Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

  “Don’t bother. They do what they want. Go where they want. They won’t find the time. And he’s such a good dog. Look at him.”

  “I can see that.”

  “The happiest boy in the world,” he said, closing his eyes and resting for a minute.

  The women came back into the room then. The quiet one, Jill, had clearly been crying. Joyce got up to leave, but George was blocking her way.

  “There’s that damn dog again,” she said. “Dad, do you hear me? Look at the great paintings you’ve made. Forget the dog.”

  “He’s a good dog,” Isaiah said, opening his eyes and glaring at his daughter with more energy than Joyce would have thought he had.

  “I told you. I told you, George. Let him have it if he wants it,” Jill said.

  “If you hadn’t brought the magazines in the first place, his mind wouldn’t be filled with sentimental trash.”

  Joyce couldn’t leave gracefully. She would have to call attention to herself to clear a path between the sisters.

  “Enough,” Savannah said to her sisters who were still bickering. “Can’t we have some dignity here? This person wants to leave.” She gestured towards Joyce.

  “She said she’d bring me a frame,” Isaiah said.

  “Is that true?” George said, ready to turn her anger on Joyce.

  “Why don’t we talk about it outside,” Joyce said. But George wasn’t prepared to leave the room to her two sisters.

  “Oh, I don’t care anymore. Frame whatever you want.”

  Even from the hall, Joyce could still hear the sisters’ voices, kept low now, but clearly irritated and bristling against each other. She wondered about the women missing from the vigil: the mothers who had all been intimate with this man, who had probably loved this man, and had given birth to these women who couldn’t stand to be in the same room.

  Joyce poked her head into the room next door, but saw that the woman there had a visitor sitting near the foot of the bed knitting something pink and frothy. Each room was like a person’s hometown, full of mementos, wedding photographs taken during the war, children, grandchildren in sudden digital sharpness, books and crossword puzzles, until things had progressed too far for that. Then slippers and bathrobes vanished, clothes disappeared from the closet, belongings were swept away by relatives, the room pared down. Families often sat in vigil in bare rooms, all the photos gone. Perhaps it was too difficult for them to be reminded of a person’s life at the moment when they had to begin to let go. She understood this because she couldn’t bear to look at photos of Ruth as a child, the three of them in happier times. Colin had given her a box of negatives, but she hadn’t been able to have them developed.

  She went to the sunroom, usually empty in the winter, and looked out at the frozen river in the dusk. Beyond the ice, a narrow slit of black was opening, so cold and fathomless it made her shiver. She sat for a few minutes wondering if anyone had ever really been hers. Ferrall certainly hadn’t been hers. She could barely remember his body, the body that had once seemed more real to her than all the accumulations of her life. And Ruth had punished her by shrinking her body so that it didn’t look very different from the bodies of the patients she tended here, so attentively. People she might meet only once or twice, before they vanished completely.

  Joyce remembered holding Ruth when she was a newborn, and losing herself in the timelessness, the hush of loving her, body to body. Nothing more was needed.

  Before she went home, she checked in on Isaiah again. His daughters were still there and Jill was framing the picture of the dog. She must have had the frame all along.

  George was feeding her father ice cream, but was leaving very little time between spoonfuls. Joyce could tell she’d never been around babies and had no talent for reading the rhythm of simple needs. He started to choke, deep hollow-sounding expulsions punctuated with little gulps. She helped George pull him forward, supporting his neck with her left hand. There was very little strength in him. The coughing exhausted him and he lay his head against Joyce’s shoulder and nestled in quite naturally. His body was very warm and when they lowered him back to the bed, she shivered a little with the loss of his heat. Why was it that people seemed most alive when they would soon be gone? He smiled at her, a little of the rake left, and she laughed. A private joke between them.

  When his daughters left to catch the doctor before he entered the room, he said, “Come here.”

  Joyce leaned closer. She had picked up some sense from the conflict in the room that there had always been another woman, and another after that. He spoke to her almost under his breath, and she hoped he wasn’t going to act out of habit.

