They’d spent the last half of the summer travelling across the Midwest and the prairies. Marion had just finished high school and was going to a small art college in California in the fall. They drove through the Black Hills of South Dakota and up into Montana, planning to head south then through Idaho and Nevada on the way to dropping her at the college. All the way from Forsythe to Custer they passed signs advertising the rodeo, each one featuring a scantily clad cowgirl smiling on horseback. And after each sign, Johnny became more insistent. “A ro-day-o, Mercedes,” he said. “When will Marion get another chance to see one?”
“Maybe Marion doesn’t want to see a ro-day-o at all, Johnny Boustani.”
“Why don’t we ask her?”
They both looked back over the front seat to their daughter.
She said, “Watch the road, Dad.” And then, “Would there be cotton candy?”
She had her father’s dark hair and Mercedes’ eyes and she had grown taller than either of her parents, so that at first glance she seemed much older than her years. They both doted on her, more and more as it became clear she was going to be their only child. Marion had a certainty about her that reminded Mercedes of her grandmother, though it didn’t lead to any smallness in the girl. When she was eleven her class went on a field trip to the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, and she came home with her mind made up to paint. They scraped together enough money to give her private art tutorials, driving her into Boston on weekends for life-drawing or watercolour classes. They spent part of each Saturday at public galleries, and once or twice a year went back to the Gardner to allow Marion to revisit her favourite pieces. An opera singer by Degas in a high-necked black dress. A Botticelli of the Virgin and Child attended by an angel. The Concert by Vermeer. Mercedes had no idea what was in them to hold her daughter’s interest. “You know, Marion,” she’d say, leaning in close to the Rembrandt self-portrait, “he hasn’t aged a day since we were here last.”
Marion took a dollar from her coat pocket. “Cafeteria,” she said. “Go. Give me an hour.”
She often felt as if Marion was the adult in their relationship, that the girl tolerated her parents’ foolishness with the kind of bemused forbearance a mother offers her children. Distracting her with cotton candy on the midway to allow Johnny to watch cowgirls circle the ring in Custer, Montana. They wandered through the crowds away from the main tent as the music struck up inside, picking at the pink clouds of cotton candy as they went. The thrum of the horses’ hooves making the ground shake underneath them.
At the heart of the incident, she learned afterwards, was the flag.
The gelding was spooked by something, a noise in the crowd, a flash of light. The cowgirl was bucked from the saddle but the flag jammed tight in its holder near the stirrup. The horse bolted from the tent, the pole slapping at its flank like a whip. A surge of movement on the midway, a wave of voices roiling toward them and Mercedes turned in time to see the horse’s head shearing above the crowd. She put a hand on Marion’s arm before she was knocked aside by the animal’s shoulder, before her daughter was pulled down and dragged along by the undertow of the hooves pistoning the packed dirt.
She had no memory of her visit with Amina when she woke, only a heaviness in her chest that she recognized as Marion. Agnes was sitting in the reclining chair, asleep in the light of the television.
From the moment Bella was conceived, Mercedes thought of the pregnancy as a kind of compensation, as if the world was out to make amends for her loss. But on the night her water broke she lost her nerve. When Johnny carried her suitcase out to the car she refused to leave the house. “I can’t face it,” she said. “I can’t go through losing another.” She leaned into a contraction, sucking air through her teeth.
Johnny knelt in front of her, using both hands to wipe the tears from her face. “It’s not like you’ve got a toothache, Mercedes. For the love of Christ,” he said.
Once she’d come through the labour, the sense of reparation that accompanied the pregnancy returned stronger than it had been at the outset. She went so far as to forget the moment of doubt entirely and disputed it every time Johnny told the story.
Mercedes had gone to the Isabella Gardner Museum on the anniversary of Marion’s death each year, to look up at those ancient pictures as her daughter had. She meant Bella’s name as a quiet memorial to the lost child, a prism she thought might refract some of Marion’s light into the arrival of their second. Johnny had reservations about drawing such a direct line between the two but he could see Mercedes would have her way and let it be.
“Ag,” Mercedes whispered. “Agnes. Where’s Isabella?”
Her sister stirred in the chair.
“Where’s Bella?” she said again.
“I sent her home for a rest.”
“What time is it?”
She brought her watch up close to her face. “Eight-thirty. You slept through supper.”
Mercedes nodded to herself. There was something pricking at her mind, some unfamiliar pea niggling beneath the depth of Marion’s loss.
Agnes stood beside the hospital bed and took Mercedes’ hand. “Well now,” she said. “Here we are.”
“What the hell does that mean, Ag?”
“I don’t know,” she said, suddenly defensive. “Just. Here we are.”
“Two widows, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Alone in the world.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Abandoned by everyone they ever loved.”
Agnes said, “Were you always as saucy as this, Sade?”
She smiled. “I guess I always had it in me.”
“You haven’t mentioned him since you come home.”
“Mentioned who?”
“Don’t play stupid.”
Mercedes glared at her sister, trying to warn her away from the subject.
“He must be in your mind. Coming back here.”
“Johnny was a good husband to me.”
“I’m not saying anything about Johnny.”
