“Fine by me,” Rachelle’s voice snaps back. “I’m going out anyway. And don’t expect me home. I’m staying at Kristen’s.”
Not brooding, then.
On the way into town, Norval reports that the pain is gone. He doesn’t tell Lila about the tightness, the feeling that an elastic band is wrapped around his chest.
“Probably angina,” Lila says. “They’ll do an ECG. And a stress test.”
He doesn’t want a battery of tests. He suggests they turn around and go home. He’ll make an appointment for a physical, he promises, but Lila won’t hear of returning home.
“There’s no need for anyone to die of a heart attack these days, Norval,” Lila says. “So we’re going to get this checked and make sure. Otherwise, I won’t sleep. The surgeries for valve repair and blocked arteries and the like are very sophisticated now.”
Surgery? He certainly doesn’t want to be told he’s going under the knife. He wonders when Lila became such an expert on the treatment of heart disease and he’s tempted to say something sarcastic, but he doesn’t because he knows she’s concerned. He notices that she is driving fast.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he says. “You’d better slow down or you’ll have us stopped by the RCMP, and that won’t get us there any faster, will it.” He rolls the window down and feels the breeze on his face. The sky, which had been the blue of early evening when they left Juliet, is now quite dark—dark enough that he can see the stars, millions of them.
“Look at that,” he says to Lila. “Such a clear night sky. No moon. The Milky Way in full force.”
“What are you talking about, Norval?” Lila asks. “It’s only eight o’clock. Of course there’s no moon. It’s still light.”
Eight o’clock. Lila must be wrong. Still, when Norval looks ahead he can clearly see the oncoming semi with its shiny red cab, the gold colour of ripe crops on either side of the highway, the turquoise farmhouse that Lila always says reflects someone’s idea of unique when it’s really just a very bad decorating choice. So odd—the earth still bright with the colours of the day, and the night sky above, sprinkled with stars.
“The very lights of heaven,” he says. It’s a joke, he doesn’t believe in heaven, and he’s just thinking that he should explain himself to Lila, lest she misunderstand, when the stars disappear and Swift Current lies spread out before them, a small city tucked into a creek valley, and Lila is off the highway and onto the service road, still driving over the speed limit and following the green h signs that indicate a hospital.
And they’re almost there, just a short distance from the brand-new facility on the edge of town, when Lila hears Norval say, “Tell Blaine Dolson it’s not his fault,” and she looks at Norval and in the evening light she can see that the pain is upon him again, the most agonizing, wrenching pain this time, and she steps on the gas and drives as fast as she can without losing control of the car, up to the Emergency entrance, leaning on the horn and saying, “Norval, stay with me, we’re almost there.” There’s no one at the door, no one coming, and Lila pounds on the car horn until finally a nurse comes running, and another, and then it’s all out of Lila’s hands. Things are happening in slow motion—Lila has time to notice that one of the young nurses has pink streaks in her hair—and warp speed at the same time. They get Norval on a gurney and whisk him inside and down a hall, through a door into Emergency, a pair of nurses calling out for a doctor and the tools of their trade, wheeling Norval away, just like they do on the Life Channel, too busy to pay any attention to Lila. Maybe she should follow, she thinks, but it’s too frightening. She holds back and then when she thinks, I should be with him, it’s too late. The door that they’ve wheeled him through is locked. She looks around and sees no one. Why is this hospital so deserted? she wonders. Where are the nurses? Busy. Busy with Norval. So she waits. There are several armchairs in the waiting area and she sits in one of them, and it feels too soft, too obviously chosen for a person needing comfort. She stares at the television on the wall, one program turning into another, a sitcom, a nature show, nothing at all making sense, until a young Hutterite couple in their black clothing come through doors leading from ICU and sit across from her. The woman is crying and Lila can’t stand it, she can’t sit here and watch a woman cry a few feet away from her. She has to leave, do something. Move her car, that’s what she can do.
