The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  Every room was the same: just the valuable stuff was gone. Watch and cuf flinks in the bedroom, chequebook and stamp collection. Candlesticks and coins and the healthy wad of cash that he kept under the head of his mattress, and could never be talked into putting in the bank. And something else – the shoes. The brogues, I mean. They were gone too – I should have noticed right away. They were always in the same place, just inside the door on a rubber tray. The tray looked bare without them. You had to know those shoes – Dad had spent good money on them, once, and they were one of his favourite lessons. Friday nights, he’d polish them with a brush and then buff them with a soft cloth, and the leather would come up as bright as glass. He’d had them resoled many times, and the tops were as soft and wrinkled as the skin at the corners of his eyes.

  “Size twelves. You can tell quality,” he would say, holding up one shoe. I’d never gotten much past size nines myself – my father was over six feet tall, and I was a good six inches shorter.

  “Get quality, and it will last.” Yeah, he’d say that, and with the next breath, it would be that the world was going to hell in a handbasket and nobody knew how to make anything good anymore.

  But they were gone – and who the heck would take an old man’s shoes?

  One thing was for sure – everything else of value was gone. And whoever had taken it had plenty of time to sort out what was worth taking, and what wasn’t.

  Looking around, it was obvious that whoever it was had to have been seen by someone else in the building. But talking to the neighbours didn’t turn out to be much help.

  There was Mrs. Hennessey, who wouldn’t take the chain off the door when she talked to me. I could see her nose and one of her eyes through the gap between the door and frame, and a slice – just one side – of her mouth.

  “He liked Terry,” Mrs. Hennessey said. Terry, who had arrived “a month or so ago,” and had started helping Dad by moving some things from the condo down to the basement storage room. Terry, who had moved into the condo, Terry who had his own key.

  Terry, who I had never even heard of.

  No, Mrs. Hennessey said. She didn’t know Terry’s last name.

  Down in the storage room, all of Dad’s suitcases were gone. They hadn’t been moved in years – I could see those brown suitcases so clearly in memory that I could imagine that there were marks on the dusty floor where they had been standing. I didn’t know where the cases could be – but I was sure that Terry did.

  Waiting for the superintendent to come down to his office, I thought about seeing my father in the hospital. It was hard to think of Dad like that, huddled and small there under the blankets. Not that he had been a big man physically, but he’d been big in a room, a presence, and he had been big enough, too, to push back out of the comfortable cocoon of professional science when my mother had died unexpectedly, big enough to be both parents to my brother and me.

  I’d known the superintendent ever since Dad had moved in. His name was Ken, and I think I would have remembered that even if I hadn’t been able to read it on his shirt. Ken brought a set of faucets with him into the office, struggling to pry the disk with the letter “c” off the top of the cold water tap. Ken was a large, square, helpful man, with hands so big it was hard to imagine them packed in under a sink, emptying the coffee grounds out of some old lady’s sink trap.

  “Terry moved out Wednesday,” Ken said. “Nice guy. Handy with tools.”

  After Mrs. Hennessey’s reaction, I didn’t want to be too direct.

  “So, did he leave a new address?” I said. “Any place I can find him? I’d kind of like to get in touch.”

  Sometimes people’s hands freeze when something you say makes them suddenly think – it’s like a curious, obvious silent alarm. I watched Ken’s hands stop, the faucets forgotten.

  “He was devoted to your dad,” Ken said, in a tone that sounded accusing. “Helped him with the shopping, ran errands. Would even bring the mail up. Said that with your dad in the hospital, he’d be finishing up.”

  “You knew my dad was in the hospital?”

  “Yeah. Terry was taking care of that. Said he’d make sure you knew.”

  Well, Terry didn’t know my father had always hated hospitals, or that he hated them even more after my mother was admitted. I can remember watching my father swear in frustration while the eggs burned black in the frying pan in front of him as he tried to figure out the controls on the stove, and I can remember being late to school that day and many more. Men in his generation didn’t ever have to cook, they moved straight from mother’s embrace into the comfortable routine of marriage without even a pause – from coddled to cared-for without a step in between. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t learn.

  Sure, he was lost at first: one day, Mom was there, and she could make home-made soup even though she was fading away so fast it was like she was making it out of herself. Standing there by the stove, wreathed in steam, her legs shaking. That’s how I remember it – one day, she was cutting a whole chicken apart for dinner, breaking the joints backwards – and the next her own joints looked like the chicken’s, knuckled out and bony, covered loosely with chicken skin. And then, just like that, she was gone. Not quite what a tenured professor usually expects, especially not my father.

  “Said he’d come back to pick up any mail,” Ken said.

  “What?” I said, distracted.

  “Terry. He said he’d come back now and then to see if there was any mail.”

  Would he, now? I’d be willing to wait and see. I looked on the key ring, and the mailbox key was still there, shiny and long – security keys, not the kind you can just get cut anywhere. Terry wouldn’t be able to get the mail himself. He’d have to come to the superintendent – or to me.

  Ken was watching me, his mouth turned down a bit at the corners.

