Home Free

by Marni Jackson

  When her eyes open, they stare straight ahead, far away, until I step into the path of her vision, and she finds me.

  “Is that you?”

  “Yes. It’s Marni.”

  “I was just sleeping.”

  “Yes. You don’t have to wake up, I can just sit here and keep you company.”

  She draws in a sigh. Even that is too much work.

  “You’ll be bored here.”A mutter.

  “No, I won’t. I like seeing you. I can just sit here and read while you sleep.”

  She is talking again, but the words are too soft and garbled. I come closer and lean over her.

  “Do you have a good book?” she asks.

  “It’s okay. It’s about divorce.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible.”

  “Well, you don’t need to read it. Not after 68 years of marriage.”

  “And nothing to show for it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Once again, I enumerate all her accomplishments, her artistic talent, her beautiful house, her three children, her three grandchildren, her great-grandson. Then I say,“And they all have a great love for you.” It’s my sensitive bedside manner, running away with me.

  She says something I can’t hear. I lean over her again.

  “I can’t imagine,” she says,“having a great love for anyone.”

  Well, that’s consoling, I think. But I know it’s just her radar picking up on my slightly phony “deathbed” vocabulary. The editor in her,weakened but still potent.

  “Maybe you do, though. You love your children greatly, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes,” she says ardently, remembering.

  “Well, that’s how we feel about you.”

  Her eyes close. Her skin is papery white, and her face is riveting. A week ago her cheek felt too warm, but now it feels too cool, deserted by the blood. She falls back into sleep, her diaphragm working to pull in air. I sit in my chair and read my book, a review assignment. Every few pages I look over to make sure the blankets still rise and fall.

  Her feet under the sheets are shrouded in down booties. There is a pressure sore on her back, and she must be turned every two hours. She doesn’t complain and mostly saves her energy to utter the necessary commands: put me flat, turn down the light, I’d like a drink. She doesn’t look happy, but I tell myself that this might just be muscular, a stiffening of the face. I wish the woman in the room next door would turn down her TV, a moronic throb that comes through the wall and must colour my mother’s dreams. Fury wells up in me, an amorphous anger that has found a convenient target.

  The next time I visit my mother, Casey comes with me.

  He has no qualms about the deathbed, although once, after a visit, he said the experience was more exhausting than running 15 kilometres. It’s the vampire effect, the hunger of the old for his youth. When he walks through the common room of the facility, where the crooked, the tremulous, and the silent are lined up in wheelchairs, the energy seems to come off him in waves; the old feast on him with their eyes. Sometimes they reflexively reach a hand out to him. “Hello,” he says to Mabel, the one with the bemused smile who is always bent over, investigating her own feet. “Hey there, how’s it going?” he says to the thin woman who prowls the corridors in her blue slippers and meets your gaze conspiratorially. Then he walks into his grandmother’s room and pulls a chair up close to her.

  “Hi Grandma, it’s Casey.” Her eyes open in their thousand-yard stare and then slowly, swimmingly, focus on him. Her mouth shapes words. We lean in.

  “Handsome as ever,” she manages. Repartee, the last thing to go.

  “How’re you doing, Grandma?”A rhetorical question. He takes her hands,which are puffy, in his.

  “Oh, not too good.”

  “That’s okay. You’ve done a lot in your life; you can take it easy now.”

  “I think I could walk,” she says “but they don’t want me to.”An old refrain. She still plans to walk, even though it’s been two years since she has taken a step.

  Casey holds her hand while I putter around the room, watering the dying African violet, eating a stale chocolate out of the box on her dresser, cranking open the window to get some air into the stuffy room. Now it’s as if visitors distract her from the strenuous work of crossing over to new terrain. The process of dying, if it isn’t abrupt, takes longer than you expect. It runs by a different clock. Every time I see her, she has moved a notch farther away from us. I almost hesitate to call her back into the room,with us.

