?”
“I don’t know. Beijing duck, Sichuan chicken, any kind of dumpling you want…”
“I’m still a bit worried about Carson,” she said. “He’s such a fussy eater.”
“He’ll get hungry eventually and he’ll have to eat something.” He laughed softly. “Don’t worry.”
She forced a smile.
They turned into the ravine, braking as their bikes flew down the unpaved trail. Families picnicked on a sunlit field surrounded by maple and cedar trees. They rested their bikes on the grass for a moment and while Mark sat and watched a man play Frisbee with a golden retriever, Leslie stretched out on her back beneath the sun and closed her eyes.
When they started talking about moving to Beijing, several months ago, Leslie said she was worried about uprooting the kids and leaving her aging parents behind. It was true. But Mark convinced her that Emily and Carson had much to gain from the move – Language! Culture! Politics! – and said her parents were still young and energetic enough to travel and would come visit. It would be their first time leaving North America in decades.
“And as for you,” Mark said, “maybe you’ll start taking pictures again. There will be so many things to take pictures of.”
Leslie considered that. She had stopped using her camera several years ago. Painting was easier, it was all colour and shadows and mood, no underlying truths that gnawed at the heart.
She did not tell her husband the main reason she didn’t want to go to Beijing. He already knew. She didn’t want to go because Arthur couldn’t come, his three-year-old body destined instead to rest for eternity in a cemetery not far from the sunny ravine. Leslie would not be able to visit him once or twice a week while Mark was at work, to dote over his tiny tombstone and tell him about some of the things that were happening on earth. She wouldn’t be able to trick herself, on a difficult day, into thinking he was just spending the afternoon with her mother. Instead, she would pack up her life and get on a plane, leaving an entire continent and an ocean between them. There would be no mistaking it then. Arthur would be part of the past; everything present would be in Beijing.
She could not forget how frail his little body was in the final months, and how his blue eyes pleaded for the pain to stop, even in rare moments of joy. Or how Mark sat beside his empty bed night after night for weeks and then woke up one morning as if everything was fine. That had not happened to Leslie.
“I’ll come with you,” Mark said suddenly, because of course he knew what she was thinking about right then, lying on her back in the park on a day in a life with nothing but adventure ahead of it. And although she had wanted to say goodbye to Arthur alone, she nodded. It was the only way it could be. They got back on their bikes.