by Mike Barnes
“That was it!” Her eyes alight with it. “Your case officer. Like a secret agent has. Do you still report to him?” She says it teasingly. Probing for the joke or what a joke might cover.
“I do.” Any day now. “I have to. He runs me.”
A joke? Standing now, fingers crooked through the mug handles, she looks down at me a long moment, trying to decide. Or trying to decide if she should follow if it isn’t. Then comes down one way, tips into it in an instant, hazel eyes laughing above, and just ahead of, her mouth. Pale pink lip gloss. Nice white teeth.
§
Busy then in her kitchen, getting cake and making tea. While I sink into the nook life, so strange and familiar, feeling that pleasant tiredness take me down peacefully, swaying and lilting, thick coiling weed. Some cross-currents I fight, not very hard. No one leaves the ward. Not if they belong on it in the first place. What the mental health chatter tries to hide. The treatment porn. You close the ward, blow it up—Brad—or find a way to go on living on it. All kinds of ways. Judy’s. Mine. Lynette’s, with aspen-leaf hands and Botox and boob lifts and the Infinite Tunnel. And talk another way. Legends neither true nor untrue, signposts from a trail of losts. My wife and daughter? (In the bars, those first months, before I gave them up and called Ken.) Dead—both of them. One of them. From suicide. From murder-suicide. From accident. In coma from a failed attempt. Or simply gone without a trace. No notice even, no note? Yes, a note, but… Death an easier tale to tell. Except that—legends lead to intimacy. Trading them tugs you close, leans heads together. Freckled girl, big breasts, a gap between her teeth. Listening intently. She loved me, believed in me despite knowing all she knew—and I felt the same about her—we lived every day wanting nothing but the best for each other. Every day—including the day she told me my craziness had burned her out. She couldn’t take it anymore. Love wasn’t enough. It wasn’t all we needed. It never is—for anyone. Freckled girl: I’d hate to believe that. Things always happen for a reason. Otherwise there’d be nothing to fix. No way to learn. Things happen for a reason and they happen for no reason. None you’ll ever discover anyway. That’s what you learn. And knowing it does fix something. Fixed, at least, the question of us going home together. And brought me, alone, a pinstep closer to sober and to Ken.
Quiet in the nook. Lynette’s small clatterings might come from two doors over, through walls. Backyard so still, it might be painted on the glass.
“Where’s your dog?”
“Gracie? David, that’s my ex, he takes her on weekends. Sometimes during the week too. Believe it or not, she was the biggest sticking point in our separation agreement. Still easier than a kid, my lawyer said. My second ex, I should say. No kids with either one. I’ve had better luck meeting men than keeping them.”
“Most of us are better met than kept.”
“See, that sounds like you. It’s partly why I kept my distance, especially after I saw you didn’t recognize me.”
“But you recognized me.”
“Well…” She colours again. Awkward Lynette from the ward comes back into view.
“It’s all right. I wouldn’t forget me either.”
Talking so much easier when you’re doing something. Almost a rule: the more you’re doing, the more gets said. It’s a wonder we try it any other way. Setting up the face to face, insisting on it, when we’d be better off painting fences together, speaking out of the sides of our mouths over brush slaps. But fences to paint seem harder and harder to find. Like gold. Diamonds if you’re talking dual jobs, side by side. Find one and you’re doing well, one and a bit. Lynette slicing fruit for a salad—“Heck, we might as well make it a light brunch”—while I send feelers around the nook. Brush it with soft antennae. Out it comes that way, easily.
“Sandor got the call first. Early. 4 a.m., 4:30. POA, he’s first on the list. Judy’s there, yes, Maude’s daughter, but she’s not really there. That’s harsh, I know. But it’s true, isn’t it? Five minutes later—five minutes after Vivera notified him—he’s at my door. Which isn’t what you’re thinking. Oh, we had our moment—Sandor and I—had a few of them. But that’s ancient history. It’s something different now. Friendship. Writing. I know you don’t like him. He’s told me and I’ve seen it. I can feel it coming off you right now, without even turning my head. You judge him too harshly. Just my opinion. Funnily enough, he doesn’t mind you. Fine. Boys will be boys. The point is how desperate he was that morning. Desperate. Not just from grief. He knew his mom was sick and old, you’ve read his book. Desperate. If you could’ve heard that knocking. Like someone trying to get out of a cage. It’s not even light outside.”
