No One Will Be Looking At You

Brianna’s first funeral was her father’s. She stood with her mother and sister, Stéphanie, on the steps outside McGill Chapel in the amber light of the late October afternoon. On the sidewalk below, students rushed past on their way to class.

The Holt Renfrew shopper had chosen the matching outfits—their mother’s idea. The itchy fabric of the V-necked dress gaped at her chest and strained over her bum and thighs. Her panties were cutting into the flesh of her buttocks. She’d have been better off wearing her flight attendant’s uniform. At least it fit her.

“Stand up straight, Brianna,” said her mother, Claire.

“And stop tugging at your hem?” Stéphanie added in her new irritating up-speak. Everything she said sounded like a question. 

“Stop picking at me. It’s hard enough already.” 

Nan, her grandmother, stood beside them in her black crepe, Chanel-style suit, the same one she’d worn at her husband’s funeral fifty–odd years ago.

The death of Brianna’s father was unexpected. Two weeks ago, one of the night cleaners found him slumped over his desk in front of his computer. The doctor explained it was a heart attack. He’d have turned sixty in November.

Dad and Mom had been separated for years. Brianna was sixteen when he had an affair with a graduate student, and Claire threw him out. He’d moved to Victoria with his fling, but six months later, after she’d left him, he slunk back to Montreal, to his teaching job at McGill and them. Mom refused to let him move back into the house, but Brianna was convinced her parents still loved each other—always asking her and Stéphanie sneaky questions about how the other one was doing.

Brianna and Nan made their way into the chapel behind Stéphanie, whose hand rested on their mother’s shoulder. With her hesitant steps, Claire looked like a crow with a broken wing.

Claire took small, careful steps along the flagstone floor of the chapel. The light touch of Stéphanie’s hand guided her to the front pew. At any moment, she’d lose her balance and fall over. It wasn’t the hangover from the sleeping pill she’d taken last night; it was the unexpected grief—grief for her unfaithful husband.

Last week, she’d met the rector, Anglican, a gentle person, who hadn’t known Michael. Claire sat quietly in the church office as her daughters described him; a sporty, funny, loving father. They’d left out his untidy infidelities.

Claire left out some things too—that Michael had fathered a child with their friend, Fiona. The girl was sixteen now. She’d also left out that she and Fiona were much more than friends but that was still hard to say. It was complicated, the three of them working together, being friends and at times, lovers.

A few years later, there was that incident with the graduate student.  She didn’t let Michael move back in. But she’d allowed him to come to the family cottage, to be with their daughters and to pretend that they were a normal family.

And now Michael was dead. The sense of unfinished business distressed her. Perhaps he was getting to the place where he was willing to make amends. They could have apologized to each other.

Two evenings ago, Claire and her daughters tried on the outfits she’d ordered for the funeral. Despite refusing to participate in Claire’s wardrobe plan, her mother had joined them.

“I have a suitable outfit, Claire,” Nan said. “I sewed it for my husband’s funeral. Ready-to-wear on an occasion like this?”

Oh Mom. A seamstress. A snob. Uncompromising. But she was enjoying the pizza that Claire had ordered.

Nan dabbed tomato sauce from the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin and spoke softly to Brianna, who sat beside her on the couch. She gave Brianna’s hand a purposeful squeeze. Her daughters shared their secrets with their grandmother. Claire didn’t have the patience for their dramas about boyfriends or unfairness at their jobs.

Had her mother ever told the girls that, in the beginning, she didn’t like Michael? She’d warned Claire not to marry him. Said Claire was marrying too far up, overreaching. It would only lead to trouble. But over the years, her mother and Michael became allies. They’d teamed up against her in a shared resentment of her accomplishments. After all, she was an internationally recognized, tenured professor with hundreds of publications. But truth be told, Michael and Nan had done most of the work raising the girls so Claire could have her career. Everything has a cost. And then Fiona. But that was after Michael had let her down so badly.

Claire watched Stéphanie slide into her dress. The jersey fabric of the wrap dress clung to her jutting hip bones. She looked fabulous. Claire still watched what Stéphanie ate. Her eating disorder was a lifelong condition, but she’d gobbled down an entire slice of pizza. 

“Your turn, Brianna,” Claire said, pushing the garment bag toward her.

Brianna struggled as she wriggled the dress up over her hips. “It doesn’t fit.” She slid her hand into the gaping front. “The jacket won’t fix this.”

