we speak of nothing

Lena leaned against the counter while Vivianne stood watch over the moka pot on the stove. The house was quiet except for the sound of the AC and the gurgle of the coffee pot.

“We should sit outside,” Vivianne said. “It’s a nice night.”

Lena nodded. “That’s a good idea.” She looked out the patio doors at Vivianne’s yard. There was a small swing set for the kids and a little terrace with some outdoor furniture. There wasn’t much shade in the yard and evenings were the best time to sit there.

Vivianne had always loved sitting outside on summer evenings. Her apartment in university had been a semi-basement unit with outdoor stairs that lead to the door. On summer evenings Lena and Vivianne would sit on the steps and watch people go by. Sometimes people they knew would stop to talk on their way to a party. Sometimes they would invite Lena and Vivianne along. Sometimes they would ditch their plans to stay with them.

Vivianne’s upstairs neighbour was a chemistry student named Hypatia. She had a show on university radio called Hype Hour with Hypatia where she played ska music. When she’d get home after her show she’d ask Vivianne to come with her to walk her dog. When Lena was there they would all walk the dog together. When Vivianne had boyfriends, they wouldn’t walk the dog.

Noah would walk the dog. Noah was a good guy.

Hypatia had moved out by the time Vivianne started seeing Dimitri. A music student named Brian had moved in. Brian was a clarinet player. He was gay. His boyfriend’s name was Benji. Dimitri didn’t liked them. Vivianne never realized they were boyfriends.

“Do you remember Stephanie?” Lena said.

The coffee had come up and Vivianne was stirring it. “That friend of yours from years ago?”

They got out of the car and looked around. It was a nice day. The temperature was mild; the sky was clear and blue. In the distance, kites flew.

It was a perfect Saturday in the park. 

“It won’t be so bad,” Cassie said, opening the trunk. “At least there’ll be food.”

“I don’t think I can eat.” Alex had had diarrhea before he left. His body hadn’t wanted to leave the house.

Cassie handed him the gift. She took the tray of food. “Come on,” she said. “We need to be grown-ups about this.”

“Can I be a crotchety elderly grown-up who doesn’t want to waste a nice Saturday on an ugly wedding about it?”

“No.”

The wedding was a potluck wedding in the park. Alex shouldn’t have been invited. He didn’t know why he had been invited. The only explanation was that Xavier wanted to inflict one last indignity on him as a wedding present to himself.

The walk to the picnic area was winding and long. Alex’s stomach complained; his legs felt like lead.

Neither he nor Cassie talked. They walked solemnly along the path, holding their offerings, passing from light to shadow, from warm to cold.

Alex hadn’t planned to be at the wedding. He had planned to stay home, play games, pretend it wasn’t happening. It was Cassie who had insisted that they go and be big about it. 

“If we stay home, they win,” she had said.

Alex didn’t care if they won; he didn’t want to be big. He wanted to be as small as physically possible for someone his size. He wanted to disappear into the ground and disintegrate into compost.

His invitation hadn’t included a plus-one. He had called Beatrice to ask if he could bring Cassie, hoping she would be shocked by his audacity and tell him to stay home because he wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near her wedding.

But Xavier had answered.

After Alex had gotten over the shock of Xavier answering Beatrice’s phone, he had asked if he could bring Cassie.

“I don’t care who you bring,” Xavier had said. “It’s not like we have a seating arrangement.” He had laughed his terrible laugh and hung up.

The ceremony was over by the time they arrived at the picnic area. This was by design: Cassie said she didn’t want Alex making a scene.

“Do you want to burn your bridges?” she had asked. “Make sure there’s no way you can repair the friendship once this marriage ends? Or do you want some hope that we’ll all be friends again once we’re safely on the other side?”

“I don’t want there to be an other side,” Alex had said. “I want this marriage to end before it begins.”

“Well that’s not going to happen. They’re going through with this wedding whether you like it or not. But if you behave yourself, you’ll avoid putting the final nail in the coffin of the friendship.”