“Desperate about what?”
“It’s hard to explain unless you know the family a bit. I don’t know them well, mostly just what Sandor’s told me. But something he said once stuck with me. He said, My family’s good at a lot of things, great even, some of them—but what they’re best at is smoothing. Making wrinkles disappear… reality wrinkles. He sat at my table two weeks ago, the day his mom died, sat where you’re sitting, not drunk, stone sober, but shaking all over. Crying a bit. But mostly too upset to cry, if you know what I mean. Closing and unclosing his fists. Not making a lot of sense. He just kept talking about how quickly they were going to make things disappear, make his mom and everything go away… and then he started in about being asleep himself, how he’d always felt asleep in the family, like he was a dream he was having or someone else was having… and if things wrapped up too smoothly, he’d never wake up. He needed time, not necessarily to do anything, but at least to think. But thinking’s what his family never had time for. They’re just do-ers, do-ers and talkers…”
“I’ve read the papers, Lynette. So have you. Everybody has.”
“Sandor didn’t know anything about that. He’s devastated by it. He’s been locked inside his house since Thursday afternoon. Won’t answer his phone, won’t answer his door. Think about it. He’s lost everybody in two weeks. And lost his good memories of them too. Lost his whole past.”
“So what he didn’t want smoothed over, whisked away—”
“It wasn’t anything that specific. More like a sense he’s had, maybe always had. A sense of something bad. Something creepy in the house. Something haunted, if you want to get gothic about it. And all these busy people, talking and doing, keeping the bad thing out of sight, driving the ghosts away. And I think it just hit him all at once—hit him when Maude was gone—that soon there’d be no one but the smoothers left. That they’d almost wiped the board clear.”
“And you remembered an un-smoother you once knew. A wrinkle-restorer. Someone who might lift a clamped lid, poke a stick in and try to stir the pot. Disturb the sleepers with his racket.”
“Yes, but… you make it sound a lot more thought-out than it was. Someone I knew, someone I cared about, was in trouble. He needed—”
“Shock therapy?”
“He needed something. Sandor didn’t know anything about it. He was settling finally under a blanket on my couch, two of my sleeping pills taking effect, when I took Gracie for her early-morning walk.”
“How did you know where I lived?”
“Everyone knows you’re the super of that building. The one between the Latimer and the Favorite. Across from the fire station.”
§
Great fruit salad: mango chunks, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, melon, peaches. All the out-of-season things jets and MasterCard can bring you. And great coffee cake too, which is more seasonal and all Lynette’s, with bits of dates and walnuts mixed in with the apple, and a crumbly brown sugar topping, not too sweet. We savour it together, sipping Earl Grey, but the nook magic is dissolving. It needed both of us in it to seem real, and started to wobble while I sat in it alone, looking at Lynette’s collection of good books, quite a few of which I’ve read.
“You wrote it, didn’t you, Lynette?” I say a
s she’s refilling our cups.
She doesn’t do a dumb Wrote what? and for a moment the nook shimmers back into view.
“Parts of it. Sandor had notes, and I stuck close to them.”
“Notes?”
“Detailed notes. And a good plan for where he was going with them.” Her smile a little cruel, a side of her not born yet on the ward. “But yes, all right, in the high court of literature, I suppose I might be convicted of heavy editing.”
“Hence ‘Wun Wing’.”
“No. I mean, Sandor wanted some distance from it from the start. That was part of his vision of it: sort of anonymous dispatches from the front lines of caregiving. But yes, for that too… the co-writing process that evolved… we decided to bring it out under the press’s name. And to honour his mom. She had this… well, you’ve read it. It’s just a fragment, really, Around Toogood Pond. But what did you think?”
