Roost

by Ali Bryan

  The kids play musical beds moving from one room to the next. They swap sleeping bags and positions. No one wins. Emma sleeps beside me in my own bed. A strange and wriggly bedfellow.

  29

  In the morning I do a head count. Joan turns on The Littlest Hobo. All the kids watch, mesmerized, from the table where I dispense four bowls of cereal like it’s summer camp.

  Dan, looking refreshed, arrives to pick them up just before 10:00 a.m. He brings me a 7-Eleven coffee that smells nutty. I take a sip from my coffee, standing in the driveway, watching my brother pack his kids in the car. He takes the steering wheel and adjusts things on the dash the way he did in the makeshift cars we drove as kids. Opening vents, turning dials, depressing buttons. Cars made from empty appliance boxes. The broken picnic table. Two stools in the sandbox. He backs down the driveway and disappears up the street.

  Joan stands an inch from the TV screen, fascinated by a little girl in a wheelchair ministering to a man in blue pajamas. He is also in a wheelchair, newly paralyzed. Quadriplegic and in denial. Wes is less enthusiastic. He pays little attention until the man starts hollering and the dog mysteriously arrives at the hospital.

  Joan attacks the carpet with my round hairbrush.

  “Don’t use that on the carpet,” I say. “That’s dirty.”

  She tells me to sit down so she can brush my hair. A male nurse enters the hospital room and tells the patient he’s going swimming. The patient hollers, “No!”

  “Is he going to kill him?” Wes asks.

  I try to explain the story as the nurse swoops up the bald man, places him in the chair, and wheels him to the pool where the girl waits in a bathing cap that is red like my mother’s.

  “Is she going to kill him?” Wes asks, hopeful.

  “No. No one is going to kill him. That hurts, Joan.” I massage the top of my head where my hair has been yanked. “Brush it gently.”

  She takes offense, brushes harder, and then says, “It just an accident.”

  By the end of his swim, the man has accepted his disability. Joan manages to get this and stops brushing to clap.

  “What’s happening now?” Wes asks as the man leaves the hospital in his wheelchair.

  “He’s off-roading,” I reply.

  “Where he going?” Joan asks.

  “I don’t know, you’ll have to watch.”

  He comes upon his child companion who has somehow managed to fall out of her own wheelchair and down an embankment. She looks like I did as a child. Long braids, plaid dress, dirty face.

  “Is she dead?” Wes asks.

  I tell him she’s probably only unconscious and go on to explain what that is. “It’s sort of like she’s sleeping.”

  “Then where’s her tent?”

  “She’s not camping. She fell out of her chair.”

  In a courageous effort, the man in the blue pajamas throws himself out of his chair and hurls himself down the hill. Seconds later the dog arrives and runs for help.

  “Dog!” Joan exclaims.

  “Yes. He’s going to save them.”

  Joan comes around in front of me. Picks up a stray peanut off the floor and eats it. I pat the top of my head. The brush is attached to it. Sitting an inch off my scalp. I tug at it gently.

  “Wes, see if you can take this brush out of my hair.”

  “Where did that dog go?”

  “Wes, try and unravel this.”

  He stares at me blankly. “Is he going to get a doctor?”

  “Yes, now see if you can get this out.”

  My face starts to get hot.

  “How does the dog know where to find a doctor?”

  “Because he’s magic.”

  In the bathroom I stare at the bird’s nest on the top of my head. I try and manoeuvre the brush forward so I might be able to unravel some of the hair but it’s a matted mess. I hear screaming from the living room and return to find Joan straddling Wes.

  “She bit me!”

  “Joan! Get off your brother right now.” The brush sways a bit as I stomp across the room. Joan wraps her arms tight around Wes’s neck and he flails his legs and tries to buck her off. I hoist her up by the waist but she bends backwards and jabs her finger into my eye. I put her on the couch and cover my face. The theme song from The Littlest Hobo plays.

  “I didn’t see how they got saved!” Wes cries.

  Joan escapes down the hall, her wide feet flapping loudly against the laminate. I can’t open my eye. I am now a Cyclops sporting a bouffant. A steady stream of tears trickles down my face from the poked eye. I order Wes to get my phone.

  “Who are you calling?” Wes whines.

  “I need to find a babysitter.”

  “Can you tell Cathy?” Joan asks.

  “Go back to your room,” I yell. “Look at Mommy’s eye and look at the bite mark on your brother’s cheek.”

  Wes picks up my phone. “Can I play Angry Birds?”

  “No.” I take the phone from Wes and call my father. It’s nearly an hour before he’s at my house. When he arrives, he braces himself against the wall and pulls off his loafers with a grunt. He’s not wearing socks. I don’t look at his toenails in case they are too long, like his hair.

  My dad stands facing me. “Can you open it?” he asks, tilting my chin up to examine my eye.

