Viaticum

by Natelle Fitzgerald

  “Learn to play the guitar, then serenade my husband on his birthday.”

  They went tinkling past, these pretty horses all done up with longing, so close she felt she could almost touch them, and suddenly, without warning, she found herself lonely, achingly lonely for the cottage in Saltery Bay.

  Ray interrupted her thoughts. He threw his arm around her shoulder. “What about you, Bo-Bannika? You’re being awfully pensive, young Missy!”

  They all turned to look, their faces still soft with their own dreams. Annika didn’t know what to say. Her mind raced, yet she couldn’t think and as her silence went on, she saw them keen to her panic; she could feel their awareness sharpen to the question’s significance. What do you want to do before you die? Even the sounds of the restaurant seemed to be waiting. Conversation around her went into a lull. “I don’t know, really I . . .” she stammered. “I want to live somewhere quiet. I want a quiet, peaceful place.” As she spoke, she remembered a dream she’d forgotten, something she used to talk about before she’d met Hamish, at the end of her firefighting days. “I’ve always thought about opening a café or a Bed and Breakfast, something like that. A place where I could be my own boss and people could come and relax. Where they could just come and be themselves.”

  She looked around. Everyone was silent. Blood crept up into her face.

  “But Annika,” Tyler said after a long silence. “Why would you want a rewarding life in peaceful place when you could go to Germany with John and sit in an uncomfortable chair for twelve hours?”

  Rehab punched Tyler on the arm. “You. You are such a kidder.”

  Then the sounds of the restaurant rushed back in and the crisis passed. Annika sat back and sipped the wine, her thoughts returning again and again to Saltery Bay and the café she’d visited with Sasha. Maybe it was possible to start again, she thought. Maybe it was possible to leave the past behind.

  A week later, however, she was back at the cancer clinic and all her old fears had returned. She felt a tightness in her chest, like she couldn’t breathe.

  The clinic faced the interior of the hospital so there were no windows to the outside; the air was dead and smelled strongly of antiseptic. There was a hint of sweetness underneath that made Annika feel sick, a kind of undertone, like a drunk that tries to hide the booze on their breath with a breath mint but fails. It was like that here: all the pastel lights and soft tones and lemony freshness couldn’t quite mask the smell of death, couldn’t quite hide the suffering that was happening in the rooms all around.

  A young nurse in pink scrubs walked past and Annika tried to smile but it felt more like a grimace. The staff here were friendly and professional to a fault, yet they unnerved her; there was a tidiness, a neatness to the way they talked that reminded her of that other clinic, the fertility one, a way of speaking that turned sex and death into something clean and polished. A thing. A fact. An object. It was meant to make things easier, she knew, but somehow it didn’t. It felt like a lie to her, this neatness, this over-simplification that caused the depths of her, the complicated parts, to cry out with loneliness for everything that went unacknowledged.

  She tried to breathe deeply to calm herself, but the tightness in her chest remained.

  Dr. Zagar wanted to start her with chemotherapy right away. To zap it, she’d said, just to make sure. In principle, it sounded like a good idea, yet the actual logistics of arranging it, felt impossibly complicated. For starters, Annika had given up her ­apartment and didn’t have a place to stay in Seattle, which meant either travelling back and forth to Saltery Bay or finding a place to rent. For the past three days, she’d driven around, looking for apartments, and every minute she’d spent on the roads reminded her of why she’d hated it here in the first place. Everything she looked at was either too expensive or too depressing. She was staying in a cheap hostel for the time being, surrounded by kids who were one step away from the street.

  She waited; the tightness in her chest ratcheting up with every minute she spent in that dead, enclosed space. The feeling was depressingly familiar: she’d had it towards the end when it was clear things weren’t working out between her and Hamish. At that time, Dr. Zagar had dismissed it as anxiety, and maybe it was, yet she couldn’t help feel that it was this very tightening that had made her sick in the first place, that her heart had simply closed into a knot and never let go.

