by Dian Day
There was a vibration in the air at the nursing station, the staff busy in controlled and furtive movements, though the crowd of wheelchair spectators were unusually subdued and they all looked haggard and hollowed out. Helen and Louise were on shift, one of them bent over an open filing cabinet drawer, the other flipping urgently through red file folders, her eyes flickering back and forth while she was reading. There was another woman I didn’t recognize there too, a new staff member perhaps, standing a little to one side and wringing her hands.
Someone died, I thought to myself, and I looked quickly for my mother along the rows of wheelchairs, though she never sits out in the hallway with the others. I turned left and went down the hall to her room, and I have to admit that I don’t know whether or not I was hoping to see her once I got there. I know I had inhaled deeply at the desk, walked down the hall at an accelerated pace, stringendo, with my chest constricting like I had stage fright, and didn’t breathe again until I got to her room.
She was sitting in her chair, her hands crossed at the wrists and lying lightly on her lap, fluttering a little as if there was a gentle breeze blowing across her tiny room. The movement was small, but telling enough. She wasn’t dead.
But something was wrong. The shape of her face had changed somehow, and she sat uncharacteristically silent, neither singing nor talking. I thought maybe she’d had another stroke, and I went and put my hand gently under her chin to lift her head so I could look at her eyes.
Touching my mother is always a shock, though I try to do it as often as I can stand. The skin of the infirm is as thin and as fragile as last year’s leaves. Her face was neither warm nor cold; she seemed not to have any animate temperature at all; she felt the way a book does, or a piece of wood, or a leather shoe. Her eyes travelled across my face, but only because it was the thing right in front of her, and not because it engendered any memory.
I ran my thumb across her jawbone, and understanding hit me. And then I took a moment to recognize and register what I was feeling as relief. I looked around the room. I went and opened the drawers in her dresser, one by one, and rifled through her meagre possessions, a few cardigans and blouses and brassieres. I looked under the bed. And then I went back out to the nursing station, where the trio had changed positions slightly, but were still single-mindedly occupied with the same pursuits. I went right to Helen.
“Has someone died?” I asked. I wanted to know, first, if there was a bigger emergency they needed to deal with.
“Not yet,” said Helen, and she looked over at the new woman meaningfully.
I tried to read the new one’s tag, but the hand wringing was still going on, right in front of her name. It was a cryptic enough answer, but I got the sense that if anyone was going to be dead imminently, it was Hand-wringer.
“Then where are my mother’s teeth?” I asked.
As soon as I got to the question mark Hand-wringer ran towards the ward exit. She tried the door handle forcefully before she seemed to remember about the code, and it took her several tries to punch in four-three-two-one and get it right. Some of the wheelchair occupants turned their heads mutely to watch her departure, and some of them just kept right on staring at the floor.
When she was safely on the side of the living room with Marilyn and Corner Gas, and the door had closed behind her, Helen, Louise, and I looked at each other with our eyebrows up, and then the two of them transferred their focus to each other, muscles jerking and twitching, as if some form of sinewy communication was going on between them.
“Should I show him?” asked Louise, finally, and Helen nodded reluctantly.
I followed Louise down the hall in the opposite direction from my mother’s room. We turned in at the staff kitchen. Instead of the usual box of Girl Guide cookies, piles of used coffee mugs, old newspapers, and paper napkins, the counter was lined from one end to the other with residents’ false teeth. Sets of teeth were scattered on the little round table, uppers and lowers in random order. On top of the microwave, a pink and white tower of teeth balanced precariously. Beside the sink sat a box of Polident powder and a toothbrush.
Louise gave me a minute to take all this in.
“She thought she’d give them all a really good cleaning,” she said. It seemed a generous thing to do to stop there. “I don’t suppose you know which ones are your mother’s?”
I started to react slowly. At first it was like a kind of gasping for air, a kind of disbelief escaping from the depths of my belly. Then Louise’s throat made a noise like she was trying to hold something back, and that was it, we were sunk. When Helen came down the hall to see what the racket was, she found us holding our sides in agony, the tears streaming down our faces. I think because Louise was laughing, Helen just assumed that I was, too.
WHEN I GOT TO THE SHOP the next afternoon to give a voice lesson, Ed was sitting behind the counter, as far away as the dark side of the moon, holding his bristled chin in his wrinkled left hand, his fingers splayed across his face. His right hand rested on the cradled telephone, as if he had long forgotten to remove it. There was a heavy presence with him in the shop, like bass clef notes below the staff, that I felt even as the door chime tinkled shut behind me.
“Sylvia?” I asked him. “Annie?” I knew right away that something was wrong with someone.
He looked across the counter at me. His lids were heavy, and his eyes dull with confusion. He wiped his hand across his mouth and inhaled wetly, as if he had forgotten how to swallow. “No,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“What happened?” I asked. I was still a distance from him, across the floor of the shop, the door slowly shutting behind my back, the room hollow.
“Nothing,” he said. The word came out of him and he flinched, and his breath caught in his throat. I practically ran across the shop floor to the counter.
“Who?”
“I’ll be fine in a minute,” he said. “It’ll pass. It’s nothing.” I only understood then that he was in physical pain, himself.
