Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  “It’s the fever,” Lorraine said. “They can’t get it to stay down. Is Trevor okay?”

  “He’s happy outside. He likes the old birch tree that my father planted when I was born.”

  “A tree planted when you were born? How big is it?”

  “It’s not that big, I’m only forty-three.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Lorraine said, coming close to a laugh. It seemed to hurt her chest. “How about Darlene?”

  “She can tell me what they’re used to, now—” Now that Clayton was gone. Clara steered away from that. “She’s very good with Pearce, too. If he cries she can calm him better than any of us.”

  “He crying a lot?”

  “Oh no, I didn’t mean—Just when once in a while he makes a murmur.”

  “Because he’s a good baby, he doesn’t cry.”

  “He’s a perfect baby. You must be missing him.”

  Lorraine began to sob. Clara sat watching, in an agony of guilt. After a moment, though, Lorraine stopped. As if crying took more energy than she was prepared to expend. “Spilt milk,” she said. “They took that other lady out—the ovarian one. She went in for surgery, but when they opened her up they couldn’t do anything. They sewed her back up and sent her home to Wilkie.”

  Difficult to respond to that.

  “That’s the bad part,” Lorraine said. She patted the bed restlessly, and fumbled with the small flowered pillow that Clara had remembered to bring in for her.

  “Can I fix it?” Clara slid her arm under Lorraine’s neck, lifting her head gently. In one quick motion Clara slipped the flowered pillow out, shook it into softness again, and smoothed it into a double fold to fit nicely beneath Lorraine’s ear.

  “You’re good at that.”

  “I had practice with pillows, looking after my mother for many years while she was ill.”

  They sat together in silence for a while but Lorraine was still restless. “We were on our way to Fort McMurray. Clayton’s got a job lined up there. His cousin has an RV dealership, used, and now that so many people can’t find any place to live up there, there’s lots of people buying. Clayton was going to help Kenny fix up trailers, there was one on the lot that we could use while we figured out where to live. It would have been okay for a while, until we found something better.”

  “Lots of work up in Fort McMurray, they say.”

  “He can do a lot of things you wouldn’t expect,” Lorraine said. “He’s a good cabinet-maker. He upholsters furniture, too, and that’s hard work. That’s what his cousin wanted him for, to reupholster the trailer fittings. He’d surprise you, how good he is.”

  Maybe he’d gone on without them, Clara thought.

  Lorraine stopped talking, and twisted her head from side to side. “My neck hurts.”

  “Do you want me to see if they can give you something?”

  “I don’t want to take anything. I’m already taking stuff. I don’t know.”

  Clara thought the fever was increasing.

  “It’s hard,” Lorraine said.

  “Yes,” Clara said. Not knowing what else to say.

  On the very top shelf of the last kitchen cupboard Darlene found a brown envelope taped down on a glass pedestal thing. Tons of money in it. It added up to seven hundred and something, counting pretty quick, one ear open for Clara coming back from the store. But it was no good to her, it was strange pink money from England. The car! She jumped down from the counter. Too far, so the balls of her feet hurt, but she didn’t get caught.

  Finding the house in surprising disarray, Clara tidied the living room and the TV room, and the hall, and the back steps—Trevor had made a fort there with blankets and pillows—before making lunch. Mrs. Pell went to her bedroom and shut the door, and they all left her alone. Clara gave Pearce a bottle. He stared into her eyes thoughtfully while he drank, his fingers splayed against her chest.

  When he fell asleep she did three loads of laundry. She remembered to phone and extend the insurance on her mother’s car, thinking she might be liable if Clayton got into another accident. She made cookies and started a list of necessities on the door of the fridge: formula, diapers, chicken soup from an envelope. They did not like canned. She wrote down everything the children asked for. It seemed like they were all in cotton wool, or that same smothering membrane which had been bothering Clara herself lately.

  After supper Clara walked them to the park in the darkening evening. The children played on the flat merry-go-round, Trevor standing in the middle and Darlene running it around and around, faster and faster, until she could jump up too and they went spinning on and on through the indigo night air.