She goes outside and gets in the car, which is still nosed right up to the Emergency entrance and in the way of hospital traffic, forcing anyone who comes along to go around it. There’s a blinding bright fluorescent light over the entrance doors even though it’s not yet dark, and it shines down on Lila as she sits, paralyzed, until a big truck carrying more Hutterites comes along and she finally starts her car and moves it so they can get by. As she parks properly in the visitors’ lot, she thinks, This is ridiculous, they’ll be looking for me, Norval will want me. She gets out of the car, locks it and walks back to the Emergency door.
A nurse is there looking for her, and she takes her to the doctor, who explains what has happened. “Is there someone you can call?” the nurse, an older woman, asks as Lila sits, unbelieving, with Norval’s body—his body!—in the treatment room where he’d died, hardly more than a cubicle. And Lila thinks about saying my daughter but she shakes her head, no, there’s no one to call. The nurse wants information from her, the spelling of Norval’s name, his health card number, date of birth, what funeral home she would like them to call. How can she ask that? Lila thinks. But she has to, of course she does. The nurse is kindly. She tells Lila to take all the time she needs with Norval, and she even brings her a cup of tea, which goes cold on the stand beside the bed while Lila wonders, How will I tell Rachelle?
Eventually, the nurse suggests that Lila go home and get some rest. She offers to drive her when she gets off in half an hour—“I live out your way,” she says. “Juliet, isn’t it?”—but Lila says no. She turns down an over-the-counter sleeping pill too.
She doesn’t want to go home. It will be true once she gets home, everything will change as soon as she drives the car into the driveway and has to face the house and the fact of Norval’s absence. When she does finally leave the hospital, she goes to the drugstore and buys some makeup and a bottle of bath salts. Her mind is numb as her hands select cosmetics off the store shelves. She almost buys a bridal magazine for Rachelle before she remembers that the wedding is off. After the drugstore, she stops at a gas station and buys a quick-pick lottery ticket and fills the car up, and watches the young attendant wash the dust off the windows.
Now she has to go home. There is no place else to go. There is no more avoiding the truth of what has happened— no avoiding Juliet and her house and Rachelle and the kitchen table with Norval’s dinner plate still on it—and she gets back in the car and drives toward the service road and the highway going west. All the way home, she thinks of Norval’s last words and what he said before the pain took his ability to talk: Tell Blaine Dolson it’s not his fault. He hadn’t said, Tell Rachelle I love her. He hadn’t said, You’re everything in the world to me, Lila. He’d had no dying words for his wife and daughter, just a few words for a feckless client with too many kids.
But Norval hadn’t known he was dying, Lila reasons. He’d just thought of something, some little detail having to do with Blaine Dolson’s accounts, and out it had popped. It had been an abbreviated sentence, the full intent being something like, They’ll probably keep me in the hospital overnight and you’ll have to take a few calls for me. If Blaine Dolson calls, tell him it’s not his fault. There was an incorrect payment date printed on one of his bank statements. Just assure him it’s our error and not his, and we’ll straighten it out next week.
But Norval had also said something about the lights of heaven. Lila can’t remember what, she hadn’t paid attention because Norval was always saying things like that, things that were too smart for her, or at least that’s how they made her feel, but the reference to heaven—did that
not mean he was thinking about dying? And if he was thinking about dying, shouldn’t he also have been thinking about her and Rachelle, and not Blaine Dolson? It was selfish of Norval to waste his dying thoughts on a bank client, she thinks, and just as she pulls into Juliet she remembers what else he’d said that evening, about almost getting shot, and how he’d refused to explain himself and sat watching the Weather Channel, as though he knew. Oh my God, Lila thinks, he’d been having these chest pains all day and he hadn’t said anything, and that’s what he meant by “almost shot.” She’s furious, absolutely furious with him for not getting medical attention straight away, look what he’s done by being careless, just look at how he’s left her alone, how could he, and the word alone repeats in her head until she gets the car stopped in the driveway, and she pounds on the steering wheel in anger, furious with Norval for being so irresponsible, furious with Rachelle for getting pregnant and causing Norval so much stress, furious with the bank for sending Norval to Juliet in the first place and making him work too hard. And finally sobbing because she’s lost him, the other half of herself, lost him for good.
