by Ian Williams
Coffee not good for you, she said.
Nothing’s good for you. Eat.
Felicia wasn’t hungry but she unwrapped her bagel. It was still dark outside. There had been no change in her mother. His mother hadn’t coughed in hours, mostly because she had been asleep for hours.
As I was saying, Edgar said, you should see downstairs. All these folders and orange pill bottles floating around. There’s no way those machines are going to work after they pump out all the water.
What time is your flight?
Nine.
And you still planning to go and leave she in this condition?
Edgar stopped chewing and leaned forward.
Felicia could perceive a rebuke coming. What? she said, more challenge than question. It would be how boys in the nineties said it, opening their arms slightly and thrusting their chests forward. Plain talk, bad manners. You ever stop to think how you go feel if you on a plane to Calgary while your mother—
Of course, I have. I’ve been here for days, you realize. I do have obligations.
Is only one obligation you have, far as I see.
Edgar took such a fierce bite of bagel, he had to twist his head to sever the mouthful. He chewed that one mouthful until the volume in his mouth doubled and he had to swallow four times.
I not trying to be rude, she said.
Finish your bagel before I leave, he said.
He went back to eating his own, silently, leaning forward with his legs spread wide, elbows on his knees, frowning at her mother. Felicia was so impressed by this look of concentration, as if he were thinking about all of the problems of the world so she wouldn’t have to, that she adopted the opposite posture: she slouched back, stretched out her legs and crossed them at the ankles, as he had done throughout the night, held the bagel just under her chin, and ate and exhaled alternately.
You’re a bright girl, Felicia. He waited until her mouth was full before he added, It’s too late to be fooling yourself.
She swallowed.
Edgar flicked through his wallet and gave her the business card of a funeral home. Tell Jerry I sent you.
* * *
+
Edgar left then he came back while Felicia was smoothing the grey perimeter of her mother’s hair. He had forgotten his navy coat on the floor near Mutter’s bed. It was far too thin for the season, she thought as she watched him put it on. He staggered in a circle to locate the armholes by touch. He searched his pockets as he walked to the door, then whirled around and stopped with a tilt of his head and an unfurling of his fingers, as if remembering his manners.
They tried to recover the politeness of strangers.
Felicia, he said, pleased to meet you.
And you, she replied. She felt a brief flare of anger under her toque. She had explicitly told her sister to relax her hair by time not by sight.
I hope that we never meet again under such morbid circumstances and that your mother regains her former strength.
I go say a prayer for Mutter.
Mooter, he pronounced.
Mutter, she repeated. What was she speaking? German?
You be a good girl, he said.
How he said that, both patronizingly and sincerely, caused Felicia to give him more penetrating attention. It pushed him backward. He was hunched and gripping his forearms over his stomach. He appeared nauseated.
Fix your coat, she told him.
He looked down helplessly so she went to him and brushed dust and wrinkles from the front.
He smiled.
She nodded then turned back to her mother. And change your pants.
Yes, mother, he said.
Then left.
A moment later, Felicia ran to the door. Your watch, she called.
She held her position in the doorway, and he squeezed by her, turning to face her with a quick haiku of his eyebrows. Mutter was lying with her arms at her side, palms down, undead. Edgar removed his watch from her wrist, let her hand drop to the bed, and left for the airport with a little tilt of the head toward Felicia, still in the door frame, but without a look at his mother.
XY
5.
After the bagels and two goodbyes and two cigarettes under a light post near the Emergency entrance and several math problems, Edgar re-entered their room in Palliative for a third time.
What you forget now? Felicia asked.
Edgar glanced at Felicia. I wanted to check—
She’s fine.
No, not that. I was wondering—
Edgar was having a hard time finding the words.
Felicia leaned toward him with both arms on the armrest like grasshopper wings.
It wasn’t a question so much as a feeling he’d been having for months and he needed to corroborate it somehow. He’d had a similar urge to measure his body against Henry’s the summer it began to change. He had been relieved beyond explanation to discover that he was not monstrous.
Why don’t you walk me out? Edgar said. I can’t talk about it. In here.
Both of their mothers were sleeping in the background when they left. They walked toward the atrium then down the main stairs, all the while Felicia giving him sidelong looks. She stopped a few steps above the flood.
I not going any further.
Edgar looked at the water, then back at her as if she were making an undue fuss.
It’s not deep, he said. He had waded through it so many times over the night that he barely noticed it anymore. I’ll carry you.
She shook her head.
Edgar descended the final steps into the water. It came up to his knees. He reached back for her hand.
No, she said. I going back up.
It’s just a little water, he said and grasped her hand as she was turning. She tottered on the stairs. He lost his balance and his grip on her tightened.
Then he found the words.
I wish she would just die and leave me the hell alone, Edgar said. Doesn’t a little part of you wish—
Bite your tongue. Jesus, help me.
I didn’t mean it like that, he retreated.
If you want your mother to die, that’s your business, but don’t come here and kill off my mother.
