“It’s a bit early,” she said, her voice a thin whisper he didn’t know.
He shivered and lurched them onwards down the street and yielded onto a main drag that took them past Pizza Huts and takeouts and smartly dressed mannequins in shop windows. He cut through a ribbon-bannered car lot and passed a school, its yard strewn with hollering kids, and a quiet neighbourhood behind it that flowed up, up, up a steep hill. The houses thinned, the hill plateauing onto a bit of a parking lot deeply cratered from winter’s frost. He parked near the edge of the dropoff and they looked down over the city. Sulphuric smells rose from a smoking pulp mill that headed the harbour while nice shingled homes and shops and oak trees encircled the mill’s land side as ribs might encircle the life-giving heart.
To the northeast and beneath the white dome of sky was the indigo ridge of a mountain range, the range that became the hills of Cooney Arm.
“Almost see home,” said Kyle.
She nodded.
“Almost see the cliffs of Cooney Arm. I followed you up there once,” he heard himself say to her silence. “Wind near ripped my hair out.”
She put her fist to her mouth and he could see that her lips were trembling and he needed a drink, sweet Jesus he needed a drink.
“You looked calm as anything on that cliff top. All squished in amongst the tuckamores. Like they was an armchair. Come to think of it, I followed you up there a couple of times. Always made sure I kept outta your sights. You threatened to beat the crap outta me if I ever went up there.”
“Like your sister. Always sneaking around.”
“Still wouldn’t be landed if that wind got a good snatch. Freaked the crap outta me, that wind.”
“Timid.”
“Timid. Jaysus. Everything was moving up there—clouds skittering, trees rocking. And below, water skittering with whitecaps. Got dizzy. Had to crawl back down.”
Her hands were in her lap, fingers laced.
“Fired you up some, being up there. Had the go of ten people when you come back down. Always wondered why you went. Why? Why did you go up there all them times?”
She shook her head.
“Must be some reason.”
“Made me feel good, sometimes. All that grandness around me. Your father said the same thing about sitting in his boat on the water.”
“I suppose.”
“It’s fine to be nervous.”
“I knows that.”
“Everybody feels nervous about some things.”
“I’m nervous about every fucking thing.”
“Still got to move ahead. We’re blessed like Job then, when we feels the fear of something and does it anyway.”
“Getting your head around something, that’s what’s the hardest.”
“Think of something bigger than you.”
“Right. Bears. That helps.”
“I thinks of my babies I never rocked. That’s what I’m doing now, rocking them. Nothing else matters then.”
His mouth was dry. He’d seen her enough times, sitting by those three little white crosses in Cooney Arm. Three babies that never survived infancy. “Done something to you, losing those babies.”
“That’s it, now, like your father says. Some people have illness, everybody has something. It’s how you carries it—that’s what you take into the other world with you. That’s the only thing we takes. Now, then.” She looked at her watch. “We’d better go.”
Kyle started them back down the mountain road. He parked beneath the overhang of a new addition to the eastern side of the hospital. Taking her suitcase from behind the seat, he walked too fast, slowing for her to catch up each time the clip-clip of her shoes on the concrete started fading. He held the door open and they entered into a spacious foyer where people swirled and shifted around and he stood amongst them like a leaf in an unsure wind. The fan-driven air dried the wet that kept dampening his eyes and his throat felt dry. She touched his hand and guided him towards the elevators and up to the third floor. He followed her down a long corridor littered with medical carts and past workers with impatient eyes and bewildered patients in green jackets pushing their IVs before their slippered feet. The smell of bleach and alcohol brought more water to his eyes. At the nurses’ station his mother was met with a flurry of smiles and charts.
“You’re a bit late, Mrs. Now. We thought you’d stood us up. We have to hurry. Perhaps you can wait in the family room just down the hall,” Kyle was told. “We’ll come for you when she’s ready. Just a few minutes.”
