Late Breaking

by K. D. Miller

  There’s no point in trying to tell people that as soon as Morgan Pettingill started to yell, he panicked. Tried to cover her mouth, but she bit his hand. So he tried to choke off the noise she was making. Just a little pressure. Not too much. No point in trying to tell people that from the second he felt her windpipe collapse under his thumbs, he was inside. Nobody had to lock him up. He’d already put himself away.

  *

  Mary has just put foil over the platter of carved turkey and is sliding it back into the oven to stay warm. At five forty-five, when the candles on the table had burnt down to half their length, Curtis still hadn’t shown. That’s when Len said, “I think I know what’s happened. Just give me a few minutes.”

  She’s just about to blow the candles out when she thinks, Oh, for God’s sake. All day, she’s been rehearsing the words in her mind. “Dad? It’s Mary. How are you?” What could be so bloody hard about that?

  She’s reaching for her phone when it rings.

  *

  Len finds Curtis on the boardwalk, not far from the spot where they met the other night. He’s sitting hunched on a bench, rolling the bottle of wine back and forth between his palms. When he looks up, Len says, “Aren’t you a little late for dinner?”

  “I’m late for everything.”

  Len points at the bottle. “If you’d opened that, I wouldn’t be saying what I’m about to say. Mary tells me you want to start a business. I’m prepared to advance you the capital. On two conditions. First, that before you sit down at her table you tell her where you’ve been for the past thirty-five years and why. Even if she shows you the door once she’s heard your story, my offer still stands. Provided—and this is the second condition—you stay sober.”

  *

  She’s given him one of the drumsticks. It’s huge. The skin is dark gold. Crispy. The mound of mashed potatoes has a perfect round lake of gravy in the middle. The stuffing has nuts in it. He’s never had stuffing with nuts. Carrots and squash off to the side, shiny with butter and sprinkled with bits of green.

  The bottle is sitting on a coaster in the middle of the table. He reaches for it. Twists it open. He’ll have to listen to that delicious glugging sound of the first pour. Watch the red swirling up against the sides of Len’s and Mary’s glasses. Breathe in the smell of it, sweet and dark.

  “Len? Can I pour you some of this?”

  “Thanks, but alcohol does not play nicely with my heart pills.”

  Mary shakes her head too. “I shouldn’t be drinking right now either.”

  “Well. I guess it’s all mine, then.” Curtis pushes his chair back. Carries the bottle into the kitchen. Pours the contents down the sink.

  *

  It’s chilly on the boardwalk this morning. First frost. Len is holding a small box made of sturdy cardboard on his lap. Ahmed delivered it that morning, along with the vet’s bill. He looks at his watch. Better get on with it. He’s got an appointment in less than an hour with his accountant.

  He levers himself up with his cane. Carries the box to the handrail. Pries it open and upends it over the water. “Okay, Girl. Go get that muskrat that always drove you nuts.”

  He waits for the cloud of ash on the surface to darken and sink. Drops the box onto the boardwalk and flattens it with his foot. Braces with his cane, lowers himself down and picks it up. Have to keep an eye out for a recycle bin, is what he’s thinking as he sets off toward town.

  FLESH

  The younger women—not many of those—are the modest ones, undressing awkwardly under towels they’ve tucked round themselves. Women more Harriet’s age get matter-of-factly naked and take their time squeezing into their bathing suits, not seeming to care how they jiggle or bulge. Have we all just given up? Harriet thinks, hanging her suit on a hook in one of the shower stalls and rinsing down. Or is this wisdom?

  What she’d really like to do is set up her easel in a corner of the change room. She’s never seen so much mature naked flesh together in one spot. She would enjoy capturing the soft weight of buttock and breast with chalk on rough paper.

  Boobs and nipples and bums, oh my! Boobs and nipples and bums, she chants in her head as she pulls her bathing suit on over her wet skin and follows the others out to the pool. She’s always liked to look at naked bodies, the fleshier the better. She loved life class when she was a student, especially when the model was a large woman with lots of swellings and folds.