Everyone they knew was there. Even Sasha, whom Alex hadn’t seen in almost two years, was taking photos. 

Kiana greeted them. She had officiated the wedding. She was wearing a blue flower crown and a blue floral dress. Cassie was wearing a red McGill University hoodie and black sweatpants. Alex was wearing a black long-sleeved henley and jeans. 

“Alex, Cassie, I didn’t think you’d come,” Kiana said. She looked surprised, but not in a good way. “It’s been so long.”

“Six months,” Cassie said. She and Kiana both knew why it had been six months. “Six months for me. Only three months for Alex.”

“Right,” Kiana said, her face locked in some grotesque facsimile of joy. “You can put your food and gift on the tables.”

Alex felt like the evil fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, come to curse the entire party. He wasn’t going to curse the party; he didn’t know how.

Cassie put the grocery store crudité platter between a black forest cake and a tray of lasagna. Alex put his gift between a gold gift bag and an ornately-wrapped box. 

His gift was a tea set for two he had bought on sale for twenty dollars. It was a floor model and the clerk hadn’t been able to find its box. Instead she had stuffed it into a box that was just a touch too small for it. She had tried her best to hide the bulges with wrapping paper, but it tore under the force of the teapot trying to escape its fate.

“Now what?” Cassie said. 

“We go give the happy couple our blessing?”

Xavier and Beatrice were sitting under a white tent. Sasha was taking photos of them. Beatrice was wearing a dress Alex remembered from her ren faire days. 

Xavier made eye contact with Alex. He smiled his gross smile and put his arm around Beatrice in a possessive way.

“Don’t take the bait,” Cassie said. “Let’s get some food instead.”

“My stomach won’t be able to handle it.”

“Suit yourself but I’m getting my kummerspeck.”

Cassie walked off and left Alex by himself. He wished he drank. The wedding was dry, but he would have brought a flask with him if he drank. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Teddy walking towards him. He looked like he was about to start trouble. Alex wanted to run away, but as with dogs, running away would have only made things worse. 

“What are you doing here?” Teddy asked.

“I was invited,” Alex said. “I’m not Lochinvar, showing up all uninvited to wreck the wedding.”

“Right, right.” Teddy looked towards Beatrice and Xavier. 

Alex looked towards them, too. Xavier smiled his awful smile at him again. Alex didn’t want to look away, but he did.

“It’s one thing to be invited, and another to come,” Teddy said.

Teddy was drinking something fizzy. Alex wished he hadn’t left his water bottle in the car.

“I’m not going to ruin things,” Alex said, looking around for the drinks. 

“Still. Didn’t think you’d show your face after what happened at Valerie’s.”

Alex looked back at Teddy. He wished he hadn’t brought up the event at Valerie’s. It wasn’t polite to bring it up. That’s what everyone had told Alex. It wasn’t polite to keep bringing up this unpleasantness.

Teddy had been there to witness the unpleasantness. He had heard the crash and seen the look on Alex’s face. He had watched Alex hyperventilate, tears streaming down his face, and yet he had believed Xavier. He had known Alex for years; he had only met Xavier a few months earlier; but he believed Xavier. He and everyone else refused to believe that Xavier, with his charm, charisma, and smile, was a bad person.

“I was invited,” Alex repeated.

“As long as you’re chill and don’t cause a scene,” Teddy said.

“I won’t cause a scene,” Alex said, thinking he should.

“Good. You need to accept that they got married.”

“I know they got married. I’m at their wedding!” Alex laughed. He tried to catch Cassie’s eye but she was loading cans of sparkling water into her bag.

“You can’t just know,” Teddy said. “You have to accept! You need to accept that Beatrice and Xavier are married. We don’t need histrionics from a spurned suitor today.”

Alex felt a smile emerge on his face. It wasn’t voluntary; it was being put there by his brain to keep him from screaming. 

