Believe Me

by Patricia Pearson

  Stan and Calvin, chuckling at America’s Funniest Home Videos, didn’t hear the surprised, protesting groan as pain grabbed her around the middle and she, in turn, grabbed for her chair. Stan ambled in on a commercial break and found her bent over, clutching a chocolatey spoon.

  “Oh, Bernice,” he murmured as I stood by, useless and alarmed. He leaned toward her and gently removed the spoon, carried it like treasure to the sink.

  “Don’t you dare call Dr. Richardson,” she whispered into her lap.

  “Alright, Bernice, alright.” He dropped the spoon into dishwater with a hesitant, trembling hand. The wind fell quiet. On the roof, now, a steadying drumbeat of rain.

  Maybe he died before she did because he had to. She wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t stop, until he was gone.

  We switched planes in Halifax, and took the “puddle jumper” up to Sydney, a plane that vibrated and buzzed like a giant bumblebee, and I tried to get a grip on my fear as Lester trustingly lay his head on my shoulder. We dropped five hundred feet in a downdraft, and I clutched discreetly at my forehead, holding Lester’s hand as lightly as I could while I prayed. “Lord, in Your grace give me strength.” It was a new prayer for me. I used to scrunch up my eyes on these flights and plaintively call out for rescue. But God wasn’t in the business of protecting people from their own inventions. Somewhere along in this journey, I had realized that rescue wasn’t God’s job.

  38

  “How are you, Barbara?” I asked the head nurse as Lester and I stepped out of the elevator and collided with a gaggle of pink and purple balloons.

  “Oh, not too bad, Frannie!” She smiled, shifting her balloons to the other hand. “Not too bad. It’s nice to see ya. Celia got out a couple weeks back, asked me to send her love to Lester.” She bent over to tweak his nose. He ducked behind me and she chuckled.

  “Oh,” I said with genuine pleasure, imagining Celia and Jim out for a celebratory dinner at the Cranberry Nook, “that’s great! I’m glad to hear about Celia. How are Julia and Aileen?”

  “Julia sleeps a lot. Real quiet. You know. Aileen went home a while back, too, up to her daughter’s place in Glace Bay.” Barbara tugged at the tie that held her clutch of balloons, and freed a pink one for Lester. “I took her some Easter chocolates last week, they were on sale at Sobey’s.” She looked down at my son and handed him the balloon, which he accepted with the same surprised reverence with which I might greet a stranger handing me a thousand dollars. “Aa’ll excited about the Easter Bunny I’ll bet?” He nodded, solemn.

  “How is Bernice, Barbara?”

  “Oh, not too good, hon.” She glanced down at Lester, smoothed out her uniform and chose to say nothing further about Bernice’s appetite, or lack thereof. “You go on and see her, hon, Calvin’s there now.”

  I can’t say, in that moment, that I had an overwhelming desire to walk down the familiar white-walled corridor, festooned though it was now with yellow chicks and fake green grass in early anticipation of Easter. It tore through me again—rent me straight through the center—that I brought Lester with me this time. Was it careless to expose him to Bernice in her slow transformation? Would it threaten his delicately conceived cosmology, in which humans evolved into angels? This was not, I had gathered from my last call with Calvin, a simple matter of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. There was the benign cocoon stage to consider, which in this instance took the form of a woman swollen to the point of disfigurement, whose breath rattled.

  We came to the doorway of Room 10, to which Bernice had been assigned when it became clear to the nurses that she was deteriorating swiftly. The Regional had a palliative ward, but they only used it for patients who accepted that they were dying. For women like Bernice, they had private rooms on workaday wards for the family to conduct their vigils.

  Calvin sat beside his mother as quiet as a schoolboy, with his hands on his knees, his expression hovering somewhere indefinable between stoic and forlorn. He had surrounded Bernice with trinkets from her house. There was the chuckwagon that I’d hidden away from Lester, and the small plastic replica of St. Anne de Beaupré that he’d plugged into the wall as a nightlight. A bingo trophy she had won, some samples of her Knit Wit, a couple of doilies that Calvin had laid out on her metal bed table, smoothed carefully beneath a paper cup of ice water and a bottle of pills.

