Nobody was around. Early enough on Sunday morning. Mrs. Pell went up the back alley and paused behind the workshop. Not for long, in case that meddler, Mrs. Zenko, was out hanging laundry on the line. That’d be like her, nose into everything. Couldn’t just use the dryer like everybody else.
Mrs. Pell unlatched the gate and lifted it up awkwardly on one bent arm, to stop the metal from grating on the cement sidewalk at the bottom, and went along, hugging the side of the shop close to the bushes. It wouldn’t be locked, she hadn’t locked it when Clayton hustled her out of there, and she did not think Clary would have. Open—in—shut. Enough light through the blinds to see. The TV was still there, but no sheets on the bed. She stumbled along to the back of the building, to unbar the alley door. There, she’d be set in case she needed to get in the back way another time.
She sat on the bed picking her teeth—a popcorn hull from last night. She had to go to the toilet in a minute. Those kids, always nagging to get into the bathroom. An old woman ought to be able to count on a bathroom to herself. It might be a question of rent. After spending money on the kids all those months like it was going out of style, Clary might welcome a little income. Say $100, or $75. Light and water included.
Mrs. Pell sat on in the morning twilight of the workshop, nobody bugging her. She’d sneak in and out, sneaky-snake back and forth. Nobody needed to know where she was.
Dolly was awake, lying in the bottom bunk. If she closed her eyes, she could still think she was at Clary’s house. There was no going back there, she knew that. She couldn’t even go to the library at school now. She wished Keys Books was not closed, and hoped the guy was not dead yet, but he probably was. She shouldn’t need books now anyway because everything was better: her mom was back, they were safe in Moreland’s house, they didn’t need first and last month’s rent any more. That money could stay in the bear’s butt at Mrs. Bunt’s house. No need for any of the things she knew from people’s houses, all their secrets. That made her think of Ann, and she turned over in bed. No goodbye, nothing, moved away on a Thursday night. Ann could have come here, Ann’s mother didn’t care where she went. Those two girls in the other duplex were mean; one of them had hit Trevor. She could hear his poor stuffy nose snoring on the bunk above her. These sheets still smelled almost like Clary’s house.
Her mother came softly in and sat on the edge of the bed. It was so early in the morning that Dolly thought her mom might have been awake all night.
“Hey, have you seen Trevor? I can’t find him anywhere,” her mom said.
“What?” Dolly sprang up in bed.
“April Fool!” she said. “He’s asleep, don’t worry.”
Dolly laughed. It had fooled her, even though she’d just heard him breathing over her head. She couldn’t think of anything to joke back with, though. She stared at her mother’s face, the same as before if you didn’t count the baldy hair. She remembered the day they went to the hospital the first time, after the accident. She shuffled her legs over to make more room, and reached for her mother’s cold hand.
“What’re you thinking about?”
“School,” Dolly said. “Stuff.”
“Are you sad these days? Everything’s pretty different now, from Clary’s.”
Dolly sat up and leaned on her mother’s chest. “It’s better now,” she said. Liar.
Later, when her mom walked down to the bulk store with Trevor and Pearce, Dolly decided that she should go visit Mrs. Zenko, who was old. Nobody would be mad at that. She had her bus pass. Maybe Clary would come over while she was there.
She swung onto the 1:12 bus and up the steps, flashing her card at the driver but mostly ignoring him; you didn’t have to be friendly when you had a pass. She sat by the back door, in a sideways seat, and passed the time reading the ads. There was a boy in one of them, leaning back on a rock laughing. He looked like her dad when he was a kid, if he’d had a different life. Along 8th Street, the place Keys Books used to be was open again already, a cell phone store. She should get that money out of Mrs. Bunt’s bear after all, and go find the Keys Books guy and give it to him. Except he might be dead.
The bus stopped at the corner by the school. She could see Clary’s house from there.