  “Do you think that makes me a little bit lesbian?” she asked Halvor during their honeymoon in Vancouver. That afternoon they had visited Wreck Beach, and Harriet had surprised herself with how readily she stripped in front of dozens of naked strangers. Halvor, being Danish, was an old hand.

  “Believe me,” he said, “you are not lesbian.” They were back in their hotel room, naked together in bed. She had just told him about preferring the heavier models in life class. “We all like it. Woman flesh. Because we were all once babies.” He kneaded one of her breasts and planted his mouth on the other.

  This is Harriet’s first time at Aqua Fit. Her doctor has told her to take off fifteen pounds, so she’s trying to get more exercise. She stands waiting near the edge of the pool with the rest of the class. They all chatter familiarly with each other, having obviously done this for ages. One or two give kind, welcoming smiles to Harriet, who smiles back but does not join in.

  My daughter, my husband, my son, my niece, my dog. The my-my litany. She could do it, too—my husband, Halvor, who drowned at the cottage while I was arguing with the radio; my son Ranald the gay architect whom I can hardly stand; my son-in-law Patrick whom I wish was my son. What is it in aid of, this constant, other-directed talk? She’s always wondered if it isn’t in fact some kind of bluff. For all their giving and sharing, there’s something essentially secretive about women. Tucked up inside. Not like men, hanging and swinging for all the world to see. Whenever she’s been in a group of women going my-my this and my-my that, the phrase sitting on our secrets has gone through her mind. She imagines being able to enter and travel her own vagina. What would she find in there? Cave paintings? Glittering cities? An entire alternate universe? Maybe that’s what men are trying to do with their relentless push push push. Explore. Discover. Claim.

  She would love to talk about this with Halvor. The two of them were cheated out of their old age together. Now it’s just her and Ranald, with whom she is going to have lunch as soon as this class is over. That’s another secret women keep. She can’t be the only mother who feels relief when a visit with her adult kid shows signs of coming to an end.

  Their teacher has arrived—a young black woman in spandex that shows off her muscled perfection. She gets them going even before they’ve finished stepping down into the water and spreading out. Running on the spot. (“Get those knees up!”) Cross-country skiing. (“No bent elbows!”) Leapfrog. (“I see bums sticking out! Straighten those torsos!”) Jumping jacks. (“To the left! To the right!”) One-leg figure eights. (“Clockwise! Counter-clockwise! Other leg!”) Cross-country skiing again. (“Shoulders under the water! For every pair of shoulders I see, I will add five seconds to this exercise!”)

  “Oh, shut up, little girl,” Harriet grunts under her breath. “When you’re my age you’ll—”

  “I hear talking! If you are talking you are not working hard enough!”

  She says it all with a grin, and Harriet knows she’s just kidding. But an old resentment wells up, born of long-ago high-school phys-ed classes. Physical education. Who thought that one up? Might as well have been corporal punishment. Twice a week for two hours. God. And there was—there is—something sadistic about one professionally fit individual forcing a class of the feeble, the fat, and the maladroit to huff and heave, aching for the whole thing to be over.

  Then, all at once, it is over. Harriet admits grudgingly to feeling marvellous. Loose-jointed and floaty. She could happily go home and sleep. But
she has to have lunch with her son.

  “Something is leaking in the bottom of your bag.” This is how Ranald greets her in the Rendezvous, where he’s reserved a table near the back.

  “Nice to see you too,” Harriet says, kissing his remarkably smooth cheek. How many times a day does he shave? And why are they sitting in the dark? He usually insists on a window table. “That’s my wet bathing suit leaking. And if you smell chlorine, it’s me.”

  She wants the club sandwich, but orders the large Caesar salad. Hopes it comes with bread. Ranald orders the soup-and-sandwich combo. They decline drinks. He’s returning to work, and she wants to paint this afternoon. Wine at lunch makes her logy.

