Notes Towards Recovery

by Louise Ells

  The telephone rang.

  Darlene? Or the hospital? Or Michael, calling back to finish his sentence?

  Valerie let the telephone ring. Whoever it was could leave a message.

  She started to hum then, louder, and louder still so that she wouldn’t have to listen to a voice on the machine. Words trying to fill the empty room.

  Notes towards Recovery

  I: GRACE ANNE

  It was easy for me to choose you from the list of people who replied to my advertisement for this free sofa. Even before I read your email - so polite - I had decided. You have the same name as my daughter.

  I suppose I’d assumed our Grace might take this sofa off to university one day and we’d replace it with something more modern, but it’s lasted well and I’m sure you’ll enjoy many years with it.

  It was the first piece of furniture my husband and I bought together when we moved into this house; the rest was an odd collection of handouts from our families and leftovers from our own student days. It was the most garish plaid (as you’ll discover) but cut price, and so comfy: we took it home that same day. It’s still as comfortable as ever and it’s always been my favourite place to read.

  We bought the silk in a little shop behind the Ottawa market where the salesman made us strong coffee and served us rose-flavoured sweets and it felt as if we’d left the country entirely. He charmed me into buying the silk even though I knew it wouldn’t be heavy enough to withstand daily use. It didn’t help that Milo designated this as his favourite napping spot, scratching himself a patch in the middle of the sofa each afternoon, or that we put it right under the big window where the sun faded the deep cayenne to a dusty coral.

  Recovering the sofa was on my list of things to get round to one day but I never fell in love with a more practical fabric like canvas or twill. Perhaps you’ll have better luck. If so, remember to pre-wash and iron the material, then measure the sofa. Measure it again, and then one more time and don’t forget to allow for shrinkage and seams. Better to have too much and make it slightly loose, you can always tuck bits away. That’s what I did, but then again I am an expert at covering up mistakes and hiding the worst of a mess.

  II: COMMUNITY CHURCH QUILTING BEE

  When I placed an ad in our local paper I saw your appeal for supplies to make quilts for people affected by the recent ice storm and wonder if this might meet your requirements.

  It is a project I started the winter I was pregnant. My great grandmother made the original quilt and though it was badly damaged it had sentimental value and I thought I could recover it. I soon discovered it was going to be as much (more) work than starting a new one. All the sewing had to be done by hand rather than machine and I wasn’t good at the chain stitch or binding. I hadn’t realized how many loose seams and missing pieces there were and struggled to match the original fabric.

  I had forgotten all about it until last week when I emptied the back cupboard at the top of my basement stairs. The real estate agent has told me that repainting the house will make the difference between sale and no sale. She was kind enough to suggest some colours - misty cloud, frosted breeze, iced eggshell. When I got to Canadian Tire I confused all the weathers and in any event they looked the same, so I settled on one called off white. But I digress, you don’t care about all this. I emptied out the cupboard and when I reached for a bag above my head it burst open and I was showered by scraps.

  I briefly considered starting afresh, thinking it could be good busy work to fill the evenings and make me feel productive. But when I looked through the pastel blues and yellows and pinks, all I felt was abandoned, unfinished. And then I read about the work you do, your recovery quilts for the homeless; I know you will be able to complete what I did not.

  III: GRANT

  I have given away the furniture and taken everything I want from the house. It didn’t amount to much but know that I am not leaving you all the rest to be spiteful. You’ll be able to sort through it quickly, dispassionately. You always were better than me at letting go.

  I found a shoebox of stuff you might enjoy looking through; mementoes we collected that summer we drove down to Niagara Falls. Remember? We were so broke we stayed in that tacky hotel on the American side, with its magic tickle fingers bed and the leaky whirlpool bath shaped like a champagne saucer.

  Our one extravagance was the day in Hamilton, visiting the Warplane Heritage Museum where you spent hours talking to that elderly vet who’d flown a Hawker Hurricane during the Battle of Britain. He’d crashed, he said, been shot down in the English Channel and managed to swim ashore. You weren’t entirely sure you believed him, but I did.

