Her hair and her gown smell like sandalwood. Even her breath seems to smell sweet. The scent is so rich and relaxed that it cancels out the smell of flowers from bouquets around the room. Even the lilies are washed out.
“You never told me before that you like sandalwood. Or did you?” Luke asks.
“I think of the water buffalo sandals I bought for $2.98 at Orientique. That whole store smelled like sandalwood. It makes me think of my long hair and thin hips and being 19.”
“That was before my time,” he says, suddenly acutely aware of losing her. There was a time in his life when he didn’t know her and that time would come again soon.
“But whenever they come in to turn me in the middle of the night, I see the little candle and think of you lighting it for me. You’re here beside me and I’m so grateful. I’m just so happy I married you.”
He is sitting beside a bouquet of flowers, pink carnations piercing a damp block of green Styrofoam, dwarfed by swooping white lilies dropping their yellow pollen on his shoulder. Being so close to the lilies, their perfume snakes down his throat, irritating his lungs and making him cough. He gets up and goes into the bathroom to cup water in his hands to drink. The bright florescent light is too stark after the candlelit dimness of the bedside. There are the bright pink mouth swabs on sucker sticks, the pile of diapers, the bed pads folded neatly on the shelf. Impossible to ignore.
He moves back to her bedside to confront her. Later, when he understands better, he will regret his words.
“Dying was unnecessary. I know it and you know it.”
“Please,” Deirdre says weakly.
“For God’s sake, can’t you just tell me why?”
She watches him with a look on her face that is something like pity, but then he realizes that it is really the gaze of love when it’s new and wide open. He wonders if she has hit the button on her morphine pump surreptitiously. She’s half-smiling at him with such kind regard, her skin surprisingly rosy by the light turned down to almost nothing and the calm flickering of the candle.
He wants a reaction from her.
“So you prefer morphine to cancer treatment. Your father’s death was just a faster form of suicide.”
Deirdre closes her eyes. He’s hurt her and he’s immediately sorry and sits beside her again, holding her hand until her breathing tells him she’s slipped back into sleep.
THE NEXT MORNING, she asks him to turn off the air conditioning unit in her window although she’s hot to his touch. She tells him she likes to hear the way the day progresses out in the hospice’s garden. It’s June and the robins are ecstatic before dawn. Then the more moderate songbirds begin, chirping as they go about their foraging, along with the sounds of the city waking up. The metal clang of trucks pulling compartments open and closed, the soft roar of traffic blocks away. Then the sprinklers, a sound both dry and wet, like grasshoppers all leaping in unison forward, then back, then forward. The wind rising as the heat of the day builds, shaking all the birch and maple leaves, hollow cough of a basketball on pavement. Children in the garden playing while the adults visit a patient in one of the neighbouring rooms. In the afternoon, she hears the first cicada of the summer, she reaches for his hand and tries to describe it.
“A deep electric current. You feel it more than hear it,” she says. “When I was little, I thought that was God and Satan fighting it out in the trees.”
“Who won?” Luke asks her and she smiles, lacking the energy now to laugh.
“The Holy Ghost.”
“Well, the ghost always wins. The human condition.”
They hold each other’s gaze, in sync, and he starts to understand how time can slow down during perfect moments.
When Deirdre’s sleeping, he walks the hallways. The nurse tells him that hearing is the last sense to go. Senses close down one by one. It’s ominous, the way she describes to him the things she’s heard, as though the other senses are dimming.
Later she wakes up and tells him she heard her father’s voice out in the garden. He was talking about fishing lines and lures, teaching Zoe how to cast out in the river, beyond the reeds at the end of the garden.
“It was nice. He was being a grandfather. Encouraging Zoe. ‘Just reel it in and try again. Like this.’ So patient. He never really had a chance to be a grandfather to her and I’m sad for him.”
“Did he do that for you and your brother when you were children?”
“No. There was always his illness buffeting us this way and that. Always this terrible thing hanging over us. I think he was too ashamed after that first suicide attempt to look us in the eye.”