But she was shy to go there, now that she could see it. She climbed down the stairs and off the bus, since she’d pulled the cord, but she couldn’t make herself walk down the street once the bus wheezed away.
She was an April fool to come. After a minute she crossed the street to the other bus stop, hoping it would not be the same driver when the bus came back. Then down the block a dumpy figure inched out of the alley—Gran, her feet bad, it looked like. Dolly walked over to meet her and gave her an arm.
“Huh!” her gran said. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing?”
Neither of them answered. Three-legged-race, they made their way back to the bus stop. They didn’t have long to wait. On the way back down 8th Street, Dolly looked out the window and saw her mom and dad walking along from the bulk store with the boys. Her dad was carrying Pearce on his shoulders, and Trevor had a cinnamon bun.
“You got to watch him,” her gran said. “He lies, you know. And he steals. He’s stolen money from me.”
“I know,” she said. Gran always talked about her dad like that. “I’ll be careful.”
There was that same laughing boy ad on this bus too. People were so screwed up.
Paul drove to the superstore. He was having some difficulty remembering to feed himself. After communion, while he was finishing the Host (torn pita bread, not papery wafers, in this historically careful time), he had thought, that’s what I need. Good bread.
As he drove down 8th Street Paul saw Clayton and Lorraine walking along in the persistent sludge of old snow, finally melting now. Clayton had Pearce perched on his shoulders. Lorraine held Trevor by the hand. Maybe there was something wrong with their car. Strange to see them, and not be able to wave or stop and talk—strange ever to have known them in the first place, he supposed.
Stopped at a red light a few blocks farther on, he looked up and saw Clary Purdy walking west. Maybe there was something wrong with her car. He had not seen her for weeks. He really had to give her back the carpet—he remembered the strength of the tendon tensed in her inner thigh. She was wearing the taupe wool coat with the black velvet collar, long black boots: she looked like a Canada goose, a helpless, honking goose. He felt a painful contraction in his throat. Over-dressed, over-precise—he could see her getting old, alone.
In three minutes she would walk straight into the Gage family. He did a wildly illegal U-turn and stopped ahead of her.
He leaped out and leaned on the car. “Can I give you a ride?” he called. “Please?”
She stood still, bewildered.
“I—needed to ask you—I had a question,” he said.
She remained serious, but she came over to the car, contained and careful. No goose. He held the door and kept her attention in time for the Gages to pass by, oblivious.
“Do you think,” he began, pulling away from the curb with no idea what the rest of the sentence would be—anything—“That I could take Mrs. Zenko out for dinner? When she’s back from London?” Ludicrous thing to ask. Fool.
“Well, I guess so,” Clary said. “She is back. I walked over to church with her this morning.” He watched the flush climb her face. “The Ukrainian Orthodox,” she added.
Because she could not go to his church anymore.
“You sound awful,” he said, to relieve her discomfort.
“I have a cold,” she told him.
She was not looking at him. His elbow was too close to hers. He pulled himself in. “I didn’t mean awful, just sick. You sound hoarse.”
“Are you sick? Iris Haywood said you were in pain, but I was too shy to ask why.”
“Oh, it was shingles,” he said. “Nothing, really. They’re almost gone.”
They had arrived at her house. Sh
e thanked him, still without meeting his eyes, and got out of the car. He watched her go up the walk and into her empty, echoing house. He was an idiot.
That was horrible, Clary thought. She took off her coat in the silent house, pulling off her protective outer skin. She would not let herself even begin to think about Paul’s face and his fingers on the steering wheel, the spiking thorn of not being with him, and all that being wrecked. The only thing harder would have been running into Lorraine, her most constant dread. She felt tired, and as foolishly heartsick as a velvet clown.
His eyes were set deeper in their hollows; even his hair was patchy. Everything was so hard on him. She went to fill the kettle at the kitchen sink and looked out absently on the garden.