  Furtively, when I’m alone with her, I tell her she can do as she likes now, that we’re all fine, and she’s free to go. She doesn’t answer. Or she might say,“Well, if you have pills, you could give them to me.”“Medicine, you mean?”“No, not medicine,” she says firmly. But I don’t have those pills and I don’t think I could do it anyway.

  Then she will ask me if “our” mother is still alive. She worries about her mother and seems to miss her, like a child. I imagine I’ll be the same when I’m 99.

  When she murmurs something about us “beating the traffic,” it’s a sign that we should go soon. But I like being in the room with her when she’s asleep; it’s comforting. The last time I visited, I stayed on for an hour or so. Then I crept over, because I couldn’t see the blankets moving any more and I got alarmed. I was staring at her belly, waiting for it to rise,when her eyes sprang opened.

  “What are you doing?”my mother asked.

  “Uh, just looking at you.” She looked skeptical. At least I didn’t hold a mirror up to her mouth.

  Later, in the car, Casey and I talked about what it’s like to be in the presence of dying. “There’s so much going on,” he marvelled. “Sitting beside her, it’s like sitting beside the ocean. It’s intense.”

  “It was a good time to visit,”I said, and then we let the radio play.

  Back in the room, we give her some water, a thickened syrup of water that won’t cause her to choke, and a few spoonfuls of applesauce. But eating looks like something that makes no sense to her any more, and soon she says,“Enough.”

  Casey asks if she’s tired.

  “I think if you leave and I leave, then it will be best for both of us,” she says. Gentle. I feel the effort it takes for her to deal with us, so casually alive.

  “I’ll see you soon,” Casey says with a smile, “I love you very much, Grandma.”My mother looks at him frankly. Even though she’s not in the habit of making such statements, she rallies.

  “I love you too.”

  “Sweet dreams,” he says.

  But she’s already falling back into the new place, where it’s easiest to float now.

  As we gather up our things to leave, I turn the lights down, pull the blankets up to her neck. Tuck her in. The emergency call button is pinned to her pillow, but she’s too weak to push it now. Or wouldn’t. I tell her I’ll see her tomorrow and pull the door half shut.

  Casey lopes through the common room, past the other residents, trailing his youth and energy like a comet’s tail.

  Hello, Goodbye

  IT’S LATE AUGUST. I’m 63, with a metal plate in my right elbow and too old to be helping my grown son move. He has it all organized,with friends at this end. But here I am anyway, wearing age-inappropriate capris, standing on College Street at Shaw, the Toronto equivalent of his old neighbourhood in Montreal. I peer east up into the river of rush-hour traffic as I wait for Casey to arrive in a U-Haul with all his earthly goods. He is moving back to the city, but not, to our mutual relief, into his old room. As he cheerfully said, a propos of living under the same roof with us, “Nothing personal, but it’s unsustainable.”

  Seven years earlier, he had to go all the way to Guatemala to draw the line. Now he just needs to be on the other side of town. This seems to be what families keep on doing. We pull away from each other then pick up the phone.

  It felt like the right time to move. If you’re not in college, in love, or playing in a band named Border Collie, Montreal can be
, as Casey put it, “a cruel mistress.”Not the easiest place to find work or to put down roots. In the six years he lived there, he had come to know the far corners of the city intimately. He’d consumed a thousand warm bagels on St. Viateur and shared a huge loft in the east end with some bohemian yoga girls. He’d worked six jobs, climbed Mount Royal countless times, and played some Hank Williams at The Wheel Club. But now the city wasn’t returning his calls.

  In an email, he described to us his last summer weekend in the city, when he rode his bike around some of his old haunts. There was an outdoor tango festival in Parc Lafontaine. He sat on the grass and watched the couples dance, the city’s haughty kiss goodbye. Last tango in Montreal. He threw a desultory farewell party, and his former roommates showed up. But that was bittersweet too.

