Real Life

by Sharon Butala

  At thirty miles the wind had risen, blowing the snow across the road in perpendicular sheets so that she gripped the wheel hard and leaned forward to peer out the windshield in an effort to keep right of the centre line which disappeared in the blowing snow, reappeared, and then vanished again. She began to be afraid. The intervals when she couldn’t make out the yellow line were lasting longer and longer; she was slowed to half her usual speed, and now she just hoped to stay on the road.

  Sheets of snow swept across the hood, hitting the glass, and whirled away into the darkness. It seemed she’d driven straight into the heart of a storm, for suddenly the wind was stronger, the air much colder, and the heater was barely keeping the windshield clear of frost. As she peered ahead, the road vanished completely in the dizzying whirl of snow blowing in an unbroken, rolling screen across the hood. She flicked on her headlights to high to see if visibility would be any better, but she could see only a howling wall of white. She braked, dropping her hands from the steering wheel and slumping back in her seat. Terror nipped at her—this was just what she had most feared when she took this night job—and she fought to keep it away.

  Abruptly, a break appeared in the wall of white pommelling the car; she could see ahead for perhaps thirty feet. She took her foot off the brake and the car rolled ahead again, picking up speed. Then, as suddenly as the storm had opened, it closed. She braked hard, the car fishtailed on the loose snow and the ice that had formed beneath it, skidded sideways, hit a bank of drifted snow along the shoulder, ploughed through it, and she was in the ditch and, Christine guessed, on the wrong side of the road.

  She sat trying to slow her mind down enough to assess her situation. Then she edged the door open a crack and saw that the wind was sweeping the snow past so fast that the ditch wasn’t filling. At least she wouldn’t be suffocated. That grim task done, she checked the gas gauge—nearly full. She’d filled the tank on the way to work this morning. She put both hands against her cold cheeks, trying to think. What else was there? Oh, yes. She put the car back in gear and eased the gas pedal down to see if she could crawl back onto the road. But no, she needed new tires, these hadn’t sufficient grip. Or she needed somebody behind pushing.

  Surely the storm would blow itself out in a couple of hours, and what about the Mounties—they were always out checking the highways for people in trouble during blizzards. Someone would find her, she felt sure. There was nothing to worry about, she muttered to herself. In the meantime, she would get the sleeping bag and, using it to keep herself warm, wait for her rescuers. With difficulty she crawled backward between the seats, but the kit wasn’t in the back seat, and when she looked further back under the hatch, it wasn’t there either.

  She knew where it was: sitting in her office. She’d had to borrow a heavier sleeping bag from one of her friends at work; she’d bought candles in the bookstore and a chocolate bar in the cafeteria. They were all together where she’d left them when she’d hurried out to the meeting, in a bundle behind her desk. She remembered how harrassed she’d felt as she’d closed the door, how something nagged at her that she couldn’t identify, how something was always nagging at her that she’d only partly done, or not done at all.

  She sat with her mittened hands still uselessly clutching the steering wheel, too afraid to think, while a driving wall of

  white came at the car, seeming from all directions at once, striking it with such force that it felt as if at any moment she might be whirled away and lifted clear of the earth.

  Shivering in the cab of the monastery’s ton truck which was used, Father Dominique told her, to haul vegetables to the farmer’s market in the summer, her car being towed behind, he explained that when the weather had turned bad he’d called her home to find she’d already left, and that there’d been no answer to his call to the university.

  “So, when you didn’t arrive on time, I set out to look for you.” From the cab’s added height she could see the road reasonably well even though the storm hadn’t abated, and she saw now that if she’d had a bigger vehicle, she’d probably have been all right. She wondered if her mother or one of her brothers would lend her the money to buy a better car. She saw that this was a sensible thought, one she should have had sooner, and caught a glimpse, suddenly, amazingly, into her own recalcitrance, how she failed, wilfully, to grasp the truth of her life.

