The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  Then the final sound. A thud, muted but definitive, and here our story changes, yet again.

  Fifteen

  He has an unusual blood type. The emergency unfolding around us has several components, but this is the first one that arises. The child lying on the edge of the street has B negative blood, a condition that is true of slightly less than two percent of the population, at least in the States. I imagine it is similar in England.

  I know this statistic because I have B negative blood.

  A burst of activity exploded around us the instant the boy was struck by the car. The driver leapt out, a tall man apparently unknown to the villagers. A nobody, someone just passing through. Four or five of the locals spilled from the café at the sound of impact, one of them rushing to restrain the hysterical mother and the rest gathering around the boy. One of them identifies himself as a doctor, and it will be several minutes before any of us realize he is a veterinarian. But the veterinarian is a decisive man, which in this moment is the most important thing he could be.

  The vet waves off the driver’s offer to take the boy to the hospital in Canterbury, saying he shouldn’t be moved until they’ve determined the extent of his injuries. Another one of the diners calls for an ambulance and that is when the mother says the boy’s blood type is rare. She doesn’t have it, his father did. His no-good knockabout father, gone to Spain or Morocco or God-knows-where, and the ambulance must bring B negative blood when they come, for any fool can see that he must be transfused as quickly as possible. Life is seeping from the child’s pale, immobile body, the pool of red around him growing by the minute. Blood runs between the cobblestones, and it soaks into the boy’s sweater and pants.

  But I’m B negative, I tell the doctor. I dig out my wallet, with the Red Cross card I always carry and show him the proof.

  No, he says. It’s risky. There’s no definitive way to measure the flow, to make sure I’m not giving too much, or that I’m not giving it too fast.

  We have no choice, I say. Do we? I point at the child in the street.

  And thus the table is cleared . . . the empty bowls of stew are knocked off with the broad sweep of someone’s arm. They fall to the pavement in a series of clatters, spilling out the last vestiges of carrots and potatoes as the table is moved to the edge of the sidewalk. The doctor has run to his car and come back with a bag. Steffi kneels on the pavement and untangles the line of tubes, then unsheathes the needles, her hands moving swiftly and efficiently. I bare my arm. The rub of alcohol, the making of a fist.

  The stick is a hard one. Despite everything, despite the fact that we are all numb with shock, the jab of the needle is so cruel that I make a sound. Release my fist without having to be told to. Like most people with an unusual type, I have given blood many times. I know the drill.

  Valerie is clutching my other hand. “Lie back,” she says, and I realize I must look terrible, as if I am about to faint. So I let her prop me on the café table and turn my head to see that the doctor is working quickly, too fast for finesse. Blood is flowing from my arm through a tube stretched from the table to the street, where it enters the arm of the boy. And it is somewhere in this process, something about the man’s bag or maybe what he pulls from it, that Steffi realizes she has been playing nursemaid to a county vet. In an instant she takes over the situation, standing up and barking out orders, dispatching the small crowd this way and that on various tasks.

  How long do I lie like this, with blood moving from me to the child? I don’t know. In some ways it seems like merely seconds, in other ways, hours. In the distance I can hear the approach of the ambulance, which has that horrible wah-wah pulse of European danger, which seems so different from the high, steady shriek of American danger. Lie still, everyone keeps telling me. Don’t try to sit up or move.

  Because the link between my life and that of the boy is a fragile one. He and I are held together by a tangle of tubing and two needles that were designed to inoculate cattle. Despite my efforts to obey their orders, I lose the stew at some point in the process. Jean holds a bowl beneath my mouth while Valerie pulls back my hair and helps me turn my head. It is nightmarish. No sound has come from the boy, and I look to Jean at some point, trying to mouth the words that no one must say aloud. Is he dead? I ask, but she’s not looking at me. She’s looking both at the child and past the child and I think of that split second just before the crash—Becca’s stinging accusation that Jean’s story had been a false one. A lie she had told us, just as she told it to her children and herself. I crane my head, trying to see the boy’s face, but even that slight motion causes the world to shift and lurch and I know that the vet’s hesitation had merit. I’m bleeding out too fast. I think I must lose consciousness myself for a minute, because when I open my eyes again, the ambulance is now parked in the street, that horrible wah-wah making it impossible to ask anyone anything.

  Wait right there, Valerie mouths to me, as if I have a choice. As if there is anything I can do but lie flat on this café table and bleed, and I know they won’t let me bleed to death, not now that the ambulance is here, with blood and medicine and more doctors and human-size needles. And I try to take comfort in that thought because it feels as if I am dying, as if once the life force begins to leave a human body, there’s no way to tempt it back inside. I know that it only feels that way, that this is all a woozy illusion, for there is no way Steffi would let me actually die. She’s incredibly competent, the fiercest of fighters, and I’m suddenly grateful for her bossiness, the angry way she refuses to make a single mistake. She won’t let me die; none of them will let me die. I know that, but it seems as if the whole world is clustered around the boy in the street and the woman on the table has been forgotten.

