by Dolly Dennis
“Oh, almost forgot to tell you, dear, my therapist says I’ve improved so much, she wants to see me only every other day. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Walter is breathing through his mouth, now wide open. Drool settles in the corners of his mouth.
“I guess I best leave you.” She reaches for a tissue and wipes the spittle. “I’ll just be across the way if you need me. Like always.”
Rosemary enters her small bedroom, changes into the transparent black negligee she bought herself one Valentine’s Day. She switches on the TV, clears her throat as if she were about to present a speech. Walter’s bedroom is directly across the hall from hers and she keeps both doors partially open so she can hear his laboured sighs. Just in case. She slides a video into the box and slips under her duvet. It has become habit, the ending to another stressful day of confusion and exhaustion.
It isn’t the nakedness of the couple copulating that arouses her, but their heavy panting, the way the young girl moans and groans, gasps for air to prolong the pleasure, the way her partner grunts with unrelenting desire.
Rosemary cranes her neck toward the open door, cocks her ear to hear Walter’s breathing, the machine still beeping. Both are faint but she is too distracted to notice. She lifts her nightgown and touches herself. She is now moaning, too, a quartet in ecstasy and pain — Walter, the couple in the video, and Rosemary — a crescendo of breaths, rising, halting, rising, halting, then stopping altogether. She stifles a cry, removes her arm from under the covers, switches off the TV with the remote, and lies there.
The next day Rosemary doesn’t remember when her life began and Walter’s ended. A seamless death.
ADEEN
People’s lives. I thought I had it bad. Rosemary’s story was crippling. I truly believe Albertans who want to live as far away as possible from their neighbours carry secrets.
Acreage living, and rural communities framed by acres of land away from anything, is the dream for many. At least that’s what Denton’s wife told me. This is how the rich live. The isolation would kill me.
If you have an addiction, a mental illness, something not right in your head, sure, keep your life on the privacy settings. There are exceptions, of course. I don’t want to colour everyone here with the same black paint, but it’s been my experience that … well, what can you do when that’s your introduction to a province, a city, a town? My initial impression of Edmonton — okay, don’t hurt me — was that it was a place of much indecision and lethargy, bland as a vanilla bean. It took forever to get anything done.
Rosemary was both educated and smart. She was another one of my original tenants. She relocated from some sleepy rural town in the Peace River to access the psychiatric clinic here. You see, she was molested as a child. She was writing her memoir when we became friends. As I remember it, she was sitting on a bench near the bus stop, waiting for the 66 to take her to her daily appointment. Her doctor said putting her feelings down on paper would help her deal with all that pain and anger. She was looking for someone to type the manuscript and since I had worked as a secretary and could use the money myself, I said sure. There were nights when I would be typing and had to stop and weep for all the harm that was done to that poor child.
The molesters were all relatives. Can you imagine! What a screwed-up family. Screwed-up world is what it is. Felt like ripping up the universe and telling whoever created it to start all over and do it right the next time. Rosemary never finished writing that memoir. Can’t blame her. I guess it was just too painful.
There was an incident that still haunts me to this day. Five-year-old Rosemary was sitting in a washtub. Her mother was giving her a bath when the father walked in from the fields for supper and started to whip the dickens out of the child with one of those beaded skipping ropes. Waves of water splashed, splashed like an angry ocean, the wet rope on wet skin, wet rope on wet skin, her punishment for disobeying curfew, overstaying at the playground, and the mother just stood there and said nothing like she was next in line. And then the mother finally cried out. “Stop! Enough!” Well, yeah, lacerations and blood in the tub would make anyone take notice and do something. Little Rosemary pretended it wasn’t happening. She told me that’s how she dealt with the pain.
I thought it a great coping device to bear life’s agonies. I’ve done it myself several times, but not with her intensity. Times when Irene hurt me with her slapping and kicks, and I had to refrain from punching back, I just had one of those out-of-body experiences, you might say. My mind went somewhere else; someone else took over.