“What are you saying, then? That I haven’t got over something that happened when I was sixteen?”
“Now, Sadie.”
“I barely knew him, Agnes. I can hardly remember …”
“If you were over it you’d have come home for long ago.”
They were quiet for a while, and that persistent niggle worked at her, Mercedes trying to pin it down. It came to her suddenly then, like a voice from the stars. “When I get out of here,” she said, “I want to go visit St. Pat’s.”
“Where?”
“St. Pat’s Mercy Home. There’s someone there I need to see.”
The Mercy Home was built on a small rise of land just north of Elizabeth Avenue. Mercedes talked Agnes and Bella into dropping in there as soon as she was discharged.
“Well who is it?” Agnes wanted to know.
“A woman I met while I was in St. John’s.”
“What kind of woman?”
“Just be quiet and drive, Ag.”
They spoke to a nurse at reception and then Mercedes asked her daughter and sister to wait in the lobby.
Bella lifted her arms and let them fall back against her sides. Agnes took her by the elbow and led her to a bench beside the window. “Your mother was always like that,” Mercedes heard her saying.
“Like what?”
Bella turned her head and said, “We’re waiting, Mercedes.”
She took the elevator to the fourth floor, repeating the room number in her head. She went along the corridor slowly, looking in at each open door. It was like passing lighted windows at night, she couldn’t help herself. Gnarled creatures asleep in front of television sets or nearly buried under quilts in their beds. The home had a feel similar to the hospital, the same unnatural state of cleanliness and order. But an undertone of quiet resignation in place of the frantic bustle, the apprehension.
She hadn’t been able to think of anything but Lilly since her name and lo
cation had mysteriously come to mind. She thought of the last time she’d laid eyes on the woman, standing behind her shack with an axe in her hands. Walking up to Mercedes with her preternatural stare, touching her face and her belly. You have the news you need, she’d said. It was years later before it occurred to Mercedes she was pregnant at the time, though not even she knew it then.
A candystriper stood in Room 417 with her back to the door, tucking a shawl around the lap of a resident, blocking Mercedes’ view. She knocked gently on the door.
“Come in,” the girl said. “Show’s just about to start.”
“Hello?” Mercedes said.
The girl looked over her shoulder. “Thought you were someone else,” she said. “I’m just setting up Ms. Berrigan for her show.”
“Lilly Berrigan?” Mercedes said.
“That’s the one. Come in and have a seat.”
The candystriper went across to a tiny colour television on a dresser and adjusted it so the screen faced Lilly more directly. The old woman watching the girl with her tongue protruding from her mouth and a bemused look on her face, as if she hadn’t wanted a shawl tucked on her lap or the television adjusted and was simply humouring her.
“Hello, Lilly,” Mercedes said, coming into the room.
She looked up and nodded. “Hello,” she managed, barely above a whisper.
“I’m Kathleen,” the candystriper said, holding out a hand. She was over six feet tall.
“How long has Lilly been here?”
“Since before I got here, and I’ve been volunteering for seven years now. She was transferred over from the Waterford back in the eighties sometime.”
“The mental institution?”
“That’s right.”
Mercedes looked past her to Lilly, who was ignoring the two women altogether. Wheel of Fortune was just coming on, waves of tinny applause rippling into the room.
“She’s harmless enough,” Kathleen said. She turned to Lilly and raised her voice. “Aren’t you, my love?” She smiled at Mercedes. “Those sorts of things tend to go into a kind of remission as people age. Although she still has her moments.”
The candystriper’s cheerfulness was so overwhelming it made Mercedes feel tired, as if she’d spent too much time in full sun.
Kathleen glanced down at her watch. “He’s usually in before the show starts.”
Mercedes said, “Who?” It was an innocent question altogether.
“Her nephew.”
A ridiculous sense of being called flooded through her, the hand of God turning her this way or that. She felt calm and hollow and ready to be filled. “Her nephew?” she said.
“Yes,” the girl said on her way out the door. “Do you know him?”
The old woman was staring at the television, clapping the heels of her palms together as the wheel spun on the screen. Mercedes turned around twice in the middle of the room and then left without bothering to say goodbye to Lilly.
“Well,” Agnes said, getting to her feet when Mercedes came toward them. “Was she not there?”
“I want to sit for a few minutes,” Mercedes said.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“Fine,” she said. “Fine. I just need a minute.”
Agnes said, “I’ll go get the car.” And she left them to sit in silence, Mercedes watching the front door, sitting up slightly each time it opened.
“What’s wrong with you?” Bella asked.
A man in a tan raglan and brown slacks came through the door. He was carrying a large Tim Hortons cup. A bald pate so dark and smooth it looked polished, a ring of white, white hair like a laurel around his head. A small constellation of age spots at the temples. The same peculiarly long, peculiarly handsome face. Mercedes watched him wait at the elevator and caught his eye briefly as he turned inside to punch the floor number. She watched the lights indicate the elevator’s rise to the fourth floor.
“Who was that?” Bella asked suspiciously.
“Someone I used to know,” Mercedes said. “A long time ago.” She got up from her seat. “I’m ready now,” she said, still impossibly calm.
