A muttered “Christ” came from the pillow. I was making things worse, shredding his self-esteem by my frankness. I was being arrogant and insensitive. He took pride in being my provider, making me happy, but now I was throwing it all away as if of no consequence.
“The playoffs are this month,” he said.
“So bloody what?” I replied.
What was he thinking? I thought.
I started to pack, quietly, for both of us. There was not enough room for the new wardrobe and another suitcase was necessary. I’d get one tomorrow. I watched him closely. He was asleep. He tired so easily. Was it the remnants of the concussion combined with the stress of our altercation? I wondered. I should not have been so combative, but it was because now I loved him so much. Ma had been right—if you love, then the hurt begins. I went out to the balcony. Before me was the beauty of the Louvre and around me Paris winked. I longed to take a final lingering look at the city, but I could not leave him. The summer, a summer of intimacy and closeness, lay ahead. I would convince him not to return.
“I’ve packed for you,” I said the next morning.
“Thanks.”
There was silence all through breakfast, even while we purchased the extra suitcase and until we were settled in our first-class seats for the trip home. Finally I could stand it no longer. He was sitting looking straight ahead, his fair hair dipping over his forehead and his dark blue eyes looking into the distance. What did he see? Was it a crowded stadium? Did he hear the roar of the fans intermingled with the growling engine of our soon-to-depart plane?
I reached over and took his hand. “Let’s make up. I’ll stop. If I didn’t love you so much, I wouldn’t care.”
I had never told him I loved him before: it had always been his line. He squeezed my hand hard and started to smile, and the smile remained, a faint vestige of it, even when he dozed during the flight. Unlike Carl, I couldn’t sleep. Inside my head lurked the dark intruders of dementia and death. But I kept, and would keep, these thoughts to myself.
14
THE END OF SUMMER
THE NEW HOUSE WAS LARGE, stately, and only two streets north of Mutti’s bungalow. And there were four bathrooms. We took back a small mortgage, which would be paid off in six months from Carl’s hockey money. The house, down payment, and new furniture, shipped from the Art Shoppe in Toronto, finished off the shrinking signing bonus.
“I love the bathrooms. You do know I married you for hot water and a big tub and shower?”
He laughed. He was more relaxed since our Paris fight and my use of the word love on the plane. Perhaps, I thought, some things have to be said. I avoided voicing my concerns until late August, a week before he said he was leaving for training camp. I approached the subject tentatively, having already exhausted my efforts to get Mutti to intervene. She was worse than Carl.
“I don’t want us to fight,” I murmured.
My timing was good. We had made love and my skin smelled of him, a diffuse smell of soap and sweat. He had taken longer than usual and I felt drained and satiated but was still throbbing with the intensity of our shared climax. I rubbed his back and my hand was wet from his thin layer of sweat. Outside the open window of this warm August night the moon appeared tangled in the branches of a giant maple, and the air breathing through the window was rich with the ripe, sweet smell of the grasses of late summer.
“It’s just,” I continued, “I want you to know you’ve got options. They’re looking for a coach for the Junior hockey team and you’d be perfect. The kids would all think you were Jesus Christ incarnate and if that doesn’t move you we can go to Toronto together. You can go to community college and take a course in design, advertising, real estate sales, anything you like. We’d be together every day and make awesome steamy love every night, and I’d tutor you, just like in the old days.”
He was very still and I thought for a moment he was sleeping.
“Finished?” he asked briskly. “Didn’t we visit all this two months ago?”
“Would you consider going with me to Boston to see Dr. Folkes, to redo the tests?”
“No way. They’ll be checking me out at training camp. They have their own doctors.”
“But Dr. Folkes is famous . . . and independent.”
“End of story.”
“It’s never the end of the story.”
But there was no reply.
IN LATE AUGUST, Carl drove to the Toronto airport. I sat in front with Carl, and Mutti and Carl Sr. were in the back seat. I wished they had taken their own car as now he was leaving I was jealous of the time remaining and inwardly irritated by Mutti’s stream of upbeat comments meant to encourage everyone, especially me.
