THREE DAYS
______________________
Arthur Simmons thought about just staying put this time and urinating in the bed.
Wondered if that would be going too far.
He was taking short, shallow breaths, aware that breathing more deeply would rattle the phlegm in his lungs and start another round of coughing. He’d heard somewhere that, once you got old, you could easily cough hard enough to crack a rib. He believed it. Every time the coughing started, he felt like an old bellows with its handles being pumped too hard: air rushing out, rattling back in again , shaking things loose and starting the whole cycle all over again. Each coughing spell was exhausting; afterwards, he would feel as if he was unable even to lift his arms. He stayed as still as he could, breathing flatly through his nose. It had started as a cold on Sunday; by Monday, he could feel the weight of it shifting into his chest, settling there, and he knew he was really sick, the kind of sick that is more a forced march than a nuisance.
It was five o’clock on a late June morning, a Thursday, and there had already been light outside at four-thirty; he could see it edging in through the blinds in thin stripes, the night lightening to a pale grey.
Would wetting the bed make the point any more clearly? he wondered. Would it make them pay any sort of attention when they got around to finding him?
He imagined the feel of brief, welcome warmth, the rest of the day clammy, the room filled with the particularly sharp stink of old man’s urine.
He’d been getting up to go to the bathroom, but that was the only time he’d been getting up, shuffling slowly down the hall, leaning against the wall when the coughing overtook him. He would stop afterwards to get a drink of water from the sink faucet and at the same time hated himself for that weakness. But that was it, he thought — the only times he’d moved from the bed. He hadn’t been downstairs to the kitchen, hadn’t picked up the phone to call anyone. Outside, there might well be mail waiting for him in the mailbox, a handful of flyers and one or two bills. They could stay there, he thought. He wanted every hour to count, each minute on the clock to be a precise measure of guilt.
There had been six others as well as him, three brothers, three sisters, but they had all died. All of the wives and husbands gone too. A dead generation. Was that too harsh? Arthur thought. Should I be thinking they’ve “passed”? Or maybe that Salvation Army thing, “promoted to Glory.”
But they weren’t promoted to anywhere, he thought. They just winked out, there one day, packed up and gone the next. Perhaps it would be closer to say they were fired to purgatory.
There was one part he kept coming back to, though: the fact that everything they were was just gone too. And he was the last, the final custodian, the keeper of all the information. Memories? Facts? Experience? All folding in on themselves, he thought. All wasted. Trapped in the last remaining memory of someone who couldn’t find anyone who cared enough to stop and listen.
The birds were starting up outside, Art noticed. Nothing wrong with his hearing. Crows out there for certain, raucous, and robins burbling along. Other smaller birds fleshed out the chorus.
He’d been two full days in bed already, and this morning would mark the third morning that no one had come, that no one had even called to check.
He looked over at the phone, a flat 1970s push-button, cream-coloured, silent, sitting on the table beside the bed. It wouldn’t take much effort to call, he thought, neither for me nor for them. But he had resisted. Art was following the rules he’d set for himself from the very beginning: wait. Wait for someone else to make the first move. Wait, for as long as it took.
There wasn’t any prize for being the survivor, Art thought. But he didn’t miss his siblings, not any of them. Not Anne with her ability to go stomping off righteously after the slightest provocation, her chin firmly in the air and ready to hold on to the slight for years; nor Heather, whose skill at winning any argument had left the rest of her siblings unwilling to talk to her about any important topic, let alone engage in debate. But he did miss the things they’d had, the things they’d done together — summers in Maine, for example, sailing small boats on the Eggemoggin Reach near Mount Desert Island. Rowing to any one of the small, empty islands along the reach to dig through ancient shell middens for arrowhead fragments or wandering the beaches collecting sand dollars.
Art could remember heading out through the roiling tidal currents with his mother in the family canoe, his brother Dave in the middle, Art in the bow, pulling hard past one of the big houses on the shore, a Rockefeller relative or something with a great barn of a boathouse down on the shore, a seaplane nestled up at the top of the boathouse ramp like a stiff-winged bird waiting to be startled into instant motion, into uncatchable escape. Art could remember his mother saying that the salt water was riskier canoeing but better for the canoe, especially in the several places where beaching the craft had chipped the dark green paint away. “Salt water won’t help,” she had said, “but it won’t rot the canvas either.” He could remember the taste of that salt too, licking it off the back of his hand, his left hand, the hand that most often took the bottom grip on the canoe paddle. He remembered the day as being dark, glowering, the water particularly choppy, but all his reference points were gone: his mother, dead twenty years now, and Dave, buried some six years later after four long months of cancer fingering ungently through his bones. Art hadn’t been back to Maine for at least a decade; he wasn’t even sure that the map in his head was right.
