The Better Mother

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  A minute later, he hears the sound of something crashing to the floor, the unmistakeable rush of air on his face that means something has been disturbed. Something has gone wrong.

  He stands up and steadies himself on the sliding glass door. As he makes his way into the hall, he sees Edwin crouching, his hands sweeping up the photographs that have spilled over the floor. Half of them sit in a puddle of red wine, their edges curling with moisture. A black box lies on its side, leaning against the bookcase.

  “I’m sorry, Danny,” Edwin starts, picking up a print and shaking it, sending droplets of wine flying through the hall and onto the walls. “I was putting that stripper photo away and I knocked the whole box over. I dropped my glass too. I’m sorry. Really.”

  Danny stares. All those prints, tinged red, dotted with dust from the floor that will stick to their surfaces and never come off. He’ll have to buy more paper, develop them all over again. He rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand and closes his eyes. It’s red underneath his lids, except for the bright white starbursts that explode one after another.

  Edwin’s voice again: “I can help you reprint them. I mean, I don’t know how to do it, but you just have to tell me once. I’m a fast learner.”

  When Danny opens his eyes, Edwin is standing up, the empty black box in his hand. All these years, and Edwin hasn’t magically learned subtlety or grown any thinner; he has only adjusted his clothes and transformed his fat into muscle. But in all the essential ways, he is the same boy with the silly grin who would never leave Danny alone, whose constant presence chased away all his other teenaged friends, who never understood when he wasn’t wanted. Who now greets disease and death and love and dancing with martinis and silk shirts. Who never knows when it’s time to stop.

  “Danny? Please say something.”

  Danny slaps the wall with his right hand. “Shut up! Aren’t you ever quiet?”

  Edwin takes a step backward, not smiling for once.

  “You ruin everything,” Danny continues. “People are dying and all you can do is get drunk and mess up my apartment. I hate you! Do you understand?”

  “Calm down. You need some sleep, that’s all. I’ll leave now.” Edwin turns and squints toward the front door, his eyes searching the hall for his shoes.

  Danny reaches out and pushes Edwin on the back of the shoulder, propelling him forward. Before Edwin can say anything or even turn around, Danny has pushed him again, so hard that his face is crushed against the door. Quickly, Danny punches him in the back of his head. Danny’s fist is pulled back, ready to hit Edwin again, when he hears him whimpering. A quiet, subconscious whimper, one that isn’t even a cry for help, only the audible expression of pain. Danny punches the door to the left of Edwin’s face.

  Danny wants to crawl into bed with his throbbing hand and breathe in the air through the open window. But he stands, inches away from Edwin’s hunched body, clenching and unclenching his right fist.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Edwin whispers, his face still mashed against the door.

  “I don’t know,” he says, because there is no way of explaining his confusion, his fear of what lies underneath.

  Slowly, Edwin turns around, and Danny can see the trail of tears on his cheeks, the snot now glistening on his upper lip. “I’m going to leave,” he says quietly. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” And he turns the doorknob and walks down the hallway, one hand on the wall, the other wiping his face.

  Danny walks back to the balcony and lies down. He rests his cheek against the concrete and briefly wonders if the tiny embedded pebbles will somehow burrow themselves into his face, appearing to others to be the pits and scars from teen-aged acne or chicken pox. It might be a relief, he thinks, to carry your marks on the outside, to be identified by sight as a dentist or a pianist or a man who loves men, or, more specifically, loves one man who is dying. Then there would be no confusion, and those who might shun you would do so from the very beginning and you could walk through life without any surprises, knowing for certain who hates you or loves you. He feels his cheek beginning to settle into a dimple in the balcony floor. His left hand grips the railing but he is too drunk to pound on the wrought-iron bars, or to even wonder at himself, lying here like this, bruises starting to flower blue and yellow on his knuckles.

