Late Breaking

by K. D. Miller

  Harriet and Jill responded as one, “The ball in the hole.” Trying not to cough.

  “Even if the reason eludes us.”

  “Especially if the reason eludes us.”

  “Do you ever think about Morgan?” Harriet asks Jill on the third night of her visit. They are draining a bottle of pinot grigio and picking the last fluffy bits out of a bowl of popcorn, having just watched their favourite DVD, Stand By Me. They haven’t talked much about Ranald. They did try. But once Harriet had come out with the words malignant and chemo, there didn’t seem to be much else to say. Or much point in saying it. What she knows is what Patrick tells her when he phones. Ranald is losing weight and losing hair. No, a visit from his mother at this time would not be a good thing. This is Ranald, after all.

  Harriet suspects that she and Jill may even have used Ranald’s cancer as an excuse to get together. Ranald’s cancer. She hates that. The way you come to possess something that you would never have chosen. A year after Halvor died, someone asked her how far she was into her widowhood. She wanted to tell them that it wasn’t hers, that she didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it, and that they could take it and shove it up their ass.

  “I do think about Morgan. Sometimes,” Jill says now in answer to her question. “But I still can’t write about her.” Jill has published seven books. Harriet goes to her launches and readings as often as she comes to Harriet’s gallery shows. “Could you paint her?”

  “I’ve sometimes tried to paint the pond from memory.” Then, “Do you ever wonder what we all would have been like? If Morgan …?”

  “Yeah. I do. But I can’t imagine it.”

  Harriet can. She is convinced that neither she nor Jill would have accomplished anything much. Instead, they would have followed Morgan’s career in the papers. Shown up for her concerts whenever she touched down in Toronto. Made awkward small talk with each other during the intermissions.

  Morgan’s family had a summer house on the edge of Lost Lake in the Laurentians. When camp ended that year, she invited Harriet and Jill up for the Labour Day weekend. It was the start of a tradition, the three of them coming together just prior to going back to their respective schools in the fall.

  They each had their own room in the two-storey field-stone house. When Harriet first saw hers, she wanted to paint it. The pine four-poster with the faded antique quilt. The braided rag rug. The rush-bottomed rocker. The table under the window with the mayonnaise jar—label still on—full of wild flowers. I could live here.

  Downstairs, everything was just shabby and peculiar enough to hint at the kind of wealth that can afford to let its shabby, peculiar side show. There were dried bats in sealed mason jars on the mantle. (“Mummy is a frustrated naturalist.”) There was a glassed-in bookshelf filled with collector’s editions of Le Morte d’Artur, Idylls of the King and The Once and Future King. (“In another life Daddy was an Arthurian scholar. I was in danger of being named Guinevere, but Mummy for once put her foot down.”) Morgan spoke of her parents indulgently, as if they were characters in a favourite childhood book. When asked where they were that first weekend, she replied, as if stating the obvious, “Switzerland.”

  She did not seem to know how extraordinary she was in the eyes of Harriet and Jill. That first time up at the summer house, she taught them how to make a cheese fondue. As she lifted handfuls of grated Emmental off the marble cutting board and stirred the melting mixture with a wooden spoon, she apologized for using Canadian cheese, but assured them that the recipe was authentically Swiss. Harriet’s and Jill’s eyes met. Prior to that weekend, neither of them had ever even heard of cheese fondue.

  Morgan described her own future in a way that would have been preposterous coming from anyone else. After getting her BA from Carleton, she told them confidently, she would attend Juilliard in New York, where she would either be discovered or win a global competition. Either way, she would step onto the world stage as a concert pianist. Furthermore, she expected the same level of achievement from the two of them. “What do you mean, if you publish? What do you mean, if you get shown in a gallery? When! When!”

