What We Both Know Read online

  ALSO BY FAWN PARKER

  NOVELS

  Set-Point

  Dumb-Show

  POETRY

  Jolie Laide

  Copyright © 2022 by Fawn Parker

  Trade paperback edition published 2022

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: What we both know : a novel / Fawn Parker.

  Names: Parker, Fawn, 1994- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210393556 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210393564 | ISBN 9780771096730 (softcover) | ISBN 9780771096747 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS8631.A7535 W43 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Book design by Emma Dolan, adapted for ebook

  Cover art: Emma Dolan

  Cover design based on an image by Igor Ustynskyy / Moment / Getty Images

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_6.0_139880754_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Fawn Parker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Elliot

  A note to the reader: this book includes depictions of animal death, child abuse (emotional and sexual), self-harm, and suicide.

  1

  THE EGG IS BOILED until firm. Rubbery outside and chalky in the middle, a moment before it might form a dark silvery ring around the yolk. The yolk will be removed, a soft almost-sphere, the white discarded. The egg is boiled on high heat for ten minutes, removed, placed on a paper towel, cooled. A crack is made against the counter, the shell chipped away into the damp paper towel which is bunched then placed in the trash.

  Baby is talking, talking.

  I prepare the eggs, place one on a plate and slice through with a butter knife. I’m doing it wrong; this one is for myself. Should he take notice, he might interpret it as some small act of protest. So I let him. Baby’s egg has been spread onto an over-toasted slice of sprouted bread. He chews in a particular way…I can’t watch. Mine, I’ll have on its own, maybe some plain cooked oats afterwards.

  The kitchen is full of feeling. There’s a lemon-scented disc of wax that’s been melted into an outlet-powered warmer. The wax is sold in packages like small ice cube trays, the cubes then melt into the top bowl-like portion of the apparatus. The lemon scent is dry, reminded me of yellow Pez candy when I first smelled it, now reminds me of itself and other moments taking a similar shape to this one. These types of things Baby doesn’t care for, dismisses when asked, as if the object is naturally occurring—cobwebs, insects collected in the glass dishes of ceiling light fixtures, the like. Baby doesn’t remember where the wax warmer is from, who it’s from, as he wouldn’t make such a purchase himself. His dismissal is permission for me to adopt the object and to use it when I please. I like the scent. I like the slow glisten as the yellow goes from soapy-dull to wet juice, then solidifies again. The eggs bump against one another and grow hard inside, the yellow wax softens.

  I read that each time something is remembered it is changed. Each morning I remember how to make Baby’s breakfast and surely I must do something differently. A wrong swipe of butter across bread, too much salt, the offensive addition of paprika. Baby recites his lines, doesn’t know one egg from another.

  My routine now is being streamlined into its most simple form. In the mornings I must do things right or there is a risk of getting thrown off. The housework comes first, then the real work, then the day. The day is what I’m talking about, the thing that can get thrown. I work quickly against the anxiety of losing the morning altogether. It’s as if I expect I can exist outside of time.

  The real work is the writing. Baby began outlining a new book, a memoir, just over a year ago, but in recent months he has been less and less able to put the ideas together. The irony is not lost on me that the work is strictly from memory. This project, he told me, will finally cement his legacy. “Reveal the hand that holds the pen!” he’d said excitedly, most certainly after rehearsing it. I think really his characters were just getting too much attention. He has tasked me with crawling through his notebooks, rough notes he makes in his lucid moments day to day, and article clippings from reviews and interviews. Then I am to compile all of this information into a narrative, get it to the literary agent through his personal email, and nobody needs to know any more than that. It’s true I would like to be working on something of my own, but I agreed out of excitement, having never before written for an audience. I’ve spent my life writing into thin air, my printer feeding it into my own hands, where it gets mailed to magazines, mailed back with a form rejection. I don’t keep the work, usually, as if I can pretend that the failures don’t exist. So far I’ve just had a piece in one of the magazines. The fiction one from the Prairies. But not much else to show.

  I did have an idea for something longer. Oh, but it’s silly. I’d been thinking about trying my hand at a long poem. The funny thing is, I’ve never even read one! Not all the way through. To commit so much time to a poem, to let it span a year, or even longer. I am so drawn to the slowness. The largeness. The way I could hide anything I wanted in there.

  Anyway, I’m not too good at all. Baby has said before that Pauline “had the touch.” He’s not said anything about me to the contrary; it’s just he hasn’t said anything at all. I expect this project will propel me forward in my abilities, to mimic somebody great. And I’ve been considering how my name must affect things; it forces an association. Without it I may not have stood any chance at all. And with it, well they either expect so much or nothing at all. Really I am just another of his projects, and if I can help it not the one of least integrity.

