Viaticum

by Natelle Fitzgerald

  Annika shrugged. “Apparently, they can. They did.” A hardness had crept into her voice. “No one forced me to sign the contract. I took the money. I made that choice.”

  The sound of a compressor started up, hammering into the silence. Annika looked out the window; Helmut was spraying his loot with a pressure washer.

  Marion frowned but said nothing.

  “Well don’t let them make you feel bad for a second,” said Velma. Her small voice was nearly lost to the roar of the machine but her eyes were blazing fury. “They’re nothing but a bunch of vultures, a bunch of capitalist vultures.”

  “People wonder why the system is crashing,” Doug added, chin firm with indignation. “I say it deserves to crash when I hear a story like that.”

  They were warming up now, mustering their outraged support, all but Marion who continued to frown.

  “Don’t let them get to you, Annika. You stay healthy and strong and stick it to those bastards,” Velma rallied.

  “Live forever just for spite,” Barry twinkled. “Make their goddamn grandchildren inherit the premiums.”

  Marion motioned for calm, holding her hands to each side and pressing down like she was pressing on a bellows. Her big watery eyes couldn’t hide her irritation. “Let’s focus on Annika, not on what’s wrong with the world.” That was one of her rules: to keep discussion in the personal. “How did you feel, Annika, when you read the letter?”

  How did she feel? Blood rushed to Annika’s face. Sometimes she wanted to smack Marion, to wake her up from her dreamy earnestness. What did she want to hear, exactly? That after receiving the letter, Annika had sat on the floor for two hours, staring into space in the place the cot had been? That it had felt cold, her blood had felt cold, that death could leak back into a room, into a life, just like that? “It made me really fucking angry,” Annika spat.

  Fucking. Annika didn’t usually swear but the word broke from her lips with all the pent-up fury of a rodeo bronc and for a moment she felt pleased by the shock it created: by Marion’s frozen face like a stunned fish in her watery little world, by Susan who literally cringed.

  Across the table, Barry started to shake. His white-blond head was bowed and his hands were folded in front of him, so Annika couldn’t tell if he was laughing or if it was his Parkinson’s acting up. Cups rattled on their saucers. It would be just like him to find it funny, she thought with a measure of affection, and she might have even laughed herself to relieve the tension except that the rest of them were all so wide-eyed and serious. They sat in silence, breathing deeply and letting it be until her outburst seemed an absurd and awkward thing between them. She found herself missing the firefighters, her friends from so many years ago, when they were all young and full of life, free in their joy and their speech and their anger; she thought about those vivid young men punching holes in hotel room walls on drunken nights off; she remembered their bruised hands in the mornings. How real, how raw it had all been!

  Now, around her, these much older, much more comfortable people continued to sit in silence until she felt she had to say something. “Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just frustrated, that’s all. I feel like I’ve been doing well and this . . . it’s like a cold hand dragging me back, I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “Okay. It’s okay to have setbacks, right?” Marion said, her voice overly bright and hopeful. “Remember what we learned the last time? That growth is like a spiral? That we come back to the same place again and again but each time with a bit more insight and awareness than before. So here we are again. Anger.”

  Outside, the compressor stopped. The silence rang.

  “What makes you angry?” Marion pressed.

  “I don’t know. The tone of it . . . It was so sloppy and aggressive, like he was accusing me of something but wouldn’t just come out and say it . . .”

  Marion leaned forward, her dark eyes welling up with tears. “You know, when Emma died, I was so angry I thought I would literally explode,” she whispered. Here it was: the trump card, the mother of all grief. “I went after the driver in the courts. I spent all my time on lawsuits but it was wasted energy. I was putting up a wall around my own hurt, looking at the world when what I needed to do was look inside.”

  Annika looked down at the table. It was too much. It was not the same problem at all.

  “Don’t put up a wall, Annika. It’s okay to feel hurt. We’re here to take down walls, to erase boundaries.”