When Lila eventually gets out of the car, the first thing she notices is that the grass is too long. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? It was unlike Norval to let the grass grow. He’s very fussy about the length of his lawn. She’s even seen him measure it, as though it were a green on a golf course. She walks around the side of the house to the back and the grass in the backyard is overgrown as well. Then she notices the new lawn mower, and remembers that the old one was not working, and that Norval had been going on and on about needing a new mower.
She enters the house through the back door and the kitchen, and falters when she sees Norval’s plate and the pair of chopsticks on the table. She stands in the kitchen, not sure that she can face the rest of the house, not sure that she can get through this. Perhaps if Rachelle were here they could get through it together. She should try to reach her, try her cell, or Kristen’s, ask her to come home without saying why. But Rachelle will argue, demand to know, and Lila will break down, and she can’t tell Rachelle over the phone. Your father died tonight. Not over the phone.
In the living room she stares at the couch, not believing that just hours ago Norval was lying there watching the Weather Channel. She can still see the outline of his body in the nap of the Ultrasuede fabric. Norval’s couch. She’d always thought of it as his because he’d driven all the way to Regina in a borrowed truck to pick it up, and then when he got it home, she discovered that the company had ordered the wrong couch, only she’d never told Norval because he seemed so happy with this one. It was the most interest he’d ever shown in a piece of furniture and he complimented her several times on her choice. Because she was pretty sure it was an even more expensive couch than the one she’d ordered, she kept the company’s mistake to herself, even when she noticed that the fabric had a tendency to hold the outlines of people’s buttocks—a definite flaw, she’d thought, considering how much money she’d spent. She puts her hand down on Norval’s couch and imagines his warmth. She wants to lie down on the couch and let herself sink into the outline of Norval’s body, feel the warmth that she will never—is it possible?—feel again. But the couch is a shrine that she can’t yet disturb.
Instead, she goes looking. For clues. Clues that Norval knew something was wrong—You know, Lila, I was almost shot today—a note perhaps, like a suicide note, a message for her or for Rachelle, a goodbye, last words like the ones people on doomed aircraft write on the backs of blank cheques or the insides of cigarette boxes, and which are found floating amid the debris in the North Sea or the Indian Ocean.
She begins with his sports jacket, which is hanging over the back of a chair in the kitchen. She finds a miniature appointment book—no PalmPilot, even though she’d wanted to buy him one; a cell phone was enough portable technology, he’d said. In another pocket, his keys. And a list—her own list—of items that he was to discuss with Joe. How could it be that just hours ago Norval was at the church talking about something as ordinary as paint? She hangs the jacket back on the chair.
She moves from the kitchen to Norval’s den, where he has a desk, an armchair and a set of bookshelves. The desk is so neat you’d swear he hadn’t done any work at it in years, and perhaps he hadn’t. When Lila thinks about it, she has no idea what Norval did in here. He has a small TV on one of the bookshelves. Maybe he just came in here and watched the Weather Channel while Lila and Rachelle were watching reality shows in the living room. She scans the books on the shelves: several on history and geography, a couple of decades-old university commerce texts, the poetry and devotional books Norval used for his lay services, a set of reference books of famous quotations, and a National Geographic atlas that had been a Christmas present from her, at Norval’s request.
