They built a Shoppers Drug Mart near the entrance of our cul-de-sac. They started digging the week June died. It used to be a concrete square with a bench and a garbage can, but when I rode my bike past on the way to her wake it was a gaping brown hole six feet deep. I’d never seen the earth in this part of the city before. Our lawns are rolled out before we move in, and stitched together seamlessly by skilled hands.
We staged the wake at her mother’s house. It was very organized. The refrigerator photos were arranged just so. The floors had been scrubbed clean and smelled like lemons.
I felt too large for the space, standing dumb with a beer in my hand while her boyfriend cried. The blanched faces of finger sandwiches stared at me from the kitchen table. I was overwhelmed by every mundane thing she had ever touched: the microwave, the back door, the carpeted staircase that lead to the basement bedroom. Forever dark and messy and childish.
Each time I drained my drink, a hand reached out with a new one. It seemed like they were all one beer, full and cold, no matter how many sips I took. I lost track of the kitchen. Later I became dimly aware, smoking a cigarette in the grey light, that I had wandered away from anyone I knew.
A circle of aunts and cousins sat quietly in folding lawn chairs, pretending not to see me. They spoke in respectful murmurs. I finished my cigarette and, feeling my way through the house with raw eyes, found June’s mother. She sat primly alone in the living room with a cup of tea, wearing her daughter’s mittens. I told her: “I can’t go home to my mother like this” and went downstairs to the basement, as if nothing had changed.
In the following weeks, every time I rode past the Shoppers they’d put up a new wall. Our houses were built fast like that. They look vulnerable now that I’ve seen the process, like the gingerbread houses my family used to make, with walls that slide apart whenever you let go.
I woke up in her bed that night, tucked in against the wall as though she were beside me. By then, the wake was over and the guests had left. I knew right away that the sheets had not been changed. I knew that the pillow had not been moved, and that the pink diary beneath it had not been retrieved.
Since then, I often awake to the sensation of her blankets draped over me. I try to wipe it off by pressing my skin into the sheets. I make snow angels, trading the memory of her bed for my own pulse and tangled linen. I think, I am alive and this is my dirty laundry; maybe somebody will search it for clues when I go.
The act of memorializing is inane when her skin cells still line those printed sheets. I could round up the indented lipsticks, and empty liquor bottles stashed in the back of her closet: they’re better proof of her life than my account in words. She didn’t spend her time wrestling with the Canadian landscape, fishing wire dragging her back to the old country by the hem of her dress. She was ignoble and aimless.
We traipsed down smooth development roads, leading us to drowsy suburban bungalows, lights low and no car in the driveway. We spent our time on games of spin the bottle, and then a trudge back home, always coughing up smoke and sputtering with laughter. We insisted we knew one another; we proved it with heads on shoulders, kisses on cheeks, her head in a toilet
and my hands stroking her back.
One night, miles from any harbor, the carpeting of her basement floor became an ocean. We tossed and turned, spilled drinks, crunched a smattering of lost pills and potato chips beneath our feet. Those nights can be like an ocean in November, riding out waves of nausea,
depression, and boredom with illicit secrets, drinks, rebellion. The party was treacherous, and we thrashed at one another while our waves rose.
When she fell, nobody noticed. It wasn’t until much later, sitting around with the stragglers, that I saw her face. She was blue and still, and her eyes did not understand the magnitude of the moment.
I go into Shoppers on the day that it opens; the draw of new fluorescents and un-scuffed linoleum is too much for me. Rows of lipstick tubes stand at attention. Everything is so white it’s like the dentist’s office, or heaven. I buy an iced tea and sit in the parking lot. They’re digging a hole across the street and I wonder what will grow there.
The night of her wake, my mouth breathing her pillow warm, the door opened and her mother sat on the edge of the bed. I closed my eyes. She put her palm on my head, and I counted out my breaths.
“I miss you” she whispered.
She gives her daughter’s things away to girls who make the pilgrimage down. They go through June’s bedroom, searching for artifacts that tie themselves to her. I do the same thing, stake claims.
The problem is that she keeps buying more. June’s personality lives on in clothing she’s never seen, distilled down to frills and buttons and peter pan collars. They populate the city, these girls who have been fashioned to look like her. Maybe that’s a memorial too. It’s kinder
than anything I can write. The fabric is more flexible, contours a soft image, it doesn’t lie or add depth but sits gently on top: she was exactly what she looked like.
Ferron Guerreiro is currently completing an MA in English at Dalhousie University. Her research focus is female virginity in early modern drama.