The first time Rosemary let me into her apartment to babysit Walter while she went for her appointments, she showed me the three molesters: her father, uncle, and paternal grandfather.
“How can you hang their photos on your wall?”
“They’re family,” she said.
I didn’t understand. “But they hurt you,” I said.
“I forgave them.”
“I would have killed them.”
Walter’s stroke and his now full-blown Alzheimer’s taxed Rosemary beyond endurance. For example, he kept peeing in the van’s passenger seat whenever she took him for his medical appointments. I suggested she put him in an assisted-living residence but she refused. I understood. It’s like me and Irene. I couldn’t put her away either. You don’t do that to family even if they make you miserable.
It was early, dawn, when the wail of an ambulance woke me up. The blare faded as it approached the Complex Arms. I looked out the window and saw the vehicle parked in front. Now what? Rosemary came stumbling out her door into the hallway bawling her eyes out. “He’s gone, he’s gone.”
I let the medics in and they tried to calm her down, guided her back inside with me following straight behind.
Rosemary just stood in her apartment doorway as the emergency crew entered Walter’s bedroom. I told her I would stay if she wanted company. Could I call anyone? Her family, perhaps? But she shook her head as though I had slapped her cheek a couple of times.
“I’ll call my son in Manitoba,” she said. “He’ll want to know.” I led her into the living room. “The other one up north,” she continued. “He doesn’t need to know. He’s a bit slow and lives on his own in the woods in a log cabin we built just for him. He doesn’t like people. We gave him some land so he could stay near the old farmhouse. He wouldn’t understand. He is mentally unwell. Not his fault. Poor genes. My fault.”
It’s always the mother’s fault. I told her if she needed anything to let me know. What else was I to do? My tenants. Like I said, they are like family to me. Rosemary Androski and Mrs. Lapinberg, both like the grandmothers I never had.
Walter died in his sleep, a quietness she wasn’t aware of until she brought him his Ensure next morning and he was lying there stiff as plywood, his oxygen mask by his face as though he had put up a good fight. I guess she had a sane moment to call emergency.
That’s the way I want to go. Quiet-like. In my sleep. I stayed with Rosemary as the ambulance drove off then helped her phone her son in Manitoba, the one with a Native wife and two sons.
At that point Frosty arrived from wherever he had spent the night, saw the open door to Rosemary’s apartment, and burst inside. Asked what was going on. I said this was not the time to talk. Walter’s dead. We had another argument the night before and I just didn’t want him to touch me until he grew up.
I left Rosemary, assuring her if she needed anything to come see me. Don’t think she heard. She was still staring out there somewhere into space like she was undergoing an out-of-body experience. At the same time her voice changed into something evil. “Glad that Kraut is dead,” she hollered in this husky, unrecognizable voice, her mouth ugly in a twist of words. “Glad that Kraut is dead,” she kept repeating. “Now I am free!”
People’s lives. Crazy.
Anyhow, that’s the story there.
WAYNE AND CODY
Mid-July. Another sultry prairie day. Adeen is outside sweeping the du
st and grime that accumulated on the cement walk. Neighbourhood children play in the dirt or hopscotch on the side of the road. Some are immersed in pulling out quack grass, searching for four-leaf clovers, abandoning their skipping ropes, toys, and chalk. She is mumbling to herself in a self-imposed gibberish. A surge of wetness drips from her face, skis down her neck and seeps through her T-shirt at the neckline.
She is puzzled by the slow movements of an indigo-blue Toyota as it crawls then stops in the parking zone across the street. She noticed the van the last three days, always stationed in the same space. The driver hid behind oversized, movie-star sunglasses, contrasted by the lacklustre, dyed black hair, a sorry attempt to put a lie to her advancing age. The entire Gothic statement reminded Adeen of a witch.
There is familiarity in the look of this mysterious creature, and Adeen moves forward for a closer examination, dropping the broom on the lawn. The woman tosses a cigarette out the window. The street is empty, but Adeen checks both ways, nonetheless, because there are always crazies on motorcycles who race up and down.
