Bridget spun toward him. “You’ve sent him to England? You don’t even have enough money to pay him what you owe him.”
“It’s not for me, Bridget. It’s for that.” He touched the tip of his shoe to the package.
“Which is?”
“It’ll be better if you just read it.”
“Why,” said Marianne.
Rosen stood and suddenly his face was bright scarlet. “Because I can’t fucking explain it to you, that’s why! It’s for you, he says. He asks me to deliver it, and now I have. I’ve done my duty. Now yours is to read it and get on with your lives.” He scooped his jacket off the bed, but Bridget rushed to block his way to the door.
“Hold on — you’re not going anywhere yet.” She stood in front of him with her arms crossed. “I thought John worked for you.”
“I thought that too.”
“When is he coming back?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Rosen said over his shoulder, and he backed up to go around Bridget the other way.
“Let him go,” said Marianne. Bridget looked over to see that a sheaf of paper lay on Marianne’s lap. Bridget was barely aware of the sound of the door closing behind her. Marianne was riffling the paper: pages and pages of John’s handwriting. She handed Bridget a small white envelope. “This was in the envelope too. It’s addressed to you.” Bridget took it and tore it open, slipped out the thin white card inside, and read it. She muttered, “Jesus,” and dropped it onto the bedspread as if it were burning.
“What?” said Marianne.
“The bastard.”
“Bridget?” Marianne laid the pile of paper on the desk and rose to hold her, and Bridget stood stiffly in her arms.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“It’s just us now,” said Marianne.
Bridget drew away. “So I get a greeting card and you get . . . what? A full accounting?”
Marianne turned half the pile of paper over and they both stared at it. The line at the top of the page said, As if beckoned by a strange gesture of hope, the spring came in earnest the week after Mrs. Rowe moved into Hallam’s rooms. Bridget looked up at her mother. “Who’s Hallam?”
“Maybe this is the man who wrote your father’s diary.”
“This is not a diary.”
“Well, maybe that’s good,” Marianne said. “You don’t get to find out the ending in a diary.”
“We know how this ends,” said Bridget. “Everyone vanishes in a puff of smoke and no one ever remembers what they said or did. And the last ones get a few extra minutes to see if they can make any sense of it all. Do you like that ending?”
“I prefer it to nothing.” Marianne pulled the sheaf of paper off the desk and slid it into its envelope.
“This is John’s talent, isn’t it? Sowing chaos.”
“I don’t know what his talents are anymore,” said Marianne. “At least he didn’t leave without saying good-bye.”
“The result is the same.”
“No, it isn’t, love.” She put her hand against her daughter’s cheek, and Bridget did not pull away as Marianne thought she would. If anything, she felt her daughter turn her face minutely into the heat of her palm. “Take me home now. Please.”
Bridget stirred herself and went to begin collecting her mother’s clothes from the drawers and stacking the few remaining books. A couple of large paper bags with handles accommodated everything. They’d send a cab for the lamps.
They brought everything out to the elevators and waited, watched the numbers rising and falling in the wall, not speaking. When one of the doors opened, Marianne said, “Hold on,” and apologized to the people within who stood with their belongings, looking embarrassed. “Let this one go,” she said to Bridget, and she went back down the hall alone. In the room, she found John’s note, on the bed where Bridget had dropped it. There were five words on it: I hold you to me, and Marianne put it into her pocket, in case her daughter wanted it at some more forgiving time, in the future.
The birds returned and it was time to lay in the spring bulbs again. Almost a year since she’d last done this planting — but with David of course sitting nearby, still alive, yet alive, a mug of tea in his hand. Then the summer came on afterwards with its unseemly optimism. But this did not distract her from the fact of his life ending. It would not be put aside, not even for a second. It was like having a distant memory in her mind that would not leave her, although this was a memory that had not yet formed. It was waiting to take its final shape. The sensation that accompanied it was filled with an emotion, but not an emotion she would have called sadness. She suspected it was something that animals felt, something completely removed from life’s orders, a primal thing, unspeakable.