  She’s glad to have Aqua Fit to talk about. Whenever she’s going to meet with Ranald, she tries to line up some topics—hooks to hang the conversation on. Oh, Halvor, she thinks at times like this. You could have made this so much easier. As she prattles on about the fitness class, she wonders in the back of her mind if Ranald is thinking the same thing. What if his father had lived? Would the two of them get along better if they had Halvor as a buffer between them? Maybe. But then, would Ranald have sought out and married Patrick, who is sunny and sweet, like the grade threes he teaches?

  “I have some news.”

  “Oh? What?” She was just going to tell him about the pool noodles, which was the only part of the class she enjoyed, but it can wait. Is he up for some architecture award?

  “I have a small lump under my left nipple. It seems to be growing. It’s going to be needle biopsied next week.”

  She stares at him.

  Into the silence, Ranald says, a bit defensively, “It is not unheard-of for a man to have breast cancer.”

  “Yes. I know. But—”

  The waiter arrives with their food. Ranald starts right in on his soup, so Harriet picks up her fork and stabs some romaine. “When did you find out?” She is furious, but keeps her voice neutral. She knows that if there’s even a hint of why didn’t you tell me right away, he will ice over the way he does.

  “Two months ago. My doctor noticed a slight dimpling during my last checkup and sent me for an ultrasound. I had a second ultrasound last week. That’s how they can tell it’s growing. The needle biopsy will determine whether or not it’s malignant. If it is, I’ll do chemo. It’s faster than radiation. And now I would like to talk about other things.” He gives her a look, picks his spoon back up, and carries on drinking his soup.

  She knows there is no point in trying to push for more. Or in reminding him that the growth might very well be benign, that cancer isn’t the only thing that manifests as a lump, that the worst-case scenario isn’t the only one or even the most likely one. She can just imagine what Halvor would say to that. He is an architect, Harriet. He is trained to imagine every contingency. Second-guess any possible disaster.

  “How’s Patrick taking it?” Surely she can ask Ranald about his husband. And to her relief, she gets a wry smile from him.

  “Patrick is Patrick.”

  She smiles back. Patrick is the heart, the emotional worker in the marriage. It would have been his job to go into shock, then do the crying and the worrying for the two of them. Her son-in-law is easy to love. When they met, he practically sprang at her like a puppy, wanting to know her, wanting to adore and be adored by her.

  Patrick probably put Ranald up to this lunch. Would have insisted, with threats of telling her himself, on his at least giving her the facts. And facts are what she is going to have to be satisfied with. Ranald is Ranald. Cold and severe, like his buildings. Yes, his buildings serve a purpose. But they do it grudgingly, as if they regard function, and the people who make it necessary, as secondary to form.

  Harriet eats her salad, for which she is actually hungry. It did not come with bread. You gets no bread with one meatball. That old song from the Depression. Would the lump look a bit like a meatball? A meatball that’s growing. Right now. Inside her son. She puts her fork down and tries to distract herself by listening in on the conversation of two men at the next table. They’re talking about going to the aquarium. Didn’t Patrick say something about taking his grade three class there? God, the thought of taking a bunch of kids on a field trip. The memory of that one summer when she was a camp counsellor still wears her out. But Patrick seems to thrive on all the neediness and chaos.

  Ranald has finished his soup and started in on his sandwich. He still eats the way he did when he was a little boy—completely devouring one item on his plate before proceeding to the next. Sitting across from her son, watching him take food, nourish himself, she feels a yearning for his body—its life, its health, its continuance—that she hardly ever felt when he was a baby. The way some mothers talked about loving to breathe in their baby’s smell, about wanting to nip gently at the tiny buttocks with their teeth, about breastfeeding being a sexual turn-on, frankly mystified her. She was alarmed by Ranald’s dense heaviness in her arms, even when he was newborn. Too often, he smelled like shit or spat-up milk. And he was a gobbling little vampire to feed. Her nipples cracked till they bled.

  Now she does want to touch him. She would like to strip and feel his naked skin on hers all the way down. She wants to cover and warm him. Absorb any shock or hurt. Keep him whole.

  All she can say is, “How’s the sandwich?”