  But it’s what I do, no? It’s why I’m here. That and other reasons. And if I don’t do the writing then there’s not so much else to do, once the tidying up is done. At times I allow myself to do what comes naturally, for the moment at least. I bunch my duvet around my legs and watch the drapes dance with an afternoon breeze. In those moments I feel deserving of the slowness; for
what I’ve been through. And what’s that? Well for one thing I lost Pauline. But that was one year ago, and a day. The anniversary marked a conclusion to the chaos. Now we go on living again, without Pauline. Now every day, every season, is not the first without her.

  Well, and there’s Baby. Surely it must be difficult, my exposure to him and his decline, but at present I don’t feel it. We do our small things. I take care of the errands, the meals. At the breakfast table he watches his tapes and recites the lines. The days aren’t so bad.

  So long as there’s something to do in the evening, things are okay in a day. Dinner with a friend of Baby’s later, and of course our usual routines. The washing-up, a crossword puzzle if we’ve time, and some of Baby’s slow, repetitive exercises. The evening will eat itself up. So, the day should be good. After all, I chose this. I withdrew from my position at the university, broke my lease on the one-bedroom in Toronto’s east end. It even had a little window seat, like I’ve always wanted. A place to be.

  Now it’s still early. I’ve had my coffee, not yet my tea. I drink Earl Grey because it reminds me of Pauline. She would always stand leaning against the kitchen counter, holding the mug in both hands. I do it too, sometimes, just to feel how it feels. I won’t go on about that. Everyone is always missing someone. Besides at this point it has become my “thing” as much as it was hers, the tea. I barely think of Pauline sometimes. I don’t do it how she did it either: black. I add some 2% and a pinch of white sugar. I am a bit softer of a person.

  Baby is beginning to go more and more each day. Not so long ago he was in a place we called “on the edge.” Myself and the doctor, that is. Back then I was just popping over for visits, finding excuses to check in on him. Then, last month, the doctor told me it was time. Now I live here. Now he is forgetting, moving things to new places they never would have gone before, not really answering my more direct questions (“Would you like to go now or wait and do something else first”—it was the or, I had deduced, that he didn’t like; he would have to remember too much).

  In the kitchen, he sits in front of his tablet, which is mounted in a desktop holster, and watches Charlie Rose ask him questions. On screen Baby laughs, answers first coyly and then at length. Yes, the duty of the writer is to insult one’s friends and have them brag, “That’s me!” He is handsome, dressed expensively.

  “Yes,” Baby says, pauses the video, mimics the coy expression. His mouth tenses, the corners turn down, and somehow he uses this shape to convey a certain suppressed joy. I turn away, give him the illusion of privacy. “The duty of the writer…,” he goes on.

  My missing of Pauline—sorry, again about Pauline—has in a way prepared me for how I’ll feel when Baby goes all the way. I’ve started to go through the motions of missing him already. For example, I’ve more or less stopped saying “dad” like I used to.

  Yesterday I did some of my best work. I went through pages of Baby’s notes, writing a scene from his childhood in which he is on a tour bus with his parents in Toronto, having to pee so badly that he considers jumping out of the vehicle, eventually reaching a rest stop and experiencing such bliss while urinating that he develops a habit of holding it in, as a teenager contracts a uti, has to tell his doctor he is “addicted to peeing,” ties this into a burgeoning fixation on genital release. I don’t mind so much the more explicit writing as long as it concerns Baby’s youth. So long as he’s more or less sterile in present day. Long ago he taught me the difference between art and life, that there are special rules for each.

  This morning I had a feeling of anxiety that while in my office, lost in my work, the rest of my life would get away from me. That I wouldn’t think about the right things, would let my routines slip away. Mostly I was thinking about Pauline, how I worry I’ll forget her even for a moment, though I try to see this fixation as a symptom of some inner artfulness and not something sad, clinical. Perhaps there is a more romantic edge to my grief. More than just that I had Pauline once, and now I don’t.

  Sometimes I feel that I died when Pauline died. Or, that I ended. When I consider life after her I do not feel that there was life then loss then life again, without her. I feel that there was life and then there was loss and now there is something…fast, light. Even the sadness feels contained in the life before, as if, yes, I would feel devastation were I still in the pre-life. But she is too far away now, and I am changed. I feel sad for those selves, but for the new self I have shifted into—I haven’t decided yet.