  “Is there any way you could spirit me away from here?” he asked. She was struck by his choice of words.

  “I don’t have my wallet, or my driver’s licence. I don’t know where they put my pants,” he said.

  “It’s pretty cold out today. And the roads are icy,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Would tomorrow be better?”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” she said. One of these days, he would be gone.

  “I have to take my dog with me.”

  “That’s the great thing about dogs. They’ll follow you anywhere.”

  “He’s such a good boy,” Isaiah said, concentrating on the photo of the dog then, cajoling, soothing, caressing in a voice too low to make out. Joyce knew she was leaving him in good company.

  SHE CALLED RUTH THAT NIGHT. Colin answered, sounding in good humour.

  “Joyce, we’re playing music. Yasmin and Doug are here. Why don’t you come over? And bring your flute.”

  This quality of forgetfulness, of resilience, had been aggravating when they were together. Now she recognized it as his particular talent for living. But she couldn’t come over. Most of their friends had fallen away from her life. She had grown used to being alone and would have become disoriented by revisiting what had gone on without her.

  Once she stood inside the doorway of her former apartment waiting for Ruth to come to the door. She had arranged a visit with her daughter, a formal request to Colin that had obviously not been agreed to by Ruth. She had heard the two of them talking urgently, too low to hear what was being said. As she had waited, she avoided looking too far into the place that had been her home. At her feet had been a new throw rug, orange and green, a colour combination she never would have chosen.

  Lifting her eyes, she caught sight of a familiar sleeve, steel-blue with a band of Inuit embroidery, the two-part layered parka she had been wearing the New Year’s Eve she had met Ferrall. She felt a bit light-headed, her heart giving two hard knocks against her chest wall as though it wanted to escape her and live again in this apartment, beat within that warm confines of that coat she had abandoned, along with her life. She was sure it must still be stained with the spots of blood from the cut above her eye, the cut Ferrall had tended that night she had become separated from her family on Parliament Hill. She had once left those blood spots there purposefully, brazenly. Winter would be coming soon, she had realized, and she would have to make a decision about whether or not to reclaim that coat.

  Finally, she had not, and found another parka at the second-hand store. She was wearing someone else’s history through the first winter she was spending alone. She could see its plum-coloured sleeve on a hook near the door as she talked with Colin on the telephone.

  “Joyce?” he asked, and she realized that she hadn’t answered him.

  “Thanks for the invitation, but I just need to talk to Ruth for a minute.”

  Ruth took a long time to answer the phone and Joyce could hear the wariness in her voice.

  “Are you finished dinner?” Joyce asked.

  “Yes, Mom. I ate a half a side of beef, two suckling pigs and a whole apple pie.”

  Joyce laughed, but Ruth hadn’t meant to be funny, only sarcastic. She had started eating again, had quickly regained her former weight. Joyce’s absence had allowed her to give up her vigilance
, but she was still angry.

  “I was thinking of you today. I saw a little boy stamping in the slush with new red boots, rain boots for spring. And I remembered that night you wanted to be tucked into bed with your boot. It was new and had a cartoon figure up near the brim. Bugs Bunny, I think.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I remember like it was yesterday.”

  “So, you called to reminisce about my childhood wardrobe?”

  “No. I wanted to tell you that I’m always thinking about you. I miss you.”

  “That was your choice, your doing. Don’t blame me.”

  Hearing her resistance and lack of trust, Joyce thought, good, she’s not hardened. She hasn’t turned and walked away.

  WHEN SHE NEXT ARRIVED at the hospice, the two nurses on duty were moving quickly. The usual timeless quality was suspended because two patients were actively dying, and the hospice tried to make sure that they wouldn’t be alone during this time. Isaiah was one of them and she went immediately to his room.

  His breathing was strange, as though the automatic function had been turned off. Many people pulled inside themselves when this hard part began, but Isaiah spoke softly, as though in a dream.

