Jennifer McGuire

Toothpaste on the Mirror

Nobody tells you how many times your kids die. Maybe not every year but at least every three. More when they’re little. This is what kicks me in the stomach in the washroom this morning.

I’m standing in front of a sink with zero beard hairs clinging to the chipped silver drain. My toothbrush holder has one that’s mine only and two that have gone mouldy from being forgotten. This can happen to toothbrushes and also people, but I’m not going down that dark lane just yet.

It’s tough enough to stand here and look at my oval mirror and see there are no toothpaste spit dots along the bottom. The hand towel I hung yesterday in the ring beside the sink is still there, the towels folded neatly in threes instead of crumpled on the floor or — and this is what I always find worse — hanging weird. Boys don’t know how to hang towels. I think this is from their Neanderthal days when they didn’t have towels but only grass or plain outside air to dry themselves. Every time Nathan had a shower I’d go in after him and sigh loud enough for him to feel it and take his extra damp towel off the shower hook where he tried to hang it by balling it up and jamming it in place. I hung it over the shower curtain rod every time, thinking maybe this time he’d get it.

Now my towels are all hung neat. The window is two-thirds open so there’s a breeze for when I’m in the tub. When they were little, I’d take a long bath at night with that window open and candles and wine and Billie Holiday singing “He’s Funny That Way” in my ear as though I was a pretty big deal. Then I’d hang around waiting to tell someone about my night because it felt like a sexy vignette I should share.

In my bathtub there are still signs of the boys who are gone. Axe body wash that’s empty enough to leave behind but not full enough to ever use. This is the same with every peanut butter jar, ketchup bottle, jam jar.

I wish I didn’t need to tell you about this because it’s the most boring cliché, until it’s your everyday life then, oh brother, is it irritating. Almost as irritating as the smell of Axe mingled with teen-boy sweat that gets in your clothes no matter how many times you wash them. Maybe Axe is the smell of our life together.

My four sons and I have lived in many houses during our sixteen years alone. All rented and all a little nicer than we could afford. Now when we talk about the early years, we identify our houses by address and smell.

The first place we lived in when we left my husband, armed with toys but no washer or dryer or enough beds, was on 9th Avenue in my hometown. This place smelled like diapers and Aveeno oatmeal bath treatment from that time they all got chicken pox together. Also, cookies. All our houses smelled like chocolate chip cookies on account of me needing to apologize to them through batter so often. The next house was haunted for sure and smelled like dust and mouse shit. That was my darkest year. After that we found the little place on 3rd Avenue that was supposed to be someone’s part-time cottage but became our full time home. It smelled like scented candles in a revolving menu of pumpkin spice for fall, cinnamon apple for winter, and mango and tart raspberry for summer. Also Toy Story 2 bubble bath, crock-pot chili and, finally, laundry soap. Finally, we could do laundry in a house of our own.

Axe was the smell of our 7th Avenue East house, the one with the good upstairs and the good downstairs. The only place where everyone had their own bedroom — do the math — that means a five-bedroom house. If I were going to add a photo to this book, it would be a crayon map of that house. Nathan liked to draw it when we lived there; it was bigger than anything to him. It was all windows and had two fireplaces but also green carpet —

because it was just a rental and no one was giving us good hardwood floors, obviously.

Ben was in his young teens when we lived on 7th Avenue East and he really liked the ladies. He was hoping the Axe body spray would get them to like him back. He played football that year, learned the drums and the guitar. Plus, Ben was becoming big

man handsome instead of young-man pretty in those days, so things were looking up. I wasn’t sure if the Axe helped but I can tell you, our towels and dish cloths and sheets and even my bras that were washed with Ben’s clothes had that spicy testosterone Axe smell in them for years after.

Ben is now a grown man with his own apartment and a girlfriend (no more Axe!). The same with his older brother, Callum, living in Toronto in a basement apartment with twinkle lights and potted succulents and a girlfriend of his own who wears red lipstick and plays the ukulele. Ditto Jack, working in an office with benefits and business-casual khakis like he’s forty because he always forgets he’s just twenty and so does everyone else but me. I’ll always remember his age for him. Nathan is in his first semester at university to become a history teacher. This will be a good job for him. I already know this. He’s taught me more about history than any teacher ever with his excellent blend of knowledge plus passion plus relating everything to movies I’ve seen.