“Well, you managed. You taught Zoe how to knit, how to ride a bicycle. He should have tried a little harder.” There it is again—his anger with no place to go. She looks away from him and says, “Poor sad soul. He lost everything.”
ANOTHER DAY, and he leans close to her ear.
“Zoe is coming in from Vancouver on the weekend,” he tells her, hoping that expectation will bring her back into the room.
“Oh, she doesn’t need to. She has a life of her own,” she says.
“She wants to be here. You’re her mother.” He catches the pleading in his voice, the old habit, and lets it go. “Zoe wants to be here.”
“She’s away. That’s good,” she says. “I don’t want her to worry about me.” She starts to doze again.
He remembers Zoe as a newborn, and one night he almost interrupted a scene of such tenderness, he’d turned quietly and went back to bed before she noticed. She was breastfeeding in the dark and he heard the soft vocalizing of Zoe, the uh, uh, uh, of a newborn as she drank, intertwined with a mother’s cooing, a soft wordless hymn of love and comfort. He should have realized all these years that nothing was more powerful than her desire to protect.
FIRST, SHE CAN’T BE TEMPTED by the soft furred flesh of a raspberry. Then the gentlest of cheese, warmed to the temperature of the body. The meats are long gone, then the vegetables. All the fruits, one by one, are given up. Sips of ginger ale, then of water, lose all importance to her.
He dips the pink swab in water and places it on her tongue. It smells of mint and slips like glycerin between her dry lips. Each time he does this, she is able to speak again. Just a word, the only word he needs to hear now. Their love has come full circle, surrounding them and cutting them off from their grown child, ,who sits in a plastic chair close to the foot of the bed. Zoe comes and goes, as Deirdre has wanted her to … He can’t imagine he’s ever been angry with her.
Luke speaks softly into Deirdre’s ear so that these words are for the two of them only.
“I know now. There are worse things that can happen than this,” he says, his hand gently touching her shoulder.
“Yes.”
“You’re safe.”
“Yes.”
“Home free.”
“Almost.”
Bare Bones
“THIS IS NOT ABOUT REVENGE,” Helen says. “But I’ve denied myself all these years, and for what?” She’s sitting on their bed, wrapped in a towel that has dried except for the chill held in the damp knot above her breasts.
It’s a rhetorical question he can’t possibly answer. He waits. Their future together teeters on a thin edge. He thinks of Ephram’s metronome. The further the silver weight is from the centre, the wider, more voluptuous the charged quiet between ticks. A sharp sound, metal on metal, like a bullet locking into the breach.
“I never denied you. I never froze you out,” he says. “You’re hardly a virgin.”
She ignores this and goes on as though he hasn’t said a thing.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Donny,” she says in a reasonable tone, but she doesn’t turn to meet his eyes. Gone is the uncertainty that he thought he could count on. The intimate use of his name reminds him just how personal this is. “But I was too young when I married you.”
He exhales. All-out war ahead. She’ll be sneaky about it, a guerrilla slipping out on her fora
ys. Seizing the high ground even as she’s down grovelling on her belly.
Then she says, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell you when it happens. It really has nothing to do with you. It’s all about Me, Me, Me.”
This is a sour echo of what he told her when she overheard him on the telephone. He must have wanted her to find out, he thinks now. He had felt a terrible fatigue as he listened to the woman’s voice on the phone, her secretive and needy voice. He always thought of her as the woman, even after he knew her name, Sandi, with an i she insisted, because he wanted to maintain the illusion that drew him to her, waifish, with her long blond hair straggling down to skinny points below her shoulder blades. She told him once that she never cut her hair, it just broke off and was shortening by the year. He first saw her browsing through strangely shaped literary magazines with stiff bright covers at the large newsstand on Rideau Street.
Helen came into the room, where he was sitting on the bed, dumped a load of laundry beside him and started folding. He was watching Helen, but the disconnect was too great, so he looked away. The woman on the phone picked up on some change, could tell even over the phone line that he wasn’t paying attention.