There was no one left to ask about it, Art thought, realizing — again — that his version of the experience was now the truth, merely by being the only one left in existence. It could have been sunny that day, he thought. I could have gotten it wrong. His mother might only have told him about the seaplane; the doors to the boathouse might have been tightly closed, the rest of it in his head.
It might not have been the Rockefellers at all, although he knew for certain they’d had summer homes there.
And he did get it wrong sometimes. Several times, years earlier, he’d told his brothers and sisters about something he remembered, only to be met with blank stares and incomprehension.
“You have the most vivid imagination.” That would have to have been Eleanor, who, if nothing else, was always certain that her version was absolutely, impeccably right. Dismissive.
Now, Art thought, she would have been the right one to be the survivor — but she’d gone, and gone quick, too. One morning she’d called a nearby friend, another retired and widowed woman, who’d arrived in a rush to find every single coffee maker in the house taken apart and laid out on the counter: glass percolator, French press, filter drip. Every piece laid out in order like a mechanic’s tear-down manual, as if she were trying to figure out just exactly how each of them worked. It was a startling combination of scientific rigour and absolute bewilderment.
“All I want is a cup of coffee,” the normally prim Ellie had told her friend. “And I don’t care what the fuck you have to do to make it.”
Two months later, she was dead too, also cancer, tumours cropping up in her brain and everywhere else like weeds filtering up through a lawn, travelling along unseen, unmarked tangles of underground roots.
“It wasn’t anywhere until it was everywhere,” her doctor told Art on the phone, at the same time managing to make it sound as if he felt he had been the victim of a particularly horrible magic trick. Eleanor had no kids; her executor was her family lawyer, who sent Art his sister’s ashes in a plain brown paper–wrapped package.
Second last was John. Art and John stopped even sending Christmas cards after Ellie’s death. Art had never seen the point in the first place, and with John, it was as if
hearing about Eleanor’s ashes ending up with Art was the last straw.
“You’re not the oldest,” John protested in one last distant and tinny-sounding, bitter phone call. “You’re not even the oldest one left.”
At that moment, Art suddenly found himself wanting to remind John that, when they had shared a room during the family’s summers in Maine, John had always been the one who was frightened by the big summer thunderstorms rolling up the Reach. So scared, in fact, that one night, in the middle of a heavy storm rolling almost directly overhead, Art had woken up to find that John had climbed into his bed, so that, rolling over, Art could see the whites of John’s wide-open eyes with every flare of lightning.
Reminding John of that over the phone had seemed like the best response, but at the same time it was something held out of bounds by unwritten family rules. There were things they all knew but just never said.
Like the fact that their brother Dave had been, for the briefest of periods, a bedwetter — just long enough for everyone in the family to have one or more memories of their mother hauling great bundles of sheets and blankets out of Dave’s room in the middle of the night, an event that always seemed overlarge and overwrought by the rush and the fact it always occurred around two or three in the morning. Dave, as always, managing to be the centre of attention again.
John had dodged all of the big threats. Cancer and heart disease and stroke had all kept their distance, islands of cholesterol had no doubt floated benignly through his veins without ever successfully blocking anything, but in his seventies John had stepped on the upturned tines of a rock rake while gardening. He became living — and eventually dying — proof of the difficulty of cleansing deep puncture wounds and had died of blood poisoning after a full week in hospital.
John had kids, three of them, but only two were in the country to sit next to his bed as the infection grew, making his foot enormous and multicoloured, draining horribly, and then growing massive again. He moved in and out of consciousness. The two adult children made careful and quiet funeral plans at his bedside while the third, a son, wrestled airline schedules and business commitments and just managed to get back before John slipped into a final coma. John’s first and last words to his travelling son? “You’ve put on a bit of weight.”
Ellie had no children. Anne and Dave had two, Heather one, Ian and John both three.
Art had two as well, a boy and a girl. In total, he calculated, everyone’s children came out to one short of the total number of parents — a family destined to be in slow decline.
Maybe it’s pneumonia, Art thought, feeling the gentle rattle in his chest every time he breathed. The default killer of scores of the elderly, up there with congestive heart failure on a scorecard of the most likely excuses. His brother Ian had soldiered on through multiple sclerosis and skin cancer and the loss of both a kidney and a lung — with his shirt off, the scars looked as though he had been inexpertly repaired by amateurs — but it was pneumonia that had finally won the battle.
It could have been anything: by that time, Ian had become a fiery wraith of himself, a leathery leftover puppet strung together with sinew and tendons that looked more and more like fat braided rope as everything else melted away. Art had gone to visit him, the last time with Ian bending up towards him urgently from his hospital bed as if he had something critical to impart, eyes wide and intense.