Nan nodded. Claire felt the corners of her mouth tightening. Brianna wasn’t pulling her weight. “No one will be looking at you, Brianna.” No, they won’t. They’ll be looking at Stéphanie.

But now, they were in the chapel, seated in the front pew—Nan beside Stéphanie, then her, and Brianna on the aisle. They looked unified, dignified—a sort of solidarity against the shock of Michael’s death.

Claire’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. Her chest felt tight, and it was difficult to breathe. She interlaced her fingers with Stéphanie’s and let out a long sigh.

Brianna stared at the pewter urn containing her dad’s ashes resting on the altar table a few feet in front of her. Beside it was the picture of him smiling, his curly chestnut bangs draped over his forehead. It was Stéphanie who’d taken the photo—the final weekend they’d been at the cottage. She’d also chosen the pointed, patent shoes crushing Brianna’s toes. She gripped her tongue between her teeth and wriggled her heels out of them. 

Last week, Brianna had met Stéphanie at Dad’s apartment on Nun’s Island to choose a suit for his cremation. Mom had refused to come.

She found Stéphanie standing in his bedroom, her fists on her hips, gazing through the streaky windows at the view of the swirling waters of the St Lawrence River.

“We walked across the river on the Escalade with Dad?” Stéph said.

More annoying up-speak—must be nerves. Brianna sniffed. “I remember. That Minke whale swimming upstream. It died.” She felt her face screwing up tightly in the way that was supposed to stop her crying. She retreated into the tiny bathroom, shut the door, and slumped onto the toilet seat. Abandoned on the edge of the spit-splattered sink were Dad’s worn-out toothbrush and a chubby tube of toothpaste squeezed in the middle. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue, flushed it down the toilet and went back out.

Stéphanie slid back the mirrored closet doors. “Not much here, Bree?” 

The hangers scraped as she pulled each one across the metal rod.

“What about this?” she said, holding up a navy-blue pinstripe suit.

“That’s not him,” Brianna said. 

“This tie?” Stéphanie held up a brown tie, patterned diagonally with dark blobs. If you looked closely, you could see they were perching birds. “Mom gave it to him. Birds, it’s how they met.”

“Never saw him wear that either,” Brianna said.

Stéphanie pulled his camel hair jacket off the mangled wire hanger. “The tie’s perfect with this?”

Brianna stepped closer and pushed her face into the lapels of the jacket. “That’s his scent, that oaky scent. She held up the sleeve. “Remember?”

Stéphanie sniffed the sleeve. Brianna saw that she didn’t. “No tie. The cream turtleneck he always wore,” Brianna said, her voice muffled in the fabric of the jacket.

Stéphanie found the crumpled turtleneck stuffed in his bottom dresser drawer. Her nose wrinkled as she held it up.

“Doesn’t matter Stéph, it’ll be fine,” Brianna said too sharply.

 “I’m just as sad as you are, Bree. He was my dad too.”

“Sorry.” She hadn’t meant to be mean, but she’d been closer to him. She’d understood him better than Steph.

But none of that mattered anymore. Dad and his clothes had been cremated. What was left of him was in that urn. She sat on the hard oak bench, tugging at her sweaty polyester dress and wishing she could hug him.

Claire glanced back at her friends and colleagues, murmuring among themselves as they filed into the pews. The air was thick with smells of polished wood and dusty hymnals. The organist was playing a mournful Bach piece she couldn’t name, the one the rector had suggested. What would Michael have chosen if he’d had the chance?

Nathalie, the department chair, caught her eye, making a warm half-smile. Claire spotted the cleaner who’d found Michael. And there was his uncle, Fred, ninety-four now, bent over his walker and shuffling up the aisle with his caregiver. 

And despite their argument last night, Fiona had come. She sat in the final row beside sixteen-year-old Sophia. Claire had begged Fiona to come, to help her get through the day.

“Sophia never knew Michael. He wasn’t in the picture.” Fiona said.

“Come for me.” Claire replied. 

Claire recalled the kerfuffle in the department seventeen years ago—Fiona announcing she was planning to get pregnant and raise a child single-handedly. Michael agreed to donate his sperm. Claire should have anticipated that Michael would get involved with Fiona after the baby was born. After all, he did have a history.

