Late Breaking

by K. D. Miller

  When Ranald is told he only needs to come back for checkups every six months, Patrick’s parents host a celebration barbecue on their deck.

  Ranald is still wearing the baseball cap and probably will until his hair has completely grown back. “They give you these at the clinic when you do your last chemo session,” he says. “And everybody claps. Jesus. As if it’s some kind of achievement.”

  “Well, it is.” Steve, Patrick’s father. Harriet likes him, for all she can tell he has never liked Ranald. He puts his hand on Ranald’s shoulder and says, “Well done. Son.”

  Marion, Patrick’s mother, starts to cry. Right on cue, Harriet thinks, hoping her eye-roll went unnoticed. Marion is a quintessential my-my woman. When Patrick embraces his mother, Harriet slips away before she can be pulled into a group hug.

  Unseen, she steps down off the deck into the shadows of the cedar trees. She goes to the back of the yard, past the koi pond, and stands where there is no light, where they can’t see her, but she can see them. There’s something she needs to do. Because there’s something she’s finally figured out.

  She stands in the dark and looks at each person on the deck in turn. Raises one hand, exactly the way Morgan did. Says what she now knows Morgan was saying.

  IN THE CROW’S KEEPING

  Clarissa knows she should throw it all away. Just get rid of the stuff. After all, where is it going to go, once she’s gone? She doubts even Morgan, had she lived, would have taken it. Ramsay’s been dead five years, and she herself is ninety. So where will it all end up, when somebody gets stuck with having to clear out her apartment? Flea markets? Junk shops? Sidewalk sales? Strangers pouring over photographs of her daughter, her husband, herself. Saying Who were these people, and, Look at the funny hats. Landfill, more like. Well. Doesn’t everything become landfill, eventually? Even people?

  So she has to do it. This damned restlessness that’s been plaguing her lately. Hard to be restless at ninety. There is a window of energy—just a few hours—that opens for her in the morning. If she has errands or tasks to do, she has to get them all done before that window closes.

  When she was young, she thought old age would involve sitting serenely in a chair and watching a film of her own life as it looped round and round in her memory. Ha. A chair does not exist that will accommodate her joints comfortably for much more than half an hour. And living means moving. Inability to move was one item in a list of indications of death that appeared in her Biology 110 textbook all those years ago. Its obviousness made her laugh out loud.

  All right. If she’s going to start weeding her possessions, if that’s what this is about, she’ll start with Morgan’s effects. The photographs. The certificates and prizes. Even the diaries. Well. Maybe she’ll reread the diaries, one by one. But then she will dispose of them, one by one, as she finishes.

  Five years ago, when Ramsay died, she discontinued the annual visits to Morgan’s grave. She was eighty-five and the four-hour train trip to Ottawa had become impossible. The last time, she actually flew from Toronto, but even that almost did her in. The standing in line, the fuss over security, all for a flight of less than an hour. Then getting a cab to the hotel. Checking in. Unpacking. And then, when she was so exhausted she just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep through till her morning flight home, the trip to the graveyard.

  She and Ramsay started meeting up for their annual vigil in 1975—two years after their daughter’s death. It was his idea. Clarissa had begun divorce proceedings by then, and had moved to Toronto. Taken a small apartment she could afford while finally finishing the degree in biology and zoology she had started as a young, single woman. Ramsay’s letter was one of the first pieces of mail she received at her new address.

  She sighed when she saw his handwriting on the envelope. She half expected the first line to read, Clarissa, there’s a spider in the bathtub. Their old running joke about why she must never leave him.

  It still interests her that her first published book would have been one her ex-husband would not read. Could not read, in fact. Could not even pick up and thumb through, for fear of encountering any of the drawings or photographs it contained. His fear of spiders was so profound that he claimed to dislike seeing the word spider printed on a page or hearing it spoken, and could not tolerate calamari, crab, lobster, or anything else remotely spidery on his plate unless it had been rendered unrecognizable.

