Charity

by Keath Fraser

  When the leaves turned in October, I was outside with a message to return his call. I had come home early to have a little talk with Greta and it hadn’t gone well. I found her eating disorder, involving too little food instead of too much, difficult to broach. It was complicated by post-traumatic stress we could only guess at. In her room, where I had to knock several times, she volunteered nothing and told me to leave. No wonder. Having mentioned that the heart-shaped leaves falling outside her window lacked the drop-dead blush of our Japanese maples, thoughtlessly I called their colour “pukish.” I felt like a douchebag. I needed to avoid mentioning sickness if I hoped to win her confidence.

  “Listen,” said Judy, “if she was puking, she’d be eating. She’s not eating.”

  Judy had offered to help with what she started calling “the project,” but I didn’t feel it was Judy’s right to do so when I was the one, not her, who had nourished Greta since age two. Until recently I’d been only too successful in feeding her, so her refusal now to eat anything more than a cornflake felt like a painful blowback from her fat years holding me accountable.

  Standing in the garden I was on hold with Lucille. The length of my raking stroke had shortened up without my noticing until this autumn. A sore hip was also bringing a new me into focus.

  “Are you sitting down?” Patrick’s professional, understated voice was not entirely familiar. “The news isn’t good.”

  A young female doctor at the clinic had confided to him that his daughter, Margaret Fitzgerald, might be buying drugs downtown. This colleague understood from her source—an unnamed patient who’d seen her more than once collaborating warily with a low-life on Powell Street—that such trysts, given Patrick’s confirmation of Greta’s arrival date, could have been going on since her return from Africa.

  I took a moment to absorb our latest reconnaissance. The frequent flushing: possible cover for the sound of her snorting? Which might explain why the bathroom never smelled of vomit. At least, I replied, she wasn’t smoking it. “Maybe not,” said Patrick, but she could be injecting it.” He paused. “Heroin?” I squeezed my rake. Really? “Once or twice,” he said, “I’ve smelt burning. Where there’s smoke . . .” He mentioned a spoon. “No way,” I said, “actual burning? I thought that was the hairdryer.” Here was ammunition to confront her with when I returned indoors—drugs, house insurance, before long the fire alarm upstairs and a truck outside. I’ll talk to her again right away. “Hold your horses,” cautioned Patrick.

  I decided it was his fault I’d spoken to her too soon. His diagnosis was based on a case history he had failed to establish. I replied that he should get his physician’s act together, seriously, and document the nature and length of her addiction if we hoped to persuade her to seek treatment. This was the minimum we would need for admission to a recovery centre.

  He considered this.

  “A formal patient-physician sit-down, yup. But I doubt she’ll come to the office. And we more or less know what happened.” We did? “If we want her in rehab, sooner rather than later, I need her to agree she’s addicted. That she wants help. We’re past the diagnosis stage.”

  “But not beyond a case study,” I reiterated. I suggested we reach out to doctors who might have known or worked with Greta at her clinic in Sierra Leone.

  “No harm in that, I suppose. But we know enough already to get on with the antidote. Just don’t involve Lucille.”

  “I thought the antidote was a treatment centre.”

  “It is, and the usual recipe there for recovery is talking therapy, plus methadone, when withdrawal sets in. She’ll open up over time.” He had recommended other patients for similar treatment. He thought her story of addiction, as she was likely to share it with fellow addicts, would in broad strokes go as follows.

  This time he didn’t seek to amuse me, as he’d done diagnosing Rudy’s demise. Rudy had died of one malady or another no one treating him in the field would’ve had time to pinpoint before he passed. In Greta’s case, Patrick was basing his “professional preview” upon other cases of addiction he had treated. What their substance abuse had in common was access.

  “That’s news?”

  “No, but listen.”

  To alleviate her sorrow, after supervising Rudy’s palliative care, it had been tempting for Margaret to sample the morphine his physician was administering to Rudy in his final days. She would’ve known where the drug was stored and the syringes used to inject it—inside a lockable cupboard to which she had sanctioned access or at minimum the knowledge of where its key was kept.