“It’s good. It surprised me how good it is. I wouldn’t have thought Sandor had it in him. But it’s not as good as it could or should be. That’s why you went ahead and published it on the quick, isn’t it? Sandor was never going to slug it out and finish. You thought if he got a taste of writing he might actually write. But don’t you see he can’t?”
“He might if you accept that someone can be fragile and have substance.” Narrowing her eyes and pressing her lips tight together, like an intake interviewer.
“You’re trying to wake this guy up. You see signs of life and get encouraged. But it’s only sleepwalking. What’s more, I think you realize that. Some people you can’t ever wake up. If they can’t stand the light of day or the dark of night, they can only go on snoring.”
She starts crying as I remember her crying. Big plump tears rolling off sharp cheekbones where plump cheeks used to be. Eyes wide and unblinking, unashamed of the sadness springing out of them. In the day room, sitting on the edge of her bed, standing beside a window in the corridor—I came upon her many times a day like that.
“You love him, don’t you?”
She laughs hollowly, tears still flowing. “There’s a guy question. A woman’s crying, so it must be for another man.” She sighs, wipes her eyes and cheeks with the backs of her hands.
“You were different on the ward. I thought you might just do something like what you did to Fresca. Stir things up a bit. Jolt people awake.”
“That’s stupid, Lynette.” She stiffens, flattens her nostrils. “I was in a confined space on the ward. I was years, decades younger. And Fresca was aggravating people, not drugging and raping them.”
“I told you, Sandor didn’t know—”
“Not letting them rot alone for years because they had the bad manners to become ill. For decades in Judy’s case. Like tossing mouldy fruit in a bin.”
“I believe him. Most people aren’t good liars. Not when you know them.”
“On TV shows maybe. Otherwise they’d never catch anyone in half an hour. In real life, we’re perfect.”
“That’s a horrible thing to believe.”
“Yes.”
After a time, she says, “Not just years younger. Years more… approachable. Gentler too. Why is it people always think hardness means you’re learning? Gaining experience?”
Good question.
“Lynette, I was hard when you met me. Had a sheet of things I’d done”—to people, to things, to animals—“longer than you’d been alive.”
“I’m not talking about armour. I’m talking about the man inside it.”
As an Island shimmers into view…
“Good peaches. Juicy. Do you always peel them?”
“I don’t like the skins. The little fuzzy hairs.”
“They can be chewy sometimes. But they don’t come off easily. I tug at corners with a paring knife, but chunks come off. You end up with a plum-sized peach.”
“You scald them first. Two minutes in boiling water. The skin slides right off, sometimes in one piece.”
§
“Tell me something, will you? What did Sandor do when he found out the truth?”
She exhales noisily. “You’re going to believe what you want to—”
“I mean any truth. One even. Maude’s, let’s say. Father shuts his wife away so he can bang young immigrants without a depressive cramping his style. Pays number one son to handle the bills so not even an invoice distracts him. Number one son visits occasionally at first—probably to make sure costs are in line—then not at all. Father’s consistent from the start. Away’s away.”
“It’s childish to believe in monsters, isn’t it? Ultimately, we’re all people.”
“I am a child.”
She looks so long at something out the window, to the side of my face, that I turn to see what’s there. A line of green hedge, virid in the sun. A walkway I can’t quite see down to the street. She answers me without taking her eyes from the view.
“Well, he just about went crazy. Or did go crazy for a while. You read the book. He thought he was living inside a dream, a nightmare. He said he knew he was an alcoholic, but he was afraid of what he might see if he got sober. He thought that if he could just…”
“What did he do?” I say again, quietly.
Her eyes come back to me: flat, hard buttons. Her lips set in a thin bitter line. Is there any good way to get older?
“Lynette, there are two types of people in a crisis. Lots of types in other situations, but just two in a crisis. One rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. Gets whoever he can to safety, calls for help, and so forth. The other type doesn’t.