  Chinatown is a place Danny avoids. Elements from his past hide in alleys and doorways, emerging silently when he walks by. They watch him with eyes full of reproach, frowning at his well-dressed self with his right hand wrapped in white bandages. In the alley behind the butcher shop are his father’s high-school friends, sitting on overturned wooden crates, smoking, reliving their days as teenaged boys who were only starting to feel the crush of expectations they never met. On the stoop of the single-room hotel, a little girl with faded pedal-pushers clutches a blond-haired doll, eyeing the sweet red-bean buns in the bakery across the street. In the window of the busy noodle house on Keefer, a woman, her face so fallen and lined that she appears to be aching for sleep, mops the linoleum floor with dirty water.

  But he can’t avoid the neighbourhood forever. A bride he has been working with told him last week that she might want to have her photographs taken in Chinatown. She smiled when she mentioned it, her white teeth perfectly straight, her chin resting on her hands. “Could you take some test shots down there first, so I can see how it’ll look on film? What I want is all that atmosphere, but I’m afraid it’ll look too dingy,” she said, and patted her smooth brown hair.

  He walks up and down the sidewalks, his camera around his neck. When he’s a block away from the curio shop, he crosses the street and peers past the parked and speeding cars, the old women with their wheeled carts and knitted caps. Through the window, he can barely make out his father standing by the cash register, talking to another man his age, who is leaning against the glass display case. As Danny creeps from one parking meter to another, the other man leaves, squints at the bright light outside and turns into the alley. It is Doug’s cousin Uncle Kwan, or, as his patients know him, Dr. Lim.

  Uncle Kwan. Beautiful wife. Big house in South Cambie. Vacations in Hawaii and California. And that big blue Cadillac.

  Doug walks out into the sunshine, watches as the Cadillac eases out of the alley and drives slowly toward downtown, the top of Uncle Kwan’s bald head visible above the seat. Doug’s shoulders are hunched, and his hands hang loose at his sides, like stray threads dangling from a poorly sewn seam. The drooping of his head points to the years of his life wasted on racing and girls and late-night poker, a time that led to this current life of saving, always saving, rearranging cheap painted vases and bamboo placemats. Danny feels burdened with this flash, this sudden understanding. He stumbles down the street and into a parking lot, where he leans against a car and closes his eyes against the sunlight.

  So much easier, he thinks, to always know my father as only a father. He rests his hands on his camera, feels the coolness of metal and plastic, the soothing solidity of the lens, the body, even the strap. He remembers the request for test shots, opens his eyes, and continues walking, briefly wondering if disappointment runs in families.

  Danny parks the car outside his studio and steps out onto the sidewalk. Even though autumn is inching closer and closer, the early evening is still thick with heat, and he wipes his forehead with the back of his bandaged hand. A skinny man wrapped in a dark grey overcoat crouches to the side of the front door. As usual, Danny reaches into his pocket for spare change.

  The man looks up and brushes the hair away from his forehead. It’s Frank, standing up creakily, shivering even as he steps into the sunshine.

  Danny rushes forward. “Are you all right? What are you doing here?”

  Frank points a finger in Danny’s face, jabbing at the air as forcefully as he can. “You told Cindy, didn’t you.”

  “About what?” But he already knows.

  “About me being sick, you moron. She freaked out and told the branch manager, who told the head o
ffice. They’ve forced me to quit, Danny.” A dry, rattling cough emerges from his throat.

  “I’m sorry, Frank. I didn’t think. I didn’t know she was going to do that.”

  Frank wavers in place, and Danny puts out an arm to steady him. Frank tries to shake him off, but Danny holds his elbow tightly.

  “She wouldn’t even look at me when I was leaving. Not one look.”

  Frank begins to crumple in Danny’s arms; his knees buckle and he doubles over at the waist, his head falling forward. Danny pulls and hoists and manages to half carry, half drag Frank into the studio. He settles him in a chair and kneels on the floor in front of him, rubbing his bony hands in his own. Frank’s hands are papery, the skin hardly like skin.

  “The doctor said one more month. I have infections I’ve never even heard of.”

  Danny can’t see anymore. Tears and snot drip down his face, onto the collar of his shirt.

  “My mother wants me to move back in with her and Dad. I suppose I’ll have to. What else is there to do?”

