Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  “Later,” I said. “Thanks for showing me.”

  She went back to work, but not before sending me a friend request and then accepting it for me, and showing me how to send someone a message—too much information for one lesson, but I took notes.

  After she left, I tried to get on Ian’s page, but I couldn’t. I saw who his friends were, though. He had eleven. His brother. His nephews. A couple of people whose names I recognized from his office. A woman named Meika.

  Meika? I didn’t know anyone by that name.

  I looked up from my phone to see that Mr. Weins was considering going somewhere. “Help me,” he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Be careful you don’t fall,” I said to him, alarmed, but he ignored me.

  He managed to rid himself of the bed covers and stand on both feet, but he looked as though he didn’t know what to do next. He stood by the bed saying, “Help me, someone . . . help me,” and I felt terrible ignoring him but there was nothing I could do, or wanted to do, so I pushed the call button by Joe’s bed.

  Mr. Weins stood on his skinny, shaky legs then and looked right at me and said, “Get away from that man, you hussy.” He stood with one hand on the bed, swaying as though he might collapse, and said it over and over, getting more and more agitated, until finally a nurse arrived—Kelly this time—and told me that he likely thought I was his wife and couldn’t figure out what I was doing sitting by the wrong bed. Kelly talked Mr. Weins back into bed and tucked him tightly in the sheets and he calmed down. He stared at me the whole time, his eyelids fluttering, until finally he closed them and nodded off.

  Joe Fletcher’s eyes remained closed. He gave no sign that he was aware of my presence, even though I’d said, several times, “Joe, it’s me, Frances.” It looked as though he was unconscious, inching toward the inevitable, but the nurses told me that just that morning he had opened his eyes, and they thought he understood what they were saying to him. Once I got the idea in my head that he could understand what people said to him, I couldn’t get it out. I felt stupid talking to him, but I did anyway. I knew time was running out. I tried to be honest. “I was too young. My mother was right. I was too young and you were too old for me, and your friends terrified me.” It was as though I was trying on memories, getting my tongue around things that I’d never before spoken of. Once I said, “I was so frightened, I thought I would die. I thought someone was going to kill me. Not you, I didn’t think that. But it all felt so out of control. And then the cap. Silas Chance’s cap, or at least that’s what I believed.” I thought I saw him twitch. When the student nurse came into the room, I pretended that I’d been singing to him so she wouldn’t know what I was really saying. “Crazy,” the Patsy Cline song, a few scattered lines, since I couldn’t remember the words. I tried not to think what a young nurse with no life experience might make of that.

  As I talked, I studied Joe’s eyelids, the rise and fall of his chest, his breathing, which was not erratic the way I thought a dying man’s should be. He can hear me, I kept thinking. He’s listening. I began easing my way into what I wanted from him. If anything good was going to come of me stepping on a rusty nail, it had to be this. “Joe,” I said, “is there something you want to get off your chest before you go? Silas Chance and that whole business with the cap. How it ended up in Saul’s hands, and yours. It will help so many people if you tell me—more than you know.”

  On the one hand, I thought it was possible. Joe Fletcher would open his eyes and tell me the whole story as I imagined it happening, a drunken accident, the way Dooley thought it had happened but with a different vehicle, different people.

  On the other hand, I knew what I was hoping for was far-fetched, and worse, I was being hugely self-important, because I was speaking as though I thought I was special, a person who meant something to this dying man, or some saint, able to conjure a miracle. St. Frances of Elliot. Hardly.

  But I believed I saw the slightest movement of an eyelid.

  “Just lift a hand,” I said. “Anything to let me know you understand what I’m saying. There’s an opportunity. You should take it.”

  Nothing.

  I leaned back in my chair and studied Joe Fletcher, the man in the bed, the one I had married. It was the same man, but it was hard to imagine this man ever having had the strength for bush work in the dead of winter, and it was hard to imagine I’d ever convinced myself that he was as attractive as a movie star, or that I was in love with him. This dying old man was the first man I’d ever slept with, disastrously. As repulsed and frightened by him as I had once been, he now made me sad. He was dying alone. I knew I couldn’t take the blame for that, but I felt guilty anyway.