“One of the things that mars Sandor’s writing—that keeps his book from being the book it could be—is his constant need to tell himself he’s the first kind of person when he’s really the second. That’s why he doesn’t put the blame where it belongs. Because if he did, some of it would have to fall on him.”
That new—to me—capacity for cruelty, and taste for it, spreads over her face like an ash cloud—
“Which would qualify you to complete the book, I guess.”
—and lands me smack dab in the nook again, snug in searing light and space.
“I could do some heavy editing. No question.”
Post-mirage, deserts are hotter. Dryer and more lifeless. Nothing burns like the memory of hope.
She isn’t surprised or flustered when I ask for Sandor’s address. She refuses politely, citing her promise to help protect his privacy. What surprises her is that I don’t press.
I stand up to go. “It’s a small neighbourhood. I’ll poke around.”
Awkwardness at the door, on both sides. Lynette breaks the silence.
“Well, maybe now that we’ve met… Met again, I mean.”
With that girlish blush. Teen to crone to angel on a tombstone.
I look down the street at the maple where I stood a few nights ago, watching her draw the line with her ex. The tree’s almost bare. A few red-orange leaves cling to it like flares. Like the tips of milkweed stalks set on fire with Bics stolen from foster parents, just catching or just sputtering out.
I turn back to her. “Lynette. You come into Sandor’s book fairly often. He always calls you ‘L.’ But an ‘L’ also framed the butterfly wing. The ‘one wing.’ I can’t see you working as a framer anytime recently.”
“That was Lois,” she says, wincing a little. But it aches rather than stabs, like a thump on an old bruise. “She worked at Loomis for a while. The art store at Yonge and Eg?” Back where we met. And the one place on earth I’d never have looked. “We talked a bit, not much. Enough to establish we both knew you.”
“And my daughter? Megan?”
“We never talked about kids. I’m sorry. It was quite a while, maybe ten years ago, and she left not long after. She did ask if you were well.”
“And?”
“I said I really did
n’t know.”
Silence behind me as I’m heading toward the street. Then quick steps. She runs after me, grabs my wrist when I’m almost at the sidewalk.
“Don’t hurt him. If you do find him, I mean. He doesn’t know any better. Nobody’s taught him how. He’s damaged and doesn’t know how badly. Or how to heal himself.”
I look at Lynette. Sniffling girl, sniffling old woman. Identity gone spiralling in the sun.
“Past a certain age, past childhood, that’s not an excuse. It’s an accusation.”
20
Sandor. Within a few blocks, I know, from following them the other night. But the neighbourhood bristling with Castles and Shields. A local job, but Forest Hill. Steep, dark woods.
A few doors down Roselawn, on the north side, a guy standing on the sidewalk with a metal box in his hand. Thirty-something, glasses, buzzcut. Fleshy arms and calves coming out of his T-shirt and cutoffs. An ex-soldier or an office wannabe, cadets in high school. His right hand on a lever on the box, making small movements with it while he stares into space. I stop a few feet from him, look where he’s looking. Finally see a small helicopter hovering over his lawn. Neat as a dragonfly, maybe triple the size. “Excuse me,” I say. He doesn’t move his hand from the box or take his eyes off the copter. “Excuse me?” No reaction.
“Happy toggles, gearbox.”
A little farther on the same side, an old man mowing his lawn. His steps a bit tottery, even with the mower supporting him. He seems to be using it as a kind of walker—but with electric, whirring blades? I stand where he can see me on his next turn. He shuts off the machine.
“Excuse me, sir. A friend of mine, Sandor Wyvern? I guess you know his family trouble. Everybody does by now. And he called me to come over and talk a bit. But—it’s stupid—I can’t remember his house number since the last time I visited. I guess the news has really got me rattled,” I say, shaking my head with it.
The old man’s neck lengthens under his Blue Jays cap, like a turtle’s extending from its shell.
“It is stupid,” he says. “Someone who doesn’t know where you live, yet you call him in your hour of need.”