The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  “There’s never a good time to dump someone.”

  “But considering that your mother . . . I made my move too soon, I see that now . . .”

  I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror behind the bar as he talks. I am pale, horribly pale, which makes my eyes seem bluer than ever, and there is a new thinness in me too, my skin pulled taut over the edges of my jaw. I have never looked so much like Diana, I think, or at least not so much like she was at the very end. When she was dissolving, losing form, already halfway down the road to the great Somewhere Else.

  “I should be there in England with you,” Ned is rambling on, his voice cracking and popping with this uncertain connection. “I can still come. I can come now. Did you say you’re in Canterbury?”

  “Not quite. We stopped for lunch in a bar and after this . . . there should be one more day of walking left.”

  “You shouldn’t be walking alone.”

  “I’m not alone. I’m with a group of women. One of those touring companies. They call it Broads Abroad. Pretty funny, huh?”

  “No. There’s nothing funny about any of this. I’ve been worried sick and I’ve been beating myself up . . . sending that letter like an idiot when your mother had only been dead a few . . . I tell you what. I’ll get a flight and meet you there. Does Canterbury have an airport, or do I need to come in through London? Never mind. I’ll figure it out. I want to be in your life, Che. I want you to know you can still count on me. That we will always be friends and nothing can take that away from us. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  What I understand is that you like me better now that I’m pitiful, I think. My mother is dead and my voice sounds weak and if you knew that I had just given blood, way too much blood, if you knew I had fainted in the effort . . . well then I would be even closer to the girl you always wanted me to be.

  “I was too strong,” I say out loud. “Was that it?”

  “What are you talking about? Of course you weren’t too strong.”

  “But I never really fell, did I? Not in love or anywhere else. I never let myself be swept—” and here I gesture toward the sight of Becca lugging a rug to the open door. Jean is following her with a broom, so they are evidently intending to beat it, but of course Ned can’t see any of this. He’s back in America sitting behind his big heavy lawyer’s desk, frowning into his phone. “We fell in love with the perfection and tried to make it enough,” I begin again, “but love isn’t supposed to be easy. I see that now. We’re supposed to fall in love with the mess.”

  “I don’t know what we were supposed to love. I only know that you don’t sound good. You sound like you’re lying down. Where did you say you were? Just outside of Canterbury? What’s the name of the town?”

  “It doesn’t have a name.”

  “Come on. Everywhere has a name.”

  “I don’t think so. I heard them tell the ambulance driver—”

  “Ambulance driver? What the hell’s going on, Che?” His voice is high now, strident with fear, and I see Jean and Becca dragging the rug back in. They are smiling, both of them covered in dust.

  “The ambulance wasn’t for me,” I say. “And I don’t need you to come. This town doesn’t have a name so you probably couldn’t find it if you tried and I don’t think Canterbury has an airport and besides . . . I’m moving on. Or at least I will be, as soon as they let me walk. I was really just calling to tell you I’m fine. I have to go, in fact. There aren’t a lot of bars here.”

  “I thought you said you were in a bar.”

  “I mean not a lot of bars on my phone.”

  “But this isn’t even your number, is it? I started not to pick up but I’ve been so worried. When you just disappeared like that, my mind went wild. I even thought that maybe you had—”

  “No. Not even close.”

  I click the phone off and look down at it there in my hand. I sort of just hung up on him, didn’t I? And it was surprisingly easy to do. Of course over the long run it won’t really be quite so simple to rid myself of Ned and his legacy. It’s like Silvia says—the world makes it easier for men to move on than for women and I know what’s ahead of me. Months of therapy, years of first dates, decades of self-recrimination, an empty white vase.

  But it still felt damn good to be the one who broke the connection. To press the long red bar that says END.

  THE NEWS comes back from Canterbury along with the veterinarian. The boy has a broken femur, several broken ribs. A perforated intestine, that’s the worst of it, and he needed additional units of blood once they got him into triage. “But we did the right thing transfusing him,” the vet adds, his eyes falling on me. “I’ll admit I wasn’t sure at the time.”

  With this resolution, the manic energy in the group deflates. Tim has come back with the van and for a minute everyone debates climbing into it and simply riding to the next destination, but then Silvia says no, that we should finish the route of the day. Well, not me, of course. I’m still woozy and Valerie is still determined to be the one to escort me on to the inn and put me to bed. She and I climb into the seat right behind Tim and wave goodbye to the others—the women who are ready to set back out and the villagers who are now our foxhole friends. And the vet who says to me, through the window, “Sorry I was so rough on the arm, love. Lots more ice when you get there, right?”

  And then we are gone, enveloped in the van’s soft roar. When I finally get into bed tonight I know I’ll sleep for hours, maybe days.

  “I know the truth,” says Valerie. “You planned all this just to get out of telling your story.”

  “You got me,” I say. I hadn’t thought of it yet, but I don’t have to tell my story now. I’ve earned a free pass to Canterbury with the spilling of my blood.

  “But if memory serves,” I say to Valerie,“you didn’t tell your story either. You told a story, but you didn’t tell your own story and thus you’re in the same boat that I am.”

  “True,” she says. “I’m a coward.”

