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The People Who Love Her
Under Sephie’s arms there are red marks where the tops of the crutches have rubbed against her armpit skin. She’ll get used to them, the nurse at the hospital told me last night but maybe at first she’ll get a bit of a rash. Tell her to use some lotion and wear long-sleeved shirts. But it is summer and Sephie only wants to wear tank tops; she is stubborn like that. Plus she has really nice shoulders, all soft and freckly and covered in fine, silky hair. Sometimes I am surprised at how easily things break. We are going to Cosy’s for breakfast because I have no food in my apartment and even if I did it would be too hot to cook. Last night Sephie slept in my bed and I slept on the couch, which is not really a couch but a loveseat and so this morning my legs are cramped up and tired, as if I spent the entire night crouching in a corner. I was supposed to prop Sephie’s leg up on pillows before she went to sleep but I don’t have many pillows so I ended up propping her leg up on a stack of magazines. Now my bed smells like plaster and perfume. At Cosy’s Sephie bumps into an old man sitting at the counter when she is trying to squeeze between the tables. She is not very good at maneuvering her crutches yet or maybe she is still a bit drunk. The old man glares at her, but secretly I think he is happy that someone has touched him, that he is sitting on that stool with his butt pushed way out just so someone will. Sephie once lived in London with a man named Jonah who loved her more than anyone has ever loved anyone. They lived together in a small, cold apartment with rats and did a lot of drugs and Jonah painted pictures of Sephie – Sephie sleeping, Sephie eating, Sephie lighting candles, Sephie in the bathtub – hundreds of pictures on huge canvases at first, then on loose-leaf when he had no money left to buy canvases, cheap copy paper, napkins. Sephie never left the apartment and Jonah only went out to buy bread and soup. Jonah loved Sephie so much that he would cry the whole time he was apart from her and when he came back his tears would be frozen to his face, tiny icicles dangling from his eyelashes. The last portrait of her he painted in his own blood on the classified section of the newspaper, pictures of sad-faced real estate agents peeking out from the dried-brown flakes of her eyes. By then they had only four slices of bread left and one can of chicken noodle soup. Sephie let Jonah eat the bread and they shared the soup, sitting and staring at each other until their last candle was burnt out. Jonah was beautiful, Sephie said; he had kind eyes and pale parchment skin that cracked in the London winter. When the candle had burnt out Sephie came home. She still had a five-pound note sewn into the lining of her backpack and a return ticket to Halifax. She said she waited until it was dark because she wanted Jonah to remember her sitting there in the apartment, her face lit by candlelight; she didn’t want him to think of her leaving him. She said she wanted to stay burned on the back of his eyelids. Sephie could be dramatic like that. When I asked her if she was happy in London with Jonah she told me that when someone loved you that much it was impossible to be happy. |
