The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  Mercedes glanced at Isabella. An unfortunate face, she thought, pear shaped and all the features tightly clustered at the centre, it made Bella look permanently offended. She was twenty-nine years old and disappointed in life in some way. As if it had all been rehearsal so far and she was uncertain about ever making it to opening night.

  Mercedes looked out at the city. “Never thought I’d lay eyes on this place again.”

  Bella said, “Did you want to do it now?”

  “I’m not ready,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “He’s been dead three years, Mom.”

  “I want him with me tomorrow,” she said. She let out a long breath of air. “Johnny never really thought much of this place. I don’t know why he’d want to be set out here for evermore.”

  “He was just looking for a way to get you home,” Agnes told her. “That’s what I think.”

  Mercedes saw the truth of it right away, though it had never occurred to her before that moment. “You always were the one with the brains, Agnes,” she said.

  “I’d have traded them for looks any day.”

  Mercedes laughed. “You see what can happen to looks.”

  Agnes slipped off her sister’s sunglasses and touched the injured side of her face. “Where’s the plate?”

  Mercedes drew a line from her left eye socket down across her cheek, then put the sunglasses back on. “I think myself and Johnny are going to take a little walk out past the tower,” she said. But she didn’t move from the spot where she was standing.

  Agnes lived in an apartment building just off Torbay Road, across the street from a strip mall. A kitchenette and boxy living room downstairs. Photos of her three children over the television. Half a dozen pictures of her and David through the years and in every shot his lame hand was hidden in a pocket or behind Agnes’s back. Ag had married Clive Reid’s youngest boy while they were still living in the Cove, where David taught kindergarten through Grade 11 until the school was closed in 1964. Once their own children left for universities and jobs on the mainland David retired, and they moved to St. John’s from Fogo. David dead nearly a year now.

  After their supper Agnes brought out a bottle of sherry. Isabella drank only a few mouthfuls before she went upstairs to bed. It was barely coming on to dark.

  “Is she all right?”

  “She had an early morning,” Mercedes said. Though in her mind the simple question rippled out into every nook of her daughter’s life.

  Bella had been the most unexpected of unexpected children. Born almost twenty years after Marion, their only child as Mercedes had come to think of her. She had been calling her husband One-shot Boustani for the better part of two decades. And then Isabella.

  “I can’t believe she’s not married yet,” Agnes said.

  Mercedes rolled her eyes. Through Bella’s twenties half a dozen men came and went without making a dent in her aimlessness, her detachment. Mercedes rarely met the people she dated, sometimes knew nothing more than a first name. Which made her suspect some of them, at least, were married. Each unsuccessful affair left her daughter a little more contrary, a little sadder. There was an abortion when she was twenty-six, Bella talking about it as if it was nothing more than a toothache. Her nonchalance in matters of the heart was too practised to be sincere, Mercedes thought. The listless world-weariness in her bordered on self-hatred.

  “Wasn’t she seeing someone just now?” Agnes asked.

  Mercedes made a pffft sound through her teeth and lips.

  “What a sin. She’s a sweetheart.”

  “To you maybe.” Mercedes raised her glass of sherry. “To the rest of us she’s cold as a witch’s tit.”

  Agnes put a hand to her mouth, appalled. “Sadie,” she whispered.

  Mercedes’ face went suddenly serious. She said, “No one’s called me Sadie since I moved to the States.”

  They looked at one another awhile longer.

  “Welcome home,” Agnes said.

  A crowd of several hundred gathered at the war memorial on Duckworth Street the following morning to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in Europe. Wreaths were laid under a steady drizzle of speeches and prayers. Mercedes and Isabella and Agnes stood across the street from the ceremonies, keeping to the outskirts of the crowd. She still disliked large groups, the mauzy whiff of them, how they made it impossible to isolate any individual smell. It was like white noise to Mercedes, an irritating hum.

  Earlier that morning she had hugged her sister at the sink, before either of them had dressed for the day. She wanted to get to her before she powdered up, pushed her face into Agnes’s neck to breathe her in. “You smell exactly the same as I remember,” she said.

