This One
Because of
the Dead
This One
Because of
the Dead
stories by
Laure Baudot
Copyright © 2019 Laure Baudot
This edition copyright © 2019 Cormorant Books Inc.
This is a first edition.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through Ontario Creates, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Baudot, Laure
[Short stories. Selections]
This one because of the dead / Laure Baudot.
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77086-514-3 (softcover).— ISBN 978-1-77086-515-0 (html)
I. Title.
PS8603.A897A6 2019 C813’.6 C2018-900024-4
C2018-900025-2
Cover photo and design: angeljohnguerra.com
Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, tannicegdesigns.ca
Printer: Friesens
Printed and bound in Canada.
Cormorant Books Inc.
260 Spadina Avenue, Suite 502, Toronto, ON M5T 2E4
www.cormorantbooks.com
To Leeor — muse, companion, adventurer —
and to our intrepid children:
Rachel, Nathan, and Simon. With love.
Table of Contents
This One Because of the Dead
Siblings
Starting Somewhere
Stage Presence
Restaurants With My Daughter
Salary Man
In the Afternoon
Luck
Inheritance
Angels Landing
The Bread Maker
On the Train to Antibes
Acknowledgements
Landmarks
Cover
Title Page
Frontmatter
Start of Content
Table of Contents
Backmatter
PageList
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8
Page 9
Page 10
Page 11
Page 12
Page 13
Page 14
Page 15
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This One Because of the Dead
On the night before Akash leaves for Everest, Julie cooks for him a dish his grandmother has taught her. He gobbles the cubed pumpkin and wilted greens. “Delicious, Jules.”
Normally this statement would thrill her. She’s innovated on Punjabi cooking, jokes that she makes “Nouveau Indian.” But tonight she’s getting that familiar feeling, that stiffness in her jaw. Their conversations accumulate, each one a domino falling against the next, pieces piled up at the base of her skull.
“Don’t start,” he says.
He’s right not to go into it. Acknowledging her anxiety will weaken both of them. Like when she first went up en pointe in ballet: she pictured herself falling, and then she did.
Six months ago, against her better judgment, she’d asked if she could come to base camp.
“Terrible idea,” he’d said.
As she’d expected.
Increasingly over the past year, she’d been asking the thing she shouldn’t. The thing he didn’t want her to. The thing she had to admit to herself she knew better than to bring up. She could hear the irritation in his voice when he perceived her as trying to hold him back.
Akash’s voice softens. “It’s all good, Jules.”
He leaves his empty plate on the table and crosses the hall into their home office. The office chair’s wheels whirr against the hardwood floor. He’s browsing at the computer, looking not only at mountaineering pages with details of Everest’s southern route, but also at financial sites with the earnings of the companies he invests in to fund his expeditions.
From this moment on he will be increasingly quiet. She will become most aware of his silence around ten p.m., which is when he will go to bed. Tomorrow morning, just before leaving, he’ll joke with her, sounding like his usual self: relaxed, but with an undercurrent of watchfulness.
She is left in the dining room with the scent of old oil, onions, and cumin. Across the hall the computer mouse clicks like a metronome losing time.
He caught her attention the first time she saw him, five years before. She was filled with anticipation, a sense that here was someone different from the men she sometimes dated. They were working at a satellite call centre and Akash was a team leader, liked by everyone. He wore thin, wool sports shirts that showed off the definition of his upper back. Julie sat in a cubicle behind him and to his left, a position from which she could see the bristles of his crew cut above his tan nape. She learned later that, although he had been brought up Sikh, he was not religious and had cut his hair in his late teens.
A co-worker saw her watching, and said, “He does this crazy-assed mountain stuff.”
Julie insinuated herself into his life. She made sure she sat beside him at pub nights, and joined him and his climbing friends for after-gym beers. She told him that she’d always been fascinated by rock climbing, and was elated by their bantering: instead of the vocabulary of single, downtown urbanites — “condo,” “storage,” “paycheque,” — she heard the diction of climbing — “pitch,” “belay,” “boulder.” She didn’t understand a word of what they said, but she loved being on the cusp of learning a whole new language. Julie also realized that she had not witnessed people so immersed in their field of expertise since her dancing days.
After he refused to meet her on a Sunday for the third time in a row, she remembered he had told her before they were dating that on Sundays he had dinner with his family. When he finally invited her home for family dinner, she felt as if she had won the lottery. Her parents’ idea of together-ness was going out to Morton’s steakhouse once a month. In Akash’s huge family, in the enormous sit-down dinners where family members bantered and cheered each other on, she saw another example of how a family could be.
One day, after they had been dating for a year, she was felled by a cold. She didn’t want him to see her sick, but he came into her apartment as if he assumed she wouldn’t refuse him, and seemed to ignore her unbrushed hair and a nose that was red and peeling from too much blowing.