  Now, anything can happen. In the now, Pauline is dead. In the now, Baby is dying. In the now, I act in ways I do not recognize. I am old. I feel old in my permanent changedness. I feel that I am overstaying, pacing. And for that I hate Pauline, for she will never know the new life. She, the marker of change, singing the cue of the switch, the lipstick pop of then-then-now, then-now-now. And I sit at Baby’s desk, and I cannot write because I am unskilled. I approach middle age. I have nothing to show for myself.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE UPSTAIRS OFFICE there’s a view of a field with a baseball diamond and a dirt track around the outside. I watched two children chase each other, their breath visible in the frigid air when they laughed and yelped. An orange ball rising in arcs between them, sometimes hitting the ground and being run after, was the only break in palette. The rest was grey, dark green, brown, including their fleece jackets and wool caps. Their father stood off to one side with a Thermos of something.

  Here is the approximate layout of the house in bird’s-eye view:

  FIRST FLOOR

  Living Room

  Storage Closet

  Coat Closet

  Staircase

  Baby’s Office

  Mud Room

  Kitchen

  Dining Room

  Back Deck

  SECOND FLOOR

  My Office

  Bathroom

  My Room

  Balcony

  Baby’s Room

  Hallway

  Pauline’s Room

  Balcony

  Make sense?

  I do wish I’d kept my own place. But desire must come second to some things, such as my situation with Baby. He has nobody else. Were I to treat this strictly as a job, arrive at nine and leave at five, then what? Sixteen hours he’d be in the house on his own.

  The two floors of the house feel disconnected now that Baby so rarely goes upstairs. Often he will sleep on the leather couch in his office, in his clothes. It is like we are each in our own apartment, one on top of the other. If I am in my office and he is in his office it is like we are co-workers. It is becoming rarer that Baby will work unless I am downstairs, too. Mostly he comes slowly into a room once I am set up in there. Anyway, my work is his work and his work mine.

  This morning I have more to do, setting the dining room table for when Catherine arrives, driving into town to fetch produce for dinner. The market closes at four, and I hope to get zucchini, button mushrooms, maybe some fresh tortellini if they have and make a sauce with plum tomatoes, basil, garlic, red wine.

  2

  LAST NIGHT I SAW my mother. I was surprised she’d agreed to come, more so that she followed through. Most of the group was my age, couples with young children, or artsy-looking girls in smock dresses. Most of them were Pauline’s friends from university, or friends of friends. What I noticed was how her ex-boyfriend was not there, though he had phoned me to personally rsvp.

  In a circle around the dining table we told stories about Pauline. Some didn’t sound like Pauline at all. That’s not right, I wanted to say. Pauline wouldn’t do that. Baby laughed when we laughed, nodded; we skipped him when it came
to his turn. He didn’t realize, surely. He nodded again, looked attentively at the woman to his left. I kept an eye on him, thinking somehow that if I watched closely enough, I could prevent him from acting out. The secrecy of his condition felt at times like a heavy container of water I carried with me, always about to spill.

  My mother rocked in her chair and held her amethyst necklace.

  The name must have finally resonated with him because Baby interrupted the woman who was speaking, exclaiming, “Pauline!” He looked around the table. “When will Pauline arrive? We’ve been waiting all evening!” He looked as if he might punish her, should she arrive, which, of course, she wouldn’t.

  No answer would satisfy him. I tried to calm him, but when he is like that, I am his enemy. He pulled his arm out of my grip. A server came to check on us, then returned to ask if we could remove Baby from the restaurant, his episode was disturbing other diners. In getting up from his seat, Baby’s knees bumped the table, knocked over a handful of glasses, some into the laps of Pauline’s friends.

  “Why is she shutting me out?” he asked us, each of us, over and over. For a moment I wondered if he meant my mother.

  Eventually I shepherded him out. I looked into the anxious faces around the table, tried silently to communicate something between an apology and a plea for help.

  Baby sat in the passenger seat while I said goodbye to my mother. I’d wanted them to have a moment together, for her to find something in him that nobody else could see. She’d watched him from across the table. A spectacle, none of her business.

  “Don’t you let him have you.” She shook her cigarette at me. She’d looked glamorous, old. As if the more she lost her children the more she regained herself. Besides, I say lost, but it’s her disinterest that divides us, her and me. This was the first she’d so much as mentioned Baby all evening. Her train was early the next morning, which left no time for another meeting. I searched for something significant to say, she squeezed my shoulder, and I got into the Jeep to take Baby home. In my rear-view mirror I saw her watching just as at dinner. None of her business.