His mother gave him an encouraging smile and he walked down the ward. Gaunt faces stared at him from doorways, nervous eyes. Inside the waiting room he sat at a round table with a puzzle half pieced together and stared along with a few others at some talk-show host on the TV flashing a white smile as she chatted to them.
He got up and paced the ward, his workboots big and clumsy on the polished floors. He went back to the talk show and listened to words he couldn’t hear and tried not to fidget. The host waved goodbye and the news came on, then another talk show, and he wondered if they’d forgotten him.
“Mr. Now?”
He jerked to his feet and went out into the ward. She was lying on a gurney being wheeled towards the elevators by a couple of aides in blue jackets, a nurse at her side. She looked tiny and exposed in a pale green hospital gown, her hair combed back, her eyes biggish and bright as they flitted about like a frightened bird’s. She raised her hand for his when she saw him. He clutched onto it. Awkwardly walked alongside the gurney as they wheeled her in through the elevator doors.
She tugged his hand, half whispering, “I have to put this on” as she looked down at a puffy plastic cap sitting on her chest.
“She’s vain, your mother is,” said the nurse. “Doesn’t want to be seen wearing her granny cap.” Addie smiled and Kyle was glad for the nurse’s stream of banter as they descended to the second floor and down a short corridor. They stopped before a double set of doors, a little window in one of them—the pre-operative room, the nurse called it. “And this is where you best leave us, Mr. Now. We’ll have her back to you in three or four hours.”
His mother’s hand was cold in his. He forced himself to look at her and was relieved. Her eyes were veiled. She had already left him, had left them all. She was tucked inside herself like a babe within a womb and swear to jeezes he could hear her rocker creaking. She gripped his hand and forced her dry lips to smile.
“Go,” she said, surprisingly loud. “Go out for a walk. To a nice restaurant. You best make him leave, else he’ll follow me inside,” she said to the small group gathering around her. They laughed and she gave them a cautioning look. “He’ll be fainting before the doors are closed,” she said. They laughed again and he was proud of her, talking to them all so brave like that, making them laugh.
He squeezed her hand, wanting to tuck it inside his armpit to warm it. He bent over and kissed her brow. She clutched onto his arm, drawing him nearer.
“Be here when I comes out,” she whispered harshly. “And take that cap off my head soon as they wheels me through those doors.”
“I will, I will,” he promised, trying to grin.
“And find a nice place and have your lunch. Will you? A nice place.”
He nodded and she smiled as though he’d just given her something nice and then they were wheeling her through the door and her silky soft palm was still clutching onto his hand and it tore his heart out to pull his hand away. The doors closed and he cupped his hand to the little window, catching one last glimpse of her small face and fading eyes and one last smile as she spotted him at the window. Then she was gone. And his heart shrank as it must have that first moment he was gripped by unseen hands and pulled from the warmth of her belly. Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus, don’t take her, don’t take her, you greedy bastard, you’ve taken enough.
He hastened down the corridor, head down, wiping his face. Through the hospital doors and across the parking lot to the truck. Inside, he started th
e motor and gunned it down and drove through a maze of streets. Near sideswiping a city bus, he slowed and parked before a fancy storefront and got out. Farther down the street he saw a Holiday Inn. He went inside and found the lounge and sat at a table before a wall-sized window that looked out onto the cars snarling past. The chair he sat on was pinkish and padded and swivelled. She would like it. He ordered a beer and soup but was told it was a buffet lunch. He got up and went into the dining room across the way and took a shiny white plate from a stack on an island and walked around an array of food, passing the plainly cooked dishes of chicken and beef and spuds. Instead he scooped onto his plate the fancy lentil salads, the broccoli and cauliflower soaking in cream sauce, the stir-fries and different foods he knew she’d like. Taking his plate back to his table, he sat, folded his napkin on his knees, and forked the mess into his mouth and tasted nothing of it. City life. What she was cut out for. He’d heard his father moan those words often enough over his fifth or sixth or tenth swallow of whisky in the mornings. City life. Nice clothes. Sin. Sin she was took out of school, working them flakes. And he helped keep her in the outports by marrying her and having babies and he was too damn stubborn to move and her first three babies died because there was no hospital close by.