There were footprints in the clean old snow all over the back yard. From the back alley gate around the workshop; in meandering arcs around the garden and up to the windows of her house. Like a large, curious rabbit had come sniff-sniffing around her house, to see who was there, what was happening. April Fool.
46. Eye
Sitting at the kitchen table late at night, Lorraine wrote Clary a letter. Her handwriting was not good, and she was self-conscious about it. But she could make a rough copy. It was hard to start.
Dear Clara,
She thought Clara was better, because this should be more formal.
I have to write to thank you for everything you’ve done for us in the last year.
Yesterday I had my first checkup at the cancer centre. They took more blood and did X-rays and I sat in the waiting room for a long time. It made me think about how kind you were all through all that long time. It probably saved my life that you were there looking after the kids and coming in all the time, and I wanted to fix things up between us.
Also because I am not sure how things will go from now on, and I know the kids miss you very much, and I think they need to see you sometimes.
The doctor was pretty straight with me, she told me what to watch out for. It was Dr. Lester, you remember her. They think I’m doing really well with the transplant stuff. I’m allergic to raspberries now, just like Darwin. But they will keep watching me for a long time. I could get infections, or there are tons of other delayed things, complications. I’m not getting them, but I could, I have to make the plans. My eyes too, I could get cataracts, you have to wait for a couple of years before you know.
It’s all scary but I’m not dead, that’s the bonus. Or it could come back. Maybe I’d rather head to Fort McMurray and have our own lives, but I don’t get to choose that one. I have to stay where I can get help if I need it, and I’ve got Bertrice to go to, who’s been really great.
I’ve got disability coming in now, and I have started back to cleaning a couple days a week and we are managing okay. So this letter is not to ask you for any more help of that kind and I hope to be able to repay you some of the money I know you laid out on us one of these days.
But I know Darlene and Trevor and specially Pearce really miss you and would like to spend some time with you once in a while, if that would be okay with you.
Hoping that you are well,
Yours sincerely,
Lorraine Gage
The stove light flickered gently in the night-silent house as she was writing all this, and she sat for a few minutes listening to the kitchen clock’s delayed, inconstant tick. She read it again. It was a good letter. She tapped the pages together on their edges, and folded it neatly in thirds, and then reached for Clayton’s lighter and set the edge on fire. The smell of burning paper was somehow pleasant in her nose. She carried the burning brand over to the sink. Then the smoke alarm screeled over her head, and she dropped the letter and grabbed a tea-towel to wave the smoke away from the ceiling before everybody woke up.
She would have to try another way.
Clary’s cold settled in her head, making everything grim. She had developed an annoying purple splotch in her field of vision, like an amoeba. At first only a floating mark, it grew until it took over most of her right eye’s sight. She lay in bed one bright morning, afraid to open her eyes. The night before she had stayed up late, doing her taxes, trying to sort out which expenses she could claim. No charitable donation receipt for practical efforts. By the end of it she hadn’t been able to see straight, even around the blotch.
Right eye open. There it was, still. She would have to go to the doctor. Mrs. Zenko offered to come with her, but Clary laughed it off and said she’d be back by lunch and would stop in and tell her what they had said. Hughes was away; his vacation replacement sent her straight to Emergency. At Emergency they sent her to neurology on the seventh floor. It was a brain tumour, of course, and it would be inoperable.
The nurse said it would be an hour’s wait, so Clary went down to the lobby for a bottle of water.
When the elevator doors opened she could see Paul Tippett coming across the lobby. She pushed 7 again, and the close-door button, stabbing it, but he slid his hand between just as the doors were closing, and when they obediently opened again he saw her.
“Clary!” he said, his face brightening in absurd increments, like a tri-light bulb.
She kept her own face stiff.
“Are you—Who are you visiting?” he asked, that fear in his voice which taints everyone who spends too much time at the hospital. Mrs. Zenko? Moreland’s heart? Even Clary felt a clutching claw.
“It’s only me,” she said. “I mean, I’m here for myself.”
He got into the elevator. “I’ll go with you.”