  His confidence in this sketch was not surprising given his status among peers as a quick study. They’d given him the Fish or Cut Bait Award at an informal conference in Harrison for physicians and small pharma. Tolerating uncertainty counted, who’d discount caution?, but sometimes Patrick saw the picture whole before the patient herself could remember how or why she’d first fallen from the wagon.

  Following Rudy’s death, and with grief leaching Greta’s determination to finish a full tour in Africa, he could see how, in the months following, an opiate taken for a pleasant release from pain had got her hooked and then had begun to dominate any determination to quit. Or to eat the way she used to. Indeed, proud of losing weight for the first time in her life, along with the flood of endorphins the drug afforded (“Didn’t her swimming do this too?”), it was tempting for her to keep self-administering “pride” in this new, unexpected control over her body. “An illusion, of course.” Yet here she was, rising above the excesses of appetite, and above the sad residue of her friend’s death.

  “For Greta it felt very good. And still does, unfortunately.”

  He brought home a naloxone kit and showed me how to use it. His clinic, while not a downtown clinic attended by welfare drug addicts, was seeing its share of fentanyl survivors among homeless youth.

  “You can’t be afraid to jab, the minute you find her.”

  On the floor he meant, as good as dead.

  “She’ll bounce back so fast she’ll wonder why you’re fussing over her.”

  That evening I came up with a veal hotpot to serve over couscous, and her demeanour, instead of scowling, looked non-judgmental for once, easing slowly to a smile as her father spoke frankly about administering morphine to Rudy as he died. I was surprised by the gentleness of his induction. He asked if perhaps she had been tempted to ease her difficult transition out of grief, and eventually out of a very difficult assignment in a hellish climate, through the consolation of drugs now somewhat out of her control. We happened to know, it didn’t matter how, that she was still addicted to a sustaining substance, but we were, as her loving parents, here to help her get over this crippling habit.

  When Patrick stopped she sat very still, on the edge, I thought, of tears she could barely restrain. And then her shoulders started to shake. She put down the fork she’d picked up. Catharsis, at last, some return to normality.

  It took her a minute, finally, to explode into laughter. At what sounded like his entire premise. Oh my god! she shrieked. In convulsions, pushing away from her untouched dinner, storming upstairs. You have no idea how annoying you are! Her bedroom door, slamming. Not only had we not got anywhere, we were nowhere nearer understanding how she thought of her own emaciated state. She opened the door to shout back down: Why don’t you stick to fucking Jeopardy?

  “At least her laugh is back,” Patrick said ruefully.

  *

  Greta’s drug addiction came as a surprise to Judy. I was pleased to see how far out of the loop she’d drifted. She nevertheless felt—a week later, when she dropped in for a glass of wine, wearing a polka-dot blouse that didn’t suit her—that Patrick had possibly gone about confronting the issue in the wrong way and she left promising to figure out a better way. She would start by inviting Margie, her pet name still grated on me, for a hit of double espresso and a girlie talk. She w
as determined to be a better mother.

  “Sorry, Denise. But I am.”

  Her presumption that she was her mother at all pained me. Also upsetting, somehow presuming she had the inside track to our daughter’s confidence, while remaining ignorant of my own inquiries into Greta’s doings abroad and lately her domestic ones. Where was she getting the cash to indulge her habit? From a dwindling stipend via the good doctors in exile? Perhaps, but I was still monitoring our household treasury, starting with the silverware, just in case the resilience of her virtue had suffered along with her health since its decline abroad. I checked for figurines missing above the fireplace and the waffle maker. The walls for minor Smiths and Onleys. Proceeding upstairs to any space emptied of Hockney or a Shadbolt. If things were missing, and I sensed they were, I wondered if I wasn’t hallucinating. I wondered about the essence of addiction and, opening the lid of my jewelry box, the riddle it now occasioned.

  I confronted Patrick.