  Still, Clarissa doesn’t think her choice of topic had anything consciously to do with Ramsay. It was certainly not a gesture of meanness or revenge. From girlhood, long before she met her future husband, she had been fascinated by spiders—their grace and speed and creativity. Their ability to spin or dig a home, to trap, hunt, and even fish for their food. And their almost complete independence.

  There. All right, maybe her choice of topic did have something to do with Ramsay. Leaving Ramsay. She had planned to wait till Morgan was through university. But the girl’s death pulled the two of them—their bodies, at least—back together for a time. After years of a celibate marriage, she lay beneath Ramsay night after night while he pumped away, sometimes dropping tears on her forehead. It would have been cruel to refuse him. Even once he had stopped reaching for her in bed, there was the issue of how he would deal with spiders once she was gone. This was the story she told herself to explain her persisting inertia. Absurd as it was, it made sense.

  “You do know that a spider is a clean and necessary creature of God, don’t you?” Clarissa said to him once early in their marriage, when he was momentarily paralyzed because an occupied web stretched across one corner of a doorway. The look he gave her was so bruised that she resolved, as she swiped the creature into her cupped hands and carried it outside, never to say such a thing again.

  The letter that arrived shortly after she moved to Toronto did not in fact begin with their old joke. Instead, it simply suggested an annual reunion in the graveyard where Morgan was buried. And so began a tradition spanning over forty years.

  Ramsay would always be there ahead of her, sitting on the bench across from Morgan’s headstone. Some years, it would be pouring rain. Others, there would still be snow on the ground. April, the month of their daughter’s birth and death, was so unpredictable. Clarissa would sit down beside Ramsay and take his hand. Even the first time, when anger at her defection came off him like a smell and they sat without speaking, she did that much.

  The following year, the fourth since Morgan’s death, Ramsay breached the silence. He told Clarissa that when she first left him, he would wake up every morning trapped inside his combined anger and grief. He would spend the whole day inside it, as if inside a bubble. But in time, he started waking up by its side, as if it were in bed with him. It would dog him through his day, a constant presence. Now, however, it does not even do that much. Instead, he will come across it at random, when some sight or sound causes him to remember that his wife is gone and his daughter is dead.

  Clarissa was so astonished at how close his experience was to her own that all she could do was squeeze his hand. It was like one of those moments in their courtship, years ago, when they discovered some small or big thing they had in common, and took it as a sign.

  After that, they started greeting each other every year with smiles. In time, small talk felt natural. Queries as to each other’s health and happiness. Was he as surprised as she was when happiness once again became possible?

  In the last decade, they began going out for dinner together after their yearly vigil. A little bistro in the Byward Market that they both liked. She would sit across from this shrunken, white-haired man she had slept beside for twenty-two years of her life, this man she had kissed and bitten and confided in and pummelled and screamed at, and feel nothing more than a slightly bored fondness. Each year she would look forward to their dinner. Then, not quite half way through it, she would start looking forward to its being over.

  She did not a
ttend Ramsay’s funeral. It was held at Christ Church Cathedral in Ottawa, where he had been dean until Morgan died. There was a short article about it on the back page of the front section of the Toronto Star. Some of Ramsay’s old church colleagues were there. A few from his CBC days, too. One or two minor politicians who had been fans of his show in the 1980s. Ramsay collected colleagues and fans. He did not have friends. And like her, he never remarried. She even retained the title Mrs.—perhaps out of some perversity, more likely because she could not abide the sound of Ms.

  The news of his death gave her, yes she admits it, a pang. She would not call it grief. It was more a kind of pity. There was relief, too. Ramsay would be buried beside Morgan. And that somehow assured her she would never have to make that graveyard pilgrimage again.

  Ramsay bought his own burial plot a year after Morgan was killed. He came home and informed her, coldly, that he had made the purchase. An identical plot was available on the other side of Morgan’s grave. Should he purchase it for her?

  That was when she knew it was time to go. Spiders be damned.