  Suddenly she stood. She didn’t want to be here. Couldn’t be here. Walking quickly, she left the hospital. She didn’t think much of anything, only that she wanted, needed to leave. She missed the cottage. She missed Sasha. She thought of the sea, of a big wide sky above her and decided she would take her chances.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It happened on a Monday at the beginning of October. It was not quite noon yet when Matt ducked into a pub, an upscale Irish place with a grand old bar in the center, the tiers of bottles lit up like a temple and taps on all four sides. He took a seat and ordered a scotch. Several men in suits were tucked away in a dark-paneled booth and there was a woman at the bar across from him doing a crossword, a plump redhead with catty glasses, the kind that were popular in the fifties, a half-empty pint glass on the bar in front of her. She was closer to his age than Jen and wasn’t overtly sexy, not in the way he ordinarily defined it; yet he felt attracted to her right away. He liked the fact that she was here before noon on a Monday, drinking by herself. Who were any of them kidding, anyway? He flashed her a smile and she smiled back, rouging slightly.

  The bartender slid his drink in front of him. Matt closed his eyes and held the liquor in his mouth, trying to place his mind into the whiteness of the burn, to sear his worries away. The bank had called and left a message on his phone and he hadn’t yet mustered the courage to call them back. He knew what it was about: his line of credit was maxed out and the automatic payment for the mortgage must have bounced. He sipped his drink, his mind scrabbling over the various combinations of loans and credit cards that might keep them afloat a while longer. Six months to a year, Ken had told him, and now that year was almost up. He’d be getting a much-needed injection of cash any day.

  He ordered another scotch and watched the waitress as she went about the room, wiping the surface of each table with a rag. There was something strange about her. She had a pretty, slim face and long, dark hair; a lean stretch of thigh was visible between her black bobby socks and short skirt; yet there was a stockiness to her upper body that was incongruent with her limbs, a thickness in the middle. It wasn’t until she bent over a nearby table that he realized she was pregnant.

  He looked away and swirled his drink. The ice cubes clicked softly against the sides of his glass.

  Jen had kept working right up until the last month, out of stubbornness or pride he wasn’t sure. She’d been huge at the end, awkward to look at, and they’d stuck her on lunches, the dead times, the B team. She didn’t fit the image anymore. Still, she’d refused to quit and would come back to his apartment after each of her shifts crying. He’d told her to take the time off but she wouldn’t do it. He took another sip and held it in his mouth. The night that Jacob was born he’d been working, he remembered. The bar had been hopping, a real party vibe and he’d been in the flow, his hands flying, the jokes cracking when he got the call that she was in labor. Before he’d left for the hospital, he’d ordered a staff shooter, the A team pressing up around him in their sexy little outfits. “Matty Matt’s going to be a Daddy!” they’d cooed and then they’d all knocked one back, then another, and then he’d taken a taxi out to the hospital with that fire still in him, with the music still throbbing in his ears. It wasn’t until he saw Jen’s face, her frightened, naked face, that he’d actually understood the enormity of the changes that were about to happen, and then it was too late, then he was there, stumbling around the delivery room, trying to hide the tequila on his breath.

  Matty Matt’s going to be a D
addy!

  He closed his eyes and tried to hold the burn, to prolong it as it went down.

  Then the crossword cat said, “Hey. Turn that up for a ­second.”

  He opened his eyes and watched as the bartender put down his rag and reached for the remote.

  The television above the bar showed a reporter standing in front of the New York stock exchange and crowds of people milling about. “Investors are panicking here as the afternoon wears on,” the reporter said. “It’s absolute mayhem here on Wall Street. With only a few hours left to close, this stands to be the worst crisis in over 50 years.” Now the screen showed a series of graphs with steeply dropping slopes.

  The two businessmen came over and leaned against the bar. The pregnant waitress stood still in the middle of the room, holding a tray of empty glassware. They all watched the television. The crossword cat whispered, “I can’t believe this is actually happening.”