  “We’ve cancelled classes,” Father Dominique said, and she turned her head slowly toward him. “Too dangerous for students coming in from the country. You’ll have to stay the night. And your husband has called a couple of times. He wants you to phone him when you arrive.” Christine wondered what could be so important it couldn’t wait until she got home. Her mother could take care of any emergency, Graeme knew that, so it had to be something other than the children. Maybe his father had died? He’d been ill. But Father Dominique was pulling up at the monastery doors, as if they’d just been out for a pleasant evening drive. “You go get warm. Brother Gerald will take you to your room. I’ll look after your car.”

  Wearily, she climbed down from the truck. Wind-driven snow whipped her hair and stung her face as she struggled to open the heavy door. A monk she hadn’t seen before came toward her as she stood inside stamping the snow off her boots. He was short and thin and at least seventy, with sparse grey hair on a head that trembled faintly as he spoke to her. He led her to an office, unlocked the door, switched on the light, indicated the phone on the desk, and handed her the slip with Graeme’s number on it. She was a little taken aback by the abruptness of all this, having had time only to step out of her boots and slip her icy feet into her shoes. But now, not even bothering to take off her jacket, she dialled the number he’d given her. Graeme answered before the phone had finished its first ring.

  “Christine?” Suddenly, she saw Aaron dead on the road, a car speeding away; she saw her house engulfed in flames.

  “What? What is it?”

  “You better sit down.” Her heart pounding, her mouth dry, she dropped into the chair behind the desk.

  “Your mother’s had a heart attack. She’s in the university hospital. The kids—”

  “The kids?”

  “They’re fine. She’s quite a woman, that mother of yours. When she started to feel herself getting sick, she phoned that sitter you use sometimes, and then, while she was waiting for her to arrive, and she felt herself getting worse, she phoned me so that I could find you. And then she called 911 to tell them she was having a heart attack.” He laughed briefly.

  “Is she—all right?” Although she must be, or surely he wouldn’t be talking to her in this half-jovial way.

  “Well, she’s not fine, but she’s stable and she’s in good hands.” He gave her the doctor’s name and the ward number. “I hear you’ve had a little trouble yourself.”

  She began to cry. Tears coursed down her cheeks, she could hear herself making a thick, rasping sound, her chest hurt with the effort to stifle it.

  “This is maybe not the best time,” he said, as if she weren’t making that awful noise, as if everything were perfectly fine, “but obviously that’s the end of your mother as a sitter for the kids. She told me she’s known about her heart condition since October and just couldn’t bring herself to tell you.” Christine had managed to stop the noise in her throat and chest, and though water still spread down her cheeks, it didn’t seem to her that she was crying.

  “He’s your son, too,” she said. “Come back and help me. Please.” She had not imagined that she would ever beg him to return, and she wondered now if that was all that he’d been waiting for. On the other end of the line, though, there was only silence. “Graeme?” she said finally. He didn’t reply, but she heard him draw in a long breath and expel it slowly. Was there someone else in the room with him?

  She waited, then slowly put the phone down. She blew her nose, wiped her wet cheeks, and after another moment spent motionless, eyes closed, forcing herself to breathe deeply, she called the operator, asked for t
he hospital, and when she reached it, for the ward where her mother lay alone and gravely ill. When the nurse told her that her mother was out of danger and could have visitors in the morning, Christine almost began crying again.

  “Tell her I love her,” she said and hung up quickly. She knew she should call the babysitter, but decided it was too late, she would only wake her.

  She rose then and left the office, remembering to flick off the lights and to close the door. As soon as she emerged, Brother Gerald shuffled toward her from where he’d been waiting a discreet distance from the door. She followed him down that hall and then the next until he stopped and opened a door into one of the bare guest rooms. Someone had already put her boots on the spotless rubber mat inside, and wiped her briefcase and set it on the desk across the room.

  “Breakfast is at seven.” He went shuffling and shaking away.

  Christine shut the door and sat down on the bed. The light was so bright it hurt her eyes, but looking around she saw there was no lamp, only the single, bare overhead bulb. She listened, but there was no sound at all, only that odd stillness she’d noticed before in the monastery. Not mere silence as much as it was an intensity in the air, as if the air itself had consciousness. There was a pain in her chest, and she straightened her back, hoping to relieve it.