  “Listen to me, all right? If two of the three virtues were eliminated—entirely—which one remains to equal love?”

  Patrick looked at me, a little surprised at the span of my distraction. “Are you using, too?” he joked.

  He wasn’t inclined to answer, until I told him my opera pearls were missing. As a girl guide I’d played the Jewel Game, to remember which stones had been removed, so the pearls were easy to see gone.

  “Charity?” he now answered. He seemed wary there might be something else missing.

  “I wonder if that’s true, Dr. Fitzgerald.” I lifted my hands, parting them in a benevolent manner. “Faith, hope, charity—isn’t the greatest of these hope?”

  Interest in his apple strudel increased noticeably.

  I said, “Without hope she’s got nothing.”

  A little sarcastically, he responded. “And nothing comes of nothing?”

  I considered how to answer this. “With nothing to look forward to, yes. Apart from a rush, always dissolving to despair, how can she be faithful to the future let alone to herself? She certainly can’t be charitable to herself. Or forgiving of her past mistake.”

  I was struck by my persistence. Patrick finished his dessert and tabled his spoon.

  “And selling off pieces of her home, for another fix, keeps hope alive?”

  “Can you blame her?”

  “ Depends. My good cufflinks still around?”

  “Patrick, we are talking about the extinction of her life. She could be suicidal.”

  “Hm.”

  I wanted this to sink in. “Unless she remembers what it’s like to be hungry, she can’t yearn for much besides drugs.”

  Nodding slowly, he lifted his napkin and wiped his chin. I was only furthering his case study . . . this one of me, his bookkeeper and homemaker, not previously known to him as an ethical whiz woman.

  I confess the feeling pleased me. Over a decade older than Patrick—my perspective widening a little every year despite shrinking telomeres and silver hair, recently the glimpse of a withered underarm reaching to turn off my bed lamp—I still might surprise him enough to rehabilitate his unspoken regret of having once lost the industrially breasted Judy to a tennis tramp. With Judy, he always seemed a touch too eager to hear her out, over what was seldom worth reporting. I’d never expected him to marry me, and it didn’t matter that he hadn’t, but I did want to be appreciated as someone capable of framing case histories of her own, including, I thought, one of him. It would frankly run along the lines of many men’s remotion, women’s too, should age threaten not to resolve some past shame when the need to withdraw sends us wandering. Except in Patrick’s case, the opposite was true. He enjoyed his work and the thought of travel only made him yearn for one more colleague to expand his clinic. His was a family clinic and he was loyal to its growth.

  Not until the following Saturday did I have something more dramatic to report than pearls. At our door had come three measured knocks. Standing, a policeman, chirpy with static from his two-way radio clipped to a black, pen-spiked shirt.

  I was eager to share the purpose of his visit with Patrick. But Judy dropped by with her own news as soon as he returned home from the office. She was reporting on her meeting over coffee with Margie “to talk turkey”—not, she regretted, as in “cold turkey,” but enough turkey to persuade a grateful Patrick that, along with what we already knew, it might help to complete his case file for her recovery.

  “Yes,” said Judy smugly. “It was kind of a catharsis for her. Finally dealing with the old fool’s ashes.”

  Ashes, what ashes?

  “The ones she and I set free in a cloud at low tide. Yesterday, at Spanish Banks?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Patrick. “Out of the cooking pot into the ether. I guess we spotted his ashes without knowing it at the airport. What else did you find out, Joos?” He sounded mirthful, and apologized. “No, his deathbed can’t have been a happy time for Margaret. Caring for him, no way.”

  “What deathbed?” asked Judy.

  In her rush to tell us of helping to pilot his ashes to their final resting place, surely a misnomer at low tide, she had clearly forgotten the details of his death we’d shared with her months ago. It felt good to underscore this by reminding her of something else she didn’t know, and that Patrick didn’t either.