  “Oh Jesus,” Bella said. “The Nose has found you out, Aunt Agnes.”

  “What do I smell like?”

  “Like you.”

  “And what is that, if you don’t mind?”

  “It’s—” she paused, “it’s a bit like toasted homemade bread.”

  Bella threw her head back and laughed. “Buttered or not buttered?” she asked.

  “Oh be quiet, Bella.”

  Agnes smiled up at Mercedes, embarrassed by the peculiar intimacy. “Toast?” she said.

  “I took her to a movie once, Aggie. And she kept moving her head back and forth, like a dog sniffing the air. ‘Do you smell that?’ she said. ‘Do you smell that?’ I thought she was losing her mind. ‘Baby poo,’ she said. ‘It smells like baby poo in here.’”

  Mercedes stood with her arms tightly folded. Agnes looked from Isabella to her sister and back again. “What was it?” she asked.

  “Popcorn.” Bella threw her head back again. “She thinks theatre popcorn smells like baby caca.”

  “While they’re breastfeeding,” Mercedes insisted. “It does.”

  “What do you want for breakfast?” Agnes asked, desperate to change the subject.

  “Have some toast, Mom,” Bella said.

  Agnes gave her niece a look. “I could make you some oatmeal, Sadie.”

  “Just tea,” Mercedes said coldly.

  It was nearly impossible to see what was happening at the base of the war memorial from where they were standing. “Why don’t we try to get a little closer,” Agnes suggested.

  Mercedes said, “Johnny would have wanted to stay a little out of the way. He was always embarrassed about serving here. Not making it overseas.”

  “There was all kinds of ways to serve, Sadie. He was one of the lucky ones.” Agnes lifted her glasses to wipe at her eyes.

  Isabella said, “It was the merchant marine Hardy was with, was it?”

  Agnes nodded. “Ruthie wouldn’t let him—that was his wife, Ruthie—she wouldn’t let him join the forces. Merchant marine was the closest she’d let him get to overseas. Last part of 1943 he signed up.” She took a breath and let it out slowly through her nostrils. “He told some stories when he was home on leave,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “Isabella,” Mercedes said.

  “Like what, Agnes?”

  “They went across in these huge convoys, you know, merchant marine and navy ships together. When a boat was torpedoed the convoys just kept moving. Even if there were survivors in the water, they couldn’t stop for fear of losing more ships. His first time across, two boats went down. The calmest kind of weather, not a breath of wind. Hardy saw a fellow out in open water, he had his life jacket on and was watching the convoy sail past him. A Brit he was. And he had his hand in the air, waving it around, and he was yelling ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ Making a joke of it.”

  “Jesus,” Bella said. “He told you that?”

  “He never said a word around us women. He was up drinking with Clive when all this came out. I heard it from David, after we got married.” Agnes paused there, and Mercedes steeled herself, gripping the straps of her shoulder bag and hanging on. “I keep thinking of Hardy out there like that,” Agnes said, “watching the boats sail by.”

  “We don�
��t know,” Mercedes said. “We don’t know what happened to him except his ship went down.” She was trying to keep the anger from her voice. “Don’t torture yourself.”

  “Leave her alone, Mercedes.”

  “Can we just be quiet and watch what’s going on?” she said.

  Bella looked away and hugged her aunt’s arm tighter. And no one said another word.

  Mercedes didn’t know that Hardy was on his way to join the merchant marine the last time she saw him in St. John’s. Johnny insisted she write a letter home after Marion was christened and she included a picture of the baby in her silk shantung gown. Agnes wrote back, sending a copy of Hardy’s obituary. Dead more than a year before Mercedes heard, a year that he’d been living on in her head. Fishing, she thought, where her father had spent his life fishing, raising his own children with Ruthie. It made her feel like a fool to have imagined him happy all that time and finding some measure of happiness in imagining it.

  The speakers went on and on, she didn’t know why a memorial service had to be as interminable as the war it commemorated. A cold rain began to fall just as a young cadet lifted a bugle to play “Taps” and Mercedes felt gut-foundered suddenly, so greedily hungry that the world seemed to drop under her feet. A whiff of ammonia flooded her nostrils and she grabbed uselessly at Aggie’s coat before she hit the sidewalk.