  Forgotten, that is, by everyone except for Valerie. She wraps a green tablecloth around me, since I am trembling. She asks one of the medics if I should have fluids and he looks up and nods. Tells her to give me a beer. Someone brings a pitcher from the bar and she lifts my head and tries to pour it in, right from the spout. But we’re a mess, she and I. She’s trembling nearly as hard as I am and the beer goes all over the front of my sweater, which is actually Claire’s sweater, the cashmere soaked and ruined for sure now, and then I hear a noise, a wail coming from the child, and relief swirls through the group. The sort of relief that follows the cry of a baby who has just been born.

  “They think he’ll make it,” Valerie yells in my ear. “But they want to get him stabilized before they transport him.” And then one of the medics is at my side, removing the needle from my vein and helping me to sit up, just a little. He says not to try and stand, at least not for a couple of hours, and then there is some talk of taking me to the Canterbury hospital too, since no one can say with any certainty how much blood I’ve lost in the past twenty minutes. The shell of the old hospital is visible over the medic’s shoulder and in my dizzy confusion, I think that’s what he means, that he plans to carry me there to wait for death on the roots of the tree. They can bury me out back under one of the nameless tombstones, I think. The other women can carry my mother’s ashes on to Canterbury.

  “I’m fine,” I say over and over but when I try to sit up, the earth tilts again and the smell of the blood, both my own and the boy’s, is overwhelming. I look at my arm, at the bruise that is already forming, running from my shoulder to the crook of my elbow and I say again, to no one in particular, “I’m fine.” But then the scene before me dissolves, the images of the green tablecloth and the ambulance and the boy breaking apart like the pieces of a scattered jigsaw puzzle, and my last thought is Okay, maybe not so fine.

  I TOLD everyone that I wasn’t there when Diana died. That I got the call late at night and rushed to the nursing home but that she was already at peace by the time I arrived. At peace. People like that term for death—they like comparisons to rest and sleeping, phrases like “went easily” or “slipped away.”

  Her hand, I add, was st
ill warm.

  And that’s as much detail as I give them because I’m not like Jean, at least not yet. I haven’t had time to add nuance to my fiction. To build in symbols, to know where to pause in the story for greatest effect. I’m sure I will be able to brushstroke all this in later, for it is what we humans do. We lie. Especially to ourselves. An event doesn’t even have to be over before we begin telling ourselves stories about it. Softening the edges, eliminating unnecessary characters and minor details, trimming our own unwieldy interior responses into something tidy and acceptable.

  And thus our personal myths are born. We know what should have happened, so we convince ourselves that it must have happened, just that way. Society demands official emotions for all events—joy for weddings, sadness for funerals, excitement for graduations, fury in the moment of a lover’s desertion. And so if the graduate refuses to leave home, the heir is dancing on the grave, the bride goes fearfully down the aisle, or we are secretly relieved to be free of our dull lover, we edit these inappropriate emotions right out of the story. We all become Jeans, the authors of a fictional life.

  How long will it be until I dream about Diana? Because I did make it there that night, in plenty of time. I heard the soft, low rattle of her last breaths. Dried beans in a box, I thought, the sound of the homemade percussion instruments we used to have back at the commune, in those years when she thought the children might form a band. Fewer beans with each rattle and then . . . no rattle at all. Her eyes were open. I stood there and watched the very moment when the light went out. The doctor said, “She’s gone,” and the priest said, “She’ll always be with us,” and I stood between them, wondering which one was right.

  I thought she would have something to tell me. I thought there would be some final words and that’s why when I got the call from the nursing home, I tore out of bed half-dressed and rushed across town without shoes on, running traffic lights and saying out loud, to nobody, “Just let her hold on.” And she did hold on, not only until I was there but for several hours beyond that, and I think at moments she was conscious, just a little bit. Coming and going like I am now, her eyes fluttering open, then closing. I guess it was peaceful. I guess she went easily. I suppose she slipped away. That’s as good a way to say the unsayable as any, and the only surprising thing is that when it was time to go, Diana died without comment. She put her life down as if it were an afterthought, as if her body were a sweater with a very slight flaw, something she no longer needed. She just tossed it on the bed, turned off the light, and left the room.

  Steffi insists I shouldn’t walk for the rest of the day and probably not tomorrow either. I insist the others go on without me. Valerie insists she will stay by my side and Tess insists she will find Tim and send him back with the van. There is a lot of insisting going on, for after an experience like the one we’ve just been through, what else can we do? We are frightened and drained. We have to insist on all sorts of things just to make us feel like we’re back in control of our lives.

  The ambulance, holding the boy and his mother and the veterinarian too, has departed and the pilgrims and the other diners have moved inside to help clean up the restaurant. Some of them wash dishes and put away the food in the kitchen, others go out to the street with buckets to pick up the shattered dishes and wash away the blood. People from the village, including the boy’s grandmother, come dashing in one by one, as they hear the news. They are directed on toward Canterbury hospital.

  Through it all I sit and stare. They have positioned me at a table in the corner and Steffi has put her phone in my hand.

  “Here,” she says. “Relax and check in with everyone at home. Or play Candy Crush or Angry Birds if you want to. Seriously, Che. Distract yourself. I have unlimited minutes, remember?”