I looked at his profile, his hair tousled over his forehead where the pink scar still shone, the dark glasses, and the slight smile playing around his mouth. He was obviously happy—a mindless euphoria, I thought, trying not to think “suicidal idiot.” I took his hand and he easily navigated with one. He could have been a pilot—anything but a hockey player.
He would phone me every night, he promised, as we hugged our goodbyes. I would come down for the first game against the Penguins in October, and we would celebrate my twentieth birthday together. On hearing this, I buried my face in his neck and shook with worry.
“Sonja, this is not way you treat my son,” scolded Mutti, her mouth tightening into a rosy knot of disapproval. “He go to win games, not go to war. You make him feel bat.”
Not quite true, I thought, when I composed myself. Carl smiled, and when I whispered I loved him, his smile broadened. As I had learned after our week in Paris, Carl needed to be told. Loving glances were not enough.
“Don’t know what I’ll do without you,” he whispered.
“Nothing, I hope,” I whispered back and we both laughed.
Perhaps, I thought, Dr. Folkes was wrong and all will be well. My love has made me over-anxious and neurotic. Doctors make mistakes. In the back seat Mutti for once kept quiet and Carl Sr. slept. Next week I’d be back at university and moving to the new apartment, but nothing would be the same.
“MA, I WANT you to move in. No one will be here until Christmas. Just promise me you’ll smoke outside or, better, not at all.”
It was the day after Carl left and I was taking Ma for a final meal at the Sinclair, a hotel I now thought of with even greater affection because of my honeymoon night.
“I’ll keep paying the rent on your apartment, but it’ll be a break for you living in a house like ours and you’ll keep it safe.”
Ma nodded but appeared concerned. “So much money, living in one place and paying rent in another.”
“Not really, Ma. We may want the house back at any time. I tried to stop Carl from going. I didn’t want any more head injuries, but I couldn’t stop him.”
The waitress bought us two glasses of the house white. Ma looked at me thoughtfully. “I watch you, Sonja, together with Carl, and when you speak of him. I believe now you love him. Remember what I say before: sometimes things change, for better or worse. You different now, Sonja, not so high up, and I not say this ’cause I get money. You are a little more soft. Usually a woman get like this when she has baby, but with you, I believe it Carl.”
“He’s my baby, Ma.”
Ma looked into her wineglass in silence before saying anything. “It’s then when you care that you get hurt. That’s why at the beginning, I glad you not love him. Love open you up.”
I smiled at Ma, the Ukrainian philosopher cleaning woman, who, although she had money in the bank and no longer held her night job, kept working, “for independence.”
“Not much I can do about it, Ma: good sex, a new house, and a Paris wardrobe, it’ll do it every time.”
My flippant reply did not work and Ma didn’t return my smile. “It more than that, Sonja,” was all she said.
I WAS PLEASED with my second-year courses, especially the history of the novel and nineteenth-century poetry. I settled into the small a
partment in the Manulife Centre and spoke to Carl every night. “Things,” he said, his voice upbeat, “are going great.” Once his neck was stiff after an accidental brush against a buddy, but he took some Vicodin and the next day he was fine. I had worried for nothing. He had passed his ImPACT test and the team doctor had given him clearance. He missed me “somethin’ awful” and could not wait to see me for my birthday in October when I came to Boston to see them take on the Penguins.
I had been, I told myself, much too morbid. Things were going well, and for my birthday I’d have Carl.
At times out of loneliness I ate in the old cafeteria. Jo and Janet both said they were sorry to have missed the wedding. Jo was noticeably circumspect over Carl’s return to the Bruins, stating only that she hoped he had fully recovered.