  2.

  TWO PEOPLE WERE STANDING at the foot of her bed when she came to herself, Isabella and a young man in a white lab coat who was saying, “Most of the effects of a concussion are temporary. It all depends on the severity.” He looked barely old enough to drive a car. “And things are complicated in this case by the concussion sustained in her earlier accident. Some of these effects are cumulative. And with someone as elderly as your mother.”

  “I’m right here,” Mercedes interrupted. She closed her eyes again. “I can hear you.”

  “Mrs. Boustani,” the doctor said cheerfully.

  “How long have I been here, Bella?”

  “Since yesterday, Mom.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Do you remember any of our conversations, Mrs. Boustani?”

  Mercedes looked at the doctor. “No,” she said angrily.

  “Do you know my name?”

  “I’ve never laid eyes on you in my life.”

  He smiled at her. “I’m Dr. Mullaly. I’ll be looking after you while you’re here. You gave yourself a nasty knock. We’re going to keep an eye on you for a few days.”

  She tried to sit up. “Where’s Johnny, Isabella? Where’s your father?”

  “He’s right here, Mom.” She pointed to the shoulder bag in a chair by the bed.

  Mercedes slumped back against the pillow. “I hate hospitals,” she said. “They have such a …” A look of confusion and fear crossed her face.

  “What is it?” the doctor said.

  She took a breath of air through her nostrils, searching for the ubiquitous medicinal smell she detested. But there was only a stark blankness.

  “You were going to say something, Mrs. Boustani.”

  “No, nothing. Never mind.”

  “Mrs. Boustani,” Mullaly said. “Did you have a word in your head that you weren’t able to get ahold of just then?”

  “No,” she said.

  He was about to ask something else when Agnes came into the room carrying a Tupperware container and waving a copy of the Evening Telegram.

  She said, “You made the paper, Sadie.”

  “Oh fuck.”

  “Mom,” Bella whispered.

  Agnes placed the Tupperware container on the table tray and opened the paper across the bed. “Here, here, here,” she said. “‘The commemoration was interrupted briefly when Mrs. Mercedes Boustani (nee Parsons) collapsed.’”

  Mercedes’ eyes rolled back in her head.

  “‘She was attended by St. John Ambulance workers at the scene,’” Agnes read, “‘and transferred to the Health Sciences Centre where she is being treated for a concussion. Mrs. Boustani, a Newfoundland native originally from Little Fogo Island, is the widow of Lieutenant Johnny Boustani (ret.) who was stationed in St. John’s during the Second World War.’”

  “How do they know all that?”

  Agnes looked up at her sister, her mouth open. “They asked me.”

  “Jesus, Agnes.”

  “All right,” Dr. Mullaly said. “That’s enough excitement for now. You need to rest, Mrs. Boustani.”

  Bella opened the Tupperware and offered it to her mother. “Have a muffin, Mom.”

  “Just out of the oven,” Agnes said.

  Mercedes picked one from the container and brought it to her mouth. The heat was still in it, but she couldn’t smell a thing. She felt as if her head was stuck inside a box of Styrofoam. “I’m not hungry,” she said. There were tears in her eyes and she looked away out the window.

  “Maybe it would be best,” Dr. Mullaly suggested, “if we gave your mother some time alone to rest.”

  And the three of them stepped out of the room together.

  By the third day Mercedes was able to sit in a reclining chair beside her bed and watch the tiny television set for an hour at a time before her head started throbbing. Bella went downstairs to the cafeteria for a coffee while Mercedes was watching a husband and wife throw chairs at one another on a daytime talk show. She heard her name being called softly and turned to see Amina holding a black leather purse in both hands, looking expectantly at the woman asleep in the bed beside her own.

  “She a friend of yours?” Mercedes asked.

  “Someone I knew years ago. During the war. I didn’t even know she was in town.”

  “She don’t look well.”