“You win,” he finally managed to say, and Art was pretty certain that Ian was smiling when he said it.
It was hard to tell: Ian’s face was pulled tight by that time, stretched over his skull as if it were drying on a board for later taxidermy. But Art was convinced from the sound of his voice that the smile was real. Ian died a day later, stopping breathing only when it seemed that everything left of his body had already consumed itself to ash.
The light behind the blinds had brightened, hardened.
It would have been nice to open the blinds, maybe even open the bedroom window too, Art thought. See a bit of the sun. Get a little fresh air in. Art wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling the room might smell bad — stale, or even worse. You get used to something and it’s just normal, he thought. But every now and then he’d catch a hint of a smell of something off — the kind of smell that would then flit away from his senses, as if concentrating on it only served to make it more discreet. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to air the place out, he thought.
But that would mean getting up and, in the process, losing the high ground. First I’d be opening the windows, then I’d be creeping downstairs to make a sandwich, he thought. Then the whole effort would be lost. Hunger’s a funny thing, Art thought. He had been hungry, but it had faded. Now he wasn’t sure that he would be able to eat even if he tried.
Instead, Art lay on his back in bed in the half-light of the room, watching the dust dance in one thin band of sunlight that was coming through a hall window and reaching all the way through the door into his bedroom. There were only a handful of days, he thought, on either side of the summer solstice when the sun was in the right place to actually make the straight line and reach the room. He’d noticed it before: the same kind of strange, poignant, meaningless marker as when, all too frequently it seemed, he’d glance at a clock and see the digital numbers all line up: 11:11.
He wondered who would be the first to call — or the first to show up.
Would it be Patrick or Jane? They’d both gotten more and more dismissive as the years had gone by: Patrick, busy enough with a family of his own, and Jane, a health care consultant, on the road more often than not.
A week ago, she’d read him the riot act when he asked her to help him get groceries. “Honestly, Dad, I can’t be at your beck and call. I’m not even in the province half the time. We’ve got to find a better way.”
Five years ago she would never have said that. Five years ago, he thought, she would have gotten the groceries herself, brought them over, helped him with supper, and they would have eaten together, cleaning the kitchen with an easy handoff of the tasks between them.
He wasn’t sure what time it was. The clock on the bureau was slightly turned away and he couldn’t see the numbers clearly. He couldn’t reach it without getting out of bed. Art decided it must be close to ten.
By then he’d practised his first sentence several times, listened to it rattle around his bedroom when he said it out loud, astounded by how thin and reedy his voice sounded.
“I haven’t been out of bed in three days.”
No, not quite.
“I haven’t been strong enough to even get out of this bed for three days.”
That was better. If that didn’t make them stop and take notice, he didn’t know what would. Maybe he could act drowsy and a bit confused when someone finally came upstairs. And he could muster up a deep, rattling cough with no problem. As he thought about coughing, he could feel the fluttering in his lungs, a cough that wanted to start, and he managed to hold the reflex at bay until it faded away.
As the urge to cough faded, a memory rose, flickering like old film: Patrick and Jane, both still children, somewhere between five and ten, in their aunt Anne’s yard in Maine, during a summer when Anne had been breeding setter puppies. He remembered bright sunshine, the clumsy new puppies tumbling and rolling over in the grass, Jane on her then-pudgy knees with her hands held straight up over her head in the air, Patrick holding a puppy carefully while the dog chewed busily on his thumb with its new, needling teeth. Both Anne and the puppies’ mother carefully attentive, not interfering but clearly concentrating on everything that was happening. Tolerantly on guard. Anne had already explained that the mother dog — was its name Dex? Art couldn’t be sure — might nip if it felt the puppies were in danger. Both children smiling, concentrating on the small dogs. The kind of memory Art could hold in his mind and see as sharply as if he were holding a photograph of it in his hands.
It’s all in here, Art thoug
ht, one hand behind his head as if he could safely cradle every thought. All of it. He was watching the light behind the venetian blinds changing.
All they had to do was ask.
Afternoon came.
Then evening.
Three days folded gently into four.
Art slept.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Russell Wangersky is critically acclaimed writer whose most recent short story collection, Whirl Away, was a finalist for the Scotiabank-Giller Prize. He has also won the British Columbia National Award for Non-Fiction (Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself), the BMO Winterset Award (The Glass Harmonica) and has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (The Hour of Bad Decisions). He is a newspaper editor and columnist based in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Copyright © 2013 Russell Wangersky
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This edition published in 2013 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
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ISBN 978-1-77089-473-0
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
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