Why had it been so easy for everyone to believe Xavier’s story over his? Why had they been so quick to believe that he was a rejected lover consumed by jealousy? Why had they found it so hard to believe that Xavier was a terrible person who wanted nothing more than to do away with him?

“I accept it,” he said. “There won’t be any histrionics.”

“Good. We don’t need a repeat of what happened at Valerie’s.”

“No, of course not.”

He also didn’t want a repeat of what happened at Valerie’s. He didn’t want a repeat of Xavier attacking him, pushing him against a wall, and forcing a kiss on him.

“I thought you were bisexual,” Xavier said after Alex pushed him away in self-defence. “You don’t act like it.” Then he laughed. He laughed. He laughed that awful laugh. 

Xavier had landed on Valerie’s bedside table, breaking her lamp. Everyone had come in to see what the commotion was. 

Alex had told them what happened.

And no one had believed him.

Alex had gone home and told Cassie. Cassie had believed him. The same thing had happened to her and no one had believed her either.

“I should go find Cassie,” Alex said. He could feel Xavier staring at him. 

“She’s here, too?” Teddy said, laughing. “I gotta give it to the two of you! I wouldn’t have shown my face around here after all your bullshit.” 

Teddy walked off towards Kiana. Alex knew they were going to talk about him and Cassie.

Cassie hadn’t moved from the food table. She was filling her bag with chocolates.

“Someone brought pistachio Lindors,” she said. She took two handfuls and threw them into her bag. “This is compensation for emotional damage.”

They left without saying goodbye. No one noticed them leave. Or if anyone did, they said nothing. 

Alex looked behind him as he left. He looked at all the ghosts of his friendships. All the people he had trusted in a previous life. 

At first he couldn’t believe it; he thought they were talking about another Liam, a different Liam, a Liam he didn’t know. He thought he had misread the text. Forty year olds didn’t have heart attacks, especially not forty year olds who were as fit as Liam. 

He texted back his friend. Waited for the reply. Then stared out at the canopy of trees. There were birds chirping somewhere inside them. They had no business chirping.

Mike couldn’t make sense of it. He kept going on his morning runs, moving to the side when he saw someone else on the trail, occasionally putting on a mask if they put on a mask. He played with his kids and talked to Liz. They discussed how they would spend the rest of the summer.

There wasn’t any funeral that Mike could attend. There was a memorial over zoom. Mike didn’t want to attend a zoom call with several people he didn’t know, like an all-hands meeting but with crying. He didn’t want to sit in a room alone, thinking about Liam alone, crying alone, his camera on as he lied to Liam’s family and friends about who Liam was to him. 

Funerals weren’t places for lies.

Without the closure, Mike started to think of Liam as a friend he had lost touch with, still existing somewhere in the ether, living his best life.

Time passed. Mike became busy with work and the kids. The kids were still little and weren’t yet in school. He and Liz took turns amusing them and feeding them between meetings and tasks. 

Eventually the office reopened and Mike went back once a week. Liz went back, too. She was in the office three times a week. The kids were in school now, too. This left Mike alone in the house more often than not, with nothing to do between tasks but wander the empty rooms while trying to ignore his thoughts.

He had hoped going into the office would distract him from his thoughts, but the office wasn’t the same as it had been, and he found himself being alone there, too. 

So many things were gone: the water cooler in the office kitchen; the sandwich place everyone used to go to; most of the people.

Sometimes Mike saw Brad at the office. Brad said he came in on Wednesdays, and Mike decided to come in on Wednesdays, too. He and Brad would have lunch together then go for a walk. It felt good to have company. It felt good to talk to someone who barely knew him.

The day of Liam’s birthday fell on a Wednesday, and Mike decided to drive by Liam’s old apartment, the one he had lived in in university. Mike had fond memories of hanging out there with Liam after class, watching Laguna Beach, listening to Liam’s Avril Lavigne CD on repeat, getting high. But the building was gone, as was the coffee shop they used to go to. There was nothing tangible with which to anchor his memories of Liam. It was almost as if Liam had never existed; it was as if Liam was someone he had made up in a dream.