  “So tell it to me now,” I say. “Not something about King Arthur and Sir Gawain, but your own rock-bottom truth, something so dark and disgusting you dare not confess it, even in the company of sisters.”

  She cracks the window to let in a little air. It blows into both of our faces, making us blink, keeping us from sweltering amid the roaring heat vents supplied by the well-meaning Tim. She looks out for a moment, taking in the green fields, the stone walls. The sheep and meadows, this sweet and drowsy world.

  “My story is a secret,” she says.

  “That’s all right,” I say. “It’s all right to have a secret.”

  “You won’t tell the others?” she asks.

  “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “Because I’m a bit of a buzzkill.”

  I thought that was my job, to be a bit of a buzzkill, but I shake my head to reassure her again that I won’t give her up to the rest of the women.

  “I won’t tell,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says. She rolls the window open a little more. “I’m dying.”

  Sixteen

  The next morning Valerie and I do not walk into Canterbury with the others. They take the longer, more circular route that Tess promised yesterday, the one that enters the city from the same angle as Chaucer’s pilgrims. Perhaps they will see more than us, perhaps less.

  The fiction is that I’m still weak from my bloodletting and, like most fiction, there’s some truth in it. The other women accept this explanation readily, just as they accept Valerie’s offer to stay behind and escort me into the gates of the city. I am the one who is officially ill, but now that I’ve studied her more closely, I can see just how much this walk has cost Valerie, day by day. She had a round of chemo just before leaving the States, she says, an especially intense protocol that her doctors believe might buy her a “bonus round,” and she’d been en
couraged by the fact she was able to keep up with the rest of us. Not only have we not had to make special concessions, but no one has really even realized that she’s sick. For her this has been a true pilgrimage, much like the one Diana envisioned. A last-ditch stab at a medical miracle, which, if denied, she is prepared to turn into an appeal for forgiveness. The chance to make peace with herself before she enters the final stage of her illness, now that the cancer has moved from her breast into her bones, progressed from something that a woman can live without into something she can’t. And so Tim is pressed into service once again, and even though we will not take the full lap on this final day, Valerie and I shall enter Canterbury by foot, and that’s all that really matters.

  The whole thing makes Tess nervous. She doesn’t like it when the group splits off and she gives me and Valerie precise instructions on how to get to the Cathedral. We listen patiently and then Valerie says, “But there are signs, aren’t there?” and Tess laughs and says, “Oh, of course. Signs are everywhere.” And I say, “And you can see it, can’t you?” and she laughs and says, “Of course. It’s the only large thing in a rather small town.”

  The van drops us off right at the gate of the city and once again we wave madly as Tim seesaws in the street, turning back to take the others to the beginning of their own trailhead. As they fade from sight, Valerie says, “Do you feel like we’re missing something?” and I say, “Not at all.”

  Compared to the villages we’ve walked through in the last few days, Canterbury is metropolitan. It’s home to four colleges and thus young people are everywhere, zooming past us on bikes and skateboards, playing music and laughing. It’s a beautiful place, the perfect size, halved by a river so gentle that it’s almost a stream. Full of bookstores and tiny, trendy cafés. The smell of olive oil and garlic wafting from one of them nearly stops me in my tracks.

  “Don’t get your hopes completely up,” I say, “but I think the restaurants of Canterbury may offer more than cod and potatoes.”

  “You’re limping,” Valerie says. “Is it where you hurt your heel?”

  I shake my head. “These boots have never quite fit.”

  “What size is your foot?”

  “Eight. The most average in the world.”

  “I’m an eight too. Want to switch shoes and see if that helps?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not going to give you bad boots on top of everything else.”

  She shrugs. “They might not be bad boots on me. Sometimes a shoe that rubs one woman raw fits another just fine.”

  We stop at a bench and I unlace my boots, then hand them to Valerie one at a time. Hers are softer, more broken in, the footwear of a woman who had the good sense to prepare herself for a sixty-mile walk, who didn’t just flee in the moment because she was afraid to face her own life. I pull on one and sigh before I can help myself. They feel like bedroom slippers.

  “Did she say anything?” Valerie asks.

  “Who?”

  “Your mother. In the last moments. Was she one of those people who talked about white lights and long halls? Grandparents waiting for her, that kind of thing?”

  I consider lying. Offering up some sort of false comfort, but then I’ve never been much of a liar and this doesn’t seem like the right time to start. “You said your mother was a narcissist?” I finally say. “Give me an example.”

  “She stabbed herself on my sister’s wedding day.”

  I burst out laughing. I can’t help myself. “How did she manage to do that?”

  “No one’s exactly sure. She went in to talk to the caterer and the next thing we know, the wedding has to be postponed while the ambulance comes.”

  “That’s good. I’d give that at least a seven.”

  “Just a seven?” She leans back on the bench and begins lacing the second boot. “Top it.”

  “There was a time when some Russians came to our commune to talk about . . . you know, communism. The real kind, not the fake Pennsylvania kind. And just before they were due to arrive, Diana locked herself in her bedroom over the weekend and emerged fluent in Russian so she could greet them. Well, not fluent, I guess. But she managed to learn enough to seduce the man and his wife into a three-way.”