  What had she been doing at Onteora Arts Camp? Surely not, like Harriet and Jill, earning her next year’s tuition. Harriet did ask her, one morning when she found her watering plants on the deck of the summer house. Jill was still asleep upstairs. Harriet had come down to the kitchen to get coffee and had heard Morgan half-humming, half-singing one of the hymns that, along with old Beatles and Beach Boys tunes, formed her personal hit parade. And did those feet in ancient times … And was the holy Lamb of God … among those dark Satanic Mills …

  “It was Daddy’s idea,” she said with a sigh and an eye-roll when Harriet asked her about Onteora. “He insisted that I take at least one opportunity to render a service. So I did. And all I can say is, thank God that’s over.”

  It was right then that Harriet knew she was in love with Morgan. As strange as that was, it made sense. It explained why, toward the end of each summer, she would watch for the mail, hoping for a letter from Ottawa addressed in Morgan’s hand. If no letter was there, she would feel the need to hide her disappointment from her parents. When it finally did arrive, inviting her once again up to the summer house for the long weekend, her joy and relief would be so sharp it hurt. And from the moment she and Jill drove up the lane to the house and caught sight of Morgan grinning at them from the deck, she would start to dread the visit’s end.

  Did Morgan know how she felt? Harriet both did and did not want her to. Nor could she imagine telling her. What could she say? She could barely describe her feelings to herself. It wasn’t as if she wanted to make love to Morgan. A young nineteen, she was still slightly vague in her mind about how she would do that with a man, let alone a woman. It was more that she wanted to follow Morgan through life. Worship her. Be known by her. Seen by her. Yes. Be the one. The apple of Morgan’s eye.

  “You are the boss of your pool noodle!” The Aqua Fit instructor.

  “Like hell I am.” Jill’s has just reared up through the water and bopped her under the chin. “Tell me again why we’re doing this?”

  “Hey, this is the fun part,” Harriet says, bobbing past with the end of her own noodle sticking up from between her legs. “This is as close to sex as I’ve gotten in years.”

  “I hear talking!”

  Harriet has enjoyed letting Jill in on every aspect of her life. Her long mornings of drinking coffee and reading the paper. Her afternoons kept strictly for painting in her studio, which Jill has respected by staying in her—Ranald’s—room and working on the manuscript she brought with her.

  More than once, Harriet has toyed with the idea of asking Jill to live with her. There’s room. They’re both alone now. And Jill has finally retired, after selling that frame shop in Hamilton.

  But each time Harriet has felt ready to raise the possibility, something has stopped her. She senses the impulse is disingenuous. That it is not really about her and Jill, here and now. That it is really about her and Jill and Morgan. There. Then.

  There was a pond behind the summer house. It was almost perfectly round, ringed with bulrushes, spring-fed and very cold. After lunch the three of them would get into their bathing suits and go in. Not for long. The point was to get out, lie on the dock and dry off in the hot sun.

  Whenever Harriet thinks of those weekends now, it is the pond and that sun-warmed dock that come first to mind. She can hardly believe how little time the three of them had together.

  One weekend—the last, as it turned out—they were all drowsing on the dock. The pond was smooth and cold beneath them. If waves had slapped up between the boards they would have iced their stomachs in stripes. Their few words hung like smoke in the still air. Jill murmured that her back was burning. Harriet said another cucumber sandwich would be nice.

  Morgan got up quietly and stood on the warm dock. Harriet looked at her feet
and thought, You can’t be going in again. Not into that cold water, after being so hot. The feet stood still for a long time on the weather-silvered boards, as if making up their mind. Then they walked swiftly, softly off the dock onto land.

  Jill was asleep, snoring in little sighs like a cat. Harriet pretended she was too, while watching Morgan through her lashes. Morgan circled the pond. Stopped on the far side, opposite the dock. We only see you in the summer, Harriet thought. When your hair’s almost white from the sun and your face is all freckles and your shoulders and thighs are such a smooth brown.

  As she stood there, Morgan raised one hand. Spoke. Harriet could see her mouth moving, but could not make out what she was saying.

  Jill leaves after a week. They both know that being together is not so much about keeping Harriet company as keeping her from dealing with Ranald. In the cab on the way to Union Station, Harriet keeps wanting to say, Morgan would be proud of us, but is too afraid she might cry. On the platform beside the idling Hamilton bus, she and Jill hold each other close for a moment.