Sometimes when Mike and Liz were home alone, sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, he would want to tell her about Liam. He would put down his cup and try to think of where to start: at the beginning, when he first saw him walk across the hall, or at the end, when he got the text message at the cottage? Would he tell her everything, or leave the most important parts of the story blank, like notes left unplayed in a jazz tune? Would he explain to her that there was an entire half of his self that he had never told her about because everyone had convinced him that it was irrelevant once he started seeing her? 

He worried that revealing too many secrets too quickly would cause Liz to recoil and pull away. He didn’t want to lose one more person in his life. He would prefer to hold Liam’s memory in a closed box than risk alienating Liz.

At the office it was different: he mentioned Liam to coworkers, talking about him as if he were a character in a movie he had seen or in a book he had once read. He talked about Liam with detachment, without mentioning the affection he had felt for him. After work he would sit in his car and think about how he should have told Liam how he felt instead of living a life of deceit. He thought about how it was wrong to think it was fine to pine in secret because it was better to have Liam as a friend than not have him at all.

Risk wasn’t something Mike liked. He preferred to be safe, make sure he didn’t get hurt, make sure no one abandoned him.

And yet Liam had abandoned him.

Mike wished Liam had had a long ailment that would have allowed him to sit by his bed and confess his feelings. He wished the end hadn’t been so sudden. He wished he had had more time. He wished he could go back and say all the things he had left unsaid. 

He wished he would have taken the risk.

He tried to move on and stop thinking about it, but things kept getting in the way.

The company made everyone put security software on their phones. The software wasn’t meant to cause problems, but it did. Phones were locked; apps were deleted; and one day Spotify stopped working.

Mike liked to listen to music on his runs. He knew he shouldn’t. He could hear his parents and teachers admonishing him for listening to his walkman on his walk to school. He didn’t care. The park with the running path was only one block from his house and it was unlikely a car would rush up from behind him and run him over. The music kept Mike’s thoughts from wandering back to his run three years earlier. He needed music to run away and escape.

He went to his basement and pulled out an old box of electronics. In it was his old iPod Mini. He connected an old a pair of wired earphones to it to see if it still worked. It did. I Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Kylie Minogue started to play. Mike laughed. It would do.

The next day he went on his run with his iPod. Naughty Girl by Beyoncé started him off. He smiled to himself. The next song was Why Can’t I? by Liz Phair and he felt a panic attack come on. The song had always made him think of Liam. He skipped to the next song. It was I’m With You by Avril Lavigne. The panic got worse. He skipped two, three songs. Come Clean by Hilary Duff started to play. 

Mike couldn’t go on. He stopped and leaned against a tree. He wanted to stop the music, but he listened through it instead. He let the memory of watching Laguna Beach in Liam’s apartment come back to him. Tears welled in his eyes. He put his head against the tree and let out a quiet sob. The song ended. Love At First Sight by Kylie Minogue started up. Mike wiped his eyes, took the earphones out of his ears, and walked home.

The next day he put the iPod back into the box and told Liz that the music was reminding him of studying for exams. She offered to help him update the music, but Mike declined, saying that it was up to the office to settle their issues with their security software.

Eventually Mike uninstalled the security software and got Spotify working again. It had been a relief to go back to running with music and to stop thinking about Liam.

Mike wondered if this was what hauntings really were: unresolved grief.

A coffee shop opened up near the office. It looked nice. It was painted in warm colours and there was art on the walls. When the door opened, interesting music and the smell of coffee would drift out from it. It was the kind of place Liam would have loved. 

Brad always wanted to go to there after lunch. He said that the coffee in the office was terrible and he was sick of drinking it. Mike agreed, but he couldn’t bring himself to go in. He made up excuses, said the shop looked pretentious, that the art on its walls was bourgeois, that at least the coffee at the office was free. Brad would roll his eyes and let it go, and they would have the bad coffee in their bad office. 

