by Ian Williams
While the beheaded girls were dying in her mouth, Edgar reached out and pressed his thumb into her forehead and with the slightest pressure rubbed small circles. It was impossible to interpret her story as erotic, yet here was Edgar, Felicia realized, trying to turn her on.
Did you see?
No.
Poor thing.
I said I didn’t see.
I meant the girl, girls. He applied slightly more pressure and rubbed circles into her forehead with the pad of his finger. Are you going to put your head on my shoulder?
Despite her reclined position, she felt no alarm. Edgar was no more man than she was woman. They were benched teammates. They were children considering the hornet’s nest while waiting for their mothers, one to recover, the other to die. He could have done anything to her. And who would recognize me from the back of my knees? He could have digitally penetrated her, in the Latin sense rather than the modern, a term she learned later in life while reading harassment allegations between two young people. The newspaper printed a photograph of the girls, the back of the legs, knees, socks, hanging limply over the fence. She would have gone on thinking this long strand of protein and looking at the china cabinet as he digitally penetrated her. She doubted that he could penetrate her in any other way, as flaccid as she assumed he felt, a man in his situation and of his age. By the time they found the heads, thin, mangy dogs had eaten away the flesh. The blue ribbons had been pulled off. There was still some hair though. Would it be easier to recognize a faceless head or the headless body? What would one identify against? Memory.
I want to go back to the hospital, Felicia said.
There’s nothing you can do at the hospital.
She yawned.
Cut the charade, Edgar said. He pronounced it charahd.
What, I can’t yawn?
Edgar got up. He took the bowls in one hand and adjusted his underwear through the pocket with the other while walking away toward the kitchen. She had offended him? Was that any reason to toss her head off his shoulder? She yawned again. She should buy him some jockey shorts that fit. Three in a pack from Simpsons.
I’m not taking you back to the hospital, he said from the kitchen.
XY
8.
This is a point where their stories diverge.
Her directions were poor. She might have been on the ganja. On the way to his house, she fell asleep against the headrest although she kept talking most of the way about a man who attacked his pregnant wife with the claw side of a hammer. She wore the story around her like armour.
Edgar turned off the engine. They were in his garage. I’ll be right back.
At first, no, he didn’t ask her to come in. He would just go in, why was he here exactly, grab a few things, she didn’t even see the stonework, take care of that thing, and then they’d be on their way. He got as far as the inside mat before he turned around, knocked on the passenger window, and beckoned.
* * *
+
In the foyer, he sensed she was judging him. She held the house against him like a shirt against his shoulders to see whether it suited him. He looked at her as into a mirror.
The house was divided by a long hallway. At one end was the front door and at the other, the back door, where they’d entered. There were frames along the wall of the hallway. He didn’t turn on any lights so she couldn’t see more than that. The mat had a rooster on it. The doorknobs were shaped like large crystals. He was embarrassed or vulnerable, emotions to which he was unaccustomed.
She asked him to turn on the lights.
The neighbours, he said.
The neighbours what?
Don’t like it when we turn on the lights too late, he said.
Felicia didn’t believe that. She went to flick a switch, but he stopped her hand and put his finger to his lips.
How big is it? she asked.
It took Edgar a moment to register what the it referred to because her eyes were wandering over the house and him comparatively.
Large, he said. Too large. The yard backs on to woods so I’d say, sizewise, the property is endless.
They probably killing people back there as we speak.
* * *
+
He brought her to his house to feed her. Soup. He had canned soup. He offered. She refused. He insisted. When it was ready, he sat on the counter and began eating. She looked at him disapprovingly.
No grace? she said. However humble, we should thank the Lord.
But she hadn’t thanked the Lord for the bagel at breakfast. How was it that his food needed to be blessed all of a sudden?
The baby survive and living with the woman family, she said.
You already told me that.
I want to know what they go tell the child about the father.
And her mother, Edgar said.
Well, they can’t talk about the father without talking about the mother.
* * *
+
She was too tired to stand but she would not sit on the counter like a man. She dug an elbow into his thigh to support herself. At first, it felt like she was massaging a pressure point but after a few minutes he had an attack of leg spasms.
It was altogether possible that he was confusing her with another woman.
* * *
+
He calculated the risk of her mouth. But he did not kiss her.
* * *
+
As he was driving her home, he asked, Do you mind if I smoke? He was already rolling down the car window.
I do, she said.
XX
9.
After a few hours in her own bed, Felicia took transit back to the hospital. Her mother was worse. There had been a second heart attack, what people in her country would call a massive heart attack, in the night. Her organs were shutting down.
The nurse told Felicia someone had tried to reach her at Christian Lady’s house.
Felicia said, No. No one had tried to reach her.
Yes, in the log, it says someone tried to reach you.
Nobody tried to reach me. Because if they wanted to reach me they would have reach me. How many hours now? You mean to tell me in six hours, she counted them out with her fingers, twelve, one, two, three, four, five o’clock, nobody could reach me. I is not the Queen of England. I don’ have no secretary. You dial the phone and you reach me.
