Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:15:06 -0500 (EST) From: Karla Schulz Subject: Carrots and Celery series - Damage Deposit (Chapters 2 to 4) Thanks to everyone who wrote me to say such nice things about the story, I'm glad I'm back too! It's awesome to hear that people are still interested in these strange brain children of mine. As before, you can also check out the story at: http://karlaschulz.livejournal.com/ Also feel free to "friend" the journal and comment and stuff! E-mails are also GREATLY appreciated! Here it comes: --- Chapter Two; the damage done (Carrots) It happened when we were gone. Of course it did. We'd called to tell them we were coming back that day but not when, so when we got home and they weren't there we thought nothing of it, they were always off somewhere, taking care of things. So we didn't worry. Kyle dropped off Jonas at his house and we unpacked. There was a note welcoming us home, leaving directions to cookies and food in the fridge, telling us Kara was at Sue's and the twins were at soccer practice so we grabbed food and then, taking advantage of the empty house, got quickly down to the business of re-christening my long bereft bed -- tearing desperately into each other like we hadn't been fucking every spare second in Calgary -- and all the while my parents were slowly bleeding to death on gurneys in the hospital emergency room. Kyle came back and Kara came home and the twins were still gone but we made some supper anyway, with enough to save for them for later. Then someone called and Kyle got a strange blank look on his face and hung up abruptly, after saying "I'll be right there." We thought it was Jonas, but then he was shaking his head, saying no, it was the twins, they needed him to come pick them up. For a minute it looked like something was wrong but then he was shaking his head, like he was dismissing the idea, the possible reality of the thing that upset him, and he was smiling confidently, so we relaxed. He left to go get the twins and Kara helped us with the dishes, sneaking smiles at Celery and bumping into him to get hugs. Relishing in the fucking fantastic wonderfulness of the normalcy of it, we snuggled down to a movie after that, not The Princess Bride, which would have been too much, drawing attention, ceremony, but instead The Royal Tenenbaums, another familiar favorite. We didn't know it -- how could we have known when Kyle didn't tell us, gave us no sign -- but they were being frantically operated on, then, as we sat together, me with my head in Celery's lap, watching Royal say to Ritchie, "but I'm going to live," and my parents were dying, all the while. Kyle hadn't known. That was the thing of it. All the twins had said was "we were in an accident, we're okay but mom and dad are going in for surgery, they're not sure how serious it is yet" and he was gone. He hadn't thought, hadn't let himself believe it was going to be anything to worry about, hadn't wanted to throw me into panic so soon after we got home. Hadn't wanted to frighten Kara. In the end, it wouldn't have mattered if he had told us, had brought us along -- they were dead before he reached the hospital. The twins had been waiting for Kyle in the hospital waiting room, not allowed in with our parents while they were operating, and they had just died, on the table, as the expression goes, my dad first and then my mom only minutes later. Kyle got there just after the doctors had come in to tell the twins. He had to see their faces, just as the news sunk in. He told me, weeks later, that he had known right then, as soon as he saw their faces, and had walked right into a nurse who was hurrying by. Just one moment of weakness and he snapped into action, brother protection mode, and had rushed over to them. He doesn't remember what he said to them, or any of the ride home, and after the fact none of them could remember how they were able to step back into a car, especially the twins, right after what had happened. None of us have driven since. But somehow they did, that time, and they got home, having driven well under the speed limit the whole way. Chapter Three; reconstruction site (Carrots) The house feels different now, like it's mine and ours in a new way. Because we are afraid it will become like a museum, that we and it will remain frozen in time, never changing and never growing, we move furniture around and strip away the regal blue striped wall paper in the living room that I ran my hands down so many times in my childhood and paint the walls a creamy chocolate brown instead. We turn the kitchen a golden sunflower yellow, which seems to call out warmly to the hardwood below. Celery and I tear down everything in our room except the glow in the dark stars we put up when we were little, back when it wasn't even my room but Kyle let us because I gave him the big eyes and promised him it would look cool, just like the ones I had in my old room too, so we'd match, and my walls go from light blue to kind of meadow green, with a burnt orange trim. We paint the door leading out onto the balcony a dark cherry red. All my posters are gone and replaced with stills of him skateboarding which Saul took and one large panorama shot of all of us sitting in a row on the steps, which we reluctantly asked a passerby to take early in the summer. The twins open up their room and