You don’t understand. He was pulling her down the final steps into the water.
Lord Jesus, he gone and curse he own mother. She pulled her hand away.
I said forget it. Forget it. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Then he took it out to say, But of all people, I thought you might—
Is my sympathy you want?
I’m tired. That’s all. She’s tired too, he said. She doesn’t even know she’s alive.
She know plenty.
I know if it was me, I would want— He put the cigarette back in his mouth.
He took it out.
He put it back in.
He took it out.
Felicia took it from his hand and for a moment he was holding her fist.
Slowly, she said: You don’t know what good for you.
He left her with the cigarette—whatever, he had a whole pack of them—and scissored his way through the water to the door.
XX
6.
Throughout the day, people visited. It was Halloween. But by then and for the next year, Felicia and Edgar would be the only two people on earth. Everyone else was background jazz.
Felicia kept a list of the day’s events in the margin of the newspaper that Edgar left behind.
Her sisters called. She heard one brother in the background asking questions and kissing his teeth in exasperation.
The head elder came to visit and prayed a mighty, frowning prayer that should have raised the dead from the morgue. Her mother squeezed her hand, Felicia felt, thought, believed, wrote. After him, Sister Jazz from the choir visited and vigorously oiled her mother’s extremities. Then the landlady came with investigative gusto. Felicia recorded her name and 3:45 PM in the margin. PM was double underlined. They combed through the events of the morning. I saw he
r from the upstairs window going for her bus, the landlady said. Going in her brown coat. I telling you, said the landlady who had not returned Felicia’s call from last night, I can hardly believe that’s her. Sister Jazz 2 visited with some money she owed her mother. She asked the doctor why Geraldine looked so bloated. He said, It might be an infection. An infection from what? Felicia asked. Mutter’s cough was less frequent, Felicia noticed. Her eyes watered like a South American statue of the Virgin Mary, an emotionless, miraculous weeping. Could be anything, the doctor said. Could even be the thrombolytic. Felicia wrote thrombolytic, near the date of the newspaper.
Between visitors, Felicia watched the time and urine trickle through her mother’s catheter. She reread parts of the newspaper. She napped. How hard could it be to care for his own mother? If he had said, So she could be at peace or So she could remain in fair health in his memory, Felicia might, might, have understood. Regardless, all evening and night she had spoken too badly with Edgar, like an uneducated girl from bush country. From now on, she would bite her th and say please, pardon, and shall. Would you like a cup of tea?
No one visited Mutter so Felicia appended a footnote about her in the prayers of the church ladies before they could say Amen. Strangely, though, Mutter seemed to improve so steadily in Edgar’s absence that Felicia attributed the improvement to his absence. She was conscious and silent, except for the coughing. He wasn’t due back for days, he had told her. Mutter would be pole-vaulting by then.
XY
6.
Edgar’s daybook should have read:
8:00: Forget about Jazz, Jazz, and Jazz in Calgary.
8:30: Drive to hospital. Change mind. Drive past hospital.
9:00: Flight. Go home. Call Calgary. Lie. Lie down.
9:30:
10:00:
10:30:
11:00:
11:30:
12:00:
12:30:
1:00:
1:30: Wake up.
2:00: Lunch with Jazz Distributors. Die a little.
2:30: Rummage. Graze.
3:00: Meeting with Jazz and associates. Light housekeeping.
3:30:
4:00: Work on impression of smoking cat looking out window.
4:30: Take bath.
5:00:
5:30: Shrug.
6:00:
6:30:
7:00: (Find a girl??)
XX
7.
Both of their mothers were living or dying in the background when Felicia’s lab partner visited. He was the only person from school who did. He entered the room meekly after the last church lady left, as if he were waiting in the hallway for Felicia to be alone.
My condolences, he said.
She’s not dead.
Oh. He paused. I mean my sympathies.
I tell you she not dead, Felicia said. Her lab partner was a naturally effeminate boy with few friends. They had that in common. She softened. What did I miss?
Onions, onions, and more onions. He unzipped his backpack and handed her his drawings of onion cells. I skipped last period to travel up here.
By yourself?
He grinned.
She didn’t thank him for the effort although she knew how difficult it was to take public transit from Brampton to Toronto. She returned the drawings to him without comment. They had shared a microscope to identify the parts of a cell. She had already completed the assignment.
He put the drawings back in his bag. Are your sisters coming to help you out?
They trying, they trying. But it’s hard to leave the country.
Money?
Visas. Especially on short notice. They go find a way. God is good. Somebody must know somebody in the embassy.
How about your dad?
He doesn’t travel.
This isn’t a holiday.
He doesn’t go anywhere by plane or boat. He doesn’t drive, he doesn’t like how the young boys drive taxis, and it getting hard for him to ride his bicycle up and down the hills.
Still.
You’re very judgmental, Felicia said though she knew she wasn’t being fair. She was touchy and more unkind to him than any of her previous visitors.