“I can hear your computer keys,” she said. “You’re answering your emails, aren’t you?”
“Not even close. I’m in the bedroom,” he said, regretting it right away. She had never seen his bedroom, or even the inside of his house. They had always met at her house while her children were at school. He had already seen her that afternoon. She had read him her poetry. Her voice rose and fell in a rhythmic unmusical way, and it seemed to him that she was trying to manufacture passion where none existed. He was vaguely disappointed and suddenly tired.
“Why do you torment me?” she said. This was the interpretation she had settled on over the last little while. That she would never get enough of him. She was pale and insubstantial, as though she ate nothing except things that sprouted in the dark. And he had felt powerful, with his red blood beating inside of her. But it was true. He had been impatient with the wheedling tone of her voice.
“Torment is your territory, not mine,” he said, as Helen stopped folding.
Later, he refused to discuss the details with Helen. The fact of it was enough and in a way he was glad things were out and over with. The woman had taken it better than Helen had. He did it by telephone, careful that Helen wasn’t in the house. The woman said she hadn’t expected anything else from him; he was a man after all. He suspected there would be poems for the next man to hear.
“Just what made her so irresistible?” Helen had asked. “Is she beautiful? Did you even think of me when you were with her?”
He refused to answer, having chosen the bare bones of his script and sticking to it. He expected tears, followed by a period of cool grief, then a return to their life together, but with more tender attention paid to one another. He hadn’t expected this, this tight way of keeping her emotions in check.
HE GETS UP and returns to the kitchen. He turns the burner back on beneath the pasta sauce he turned off when she came home from work, thinking that now, after a day apart, they would be able to talk about it. But he was wrong.
When she comes into the kitchen, she has nothing more to say. They look at each other blankly. Ephram is playing his violin in his room, something florid, intense and romantic—Corelli, for his upcoming exam. He knows one of them should be in there with him, counting out the beats. Their son’s timing is not impeccable and he gets flustered. Normally Helen would be sitting on his bed, speeding him up, slowing him down.
The pasta sauce is now bubbling on the stove, steaming up the kitchen window. This was the best he could come up with for this evening’s penance, a warm spicy smell and their glasses of red wine that stand on the counter untouched.
“He sounds better tonight,” she says.
“Every day around here is like an expensive Italian restaurant,” he says, hoping she will laugh, as she would have as recently as last week.
Instead, she exhales in a clipped way and asks, “You’re thinking romance?”
She returns to the thought he had hoped, futilely, that she had forgotten.
“It’s not romance I’m looking for,” she says. “Only men are stupid enough to think they’ll find romance at this age.”
“Maybe I’m not finished with romance,” he says. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
“So this is my fault?” Helen looks at him. She’s furious and he doesn’t want to rile her any more than he has.
“What are you looking for then?” he asks. He’s frustrated that the wine and the smell of garlic, rosemary, thyme hasn’t chased away the bad blood between them. “Do you want to be married or not?” he says, but he hates listening to himself, the blustering puffed-up male, the cuckold-to-be.
“That’s quite the statement coming from you,” Helen says. She turns towards the window, clears a small porthole with her hand to look out at the dark tangled branches of the apple tree growing close to the house. In spring, this tree offers handfuls of pink blossoms and in fall, armfuls of small inedible apples, as they sit at the table to eat. Her reflection is distorted, with condensation from the heated kitchen running down her face, as though she really is crying, but she’s steely.
“Helen, don’t do this.”
“I need to. It’s the only way for me. I’m sorry,” she says, turning back towards him, leaning against the counter.
“I want to,” she says finally, backing away from him, spilling her wine with her elbow. The deep red stain spreads along her side, ruining forever the pale blue of her blouse. She starts to unbutton even before she reaches the kitchen door. The glimpse of the fullness of her breasts pushed up by her bra on her thin breastbone makes him want to follow, but he knows better. He lets her go.