She would not let them throw her mother’s body into the Atlantic. Everybody in this hospital would die first.
Felicia followed the nurse out to the station, demanding, threatening, index-finger-pointing, ready to break some nose, shaking her head like a horse clearing flies. The conversation circled and circled. Every time the nurse tried to shake her off, Felicia brought up one of three points: Why had no one called her, turn-for-the-worse, and where’s the doctor? She raised her voice. She wanted to know why no one had called her.
The doctor, a different one from yesterday, told Felicia that her mother wouldn’t last the day. He was sorry. They did the best they could do. But the outcome was out of their hands. She should prepare herself. He was sorry. Felicia called her sister in the unrecognized island. Her visa came through. Keep her alive until Saturday.
Her mother had darkened and become swollen. Her nail polish was burgundy. Felicia had tried to keep her looking respectable, to keep her hair neat and simple, to lotion her hands and feet. Then in the afternoon, she sat, in what appeared to be resignation but was only fatigue, bent forward, forehead on the bed, arms crossed, hands on opposite shoulders. Around sunset, she opened her eyes to evaluate the precise tint of light in the room. Did the doctor mean end-of-the-day-sunset or end-of-the-day-midnight?
* * *
+
Her mother defied both. She lived past sunset, she lived through Edgar’s evening visit, she lived past midnight, she lived through breakfast and lunch, she lived and lived and lived. Until she died.
Two nurses tried to pronounce her but Felicia knew only docto
rs could pronounce (Mooter, Mutter, Mooter, Mütter) the dead, so at 4:26 p.m., November 2, one did. Prematurely, Felicia believed. Surely there was a cell that was still on, the last house to turn off its lights along a street. The nurses moved their mouths and Felicia just wanted them to finish saying whatever comforting nonsense they had to, so she could be alone with her mother and continue to lotion her hands until she woke up refreshed.
As with a birthday, Felicia was unable to detect a marked change in herself between one state of being and another. In the hallway, she could hear the nurses ruthlessly going about their business. Outside, she could see the single tree in the courtyard and beyond that a car waiting to make a left turn, very innocently.
Her mother had slipped out the door and would be right back. Hadn’t her mother died before? Hadn’t her mother died every time she left for work? Wasn’t her mother dead when Felicia sat in math factoring polynomials? Wasn’t she dead for years while Felicia was ironing her uniform on a small unrecognized island? Wasn’t she displaced to heaven and would return with ten thousand times ten thousand angels en retinue? What did she believe about death and the resurrection? Wasn’t Edgar dead now? Wasn’t the whole cafeteria dead until she activated them? If she left the room and came back, mightn’t her mother be sitting up, with a comb in her hair and a jar of pomade open beside her, with wax paper for the curlers? The cloudy feeling inside of her was for the curlers and wax paper, for all of the things her mother did with such earnestness while this terror was surreptitiously conspiring against her. She was counting the number of spoons of oats (seven, the Lord’s number) to put into the porridge while her heart was winding to a stop. What could she have done even if she foresaw the moment when she would just be an inconvenient change of sheets to nurses?
XY
9.
Edgar was upstairs in B403 when Felicia’s mother died. Felicia did not step into the room. She stood in the doorway holding a plastic bag with both hands to ask if he would take her home.
He asked to see the body, as a point of reference more than as a point of respect, but Felicia said the body was already removed to the morgue. And indeed when they went downstairs, another woman was in the bed. Edgar crossed himself although he was not Catholic.
In the car, Felicia closed her eyes and told him that a group of men caught her uncle one night, put tires around him, and set him on fire. It happened when she was a child, before her mother left for Canada.
He thought she was connecting deaths in her family.
But then she said, Be warned.
And Edgar realized that the story was intended for him, that she was protecting herself.
Nevertheless, he took her to his dark garage.
Felicia refused to get out. I said straight home.
He went into his house and came back with a bag of bagels, cream cheese, a knife, and a tea towel. He spread the cheese on the bagels in the car and they ate, she absently, sniffing snot back into her nose.
He looked at her, reading her profile for a sign. She kept her eyes ahead, glazed. Between her calves was the plastic bag containing her mother’s handbag.
She hiccupped a belch when she was done.
He reversed and drove her home.
XX
10.
Waking the following morning at her house, rather, the room she shared with her mother, rather used to share with her mother, in Christian Lady’s house, Felicia was struck by how the room itself seemed to have a heart attack. It was stuffed with so many things, greeting cards, ornaments, peacock feathers in vases, creams, boxes of clothes that couldn’t fit in drawers, petticoats airing out. By contrast, Edgar’s house could be diagnosed with pneumonia. The air was frail and old. It smelled of smoke, rubbing alcohol, cleaning agents, all very thinly, like a chewed flavour on someone’s breath.