  Wisps of bubbles are clinging to her hand as she hands me the phone. She has gone from doctor to dishwasher. It’s lovely, I think, all of these strangers pitching in to set this woman’s restaurant right. We can’t help what happened, but at least she won’t come home to find her kitchen burned up and her son’s blood on the cobblestones. I look down at the phone in my hand. Tap it and let it take me straight to the news of the hour, back to the big, bright world I’ve done such a good job of avoiding for the last five days. I tap the screen again and again, mindlessly watching the images pop up in my palm.

  The Internet is a religion of its own, is it not, and such a perfect prototype of the universe—broad, complex, self-contradictory. Are you looking for recipes, earthquakes, or maybe the score of a hockey game in Saskatchewan? Horrible cruelties, noble sacrifices, political corruption, random acts of kindness? We have them. We have them all. You want porn? Well, lucky you, for as it turns out, the world is full of porn. But it also has babies laughing and puppies trying to sing, more than you can count. Any assertion you wish to make about life, the Internet will provide you with plenty of evidence to back up your claims. Google is the Jesus of our generation. Seek and ye shall find.

  “Call him,” says Valerie. She has brought me another beer, even though I spilled half of the first one and then puked up the rest. But she has taken the medic’s advice they should hydrate me seriously and she sets the stein in front of me with a clatter.

  “Call who?”

  “Whatever man you’ve been avoiding all week,” she says. “You’ve been running from someone, haven’t you? Ever since London?”

  “I wouldn’t say running. More like walking. I’ve been walking away from someone. Ever since London.”

  She shrugs, willing to let the semantics slide. “And call your own phone,” she says. “Maybe it’s turned up by now.”

  I start to argue with her. Tell her that back at the George I phoned my number with the bartender’s phone and that it only went to voice mail, but it seems that the fight has gone out of me along with half my blood and besides, I’m a little curious as to whether my voice mail is even still operative. I nod in resignation and call my phone, having to struggle more to remember the number than it seems like I should. And then I hear my own voice, and I say out loud to myself, “If you’re the person who has found my phone, please return it to the George Inn in Southwark in London. I will check back for it there on Sunday.”

  Which is kind of a stab in the dark, but perhaps there is some goodwill left somewhere in the universe. Today has made that idea seem more likely, this odd little tribe of people swarming all over this restaurant, scrubbing it down from top to bottom and probably making it cleaner than it’s been in years. Because we all have to do something while we wait to hear about the boy.

  Valerie has gone back into the kitchen. And now that she isn’t watching me, I feel free to do the thing she advised. I call Ned.

  I press my head back against the blue stucco wall of the café while I listen to the numbers beep and drone their way across the sky. Across the ocean, and that great gasp of space that has always separated me from Ned. We were so easy with each other. Too easy, and here is the story I should have told the women. The story of how I mistook convenience for love. I would tell them that despite all the men, despite that shocking number, I’ve never been swept off my feet. I would tell them that those men were nothing more than bottles of wine that I sampled and rejected. That I opened each one expecting to be disappointed, looking for the subtle flaws, finding them, and then moving on to the next, my palate becoming ever more sophisticated and love becoming ever more elusive.

  And then I met Ned. The universe served him up to me, put him right on the treadmill beside mine. Within minutes of our first gasped hello I could see he was everything I’d been looking for. Smart and handsome and funny and well-employed. Taller than my imaginary first husband, with the additional bonus of being existent in the flesh. I took him to meet Diana on our third date. When she hugged me goodbye after that visit, she whispered in my ear, “Perfection.” I told myself it didn’t matter, that I had long ago outgrown the need for her approval, but of
course it mattered. Perfection. That single word. It was a benediction, a sign I had arrived somewhere, that I could stop running at last.

  Ned seemed as relieved as I was. He was intoxicatingly quick to commit, using the word “girlfriend” almost at once, introducing me to his friends with the words “Isn’t she everything I said she would be?” It seemed like magic at the time—that I not only found something for which I’d long been searching, but that I had also, in just that moment, found myself. And then of course there were those damn sunflowers. I keep seeing them. Sunflowers in a white vase sitting on a plain wooden table at a beach cottage. They stood proof that for four years the universe was benevolent and safe and of course it is hard to let that go. We will divide up the contents of the cottage and I will take that vase. But I’ll never put anything in it again. It will stand empty until the end of time.

  This is exactly what I’m thinking when I hear Ned’s breathless hello.

  “It’s me,” I say. “Che.”

  “My God,” he says. “You’re alive.”

  Barely, I think, but aloud I say, “I’m in England.”

  “England? Why the hell are you there?”

  “I’m walking to Canterbury to scatter Diana’s ashes.”

  It takes him a second to process this, almost as if he doesn’t believe I’m telling the truth. And when he speaks, his voice is cautious.

  “You didn’t bury the urn? Well, I mean, obviously not.”

  “Her last request was to be taken to the Cathedral. Her note came with the ashes.” I can’t seem to resist getting a tiny dig in. “The same day as your letter.”

  He gives me a big transatlantic sigh. “I shouldn’t have written that letter. Not when I did. My timing sucked.”