He brought her grocery store chicken soup. She was pleased, but puzzled. “What do you get for yourself when you’re sick?”
Akash disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later, he returned with a mug of hot, thick milk. A drink he had been given as a child, it was supposed to soothe a sore throat. He took it to her in bed, on a tray, with paper towels he had folded into triangles. It left a pasty, sweet aftertaste on her tongue that was not unpleasant.
For the next two days, he brought her movies and magazines and made sure she was comfortable. She, who had witnessed the competitiveness of the ballet world, now saw evidence that even someone as pre-occupied with himself as Akash could, at times, be quite aware of others. He could be both ambitious and a good person.
As soon as Akash stops browsing online, he feels the tautness of his limbs. He wants to be on the mountain already. Peaks, unlike loved ones, are easy. Starting a climb is always difficult, but as he gradually gives himself up to it, everything else in his life is eliminated. Sometimes he feels as if he and a mountain are playing a chess game. The mountain is a great but generous opponent — it always lets Akash win.
The days leading up to an expedition are terrible. Exercising would help, but tonight he can’t, for fear of overexertion. He goes to the living room, where an enormous rucksack and a small knapsack sit on the carpet. Save for a mattress and jumar, which he’ll buy in Kathmandu, he’s taking all his equipment. He has created layers: the sharp items (including crampons and an ice pick, its tip covered by a guard) at the bottom of each bag, followed by footwear, bottles, carabiners, ropes, harnesses, helmet, and freeze-dried snacks. Rolled-up clothes in every crevice. No need to unpack to check if he has everything; he used a packing list on his cellphone, created years ago and updated for each expedition. He runs his index finger along each bag, listens to the rustle of the nail as it drags along the nylon.
Akash was neither solitary nor social, but could adapt to circumstances. He felt himself apart from his co-workers because of his hobby. He was always friendly, but had learned long before not to go in depth about climbing; he found most people were either frightened or almost morbidly interested, asking him about accidents on the mountains. As for Julie, her curiosity seemed more genuine than what he was used to encountering; in time he answered her questions about mountaineering with increasingly detailed answers, and she responded eagerly.
The first time Akash really talked to Julie, it was at a pub night organized by their co-workers. In order to accommodate his then-training schedule, he arrived early so he could leave early enough to get to bed on time. He sat at one of the wood-panelled booths and thought he was there before everyone else, until Julie shimmied in beside him.
He had noticed Julie before because she seemed to hold herself apart, didn’t join in the office gossip. Her long hair reminded him of the heavy
gold necklaces his grandmother wore. When she leaned over to study the menu, her hair wafted patchouli, familiar and comforting. It was only later that he wondered if she had come early in order to look for him.
In the course of conversation, he told her he went home every weekend, for dinner with his parents and grandmother. At first, she seemed not to believe him. Then, she was astonished. “That’s so nice.”
He asked her where her parents lived and she waved vaguely in the direction of downtown. “They have their own lives.”
He swigged his beer. “To tell the truth, I wish mine wouldn’t expect so much.”
Akash found that he enjoyed being with her; she was a change of pace. After three months, he took her home for Sunday dinner and introduced her to his family. They, having been afraid that he would never find a girlfriend, took Julie in like a daughter. They would have preferred a wife, but counted their blessings.
One Sunday, he came to his parents’ home to find Julie already in the kitchen, cooking with his grandmother. Her hair was in a ponytail, a wisp sticking out from her forehead. She looked happy.
“Your grandmother is teaching me curries from scratch.”
His grandmother, a tiny woman with a gold nose ring, said, “We are learning.”
The kitchen steamed, the pots bubbled with ghee and spices. In her bare feet and apron, Julie seemed to fit right in. The discomfort in Akash’s gut was replaced with a feeling of pleasure, and when his grandmother and his girlfriend turned back to the stove, he thought, My women.
A few weeks into Julie and Akash’s relationship, Akash’s climbing partner Singleton, who lived in Calgary, came to visit. He was of Irish stock, with fish-belly-white skin, marble-blue eyes, and a lined forehead, and he talked to Akash as though Julie were not there. “You’ve got to come out, man. I could set you up with the business. You could make a little money, take time off to climb.”
The swiftness of Julie’s rage surprised her. Until then she had felt as if she alone understood Akash, but she saw that she had been mistaken, that there was a whole other rela-tionship in his life. Her throat closed.
Akash nodded. “Work offered me a position. Opportunity to open a new office.”
“You should get with that.”
Julie stared. “When was this?”
Akash’s head swivelled toward her. “I’m not going.”
“Do it!” said Singleton.
Akash took a few gulps of beer. “My mother would kill me.”
Singleton peered at Julie for what seemed to be the first time. “You factor into this too, don’t you?” He seemed both resigned and bemused. Akash smiled and reddened, and Julie’s jaw relaxed.