“This isn’t nothing,” I said. “What does it feel like?” He looked translucent and thin, as if some of the life had leaked out of him.
“No,” he said. “It’s nothing. I’m fine now.”
“I think I should call an ambulance.”
“Don’t you dare,” he said.
I stood there for a small minute, just waiting to see if he would take his hand off the phone. My bag of students’ sheet music was suddenly heavy, the strap cutting into me, weighted with other people’s notes that were no use to me at all, and I let the bag slide off my shoulder and down my body until it rested against the bottom of the counter. I put my hand out and laid it on his forearm, and I was surprised at how bony and frail it seemed, for all his apparent strength and height. As soon as I touched him, he shuddered as if being woken unexpectedly from sleep, and rubbed his face forcefully with his liver-spotted hands. I let go of him and reached for the phone.
“I’ll kill you,” he said. “Just help me into the back. I’ll sit back there for a few minutes. I’ll be fine.”
“I have a student coming,” I said. “Barbara.”
“Then hurry up. Get me in there before she gets here. If Barbara knows anything, the whole damn town knows.”
So I went to the front door and turned over the OPEN sign to CLOSED, hung out the “Back in 5 minutes” clock face, and turned the bolt in the lock. Then I went and got him up and led him into the storeroom—he leaned on me heavily—and moved several boxes of hissing snare drums one-handed, to clear a way to the beat-up office chair he’d recently gotten out of Steve Packer’s garbage. It was like clearing a den of snakes.
“I’ll be all right in a minute,” said Ed as he sat down. “I’ll be fine.”
I pushed down on his shoulder with some kind of non-verbal signal that I hoped would keep him sitting there for a while.
“Don’t you dare call
Sylvia,” he finished.
I went back out—closing the storeroom door carefully behind me on my way—and, of course, I called Sylvia.
“I think he’s okay now,” I told her, “but I don’t know what happened. He’s threatening to kill me if I call an ambulance.”
“All right,” she said, “I’ll take the heat for taking him to the hospital. I’m on my way. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Bring your key,” I told her. “He’s in the back.”
I went and looked in at him in the storeroom one more time. Some of the colour had returned to his face, but his eyes were closed and he didn’t open them when he heard the door. If he heard the door. I listened for his breathing, and it was ragged, but even.
“You called her,” he said angrily. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Don’t you dare move!” I told him fiercely in return, on my way out again. I’d never talked to him like that before.
Then I unlocked and opened the shop door. It was starting to snow, and my next voice student was standing on the sidewalk, a young woman who had dreams that were bigger than her voice. She was looking at her watch. “Sorry, Barbara,” I said. “Come on in.”
I held the door open and then I shut it behind her and locked it again, leaving the clock and the CLOSED in view to passersby. I didn’t want her to see Sylvia coming in, and Ed going out. She followed me in to the soundproof room. I shut that door too, although there was no sound from Ed in the storeroom, and positioned her music stand so she had her back to the glass.
Then, somehow, we had a singing lesson.
SYLVIA STOPPED BY MUCH LATER that night on her way home from the hospital to let me know that Ed had been admitted. They’d taken five vials of his blood and done a CT scan, and were planning a liver biopsy for the following morning.
“Ah,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. There was a pause. It seemed that neither of us was surprised.
“Do you want to come in?” I asked at last. I was holding my front door open, and snow was drifting in onto the toes of my corduroy slippers.
“No, no, I’ve got to get going. I’m pretty tired, and I told him I’d be back first thing in the morning.” She turned to go. “I’ll call you when I know something,” she said. “I’ll call you at the shop.”
“I don’t know if it’s related,” I said quickly, “or if it’s something else, but he’s been a little confused—”
“No,” she said, and she put out her hand as if she could stop Truth by willpower alone.
“Disorganized—” I continued.
“No. Don’t even say it,” she said.
She was careful to hold on to the railing as she went down my single porch step.
I watched her back and shoulders turn white as she opened and reached inside the passenger door for the snow brush and circled around her car on the road, it was snowing that hard. She swept the windshield, but as soon as she had it almost clear on one side, it was covered again on the other.
I slipped my feet out of my slippers and into my boots, and kept her company by attempting to sweep the snow, first from the hallway, and then from the porch, the one step, and down the walkway. My porch light was burnt out so I left the door wide open behind me so I would have some light. The broom lifted the grains of snow into an arc over my head, and soon my pyjama shirt was soaked through with the double precipitation, though I couldn’t feel the cold.
I knew we were both thinking about my mother.
“HEY,” I SAID.
“Hey,” Ed replied. He turned his head slightly in my direction, though his eyes appeared dull and focused inward. That didn’t change as I entered his line of vision.
He was in a semi-private room, but the other bed was empty and unmade. The guardrails were up on the bed he was in. The head of the bed was angled about halfway up, and he had a sheet tangled between his legs as if he were rope climbing. His hospital gown was twisted and a bare inch of skin was visible all the way down his backside. There was a pulse monitor attached to one of his fingers, and I could see various other wires emerging from the sleeves of his gown. On the machine beside his head, a green line rose and fell reassuringly, making a music entirely of the body.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
“Going, going, gone?” he suggested. He was trying to make a joke, but the hint of sarcasm and taste of fear in his voice meant that it fell flat; he could hear that himself, I could tell. He turned and looked out the window, but there was nothing to see there but his own reflection.