  “Blue … heart of blue … glowing,” he said, so softly Joyce had to lean close to make out the words. Joyce couldn’t tell if he knew anyone was there. She had been told that the daughters were on their way. This last vigil would be very painful for them and perhaps they were putting it off as long as they could. His eyes were closed. He might have been lying here whispering to himself for a long time. Colours, all colours, a pulsing generous spectrum was what she hoped for him.

  She asked if there was anything she could do. Did he want company until his daughters arrived? She wanted him to hear her voice, know he wasn’t on his own. Hearing was the last sense to go.

  “My arm … so cold … ”

  She touched his arm, where the bruised stain of pooled blood had appeared since the last time she had been here, but his arm and hand felt warm.

  He stopped speaking and fell deeper into himself and Joyce continued to sit with him and held his hand in the cup of her hand. Outside the window, winter was melting. The sun was lifting higher every day and a weak shaft of it angled across the foot of the bed. Something was different about the room. It already felt empty and then she realized why. His paintings had been taken down from the walls, but the watercolour paintings had not yet been returned to their hooks.

  Then, the sun set, light suddenly fading, and shadows stood patiently in the corners, waiting to be asked to step forward into the room. Over the next half hour the walls, the bed, the empty shelves suddenly turned grey. She could hear a drip outside the window onto the flagstone path, irregular, three beats close together, then two spaced. A pause, then two beats again. No rhythm, a randomness. Yet Isaiah’s breathing had a distinct pattern. His chest would rise as his breaths intensified, reaching a depth and then beginning to recede, breath by breath, until they stopped. She waited and after 30 seconds or so, a shallow breath would be taken again, each one even, although deeper than the last, until the largest deepest breath was taken again. This pattern had a name, Cheyne-Stokes breathing, and it could go on for an hour, or a day, or several days, until that shallow breath did not reassert itself in his chest and he would be finally still.

  She closed her eyes and listened and it was like sleeping in a tent close to the sea. Like she was back with Colin and Ruth on the island of Grand Manan, listening to the waves as they lay in their little tent on a cliff above a herring weir. And then, when the tide was finally high, the sound of whales breathing in the middle of the night, surfacing and gently receding as they fed on the small fish milling about at the dark mouth of the weir. Such huge, calm breaths, with all the time in the world between them. Colin had put his arm over her and she held his hand against her heart, both too moved to speak. Ruth slept through it and they let her. This was something private between them

  She opened her eyes then and watched Isaiah sleep. His daughters would be here soon and she would never see him again. But she knew from her own losses that there would be no completion even if she stayed in the room with him. He was rising and easing below the surface naturally, without effort now. His eyes seemed to be spaced more widely, there were shimmery movements beneath the pale lids, his mouth thinning and widening like the mild dreamy face of a fish. This wasn’t exactly sleep, just as a newborn doesn’t exactly sleep. Gently, between being here and being nowhere, she felt herself travelling with him and understood that she wasn’t holding his hand any longer; he was holding hers.

  Blood Secrets

  “THERE’S A REASON I LOOK LIKE MY DOG,” Dulcie said. “But I only figured out why after many years.”

  She was at a neighbourhood party, in the kitchen with women her own age. The kitchen had been recently renovated and they had been given the tour by the much younger owner to admire the changes, but stayed on after the hostess left for the living room where the younger crowd and men had gathered. The colour scheme was avocado and gold, just like the kitchens of her teenaged years, but with a brass space-aged hood for the stove and brushed chrome faucets. The sink was white enamel like the old sink at Graham’s mother’s farm. It was the sink that made her think of telling her dog story.

  “Emma’s a beauty, not like those stinky Labs. You could do worse,” her friend, Kristin, said.

  Her dog, Emma, was an unlikely choice for a small house in the suburbs, being a full-sized collie bred to run long distances herding sheep on foggy mountainsides. She had a flowing black coat, with the same wings of white streaming from her temples as Dulcie. They both had long sad faces.

  “Labs are bad, all that shedding and farting and bad manners. If they were men, we wouldn’t let them in the house,” said a woman with short spiky grey hair. Dulcie didn’t know her.