  “Mail comes around ten,” Ken said. “Terry liked to be there when the mailman came. That’s your best bet.” When Ken turned back to the faucets, when his hands started to move again, I couldn’t help but feel I had been dismissed.

  After my mother died, my father could have hired help, could have had people in to look after us. Instead, he started to break a lot of rules, doing things that no one expected. Took Stephen with him to conferences in the States, took me at least once to Ottawa, where he talked to a Parliamentary committee about protecting seed varieties, while I chased pigeons in front of the House of Commons. We didn’t think anything of it at the time. We weren’t paying enough attention to realize that the other professors didn’t bring their children to the departmental beer socials, or that we were invariably the only kids at get-togethers where the highlights were potluck suppers and the tweed jackets and the tie-dyed shirts all getting sopping drunk together on cheap Yugoslavian red wine.

  He must have paid a price for that. Academe at that time had its own rules, and I know there were plenty of late nights where Stephen and I were the only kids toppling forward asleep into our dessert plates. Five, maybe ten years later, it would have been a lot different. By then, perhaps, it might have seemed almost normal. Ten years later, the rules were out the window, and plant scientists were doing crossover work with Mexican philosophers, and anything seemed possible and reasonable. Hard to imagine with the way things are now, but Dad must have been quite determined.

  Every day, I tried to be at the apartment as close to ten as I could – and sure enough, three or four days later, there were a couple of letters addressed to Terry Traves, with my father’s address on the envelope. Three on the first day alone, and I opened them all with hardly a pang – they were answers to a personal ad, all women. One with a picture: a dark-haired woman, pretty, looking half-on towards the camera with what was apparently meant to be an eager look. I threw it out – what I wanted was the picture he would have sent back to her. “Hi, I’m Terry. I’m single, white, and I like cold beer and making my living stealing from helpless senior citizens.”

  Bastard.

  But that fir
st day, there was no Terry Traves. The second day, there was a mailout from his parole officer, changing the date of his next appointment. Three or four days in, right on ten, a little guy came in, brown leather jacket and slicked-back hair, and I was out through the door and grabbing his sleeve, my other hand a first, before he could even take the mailbox keys out of his pocket – but it was the wrong guy.

  I hadn’t even seen the pest control van until he started pointing at it.

  Then, a few days later, a cheque came in the mail from a second-hand consignment furniture store – a big cheque. I realized then that I hadn’t even noticed the long table in the living room had disappeared.

  I could remember that table from before my mother had died. It was supposed to be left to me in the end, a teak table with ivory inlay around the edge. You couldn’t even buy anything like that now, could-n’t even bring it into the country because of the ivory. That’s when I called the police.

  The police didn’t impress me any more than the emergency room had.

  An hour and a half in yet another plastic chair, waiting for a Sergeant Parsons to tell me he knew just who Terry Traves was, but that he wasn’t sure just what kind of crime – if any – had been committed.

  “See, if your father gave him the stuff – or told him he could take it – then there’s not a lot we can do,” Parsons said. “He’s an old man, sure, but it’s not like you’ve got power of attorney or anything. He can do pretty much anything he likes.”

  Parsons was a big man, in rumpled white shirt. He was sweating. I knew why – like the hospital, it seemed like the heat just wouldn’t stop. The whole place was a dump, overcrowded with too many old metal desks and wire baskets full of dog-eared paper and file folders.

  “We’ll interview your Dad, get his take on it.”

  “Well, that’ll be a bit difficult,” I said curtly. I know I was past rude by then, but I was completely frustrated. “He’s had a stroke. He’s not talking at all.”

  “Can he write? Is he expected to get any better?” Sergeant Parsons asked me.

  “I don’t know. I suppose he might.”

  “Then we wait. Check his bank accounts and change the locks, and we’ll go from there.”

  Sitting in the hospital next to my father, I tried to count backwards through the days, to see how it could be possible that I hadn’t seen him for more than a month. He was flat on his back, still not talking, an iv in his arm, the whole arm tied down to keep him from thrashing the needle out. I tried to imagine how it was that I could have been absent for enough time for this Terry to turn up and settle in.

  At first, the math didn’t add up. I thought I must have seen him about three weeks before, because on the first Wednesday of every month I bring over Chinese food. Then, before we start eating, he always tells me that it’s not real Chinese food at all, that he had been at conferences in Beijing – he still calls it Peking – where you’d go and look at a bright red, plucked smoked duck hanging in the restaurant window, and a few minutes later, it would be out of the window and onto your plate.

  But then I remembered that I’d had to cancel the last Chinese meal, that I’d been at work late and hadn’t wanted to punch in another two hours of not measuring up with Dad. After that, I tried to piece together when it would have been that I’d seen him last, but finding the exact day was like those little floaters you get in your eyes sometimes – try to look straight at one, and it just flitters away. Your only chance to catch it is somewhere in your peripheral vision, looking at it while at the same time pretending to ignore it completely.

  To be honest, maybe it had been a month and a half. Maybe, on the absolute outside, two months since I had last been over – but I had called more recently than that, I was sure.