Sophia was two years old and in daycare. Claire and Fiona had resumed their weekly habit of coffee on The Main. The single parenting had been rough on Fiona. She had no other family and Claire and Michael helped when they could. At eight and ten, the girls were too young to be of any use babysitting. But they should have let the girls meet their half-sister—be included in raising her.

Claire was sipping her cappuccino, her mouth stuffed with apple torte when Fiona reached across the café table and gripped her arm.

“I can’t sit here chatting with you like nothing’s going on,” she said, more huskily than usual. “No more lying for me. I’ve been screwing Michael since before I got pregnant. I’m sorry.”

Claire choked on her pastry and lowered her cup. So obvious now. His willingness to father the baby. His attentiveness to Fiona. She lifted Fiona’s hand from her arm and stared into her moistening eyes. “And now?”

“We’re done now.” Fiona rubbed her eyes. “I was blinded by wanting a child and then so grateful. I needed him.” Tears flowed. “I was a project,” she whispered between sobs.

Fucking Michael. Again. With Fiona. Michael needing to be needed—then, the usual, he loses interest.

“I was using him to get what I wanted but …”

Claire took Fiona’s hand. “He has a way of getting what he wants, when he wants, Fiona.” Claire was angry but not at Fiona. Claire had helped set Fiona up. She was the victim—postpartum, single mother, home alone for those first nine months. Claire should’ve seen it coming. 

Fiona’s phone alarm rang. “Gotta go. Daycare’s gonna fine me if I’m late.”

“I’ll need some time, Fiona,” Claire said as she got up and hugged her tightly. “Let’s talk again tomorrow and all the days after that.”

They did talk more. They became a couple. But now Michael’s dead and the girls still haven’t been told about Sophia or even harder, Fiona.

The organ was quiet now. If Brianna thought of only breathing in and then breathing out, she’d get through this. Gregory, her dad’s childhood friend, delivered the eulogy, telling his favourite story, “He Just Wouldn’t Leave.” Dad had loved describing casting his father’s ashes into Georgian Bay, the horror of the greasy pile refusing to sink or drift away. What would they do with Dad’s ashes?

Her mother, who was not religious, had insisted on a reading of the 23rd Psalm from the King James Version. Brianna wanted to read the lyrics of a Tragically Hip song.

“It was Dad’s favourite song, his favourite band,” Brianna said. “Ahead by a Century.”

“It’s a rock song.”

“It’s a love song, Mom.”

Brianna refused to read anything else, so Stéphanie read the psalm in her stupid up-speak. “The lord is my shepherd” is not a question, Brianna murmured under her breath. Her brain brimmed with messy feelings–annoyance with Stéphanie for being such a show-off, sorrow for her mother and fury at her father for dying.

As Brianna squirmed on the bench to adjust her panties, she glimpsed of a tall woman sitting on the aisle in the last pew. Her oval face was strangely familiar. From Mom’s work? And beside her, looking like she wanted to bolt out the door, was a slender, white-faced teenager. Her hair was frizzy, ginger like Stéphanie’s but tugged into a bun. They had the same almond-shaped, emerald eyes.

A memory flashed through Brianna’s mind. She was seven. It was a summer Sunday afternoon, in a small park with wilted geraniums in the window boxes of the row houses surrounding the square.

She and Stéphanie, who was five, were playing on the swings near the fountain. Brianna glanced back to check for her dad and saw the woman with the oval face sitting beside him on the park bench. Her long legs were stretched out in front of her, and her hands were clasped over her pregnant belly.

“Hey, Brianna. Come here.”

Dad was smiling, drumming his fingers on the back of the bench.

The woman looked at her with shining green eyes. “You’re noticing my belly.” Brianna nodded. “Would you like to touch it?”

Brianna did but she squeezed her hands together behind her back.

“Take your sister. Get some ice cream,” Dad said, handing her a five-dollar bill.

“By ourselves?”

“By yourselves.”

But when Brianna was in the variety store, Stéphanie disappeared. “Dad, I’ve lost Stéphanie,” she panted as she ran towards the couple on the bench in the park.

He grinned and pointed towards the fountain, where Stéphanie was trailing her fingers in the water. Brianna worried that Dad would tell Mom that she’d lost Stéphanie. She worried that she’d forgotten to close the freezer in the store.

“Bree, you worry too much for someone your age,” Dad said.

“The Day Brianna Lost Stéphanie,” became one of his favourite stories. When he told it, he never mentioned the woman, Fiona. But the worst part was that Dad hadn’t understood how frightened she’d been.