The third one died in a hospital, Kyle was always quick to remind him, but his father never heard. Too intent on mortifying himself with his hair shirt. And suppose she had never married you, Kyle now thought, wiping his mouth with the white linen napkin, what the hell then? There wouldn’t have been a Sylvie and a Chris and three dead babies. There wouldn’t be a me. And she’d be living down the street somewhere in a fancy house with shrubs and with no cancer. Jaysus. As well to say that Adelaide Now defied her fate to marry a fisherman and was now victim of her own ills. Not to mention all her youngsters were bastards. Perhaps that’s what was in store for him—to discover at the pearly gates that he was little more than fate’s bastard.
He folded the napkin into a perfect square on his knee. He saw in its perfection his mother’s determined shoulders as she pulled herself up that cliff path in Cooney Arm. He saw her bony hands gripping the roots of trees, dragging herself up, inch by inch, her chin defiant against the awful wind snatching at her. Finding shelter for herself amidst the clumps of wind-stripped tuckamores at the top, she’d crawl inside herself for hours, and when she rebirthed herself again she was a force no wind could topple. Adelaide Now was no come-by-chance. She took fate by the throat like an unruly dog and bade it do her bidding. She was her fate. And they stood to learn from her, he and his father. Two arseholes walking like stiffs, scared of farting for fear of crapping their pants.
He paid his bill and went back to the truck and drove around the town till he found a park area and there he stopped. And waited.
SIX
Outside the hospital Kyle stood patiently behind a scrawny old man shuffling in through the door, a parka over his hospital gown, dragging his IV pole with brown-splotched hands and reeking of pipe tobacco. Finally he pushed past the old geezer, near hooking his coat on the pole. Jaysus. Inside, he caught sight of a purple toque and a long grey braid vanishing inside the elevator doors.
“Kate!”
She turned, the light glancing off her glasses, and the door shut. She’d seen him, he was sure. He reached the doors but the elevator was already rising. It went straight up to the sixth floor and stopped. He jabbed the down button and it came directly back down and he stepped inside and stared hard at the sixth-floor button. He hit third.
At the nurses’ station they told him his mother was still in recovery. Perhaps another half hour. He went back to the elevator and took it to the sixth floor. It opened onto a small square foyer bared of everything but a barred window and time-dulled walls. Before him was a double-wide door with a small, wire-meshed window. He gripped the handle; the door was locked. He peered through the window and down a long corridor. An orderly dragging a trolley banked with linen. A couple of old-timers tottering about in pyjamas. One of them reached for the arms of a nurse who was hustling past with a stethoscope swinging from her neck. She spoke to him, smiling kindly. Kyle heard nothing because of the soundproofed doors. It was the psych ward.
He drew back. Some things weren’t his business. Just as quickly he leaned forward again—Kate was coming from one of the rooms. She simply stood there. Her toque was off and her jacket too. Her knees buckled and she slumped against the wall as though needing its strength to hold her up.
What the hell? He raised his hand to rap on the window but his view was suddenly blocked by a young man about his own age with a wide nose and wider smile.
“Get away, move!” Kyle yelled, but the fellow kept staring at him, his voice sounding like a low moan through the glass. Ooopen the doooor ooopen the doooor.
“Gawd-damnit, get outta the way!” The face vanished and Kate had vanished and Kyle jiggled the door handle, again to no avail. He blew out a deep breath and walked about the foyer, his arms stretched over his head to open his lungs. What did he know? He knew nothing. Her name was Kate. She played guitar beside a fire at night. He knew nothing. It wasn’t his to know. Else she’d have told him by now.
He jabbed the elevator button, suddenly anxious to get away before she saw him. On the third floor he dawdled, wanting to go back up to the sixth, but felt he shouldn’t. His mother would be back by now.