  On the wall above her sleeping head, Calvin had taped up some photographs. Lester at Halloween, costumed rather unconvincingly as a squid. Shirley and her husband at the picnic table in Bernice’s garden, sipping rye and Cokes in the pale yellow sunshine of a Cape Breton summer. Stan, from about twenty years ago, maybe, on the cold, rocky North Atlantic beach, shoulders hunched, a cockeyed grin, body lilting to one side with his hand on his jutting hip—his “hoodlum” stance, Bernice called it. And a striking picture of Bernice herself, which must have dated from the late ’40s. She was leaning on the rail of a ship with her blond hair blowing carefree around a happy and lovely heart-shaped face. She wore a swish skirt and suit, très Princess Grace, and high heels that accentuated the slender curve of her calves. That was the woman whose fur coat I had found in the basement, in amidst the Christmas knickknacks. I’d been wondering to whom that coat had belonged.

  “Daddy!” cried Lester, running to greet his father, who was startled out of distant thoughts by his son’s bright voice.

  “Small young man!” replied Calvin, grinning in pleasure and reaching out his arms.

  I hung back, leaning my head against the door frame, still captivated by what I saw. By the meaning Calvin had been trying to construct of his mother’s life, through an assembly of all her small treasures.

  “Hey, sweetie,” I said as I broke my stillness and walked into the room. He stood, and hugged me, and told me everything and nothing in the clinging strength of his embrace.

  39

  “Why don’t you take Les for dinner at the KFC,” I suggested as I set down my suitcase, loosened my coat, and noticed Lester staring at his granny. “I’ll stay here with her. See if she needs anything.”

  “Aunt Shirley might come by,” he warned, taking Lester’s hand. “She and Mum are still in cahoots over Mum not dying, and Shirley’s looking into a senior’s apartment she wants Mum to rent.”

  “Okay,” I said, giving him a puzzled look. “I thought they were in the opposite of cahoots. Wasn’t Shirley refusing to speak to Bernice the last time we talked about it?”

  Calvin shrugged and tugged Lester toward the corridor. “It seesaws,” he said, grimly, and then to his son, “Come on, small young man, we are going out to dine.”

  I almost wailed “Don’t go!” I wanted to see more of Calvin, I hungered for him. I hated, in that moment, that we had to orchestrate this now in the best interests of our child. Parenthood forced us worlds away when we needed to cling, and yet that was that. Bereft, I hung up my coat beside Bernice’s terry bathrobe, and then looked around the room as if I could find something immediate and pressing to do. But there was nothing. A fan whirred quietly in the corner. The nurses, calling back and forth to one another in the hallway, sounded distant. Everything was clean and orderly. Bernice slumbered on in the bed. I sat down and stared for a long time at the pictures on the wall.

  I wasn’t prepared for the conversation I had with Bernice when she finally aroused from her doze.

  “Hand me the blueberries, will you dear, they’re in my change purse,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Her tone was so cheerful and resolute that it felt as if we’d been shopping together at the mall.

  “My blueberries, for Heaven’s sake,” she repeated, impatient.

  I might have seen this request as delirious, but with Bernice it hovered within the realm of the possible, given her recent tendency to hide pills in her sneakers, so I checked her small embroidered change purse, which contained nothing but coins. I relayed the unfortunate news.

  “Well, where are they?” she demanded. “I won’t have enough for the pie.”r />
  “I’m sorry, Bernice, I don’t know where they are,” I said, smiling helplessly and wondering why I had to imagine conversations with past-life people and power animals, yet this was the one that was real.

  She stared up at the ceiling and sighed. “No one knows nothin’.”

  I couldn’t begin to think of a reply. We lapsed into silence and she fell back to sleep.

  An hour later: “Oh, good Lord in Heaven,” she cried suddenly, scrabbling for my hand, “who let the geese in here?”

  “What geese?” I asked, startled.

  “What do you mean, what geese?” she retorted, looking pointedly at the end of her bed. “They’re waddlin’ all over my kitchen! Go get me my whisk.”

  “Your whisk?”