  He showed us a pocket manual put out by the Air Ministry and the Canadian Legion War Services that detailed emergency landing procedures and airplane recovery. It was only thin; I read it cover to cover while you listened to him reminisce. Then we toured the hangars with the Spitfire and the Firefly and the de Havilland and the aluminum Grumman plane with its wings that looked exactly like a canoe, and I tried to learn all their names because I wanted so much to share this interest of yours.

  I quizzed you about that booklet, asked you if there was a companion to it with guidelines for saving the pilots. No, you said. You said it wasn’t that a pilot’s life was worth less than a Hurricane but there was sometimes a chance the plane would be found, could be repaired, or parts salvaged and re-used. There was never a chance for the pilot.

  When the museum closed we pooled our change and treated ourselves to dinner at a sports bar. I don’t remember but I assume we ordered a platter of buffalo wings with celery and blue cheese dip and a pitcher to share. We must have shared a second pitcher too; when you asked me what I dreamed of I told you: a child. But even I could never have imagined Grace’s squinty left eye, her cowlick, her tiny fingers that grew into sticky hands always reaching for ours.

  IV: TO THE NEXT OCCUPANT, BED 2, WARD B

  This is for you, this Easter lily, for your empty bedside table. You’ve been allocated this bed, beside the window, at the end of the row, just as I was. You may not realize for a few days how lucky you are - but you can turn your face away from the other patients and that long, beige hallway with its locked door.

  Outside there is a maple tree, the river. Spring is coming, soon you’ll see the tiny red buds and then the bright green leaves. You’ll hear a riffle when the ice melts, smell the tannin in the water, the sap in the tree as it rises and falls. That’s all you get - a view of a single maple and the sound of the spring run-off. But you have the best view on this ward. Hold on to this thought.

  I hope you won’t be woken by howls of anguish, as I was. It took me hours to understand I was making that terrifying noise. Only twice before have I cried like that. The first time was the day my toddler and I found our missing cat in the middle of the street, not twelve yards from our front door. The muted mewing coming from a mess of rotting leaves confused me until I got close enough to see what it really was.

  It was my wailing that frightened my husband outside, where he found me covering my daughter’s eyes with one hand, and with the other trying to gather bones, fur, blood too stuck to the road to be moved. When he rang the vet she said it would take her an hour to reach us. I couldn’t bear to watch, or listen to the pitiful whimpering Milo made as he died, breath by breath, but it was Grant who was brave enough to back our car down the driveway.

  When he’d done what I couldn’t, he hosed down the street, dug a grave in the back garden and we planted it with crocus bulbs. The late October sun softened the sharp edges of his face at first, but as the afternoon shadows lengthened and he drank his way into a forty-pounder of rye, that same sun aged him. I can still feel that light, weak and thin.

  You will get well.

  You’ll never again buy pine-scented disinfectant and you may have nightmares about being locked on this ward, although recollections of your first days here will be vague. You’ll have to experiment with various cocktails of drugs until o
ne of them works, as much as it ever will, and you’ll get tired of telling and retelling your story in talk therapy sessions until it feels like something that might once have happened to someone else. Your heart may never fully heal but, like a broken bone, it can mend, and that has to be good enough.

  V: DR. JOSEPH

  You were honest from our first meeting, and I thank you for that. You said a marriage can survive the death of a child, but many do not. Some couples, you said, recover enough to move on together. For months our friends assumed we had made it through the worst patch, were past the point of separation.

  I did not forgive him. I do not forgive him. If he hadn’t been tired, if he hadn’t taken the shortcut along the concession road beside the river and skidded at the curve. If it hadn’t been dark, been snowing so heavily-- If, if, if.

  You tell me I am holding on to the anger because I cannot bear to face the sorrow. You suggest that until I allow myself to feel sad, I’ll never truly recover. You’ve encouraged me to start by writing an account of that evening, the facts that I remember and because you are my last hope, I will try.