  She has donated her own body to science. She’s been told that once a cadaver has been used up, has taught all it possibly can to the ones doing the slicing and sawing and peeling and excavating, it is given some kind of respectful, vaguely spiritual send-off before being incinerated. She wonders if that’s true. She doesn’t really care.

  She’ll start with the pitching and tossing tomorrow. Morgan’s diaries first, since they’ll be the most difficult to deal with. It’s too late to start in today.

  March 6, 1963

  I am so disgusted with myself. Not even a teenager yet—a month still to go—and already I’ve sold my soul. For a baby grand. Baby. Why couldn’t he just have made it a grand piano? Still, it is a step up from the old upright I’ve been plunking away on.

  In return for it, I will be confirmed this Easter. I will kneel down in front of the bishop, feel his hand (with its dirty fingernails!) on my head and listen to him praying for me to a God I don’t believe in. At least, I’m pretty sure I don’t. I should wear a sign on my back: I AM DOING THIS FOR A NEW PIANO. NO OTHER REASON. I’m not the only one in the confirmation class who’s being bribed, either. Michael’s getting a canoe. The twins are going to Europe in the summer. And Philippa—I still can’t believe this—Philippa is getting a nose job.

  When I was still fighting with Daddy, before he dropped the hint about the baby grand, Mummy took me aside and said, “Just think of being confirmed as a kindness to your father, Grace. Imagine how it will look in the eyes of his bishop. And do it out of kindness.” Which of course made me feel like a complete brat. Peace in the family. That’s what Mummy lives for. Keeping the peace, no matter what.

  Honestly, does she even know it’s 1963? Can’t she see what Jackie Kennedy is wearing on every cover of every magazine in the house? Sunday morning after Sunday morning, I watch her putting her hat on in front of the mirror. Her flowered hat. Which she slides back then pushes forward so a couple of her poodle-permed curls can poke out from under the brim. Then she puts her purse over her arm, exactly like the Queen.

  At least she’s stopped making me wear a hat. But she won’t even try to remember to call me Morgan. How many times have I told her and Daddy that I am going by my middle name now? If they would just look at me, they would see a Morgan. Grace is not me. Grace is all frilly and ladylike. Grace would not need to be bribed with a baby grand. Grace would have no trouble believing the garbage they teach us in confirmation class.

  Grace would not have had the thoughts I did, last Thursday when I arrived early at the church after school and saw Daddy kneeling in the lady chapel. He was in his alb—no stole or robe—and had his back to me. I had the strangest feeling he knew that I—or just somebody—was there. Seeing him in his simple white alb, on his knees in the lady chapel. The Reverend Dean Doctor Ramsay Pettingill. At prayer.

  Grace would never have thought that.

  Grace would never have said what I came out with at supper last night either, about the bishop’s nose hairs. About how last week, when he dropped in on our confirmation class, one of them—it was black and greasy-looking—was actually curling up the side of his nostril. And he has tufts of hair coming out of his ears, too.

  Daddy cleared his throat the way he does when he’s hearing something he’d rather not hear while eating. So Mummy, typically, said that the poor man was a widower, and was just showing signs of needing a wife again. So I said, “Oh really? Is that a wife’s duty? To clip hair out of her husband’s orifices?” So Daddy said, “Grace, leave the table!” and I screamed back, “My name is Morgan!”

  So now I don’t know who I’m maddest at. Daddy. Mummy. Or myself. Morgan. Grace. Morgan. Grace. Morgan.

  Clarissa has read that passage before, more than once. Now, for the first time, it makes her laugh.

  It was a mistake, all those years ago, to read the diaries just six months after Morgan’s death. As soon as she started, she knew it was a mistake but kept on anyway. The pain of it was fresh and sharp. She actually welcomed it, in the perverse way she imagined people who slash themselves welcome the sear of the blade.