  The intercom crackled and a voice announced that visiting hours were over, and I left. As I passed Mr. Weins in the other bed on my way out, he opened his eyes and asked me if Joe was my son.

  “No relation,” I said. “A friend of my father’s.”

  That seemed to satisfy him.

  “Well, then,” he said, “you must be a good daughter.”

  “No,” I said. “I am not a very good daughter.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  Dooley made chicken and dumplings for supper that night, which we ate at his picnic table.

  The next day, Joe Fletcher slipped into the final hours before his death. I was in the room with him when Kelly told me that it wouldn’t be long. I didn’t want to be there when he died. I didn’t believe it was important for him to have someone there, especially not me, and it was clear that he was beyond making any kind of confession. Still, I leaned over him in the bed, leaned over his chest with its barely perceptible rise and fall, and said, “I accept that the disaster that was us was my fault. I was selfish, a silly teenager, Daddy’s baby, as you said. But the fact is, you had his cap. You must have been there. And it was wrong to keep that secret. It was just wrong.”

  I thought I saw an eyelid flutter. More distinct than the movement I thought I’d seen the day before.

  I straightened up, stared at the body on the bed. His hand lifted ever so slightly off the bedsheet where it lay. Was that it? A confession? I leaned over him again, watching, confused, as though I were about to witness the saintly miracle, something that couldn’t be explained—when the same hand came up from the top of the sheet again, came up completely unexpectedly, and caught me off-guard. The hand hit me in the chest, not hard—how could it, coming from a man so close to death?—but nonetheless I stepped backwards, and I lost my balance and fell, and my shoulder landed on one of the hard wooden arms of a chair, and then I fell sideways and hit my head on the radiator and landed on the floor.

  I lay there with my eyes closed for a minute or so, seeing something like stars, and I could hear Mr. Weins saying, “Help me, help me” over and over. Then I opened my eyes and pushed myself onto my knees and tried to get up, but it seemed my legs wouldn’t hold me. I thought I might vomit, so I lay down again, my cheek on the cold floor. I felt my forehead. There was blood. “Help me, help me,” droned Mr. Weins, and I felt trapped by his voice. I listened to him until I couldn’t stand to hear his plaintive cry one more time, and once the nausea had passed, I struggled to my feet and walked over to his bed and pushed the call button.

  “Shushh,” I said. “Someone is coming to help you. It’s just not me.”

  A drop of blood fell from my forehead onto his white cotton bedcover. I thought it might frighten him, but he was smirking.

  Kelly in her purple scrubs came into the room. “What happened to you?” she asked when she saw the blood on my forehead.

  “I think Joe Fletcher pushed me,” I said. “I could swear it. I was standing over him and he pushed me and I fell. Honest to God.”

  She took my arm and led me from the room and down the hall to a treatment room, the same one where she’d patched my foot. “Not possible,” she said. “You must have tripped. You might have a concussion.”

  I s
aid, “He was trying to tell me something.”

  She said, “He wasn’t. He’s past that.”

  She sat me down in a chair and took my blood pressure to make sure I wasn’t going into shock.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  At that moment, the nurse doing her practicum—my Facebook friend—came to the door and told us that Joe Fletcher had died. “Mr. Fletcher has expired,” she said. It must have been her use of the word “expired,” the formality of her announcement. It seemed hysterically funny. I started to laugh and Kelly had to ask the girl to leave us alone. She wondered if I needed a sedative, but I waved her away and told her I was going home.

  I returned to room 18 to collect my purse, and I saw that a curtain had been pulled between the two beds to conceal Joe’s body. I grabbed my purse from the floor without looking at him, and as I left the room, crazy old Mr. Weins said to me, “He’s mad at you, lady, isn’t he?”

  I stopped. “What did you see?” I asked him. “Did you see that man push me?”

  He didn’t answer. He started with his “help me” mantra and wouldn’t stop until Kelly came and restrained him by tucking the sheets around him so tightly that he couldn’t move.