Magda and Zoly were moving to Montreal, as Zoly had received a scholarship from McGill. Magda had given her notice, and had already secured a job at one of the better restaurants in Old Montreal, and Zoly was staying in residence. Greenley gave me a look of pure hatred, as if I were to blame for Magda’s leaving, when I went to pick up Zoly for our final hamburger and fries. He looked healthier, I thought, his face fuller, and Magda had purchased more sophisticated horn-rimmed glasses for him in place of the silver ones.
Edmond gave me a grin and a wink when I snaked my head around the kitchen door and asked me if I was considering re-applying for my old job, and a smiling Alistair was still drying dishes. Peter was gone and there was a younger replacement. It was rumoured he’d passed out in Allen Gardens and had been the victim of an untargeted killing, but no one really knew. No body had been found. The rumour probably came from the same “reliable source” that had assured Edmund of Greenley’s cyanide-killing of her husband.
“Carl’s playing hockey again,” Zoly said with enthusiasm as we settled ourselves in a booth at The Steak and Burger. He adored Carl, who had taken the time to talk to him at the wedding, and he had impressed his friends at Jarvis Collegiate with tales of their friendship.
“I wish I looked like Carl,” he told me.
“You look fine,” I assured him, “and I’m sure Carl would like to be you, going to McGill on a scholarship and heading for medicine. That’s what I’d be doing if I wasn’t such a moron at math.”
“Carl wouldn’t want to be anyone else,” he said with assurance. “Skating with the Bruins and having everyone cheer for you when you get a goal, what could be cooler than that?”
I looked at his large green eyes behind his new horn-rimmed glasses, and his sincere little face, and thought of how I’d miss him.
“I’ll miss you, Zoly, you know that. Good friends are hard to come by.”
“Do you miss Carl?”
“Yes, I miss him a lot.”
“You love him?”
“Yes, I love him a lot too.”
Zoly sighed, but then we smiled at each other.
“We should,” he said very seriously and softly, “try to be near people we love.”
THE WORLD HAD changed overnight with 9/11. I watched pictures of the crumbling towers and was horrified at the thought of those jumping to their deaths to avoid burning. For a short time it made me stop worrying about Carl, whose absence made me ache.
Then at the end of September I received a call from Ma.
“I go to doctor. Frau Helbig come visit and she want me to go see doctor. She say I look sick, and when I tell her I am tired and coughing blood, she take me that day to her doctor. He take picture and say I have mess in my chest.”
I felt my heart beating; it echoed in my ears and I could not breathe.
“Ma, you mean a mass in your lung, right?”
“Yes, doctor say it is in grade four.”
Ma was in the house smoking when I arrived that weekend.
“I can’t believe you’re still smoking.”
Ma sighed. “Sonja, if I knew things would turn so good, I tell you I would have stopped. Now it too late, so let me smoke.”
“MA’S GOT STAGE four cancer in both lungs and it’s metastasized to her liver, so it’s three to six months tops. There’s nothing they can do except make her comfortable near the end,” I sobbed to Carl by phone that night.
“Jesus, that’s awful, really awful. What is she, forty-eight? All those fuckin’ cigarettes. What’s wrong with some people? They never listen.”
Carl Helbig, aged twenty-two, back playing with the Bruins.
I was, I was convinced, surrounded by lunatics.
Ma’s illness filled me with aching grief. During the past year we had finally grown close and now Ma was dying, her lungs full of trees that had stretched their roots into her liver. I cried when I left to return to university that Sunday and then all the way back to Toronto.
“Don’t cry, Sonja,” said Ma, “this best year in my life because of you. I just wish I live long enough to see grandbabies.”
I WAS TO go to see Carl play in Boston on October 15, my birthday. Both Mutti and Ma insisted. “You must go,” they chorused together from Mutti’s kitchen. An odd couple, I thought. Ma, appreciative of Mutti’s, whom she now called Gertie’s, medical concern, and Mutti sympathetic to this dying shrunken little Ukrainian, the unlikely mother of Carl’s tall, clever wife.
I checked into my Boston hotel October 14 and immediately phoned Carl. “I’ll be there by seven,” he said, his voice eager and intense.
