This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  ***

  When Gina was discharged from the clinic, I had her home before the kids finished school. Anna was nine and David was five, so I’d booked a couple of days off to take care of them while Gina kept to her room and rested. She wouldn’t let the kids see her without her wide-lensed sunglasses on. I told them not to worry, their mom had an eye infection but she’d be better soon.

  That night, I bathed her sutures with warm salt water to prevent encrusted blood from sealing her eyes shut. In the morning, the bruises were worse than anything either of us had expected, based on the post-op photos of other patients the surgeon showed us: her face looked as though it had been badly beaten. By the time Ben came home ten days later, the bruises had faded enough for makeup to cover them. Gina called me the next day and said Ben hadn’t mentioned anything, good or bad, about her looks; but he’d been very affectionate with her, so she thought that the operation had done the trick.

  I don’t think she has looked the same since. The puffy bags underneath each eye have disappeared, for the most part; but her left lid pulls up at the outer corner as if it is being pinched, and the eye looks smaller compared to the still-round shape of the right. She seems to have an intractable one-eyed squint. James said he didn’t really know what I meant, when I asked him if he noticed, but every time I see Gina I think she looks like Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein.

  ***

  Early in our marriage, I thought that James might have been better matched with someone like Gina. She skied, she played volleyball, she was decent at tennis. She doesn’t do any of those things anymore, but had she been with James, who’d taken his health and physique seriously for most of his life, maybe they would have encouraged each other. Maybe James’s legs wouldn’t have atrophied after he stopped lifting weights and jogging. Maybe he wouldn’t have needed a hobby farm to fill his days.

  I’d been in that hospital one other time, long before that night. When I was thirteen, on a school ski trip, I suffered a bad leg break, a spiral fracture. My right tibia twisted as it cracked. Friends and teachers soon found me, but I lay there between moguls for close to two hours, waiting for the busy rescue team to arrive with a sled. I don’t remember the pain as much as confusion and immobility, the sensation that my back was frozen to the ground like a tongue on a cold metal pole. Voices were floating above me, telling me not to move (as if I could!), asking question after question to keep me talking and conscious: “Where were you born? How many brothers or sisters do you have? What are your hobbies? Tell me where you live, what your address is. What route do you take to get to school? Do you ride a bicycle in the summer? What’s your favourite book? Movie? Dessert? If you could have a big bowl of ice cream, what flavour would you choose?” It wasn’t often that I was surrounded by a group of people paying this much attention to me. I thought carefully about each question as if I were taking an exam — as if they were testing me to see if I met their standards, to determine if I was worth saving or not.

  ***

  “Ben’s been promoted again.”

  “That’s great, isn’t it?”

  “No! We don’t need the money. It just means he’ll be home even less than he is now. He’s not even doing the check-in with me during the day anymore.”

  “Sounds like Ted in his last year of med school. I hardly saw him. And he definitely didn’t check in with me.”

  “At least you had your job, and your friends. I have to stay home 24/7 with the kids. His kids. I hate my life.”

  “Come on, Gina. You wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s what you always said.”

  “Children screw everything up. Ben and I were fine, before I had Anna and David. You just don’t feel the same way about each other, after kids.”

  ***

  When Gina was fifteen, she started smoking in the basement at night after our parents fell asleep. When she came upstairs, I smelled cigarettes on her clothes. “If you tell,” she said, “Dad won’t believe you. Mom, either. She doesn’t even like you.”

  I didn’t refute what Gina had said. But I didn’t tell my parents about her cigarettes, either. A few years later, when I started smoking in the basement myself, I thought again about the night of my sister’s taunt, and I became determined that my mother’s coolness, her limited level of affection, would not undo me. By the time she died, I had come to feel exactly the same way toward my mother as she seemed to feel toward me.

  For some time afterward, in part because of what had killed her, I used blood clichés to describe her to new friends who asked what my mother had been like. She was cold-blooded. You can’t get blood from a stone. There was always bad blood between us. Blood isn’t always thicker than water.

  My mother said to me once, “You can’t know what is inside of my head, Maslen,” and I thought she meant that I wasn’t as smart as I seemed to think I was. Now I realize she was being truthful, and precise.

  Sometimes it is necessary to forget in order to remember a person.

  ***

  Perhaps a baby will be Tony’s means of forgetting himself. Maybe he will name his baby James, or Jamie, if it’s a girl. Was that why he changed his mind, at his age, about having children — did James’s death have that effect on him? I know this is pointless, this questioning of Tony’s motivation. None of that matters now. Besides, I don’t need any more proof that people change their minds about things, about major, life-altering things, all of the time.

  Tony told me that James would never deliberately endanger himself. But he wouldn’t necessarily tell me the truth, either.