  The tall young constable at the door had asked me about Rudy’s Nash Metropolitan. Parked for a year in his garage, it had been stolen and found for sale on Craigslist. When the constable removed his cap to share this unexpected news, I noticed his hair was kinked by nature, certainly not shorn regimentally, a chestnut tint women other than myself only hoped to emulate. “Oh, get on with it,” said Judy. Well, I continued, the current Craigslist “owner” off Renfrew had confessed to this constable that, yes, he was now reselling it—he had bought it originally, also on Craigslist, from a very thin woman who said she was selling it for her grandfather. I was then asked to identify this woman who had sold the vintage vehicle to its new owner for a song. He had found Greta’s expired student card in his lobby.

  I was pleased to see I now had Patrick’s undivided attention.

  “Well,” replied Judy, “maybe she felt entitled to at least his car.”

  “No,” I said. “She didn’t. The more entitled she feels—the closer she comes to this.”

  And I pulled down from the kitchen cupboard, where I kept it handy in the colander, the naloxone kit.

  “What is it?” asked Judy.

  Patiently, I unzipped it and began to explain its purpose. Removing the blue non-latex gloves, I pointed out swabs, a pair of syringes, three vials of naloxone, a plastic mouth-to-mouth piece to blow oxygen into Greta’s brain if her breathing stopped. I could see Patrick was impressed by how carefully I’d taken responsibility for our daughter’s survival in case of an overdose at home.

  “Into muscle,” I said to him, “not a vein. Blue lips and nails, that means—”

  “Well,” interrupted Judy. “Whatever it takes, I guess.” Studying me a little sadly, seeming to doubt my intervention would be required. She was reluctant to buy into any drug theory that lacked symptoms she herself had observed. “Anyway,” turning back to Patrick, “there wasn’t any deathbed. I don’t know where you got that notion.”

  “Her palliative care,” I said, hoping to hold my advantage and get back to the policeman.

  “Not what she told me . . .”

  Not a volley Patrick could ignore. Rudy’s ashes had been a bombshell. Further reverberations couldn’t be ruled out. The upward cast of his brow told me he thought she might have something else we weren’t privy to but badly needed to know. He turned to me.

  “Judy seems to have tapped into the mother- daughter thing.”

  “Really?”

  I told him to henceforth stick it where the sun no longer shone.

  I didn�
��t tell him anything. I knew based on what he’d long chosen to remember as “Judy’s heartbreak overseas”—after her tennis hotshot had deserted her for a Japanese geisha, or was it another player’s partner?—that he felt she could empathize with Greta’s experience in a way as to elicit confidences he and I could not.

  Turning, I said, “What did our Margie tell you, Judy?”

  “Well, for one thing,” she replied, “the house. He offered it to her.”

  “We expected as much.” I was more confident now of our deduction. “His legacy will help compensate for what she’s missed out on, abandoning school and friends.”

  “He was her only friend,” Judy reminded us. But agreed it made sense for him to bequeath her something more than anguish—after indulging the fool as if she’d had nothing better to do than follow his charitable obsession to the dark continent.

  “Yes,” repeated Judy, “it would’ve made sense if she’d accepted it.”

  “The house?”

  “She refused it.”

  “The house,” said Patrick.

  “Go figure, yeah.”

  “Trying to,” he said, shaking his head.

  “He even told her,” said Judy, “if she refused it, it would end up with his least favourite daughter.”

  Daughter? I decided she was now willing to say anything to keep Patrick enthralled by this mother-daughter thing she suddenly had going with him.

  She went on, “He told her that she—Margie—was his favourite. I don’t think he meant a charity, either.”

  I had to think for a moment. But the echo persisted. “If you’re talking about a daughter, I wonder if he wasn’t talking about a banquet? Rudy liked fairytales. With Greta, you missed out on a lot of those.”

  She ignored this. “I’ll talk to her about the Nash.”

  “Greta?”

  “Rudy’s daughter. I’ll pop by.”

  “Well,” I said. “Let her know there’s an overdue traffic violation on it. They’ve impounded the vehicle.”