Felicia tried to arrange her mother’s things but her face broke into a cubist painting just picking up her mother’s slippers. She tried to make herself a bowl of cream of wheat in the shared kitchen and Dora Maared at the folded napkin her mother placed in the spout of the cereal box to prevent ants from going in as if this were still the small unrecognized island. The attacks of grief were spontaneous: the smell of Dax hair grease on her mother’s pillowcase, a belt on a hook in the closet, the blue placemat with the torn edge, the kitchen sponge, her mother’s handwriting on a running grocery list. Felicia decided to leave the sorting of her mother’s belongings until her older sisters came. Two got visas; her brothers didn’t. Her father wanted them to send the body back but it was too expensive and in characteristic fashion he declared he was not going on a plane to bury anybody.
It wasn’t yet 9:00 a.m. and the emptiness of the day frightened Felicia. She went to the kitchen to have another try at breakfast. She took hold of a knife. Wasn’t there something she had to do? She would go to school and write the date at the top of a page. What was it? She took hold of a tomato. She sliced it. Very thinly. The slices had to be very thin for some reason. Then she stared a moment at her work and swept the slices into a plastic storage container. There was someone she had to call. She started dialling and hung up. Who was it? Right. She dialled again. She would tell the school that she would not be able to write the date today, maybe next week.
Then she went upstairs, lay on her side of the bed and went back to sleep.
It was after noon when she woke up guiltily, uneasily. She chastised herself. At the very least, she could organize her mother’s handbag. That stopped at the first thing her hand touched. Her mother’s lipstick. Felicia unspooled the tube, reddened her lips slowly, looked at her reflection, and waited a long time for lightning to strike.
* * *
+
Although her mother was no longer in the hospital, Felicia could not stay away.
She sat next to Edgar’s mother and read Great Expectations for Grade 13 English. She sat there and turned pages out of grief or habit or lipstick and none of the nurses objected. She considered Edgar’s mother, how she could still be alive when she was so neglected. Then Felicia left before she suspected Edgar would visit.
The next day, she went back, put her watch on Mutter’s wrist, and this time read Great Expectations aloud. Felicia planned to leave before Edgar arrived (because it was strange wasn’t it, wasn’t it criminal, for her to be loitering in a hospital room next to a contagious woman) but Edgar arrived early, near the end of a chapter, and surprised her.
Or she surprised him.
I don’t have no number for you, she said.
I gave you my card.
House number, I mean.
Edgar unlatched Felicia’s watch from his mother’s wrist and dangled it back to her. Then he put his gold watch in its place.
He said, She’s used to having some—
Weight on her, Felicia finished. I was just— But Felicia had no interest in defending herself. I wanted to tell you about the service.
He showed no interest.
We having a service.
We?
The church.
You called Jerry? His tone was abrasive. It seemed to Felicia that he was somehow jealous of her.
She didn’t answer. She beheld Edgar, legs crossed, arms crossed, looking blankly at his mother, looking like he was trying to figure out what to do with her, and his mother, propped up, bobbing to sleep.
I suppose you heard, Edgar said.
She didn’t know what he was referring to.
They’re discharging her tomorrow.
Felicia smiled but, looking at Edgar’s face, she realized that was the wrong reaction. It was her turn to feel envy. How could someone go from Palliative to discharged in a few days?
I’d like to know where they plan to discharge her, Edgar said. Because I, I can’t just— This week I have to— Why didn’t you call Jerry?
I called him.
Good. Because I told you to call him.
I called him.
All right.
Then they took a few moment
s to diffuse.
Weakly, he offered to drive her home, at least to the station. It sounded like he didn’t want to be alone in a hospital with Mutter on his last Mutterless night. Felicia declined. She slung her handbag over her shoulder.
Wednesday, she said. Remember.
Remember what? he asked.
The service.
XY
10.
According to Edgar, he saw Felicia once between the day her mother died and the funeral. Mutter had been discharged. He came home, ready to apologize to Jazz, the day nurse, for being late, and found Felicia sitting on his couch having tea with Mutter. Her recovering afro was tied up in a black cloth, her nails were painted, her waist was cinched, her tiny breasts pushed up, her heels were kitten, her earrings matched her necklace matched her bracelets. She was wearing lipstick, yes.
Well. Well well. Well well well. What to make of that?
Jazz say to tell you she had to go to her other job, Felicia said. She say you’re costing her money. She tell me not to tell you that part.
Edgar had converted the dining room into a makeshift bedroom for Mutter so he wouldn’t have to carry her upstairs every night.
What you think about Mutter?
She’s drinking tea.
No, I mean her— Felicia circled her face with her palm.
Felicia had brushed his mother’s hair into Queen Elizabeth style, put rings on each of her fingers, bracelets on her wrist, clipped on earrings, weighed her down with a pendant necklace. She and Felicia were wearing matching lipstick.
She looks— garish is what he wanted to say. He said, A little more subtlety. Felicia tilted her head and looked again. What do you know about makeup?