“Hey, you! That’s littering. There’s a fire ban. I can report you.” Adeen runs to pick up the smouldering stub.
The woman turns her head to face Adeen as if to say, So report me.
Then Adeen recognizes her. “Fern, is that you?” She is leaning into the driver’s open window. “Fern?”
“Yes, Mrs. Whitlaw. That would be me.”
“Wayne know you here?”
“No. I just want to see Cody.”
“He should be coming ’round from work soon. How you been doing?”
“Better than I was when you last saw me. I’ve been clean two months now, out of rehab. Living in Vancouver. Take a day at a time.”
“Yeah, that was pretty nasty business. Good for you.”
Adeen is taken back to that moment in time when Cody was just twelve: his mother living her days in smeared convulsions of cocaine, dirty stringy hair, and unwashed mottled teeth; Wayne coming home from work to find his son patting his mother’s forehead with a cold facecloth, urging her to wake up; and she, passed out on the kitchen floor from too much booze, too many men, too many drugs. The ambulance with its screaming siren signalled pedestrians and vehicles to get out of the way on the ride to the Misericordia. Adeen minded Cody, let him play with Irene and sleep over until his father returned from the hospital the following morning.
“She’s going to rehab,” he said. “We’ll see how that goes this time.”
But months later Wayne received custody of Cody and they never heard from Fern again … until today.
“Mind if I join you?”
“No, come on in, Adeen, and we can catch up.”
Adeen slides onto the passenger seat, the smell of nicotine and coffee already assaulting her headache.
“I’m surprised how much Mill Woods has changed.” Fern is rummaging through her purse.
“Hasn’t it though? Just keeps on a growing,” says Adeen, her arm stretched out the open window.
A mutual courteous pause. Explanations unnecessary, both staring through the windshield on a deserted street, the sun glaring down on them like a klieg light. Fern readjusts the car’s sun visors.
“Yep, have to feel sorry for the farmers.” Adeen is making conversation to conceal her discomfort in seeing Fern again.
They observe the transit bus approaching, coming to a full stop in front of the Complex Arms. As it pulls away, Fern spots the back of Cody’s knapsack, his boom box under his arm. “La Bamba” by Los Lobos spills into the cavernous light of a summer day and makes her smile. He will change his clothes, grab a bite as is his custom, and then head out for a late-night rehearsal with his band, the Icicles, at the Pits — not a club, but an undeveloped area with tall prairie grasses, near the swamp in Mill Woods, where they can play loud and lewd, set up their portable amplifiers, and blast their music until the gophers scram underground for cover from the racket. Cody is lead guitarist and writes all their lyrics; wants to be the next John Lennon.
“That’s him. There he is!” Fern can’t contain herself. “Cody,” she calls out.
He’s bopping up and down heading for the building when he halts and listens then resumes his dance moves. His mother is persistent and repeatedly shouts his name, Adeen joining in the chorus to get Cody’s attention. He lowers the volume and shifts his body in the direction of the parked voices.
“Cody. Over here.” Adeen is now out of the car waving wildly. “Come and meet someone.”
He’s on the edge of the sidewalk, somewhere on the lip of the street, uncertain what to do, and then his mother removes her sunglasses and smiles. “Cody,” her voice urgent.
Instinctively, he races into the middle of the road, diagonal to the crosswalk, and heads for the Pits, where he can lose himself as he used to do whenever his mother had one of her “fits.” Adeen and Fern pursue him with their eyes. No one sees the white truck as it speeds around the corner, curves onto the street, and hits Cody, spinning him into the air like a football hurled aloft for a last-minute touchdown. And there’s Adeen and Fern running, shouting, stop, stop, stop. Too late.
Wayne, hysterical, frightened, sits motionless, rooted in the truck. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t see him. The glare. It blinded me. I didn’t see.” He points at the burst of sun that just ruptured his lifeline to normality. “My son,” he says, his arms slack by his sides, nose running.
Fern is blanketing Cody’s broken body, embracing him with her own numb arms, swearing at Wayne. “You killed him; you killed our son.”