She had been anxious about summer’s coming again, the first summer without him. Last year, he’d wanted to be with her wherever she was, to sit in the garden, at the table, to lie in bed. A quiet, staring creature who sometimes stopped in her world to report something. If it occurred to him, he might say that bees and birds were responsible for everything beautiful. Or that shit was the key ingredient in the food chain, and then laugh and wipe his mouth. Laughter was the ultimate thereness: if he could do it and she could hear it, then he was alive in the ceaseless present and she might be crouching down by the tomatoes and saying to herself, The moment is still here, and she would think she was not storing a memory, she was actually living.
He was still walking on his own, although she worried how he’d cope anywhere without her. Since the spring, when he’d absconded with John for that roadside drink (it was almost funny now — almost), she’d kept a closer eye on him, and he’d seemed more willing to be watched over. An afternoon conference at U of T — where he’d finally present the work he’d spent the entire year pulling together — made her nervous, but they’d deal with the physical challenges then. Now, he was already losing motor function and he’d stop in his tracks sometimes and need help to get restarted. If she put herself in front of him and let him lean his chest against her palm, he could begin moving again with her mediating gravity for him. She’d feel his heart fisting madly behind his rib cage, and he seemed so fragile sometimes that she thought her palm would pass right through his bones and she’d be standing there, holding his heart in her hand. At night she’d sleep with her fingers wrapped around his wrist, ready to wrestle him away from whatever thought it had a claim on him.
She realized that the feeling she lived with then was the same as the one that came suddenly these days when she was nearly asleep and heard a sound in the house: all her senses immediately present, a pointed awareness that subsided when the rational mind arrived on the scene and told everyone to disperse. Except for that entire spring and summer it would not. A low-level hum of danger ran under everything; it would spike for the most banal of reasons. Seeing a cupboard full of plates, or hearing the sudden sound of a tin can landing in the garbage. As if these moments full of their meaningless orderings somehow held the code for reality and she had never noticed it until then. Once, she’d nearly fainted with horror clicking shut the soap compartment in the dishwasher.
She’d thought of killing him. She remembered this more freely now. She told Bridget this after everything at the Union Arena site was finished, and Bridget said she understood. She told her daughter that on more than one night she’d sat awake in a chair on his side of the bed, watching him breathe in his sleep, his face a little sunken, like a death mask, and seen how simple it would be. Doubling, or even tripling, his lorazepam before bedtime would depress his breathing and she could do the rest. Or just lower the head of the bed and let the various creeping fluids drown him. This is love, she’d thought, and she imagined she was mad. But rationally mad. Who wouldn’t think of this?
Long after the end of that autumn, when she was back in her own house, she wondered how much of what she’d thought in that bedside chair had crept through the ether above his head. Between them, they’d married his sickness and allowed its off
spring into the world. Something in both David’s life and his death inhabited them all now, long after simple grief had faded from their lives. It had changed them, and if this was what David had wanted from his death, then she had it now, even though it was small solace, or no solace at all. But if it was the last thing he had to give her, heart of her heart, then now — moving on in her life — she could not refuse it.
For Anne, Benjamin, and Maxime
For William Dendy and Jane Jacobs
Raconter, c’est témoigner . . .
THANK YOU
To Steven Heighton and Claudia Dey, to Michael Helm especially, and to Anne Simard profoundly.
To Rebecca Silver Slayter and the rest of the Brick sprites and editors.
To Maya Mavjee, Pat Strachan, Ravi Mirchandani, Scott Richardson, Martha Leonard, and Ellen Levine.
This is a work of fiction based on fact; for its sources, background, some commentary, and acknowledgments, please visit redhillconsolation.blogspot.com.
THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN BETWEEN 1999 AND 2006
IN THE CITY OF TORONTO.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Redhill’s first book, Martin Sloane, received the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, Canada/Caribbean, and was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize. He lives in Toronto, where he serves as publisher and one of the editors of Brick, a literary magazine. Redhill is a poet and playwright as well as a fiction writer. His most recent play, Goodness, won the 2006 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award and will open in New York in March 2007. Consolation is his third book of fiction.
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