  Once I was home, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried to see if there was a bump growing on my head. I filled the bathtub, and as I lay in the hot water, I thought about what I should do, whether it was possible that Joe Fletcher had made a deathbed confession of sorts, or whether it was what I believed miracles to be—that is, wishful thinking followed by happenstance.

  And then the name of Silas’s sister popped into my head. Darlene. Darlene Chance. No, Darlene Cyr. I got out of the tub and found my phone and searched for Darlene Cyr on Facebook. Nothing came up, so I tried the name Cyr combined with Yellowhead. There was a Lynette Cyr who listed Yellowhead Comprehensive as her high school. I found my Facebook teacher’s instructions and sent Lynette Cyr a message along with my email address. A reply came quickly: My mom had a brother named Silas.

  An hour later, this email: Who are you and what do you want?

  It was from Darlene Cyr.

  That night, lying awake in the darkness, I couldn’t stop thinking, I am no longer married, but I was surprised by how little that now meant. I also thought about the flyers Darlene Cyr had posted around Elliot: Someone knows. What exactly did I know? It was enough, I thought, to relieve Dooley of the guilt he’d lived with for so long, but was it enough to relieve an old lady, to end the story of what had happened to her brother? There was no evidence, no green cap, and no real confession that I could truthfully put forward.

  I went over and over what had happened in the hospital room, and I had no answer.

  And all night, I went over and over the year I turned eighteen and married Joe Fletcher, and I thought about the mistake I’d made, and the ones that followed, the many mistakes, and there had to have been reasons aside from the obvious, but I didn’t know what they were. I thought about the time of the Steve McQueens, which had been one of the lowest points in my life, and I thought of Daniel, the last Steve McQueen, and I wished I could say to him, “I wasn’t really all that tough, I was just pretending.” Which is likely the truth with all bad girls, something the barmaid who’d taken me aside had known, and I wished I could thank her again for trying.

  I wished too that I could say to Ian, “I don’t know why I wasn’t able to tell you everything. It doesn’t seem that bad now that I’ve told someone else.”

  And at that moment, life after Elliot began to seem possible.

  THE FIRST CONSEQUENCE of being no longer married—a widow, that is—came unexpectedly when I was asked to decide, in the absence of anyone else, about a funeral. A funeral director from Yellowhead, a man named Gregory Dern, called me, having got my phone number from someone at the hospital. He said, “Ms. Moon, Frances . . . may I call you Frances? I understand you are Mr. Fletcher’s widow, although separated. There doesn’t seem to be anyone for us to contact. Might you provide us with some direction? Will there, for example, be a funeral? Or a memorial service, perhaps? A celebration of life?”

  When I got over my dismay that Gregory Dern would ask me these questions, I said that funerals were for families and Joe Fletcher had none. If he wanted to be buried in a family plot, I said, he would have left instructions. I told Gregory Dern to choose the least expensive coffin and cremate the body; I would pay for it. There were forms, he said then; signatures were required. I told him to email me the forms and I would find a way to get them back. When he asked if I wanted the ashes—a ceramic urn, perhaps—I was beyond dumbfounded.

  “Gregory,” I said, “may I call you that? Seriously, an urn? So I can keep his ashes on the fireplace mantel? We’ve been separated for forty years. You have to be joking.”

  In an overly solicitous voice, he said, “All right, then, Frances. I understand.”

  I let that go. He clearly didn’t understand much.

  The second consequence of being Joe Fletcher’s widow came when I learned that because there was no will and no one else to claim his house in the bush, I was to become its owner. When I found this out, I called Mavis and told her she could sell the property and give the proceeds to the Elliot flood relief fund when all the legal work was completed.

  After that, I did stage a sort of memorial, for the Moon family, of which I was the only surviving member. I visited the dairy farm.