  “She was in the paper. They said she hit her head.”

  Amina was colouring her hair jet black. She wore a dark sleeveless blouse, a black skirt above the knee and high-heel shoes, as if she were on her way to the USO for a dance. The legs of a thirty-year-old.

  “Is she in a coma?”

  “Amina,” Mercedes said, smiling.

  The woman darted a look across the room. “Mercedes?” she said. “Mercedes? You witch.”

  “My God, girl, you haven’t changed in fifty years.”

  Amina came across the room and leaned into her, kissing both cheeks. She sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand. “How long are they going to keep you here, Mercedes?”

  “If I don’t wet the bed tonight or go on a raving streak, I’m a free woman.”

  “You’re not in a hotel, are you? You have to come stay with me when they let you out.”

  Mercedes smiled and squeezed her hand, to put off disappointing her. She thought of the first time she went to the Waterford River with Amina and her mother to pick spearmint. She didn’t know how to tell it from grass. “You Newfoundlanders,” Rania had said. “There is more to taste in the world than salt.” She picked a blade and crushed it in her fingers, held it to Mercedes’ face. “You see?” she said. “It grows everywhere and not a soul on this island can see it for what it is.” The locals called the Lebanese grass-eaters for this peculiar habit of theirs, picking and cooking weeds from the riverbanks. The scent of it still brought Mercedes back to that kitchen at Rawlin’s Cross, to those loud, ridiculously beautiful women. It was the cleanest smell she’d ever encountered, so intense and vibrant and clear it was almost a place of its own. It occurred to her she might never experience it again. Mercedes said, “You’re alone now, Amina?”

  “I have the two boys, they keep an eye on me.”

  “What about your Mom and Dad? And Maya and Sammy?”

  “They’re dead now, of course. Maya and Sammy went back to Lebanon in the fifties.” And a moment later she said, “Were you going to call me while you were in town?”

  Mercedes looked up at the television, where the husband and wife were being held at bay by men in blue T-shirts with the word SECURITY stamped across the backs. The audience on their feet and cheering. The husband and wife were pointing
at one another, shouting.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Johnny, Mercedes.”

  She said, “Were you happy, Amina? In your marriage?”

  “I’ve been alone ten years. I hardly remember being married. Most of the time, I guess I was.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I keep forgetting how lucky a thing that was.”

  “And how is Marion? She must be nearly fifty herself now.”

  Mercedes turned from the television. She hadn’t intended to call her or anyone else in town. To avoid this one inevitable conversation.

  Amina put a hand to her mouth. “Oh,” she said.

  “It was a lifetime ago,” Mercedes said. “She wasn’t eighteen.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just one of those things,” she said. She left it there, and the two women looked about the room, like suburban neighbours who’d run out of things to say about the weather. Mercedes’ head ached.

  “Do you remember Lilly?” Amina said finally.

  “Wish’s aunt Lilly?”

  “She’s living in town. At St. Pat’s Mercy Home.”

  “She’s still alive?”

  “She was a few months ago. Turned ninety. I saw the birthday announcement on the suppertime news. They showed a picture and everything.”

  Mercedes touched her forehead with the tips of her fingers. “Would you turn off that television for me? I’ve got such a headache.”

  “I should go and let you rest.”

  Mercedes looked at Amina but couldn’t recall her name. “Where’s Isabella?” she said.

  “You should have a little lie-down,” Amina said, and she took Mercedes’ arm and helped her up from her chair. She settled her in bed, kissed both her cheeks again. “I’m in the phone book,” she said. “You call me when you feel better.”

  Mercedes was asleep before Amina was out the door.

  Marion took her mother to find the cotton candy on the midway while Johnny went into the tent where the afternoon program was about to begin. Mercedes didn’t really care for cotton candy, sickly sweet and that clot of matted tissue dissolving in her mouth. But it was preferable to the small-time rodeo that her husband had come for. Women in cheerleader outfits circling the ring to start the events, cowboy hats and spangled boots, American flags set in leather holders in front of the stirrups. She wasn’t sure if the girls or the horses were less appealing to her.