  Was she responsible for her mother’s heart attack? She supposed she was. All her mother wanted was that she put Aaron in a special home, at least part of the time, and she would not even consider that. She pictured her mother lying in her hospital bed, electrodes fixed to her chest, a monitor beside her with its line of steady blips, then cast about frantically for another picture to erase that one.

  She found herself thinking about Peter Wilmer, that easygoing, apparently uncomplicated man she’d hoped to have a drink with earlier. What if they married? Would they have children of their own? What kind of lover would he be? She thought that perhaps she wasn’t sure any more what love was, although it was true that she loved her children, who would both be asleep now, oblivious to the fact that their grandmother was too ill to care for them any more, that their father would not return to them. That from here on, nothing would be the same. She bent her head and clasped it in both hands to stop the chaos expanding inside.

  “Nothing bad has happened,” she said out loud. “Nothing too terrible has happened.”

  She put her hands together, then pushed them flat against her breasts and rocked with the pain of her self-hatred, her humiliation, her unextinguished need. For a long time she rocked, pressing her hands against her own small breasts, until finally she felt she could breathe again. She put her hands down to rest, palms flat, on the cheap blue bedspread and sat a long time without moving. The sparseness of the room comforted her. She wondered what it was the monks said when they chanted: Relinquish, relinquish, relinquish … Was that what it was?

  Thirsty, she looked around for a water glass without finding one, although now she saw a sink against the far wall. And she was hungry, too, she’d had no dinner. It struck her as bitterly amusing that even now she was hungry and thirsty. She rose and went out into the deserted, silent hall. Her back and neck ached, the muscles of her legs hurt with each step, even her hands hurt—she must have been clenching them. Hardly noticing she had, she went straight to the dining room without one wrong turn.

  The end nearest the kitchen was lit by old-fashioned brass wall sconces that gave off a dim but warm pinkish light. She saw that, as she’d hoped, the coffee urn was still hot, and a plate of oatmeal cookies sat under plastic wrap next to it. She poured herself coffee and extracted a cookie from under the wrap. The hall was empty, but she chose to sit in the shadows near the back, where anyone entering would not readily notice her. She needed to think, or to not-think; she needed to wait and get back her strength.

  Now when she listened, she could hear only the hum of the fridges in the kitchen and the muted moan of the wind outside the thick walls. It troubled her that she couldn’t hear the silence, as she’d been able to do only moments earlier. It had surprised her, even thrilled her, although she didn’t know how or why. She hoped she had not lost that too, and it seemed now no small thing to her if she had.

  Now she heard something. It was the monks, they were chanting again, their voices rising and falling, now loud, now soft, now a tenor voice lifting the sound, now bass again. She couldn’t make out the words, realized finally that they were Latin, a language of which she knew nothing. The sound was growing louder, and puzzled, she stood.

  In the intensity of her listening, shutting out the room, the darkness, the sound of the wind faint on the other side of the thick walls, Aaron appeared before her, his small face with the long eyelashes, his perfect mouth, his large hazel eyes. How she had kissed him and loved him and cared for him and whispered sweet sayings in his ear, and sung little songs to him. For years now she’d done these things every day, and he had not, not even once, smiled in a way she could be sure was for her, had not held out his arms to be lifted by her, had not pursed those perfect lips to kiss her cheek. Nor had he ever said “Mother” to her, nor “Mom,” nor “Mommy.” He was a blank wall, yes, and Graeme was right: on the other side there was only an empty room. Did that mean she should not love him?