  The gravel road from town was so familiar I didn’t think a single thing had changed, but when I parked near the approach to my old home, I saw that the big wooden barn was gone and there were grain bins everywhere, including the spot where my mother used to have her garden. The sun shone on the farm machinery lined up neatly in the yard—tractors and seed drills and sprayers of a staggering size, four times as big as anything my father had owned. There were no animals to be seen—black-and-white cows or otherwise—and what used to be the pasture was now a field of canola coming into bloom.

  But the house itself was the biggest shock. When I inched my car forward until I could see it through the trees, I thought for a minute that I had the wrong place, not because the house had completely changed shape thanks to a huge addition that included a double garage, but because the whole monstrosity was painted a hideous lemon yellow with bright pink trim. Even the trim on the original log house was painted pink. I laughed out loud when I saw the colours through the trees. Lemon yellow was the last colour my mother would have chosen, and I imagined her cursing the fools who’d made her house look like an angel food cake. My own response to the paint job was a desire to thank the current owners for saving me from nostalgia. When I saw a vehicle coming up the road I started the car and drove on so I wouldn’t be reported to the new owners and accused of spying, or worse yet, invited in for coffee.

  After that, I went to the graveyard and spent half an hour at my parents’ graves, and the stillborn baby’s grave, which was next to theirs. The small headstone on the baby’s grave said, simply, Baby Moon. I had not gone to the graveyard at the time of the burial. I did not know if anyone had. I’d let my mother make all the arrangements and had seen the little headstone only once before, when my mother died. As I looked down at the grave, it was as though the baby belonged to someone else and had been placed there, next to my parents, by mistake. There was an unused plot on the other side of my parents and I wondered if it was meant for me. I walked around the cemetery until I found Uncle Vince and thought it was too bad that he wasn’t in that empty space in the family plot. Maybe I could get him moved, since I had no intention of spending eternity there.

  That evening, I wrote Darlene Cyr an old-fashioned, handwritten letter telling her what I believed had happened to her brother, and the next day I scanned it at the post office and sent her an email with my letter attached. I did this because I thought she deserved to know at least as much as I knew.

  I waited for a reply, but none came.

  Then a week later, I received a Facebook friend request from
Lynette Cyr, and not long after a story appeared on my timeline, along with a picture of her uncle, Silas Chance. It was a story about his life, his boyhood, residential school, the Korean War, the extended, loving family that made sure he was remembered. When I looked at the picture of him, I recalled his face as clearly as if I had seen him yesterday. The story didn’t mention how he had died, or Joe Fletcher’s confession—the one I had relayed—but it ended with “Rest in peace, Uncle.”

  I thought I understood, but probably I didn’t. What do I know about big, loving families? The only blood relations I had ever known took up four plots in the Elliot graveyard. “There’s no one,” I remembered my mother saying when I had offered to go to England with her. I remembered being relieved that I didn’t have to follow up on my offer, and perhaps that is the real fallout of my parents’ emigration, whatever it was they ran away from.

  IN THE EVENINGS—they will be my very last in Elliot—I sit on the porch in my canvas chair and watch the horses grazing across the road, their tails slapping, first in one direction, then the other. Sometimes I hear the faint sound of what I know is Dooley’s dance music, and when I do, I turn to watch his ritual tribute to Angela’s memory. He’s told me he’s now lighter on his feet when he dances, although honestly he still looks to me as much as ever like a crane with a broken leg. He says he is as content, most of the time, as his rescued horses. He claims he is not sorry for his childhood or his years of exile. He’d bet dollars to donuts that he has had a better life than many.

  I’ve sent Ian my new phone number. Since then, I’ve spent possibly too much time thinking about how a call might go.

  I believe I have finally come to my senses.

  IT’S SATURDAY, A yoga day. Mavis is coming before her class to sink a For Sale in the grass in front of the house. For some reason, this is bothering me. I don’t like to think of the house being sold after all it’s been through. The house is a survivor, a bit like the tea caddy, although it hasn’t exactly been through a war. Half an hour before Mavis is to arrive, it comes to me: I’m not selling it. I’m giving it to Dooley Sullivan. I phone Mavis and tell her I’ve changed my mind.