  “We got old.”

  “No we didn’t.”

  Later that day, when Harriet is stripping the sofa bed prior to moving her canvases back into what used to be Ranald’s room, it occurs to her that her life is all wrong. Halvor was more a mother to Ranald than she ever was. Would be more of a help now. And if anyone was going to get breast cancer, surely it should have been her.

  She thinks the wrongness may have started with what happened to Morgan, just months before she would have been packing for Juilliard. The absurdity of it. She and Jill should have been old at that funeral. Losing friends is what happens to old people.

  Once she has bundled the sheets into the laundry hamper and collapsed the sofa bed, she stands for a minute looking around, thinking how nice the room is, all cleared and tidied. But then she sighs and starts carrying canvases two by two from her studio, where they have leaned against the wall during Jill’s visit.

  Morgan. Morgan’s funeral. She searches her memory. No. Still nothing. She knows she was there. She just can’t remember it. Can’t even remember if Jerusalem, the hymn Morgan was singing while she watered the plants, was part of the service.

  Remembering, Harriet has decided, is not like reading a book cover to cover or watching a film from lights down to credits. It’s more like viewing a collage that keeps changing and rearranging its parts. A pale, tiny piece in the corner might suddenly shift to the centre and start to glow. A brand new colour will seep through from the back, where it always was, unseen till now. A defining shape will all at once be gone, leaving you wondering if it was ever there in the first place.

  She can’t remember getting the news of Morgan’s death. She can’t remember going on the train with Jill to Ottawa. Attending the funeral. (Open casket, according to Jill. Filled with spring flowers clustered close under Morgan’s chin, as if she were hugging them to her.)

  Her memory of the whole episode kicks in the morning after. She and Jill were eating an enormous breakfast in a B&B near the Byward Market. Spearing a piece of sausage, Harriet looked at Jill and said, “We never heard Morgan play!”

  Even now, it’s absurd. A piece of the collage that should have been discarded because it isn’t right. Couldn’t possibly fit. Morgan was studying late in the Carleton campus library. Her father was going to drive her home, and was waiting in the parking lot. When she was more than half an hour late, he got out of the car and went looking for her. He found her in the lane between the library and the arts complex. Her books were scattered, just out of reach of her outstretched hands. One was face up, pages turning slowly in the evening spring breeze.

  Oh, stop it, Harriet hisses at herself as she stacks canvases in Ranald’s old room. You don’t know any of those last details. Quit romanticizing. But the facts are just too banal. Morgan had been seeing a man who worked on campus. They had quarrelled about her plans to attend Juilliard. The night of her death, he got drunk. Waited for her outside the library. Followed her into the lane. Claimed he had not even meant to hurt her, let alone—

  There was a picture of him in the papers beside Morgan’s picture. Curtis Maye. Thin. Dull eyes. Weak mouth. This? Harriet remembers thinking. This was the dark Pluto who took Morgan down?

  That first semester back at school after Morgan died, Jill lost her virginity to a married English professor, breaking her heart for the first of many times. Harriet decided to transfer to the University of Toronto, where she would meet Halvor.

  Patrick pays a visit. Sits on Harriet’s couch and eats most of a plate of cookies she puts in front of him. No wonder he’s gaining weight. She can’t help staring at his jiggly chins, even as she listens to him describing how emaciated Ranald has become. The chemo is especially harsh, because the cancer is especially aggressive.

  “Why couldn’t they just take the lump out?”

  “It wasn’t that simple. The lump—it has a root system. So it would be like picking the bloom off a weed. They have to try to kill it. And it’s fighting back. It wants to live, too.” He starts to cry. A piece of cookie falls from his mouth. Harriet embraces him.

  This is how it was for Jill that time in the closet, she thinks, trying to reach round Patrick’s plumpness. This is how useless she felt.

  She has it wrapped up in waxed paper. It is warm—something that surprises her. But of course, why shouldn’t it be warm?