  “Go on!” She pushed at me, conveying such authoritative urgency that I actually stood up and started looking around for something that might resemble a whisk. “Geese don’t like to be whisked,” Bernice explained, “it’ll scare ’em off my doilies.”

  At that, I did a double take, and leaned over to stroke her cheek. “Bernice,” I said, gently, “there aren’t any geese in here. Your doilies are fine.”

  “OF COURSE there’s no geese,” she answered, like I was insane, “what are you on about? Why would there be geese?”

  “Never mind,” I said, and sat back in my chair.

  And on it went like this, until toward midnight, she sat up as lucid as Einstein and said, “Nancy, you’re back. Thank the Lord you’re here, dear, I need to go the washroom. Those nurses, you know they’re no good a’taaal.’”

  Never in my whole life have I been so relieved and elated by someone’s need to go to the washroom. To suddenly be presented with this gift of her coherence, it was thrilling, as if, having reached a straining hand to someone who was falling from a bridge, my grip loosening, their fingers sliding, they came back at the last second with a solid, affirming grasp. Hurrah Bernice! No geese, no purse fruit, just this straightforward need to get up and pee in the bathroom and not in the bed.

  I leapt to my feet and assisted her, first to a sitting position, then to slide her pale, heavy legs over and out. She hung heavily on me as we shuffled the ten long feet to the glaringly white bathroom, but it felt like running an Olympic marathon replete with cheering and laurels, for she was wholly herself, complaining the entire way.

  “Look at me, I’m a fright,” she grumbled, “all swollen up from asthma, feet don’t fit my slippers. Oh, they’re terrible to me here, Nancy, just terrible. Don’t let me buy new slippers. Won’t let me out. They’ve got me locked up like a criminal. Can’t get out to the mall.”

  I lowered her gently onto the toilet, and when she’d finished her business, I handed her some toilet paper.

  “Oh, you’re a love, Nancy, I’m so sorry you have to see me like this. Can’t even wipe myself.”

  “I’ve been there.” I assured her, “I sprained both my hands, once. Let me tell you, the surprising things you cannot do when you have no hands. Someone else has to pull your underpants up over your bum.”

  “Stan married me for my bum,” she pointed out, as she rearranged her scant hospital gown. Then she waved her hand at me, as if I were a skeptic. “Oh, yes he did, I had quite the bum.”

  We shuffled back to the bed, arm in arm. “Stan may have admired your bum, but he loved you for your love, you know, for the spark of you.”

  “Oh, go on,” she said, and I had heard her say it just that way to Stan himself, pleased as punch, trying to conceal her smile, “Oh, go on, Stan, you’re full of old rope.”

  “No, he did,” I insisted, acting on intuition. “I can tell, the way he loved to tease you, the way he loved your hams, like you were nourishing his soul.”

  “Oh, he’s an old goat, is what he is. A rascal.” Present tense.

  She settled back into bed and explained how Stan’s mother—who had been widowed young by the coal mine and grew deranged in her bitter poverty—had regularly fed her three sons offal thrown out by the New Waterford butcher, picking up discarded “roasts” that she simmered first with vinegar to tease out the maggots.

  “Can you just imagine,” Bernice concluded.

  I shivered. Decent food wasn’t just an offering of love, for Stan; it was a loving spoonful of civilization.

  “You know, Bernice,” I ventured, scrambling around in my purse for a pen and a passable bit of blank paper, which ultimately took the form of an inverted bookstore receipt, “if you’re not too tired, I would love it if you could give me the recipe for your Cape Breton meat pie. I’ve tried to make it at home, but I can’t get it right, it never tastes as wonderful as what you make.” This was no lie. Bernice and Shirley somehow produced this meat pie—I’d had it every time I was in New Waterford—that I understood to involve shredded beef and pork, but I couldn’t replicate its succulent, simple flavor.

  She took me through its preparation, step by step, advising me on what cut of meat to buy and what pot worked best for a slow simmer, as confident and content as I had ever seen her.

  “Stan married me for my pie,” she confided, when I’d finally written everything down, having started on a bookstore receipt, progressed to the inside envelope of my plane ticket and ended on a doily.