She remembers that when they first got notice they were moving to Juliet, Norval had special-ordered a number of Prairie history books from a bookstore in the city because he wanted to understand the place they were moving to. She’d tried to read one of them herself and hadn’t got past the introduction. But Norval had devoured them all, read passages aloud to her that he found particularly interesting. He told her that apparently they were moving to a desert—a desert, Lila, and I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was a desert in Canada. Well, it wasn’t much of a desert, but the first year they’d lived here Norval had taken her and baby Rachelle out into the dunes with a photographer for their yearly Christmas card picture. She’d objected, had wanted to use a studio photo, but Norval’s heart was set on the dunes picture, so she relented. She wishes she had a copy of that photograph to look at right now, but she’s not sure one even exists any more.
She checks the desk drawers. Nothing. They’re empty except for a phone book, a pad of paper and a handful of pens, some of them with the bank’s name printed in gold letters on the shaft. She holds the pad of paper up to the light to see if anything Norval had written was indented on the top page, but the pad looks brand new. The wastebasket contains just two spent scratch lotto tickets and a cellophane candy wrapper. The den is a perfect reflection of Norval, a perfect reflection of a man who kept everything to himself. She leaves the room, closing the door quietly as though she doesn’t want to disturb a man at work.
Lila checks every surface in the house that might hold a last note from Norval—the dining room table, the telephone stand, the vanity counter in the bathroom—but she finds nothing. Norval’s bedside table holds only his cell phone, a news magazine, his reading glasses and the clock radio. She gives up. On her way back downstairs, she opens Rachelle’s bedroom door and is shocked to see her there, sound asleep on top of the covers, still dressed.
Now is the time. She must wake her and tell her. She says Rachelle’s name, but when she gets no response, she quietly closes the door. I’m a coward, she thinks. Without Norval, I’m not equipped for life.
In the living room, she collapses into an armchair and looks once again at Norval’s shape in the Ultrasuede, and once again she cries, but this time not in anger. She sits with a Kleenex box on her lap and a wastebasket at her feet, dreading the conversation with her daughter, dreading all that she will have to do in the next few days, all the arrangements. Tomorrow, she thinks, she will become a widow in the eyes of the world.
And there will be a funeral to plan, instead of a wedding.
Astrid’s Secret
As Lee finally walks into his own yard, he studies the car parked by the house. He doesn’t recognize it. Cracker comes to greet him, his tail wagging, looking back toward the house as though he’s saying, Look, another stranger—the first one being the horse, all those hours ago. Now, he doesn’t pay the horse any mind at all.
“Who’s here, Cracker?” Lee says, reaching down to give the dog a pat.
As they approach the house, he sees Mrs. Bulin from the post office sitting on the step. He remembers her phone message, the one he’d ignored: Give me a call, Lee. There’s something
I need to discuss with you. Mrs. Bulin stands and stretches, giving the impression that she’s been waiting awhile. She’s wearing purple knee-length shorts and her thin legs are blue-white, as though they haven’t seen a minute of sun all summer.
She says, “That’s a long time to sit for an old girl like me. I was about to leave but I could tell from the dog that it was you coming up the road. Did you get my message?”
Lee decides ignorance is the way to plead. “Sorry,” he says, “I haven’t checked messages all day.” It’s not exactly a lie. He wonders what could be so important that it brought her out here. Surely not just an overdue bill for his mailbox. That would be beyond the call of postal duty, even for Mrs. Bulin.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she says. “In private, I mean. Not in the post office.”
Lee is tired and sore, and he can’t think of anyone he’d rather not talk to more than Mrs. Bulin right now. He’d like to put the horse in a pen, thank him for the day’s long ride with a cool bath and a good brush, then sit alone in one of Astrid’s webbed plastic lawn chairs and drink another beer or two—cold this time—and watch the sunset. He would like to be rude and send Mrs. Bulin packing, but he doesn’t because you have to be careful what you say to someone who daily sees and talks to the whole town. Anyway, Astrid didn’t approve of rudeness and sent no one packing without a good reason. He hears her voice: Use people well.
“You’d better come in, then,” Lee says. “Just let me put this horse away. Wait in the house if you want. The door’s open.”
“I might do,” Mrs. Bulin says. “That step was getting a little hard on the behind.”
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