rearrange their furniture, taking down posters and pushing their twin beds together, daring any of us to say anything. Kara moves from her bedroom at the back of the house into our parents' room where she camps out on the floor while we strip away her carpet to reveal a light honey hardwood and change the walls from the blue sprig wallpaper of her childhood into a dark rich brown with a forest ceiling that she and I paint together. We make my old bedroom, long a place used mostly to store other house junk, into a kind of study computer room, clearing out old boxes and taking them to the attic or throwing stuff away. Kyle turns his apartment into a second living space for all of us, opening up the living room and the kitchen area for midnight snacks and movie marathons, and gets rid of his old bed, buying a new king sized one with a deep red comforter and navy blue sheets, to match his newly painted walls. We redo all the bathrooms, new shower curtains and bath mats, blue and green for mine, yellow and red for the main upstairs one, black and white with new checkered tiles for Kyle's, blue and white for the downstairs. The only spaces we don't touch are the ones that were only theirs, their bedroom, and mom's study. But we don't shut the rooms up like tombs; instead we keep the doors open at all times, and go into them often. We lie on their bed when the sadness is especially intense, huddled up together like when we were kids and were afraid of thunderstorms, or older but still pretending to be because we loved being near them. Chapter Four; summer in the city (Carrots) Kyle spends his mornings baking bread and making homemade pasta, muffins, and cookies, skills we all learned from our father but never felt particularly inspired to put into practice until now. When they're up, the twins tend to help, sometimes dividing their time between that and helping us with the garden. What started out as a random impulse of Kara's to get up early one morning and do some preliminary weeding has turned into a fairly all-encompassing project. None of us really knew what the hell we were doing, with the exception of Kara in some cases, so we searched the wall of books in what used to be our mom's study and is now Kyle's sometimes war room, and found some of her books on gardening, and winged the rest. And soon enough, what began for me as a stab at keeping Kara busy and engaged has become something of an obsession. After the first few days of blitzing, turning and weeding the earth, picking out rocks and roots, we began a campaign of strategic planting, headed up by our fearless leader Kara, and have now transitioned into a strict schedule of vigilant weeding and watering. Our somewhat enormous backyard has always been roughly half garden in the summer, separate patches for vegetables and flowers, a smallish corn crop, the whole yard lined with raspberry lilac bushes, but we've expanded our vegetable planting to two new areas we dug out in the front, running parallel with the face of the house on either side of the front porch. Now, instead of watching for invading relatives and lawyers, I return numerous times throughout the day to spy suspiciously through the window, on the watch for squirrels and any rabbits that may be looking to get in our on bounty. Celery moves around, participating in all of this, doing the especially taxing physical work of the garden and learning to roll dough and shape pasta shells with Kyle, going to Assiniboine Park with Braden and the twins to play two on two soccer or to the Forks to go skateboarding. Some days we all go together, to watch him and eat hot sugary mini donuts and spicy jerk chicken enjarahs. We go to the zoo on cold Tuesday mornings when no one else is there and the animals are up, and have picnics by the camels and ride on the Prairie Dog Express. We drive to the beach at six in the morning, able to tolerate the roads when almost no one else is on them, and stay all day, in the narrow ends of Patricia Beach where people hardly ever go, and swim and play water Frisbee for hours or lie in a row on the Mexican blankets our parents brought us home one year, half asleep and frying up in the sun. In the heat of the afternoon, on days when we're home, we typically retire to our separate rooms to nap or read, coming together again around five to start making dinner. The strict adherence to a shared family meal every night is one of the many peculiarities of life in the new regime. When they were alive, our parents always saw to it that there was food in the house, typically already prepared, for us to eat for dinner, but with so many people and conflicting schedules, nights we all ate together were rare. But now Kyle insists on it, and no one is inclined to fight him on it. Even though we spend all day in the same house, or yard, it always feels good to come together at the end of the day. It's a time to catch and check up, to make sure we're all still here and to give one solid, secure touchstone around which we can plan or survive our day. After supper, we watch movies and play board games, sometimes, more frequently now, managing to forget there's something we're trying not to think about and just have a good time, together. More evenings than not, if he's not already here, Braden comes over and sits between the twins, and they rest their heads on his shoulders while we watch