Watching You Without Me: A novel

by Lynn Coady Narrated by Helen King

Overview

LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE!

From the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning story collection Hellgoing--an electrifying, brooding novel about the lengths we go to care for family, and what happens when a stranger places himself at the center of one household.

"Watching You Without Me is like a Lorrie Moore book suffering a Patricia Highsmith fever dream. You slide right along on Coady's witty and endearing style, and meanwhile the trap has closed over you without your ever standing a chance." --Jonathan Lethem

After her mother's sudden death, Karen finds herself back in her childhood home in Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade, acting as full-time caregiver to her older sister, Kelli. Overwhelmed and consumed by the isolation of her new role, Karen finds a shoulder to cry on in Trevor--one of Kelli's caregivers. Karen gratefully accepts his friendship and comes to trust him all the more when she discovers how close Trevor was to her mother, Irene. But all is not as it appears to be. What begins with friendly advice and someone to talk to soon takes a dark and mysterious turn. Who is this person Karen has let into her home and into her family's life? How well does she know the stranger she has entrusted with her sister's well-being? As Trevor slowly weaves himself into Karen and Kelli's lives, Karen starts to grasp the unsettling truth about him and his relationship with her mother--and to experience for herself the true and dangerous nature of Trevor's "care."

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Thank God for Lynn Coady’s singular voice and deliciously skewed worldview. Every book of hers is an occasion to celebrate!”
—Miriam Toews, author of Women Talking

“Expertly rendered characters, easy reading plot, and excellent pacing . . . With Watching You Without Me, Coady showcases just how smooth her writing is . . . We’ve come to expect a certain level of excellence from Lynn Coady. Watching You Without Me lives up to this expectation.”
—Dory Cerny, Quill and Quire
 
“Watching You Without Me is both a suspenseful, deeply creepy page-turner and a beautifully subtle character study of a grieving woman slowly unravelling while trying to understand how to care for her sister, and herself, in an ableist world. Another masterpiece from the singular Lynn Coady.”
—Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

“Emotionally complex, with the twists of a chilling thriller, Coady's novel explores mother-daughter and male-female relationships, what it means to be a family, the rewards of selflessness versus selfishness, and the human need not to be alone.” 
—Mary Ellen Prindiville, Booklist

“Coady’s unsettling tale of a clingy family caregiver explores a woman’s grief over the death of her mother and her struggle to take care of her intellectually disabled sister . . . Coady impresses with her careful, humane characterization . . . [Watching You Without Me] stands out for its incisive, bleakly humorous look at gullibility and the complexities of guilt.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A woman returns to her childhood home to settle her late mother's affairs . . . A thoughtful and intense drama about how insidiously family ties can be exploited."
—Kirkus

Kirkus Reviews

2020-04-13
A woman returns to her childhood home to settle her late mother’s affairs. A household aide is suspiciously eager to assist.

Karen, the narrator of Coady’s sixth novel, has returned from Toronto to her childhood home in Nova Scotia after her mother’s death. In addition to arranging to sell the house, Karen needs to find a place for her developmentally disabled sister, Kelli, and she feels lucky to have a plan already in place: A decent facility has a room ready, and a home aide, Trevor, has been showing up regularly to take Kelli on walks. Kelli and Trevor seem to have a great rapport, but practically from the start Trevor’s demeanor seems manipulative and vaguely threatening: He's overly familiar around the house, making nonregular visits using his key while steering Karen away from sensible decisions regarding Kelli’s care. And Kelli herself soon suffers spells of illness that are hard to explain. That Karen is being gaslit is never in doubt; the novel’s drama comes from Coady’s sensitivity to how Karen, a savvy woman, could be manipulated by a man who isn’t especially bright but knows her emotional weak spots. Coady has a talent for inventing creeps: Her novel The Antagonist (2013) features a half-crazed man who feels his life has been exploited by a novelist. Trevor is similarly unstable, and Coady takes a giddy pleasure in stretching out scenes that expose his capacity for menace while cloaking his intentions. And Kelli, inspired by Coady’s real-life uncle, is a rich character in her own right: Coady is careful not to make her a mere plot device, inhabiting her hard-to-express thoughts and emotions with an acuity that heightens the drama. Karen and Kelli’s unique sisterhood deepens the more Trevor tries to drive a wedge between the two.

A thoughtful and intense drama about how insidiously family ties can be exploited.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177760223
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

I was in my mother’s room when the screen door opened and a man started to yell. It was so unexpected and disorienting that for a second I didn’t even know where I was. Then I glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, with its red, oversized display for aging eyes, and remembered I’d been in here, kneeling at her empty bedside, for over an hour. I was supposed to be boxing things up, but mostly I’d spent the time laying various items across the bed and randomly smelling them.
 
Hullo there! How’s my girlfriend?
 