  The screen switched to the inside of the stock exchange where men in their shirt sleeves were holding their heads and walking around with stunned expressions. A handsome young man stood in the middle of the floor watching the numbers on a screen above him, then he crumpled to his knees and there was something about the slow-motion way that he went down, in stages like a ruined horse buckling, that was immediately recognizable. It was the way you imagine giving up in dreams, crumpling slow to the pavement as the world rushes on ahead of you.

  “I can’t believe it,” one of the businessmen echoed.

  “I can’t fucking believe it,” said the other and Matt joined the chorus of incredulity even though none of them were truly surprised. There’d been talk already. There’d been warning signs. The news was just a confirmation, really, of what everybody already knew, a creeping dread made physical by this man crumpling to his knees. Matt felt his scalp crawl as if from sudden cold.

  Outside, the sun kept shining. Cars and people went by the front windows, just as they had before. The waitress resumed her rounds, wiping tables and collecting glasses; yet it all felt suddenly precarious, as if the brightness of the day might shatter, sending the windows showering inwards in a million deadly shards. The moment seemed to stretch on, taut and discordant and strangely empty, then a single, panicked thought flooded Matt’s brain: Jen and Jacob. He had to get back to them. It was irrational, he knew, yet the feeling was so overwhelming he couldn’t deny it.

  He set his glass down on the bar, then hurried out to his car.

  He was probably over the limit, he thought as he peeled away from the curb. He’d driven in far worse states, however, and he’d always managed fine. It was a matter of focus. He weaved in and out of the slow-moving lanes until he came to the Interchange where traffic slowed to a crawl. He sat there looking at the great, shimmering line of vehicles that stretched away towards the horizon. He was drunker than he’d originally thought; this worried him. Suddenly, a siren began to wail, rising up from the lines of cars like a long, thin line of smoke. He glanced in the rearview but couldn’t see the cherry.

  C’mon, c’mon. He tapped his hand on the steering wheel, then fished in his wallet for a penny and placed it on the dash in front of him. Chew a penny and it fucks the breathalyzer. Where had he heard that? An urban legend, a Ken thing most likely, but at least it was something. At least it felt like he was taking action.

  He glanced in the rearview. The sirens were moving off now, towards downtown and it occurred to him that people might be looting, fleeing the city. He turned up the radio but there was no news of the crisis, only traffic reports and the inane flirtations of Kelly and Mike on 92.7 ROCKS. I’m going crazy, he thought. I’m losing my fucking mind, still he couldn’t shake the prickling sense of disaster that tingled across his scalp.

  By the time he arrived home it was mid-afternoon. The front of the house was bathed in a soft, golden light and Jen’s car was in the driveway. They were home.

  He opened the front door, near desperate for the sound of their voices, for their cheerful chatter to reassure him, but the house was quiet. It smelled of paint. “Hello? Hello?” He called out and his own voice echoed back to him. “Jen? Jacob?”

  He went upstairs. The door to Jacob’s room was partially opened and he peered inside, unsure of what he expected to see.

  They were in there, snuggled together on Jacob’s bed. Jen had her head propped up on the headboard and was reading a story while Jacob snuggled against her. The afternoon light fell across the room and lay rich and golden in Jen’s shiny hair; it glowed in Jacob’s eyelids, that perfect translucence where the delicate fringe of his eyelash met the lid of his downcast eye.

  “Hello?”

  They looked up. “Jacob had his frenulum out today,” Jen said. Her thin hand smoothed Jacob’s pale hair back from his forehead. “He was a very brave boy.”

  Matt stared in wonderment. Frenulums. Bravery.

  “My mouth feels like a balloon, Daddy.”

  “Like a balloon?”

  “It feels puffy like a balloon underneath.”

  Matt took a tentative step into the quiet space. The slanting gold light threw animal shadows on the walls: cats and bears and elephants, Jacob’s gentle guardians in a wicker basket on the floor. Jacob’s frenulum! That little piece of skin that connects your lip to your gums; his was too long; it was going to make a gap in between his teeth, he remembered now. Had she told him the appointment was today? He didn’t remember her telling him.

  He tiptoed towards the bed, aware of his own towering bulk, his fumbling awkwardness. “Did it hurt, buddy?”