  “And your bum,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, go on.” She waved her hand in that signature gesture of hers, as if swatting me away.

  “You’ll see him soon,” I said, studying her face. “You know that.”

  She nodded. For once, she wasn’t afraid. “In Heaven,” she murmured, shifting over to her side and surrendering to sleep.

  “Yes,” I said, pulling the thin blanket up over her shoulder. “In Heaven.”

  40

  Early morning. Orderlies preparing to wheel around their trolleys full of toast. I woke up with such a crick in my neck that I felt like I’d swallowed a hanger. No sign yet of Calvin, who was doubtless waiting for Lester to wake up and have his breakfast. I stretched, lolled my head, and had just began wondering if it would be fair of me to split when Shirley rounded the corner. She caught sight of me and jumped like a spooked cat.

  “Oh my Lord,” she stammered, “you gave me such a fright. I wasn’t expecting anyone to be here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, stifling a huge yawn, “I was actually just going to leave.”

  Shirley’s corkscrew perm was bedraggled by rain, her pink-tinted spectacles misted over. She tugged at the buttons of her silvery-gray polar parka, which looked just exactly like a sleeping bag. “Well, I hope Bernice didn’t give you too much trouble,” she ventured, eyeing me dubiously. The last time Shirley had seen me, I was having a panic attack in a bingo hall. She probably didn’t think I was up to much. “Bernice can be a handful.”

  “She was fine,” I answered, rubbing my eyes.

  “Well, she will be,” said Shirley, putting down a tray of Tim Hortons coffees. “Just get this cancer under control with that new drug the doctor’s saying about, and I’ve found her a beautiful apartment over near Sobey’s. It’s assisted living, you know, so she’ll have her own space, own kitchen and all that, but there’s nurses in the building.”

  “Okay,” I said, polite.

  It reminded me of Kate, what Shirley was doing. Trying to impose her own version of the truth. I couldn’t argue her out of it. I left Bernice with her sister and walked out of the hospital. Began shuffling, exhausted, down King Street, splashing in puddles and sniffing the salt air carried inland from the Atlantic.

  “Well, hello,” said a voice behind me on the sidewalk. “Our young stranger is back in town.” It was Father McPhee in a navy-blue pea coat, his hands thrust into his pockets as he strode to catch up with me.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, unduly pleased to see him. “How are you?”

  “Very well, thank you,” he replied. We stood smiling at one another on the sidewalk, beside a fire hydrant painted as Papa Smurf. “And you, Frannie? I’m guessing you spent the night at the hospital. Can’t get m
uch sleep there.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But it was good. Bernice told me how to make her meat pie. She gave me the recipe.”

  He grinned. “Now, isn’t that something to be treasured.” He gazed at me for a moment. “I knew you’d find a way, Frannie. Have you prayed for her, as well?”

  I nodded as I ducked my head. I had. I did pray. But there wasn’t a simple answer to the assumption behind his question, that I knew there was a God who was listening.

  “Why are you out this early?” I asked him, evading the subject.

  “Oh, I tend to be on call.” He shrugged as he glanced toward the ocean. “I wander out as the occasion requires.” He looked back at me and broke out once more into his characteristic grin. “It’s good to have Calvin out here, you know. Nice to learn more about Bernice’s family. I’ve actually had a chance to talk to him once or twice.” He winked at me. “Says you’ve been on a bit of a quest this winter. He says listening to you has helped him to think about his dad.”

  “He said that?” I asked, amazed.

  “Sure. Oh, he loves you a lot, Frannie. You remember that in the coming days, when he needs you to be there. He won’t know how to ask.”

  “Okay, I will,” I answered, and waved warmly as the priest walked away.

  I covered the final block to the house as the sun rose, reflecting on why I’d shied away when he’d asked me about prayer. I still had a journey ahead of me, if I was going to find my way to God.

  But it was fair to say this much: I had come a long distance since Jesus was born in December. Ahead of me on King Street, I saw Lester and Calvin coming out of the house and heading in my direction. I waited for Lester to notice me, for him to light up with that wondrous excitement that your small children feel when they see you. Then my anxiety about the days ahead rushed in again, as chilling as the North Atlantic tide.