  “The city seems emptied of all my hopes and dreams now, and looks completely different,” he wrote, well aware of how melodramatic that sounded. It’s only a five-hour train ride from Toronto, not Kazakhstan, I thought. But I understood the logic; he was doing his best to make this the end of a certain chapter in his life, so that a new one could begin.

  My cell rings. It’s Casey, saying that he’s a few blocks away. It’s not six o’clock yet; he’s early, but that’s good because it means he can still park legally in front of the apartment to unload. I step off the curb to claim the spot. The apartment he’s moving into is up one flight up, above Super Models Pizza (“Our crusts are thin as a supermodel”).

  Early in the day, he had phoned from the wheel of the U-Haul, on the 401, to report that a SUV had just pulled by him hauling a huge sailboat. The boat had fishtailed wildly, swerved, and then rolled off the road right in front of Casey.

  “I knew when he passed me that he was trouble, so I made sure to put some distance between us,” he said. The SUV driver was parked on the shoulder, waiting for the police to show up. Casey was behind him, ready to nose back into the stream of traffic. He sounded calm. It seemed to take the nervous edge off the journey, that little brush with bad luck.

  A few days earlier, I had come by the apartment to pick up the keys. The place was bright but airless and hot. Katie said that it became even more stifling when the pizza ovens were all firing down below them. “The girl who rented it before us said ‘the apartment really holds the heat,’” she said,“and I thought that would be a good thing in the winter.”

  Katie’s partner Alex, an old friend of Casey’s, had been accepted for an internship in another city, so she was glad to be able to have someone to share the rent with for the next few months. It would give him time to scout his own place. She showed me his tiny room, her former office, noting that it had no closet. “So I guess he’ll do the boy thing,” she said, meaning stacks of milk crates. But fresh pizza would not be a problem.

  Now we would be living at opposite ends of College, the street that runs across the middle of Toronto from High Park and Little Italy to Cabbagetown. The red and yellow streetcars,which always make me think of an embolism shunting through the veins of the city,would pass right under his window.

  Before, whenever he came home from Montreal to visit, he would occupy the spare room next to our bedroom. When everyone was in their rooms all we had to do was raise our voices to carry on a conversation. Life at the summer cabin was the same;we seem to gravitate toward small, yurt-like dwellings where we all live in the smoke of our cooking and the damp footprints of trips to the shower and back. It’s partly economics, but perhaps a relic of our communal days, too—or of life in a band’s touring van (that never goes anywhere).

  Living under one roof, though, it’s hard for a 23-year-old not to see himself constantly reflected in the funhouse mirror of his parents, with his image either magnified or distorted. The maternal reflexes keep twitching away too. My compulsion to put a vitamin pill beside his cereal or to dig out warmer scarves.

  After a certain point, living together makes everyone feel trapped in dusty roles. To have him in the same city but not down the hall felt just right. Not just home, but a hometown.

  Six-fifteen. A few blocks east, in the shining flow of metal I spot a white truck—surely too big a container for his bicycles, guitar cases, and Ikea bed. But I can see that it is Casey at the wheel. He pulls up to the curb, careful not to hit the parking meter with the truck’s wide mirrors, and jumps out. Heat comes off the engine in waves.

  “Look,” he says, pointing at the inch between the tire walls and the curb. “Now, that’s parking.”

  He’s wearing cut-off jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt, with a big smile on his face. He loves driving a truck. Just then his friend Tom shows up to help him unload. He doesn’t need my help but he’s appreciative of the welcome. Brian calls to say he’s on his way over from the office on his bike. I peer into Super Models Pizza with what I hope is a friendly wave and pick up whatever lamps and baskets I can carry with my re-engineered elbow.

  The men run up and down with bed frames and 50-pound amps. Soon I’ve done the small bits and stand around on the sidewalk feeling redundant. This becomes our last parental chore—to dwindle, to clam up, to say,“Well, you may be right,”and step aside. Once we eclipsed everything, bending over their cribs. We were the whole sky. But eventually, at 16 or 26, they realize that whenever we come in to cover them up,we also block their view.