  “Maybe walls keep the bad guys out,” said a dry male voice. Helmut. He was standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. It was unclear how long he’d been there.

  Marion’s face went white. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She reached across the table and placed her hand on top of Annika’s. “I’m so sorry for this interruption. Please excuse me.”

  Annika nodded, though in truth she was glad Helmut had intervened. She wished now that she hadn’t spoken at all.

  Marion got up and went out into the hall. “Jesus, Helmut! You cannot come in here without knocking! People are sharing very personal stories.” Her words grew increasingly muffled as they moved away. Barry looked across at Annika and mouthed ‘uh-oh.’ The muffled hissing went on and on.

  “Poor Marion,” Kat sighed, her chins trembling as she brought her tea cup to her lips. She was a strange person, grey and remote, existing in a bubble of solitude outside the busy drama of the world.

  “I don’t know how she does it,” the tight-lipped Susan shook her head. “I don’t know how she stands him.”

  Eventually, Marion came back, her beautiful face all twisted up like a little girl trying not to cry. Helmut followed behind her, seemingly unfazed. He fixed them all with his steady grey eyes. “I would like to apologize for the interruption. My intention was not to disturb, but to tell you that I have found several useful items on my latest salvage mission to the dump: a water pump with brass fittings, a bidet and several sections of very usable copper pipe. Please, you are welcome to take a look on your way out.” Then he was gone.

  Marion hung her head. Her lower lip began to tremble, then tears began to fall.

  “Oh dear,” Velma said and reached her arm around Marion’s shoulders. “Oh my, it’s hard. Life is so very hard.”

  “I’m so sorry everyone. Here I am, supposed to be mediating and I can’t even . . . He can’t even . . .”

  “It’s fine, Marion. No one is upset. We understand you’re both going through a lot. No one is here to judge.”

  “He doesn’t respect . . . He just . . . spending all his time at that goddamn dump . . .” Her voice was completely different than it had been during the meditations; now it was high and strained. “I’ve told him that he doesn’t have to join, that he doesn’t have to talk about it but just to let me have this one hour every week, just to let me have this one thing and he can’t even . . . he has to come in here and make a mockery of it . . .”

  Kat reached out from her envelope of greyness and touched Marion’s arm, her pillowy white hand barely touching Marion’s lean, golden skin before retreating back. “He’s hurt in his own way, just like the rest of us,” she said. “He just shows it different is all.”

  Annika looked out the window to where Helmut was walking away towards the water, tall, erect and muscular and she couldn’t help but wonder if, perhaps, he knew a thing or two about healing that the rest of them did not.

  On her way home, Annika stopped at the café to make sure the new girl she’d hired for the weekends was making out okay, so she didn’t get back to the cottage until early evening. When she opened the door, her cat, Zebedee, swirled about her legs, curling his body and tail around her shins. She bent and picked him up and he pushed his whiskers against her cheek. She’d been unsure about adopting a pet and had hemmed and hawed over it until Barry and Susan had shown up one day with a little tabby kitten and a promise they’d look after it, should her
health fail again.

  She held the warm, purring cat tight against her. The sun was already down, though the sky through the window was still pale where it met the water. There was a fog bank sitting just beyond the islands, an ominous grey blanket that moved out over the larger waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait during the daytime, then crept back in at night, as the air cooled. Even as she watched, she could see it creeping closer.

  She turned on the lamp, then crouched to light the fire, remaining by the grate as the kindling caught, the silence heavy all around her. She’d tried to make the cottage more comfortable, more home-like since her illness; yet tonight its essential bareness leapt out at her, like a round of bone sticking up from the earth in a summer field, a stark white reminder of coyotes and wolves and the lean of winter. The empty space where Sasha had kept the cot yawned against the wall. Quickly, she shoved another log on the fire, then stood. The fog was almost at the point now, running its shadow fingers up the blonde flank of the hillside. Watching it, her skin crawled with sudden dread and she found herself wishing, almost desperately, for company, for someone, anyone, for another human voice to distract her.