“Do you think . . . ?” I began.
“Didn’t hurt Joe Namath,” he replied. “Is this what they teach you at U of T?”
After my bath I didn’t even bother to dress, and when I responded to the assertive three knocks and saw him standing there, his smile and eyes shining at me, I threw myself into him with such force that he staggered.
“Careful. Joe Namath’s babes didn’t do that.” But his smile remained.
I helped him undress, my hands trembling. It had been two months and I longed for him, for his body, his smell, his hardness, opening me up and plunging me into crying oblivion. When we had finished, I sat on the bed beside him, running my fingers through the now-clipped brush of hair and touching the still-obvious pink scar with tentative fingers.
“You’ll be careful?”
“That’s such a stupid thing for a girl like you to say. I can’t be careful, then I’d be no good to them. They don’t pay me the big bucks to be careful. You know I been playin’ the game for fifteen years and I always played through the pain, and there were a lotta hits, dozens, and I never gave in, not till the one last February when I couldn’t stand. I was ‘a warrior,’ remember, that’s what my first coach called me.”
He had only spoken to me of the game once before, that afternoon by the lake, when he’d spoken of playing through the pain, which I supposed were minor or sub-concussions, and I felt a shadow pass over my heart.
“Perhaps,” I said, my voice high but soft, feigning a lightness I did not feel, “now that we’re together you could be less of a warrior and just leave some of that to the bedroom, and promise me if you feel pain, you’ll stop.”
“Shouldn’t have even mentioned it,” he replied and rubbed my arm, then carefully lifted one of my breasts. “Did anyone ever tell you you’ve got great breasts?”
“Yes, you that first night, when you weighed them in both hands, comparing them to all the implants you’d run into.”
“I know, I remember. I remember everything about that night. I even remember Paris and our fight in the chocolate bar.”
He left after kissing me and giving me the special ticket for the section where the players’ families sat. We would have a late dinner the next night to celebrate my birthday. I got dressed and left the hotel in search of a coffee shop. I didn’t want to eat dinner alone in a strange city.
Outside it was dark and the grounds of the Boston Common were rich with clusters of thick trees, their leaves starting to rust at the edges. In the sky the moon, its grey scar tainting its silver brightness, seemed far away, as was the scattering of faint gem-lik
e stars, but I directed my prayer toward them.
“God, I want you to take care of Carl. Please, God.”
It was not the general diffuse instruction sent out casually in the now abandoned Greek Orthodox Church I had visited with Ma in Davenport, and that had been followed by my plagiarist detection, threatened expulsion, and loss of scholarship. This prayer was specific, precise, and focused. It gave God little choice. He was to render protection to Carl, the warrior who had played through pain too often.
It was after nine and there was only one couple in the coffee house.
“A toasted tomato and bacon on whole wheat, cut the mayo, and a glass of cranberry juice.”
The waitress was a thin, nervous girl, with the name tag “Lucille” pinned to her uniform. So not a Lucille, I thought. Her mother must have watched I Love Lucy reruns in the eighties. A Margaret or Victoria would be more appropriate. She was probably a student at Boston University who needed the money.
Lucille carefully placed the sandwich on the wooden table with its plastic tablemat and then the cranberry juice, but she moved too abruptly and the glass of juice tipped over, spilled over the table, and dripped cold over my lap and jeans.
“Sorry,” said a flustered Lucille, mopping up the maroon liquid. “They just hired me. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it.”
“It’s all right,” I said, thinking of my days at Matheson’s, watching the red liquid drip from the table and the growing stain on my jeans.
On the way back to my room I picked up the Boston Herald and checked the sports section. In a small column on the second page was the headline “Helbig Returns to Bruins.”
It merely mentioned the February concussion, the fact that Carl had been a top scorer, and that on that night he was the First Star Selection and was in line to be Rookie of the Year except for the forced absence due to the concussion.
Sonja & Carl Page 17