They sat in silence for a while then her lab partner unzipped his bag again and produced a banana. He offered it to her, as if he saved it from his lunch just for her. She refused it.
What’s wrong with your neighbour? He pointed his elbow at Mutter.
Mutter was sleeping but without the light snore that Felicia had become accustomed to. Felicia longed for her mother to snore lightly.
She looks like my grandmother, he said when Felicia didn’t answer.
She has a son. He’s travelling for work.
While his mom’s sick?
She’s not dying.
Each of their mothers was still alive in the background.
And he had to go, Felicia said. She found herself wanting to defend Edgar. Very important business. You can’t expect him to be here all the time. He was here all day yesterday and all the days before that. He help me out when the nurses was playing the fool with the phone. And this morning before he leave he buy food for me. Felicia laughed at the memory of their all night conversation. It was her first real laugh in the hospital. Oy, that man can talk.
Her lab partner put the banana in the mesh side pocket of his bag.
When I was in hospital, he began in his quiet way, they put a toe tag on me. For identification. I guess there are lots of boys like me. We’re easy to mix up.
Then two orderlies came, transferred Mutter to a gurney, and wheeled her away.
XY
7.
The evening of his cancelled trip, Edgar found Felicia lying supine on his mother’s vacated bed.
Did she—? He reached for his wrists.
No, Felicia said. Upstairs. B403.
He made a sound of inflation or deflation. He thought he was but he was not prepared for Mutter to die, rather, to be dead. She should die when he was thinking about her, goodsonning her. He approached Felicia’s mother’s bed.
You smell like smoke, Felicia said, which he understood to mean, Don’t lean over my mother and breathe all over her. Go see about your own mother.
He backed away. If you want a ride later, I can come back in an hour.
It’s far.
I’ll take you to Brampton. It’s fine.
I’m not leaving, Felicia said.
Come upstairs when you’re ready. B403, you said?
Felicia didn’t answer. So he left.
* * *
+
But he came back immediately, holding a business card toward her. She didn’t move to take it, so he tucked it under her shoulder.
You gave me Jerry card already, she said. You getting commission or what?
No, that’s mine. He wanted to restore the familiarity of the previous night, to fall on his knees beside Felicia’s bed and confess that he spent the day smoking excessively, that he sat an hour in the bathtub, thinking about Oma and Salt, that he kept the radio on for company all day. Instead, he said, I took your advice.
I can see.
I put off Calgary, he said, until— and did not finish.
Felicia arched her back as she stretched. Mutter getting better.
Don’t feel obliged to hope.
No. Felicia stretched again, hands in fists, then lay back. The nurse say she never should have be—never should have been in Palliative from day one.
As if he hadn’t heard, Edgar sat on the bed near Felicia’s feet, crossed his legs at the knee, and began to tell her a story. The price of crude, was how it began. But he realized how foolish he had been, splashing Brut on his jaw, when all Felicia wanted since yesterday was to get him and Mutter out of the room. He glimpsed a series of conflicting paths forward. Spitefully, he went on and on about tariffs and the cost of freight transportation and the OPEC dragon and shahs and did not ask about her mother.
Sometimes I feel like everybody�
��s looking at me like I’m a kept whore, was how it ended—very far from where it began. Like if it wasn’t for Vater and Heinrich, I’d be selling chocolate bars in the Moncton airport store instead of sitting in the board meeting. But I have opinions on cost efficiencies. I have thoughts.
No answer. Dead. Edgar slapped Felicia’s foot.
I hearing you, she said.
Did you go home at all?
Felicia shook her head.
Did you eat?
She shook her head again.
Any change—he would not ask what she wanted—with the flooding?
Again she shook her head again.
You should go home. You need to leave the hospital. Come on.
I’m fine, Felicia said. What’s crude?
XX
8.
She was recounting a news story from her small unrecognized island. A man had beheaded three girls and hung their bodies like sheets over the brick fence of an elementary school, the one Felicia went to as a child. The heads only recently had been found, according to one of her sisters. Felicia’s secondary school teacher used the girls as grammar, an opportunity to teach the difference between hung and hanged. If they had on their heads, the teacher said, they would be hanged.
She felt Edgar’s eyes on her forehead.
What made her recall the blue pinafores of the girls’ uniforms? A uniform she herself had worn. She herself. Perhaps it was because she had come apart from herself briefly and ended up here at Edgar’s house without knowing how. Or rather, she knew how but did not know why. She had lost her head, so to speak, between Palliative and his poorly designed couch. Her left leg was also falling asleep because the seat of the sofa was longer than the length of her thigh and she was unable to make her knee coincide with the edge unless she slouched but she would have to slouch to the point that her neck was halfway down the back of the sofa, a position that was neither comfortable nor attractive. There were two bowls on the coffee table though she could not recall having eaten. She had never forgotten to eat, let alone forgotten having eaten. And she would not leave bowls on a wooden table like that. She leaned forward and slid a section of a newspaper beneath them.