  “Okay, Zebedee,” she said out loud, her words over-bright and jarring. “What next?”

  She headed to the kitchen where she began to cut vegetables for dinner. She tried to focus on the small tasks, the papery skin of the onion, the knife biting down through the layers of flesh, one after another. This was how she tried to live now, always in the present, focusing on the small details of her existence, on the running of the café. What free time she had, she filled with the healing group and healthy activities; yet tonight doubts she’d brushed aside found her: had she made a mistake selling her policy? Would she be able to make a go of it here? Maybe she should have listened to Dr. Zagar and opted for the chemo. She worried that she’d chosen wrong.

  Outside, darkness came down and the fog rolled up onto the beach. Soon, the little cottage was surrounded. When she looked up again, the view to the ocean had disappeared and she was met by her own startled reflection.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The letter, the letter, the letter . . . Matt lay awake, thinking about the letter. Beside him, Jen’s steady breath counted out his lost hours of sleep while his mind rushed and scrabbled over shameful scenarios and possibilities: this Annika person could call the cops; she could call Ken and then what would he say? That he’d been snooping? Stalking her on the internet? She could find out where he worked and trash him in one of those online forums for home buyers; he’d been so fucking sauced when he’d wrote the thing, he’d even put his home address on it and now it was out there, physically out there in the world and there was nothing he could do to get it back.

  Finally, he couldn’t stand it. He got up and crept down the darkened stairs to the kitchen where he poured himself a drink, hoping and praying please please please that the burn would sear his squirming mind to stillness but the burn did nothing. It was as if someone had punched a hole in his stomach so that the booze simply leaked out and collected under his skin, a greasy, subcutaneous layer of booze that made him feel flabby and inflamed. “Fuck,” he said aloud, knocked back the rest then crept back up to his room, his guilty feet feeling carefully for each stair, his breath short and shallow as he tiptoed past his son’s room like a thief in his own house.

  The next day he drove around drinking gas station coffee and trying to decide his next move. He felt half-crazed, full of delirious energy the way Jacob was when he needed a nap, that kind of half-crying, half-laughing mania with an emptiness at the core.

  He decided to go out to the Regional Office. They had a message board there where they posted training and job opportunities. Leo, his supervisor, was always good for a bit of advice. Leo would help him get back on track, he thought as he drove. He needed a sale and needed one fast. Leo would know what to do.

  He parked the car in an alley behind the building then walked around to the tidy storefront with the listings pasted up in the large window. The coffee shops and restaurants that lined the usually bustling street seemed eerily quiet and he found himself wondering if it was a holiday; with so much waiting and worrying he’d lost track of what day it was.

  Inside, the waiting room was deserted. The pamphlets they put out each morning were still in a perfect fan on the coffee table. A small placard on top of the secretary’s empty desk read ‘Be back in 20 minutes.’ He went down the hall to look at the bulletin board but there was nothing useful: a volunteer opportunity with Habitat for Humanity, a fundraiser for the United Way, that was all. He continued on to Leo’s office. The door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open, unsure of what he would find.

  Leo was crouched on the floor, emptying his book shelf into a large cardboard box. The small office was crammed with boxes and the walls, once a gallery of framed photos showing smiling new homeowners, were bare. Matt stood in the doorway, dumbfounded: Leo was leaving.

  “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” he said finally, trying hard to sound like his old, jovial work self. “It’s only a bit of froth.”

  Leo looked up, then stood in a swift, athletic motion. “Pop goes the fucking weasel,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up over his hairy, muscular forearms. With his gold ring and gold watch glinting in the grey light, he looked tough in a trashy way, like a mobster on a Saturday morning. Leo, of the elegant suits, the big white smile.