  That first time through the diaries, the description of Ramsay posing in prayer gave her a stab of nasty delight. The girl had put her finger on something, no doubt about it. But the business about herself smoothing her flowered hat over her poodle curls filled her with pointless regret. What if she had defied convention, thumbed her nose at the congregation with its notions of how a priest’s wife should dress, and tried to follow Jackie Kennedy’s example? Dared to appear on Sunday mornings in a sleek Chanel suit and smooth bouffant, topped by a plain little pillbox? Would Morgan have been less contemptuous of her? Less rebellious as a teenager? Less inclined, later, to fall into the arms of the man who killed her?

  Ridiculous notion. But forgivable, as she can see now.

  When she did her second read-through of the diaries—some time in the late ’80s it would have been—the put-down of Ramsay and the flowered hat and poodle perm passage made her angry. Then guilty, for being angry with her poor dead girl. It wasn’t Morgan’s fault that she had lived long enough to discern her parents’ shortcomings, but not long enough to forgive them. Still, had she ever at least suspected there might be more to her mother than a clergy wife adjusting her hat in the mirror on Sunday morning?

  As a child, Clarissa would ask the adults around her, “What are you thinking?” Then be so disappointed by the banality of the replies. I’m wondering where I put my glasses. I’m thinking a cup of tea would be nice. She couldn’t believe that was all there was to being a grown-up. She began to wonder if the banality was not in fact a baffle. Maybe growing up, for many people, was a process of gathering their more interesting thoughts and questions, a good part of their imagination, and almost all of their curiosity, then packing it into boxes, putting the boxes inside a closet at the back of their mind, and locking the closet door. Finally, in many cases, forgetting where they put the key.

  This early hunch, that appearances were essentially disguises, drove her later writing. She chose as her topics creatures nobody wanted to look at and really see—spiders, bats, crows, octopuses. And she always started a book by saying to herself, Imagine if this creature—tentacled, eight-legged, fanged, winged, whatever—were every bit as intellectually sophisticated and nuanced as I am, albeit in such a different way that I just can’t see it yet.

  Ramsay Pettingill, when she met him, gave the impression of being an adult with the mind of a brilliant child. There would have been no packing up of his imagination and curiosity into boxes in a closet, she believed, and no losing the key. She never even had to ask him what he was thinking because he was forever telling her. I’m thinking about the author of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing.’ Wondering why he remained anonymous. Was it humility or fear? In Ramsay, she sometimes felt she had discovered a new specie
s. A creature subtle and inexhaustible. Worthy of a lifetime’s study.

  She was two years married and three months pregnant before she finally admitted to herself that he did not see her this way. That her curiosity about him was not reciprocated.

  Clarissa closes the 1963 diary. It is the first of ten. Morgan started keeping them when she was twelve, after reading the diary of Anne Frank. She wrote sporadically, recording the highs and lows of her teens and early twenties. And she began a fresh new volume every first of January, even if the previous year’s was only half filled.

  It is unreasonable, Clarissa decides, to set herself the task of rereading the entire set. This morning’s single passage from 1963, with its associated memories, has exhausted her. Her narrow window of energy is closing for the day. Soon it will be time to fix her lunch, then follow that with a nap. Then the long slope of afternoon into evening, with its dipping into library books and television.

  Library books. Almost time to return her latest batch. The weekly trip to the library has become something of an epic journey, but one she relishes. She doesn’t even mind being addressed as Miss Pettingill by the increasingly younger staff. She stopped correcting them years ago, having decided that a perceived sexlessness, as if she had never been married and a mother, was part of old womanhood.

  She still restricts herself to three books. A murder mystery, a biography, and a natural history. Now that she’s using a wheeled walker—marvellous contraption, with its double basket, fold-down seat and handbrakes—she could allow herself more than three. But she established the three-book habit in her eighties, when, with her purse strapped over one shoulder, her book bag over the other, criss-crossed like a tin soldier and more or less balanced, she would cane-tap the two blocks to her local branch. Three books was what she could carry, and three books what she could get through in a week. What she can still get through.