  She has just put a pot of water on to boil and has come back into the dining room where Morgan sits at one end of the big pine table. The summer house hasn’t changed. Neither has Morgan. But something isn’t right. Harriet feels embarrassed, as if she’s committing a faux pas and being forgiven.

  She gets all brisk and bustling to cover up. Assures Morgan that once the thing is boiled and chopped up and mixed with lemon and capers and a bit of mayonnaise, it’ll taste like chicken. She’ll see. Just like chicken.

  Morgan looks down at the plate and cutlery that have been put in front of her. Says something about not being able to stay long. Harriet senses—no, not disapproval. Pity. For her.

  It won’t take long, she assures Morgan too heartily. Not long at all. The water will be coming to a boil any second now.

  She knows she is imposing on Morgan. Has no right to ask what she’s asking. It is the wrong thing to do. But what is the right thing? She has to do something.

  Back in the kitchen, she hears the waxed paper crackling. Unfolding to reveal the thing it contains. She looks. There is a sort of nucleus. The lump, she supposes. Like a little pink brain. A long dark hair trails out from one of the folds. She gives it a tug, and the surrounding flesh winces. She’ll leave it alone for now. Once it’s cooked—

  The roots—more like tentacles—are groping for the edges of the waxed paper. Trying to fold them back over. The thing is trying to hide. It wants to live, too. Who said that?

  Morgan has come into the kitchen and is trying to tell her something. It’s hard for her, because she is becoming transparent. Going back to wherever she has been all these years. The stove, Harriet, she is saying through disappearing lips. Something is burning on the stove. The stove. The—

  Harriet wakes up to the smell of hot metal. She has sleepwalked into her kitchen. Has put an empty pot on a burner and turned the heat up to High.

  “May I ask you something?” One of the Aqua Fit women. Chinese. About Harriet’s age.

  Harriet nods. She has just pulled on her bathing suit. It sags on her now. She should get a new one.

  “Have you been losing weight? I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind. It’s just that I’m a retired nurse and I know that weight loss is not always a good thing.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ve been dieting. On purpose. So it is a good thing.”

  She has been preparing her meals the same as always. Then she has been dividing every item on her plate in half. Once she’s eaten half her meat,
half her vegetables and half her dinner roll, she has gone to the kitchen and scraped the other half into the organics bin.

  The first time, she thought, There. That’s yours. It took her a while to understand who—what—she was addressing. Now she talks to it matter-of-factly. Feed yourself. Take from me. Leave Ranald alone.

  “You do look like you’ve lost quite a bit,” the Chinese woman is saying. Other women in the change room have started to listen in. One says that she noticed too, and was worried that Harriet might be sick.

  “No. I’m fine. I’m not sick. Not me.” She hesitates. Then, “It’s my son. He’s the one who’s sick.”

  The other women come round. They stay and listen to her, past the time they should be in the pool, as she goes on and on. My son. My husband. My son. My son-in-law. My son. My son.

  “Go ahead and laugh at my hat. I know you want to.”

  “No. No.” She can’t stop smiling, is all. “It’s just, you would never wear a baseball cap. Not even when you were a little boy.”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to see what’s under it.”

  They are back in the Rendezvous. Ranald is managing to get down a cup of soup and a small glass of juice. His chemo was successful. He has just come from his first three-month checkup. The cancer is still gone.

  Harriet is having the soup-and-sandwich combo. Looking forward to eating every bit of it. When she arrived carrying her damp Aqua Fit bag, Ranald greeted her with a critical once-over and said, “So it appears we’ve both been on diets.”

  He’s different. Not just physically. She can’t put her finger on it, and doesn’t want to push things. She wonders if he’s different with Patrick, too.

  Outside the restaurant when they’re done, she asks him if he wants her to accompany him home. He’s walking with a cane these days.

  “No. I’m fine.” Then he takes her by the shoulders, stoops and says, “You look good with the weight off. But don’t go and disappear on me.” Looking with Halvor’s eyes into her own.