  “Want me to come and stay for a while?” Jill. Phoning from Hamilton, in response to Harriet’s email about Ranald.

  “Yes. Come. And bring your bathing suit. We’ll be doing Aqua Fit.”

  They have been friends for over fifty years. The last time Jill came to stay for a while was a few weeks after Halvor drowned. Harriet doesn’t like to remember that visit. She knows it’s too much to hope that Jill has forgotten about finding her in Halvor’s closet late one night.

  Jill had gotten up to go to the bathroom, had peeked into the master bedroom to check on Harriet and had seen the bed empty. The sliding door onto the balcony was open. They were fourteen flights up. Just as her mind was forming a No! she heard sounds coming from the closet. Harriet had wedged herself in between Halvor’s suit jackets and pulled the door shut. She had picked up one of his shoes and fitted it over her nose and mouth like a mask. Breathing in. Wailing out.

  The memory of Jill’s skinny arms wrapped around her plumpness still embarrasses Harriet. True, she’s seen Jill through heartbreak too, more than once. Jill never married, and has a talent for falling in love with men who are emotionally inaccessible. Her last affair was just a few years ago, with someone named Eliot. Harriet had to watch the same old girlish joy in Jill’s eyes become the same old misery. Had to listen as she read aloud the letter she was sending to Eliot—a letter he never answered. Surely by now she’s stopped checking the mail twice a day?

  Sometimes Harriet wishes she could wave a wand and do away with sex and romantic love and parenthood. All the fleshly ties that hurt so much when they’re even tugged. Friendship, though, she would keep. Purely chosen attachments. Breakable, yes. But a cleaner break.

  For Jill’s visit, she clears out Ranald’s old room, where she has been storing canvases. She tries to make it tidy. Attractive. Jill was always such a neat little thing, every hair of her dark bob in place, even at camp.

  They met in the summer of 1970, when they were both counsellors at Onteora Arts Camp in the Caledon Hills. Summer jobs for students were scarce that year, otherwise they would never have applied. But then they would never have met each other. Or Morgan.

  Harriet and Morgan and Jill, oh my! Harriet and Morgan and Jill!

  At the beginning of the summer, during the counsellors’ orientation, the camp director kept emphasizing that a focus on the arts should not interfere with the process of turning out a well-rounded camper. “I resent that,” Harriet muttered after the third iteration of well-rounded. A slight, dark-haired girl sitting beside her, who turned out to be Jill, gave her a grin.

>   The camp director went on to health, safety, and morale. They might have to deal with homesickness and nightmares, especially with the younger campers. Anything a counsellor can do or say to calm the little ones’ fears and reassure them that nothing will harm them—”

  “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Lions and tigers and bears!” That line from The Wizard of Oz. Chanted wickedly, just under the breath, by someone behind them. Harriet and Jill both turned. Saw a tall, blonde, freckled girl meeting their gaze. As if she had been waiting for them to notice her.

  Morgan.

  All three of them were students—Jill at McMaster in Hamilton, Morgan at Carleton in Ottawa and Harriet at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. Harriet was to be the so-called crafts specialist at Onteora. Jill, who wrote for her campus newspaper, would do something involving stories and drama. Morgan, who had started piano at three, would be in charge of music. None of them had ever been to summer camp as kids. All of them were bored by children, had a horror of sports and had hoped and prayed not to be hired.

  Harriet and Morgan and Jill, oh my! Harriet and Morgan and Jill!

  “What we evidently need to do,” Morgan intoned, imitating her Anglican priest father, “is come to grips with the crucial, one might even say the dire, importance …” Here she sucked on a cigarette, then passed it to Harriet and Jill, who each took a puff and wished they hadn’t, “… of getting the ball in the hole.”

  They were in their hiding place behind the supplies cabin. They had just been summoned to the camp director’s office to be reminded that Onteora’s paying parents had paid for a well-rounded experience for their children. And it had been noticed by more than the camp director that the support and enthusiasm demonstrated by all three of them for the athletic side of things had been somewhat less than—