The lies and excuses became second nature to Mike. He no longer felt like himself. He was always pretending. Pretending he didn’t like the coffee shop. Pretending he wasn’t in pain. Pretending he had never known a man named Liam. 

He couldn’t do anything but pretend.

At home he needed to be a husband to Liz and a father to his kids. At work he needed to be a loyal employee. On Wednesdays he needed to be a congenial colleague to his coworkers. On his commutes he needed to be a driver concentrating on not getting into an accident. 

Only on his runs was he himself, and even then he tried not to be. He kept the music on high, concentrated on the feeling of the wind on his body and his feet on the ground. His emotional pain was masked by the pain in his body. He hid an entire side of himself in his pain.

He tried to think of how he would go on living this way. He hoped that one day the pain would ease or evaporate and he would be free of it. Until then he had to learn to endure it.

One Friday afternoon Brad called him out of the blue. It was the week after he and Brad had had lunch with Carl and discussed keeping in touch if they were ever let go. So many people were being let go. Mike answered the call expecting bad news. But the news was worse than he thought. 

Brad, his voice cracking, told him he was in love with Carl.

Mike tried to process what he was hearing. It barely made sense. He knew Brad and Carl were friends, but they had barely even spoken over lunch. He didn’t even know Brad was gay! He asked Brad if Carl was gay, and Brad said he didn’t know.

Mike listened as Brad told him all the ways that he cared for Carl and how he wanted to confess his feelings but didn’t know how Carl would take it. Mike wanted to be supportive, but he told him that Carl was most likely straight. That he was always going to the coffee shop and talking to the barista. He was on a first-name basis with her. Mike explained that it would most likely end badly and that it wasn’t a risk Brad should want to take.

That was when Brad started to cry. He said he would never be able to live with himself if he never told Carl how he felt. He said that there was no way he could live without knowing if Carl felt the same way about him.

That was when Mike started to cry, too. He didn’t tell Brad why he was crying. Brad assumed he was crying out of sympathy. Mike composed himself and agreed to talk to Carl on Brad’s behalf.

The next week Mike came up with a reason to go in on Monday when Carl was in. He arranged for them to have supper together, then avoided Carl for the entire day. 

It was rainy and miserable. Mike left work early and stood outside the office doors watching the rain fall. He looked at the umbrella he had brought with him. It was the cute one with the cartoon raindrops Liz said suited his personality. He kept it closed as he walked to the car.

He got to the restaurant early. He sat in his car alone then sat in the restaurant alone.

Carl arrived and Mike said nothing about Brad. He made small talk. He talked about the food. He would let Brad talk to Carl. He would let Brad make his own mistake.

But Carl was a sharp guy and he knew Mike had wanted to talk to him about something. It would have been easy for Mike to lie, to say that he heard a rumour that Carl’s team was going to be eliminated. Maybe then Carl would leave the company and Brad’s problem would be solved.

But he told Carl the truth.

He watched as Carl’s face changed. He braced himself to have to placate Carl, let him know that no one thought he was gay and that they would never mention this again. Breaking the news to Brad would be hard and he would have to avoid Carl from now on, but maybe this had been for the best. It would have played out the same way had he told Liam how he felt. 

Then Carl said that he felt the same way about Brad.

For a moment, Mike’s world was shattered. The regret of never telling Liam how he felt returned to him. He started to cry.

After the meal, Mike sat in his car and listened to the rain pour down over it. He was ashamed of himself for breaking down in front of Carl. He was tired of living with his grief. He thought about crashing the car into a wall on his way home. It would look like an accident because of the rain. But he couldn’t do that to Liz and the kids.