  One day, maybe after another few months pass, Tony will find that he is severed from James and their shared past. He will also realize, on the same day, that he had no choice but to cut me out of his world, too. We won’t see each other again, and Tony will rarely look for the missing compartments where he kept his old friends. From that point forward, Tony will carry on building his new self, creating newer versions that Kathleen will continue to know for the rest of their lives together, the father that their children will know and hear stories about and remember at family birthday parties and beyond, long after Tony is gone. The way I remember Josh, and my mother; the way I will eventually remember James.

  thirteen

  One recurring dream I had about Josh after James died was so realistic I could feel the tautness of his face when my hand touched his cheekbones. I’d gone to his grandmother’s house, and there was a car in the driveway with a sign that said, “Car for Sale: $495.” It wasn’t his Datsun 240z, the green one we’d buzzed around Toronto in, but a black sedan. When he opened the front door of the house and told me he was leaving to travel the world, I told him I couldn’t stand not knowing when I’d see him again. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye and promised he’d come back. But then we were in a hospital, and he was in a private room waiting for test results. He was having severe abdominal pain and was being given expensive bottles of Scotch to drink, to control it. I chased a nurse down the hall asking what was wrong with him. “I demand to be heard! This is unacceptable! I am like family!” I was shouting and running after her until a pair of doctors held out their arms to stop me when I reached them.

  Suddenly I was back in his hospital room, or in the lobby of a hotel that was also his room — it was a public space, anyhow. He was in a blue chair and I was sitting on his lap, straddling him, my legs threaded under the arms where he rested his elbows, my hands clasped behind his neck. I was trying to talk to him about his medications, and he touched my nipple. He looked up at me and said, “Okay, it’s time,” and we started to kiss. His lips were so full and soft and then he was inside me and it was wonderful and wet and he filled me with his hard-soft self and we were cuddling and I clung tight and he said he had to go, he was going to a friend’s wedding and no, I couldn’t go with him, he already had a date.

  ***

  The weekend I went with James to his father’s house for a family talk about safety — about our con
cerns that there was no one there to keep an eye on him — the front door was locked and no one answered our knocks. We found Lou in the back yard, trimming a tree. James convinced him to come into the house.

  I made sandwiches while James began the conversation. “Dad, come on. Be reasonable,” James argued. He was losing patience already. “Dad, when we got here, were you or were you not standing on a ladder that was leaning against that dying oak tree behind the house?” “I was,” said Lou. “And did you have a chainsaw in your hand?” “I did,” said Lou. “And was it on?” “It was.” “I rest my case.”

  ***

  James was the end of his bloodline. His father wasn’t shy about telling me I should get pregnant before it was too late. If James didn’t have a child with me, there would be no life after death for either of them. “I’m a practical man, Maslen dear,” Lou told me. “I don’t expect to live on in heaven any more than I believe in UFOs. We’re here, then we’re not. But passing the genes on — that’s a kind of immortality. Is that too much to ask?” “If that’s what matters,” I suggested, “then one of you boys can donate to a sperm bank.” And Lou laughed! Not James, but Lou.

  James became irritated by the rapport I developed with Lou. At first he’d been relieved that I didn’t find Lou’s personality difficult, as his ex-wife, Andrea, had. Gradually, though my visits to his father alleviated James’s guilt about not going very often himself, he became less appreciative; and then, I think, he became jealous. I think James was angry that Lou hadn’t been a person he could talk to openly, the way Lou talked to me. He wouldn’t have said so, but he probably saw it as a betrayal by both of us.

  ***

  Lou had been a salesman his whole working life. He travelled the province for decades, selling medical equipment to hospitals and clinics, and enjoyed the deference people gave him because of his association with doctors. When his gait worsened, I hunted for a cane that Lou wouldn’t find as embarrassing to use as the generic aluminum model with black foam covering the curved handle and a beige rubber stopper on its end. Something stylish. I’d once seen a man in a doctor’s office carry a cane made to resemble a hammer, and he told me, when I admired it, that he’d made it himself from a pattern. With my skill set, that was out of the question. But I found a website that sold customized canes, and ordered one.

  When the cane arrived it was more attractive than it had looked in the digital catalogue. It was made of a single piece of wood with a whorled grain, stained a golden oak with a clear, glossy varnish. From the base to the top, it widened into the shape of a large handsaw, except the teeth were missing. The handle had carved finger-holds to mimic a saw’s grip, and it was painted black. The rubber tip was black, too, and it finished the whole thing off like the period below a question mark.

  Lou looked up at me from the chair in his room, where he sat to do crossword puzzles most days after lunch. I held the cane out to him and he stood, unsteadily, to accept it. When he understood what I’d done, he took my hand and held it to his cheek. We stayed that way until his arm started to tremble. “It’s from both of us, Lou.” “You are a treasure, Miss Maslen,” he said.

  ***

  — I still dream about you, Josh.

  — You do, Mazzie?

  — Uh huh. I do.

  — I must be pretty special then.

  — In your dreams, buddy.

  — No, really. Tell me about your dreams. How old are we?

  — Oh, you’re about forty, I’d say.

  — Are we happy?

  — We drink tea and talk.

  — That’s all?

  — No, not all.

  — I didn’t think so.

  — But mostly. Mostly tea. And talk.

  — And we’re happy.

  — Yes. We’re happy. We are very happy, Josh.