She did not want to talk to him. “Do you have time?”
“How high are we going?”
She laughed, and it made her mouth feel strange. The doors opened on 7. Paul went with her to the flotilla of chairs in the waiting room. He steered her to one beside an end table, and perched himself there.
“What’s going on?”
She explained about the purple blotch. He listened, but said nothing.
“It’s the strangest thing,” she said, calming down in the face of no reaction. “I can see around it, and I can see through the other eye, but all I can think about is what’s behind the purple. I’m moving my head all the time to try to see what I’m missing.” She turned her head even as she was speaking. It didn’t hurt at all, just lurked there, purpling. “It’s like a stain on the world—a stain on my view, my way of—” She broke off, embarrassed.
“I broke out in a plague of blisters,” he said.
She couldn’t help it, she laughed. “I know! I looked up shingles on the computer at the library. I always thought they were minor, but they sound terrible, you must be in a lot of pain.”
“It was more Exodus than Revelations. They’re almost gone.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Clary was swept with disappointment, sitting beside him, for the failure of their happiness. Of every happiness, every hope. Ridiculous, she thought. Everything was.
“Why do you keep going to church?” she asked him.
“Paycheque.”
She laughed, but turned her head away. Because he had dodged her question, Paul saw. He shook his head to clear it. No need to be anything but honest with her.
“I have the relationship with God that some people have with alcohol. Something in me is always crying out God! God! the way other people’s hearts pant for a drink.”
She looked at his face carefully, to see if he was being flippant. “Sounds destructive.”
He almost asked what she longed for herself, but remembered. Pearce, and Trevor and Dolly. Flap-mouthed fool. Talking about God—did he have to flare like an oil well?
The elderly neurologist peered into Clary’s eye with different machines, booked her for an MRI two months ahead, and asked her twenty questions, to no great effect. Paul sat beside her as if he was her husband, praying silently in a constant flow, a storm sewer running under his thoughts.
“Well,” said the doctor, giving up. “It will either get bigger, stay the way it is, or go away. It will probably
go away. If it does, please phone and cancel the MRI.” That was all.
Clary thanked Paul. She put out her hand and he held it for a moment: not just shaking hands, she thought—some contact, some reconciliation. That they could be friends, at least. He was kind, and she loved his hands. She closed her mind to the rest of it, to desire or hope, and walked away down the corridor. Too many times in this hospital, too many times down hallways, always to no purpose. She couldn’t even be sick successfully.
It went away two days later.
To prevent himself from phoning Clary, Paul worked on the homilies for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Lent like a prairie fire, burning off the dead material on top, but leaving the metre-long roots, he wrote in his black scratch. Burning off extraneous outer / that we are attached to but need to lose…His belabouring of metaphor never failed to surprise him. He could use Hopkins in every sermon, or Rilke, but of course nobody wanted that. They wanted his own clumsy stories and the way he rode a thing to death, because they could understand that. What I do is me: for that I came, fair enough. I say more: the just man justices…Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places… But he would not try again the solemn mass where he undressed the altar, the knocks to signify the hammering of the nails into Christ’s hands and feet. There had been too many comments last year. Sheer Merton: Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable. Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.
Clary thought she had better talk to Paul. He had left a message on her phone to say he wanted to bring back the carpet. Giving away the damned carpet was the only good deed she had done that was not a blunder, and she was not taking it back. He would be at church all day, because it was Good Friday. She went to church, late, and stood outside the inner door listening, the wood of the door cool under her hand. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter had been her mother’s favourite part of the church year, a hugely dramatic time of mourning and then a concomitant (and to Clary’s mind, equally over-dramatized) awakening joy; Clary had only felt detached. Standing at the back of the church alone, she was ashamed. How could she not have valued, even for that one week each year, her mother’s ecstatic spirit? Her lovely mother, gone from the earth. The only good reason ever to have gone to church was to be with her mother, she thought.
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