He didn’t go into the office on the Wednesday but he talked to Brad. He asked him if he had spoken to Carl. Brad said he hadn’t. Mike could hear the pain in Brad’s voice. It was a relief to know that the outcome he predicted had come true and that there would have been no hope for him and Liam. He had made the right decision. He finally felt closure.

The kids were sick the next week, and Mike had to stay home with them so Liz could go in for a meeting. For the first time in three years he felt whole again. He was a father and a husband with no regrets.

Once the kids were better, he got sick. Liz took care of him and he was grateful to have her there. He didn’t feel the need to tell her anything. There wasn’t any reason to tell her anything.

The next Monday he got a text from Brad. It said that he hoped Mike was OK. He said that he and Carl had talked and would be spending more time together. He said he was grateful to Mike for having done this for him because otherwise he and Carl would have both been miserable.

Mike sent back a smiley face emoji.

The next week he went into the office on Friday instead of Wednesday. The week after he went in on Thursday. The week after that he went in on Tuesday. He went in on any day besides Monday and Wednesday.

Carl and Brad both sent him messages asking if he was OK, and he told them that he was, but that he had meetings on other days of the week and was changing his schedule.

Months passed. He never saw Brad or Carl anymore and they both stopped sending him messages. He heard that everyone on Carl’s team had been let go, but as far as he knew Brad was still employed with the company, existing within its walls on days when he wasn’t around. He didn’t know if Brad and Carl were together and he didn’t want to know. Merely thinking about their happiness made him miserable. 

Eventually it was June again. It was coming up on the anniversary of getting the news about Liam. Mike concentrated on packing for the cottage and wrapping things up at work. It kept his mind off the memory.

On the Friday before leaving for the cottage, the coffee machine in the office broke and Mike had no choice but to go to the coffee shop across the street.

The barista was wiping the counter when he walked in. There was no one else there. It looked like everyone had just left: there were empty dishes and cups on the tables, and the chairs were all pushed out.

He walked up to the counter, ignoring the art, and ordered a drip coffee to go. 

“I’m afraid you’ll need to wait for that,” the barista said, smiling. “I just had a rush of people and I’m all out of coffee and here we are.”

“Should I order something else?” Mike asked.

“If you prefer. But I can make a fresh pot that way I won’t have to make another when someone else walks in. You can walk around and look at the art while you wait. It shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

Mike thanked the barista. He went to the windows and looked out at the street. There were fewer people than usual outside. He didn’t understand how there could have been a rush.

“Your coffee’s ready,” the barista called from the counter. 

“One of my former coworkers used to come here,” Mike said, taking his coffee. “Carl. Do you know him?”

The barista’s face lit up. “Of course I know Carl! He and his partner are regulars at our Saturday art classes!” She pointed to the QR code on the counter. “You can sign up for classes, too, if you want.”

“It’s OK,” Mike said. 

He thanked the barista for the coffee and turned to leave.

A painting on the wall caught his eye. It was of a breakfast table set for two, but one of the place settings hadn’t been painted it. The cup, glass, and bowl were blank. 

Mike moved closer to the painting. 

He thought that maybe the artist had painted those items white, but they hadn’t: it was bare canvass, as if the items had been removed from the painting, ripped out or cut out. They had been somehow forcefully removed and all that was left was this bare emptiness where something had once been.

The barista had come up next to him. She was saying something but he couldn’t hear her. He felt a tightness in his chest, an inability to breathe or talk. His hands shook. He was sweating.

The barista took his coffee and guided him to a seat. She put his coffee in front of him, then a glass of water. He tried to drink the water, but his hands were still shaking and he couldn’t swallow.

He watched as the barista turned off the lights, closed the blinds, and turned the sign on the door to “closed”.

She walked back towards him. “Stay as long as you want,” she said. “I’ll be in the back. Call if you need anything.”

She turned off the music.

Mike was alone in the dark coffee shop. Outside it was loud and busy. He could see people and cars passing by. But inside it was still and quiet.

He looked at the coffee and water in front of him, then at the empty seat across from him.