I figure this Axe bottle is from Nathan. He never really smelled like Axe or anything other than Nathan when he was still here sleeping down the hall, but I think he was just more subtle than his brother. I wonder if I should keep it for him when he comes home. I wonder when he’s coming home. I wonder if he still thinks of this last rental like it is his home. The stone house in the country that smells only like me and my containers of salad with more blue cheese than lettuce. It doesn’t feel like my home. Even though the pear picture is hanging in the kitchen right now. The pear picture is supposed to be the sign that we’re home. It’s just a generic print I bought for thirty dollars when I was first on my own with the boys, but it’s become our hallmark for knowing we are home. Every time we had to move out of a house we couldn’t afford and left our smells behind, and sure, a garbage bag or two, the pear picture came with us.

After we were told to move out of the darkest house by our darkest landlords, Callum (who was about twelve) caught me sitting in my room sobbing. It wasn’t hard, I was pretty loud. He came in to ask me what was wrong because that kid was never an asshole at all, and I said I was sorry with words and not cookies. I was so sorry that we were moving again. So sorry that I never got anything right. Sorry that he’d just finished hanging his posters in his room and now they would come down and he’d have to start all over again. He said this to me — I remember every word — “It’s okay. We know you’ll find us a good place. You always do. Wherever the pear picture hangs is our home.” Which had always been true until now. It turns out I’m homeless without my boys. The pear picture is just a print I don’t want to look at anymore. I am rootless. All those years when I was looking for the love of my life, guess what? They are the loves of my life and now they’re gone and I’m left standing in this clean washroom clutching an Axe body wash bottle staring at my face that’s blank as anything. I might have raised them up good but I forgot to raise me up too.

I think of all the versions of them who have died before this final death. Of five-year-old Callum wearing that red polar-fleece vest and navy t-shirt and khaki pants every day. Of him coming home from school to see baby Jack, soft and pink and sweet, and loving him so much he cried. Saying to me, “Why does he always want you? Doesn’t he know I’m his brother?” This is a Callum I’ll never see again. He is dead forever.

So is six-year-old Ben. Wearing his Hawaiian shirt over a t-shirt to school for the lip-sync battle he won effortlessly with his rendition of “All Star” by Smash Mouth. Where he whipped off that shirt and threw it into the screaming crowd of grade-school children for effect. He signed autographs late into recess and said to a furious Callum, “Don’t worry, you have talents too but they just don’t show like mine.”

This Ben is gone for good.

So is four-year-old Jack. Wearing a tie and a Ben 10 watch to his first day of preschool and carrying his backpack like a briefcase. So confident and brave until nighttime when he needed to sleep beside me with the little light on.

Nathan at three. Asking a cashier at Walmart if maybe she’s a hundred and pointedly coughing if someone smoked a cigarette near him and waking me up every morning with a hand on my face to tell me I’m beautiful. I’ll never see him again no matter what. It’s all over forever and this final death of the people they were has turned out to be the death of us as a group, and this is the thing that takes away all my breath.

I don’t know when I decided to run away to Europe like a real tacky jerk. Maybe I decided that twenty-five years ago, when I was a young mom of twenty-one, huddled in some apartment with my first baby boy, Callum, and a side order of disappointing partner. Even then I knew deep down it was never going to be a clear road for me. I knew I’d need an endgame. I don’t know exactly when the idea of Europe became a physical thing, when I stopped scrolling through towns in Italy and France and Ireland like it was a TV show I was half watching and became the director of instead. I booked a flight and carried around a screenshot of my Airbnb in Italy on my phone to show people, like it was a baby photo anyone cared about. I booked flights for all the boys to visit too, even though I’m pretty sure they just wanted to start being their own people instead of just a piece of the pizza that was always us.

I’m packing up the pear picture. I’m hoping my friends throw me a party. I’m even leaving a good man behind to wait for me in the log cabin he built with his hands. Or not wait for me. I don’t

6 Nest

know.

All I know is I can’t stay here without them. Maybe I can’t be anywhere without them.

A Wife and Three Childs

There are more discount stores in Italy than I thought because maybe I thought there would be zero. Maybe all my knowledge is from two movies (Under the Tuscan Sun and Roman Holiday) and one HBO series (Rome). Not once did I ever think of Italian people needing to buy plastic cutlery or a six-pack of Bic pens, and this is my first disappointment as I’m driven alone in the back of a ten

person shuttle bus from Leonardo da Vinci Airport to Tivoli, where I’ll live for January and February.