  ***

  I knew when he left that Ted didn’t want me anymore, but for some reason I imagined he’d stay a bachelor. I imagined him flirting and flitting from woman to woman as the roaming, proverbial moth-attracting flame he’d fashioned himself to be before he met me. I suppose I wanted to believe he couldn’t love anyone else the way he’d loved me.

  In a new Facebook photo album he created, called Trip to Venice, there is a picture of Ted in a group of tourists drinking wine on a patio: he is leaning over to put his arm around a woman at the next table, as I’d have expected of him. In another he is standing next to a short, dark-haired, unhappy-looking woman in a low-cut T-shirt that shows off her ample cleavage. Her arms are crossed in front of her, but Ted’s left hand is resting loosely at her hip, and I could see that he was wearing a ring. I smiled when my eye caught it and said, out loud, “Good for you!”

  I opened a private Message box. “Did I see a wedding ring in one of your pictures?” The next day, I saw that he changed his “Relationship Status” to “Married.”

  I’m not envious of Ted’s wife; I’m really not. But I am curious about his life, about the choices he made and their consequences. Isn’t that interesting to everyone, comparing real life to the life we imagined we’d be living?

  ***

  Perhaps there’s no telling why we stop loving someone. Why being with a person you love feels like life itself, until it doesn’t. Or why we keep a select few buried in us like stars, alive because we are alive. The soot from the fiery grief that guts you when they leave this world (or, still living, leave you) coats and dulls the glint of them. It unmoors you, the absence of the light, and it breaks time into jagged pieces that take more energy than you can find to put back together, to make a normal moment. To take a normal breath.

  I imagine that relief comes when the spark emerges again, when it enlarges, when it warms every bit of you. I imagine it will feel like frostbitten limbs beginning to thaw — the thickness of those prickly stabs of pain in your fingertips, telling you all will be well, all will be well, even if it won’t.

  Well after I fell in love with Ted, I accepted that I’d lost Josh. It wasn’t mourning I went through, then; mourning Josh was what I had done each time he left for another new start. I knew the shape of that sorrow. It was a triangle, it was a shard of glass scraping against the viscera of the hollow that was myself. I’d been so wrapped up in Ted’s love, and Josh’s disappearance had seemed so gradual, that it was nearly painless.

  ***

  For a long time, I thought what Ted did to me was selfish, and that I made it too easy for him to leave me behind. But I eventually believed that Ted had a right to go, to reinvent himself, to start over, if that was what his heart was telling him to do.

  It must have been difficult for Ted, leaving me. Not deciding to go; I’ve never understood people who can’t make up their minds, and Ted was not one of them anyway. What would have been hard for him was living in the space between decision and action. He had been in the process of leaving me for some time, though I didn’t know it. How free he must have felt, packing up and driving away. Making the choice to keep making choices.

  ***

  Ted posted some more photographs and created new albums in his Facebook account:

  – Growing Up

  – Europe

  – Medical School Graduation

  – Morocco

  – The Kids

  Children. So there were replicas of his DNA out there. The little girl he’d always wanted. And a boy, too. Birthday parties, Christmas mornings, baseball games. He’d kept that wish, then, to have a family. With someone new. Someone who took his name and wore a gown. I bet he ran on the beach in his tux on his wedding day, too.

  ***

  Before I stopped thinking about Josh, I expected to see his face in magazines at the doctor’s office, at Gina’s house, in the grocery store line up. I anticipated finding those glinting green eyes looking back at me, and I imagined the letters I’d write to him again. I’d fill them with stories about the travelling I was doing for my job: being strip-searched behind curtains by a woman at the airport in Dhaka; riding in the green Vo
lkswagen Beetle taxicabs driven by unlicensed thugs in Mexico City, because I didn’t know enough my first time there to avoid them. And I’d ask about his travels, his career, his girlfriends. I’d say “Let’s get together when you’re back in town!” and sign it the usual way, “Love, Mazzie,” as if no time had passed at all.

  ***

  My last trip for the language school was to Venezuela. I went there to negotiate a contract with the continuing education director, who wanted to develop an ESL program like ours for their international business students. Nancy was going to go, but she came down with the flu and so it fell to me, as the associate registrar, to replace her.

  Usually I fall asleep quickly on airplanes, lulled by the hum of the engines, but sleep wasn’t easy for me on that red-eye flight. The humid night air that hit me on the Tarmac in Caracas induced an instant migraine. I was so disoriented that I don’t know how I found a taxi to take me to the hotel compound, a few miles from the airport. Halfway there, the driver began to speak to me very quickly, in Spanish, while looking in his rear-view mirror at vehicles following behind. “What’s wrong?” I asked, and he suddenly braked hard. “Trouble,” he said, pointing to men standing in the road up ahead. “Passports.” This is it, I thought. Something is going to happen to me here.

  And then I saw the soldiers: three armed men in full camouflage, aiming machine guns at the car, heavy ammunition belts hanging from their hips. They walked quickly. I handed over my passport, as ordered. I wasn’t afraid; at that time, I didn’t care if they shot me dead. Whatever was going to happen, whatever the story turned out to be, there was no one at home anymore who held me in his heart, or missed me, or was even thinking about me.