Only much later, still asleep in the dark stretch of predawn when she’s restless and troubled in her sleep, is he aware of her breast under his hand, her gown lifted. He moves over her as she sleeps and the way she opens her legs is not submission. Her body is hard and wily under him, hungry. She opens her mouth wide against his teeth and there is a fierce click of bone on bone.
THE NEXT DAY, he comes upstairs from his office on the main floor of the house to watch her pin up her hair. When she was young, she was a strawberry blonde, but now she tames a thick lion’s mane of vivid red, honey gold and startling silver into a complicated weave of a braid, ending with a tiny tail that brushes the back of her neck. This tiny tail is tucked under and pinned up as though she’s hiding her animal nature beneath this demure, competent exterior. When he first met her, he loved lying on the bed watching her undergo her transformations from his untamed lover into a nurse. He can’t remember the last time he watched her do this.
She still has very little to say to him. He might as well not be here. She draws on light stockings and from the back of the closet a white dress that grazes her knees. Usually she wears pants to work. He wonders if this virginal costume is a rebuke for last night’s moment of weakness. The uniform makes an unpleasant raspy, almost squeaky sound when she lifts her arms above her shoulders to fasten her hair. The little knobs of her kneecaps look vulnerable in their pale stockings. She’s taken off her wedding ring, as she does before every shift.
He offers to drive her to the hospital, but she says she wants to walk and get some fresh air.
“I’m not sure when I’ll be done. I’ll take a cab home,” she says as she opens the front door. A gust of cold wind blows some dead leaves onto the white ceramic tile.
“Wait,” Donny says and goes to the closet, drawing out a wool tartan scarf, his family tartan, Anderson, navy blue, green and a thin line of red, wrapping it around her throat.
Pulling it a little tighter, just enough so that she will barely feel the constriction, he says in his most intimate voice, “Hurry home.” She ignores him.
He imagines she’s now somewhere on the asphalt path that leads from their neighbourhood, crosses the power line, an
d moves through a thin band of trees before opening out to the hospital parking lot. They call it the rape path, a half-joking name based on the evidence of crimes already committed, although they’ve never heard of an incident. All along the length of it are high light standards with blazing bluish-tinged bulbs focused down on the winding path, making the darkness at night beyond the wide arc of light even more sinister. Bright orange signs are affixed to the poles depicting a large eye and a camera. Perhaps the signs alone are enough to discourage men from lurking around waiting for the female medical students and nurses who walk to and from shifts at odd hours.
He holds her wedding ring in his hand and imagines her at work bending over a bed, the warm scent of her underarms wafting across the face of an elderly man, emaciated, a collection of sharp bones, yellow against the white sheets. The man moans slightly and she asks him, “Are you in pain?”
She’s neglected to pull the flesh-coloured curtains around his bed and the backs of her thighs are visible from the hallway. A man is passing by carrying cheap bright flowers. Although he knows where he’s going, the man stops, looks at the backs of her legs, and the conversation proceeds the way these things do, starting with facts. Perhaps questions about a room number. But the stranger watches her carefully. Normally, she’s a bit pale, but her cheeks have colour from her exertions over the old man. He sees her as he did years ago, drawing that long sado-masochistic hairpin out of her stiff cardboard hat although nurses haven’t worn those hats for years. He sees her put her hand first on the man’s shoulder, and then as his eyes grow slightly hazy, on his face.
The man has a sharp jaw she feels she must touch. His eyes are a little too close together, his Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. She knows a place, hidden away and dark, in the endless light of the hospital corridors. “Wait,” she whispers, as the man slips his hands over her hips. He reaches up under her skirt and discovers that her demure stocking ends in a band of lace high on her thigh.
“Wait,” she says again, but she doesn’t mean it. She’s ready to minister to the sick and the lonely, to spread herself around. Of course it’s absurd. Only in bad porn flicks do working women respond to every passing flirtation. She wouldn’t wear such ridiculous stockings to work.
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