The rector’s voice hummed in the background. Brianna twisted on the hard pew considering what Nan had whispered to her the other night on the couch.

“Well, your dad can’t harm anyone anymore, can he?” 

Brianna wasn’t sure what Nan meant. He’d hurt her on the ice-cream day and that summer he went to Victoria. And why did that woman, Fiona, and the girl with the hair like Stéphanie’s belong at his funeral?

The service was over. Claire, flanked by her daughters and mother, made her way down the aisle and out of the dim chapel into the afternoon light. They stood in a line at the top of the steps. Claire exchanged kisses and hugs with Michael’s colleagues and friends. She and Fiona shared a long embrace.

“Sorry about last night,” Fiona whispered in her ear. “Of course, Sophia should be here.” She patted Claire’s bum when they moved apart.

“Who was that woman?” Brianna asked rubbing her hands on her thighs.

“My colleague, Fiona. And her daughter, Sophia.” 

Fiona’s arm was draped around Sophia’s shoulder as if to shelter her from the day’s sadness.

“Her hair’s just like Stéphanie’s. Same green eyes,” said Brianna.

“But her posture’s terrible. So slouchy and sulky,” said Claire, relieved her daughters were through the sloppy teenage phase and concerned at what lay ahead for Fiona. “Fiona works in the department. And yes, Sophia’s hair is just like Stéphanie’s. They’re both lucky.” 

Claire stopped. There’s never a good time. She took Brianna’s elbow and guided her away from the remaining guests. “Brianna, this is important. I should have told you years ago.” She pulled her fingers through her hair and took a deep breath.  “Michael fathered Sophia with Fiona. Sophia is your half-sister.”

“A half-sister? said Brianna. “Is this a joke? Does Stéphanie know?”

“Not a joke, Brianna. And let’s not tell Stéphanie. Not today. And please close your mouth.”

Claire saw Brianna’s confusion. Deaths and funerals make you do reckless things. It was the wrong time and the wrong day to tell her, but there was no going back. She glanced at Stéphanie, swaying in her high heels and flicking her flaming hair about in conversation with Michael’s soccer buddies. “Come on, girls. Let’s get to the reception.”

Claire hurried the girls past the brass-handled doors and into the faculty club. The flowers and linens did look elegant. The two-tiered cake was beautiful—royal icing decorated with tiny marzipan birds like the ones on that tie she’d him bought years ago. She’d resented the extravagant catering costs, but the girls had insisted. Her lawyer assured her there was nothing to worry about. Michael’s wealth would come to her. But she’d never stop worrying about money. She’d inherited that from her mother.

And now Michael was dead, she’d have to re-examine everything. Re-examine her anger, her disappointment and her contempt for him. To find what—sorrow or maybe even forgiveness? But if she was being truthful, she wished for a different ending; for another chance to tell him that she had loved him, at least in the beginning. But she didn’t forgive him for abusing her love with all those infidelities. Would he have forgiven her if she’d told him about her love for Fiona?

Brianna leaned against the wall of the reception room. Waves of chatter washed over her. Claire tilted her head to signal that she should join her and Stéphanie in welcoming the guests. Not yet. She hadn’t caught her breath. She wasn’t sure if she could walk. She was drowning in disbelief and anger. Today was supposed to be about Dad. The loss and the grief. Not the day to find out about a half-sister. Claire. So cruel. Questions churned inside her. Had Dad loved Sophia as much as her and Stéphanie? 

Claire had misjudged the situation. She hadn’t meant to be cruel. Poor Brianna propped up against the wall. So serious. Misunderstood. Her life would be so much easier if she’d lighten up. Claire should have spoken to Stéphanie first. She might have been amused at the situation, after all, they did look alike. It had been a mistake not to tell the girls sooner. Claire and Fiona told them the same day they told Sophia about Michael. But she and Fiona weren’t ready to come clean about their relationship. The girls would have seen it. Muddy water under a rickety bridge. 

Brianna made her way over to join them. Good girl. She’s recovering. They’d stand together for the remainder of the reception to receive condolences about Michael.

But in the future, it would be up to the girls to learn how to manage life’s tough truths. Like fledglings being forced from the nest, they needed to grow up. She wasn’t responsible for their happiness. It was hard enough to find her own happiness. But she’d begin by ensuring she got a slice of that expensive cake before it all disappeared.