The orderlies are still with her, they told him at the nurses’ station. He caught his breath and moved towards her room, dragging his feet, heart kicking. They were moving her from the gurney onto her bed. Her head was lolling like an infant’s and she gagged.
“Hold on, my love, hold on now,” a nurse soothed in a loud voice as she held a small steel pan beneath Addie’s mouth. “There you go, there you go, my love.” She glanced at Kyle gripping onto the door frame with the apprehension of a dog being lured into an unfamiliar house. “Are you family?”
“Her son.”
“Perhaps you can get us a cold cloth from the washroom.”
He bolted into the washroom and flushed cold water onto a white cloth and brought it to the nurse, dripping.
“Perhaps another squeeze,” said the nurse and he twisted back into the washroom, squeezed the thing mercilessly. The nurse was easing Addie’s head back onto her pillow. Her face was the colour of putty. The shower cap was nowhere to be seen.
“Hold the cloth to her forehead,” said the nurse. “How are you, Mrs. Now? Are you feeling better? I’ve got the pan right here—just tell me if you’re sick again.”
Too loud, the nurse’s voice was too loud, but kind, as if she was coaxing a reluctant youngster to the supper table. She’d hate it, his mother would hate it, and he was quick to her bedside, wanting to quiet the nurse. He sat in the chair close to her pillow and held the cloth awkwardly to Addie’s forehead. She turned into it, so pale, so wretchedly pale. He felt himself go faint. She groped for his hand and he wrapped his hand around hers and it felt small and soft like a handful of cotton. Her eyes were closed and she was drooling and he dabbed it with the cloth and refolded the cloth back onto her forehead.
“You okay, Mom? You look fine. The cap thing is off your head.”
“Is the nausea gone, Mrs. Now? I’m still holding the pan here. How’re you feeling, my love?”
“Shh.” Kyle shushed the nurse and silently urged her out of the room. Then he looked to his mother’s chest, all flat and bandaged, and he clutched the nurse’s sleeve so she wouldn’t leave.
“I’ll be right outside,” said the nurse. “Put the pan to her mouth if she gets sick. Push that button if you need me and I’ll be back in a flash.”
Addie opened her eyes, a pairing of blue.
“Here. Here’s the pan, throw up if you need to. I got the pan right here.” He held the pan firmly beneath her chin as she spat up, and then he wiped the fluid seeping down the side of her neck. “You’re done? All right then, lie back. Got the pan right here if you needs it agin, just let me know, I’m
right here,” and he crooned some more and kept crooning and he didn’t know himself. He heard her sigh; he put his ear to her mouth and heard her sigh again and he felt her coming back to him, coming through the darkness and emerging into the light. She opened her eyes onto his—hope already in them, dawning like the sun through morning shadow. Then a scent all too fragrant twitched his nostrils and he drew back. Bonnie Gillard stood at the foot of the bed, a bunch of yellow daffodils in her hands. She looked from Addie to Kyle and opened her mouth to speak but her lips wobbled as though she might cry.
“She’s not ready for visitors,” he said coldly but Bonnie stepped closer, offering the daffodils like an entrance fee. His mother tugged his hand and smiled faintly at the flowers.
“They were selling them downstairs. How are you, my love?” Bonnie asked but Addie was drifting again and Bonnie fitted the flowers into a vase and sat on his mother’s other side, her eyes level with his, her mouth compressed like a stalwart convict defying the tightening of the rope.
Jaysus. He got up and paced the small room, stretching out his back and shoulders, and then looked about for the first time. Faded green curtains half drawn around his mother’s bed. On the other side of the curtain someone was deep-breathing through a heavy sleep. There were no other beds, semi-private. Small blessings.
“Suppose I should offer you my condolences,” he said, sitting back down and facing Bonnie.
She fixed her eyes onto Addie’s blanket, started fussing with it.
“Must’ve been hard news to get,” he said. “Clar ending up like that.”
“Death is always hard news.”
“What do you know of it?”
She looked at him. “Know of what?”
“Of what happened to Clar.”
The Fortunate Brother Page 9