  Matt stared, unsure of what to say next. Ordinarily, Leo would have filled the silence with a joke or small talk, but today he simply stood there wiping his hands on his jeans.

  “So where are you headed?” Matt stammered. “Setting up shop somewhere else?”

  “Nah. I’m done with this racket. Deb and I are pulling the plug and heading out to North Dakota. I’ve got some work lined up out there . . .” Leo paused, frowned at the floor, then leaned his hip against the edge of the desk and peered at Matt with tired grey eyes. “How about you? How are you weathering the storm?”

  “I’m . . .” He almost said ‘keeping busy’ or ‘staying positive’ but in the quiet office with Leo looking like Tony Soprano, it seemed pointless to keep pretending. He shrugged. “I haven’t had so much as a phone call in a month. I’ve just been . . . I don’t even know what I’ve been doing, to be honest. Hoping for a turnaround, I guess.”

  Leo pursed his lips and nodded slowly as if Matt were simply confirming something he already knew, as if the hours, the aimless driving, the coffee shops and unanswered calls were just facts of life. It felt good to say it too; it felt like a drink after a long day, that hissssss-psssssst-aaahh of release, so Matt continued, “The bank is after me for that monstrosity of a house and I haven’t had sex in six months. So there you go.”

  Leo continued nodding in that slow, steady way. “Well. That just about sums it up, I guess. I thought Deb and I were through about a month ago. The stress. You know.”

  Matt wandered in and picked up a picture from a stack of photos that was sitting on top of the desk. It showed Leo standing next to a sold sign, a young couple, his brilliant teeth. “So what’s in North Dakota? How’s the market out there?”

  Leo let out a small puff of air as if Matt was being ironic, then he crouched back down beside the box. “I got a gig welding for an oil company out there. There’s a ton of work right now if you’re willing to travel. This whole fracking thing is taking off.”

  Matt flipped through more pictures, trying to get his head around it. It seemed too weird, too different from his image of them: Leo with his slick rhetoric, his charming smile, standing at the front of the room in one of his gorgeous suits and lecturing them on how to build a network, and Deb with her new boobs busting out the top of her dress at the Christmas party, sending back her chicken because it was too dry; now here Leo was looking like a guy you didn’t want to fuck with. How did that work? “So, did you just apply for a job or what? I
mean, do you need training or . . .”

  “Nah,” Leo said, as he piled stacks of computer paper into the box. “I’ve already got my ticket. My Dad owned a body shop when I was growing up and I went to trade school right out of high school. I worked at the shipyard a bunch of years before I got involved in this mess.” He ripped a strip of packing tape with his teeth, his brilliant teeth. “Deb’s got a job lined up too. She’s going to hotshot.”

  “Hotshot?”

  “It’s kind of like a remote location courier, you know, if they need parts or something. The pay is decent.” He stood with the box in his hands, forearms bulging. He paused a moment, then added, “Deb likes to drive,” before pushing past Matt and out into the hall.

  Deb likes to drive. As if it all made sense.

  The rest of the day, Matt drove around. He went to check on a couple of his listings and felt a jolt of surprise to find that his signs were still there and the houses were still standing as if everything was still absolutely fine and normal and the world wasn’t going to shit. At three, he broke down and went to Starbucks where he bought some sweet over-priced drink that gave him the shakes then he drove around some more, out to the suburbs where he stared at empty houses in empty neighbourhoods.

  He kept thinking about Leo and Deb and their new life in North Dakota. He imagined going out there himself. He imagined the three of them, Jen and Jacob and himself, driving out there under a wide blue sky, packed into the car with all their things piled up in back, the three of them roaring away to another life, to a fresh start. He was still fit enough to do the work, he reasoned. He could get on as a roughneck; it might even be nice to work for a regular pay cheque for a while, to stop all this worrying and scrabbling and speculating and just put his head down and work . . . A kind of calm came over him. Yes, he thought, he’d like to just work; he’d never been any good at the real estate thing anyway.