That was what he’d shouted, and now I could hear Kelli from her perch in the living room, babbling something pleased in reply. There was no reason to be alarmed. It was someone Kelli knew, therefore some appointment I must have overlooked in the schedule. The schedule was kept inside a chewed-up-looking file folder called Kelli’s World! (with a heart above the i), which my mother had maintained over the past few decades, and which I was only now beginning to successfully decode. In the numb and frantic days after my arrival, Kelli’s World! had been both blessing and curse. There’d been so much to do and so much to cancel—including appointments I canceled and then realized I needed, so had to call back and apologetically reschedule. Kelli had, for example, back-to-back dentist and dermatologist appointments that inconveniently fell on what it was clear would be my mother’s final days—those appointments I canceled, obviously. But I ended up rescheduling Kelli’s “friendship circle” at the community center, as much of a pain as it was to drive her there and then back across the bridge to the hospital. It was just that I’d realized that the friendship circle would allow me the opportunity to actually be alone with my mother for the first time in I didn’t know how many years. An opportunity I figured I’d better seize.
 
After she passed, the schedule just kept right on rolling. There’d been the five-on-the-dot arrival of the cheerful silver-haired couple from Meals on Wheels—not just every week, as I assumed when I saw the notation in Kelli’s World!, but every night. In the days leading up to the funeral, the “Wheelies” (as the couple very much enjoyed referring to themselves) had saved my life with their standing order of two blandly fragrant trays—one for Kelli and one for Irene—the second of which, because it was put in front of me, it occurred to me that I should eat. But after the wake, Irene’s refrigerator had been bursting with casseroles and the leftovers of casseroles. We were good for food, and the relentless cheer of the Wheelies, as much as Kelli thrilled to their arrival every evening, was becoming something I had to gird myself against. So pretty soon I canceled the Wheelies too. I figured I could handle the evening meals well enough until I figured out what I was going to do with Kelli.
 
Big Bean! Howdoya do, whaddya say, whaddya know?
 
The man sounded louder now, more inside than out. I stood up, feeling annoyed with myself because the voice had startled me so badly. You’d think I would be used to the constant intrusions by now—the flurry of hot and cold running caregivers my mother had put in place once she received her ultimate diagnosis. Kelli’s bathers, for example. My mother used to bathe Kelli herself, but it must’ve become too much for her at some point, because now she had bathers turning up every other day, at all hours, sometimes rapping on the door first thing in the morning, calling to my sister through the screen, was she ready for a nice shampoo? To be fair, the first morning this occurred also happened to be the first day the sun had risen without our mother in the world, so there hadn’t been much sleep the night before. I should have been ready for it, the tap-tap-tap at the door, but Kelli’s World! had been reading like hieroglyphics to me around then and the banging noise had brought me lurching from the bathroom wild-eyed, as if about to face a firing squad, toothbrush poking from the corner of my mouth like a final cigarette.
 
But once I understood that these invasions had my mother’s stamp—had been scheduled and approved by Irene herself—it was hard to feel aggrieved.
 
It was also hard to feel aggrieved at the sight of Kelli, always over-joyed at the arrival of her bathers, rocking and smiling, repeating their names so happily and incessantly you can bet I learned them pretty quick myself. So far there’d been Ruby. Gisele. Brenna.
 
But now it was—
 
TrebieTrebieTrebie. That’s Trebie. Kelli knows Trebie. Followed by a stream of giggles—her distinctive heh-heh-heh that properly belonged to a villain from a Scooby-Doo cartoon.
 
’Course you do! To know me is to love me!
 
Kelli kept chattering away as I came down the hall, repeating the new name in the rapid-fire way she had when something got her excited. HiTrebieHiTrebieHiTrebie.
 
My sister only has a few things she likes to say—her “catchphrases,” my father used to call them—so when they change, when you hear Kelli uttering something entirely new, it feels odd, like a cool hand landing on your shoulder out of nowhere. Like when you know a stranger’s in the house because the air has shifted with an influx of new pheromones, the dust eddies suddenly swirling around in entirely different formations.
 
Of course, there was a stranger in the house. Besides me, I mean.
 
He was my sister’s walker. Every Tuesday and Friday at ten in the morning, Trevor and Kelli took a poky, meandering turn around the neighborhood together. He’d been on vacation, he explained, which was why we hadn’t seen him before now. And which was why Gisele had been the one walking Kelli the previous week.
 
Nothing in Kelli’s World! had told me to expect a man. The bathers were all women, and the silver-haired Wheelies had operated according to a quaint boy/girl protocol: he stayed with the car while she knocked lightly, announced herself with a musical call of Din-din!, and set a tray before my vibrating-with-happiness sister. Later, as I was looking over Kelli’s World!, the only notation I could find on Trevor’s Tuesday and Friday mornings were the letters BL—Irene’s abbreviation for Bestlife, the home care agency she used.
 
He didn’t wear scrubs—none of the Bestlife people did—but if he hadn’t told me he was a worker, I probably would have assumed it. There was something about his stance, in particular: I am professional, it assured me; sanctioned. He’d also figured out a way of dressing that spoke of an office issuing orders somewhere. I think it was in the colors he chose: light khaki pants, a creamy yellow T-shirt, sunny and bright to distract from his dual vocational gloom clouds of illness and infirmity, pulled over muscles that had been sculpted just enough to let you know they were there. Gingerish hair buzzed down to bristles. Of course, the clipboard was the accessory that put the whole outfit over the top.
 
He still had a grin on his face when I arrived at the top of the stairs, the playful grin he wore to banter with Kelli. But his mouth went slack and round at the sight of me, and for a moment he looked irritated by his own confusion. I gave him an apologetic smile. It was clear that no one had told him of our mother’s death.

Videos