  Danny’s head pounds, one sickening thud after another. Frank leans forward and rests his forehead on Danny’s shoulder, his back curved like a comma. Light floods through the window and Danny looks up, squinting until he can see the strange, ghostly outline of the sun itself. His eyes burn.

  “I’ll take care of you, Frank. We’ll go back to your place and I won’t leave you. I promise.”

  The silence is tangible. Danny imagines it like snow: white, cooling, not quite weightless. He feels Frank’s body relax until he is like a cloth doll—limp, curled into Danny’s embrace. He might be asleep, or so relieved of tension that he just appears to be. It doesn’t matter as long as Danny can hold him up, their two selves so complementary it’s hard to know whose body is whose.

  The days begin quietly. Danny wakes first and kicks the covers off the couch where he has been sleeping. The light has been changing every day, growing thinner as September approaches and the days grow shorter. From the front window, Danny has been watching the roses in the front garden fade, dry and eventually float off into the wind, petal by petal. The sunsets, when you can see them at all through the smog, have grown streaky. Light bounces off the undersides of clouds well after the sun has disappeared behind the other apartment buildings to the west. Squirrels skitter by, acorns in their mouths, dodging the speeding cars. Every evening, Danny sniffs, imagining he can smell rain in the air, despite the continuing heat.

  Frank coughs himself awake, and Danny hurries in to rub his back and prop him up while he sips from a glass of lukewarm water. Danny often feels there are no words to describe the evolution of Frank’s cough, only that he is afraid Frank will one day cough up both lungs on the quilt and that they will lie there, raw-red and covered in lesions, while the two of them look on, unable to tear their eyes away.

  They eat oatmeal and applesauce for breakfast as they listen to folk singers on the radio. Danny scrambles eggs with cheese for Frank as well, for the extra calories. Sometimes, Frank throws up at the table and then cries, saying, “I’m so sorry.”

  Once a week, Danny wraps Frank in sweaters and they take a cab to the hospital, where a doctor and a nurse listen to his heartbeat, ask him questions with lines of pity creeping across their faces. For a while, they were giving him chemotherapy injections, but these only made Frank sicker, so they stopped, and now they talk about making him comfortable and his quality of life. Danny knows these are code words for others that remain unspoken, others that, if uttered, would usher in a whole new feeling of finality, of waiting for the end. No one mentions AIDS.

  Afterward, Frank’s parents meet them at the café down the street. They are almost always there first, the sleeves of his mother’s cardigan pulled down over her small, spotted hands. His father hunches over a hot cup of coffee, staring at an untouched Danish in front of him. He is quiet and only nods when Danny and Frank arrive, whereas she talks quickly, jumping from one topic to another, repeating what she’s heard on the news.

  “Did you know that these young people are trying to stop the seal hunt in Newfoundland? Baby seals, Frankie, with those big dark eyes, being clubbed to death. I can’t bear to think of it.”

  She strokes Frank’s hands across the table, inhales and exhales like a mouse catching its breath. Her eyes watch Frank as he sips his apple juice, search his face and neck for any change from the week before. While the rest of her jumps and flits, her eyes are grave and observant, taking in every line, every stray hair on her son’s head.

  Frank’s father passes him a lottery ticket, saying in his low voice, “You never know when you might get lucky,” before falling silent again, his thick fingers plucking invisible crumbs off the table and dropping them onto a paper napkin.

  When they part on the sidewalk outside the café, Frank’s mother holds his face in both her hands and smiles before linking arms with her husband and walking back to their car. Danny can hear the swish of her pants, the squeak of his clean white runners.

  Last time, before they turned away, Frank’s father put his hand on Danny’s shoulder and murmured, “That’s my boy, you know. I pray for him every day.”

  In the afternoons, Frank naps, and Danny returns to his own apartment to gather the mail and listen to the messages on his newly acquired answering machine. He shrugs at the urgency in people’s voices, the shrillness in the messages.

  “I need you to confirm, Danny. My wedding is in two weeks.”