  Clara stood a little distance away from their orbit, letting Pearce rest against her chest, feeling the weight and the balance of his body against hers. It wasn’t so hard, being with children.

  4. Counting money

  At ten that night Clara went back through the hospital to Lorraine’s silent room. The window was a dark rectangle in the white wall. She turned off the overhead fluorescent light, left on the small yellow bulb over the sink, and pulled the alcove curtain partway across so it wouldn’t glare in Lorraine’s eyes. Now they could see the lights of the city across the river, the pretty bridges, the night sky. Deep shadowy blue, not black, even so late.

  “I’m worried about the kids,” Lorraine said. Easier to talk in the darkness. “I’m worried about Clayton too, but not as much. He can take care of himself, more or less.”

  Now would be the time to mention Clayton’s departure.

  But Lorraine said, “I’m afraid.”

  All Clara could think of was, “Don’t be.” An unforgivable, asinine thing to say. She did not want to remember her father dying, or the horrors her mother went through. “I’m sorry. Of course you are afraid. I guess I mean, don’t let superstition trap you into pretending to be positive all the time. There is no jinxing, and being blindly optimistic doesn’t help.”

  “What does help then?”

  “I pray, but it does not always—” She could think of no word but suffice, which would sound pompous. “It’s hard to know what to pray for.”

  Lorraine snorted, and flapped her hands onto the sheet. “I know what to pray for! That my, this, thing will go away. That I will have my kids back with me. That everything will go on the way it was the day before we came to Saskatoon, when I was worrying about how to find work and a place to live, not how to live.”

  It was not a tirade, but a considered statement.

  “I had enough worry before. I’m not going to worry now. I’m not going to pray either. I’m going to be patient and wait for this to happen.” She corrected herself. “Wait for this to go away.”

  There were blue marks under her eyes, and her skin was puffy. The steroids, affecting her already. If her fever could be brought down they were assessing her for chemo in the morning, Clara knew, and then would come a bad time. For a moment she was glad she had been with her mother during that long struggle, so she knew a little about it, to be able to help Lorraine.

  “Is there anything you like to read? Magazines? People? Or something more serious while you’ve got some quiet time?”

  “Some of each,” Lorraine said. Her pointy smile was very tired.

  One more thing, though. “I don’t know what to do about Darlene. She wants to see you, of course. Should I put her off, or bring her in?”

  “Don’t bring Trevor, not right now. But you could bring Darlene. I need her to get some stuff from the car, now that I think of it. Good thing you said.”

  Clara had forgotten their car, in the impound lot. “They gave us the knapsacks, that first day…I’ve got the children’s things.”

  “Yeah, but I got some stuff hidden in there, in the Dart. We were living in there for the last couple weeks. You know how it is. You have to keep your stuff somewhere.”

  From her tone Clara supposed it was money, or even drugs. But she would not be a good judge. Maybe papers, that kind of treasure.
“I’ll bring Darlene tomorrow. I meant to ask if there is anyone that I should call for you. I’m not sure if Clayton has had a chance to do that.”

  “Nice way of putting it,” Lorraine said. “No, there’s no one. No one that I know where they are, anyways.”

  This time Clara stopped herself from saying she was sorry. She decided again not to get into Clayton’s absence. “You look like you could sleep,” she said. “I’ll bring books tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” Lorraine said. “I’ll catch up on that summer reading I’ve been meaning to get to. Don’t bring Pearce. That would be hard on him.”

  “All right,” Clara said. “I’ll keep him at home. He’s good, he’s doing well.”

  “Thank you.” Lorraine closed her eyes and turned her head away from Clara before she opened them again. The window looked out on all the lights across the river, a million glinting sparks.

  Walking down the hall, thinking ahead to breakfast for the children, Clara did not see Paul Tippett until he took her arm, right beside her. She jumped, and he apologized, both of them speaking in whispers because it seemed so late. The hospital was closing down around them, patients being put into storage for the night.

  “How is your family?” he asked.