The paramedics brake near the body, jump out, and try to pry Fern away. Wayne now staggers toward her. She is being restrained by an officer.
“If you had only stayed away, he’d still be alive. It’s your fault,” he says. And his arms are flailing about, ready to assault her, but he is punched down.
“It’s always my fault. Loser.” She is drenched in torture.
“We need to ask you some questions, sir.” The second officer escorts Wayne to the police cruiser.
Neighbours gather around the scene. Payton, Rosemary, Jack, Zita, and Derrick, who is crying, “Cody, what’s wrong with Cody?”
Zita covers her son’s eyes with the palms of her hands. “Come inside, Derrick. Come inside.” His mother presses forward in a rush of protective custody, hurried arms wrapped around his shoulder like a prayer shawl. Derrick peeks through the crook of her arm where a sliver of light still lives.
And just as suddenly as dusk settles over the scene of the accident, everyone vanishes, back to their two-by-four lives until the next big thing. Just Adeen is left, now surveying the splattered blood, another murky spread of burgundy.
The mean sun sears the air, intensifying the stench of Cody’s blood. Adeen studies the sky. The rain, where is it? She slips inside, arms herself with a mop and pail, and proceeds to erase this splotch of life.
ADEEN
Cody. The Pits. Oh, I will never be able to go there again. It was the place where the neighbourhood kids went to play, you know, shoot gophers, carve their names on tree trunks — a piece of utopia not far from here. Parents called the woods and fields the woodlands, but the kids christened their playground the Pits. Don’t ask why. Cody said it was his backyard. The Complex Arms has only a courtyard and parking stalls for tenants in back. Couldn’t play back there and the front was just a walkway to the bus stop and lawn. So Cody would always scram over to the Pits after school and meet up with friends.
In early April, still cool for the prairies, he took me there. We raced our second-hand bikes like mountain bikes. We could have walked, but it looked like rain that day and Cody really wanted to show me his secret place. Heck, rain never stopped anyone from doing anything here. I guess because we get so little of it. We rode down a wide hill into a marshy area, a deep valley to get to the other side. We used the boards placed there to ride across the wet marshes, and there it was, the Pits, a forbidden place full of adventure. Some kids had built a
tree house from discarded wood, cutting fingers on the rusty nails that stuck out like fishhooks. It was a place to get dirty, escape behind the rows of trees, catch frogs in the valley, climb the chain-link fence to the graveyard on Ellerslie Road, a place to grow, a place to think, a place of solitude, a place for love. Everyone needs a room of their own. Even, what’s her name, Virginia someone or other said so.
There, he pointed: a forest of trees with pathways in the middle, a discarded couch and armchair under a dome of dead branches. Yet beyond all that bleakness, there was an exterior pathway verdant with life and greenery and raspberry bushes. Things grew here, even children. The strangest thing. To me the Pits was just a dumping ground for rubbish — parts of broken-down bicycles, old tires, furniture — a burial ground for pets and fractured hearts. Junk really. Now when I think of the Pits, I think of Cody and that outer layer of road, which he called the pathway to hope. He wore the soul of a poet that young man. Frosty could have taken lessons from him.
This is where he played his music, where he wrote his songs and fell asleep on the threadbare couch, searching out the stars through the spaces of the overhead entanglement of dead branches. I guess, when you’re a kid, you can see things that adults miss.
Concrete slabs all in a pile, tiny tombstones where they buried pets is what I saw. You entered through a bike path behind the new houses and navigated downhill to where you could catch the bullfrogs and tadpoles. “Feel the peace here,” Cody would say. And I could. Later, I would come to the Pits alone and wander among the sloughs and prickly wild roses, careful to avoid the gopher holes. It was like looking across the ocean, an endless sea of existence — had to pinch my arm to make sure I was still alive. It was the noise of nothing that shifted me into a state of mind away from Frosty and Irene. I tried to explain to Cody once but he wouldn’t hear of it. He already understood. I didn’t have to say anything. Such maturity for someone so young.