  “I’ve been calling and calling. Where are you? Mom is worried.”

  “Are the prints done yet? I’ve been waiting for a long time.”

  “Call me. I know you’re sorry. It didn’t really hurt anyway.”

  “Danny? It’s Val. We should talk.”

  When he returns to Frank’s apartment, he lets himself in and creeps through the hallway in his socks. He watches Frank breathe, always slowly and sometimes erratically. He sleeps with both hands under his cheek and his mouth open, as if reciting a silent and sideways prayer. Danny sees the bones in his shoulders through the blankets and mentally calculates his dwindling weight. 152. 147. 136. Sometimes he wonders how much skin and bones and barely functioning organs weigh, thinking that Frank can’t grow any lighter. But he does.

  Usually, it’s soup for dinner and a game of Scrabble before Danny helps Frank into the bathtub. He washes him carefully, scrubbing gently between all the wrinkles, every jutting bone. He dries him with a fluffy towel and rubs baby oil over his skin, over the rashes and Kaposi’s sarcoma spots, over the boils that seem to multiply daily. Slowly, Danny buttons up Frank’s flannel pyjamas and then they lie in bed together, Danny’s head resting on the wall as he reads out loud from the pile of library books on the floor. Frank stares at him, his eyes big in his thin face, chuckling when Danny reads something funny from his favourite comic-strip collection, tearing up a little at the sad parts in an old Russian novel. Eventually, he falls asleep, and Danny pulls the covers up and shuts the bedroom door behind him. He drinks tea in front of the television until midnight, when he undresses and lies down on the couch. In the morning, he can never remember if he’s been dreaming or not, and this comforts him. He wakes with no trace of the night clinging to his face or body, and he can be satisfied with the morning and the long list of tasks he knows he will complete. After all, for once in his life he is doing exactly what he’s supposed to.

  THE MORNING

  1982

  There is so much that Danny could say that would be misunderstood and hurtful. He putters around Frank’s apartment, answers his phone when he is asleep, massages his bony feet, which feel like bags of stones. Danny barely looks at himself in the mirror, seeing only the medicine cabinet behind the glass when he brushes his teeth.

  If he could, he would say, “This apartment is so small. It’s only you and me here.” But he knows that if he were to ever say, “I need to get out,” Frank would assume that Danny wanted to leave him to his illness and would tell him to go away forever before he cou
ld even explain. Danny longs to walk through the city, hear the truncated conversations of people huddled under awnings in the August heat, smell the grease through the back doors of restaurants, step carefully around the piles of goose shit dotting the lawns at English Bay.

  Tonight, Frank sleeps on his back, a pillow behind his head and another under his knees. The apartment is clean. The laundry is folded and tucked into drawers. The doctors told Danny that everything must be washed regularly so Frank is kept away from opportunistic bacteria that could burrow their way into his skin and blood, could travel through his veins to every organ and every bone until the end products of their journey emerge on the surface as pus or abscesses. The hot-water bottle at Frank’s feet will stay warm for another two hours, and yet Danny feels that he can’t leave. What if he’s out and the iron is still plugged in, or Frank reaches for the bucket beside the bed and it’s six inches out of reach? Before he can dwell on all these possibilities, he slips on his shoes and leaves.

  For the first time this summer, he feels a wash of cool air down the collar of his shirt. He walks around the perimeter of English Bay, sees two figures huddled in sleeping bags, the tops of their heads resting against a log. He wonders if they’re in love or simply sleeping together for protection.

  He continues up Davie Street, feeling the soles of his tan loafers sticking to the layers of grime and gum coating the sidewalk. Apartment buildings rise on the left and right. A bus rolls past, rumbling and snapping; Danny catches the face of a young girl through the window, her blond hair held away from her face with a barrette, her eyes flitting from tree to building to street sign. The street kids turn their faces away when he walks past and disappear into doorways and behind shrubs. He turns left on Granville, passes the pawnbrokers and sex shops before turning right into an alley. There, the same sign with the crooked letters, the same promise of the best girls in town!