  Day by day, I was still collecting Terry’s mail. No one had shown up to get it. No Terry, no one calling on his behalf – or, at least, no one that anyone in the building had thought to tell me about. Letters, the occasional bill, once or twice a cheque for something else he’d stolen. Once, a bank statement: little by little, I felt like I was getting a sense of the man, just by the pieces of paper that were trailing after him.

  Back at the hospital, they’d look at Dad and say “at least he’s breathing on his own.” They used to tell me that three or four times a day, as if breathing carried its own kind of Olympic medal. There were others on his floor, on Four-North, on respirators, but Dad wasn’t – and I was beginning to wonder just how bad he actually was. Every now and then I’d look at him and think I’d caught him pretending, staring back at me as sharp as a weasel. And then the moment would be gone.

  It was hard not to reach out and pinch him. Hard not to say “Wake up. You’re wasting my time here. There are things I’m supposed to be doing.”

  Once, sitting on that plastic chair, I’d even tried talking to him. At least he wasn’t interrupting.

  “I do my best, Dad. There’s a lot that has to get done, and there’s just me – I can’t be here at your beck and call all the time.”

  Nothing – just breathing.

  Before, he’d always been at me because I didn’t visit enough. Always at me, and I never had the answers he was looking for: there’s no way to explain where you have to be, when the only place you have to be is work. It’s like you’re speaking some kind of foreign language, as if your consonants and vowels have gotten themselves all mixed up, and you’re spouting some kind of weird, incomprehensible job-based glossalalia.

  But things were getting by me at the office – the work still had to be done, e-mails sent, evaluations done, and I was sitting next to someone who used to be my father, and showed no signs that he was anything of the kind any more.

  Days passed, and still he couldn’t talk. But even if he could, I got the idea that my father wouldn’t be telling me anything about Traves.

  Loyalties shift quickly – and old people are so damned stubborn.

  Then one morning, as I got to the hospital with yet another handful of Terry Traves’ mail, I met Sergeant Parsons leaving my father’s room. He had a coil notebook in his hands, and he was flipping the cover shut, shaking his head.

  “Still nothing?” I asked, trying to keep the opened mail out of Parsons’ sight.

  “No,” he said. “No charges. Your father says Terry was working for him, that he gave him anything that’s gone from the apartment as pay.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. It just came out – I don’t talk like that, but it was out of my mouth all by itself. The world felt suddenly tilted.

  “Sorry,” said Parsons. “That’s what your father says.”

  “But he can’t talk.”

  “Yes, he can,” Parsons said. “To the doctors, since yesterday. To me, just now.”

  And the still-rumpled Sergeant Parsons stuffed his notebook into his jacket pocket and walked away down the hall, following the red stripe in the linoleum that led to the exit. I thought of that line as being coloured guilty red. Every night as I rushed away.

  I pushed into my father’s room, and I’ll admit I was probably more angry than I had a right to be. I certainly said more than I should have.

  “Who the hell is Terry Traves?” I yelled at him, throwing the handful of mail onto the bed. “He’s not your son. He’s not anything. He’s just some con-artist who preys on the feeble-minded. Feeble-minded like you, Dad. I had the home care in to keep you safe from people like him.

  “I put the locks on, and it did no damned good. You just let him right in.”

  My father didn’t speak. I still hadn’t seen even a sign that he could talk, that he could even move. They had him trussed right in with the sheets, pulled up high on his shoulders. He looked at me for a moment, and it seemed like his eyes were as black as night glass.

  “You bought locks. You did the best you could?” he whispered, the words ragged and unsteady, as if his mouth was full of dust. “You bought the locks, and paid someone to come and put them on. Like everything else.” And then his eyes swivelled
away from me, up to the line where the ceiling met the wall, as if there was something more important there than anything else in the world. But there were also tears on his cheeks.

  “I would have done it for you,” he said quietly.

  He wouldn’t speak to me again, even though I sat there for the next three hours, until I thought from his breathing he must be asleep.

  He looked impossibly frail then, even more fragile than he had in the emergency room, because suddenly, it was obvious he was still in there. Hiding behind that sunken face was the same person he’d always been.

  When I got up from the chair next to his bed, I realized that Terry Traves’ mail was strewn all over the bed.

  And Stephen was finally coming, probably still smelling of birds, and I would have to hire someone to clean up the condo and get rid of all the crap that Traves had left behind. I’d have to get the locksmith in. Stephen would sit with Dad and jolly him along, and I’d be left racing all over the city looking for new home care – either that or a home where they could really keep an eye on Dad, whether he liked it or not. It would just go on and on. Then Stephen would up and leave again, and I’d be the helpless dope who even wound up booking his airport taxi.

  And after that, I knew I’d still be out there all by myself, looking everywhere for a small man wearing eally big shoes.

  No Apologies for Weather

  SHE HAD TURNED THE PAPER TOWEL ROLL around again, so that the sheet of paper came off the front of the roll, instead of the back. He knew immediately what that meant.

  It was the same with the toilet paper in the bathroom – sometimes, for weeks even, it didn’t matter which way it unrolled, and then suddenly it did. Leo looked around the bathroom: the towels were hanging with their edges turned under, and the toothbrushes were lined up in straight lines like a bride and groom waiting at the altar.