  VI: NOTE TO SELF

  You never know what you’ll learn over the course of your life. Names of antique aircraft and Disney princesses, how to paint a wall and repair a quilt. I stood behind the build up of windswept slabs at the river’s edge and through the squalls I watched the recovery operation. I learned that water absorbs the impact of the blast when dynamite is used to break a hole in the ice so the windows of a car, only feet below the surface, will not be blown out. Before the explosives there was a chainsaw, fishing augers, ice picks.

  The divers wore dry suits and full face masks and were tethered to the shore by a harness that looked just like the one in Grace’s booster seat. They used underwater flashlights, and I mapped their progress by the eerie blue glow.

  The hydro poles were moved so the heavy duty crane could reach the water. I do not understand how ice thick enough to support that machinery couldn’t support a car. When they finally got all the equipment organized it was so quick - only minutes until the car was being lifted out of the river and swung over onto the shore.

  A local reporter shouted against the wind, asking a policeman was alcohol or speeding suspected, and was told no one was willing to speculate on the exact cause of the accident until the car had been analyzed. Black ice, the blizzard, bad luck were all mentioned. That and - of course - the good news, the excellent news, that the driver had survived, swimming up to the surface as the car sank, inching himself over the ice to shore on his stomach, raising the alarm. He was suffering from severe hypothermia, but he was alive.

  Do the details matter? It was minus thirty-seven plus windchill. The water temperature was thirty-two point one eight. The marine diving unit reported visibility of five point six inches and an unexpectedly swift current. All these factors hampered the rescue efforts. I stood and watched for six hours before I understood that rescue referred only to the car, not to my baby, my Grace, belted into her seat in the back of the car with the child-proof doors.

  Stained

  She’d been fooled by the light, the full moon’s reflection on the snow bright enough to be sunrise, and in her haste to get out of the house unseen by the neighbours she’d pulled on the wrong boots. An old pair, with worn treads, making her pre-dawn walk treacherous. The calendar says mid-March but it’s still winter. Her breaths come out in white puffs and the sidewalk is icy so she walks slowly, head down, concentrating on each footstep rather than admiring the scenery because she is old enough to worry that a bad slip could result in a broken bone.

  No destination, no deadline, her only ambition is to stop the spinning thoughts that plagued her as she lay awake in bed, and to slip out before being seen by anyone staring blurry-eyed from a bathroom or kitchen window. She should buy a dog. Exercising a pet is an acceptable reason for an older woman to walk at odd times of the day. But she’s ready: her goal is a footpath that leads up the ski hill and along a gravel road to the Anglian cemetery where her mother is buried. If anyone asks.

  She’s not thinking of her mother right now, but her son, Don, whose birthday it is. It shouldn’t be so different from every other day, but it is. Gail forces herself to take a deep breath and look up. Hoarfrost has encrusted each branch, transforming grey poplars into antler coral. “Beautiful.” She tries to inject some feeling into the word, knows she’s failed.

  She trudges up the hill where, twenty-five years ago, she taught Don snow-plows over the Christmas holiday by holding him between her legs. After the New Year he graduated to stem christies and parallel turns and by March Break he wanted to join the racing group, out-skiing her in months. She’d understood this was parenting - letting go again and again, but she hadn’t realized how often she’d have to let go, or how far the definition of ‘letting go’ could stretch.

  She stops to catch her breath, pretends to admire the view. A single nod towards spring, some holes in the river have opened and re-frozen several times this week. The open water is black, and rising mist wreathes upwards, like smoke from a smouldering campfire. It should be mesmerizing, an Ansel Adams-like tableau. She waits for the beauty of the scene to touch her, until she feels the cold working its way through her coat and up through her boots.