  “The mother, Lorraine, is not doing very well,” Clara said. It felt disloyal, to say it out loud. Superstition. She was as bad as anyone.

  Paul Tippett looked sad, the clear lines of his face blurred. She was sorry, because she liked him, as far as she knew him. He seemed crippled by diffidence, but always kind.

  “Will you do something for me?” she asked. “Will you visit her?” She could see him pull away involuntarily, like she had pulled away from Darlene’s snatching hand. “Tomorrow, I mean, or—not as a parishioner, to comfort her—but I’ve got her children, and her husband’s gone—oh, but don’t tell her that. Just to ease her mind, that I’m not a monster, because she has no choice, she has to put them somewhere, and I’m the only—” Clara stopped. She was making a fool of herself.

  He stared at her, in the lowered light of the night hall. “The husband has gone?”

  “Yes,” she said, not mentioning the car, or the teapot, or his weak threat. “But he might come back.”

  Paul thought Clara Purdy had experienced a radical change since he’d last seen her. She seemed charged with energy. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. It was involvement that put you into time, perhaps. He shook his head, astonished at the brightness of her face, then saw that she thought he was refusing her request.

  “No, no—I will,” he said quickly. “I will visit her. Sorry, I was thinking of something else. I’ll tell her how fortunate her family is, to be with you.”

  He couldn’t remember her house. A bungalow. “You have enough room for all of them, do you? What’s her last name?”

  “Gage. Lorraine Gage—in this ward.”

  He wrote it in his little calendar book and gave her a quick apologetic smile, for his reluctance. She could not help smiling back. She did like him. Too bad about Mrs. Tippett, that cold fish.

  Lorraine lay in bed counting money. Seventy-seven dollars in the glove compartment. Lucky sevens. Three twenties, a ten, a five, the $2 bill saved for years. Whore’s money, Clayton would call that. Not loose, for anyone to find (meaning Clayton, of course), but stuck between the back two pages of the map book. They were not going to get to Newfoundland or Labrador. $189 left in the bank, but she thought Clayton probably had her bank card, and he knew her PIN. A hundred dollars—one $100 bill—hidden, taped inside a box of tampons in the cardboard box in the trunk. He would not have found that, but the worry was that someone might throw out the box.

  She could hardly stand to think about money. What would Clayton do? He had $300 and some left on the Husky Gas card before it maxed out. But no car, so gas wasn’t going to do him much good. They could eat, though, at Husky station restaurants. If he decided to take the kids on to Fort McMurray, which she wondered if he was planning on doing, since he was obviously not at Clara’s any more.

  $189, $300, how long would that last?

  At a certain point every time in all this figuring, Lorraine would feel her neck stiffen and swell from tension, and she’d fling the whole thing out of her mind.

  She lay still, mostly. Moving made her feel weird, and whatever drugs she was pumped full of seemed to make it easier to be still. If things were ordinary, she’d be in the car, Pearce nestled in her elbow, worrying about money and thinking ahead to what work she could get in Fort McMurray. Worrying about who would look after the kids while she waitressed or cleaned houses again; about gas and how much a bunch of bananas and some fig newtons had taken out of the purse. She moved her feet under the pale green sheet and stared with torn-open eyes around the room. Here she was.

  The moon made bars of yellow light that gradually drifted across the room. She could tell she must have slept when she saw the moonlight farther advanced on her sheets, on the end of the bed, on the wall. The moon rose in the east and set in the west, just like the sun. Sometimes with the sun. She’d sat nursing Pearce in the car while the others ate outside in the sun at a Taco Bell, last week. His mouth pulling, pulling, his eyes staring at her in a trance of happiness, and the white moon visible in the blue day sky.