  “It hurt like a pinching but I didn’t cry at all and then Mummy and me had milkshakes.”

  “Mmmmm. That sounds yummy. What flavor did you have?” He stood next to the bed holding his crumpled jacket in his hand.

  “I had chocolate. Mummy had strawberry.”

  “I called you. I didn’t know if you were coming or not,” Jen said. Her voice was even, strangely neutral. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or just stating a fact.

  He stood, twisting the coat.

  Jacob slid ever closer to Jen and tapped the empty space on the bed beside him. “Daddy.”

  Matt sat and Jacob beamed, snuggling deep between both parents for maximum contact. It was a miracle, Matt thought, this sidelong warmth against him.

  “We’re reading Wally Walrus goes to school,” Jen supplied in that same, strange neutral tone. “Wally Walrus was bigger than the other seals. Much bigger. ‘Can you do this?’ the slippery seals asked then they slid down the icy slide into the blue, blue water.”

  “Look Daddy! The Walrus is stuck!”

  Matt reached his arm around Jen’s shoulder. He bent down and kissed Jacob’s fine pale hair, breathing in the clean, baby-powder scent of Jacob’s shampoo and then his own breath bounced back at him, smoky and sour with booze.

  Jen turned the page and he saw that her jaw was set. There was a hardness round her mouth and a crinkle between her brows that he’d missed. Maybe he’d wanted to miss it. He tried breathing only through his nose but the smell was still there.

  Afterwards, in the hallway, she hissed, “Where were you?”

  “Hey, Jen. Sorry I missed it. Look, traffic was backed up and . . . Have you watched the news?”

  “Were you out drinking? I told you his appointment was today.”

  “No, Jen. It’s not like . . .”

  “So what? Did you have some pretty little client to entertain?”

  “No. Jen. Honestly, I don’t remember you telling me it was today and I just went to have a drink because . . . Jesus, I rushed all the way back here to make sure you were alright. Have you heard what’s going on?”

  She raised her eyebrows and waited and the way she did it, with that mocking, overly dramatic arch and her hand on her hip, it made the world economic crisis seem pathetic.

  “The economy is tanking,” he sa
id, aware that it sounded like an excuse. “The stock market crashed and . . .” The men, he wanted to tell her, the men on Wall Street were falling to their knees.

  She rolled her eyes as if she didn’t believe him. “Well. You could have at least called to say you weren’t coming. He was expecting you to be there.” She turned on her heel and stomped downstairs.

  He retreated to the spare room where they kept the computer. The room was mostly bare, one of the few she hadn’t gotten around to with her renovations. There was a desk and a chair and a few unpacked boxes along the wall, filled with books mostly, novels and old textbooks from the time before she’d met him. He felt badly about missing Jacob’s appointment although the kid seemed to have fared okay without him. Lately, he kept forgetting things. Whole chunks of time went missing. It worried him.

  He logged onto the computer and went straight to the news for updates. The same urgency, the panic he’d felt at the bar screamed at him from the headlines and he felt calmed by it, somehow. It was real. It was happening. His reaction wasn’t crazy after all.

  He could hear Jen downstairs cleaning up in the kitchen. He looked over his shoulder at the bare room, now filling with shadow, then at the closed door, then, satisfied he was truly alone, he typed in a familiar web address. Instantly, a picture of an attractive young couple filled the screen. They were smiling at one another, standing in a bright, airy room with hardwood floors and whitewalls and cardboard boxes piled up behind them; then the picture morphed into that of a child lying in a sunny field and blowing on a dandelion gone to seed, the magic paratroopers drifting upwards into the blue, blue sky. Make your money make sense, the caption read.

  He took a deep breath, then logged into their account. The numbers made his stomach turn. We’re going to have to sell the house, he realized, although he’d be fucked if he could flip it now. He was so busy mentally tallying the what ifs and various combinations of debt that would make it somehow more palatable, that he didn’t hear Jen come back upstairs. When the door opened, he started. He reached for the mouse and clicked the browser closed. “Hey!” he said, wheeling.