  “You’re kidding. You knew that at the time?”

  “Not really. I knew something was going on, but I was only about twelve or so and I didn’t put it all together until much later. So she was a different sort of narcissist than your mother, more ‘look at me’ than ‘poor me.’ ”

  Valerie double knots her boot strings. “I’d give that a seven too.”

  “Where did she stab herself?”

  “The kitchen at the country club.”

  “No, I mean where on her body?”

  “Right in the center of the chest.”

  “Damn. Near the heart is risky. Maybe I’ll adjust my rating up to an eight.”

  “You should. It was one of Susan’s better moves.” She sighs. “Sometimes I call my mother ‘Susan.’ ”

  “It’s okay. Sometimes I call my mother ‘Diana.’ ”

  “Do you think it helps? Gives you the right kind of distance? Like Silvia telling a story in the third person?”

  “I’m not sure. Where is Susan now?”

  “In rehab. She’d been clean for years, but she relapsed when her daughter was diagnosed with cancer.”

  I stand up. The boots feel great but I can’t tell Valerie that. This isn’t some Civil War battlefield. I can’t pull the boots off a dying woman. She stands up in mine too and takes a few steps.

  “They feel fine,” she says.

  “You’re lying. Besides, it’s hard to tell how shoes feel all at once.”

  “How are those on you?”

  “Heaven.”

  “Then let’s go on for a few minutes like this. We can always switch back if either of us starts hurting. Why did you ask me to tell you about one of my mother’s stunts?”

  “Oh. Oh yeah. You’d asked me what happened the night Diana died. But that’s the weird part. Here was a woman who had approached life flamboyantly, who had . . . well, you know how they say you should live every day as if it might be your last? Diana, for all her faults, really did that. She made these big dramatic statements, and she undertook these big fuck-the-world challenges, just as if every day she was lying on her deathbed. Right up to the moment when she really was lying on her deathbed. And then, at the one point when all her drama would have finally been justified, on the one day she was most entitled to do something drastic . . . she didn’t. Her death was almost casual.”

  “She didn’t say anything?”

  “For once, no.”

  We have come to an intersection, with a small park and a visitors’ welcome kiosk on the other side. I glance right and step into the street and Valerie has to grab my arm and pull me back. She has enough sense to glance to the left, to see the cars rumbling toward us. I made exactly the same bonehead move on my one morning in London, stepping off a curb and nearly getting hit by a cab coming from a direction I didn’t expect. I visit Europe often, but not England. They don’t have much wine here.

  “I didn’t used to be afraid of the dark,” Valerie says, as if we had been discussing fear, which I guess in a way we were. “Not until I was diagnosed. Or actually rediagnosed. It was gone and then it came back . . . Now I sleep with a night-light. I have them all over the house at home and I bought one here, in a hardware store in London, before I met the other women in the George. So it would use the right current, you know, so it wouldn’t blow up like an American hair dryer. The dark is the only thing I’ve ever really feared. Look. There’s a city map beside the visitor kiosk. Tess gave me the address of our hotel for the night. Do you want to go there first and drop our bags?”

  “First?”

  “We’re going on to the Cathedral, aren’t we?”

 
“Just the two of us?” I say, as we drift toward the map.

  “We don’t have to wait all day for the others. Tess called ahead. She’s arranged for us to be greeted at noon by a priest named Matthew. You’re okay with that, aren’t you? Being blessed by a man instead of a woman?”

  I nod. It doesn’t matter a flip to me who or what blesses us, just so long as we’re blessed. Valerie runs her fingertip along the laminated map of the city, starting with the star that reads YOU ARE HERE and tracing it to the Cathedral, which sits in the dead center of Canterbury, like a castle in a board game.

  “Wow,” she says. “The hotel really does look like it’s right on the grounds of the Cathedral. Tess said it was as close as you could get, but I thought . . . Look. We’ll be sleeping right here.”

  I nod again. I’m a little thrown. I had thought we would spend the afternoon eating at some city restaurant that cooked its food in olive oil and garlic, shopping for souvenirs, maybe checking into the hotel for a shower and a nap. I didn’t expect to enter the Cathedral quite yet. Despite everything, it feels too soon. Premature. Like I’m not quite ready to let go of the last of Diana after all.

  “What’s wrong?” Valerie says. “Are the boots hurting?” I shake my head and she frowns. “Are you dizzy again?”

  “No,” I say, “but it wouldn’t hurt us to eat. Somewhere with olive oil and peppers and spice and things like that. And then, yeah, I’ll be ready for the Cathedral.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Why should I be nervous?”

  Valerie turns away from the map. “Because this is what we’ve come for. All this time, all this way, all the weird shit that’s happened. This is what it’s been leading up to, isn’t it? Our appointment with God.”

  CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL is enormous. That much is obvious. That much is to be expected. It’s the first thing a visitor notices and I’d imagine it’s the last thing he forgets. Wall after wall of Gothic ornamentation, a crown of spires, a dozen places to enter or exit. But there is very little yard around it, not much of an approach. Once you are through the gates and on the grounds, it is right there upon you, looking down.