  She starts to plod on, when a movement in her peripheral vision makes her pause, lift her head. A brief impression of a blood brown sailing ship, listing towards the ski hill. A series of masts extending towards her, their tendrils of sail clinging like the last of the oak leaves to grey branches. Just the idea and then it’s gone again, hidden by a sudden fog but it was so close to shore it could have touched her and she backs away, stumbling, falling.

  She pushes herself up, brushes off the snow, and peers into the silence where she saw the ship.

  Nothing.

  But it must be there. Waiting.

  She’s read of the ships that reached the shores of Alaska and B. C. from Japan, years after the tsunami. But this one? Dredged up from the Bermuda triangle by a current, it could have slipped between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, then along the St. Lawrence River rounding the Gaspé Peninsula, passing Quebec, passing Montreal, gliding into the Outaouais, the Rivere du Nord, up the Ottawa.

  Gail maps the route in her mind, thinking of all the cities and towns and settlements those waterways pass. Someone would have seen the ship before she did. And the hydroelectric dams, the locks, the sluices. It’s not improbable, that journey, it’s impossible.

  But she saw…

  She saw something.

  At a sharp noise she steps back, but it’s only the crackle of birch branches in the cold, followed by a thud of snow. She waits, shivering, for the fog to clear and the sun to cast more light, but still there’s nothing. Could a boat have moved on so quickly, so quietly? Gail makes her way back down the ski hill to the edge of the river. Deep blue ice, not water, and no sign of anything having cut its way through, only the weeks old tracks of a lone cross-country skier, two white lines bisecting the darkness.

  There’s no path beside the river, only a few footprints - dog or wolf - and the snow is deeper. She falls through the crust with each step, but forges on, round the rocky point and along to the bay with its cluster of shuttered summer cottages. In places the wind has pushed away enough snow to reveal the colourless sand beneath.

  Still no sign of… the pirate ship is how she is thinking of it. She expects it to loom up at any moment. At the stream past Wicker’s boathouse she stops. Water is moving beneath the frozen varnish and she doesn’t trust it. Instead she goes inshore, back into the woods, to cross the stream where it narrows up the escarpment.

  It’s only when she finds an overturned blue bin, its contents spilling onto the road - Tim Horton’s coffee cups, menus from the highway’s pizza place, baked bean and tuna tins - that she realizes she’s on Jim Anderson’s property. If there’s a lane out to the highway it hasn’t been plowed or shovelled all winter.
She walks past rusted vehicles, a pickup and two cars. One, devoid of a roof, is host to a scrawny bush, its leafless branches clawing up towards the sky.

  She looks at the naked house, no siding over the insulation board, and a tacked on porch of bare plywood perched on cement blocks. When she notices Jim sitting on the porch, she raises a blue-gloved hand in greeting, and he nods in return. She hesitates, torn between turning around to go back or cutting through his yard to carry on. She pulls back her shoulders. Why should she care what the town’s misfit thinks of her? And yet she can’t now walk by without stopping a moment to be polite.

  “Good morning, Jim.” She looks directly into his eyes, avoiding the brick-red birthmark that colours his face, from neck to forehead. “I see you’re a fellow early riser.”

  “Just got in,” he says, rolling a cigarette. “Last smoke before bed.” He lights a match, tosses it into a fire pit in the centre of the porch.

  “Just got in? Are you working nights?” She can’t imagine where. She didn’t think he’d worked since High School, when he was a caddy at the golf club with Don. There was a car crash and he was badly injured. Months in the Ottawa hospital, years of physical rehab and, she understands, a life of disability cheques.

  “Working?” He says the word slowly as if unsure how to work his tongue around the unfamiliar sound. “No. Out and about. You know.”

  She doesn’t know. She doesn’t have any idea what one would do ‘out and about’ in their small town after eleven o’clock at night when the sports bar and Tim Hortons both close. The closest twenty-four-hour trucker’s tavern is thirty kilometres up the highway and Jim doesn’t own a working vehicle, only those bits and pieces rusting away in the yard. She was aware he kept different hours to most of the community but she’s never before wondered how.