When they got into the car she said, “Take me up to Signal Hill.”
She’d intended to scatter Johnny’s ashes out on the headlands, as near the spot where he’d first drunkenly declared his love for her as she could remember. From the parking lot at Cabot Tower a wooden staircase angled down a hundred feet into a valley and a series of staircases stuttered up the opposite side. Isabella wouldn’t allow her mother do that much climbing so soon after her fall, and Mercedes decided to go down to the Battery above the Narrows instead. Bella went with her, refusing even to let her carry the shoulder bag herself.
It had been a calm day in the city but up on the hill the breeze was blustery and insistent, a faffering wind that jerked at their clothes from all directions. They stopped in the lun of the small stone building and Bella took out the urn, handed it to her mother.
Mercedes walked into the open, holding the container against her breast. She turned to all points of the compass to find a spot downwind but gave up finally, shaking out the container of ashes with her eyes closed. The grey dust kicked up into a swirl around her before flying off into the meadow grass and out over the water of the Narrows. She had to shake ash from her hair, brush it off her clothes.
Through it all she was unemotional, businesslike, as if she was fulfilling the terms of a contract on behalf of strangers. She found it impossible not to think Johnny had arranged all of this, that he planted Lilly’s name and location in her head somehow, knowing who would cross her path there. Her head a pinwheel of sparks every time Wish came into her mind and she pushed the thought of him aside. For fear of falling where she stood. To leave one more day to her husband before her life changed for good, one last time.
WISH
1.
HARRIS DIED IN HALIFAX just after the war, and Wish headed west again, travelling up through Quebec and into northern Ontario, where he worked a number of years in the gold mines of Cobalt and Kirkland Lake. Eight relentless months of winter but the weather never touched him. Riding the cage down the shaft, the temperature rising as the cables lowered them half a mile underground. Minus forty on the surface and the mine like a greenhouse, the air hotter and more humid the farther into the earth they travelled. It made him think hell was down there somewhere, as the Monsignor always claimed, if they could only manage to dig deep enough.
He kept to himself as much as possible. Found a bed among Québécois crews so he wouldn’t be burdened by the expectations of small talk, of casual conversations, arguments. He had a gaunt, ascetic look about him, and the Frenchmen called him le moine for his lack of interest in poker or dancing or the religiously observed weekly visits to local brothels. He worked as much overtime as the mines would give him and drank on his own when he wasn’t working. He kept his pay in a tobacco tin, along with Mercedes’ letters and picture and a few souvenirs from the war. Harris had pressed the Military Medal on him just before he died and Wish sometimes sat with it, drunk and alone in the bunkhouse, running a finger over the detailed profile of King George. The carefully kempt beard, the epaulets and collar of the military jacket. The king’s own row of medals on his chest.
In the early fifties Wish worked beside a man who’d lost an eye in the Korean conflict, and he got it in his mind to go back overseas. He jacked up in Kirkland Lake and travelled by train into the States. He was still twenty pounds underweight and failed the military physical, a possibility that had never occurred to him. He drifted aimlessly across the American Midwest then, taking odd jobs and handouts before he settled for a time in Chicago. He worked days as a rail mechanic in the Armour and Company Stockyards and six nights a week running the projector in a fifty-seat theatre on the outskirts of Canaryville, several blocks west of Bronzeville. He rented a single room in a boarding house near the theatre, furnished with an army cot, a table and two wooden chairs, a hot plate and a radio. On the walls he taped
up half a dozen old posters he’d found in the projection booth. Godzilla and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. Jane Russell lying back on a bed of hay in The Outlaw, one saucy stalk of straw in her mouth. The Red Shoes. Force of Evil. Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai wearing a backless black dress beside the tagline “You know nothing about wickedness.”
He was living at the edge of what was known as the Black Belt on the city’s South Side. Hundreds of Negroes passed through Canaryville on their way to and from the stockyards where they worked beside Poles and Lithuanians on the killing floor of the slaughterhouses. The only black person he knew by name was Magnolia Cooksey, who came to the theatre after the last show of the night to sweep up the spilled popcorn and scrape bubblegum off the bottoms of the seats. He didn’t know how old she was. A youngish face, but there were rich veins of grey threaded through her black hair. She sang to herself as she worked her way along the aisles. She had the most prodigious behind of any person he’d ever encountered.
Wish drank from a flask throughout the evening shows, sitting opposite the projector until it was time to change reels, watching the grey V of light flicker into the hall, the muffle of dialogue outside the room barely decipherable. He was quietly drunk by the end of the night and he took exaggerated care in shutting down the projector and putting away the reels. Before leaving, he put the room into meticulous order, straightening chairs and film canisters and the trash can, like a man trying to conceal evidence of a struggle.
He looked in on Magnolia on his way to the exit. She was never more than a third of the way to the front of the room by then, always the last to leave the building. She’d started work at the theatre around the same time he had and was just as new to the city. Her southern accent gave that much away. He felt some affinity with her for that, for the sense he had of her place on the outskirts of the world they found themselves in.
The Wreckage Page 24