  Now there was the muffled thump of feet striking the floor in unison, and over that sound, as it drew closer, she could hear a rhythmic, dull-metallic clink, clink, clink. First the abbot, then a dozen monks walking two by two, entered the dining hall through the door at the far end. They passed the coffee urns, the first row of long, scarred tables and the wooden chairs that lined it on each side. Immediately behind the abbot Christine’s student, Richard, followed. He was gowned like the other monks in a dark robe tied loosely at the waist with a cord. She was faintly shocked to see him. He was swinging a censer from which, with each clink, a thin stream of pale grey scented smoke rose, which spread toward her and backward so that the monks were partially obscured in a soft cloud, as if they were not yet fully materialized, or were on their way into dissolution. They glanced neither left nor right, chanting as they moved to one side of where Christine stood, the sound of the censer falling back against its chain, repeating itself in rhythm with their swaying forward movement.

  As the monks drew nearer, Christine saw there was a door hidden by shadows near where she stood that opened into an unknown part of the monastery, and that this was where the abbot was leading his procession. As they came abreast of her, the abbot turned, and with the edge of his hand made a sign of the cross, casting a blessing toward her.

  Then they were gone through the door, their voices fading into the muffled keen of the blizzard still raging outside.

  Keeping House

  Beth had been worrying about her daughter Janice for some time. Nothing unusual had happened, it was just something in her voice during their regular Sunday phone calls, a kind of tension tempered by sadness, so when Janice phoned on a Thursday, as Beth was finishing the breakfast dishes, she was less surprised than suddenly filled with foreboding.

  “Gerry and I are divorcing.” Beth couldn’t think of anything to say, and miscalculating, she sat down with a bump on one of her oak kitchen chairs. “I doubt you’re surprised, Mom,” Janice said. “You must have seen things weren’t working out.”

  “I am surprised,” Beth said, they hadn’t been married two full years. “I knew you haven’t been quite yourself, but I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”

  “We can’t talk to each other, we don’t want the same things, he seems to be going in some direction I can’t make sense of. I never expected this when we got married.” Confused, Beth wanted to ask if Gerald was abusive, or violent, or if he had a girlfriend, or—was Janice having an affair? Finally, she asked, “Is this—mutual?”

  “Yes!” Janice said loudly, and then more softly, “Yes,” again so that Beth could hear her relief, her desire to leave and go anywhere, now. “He’s a nice guy, Mom, but we can both see where this is leading. So we’
re going to bail out before we start to hate each other. Before we get all entangled …” In the unfinished sentence Beth saw Duncan turning his back on her, walking away from her and the car loaded with her belongings. Quickly, she said, “Do you need me to come? I’ll come right away—”

  “Oh, no,” Janice said. “I mean, I appreciate the thought, Mom, but really, I’m fine. Will you tell Dad for me?”

  Beth had been planning to bundle up and walk to the grocery store for milk and bread as soon as she finished the dishes. This was her regular morning exercise, marching briskly down the shovelled and well-scraped suburban sidewalks, breathing in the bracing winter air. Now, feeling a little strange, although she couldn’t have said just how, she poured herself the last cup of coffee, instead, and tried to come to terms with what she’d just heard.

  She suspected she was more upset than she ought to be, knowing, as she felt fairly sure she did, that Janice would be all right. She supposed this was because the news brought back memories of her own divorce twenty-six years ago now. Janice and Jeff, the children of her current marriage, were twenty-four and twenty-two. And maybe she was just a little bit angry with her daughter? And if so, why? she asked herself. Because—because—and she remembered how, after her own first marriage had broken up, she’d gone weeks that stretched into months with a pain in her chest that wouldn’t go away, that it had taken her years to admit was the literal pain of a broken heart, that—yes, it was true—she’d been close to committing suicide, that even now, today, she doubted she was fully recovered from what her divorce had done to her. And here was Janice, simply walking away, no harm done, no pain suffered. It did make her angry, and she had to laugh, rueful that at her age, her first marriage so far in the past, she still could be such a fool.

  She found she now craved her morning walk, and she went to the closet and pulled on her snowpants, her parka, and boots and left the house. Trudging down the sidewalk past the small bungalows that lined the street, she began to study them as if she hadn’t been passing them every day for years. Some were still decorated for Christmas even though it was two weeks past, and she realized now why Janice and Gerry hadn’t come home for it. At the corner was the pale blue house she could never see without an inward shudder.