  She could not die on them. $77, $189, $100. It took her a few minutes to work it out in her foggy head. $366. Well, that was a lucky number. She liked threes and sixes. Clayton couldn’t feed them all on that for long. He’d have to go to the food bank. Mom Pell had money somewhere, but she wouldn’t give it up for food, at least not for the kids. Lorraine let herself hate Mom Pell for the cherries she’d insisted on buying, that huge six-dollar bag of BC cherries that had probably caused the whole thing, anyways. Making Clayton drive too fast to make up for stopping. Bits of red pulp clinging to everything after the crash, like your own body and brains turned inside out, like one of the children had been badly hurt. Lorraine’s chest ached, the breasts and the inside too, wanting to have Pearce and the others there with her. She was filled with panicky rage just thinking about Clay and Mom Pell, but the children were so sweet. Except there was no money.

  $77, $189, $100. How long did it take for welfare to kick in last time? But they weren’t residents of Saskatchewan, they’d get sent back to Winnipeg on the bus. They couldn’t leave her, though, and she was entitled to health care anywhere in Canada, they were always saying.

  They needed $1200. Six for an apartment, another six for the damage deposit. First and last months’ rent. Who knew how long it would take for Clayton to get paid, no matter how fast he found a job. There was no way. They’d be in housing, if there was room. Or a shelter. Clayton would not be good at looking after the kids on his own in a shelter, and Mom Pell was worse than useless. She would have to talk to the kids. They’d need some kind of—the thought of a weapon for them: a nail file, a pin—

  Lorraine sat up and vomited neatly into a green plastic kidney basin. She lay back down. It might all be a dream. The moon had floated off, leaving the room dark and deserted. In a while, she slept.

  5. The Dart

  It was impossible, being with these children. After four days of it Clara was exhausted by their clatter and the grime that attended them, and their easy assumption that she would do everything for them. The cooking alone never seemed to end. The perpetual low-grade noise started at dawn with Pearce waking up, and might have been the worst thing—but Clara wasn’t sleeping anyway, too conscious of everyone else, of the new disturbing mass of people surrounding her. There was far too much to do in the house, keeping any kind of order, but they had to deal with the car, too, and she’d promised.

  Darlene was eager to press the elevator buttons and fly up to her mother’s room. But as they came closer she seemed to be repelled, as if the poles had suddenly reversed on her interior magnet. She took Clara’s hand, three or four doors away, and whispered, “Wait.”

  Clara stopped. Darlene didn’t look a
t her. She stared at the wooden rail that ran along the wall.

  “I guess this is for people who are walking but might fall down?”

  “I think so.” Clara was frightened by how dire everything seemed, when she thought of things from Darlene’s perspective. Or Lorraine’s. “It’ll be all right,” she said, inanely.

  Darlene let go of Clara’s hand, and walked past the last few doors to Lorraine’s room.

  Lorraine was sitting up in bed when they went in. “Hey, sugar plum,” she said. Her eyes were over-bright, her skin palely glowing.

  “Mama,” Darlene said. She was across the room instantly, leaning up on the bed, close to Lorraine’s face. Their two faces pressed together, cheeks and noses, their whole faces, not just kisses. Lorraine’s arms met around Darlene’s back, and she lifted her up onto the high bed with her as if she didn’t weigh anything.

  “Oh, I’m so glad to see you!” she said, as well as Clara could make out, the words muffled in Darlene’s hair.

  Darlene did not speak, she only lay curled against her mother on the green sheets, her arm over her mother’s waist.

  “You look good,” Clara told Lorraine, when she looked up and noticed her.

  “I better look good, I’m on twenty different pills.” Lorraine waved at the rolling table, where three or four paper cups held an assortment of coloured pills. “Six, seventeen, everything I need right here.”

  She bent again, curling lightly over Darlene’s tense back. “Mmm, you smell good. Clean laundry, I love that smell.”

  Watching the hard work Lorraine was having to do, to be as healthy as possible for Darlene, Clara felt a painful tension herself. And Darlene was so quick to pick up on things.

  “Hey, Clara brought me this nice nightie, gives me a little colour, don’t you think?”

  Darlene looked up at her mother’s face, still not speaking. No colour in Lorraine’s face, only the brilliant darkness of her eyes. She hugged Darlene close, rocking in a narrow range, back, forth, back, forth.