Along the highway there are discount stores and gas stations and big-block apartment buildings that look like all apartment buildings beside highways. I could be in Mississauga for all I know. It’s dark but for all the discount stores and casino lights, maybe around 10:00 p.m., but I can’t be sure, I’m so tired. The kind of tired where I could just sleep in this shuttle with a stranger driving in a foreign country, and I do. It’s been more than twenty-four hours since I left the kids back at the airport — three sons and two girlfriends and Starbucks coffee cups in our hands as one girlfriend snapped a photo of our family. Almost our whole family — because our baby Nathan was back at school and we said our goodbyes that morning. I left him with clean laundry and a little bit of money that probably wasn’t enough. I could feel it in my ribcage how it probably wasn’t enough. I could feel all the ways he’d be trying to budget for the week until I was paid again: the noodles he’d eat, the socks that would need to be replaced, but he isn’t at the age where he thinks socks need to be replaced. I hugged him when I left, a panicked hug. My fingers were claws and it was the kind of hug where we both tried not to cry and we clung a little. We both felt scared for ourselves and maybe a little bit for each other. We broke apart and he said, “That was awkward,” and everything should have felt better but, of course, it didn’t. I was still leaving.

I just couldn’t remember why.

At the airport it was the same. Ben and his girlfriend, Jess, had asked to borrow my car. I reluctantly agreed but noticed on the snowy ride to the airport that the tires felt weird and it was making a clunky sound that felt like about $600. I told him and he said, “It’s fine. We’ll figure it out,” but Jess looked worried. She didn’t want to figure it out, she wanted to feel safe. Outside Lester B. Pearson, a January storm was settling in at 10:00 p.m., thick and furious. Ben was going to use my car to drive everyone home after I left, and when I said goodbye at the gate, all I could think was, If something happens, I won’t even know for at least twelve hours. Then, If something happens, I won’t be able to come home right away. And finally, If something happens, it’s going to be my fault.

On the plane I stared out the window at the wet snow coming down sideways and freezing so fast that we had to wait on the tarmac so the wings could be de-iced. Most of my children were driving in my car with my twenty-two-year-old son who maybe thinks he knows more about driving than he really does. He doesn’t have snow tires on that car. This was the thing that went around in my head until I landed in Lisbon for my four-hour layover and could finally access Wi-Fi again. The thumbs-up sign from Ben didn’t fill me with any kind of relief. Instead, I just thought, Four months to go.

When I booked my flight to Italy, I booked the cheapest one possible and didn’t realize it would take over eighteen hours of travel to get from Toronto to Rome. More than that because my flight from Lisbon to Rome was delayed. I didn’t think about how I’d get myself from Rome to Tivoli because, when I was scrolling through potential Airbnb listings at home in Canada, Italy felt about the size of my thumbnail. I assumed trains would run from my front door to the trattoria of my choosing. I assumed there would be express trains from the airport directly to Tivoli, and I’d meander down a street or two to my lovely new studio with my luggage clicking on the cobblestone behind me.

I don’t know why I thought this, especially since I lived in a tiny village called Echandens (just outside Lausanne in Switzerland) for a year when I was nineteen. For a year I lived by train schedules and then my thumb and then rides from friends who were impossibly international. That year in Echandens was probably the reason I decided I needed to go to Europe when my sons were grown.

When I graduated from high school, I found out that I couldn’t head off to university because I was too poor, so I went to Europe instead. I was an au pair with my best friend, Gina, and we took off for Switzerland. At first, I hated it and then I never wanted to come home. This is the thing you should know about my life there. I became me when I was there — a me that wasn’t already picked out by my mom or my aunts or my grandparents or my friends. I was exactly no one in Lausanne and this suited me down to the ground.

I came home and got pregnant straight away by a boy I didn’t love, and the person I was in Switzerland became this new person called Mom. Then Mom and Mom and Mom again. Always more Mom than anything else. This is why I figured I’d head on back to Europe. It was the place where I figured out how to become me before, and now I’m here hoping I’ll figure it out again.

Only this time, I see casinos and gas stations on my first night, alongside dollar stores, and I wonder why I left people who need me for this place. I’m tired and I’ve been wearing the same socks for so long I don’t know if they’ll ever smell like regular socks again. I’m older than I was, older than I’ve ever been. I realize it suddenly, like it’s something that has only happened to me.