  On the other hand, I did leave the gym early in order to show up at the apartment in good time. Katie was away for the weekend, so I’d opened the windows in the apartment, moved the mail off the stairs, and put some flowers in a vase. Bought some milk and put it in the fridge. That wasn’t meddling, was it, to buy some milk? The thoughtful gesture of one adult to another?

  Brian arrived breathless and clapped Casey on the back. “Your first Toronto apartment,” he said. “This is a landmark!”

  Up and down we went with bins of clothing, camping gear,my father’s old record turntable, crates of our vinyl albums. Bikes and canvases. Casey gave me back the lamp I had ordered online for Seasonal Affective Disorder.

  “I appreciate the gesture,” he said, “but I don’t plan on being depressed this winter.”

  No problem, I said. I know lots of depressed people who could use it.

  His small room quickly filled up. The overflow went into a porch-like storage space at the back of the apartment.

  “You know,” I said to Casey,“you should just keep your bed in the room and put everything else back in that space—you could even put up shelves there for your clothes.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” he said, as in, “I’m going to ignore that.”

  Stealthily, I lugged some crates from the bedroom back into the space. I began to organize a “music corner” at one end, a “tool and equipment corner” in another. Stop it, stop it. I slid open the windows for more air and looked down into the jumbled yard. Yes, this place had potential. I happened to have brought along a plate of jerk chicken so I put that in the fridge too.

  “Will you be eating here or somewhere else?” I asked.

  “I’ve got to drop off more stuff to another address, then I think I’ll come home to sleep because it’ll be too late to get myself set up here.”

  Home? Here, or back with us? The meaning of the word was shifting.

  Then he barrelled off to deliver a mattress to someone in north Toronto, a moving job to help defray the cost of the truck. Brian got back on his bike; I carried the Saran-wrapped plate of chicken back to our car and drove home, where the two of us would eat it. The centrifugal household.

  I felt fully in the ambiguous grip of family, this long-term arrangement in which the connection feels either too attenuated or too claustrophobic. It’s also a lot for three people to sustain, architecturally speaking. We’d come through shaky times but here we were, still standing. How hard we make our children work, to absorb all our love, fears, and hopes.

  What we could really use, I thought, was some new weight-bearing members . . . a daughter-in-law. Grandchildren. The wider circle.

  T
he Dump

  THE MOVING-DAY adrenalin was still flowing, and Casey had one more day left on the rental fee of the truck. xxx xx xxx“Maybe we should clear some of that stuff out of the basement.”

  Ah, the basement. The lurking id of the family.

  “I’d rather do it now and get paid for it, than have to do it after you guys die,” he suggested in a rather too businesslike tone of voice.

  “Fair enough.”

  Our unfinished basement is scary. Half of it is too low to stand up in, causing Brian to navigate around it like a troll with scolio-sis. There is a damp patch on one wall that I keep spritzing with anti-mould poisons, and the drain in the floor suffers reflux after heavy rains. There was our Barbie-sized set of washer and dryer;we had tried several times to install new machines, but the turn down into the basement was too narrow;we’d have to tear down the walls to get new appliances down there. So eventually, we gave up and began using the local laundromat. We did this for three years until we finally caved in and repaired the original dwarf appliances. Sometimes late at night I would lie in bed and think about the basement and all the things that were down there:

  Two mirrored doors. A slab of cedar from a 40-year-old homemade bed frame. Suitcases full of orphaned electronic cables. My old Selectric typewriter and Brian’s first manual, an Underwood. The red Afghan tribal dress my girlfriends gave me for my birthday in 1972, which I still hope to fit into again. Five drums. Two roasting pans. Snarls of Christmas lights. Dale Carnegie books on how to influence people, from my parents’ shelves. A crate of cookbooks I have never used. And many banker boxes fill with drafts of plays, books, and screenplays, the things I’d written that had come to light, or not. Typing typing typing.