the last season of Buffy (which is mostly terrible) and Angel (which is not) and whatever movies or HBO DVDs we've rented that week. He tries to teach us how to play Canasta but we reject it because I couldn't understand the rules, and we teach him Mexican Train and Yahtzee instead. He brings us news from the outside world, and him and the twins will go out into the backyard and kick around a soccer ball into the wee hours. On warm nights, when it's been stifling all day and finally there's a cooler breeze on the air, we'll gather in small groups, usually just Kyle, Celery and I, sometimes the twins as well, up on the balcony off my room and sit together on lawn chairs, talking and watching the wind in the trees. Sometimes Kyle and Celery will have a beer, or two, and I'll see some of the tension go out of Kyle's shoulders, and he'll talk a little more freely, may be not letting stuff out, just talking around things mostly, but even that is something he doesn't allow himself, most of the time. On Saturdays, we go shopping as a group, generating complicated and often experimental lists the night before, filling our backpacks with paper bags filled with food and biking back and forth from home to different delis and corner shops. We bike all over the city buying food we'd never heard of half the time before, looking for new recipes and experiences. We buy phyllo pastry and avocados, balls of mozzarella and sauces from DeLuca's. We make Monday morning bargain bread runs to City Bread for rye and bagels, and get our flour and cheese from the bakery. Kyle uses the ingredients we buy to make most else. We've been left with a kind of stupid amount of money from their savings, investments and rather massive life insurance policies, on top of what the bakery makes. We've deferred the running of the bakery to Tony, the manager and head baker from when our parents were still alive. He's one of the few others we trust, and he calls us once a week to let us know how everything is going, and to subtly make sure we're doing okay. As far as the money goes, aside from wanting to have enough for everyone to go to University and keep the same roof over all of our heads we don't really know what we'd want the money for, so we spend it somewhat haphazardly, with occasional extravagance, but usually with more focus on convenience than opulence. We've left most of the money untouched, and hope to keep it that way for now, but we're certainly not going without. We do decide to forgo the cleaning service I didn't realize we used to have come clean once a week, a luxury the benefit of which we decided would be too greatly tempered by our unease about having someone else in the house. Besides, cleaning seems to be one of the things that best calms Kyle down, and you'll catch him at it at the oddest times of day, this determined expression on his face that seems so much like the old Kyle none of us have the heart to tell him that cleaning the kitchen floor at two in the morning is maybe a little bit crazy. We've finally reached a lull in the constant stream of visitors at our door bearing casseroles and bunt cakes and aside from our weekly shopping trips and the occasional phone call between Kyle and Mr. Sheppard, we have virtually no direct contact with the outside world. I'd worry more about turning Kara and the twins into freakish hermits incapable of even basic social interaction if I could actually manage to give a crap about what anyone outside our house thinks or wants from us, or if they didn't get wild panicked looks in their eyes every time one of us suggests they might want to go out on their own with some of their olds friends or anything along those lines. When we do go out in the world we're all far more comfortable doing it in groups, all together when possible, and Kyle seems perfectly disinclined to discourage this. Sometimes, on days we're not getting up early to garden or cook or go the beach, we stay up all night playing Risk (or, more accurately -- TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!) or blasting music loud enough to fill the whole house and trying to dance until we collapse exhausted into a pile on the living room floor. Of course, there are other times when we stay locked up in our separate rooms for days because we can't stand to look at each other because it hurts too much and the weight of acting okay or even, which is sometimes worse, BEING okay, is too much. But these times are becoming less frequent now, and when the grief does come, it's more and more often of a kind we can share. On these occasions we'll pull out all photo albums and pour over them for hours, telling the stories that go with them which we all know by heart. Or we'll read aloud from the books our dad used to read to us when he was putting us to bed, or look at the boxes of pictures she used to draw for us. We'll watch Harrison Ford and Meg Ryan movies to remind of us of him and Jane Austen and Fiddler on the Roof to remind us of her, and how she used to sing Matchmaker Matchmaker while she washed dishes in the sunny kitchen on Saturday mornings, our dad watching this go on from above his paper, a small indulgent smile on his face. We take group walks to the cemetery and tell them about how we are and what we do each day, even though none of us really believe they're anywhere they could hear us. Anywhere but gone.