“It gets dark so bloody early,” he complained. His voice was bitter.
I went around the end of the bed and pulled the two sides of the curtain across the window. The hooks made a noise like a death rattle as they slid across the track. “Where’s Sylvia?” I asked.
“Taking a break,” he said. “Having a coffee. Gone to worry for a while in the cafeteria instead of in this room.” He looked at me defiantly, and I could tell they’d had a fight. I could tell he’d sent her away for fussing over him, but it was all I could do not to fuss.
“Of course she’s worried,” I told him. “We’re all worried.” I thought about how I couldn’t say I’m worried; how we shield others from direct knowledge of our deepest selves. I thought about how he couldn’t say the two words to me I’m scared, when his body and his tone of voice and his shuttered eyes were screaming it. We could both see that his life was only a thin and fraying thread on a full spindle.
“Worried,” he said, like he was spitting the word out.
“Do you need anything?” I asked him. I didn’t have any idea what else to say.
“I need the devil,” cried Ed. “Where the hell is the devil when you want to make a bargain?” There was a silence.
“I’m here,” I told him, finally.
I STAYED AT THE WHOLE NOTE every day until closing time, to give Ed a bit of a break. I’d offered to look after the place until we were sure he could handle it—I took a week of vacation from work—and then Sylvia had called to see if I might be good for another week or two of afternoons.
“Of course,” I’d said to her. “However long you need.”
So it was two weeks and counting. I ran through my mail route like the best of them, for the first time wearing a watch and actually looking at it in between pushing envelopes into slots or handing parcels across countertops. For the first time ever, at twelve noon precisely, ditching my undelivered ad mail into the recycling dumpster behind the apartment building near the end of my route—though not without losing sleep over it.
I opened the shop at twelve-thirty; there was a sign on the door in Sylvia’s handwriting, explaining that, due to circumstances beyond management’s control, The Whole Note would be closed every morning until further notice. A handful of regulars keep asking when Ed would be coming back, but I didn’t know what to tell them. All the gusto had gone out of him. He came to the house only once in that time—dropped off by Sylvia because she wouldn’t let him drive—and spent the evening sitting on the piano bench, flebile, running his fingers in the lightest possible manner along the closed lid, his foot never leaving the damping pedal: a doubly silent elegy for I knew not what.
I hadn’t even needed to replace the Rickard’s that my brothers drank in my backyard. He only wanted orange juice.
“Drink mighta got me into this,” he said.
So I hung out in the shop, dusting guitars and waiting for customers. I held my voice lessons with the soundproof doors open, so I could hear if anybody came in. After the first day, I thought about tackling the inventory in the storage room, but after standing in the doorway staring at the disorganized piles of boxes for twenty minutes, I couldn’t decide if that would be helpful or controlling. After the second day, I thought about setting up a small business software program to track sales and expenses, but there’d only been one
sale of any significance, a reconditioned Fender guitar, and I didn’t want Ed to have to face any more bad news. By day three, I had given up all bright ideas and mostly surfed the internet and listened to YouTube when the place was empty. Those days it was most of the time.
ED FINALLY CAME BACK to the shop in mid-December, a fainter and more acerbic version of himself. He got muddled easily, and complained often of the cold, keeping the thermostat at a temperature I knew he couldn’t afford. The weather continued to be terrible. Every time the shop door opened to let in a customer, the wind whipped in behind them like Zephyrus on a jealous rampage. People kept their coats and hats on in the store, trying desperately to warm up, and ribbons of slush from their delinquent sleeves dripped across the glistening banjos, while icy fingerprints were left on the saxophones and trumpets. It drove Ed crazy, and he wandered around the shop with a soft rag and an ill humour.
I still went over to the shop every day, even when I didn’t have any students, though once Ed was back I didn’t stress myself even more by rushing through my mail route—even in those unseasonable blizzards I delivered every single piece of ad mail, in a kind of penance. I’d stop on my way over to get Ed and myself some lunch, and get there between one and two, so I’d have time to watch Ed eat before my first lesson. Sylvia had called to say that he was hardly eating at home, so I was doing my bit to keep his strength up. I brought him his favourite foods—crab cakes or Montreal smoked meat on rye from the diner, with the occasional peanut butter and banana sandwich I made at home—but he ate everything like it was sawdust, and left a lot of crusts.
Despite the fact that no one wanted to go outdoors at all, business picked up a bit in The Whole Note going into Christmas; we finally sold last year’s model baby grand, at a discounted price. I convinced Ed not to order another, and one day when he’d gone home early I rearranged the shop so the piano’s absence was not so obvious. He’d always had a piano in the store; if nothing else it helped him pass the time when business was slow. It was yet another marker that, after a long period of consistency and tranquillity, things were changing, in fits and starts and revelations of mortality. The world was becoming a place we couldn’t rely on. To what end, I did not know.