  “Wait a minute, I want to know. Why do you look like your dog?” Kristin asked.

  “Graham wanted a collie because he had one when he was a boy. He loved that dog,” Dulcie said.

  “Okay. I’m not getting it. What’s the connection?”

  Dulcie pointed at her black hair and said, “He chose me because I looked like his childhood dog.” And everyone laughed.

  “The most Freudian part of it is that she was named ‘Ring’.” She held out her left hand with the wedding ring.

  Their laughter must have drawn one of the men into the kitchen, because suddenly Dulcie heard a deep voice behind her.

  “When he calls you a bitch, it’s a compliment.”

  The women closed the circle and ignored him and he left with a fresh bottle of beer from one of the coolers at their feet.

  “Honestly, we’re not safe anywhere,” the woman said who’d made the comment about Labs. Dulcie didn’t mind. She’d told this story before and there was usually someone recently divorced who couldn’t resist the same barb. Telling this story in the face of midlife cynicism was what gave it irony, an edge, a sense of how far they had come since those first days.

  Later in the summer, she spent a weekend with many of the same women, at a cottage where they discussed a book and saw a movie based on the book. The end of summer had made them giddy, a little hysterical to burn themselves out on laughter. The book was A Thousand Acres, which they loved, but they turned the movie off around midnight in favour of skinny-dipping in the cooling lake. Soon, they would feel that old reflex to get the kids ready for school, even though the kids were going soon or already gone from home. As they swam, the musty green smell of fresh water seemed to be breathing directly into their open mouths, warm mist floating above the cooling surface. They told funny stories about their husbands, laughing the way they once would have, as adolescents. But they hadn’t known each other as teenagers; they were mid-life friends, which gave them more freedom. Treading water, her breasts buoyant as they had been when she was a teenager, Dulcie took the dog story one step further. But it was still true.

 
; “I thought it was because I looked like his childhood dog, but I actually discovered that there was another female in Graham’s life during those formative years. Cosmo, the black milk cow. Every morning at 6:00 A.M., he’d lean his head against Cosmo’s flank and milk her as he sang Leonard Cohen songs to her. That’s how he wooed me too. He used to sing me to sleep.”

  “Would you rather be following in the steps of a dog or a cow?” someone said, treading water a ways off. It sounded like Carolyn, but she couldn’t be sure. The cold water was clipping their voices, collapsing their ribcages a little.

  “Depends. When Amanda was born, I was glad there had been a Cosmo girl before me. Graham taught me how to express my own milk. And I was desperate for relief in the hospital when my milk came in.” She remembered the night sweats through the first few nights after giving birth, and the blood rushing, in a hurry to be spent after nine months held at bay. Not a gentle easing warmth like the tailings of blood in her life now, blending effortlessly, silently, invisibly with this cooling lake. How alarming birth blood was the first time, richer, darker, thicker than menstrual blood. And the way her breasts throbbed with hot tension, relieved only by giving of herself in a way that was new and strange.

  “Ugh,” her friends said, all around her, like a halo of reaction coming at her out of the dark. “He didn’t, did he? Really?”

  Someone paddled closer, breaking into the conversation.

  “What? He called you a cow? He said you remind him of a cow?’

  Dulcie, recognizing the voice, knew that this woman had been unlucky in her own choice of husband.

  “I’m the one calling myself the cow. Remember those Jersey cow days? The mechanics are the same, only the scale is different. There’s worse things to be than an animal.”

  Through the years, she had always preferred to be out rambling, pushing a stroller through sleet and freezing rain. Later, she would squelch through mud with Emma along the river paths, once her children were in school. All this wandering and pushing through urban thickets, and thinking, thinking, thinking, suited Graham. Perhaps what her friends had asked her was true. The footsteps she had been following were circuitous, informed by instinct—animal tracks along water, meandering heavily on soft spring days for the sweetest grass, or following a scent of something quick and wild. She did step into the imprints of these animals, Ring and Cosmo, and was glad.