  “No,” I wince. “It stings.”

  He looks at the brush, puzzled. “Yep, I think you should go in.”

  I sigh and gather my belongings. “Be good for Grandpa,” I caution.

  I return home from the emergency room well after the kids’ bedtime with a maxi pad taped over my left eye and the brush still attached to my head, smelling like hospital. I pull off my sweatshirt and dump it in the hall. My father sits at the kitchen table, hovering over a bowl, milk dripping from his chin.

  “Were the kids okay?” I ask, peeking into Wes’s room.

  “They’re in your room. They wanted to sleep in your bed.” Dad points at the brush. “They couldn’t get that out?”

  “Unfortunately, no. They remove bullets, not brushes.” I sit beside him.

  He reaches over and gives the brush a little tug. “Where’s your mother when you need her? I’ll give it a try.”

  He begins pulling and unraveling my hair from the brush, a few strands at a time. I bite my lip. It reminds me of when my mom French-braided my hair. For such a mild-mannered woman she was an aggressive braider.

  “Ouch!”

  “Sorry,” my father apologizes, “it’s almost out.”

  I cringe under the strain, look down at the floor. My father’s toenails are impossibly long. Yellowed claws. He hands me the brush.

  “Dad, you need to cut your toenails.” He studies his feet while I massage the top of my head feeling for bald spots. “When’s the last time you cut them?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know where your mom keeps the clippers.”

  When I go to the bathroom to retrieve the steel clippers from under the sink, I glance in the mirror and see the small goatee on top of my head.

  Returning to the kitchen, I hand the clippers to my father. “Here, you need to cut them.”

  He rolls up his pant legs and begins snapping off his nails with the clippers held backwards.

  “Hold them the other way.”

  He flips them over and works on his big toe, cutting the nail into the shape of an arrowhead and proceeding to the next.

  “Whoa, back up. You need to fix that.” I can’t tell if it’s inexperience or age. His eyes indicate a bit of both. “Here, let me do it.”

  I pull up a chair across from him and rest his foot on the edge between my legs. His foot is surprisingly soft. There’s a sprig of grey curls on his big toe. I trim the big toenail first then move on to the others, methodical in my execution. My father pays close attention. I hand him the clippers.

  “You have to cut them regularly. Okay?”

  He nods. “Yes, I will do that.”

  He rises from his chair, a
nd pats me, once, on the shoulder. Then he heads into the entryway, retrieves his coat from the floor, slips into his unlaced loafers, and heads out the front door.

  “Love you,” I call after him. “Call me when you get home so I know you got there safe.”

  After the front door closes behind him, I go straight to the sink and wash my hands. When I look down I still see my father’s feet. His thick nails, crooked metatarsi, raised veins. I gag and rinse. My left eye itches beneath the patch and I attempt to rub it with my shoulder. My mother told me that Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. I wonder if he cut their nails too. I think Mom did both for my dad.

  After forty minutes, I phone Dad. “You were supposed to call when you got home.”

  “Sorry. Let me turn down the music.”

  “I wanted to know you got home safe.”

  “Yes, yes.” He yawns. “I’m so tired.”

  “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “What time is it?”

  I look at the clock. “Twenty after ten. When do you normally go to bed?”

  “I often fall asleep in my chair.”

  “That’s probably not good for your neck.”

  “You’re probably right. Your mother would make sure I came to bed before then.”

  “From now on you should go when you’re tired. You need a good night’s sleep.”

  He yawns again. “I should have paid more attention. I didn’t know she was going to die.”

  “I know.”

  “Now I don’t know when I’m supposed to go to bed or how often I should see the dentist. And the mail. What of it do I toss? What am I allowed to keep?”

  “Toss the flyers.”

  “But your mom loved the flyers.”

  “Then keep them until the next ones come.”

  We both say nothing for a moment, but stay on the line. I hear him adjust his weight in his chair. The muffled warble of old springs.

  “Dad,” I say, “it’s time to go to bed.”

  30

  Glen comes for dinner Wednesday night before taking Wes to his Beavers’ meeting. I make spaghetti and garlic bread. Joan’s face turns orange from the sauce.

  “So what did you say happened?”

  “Joan jabbed me with her nail.”

  He leans over the table and examines my eye. He’s wearing cologne.

  “Is it better? It looks better.”

  “I took the patch off yesterday. Listen, I need you to take the kids for a few days in April during the workweek. Can you do that?”

  “I have to check my schedule. Why?”

  “Because I have to go to Calgary for training.”

  Joan eats with her hands. “Daddy, you know dis movie called Wonka —”

  I interrupt, “Wipe your chin.”

  “I do know Willy Wonka,” Glen says.

  “So can you?” I ask him.

  “Probably. You have to go all the way to Calgary for training?”

  “The regional one was in October.”

  “When your mom …”

  “Died!” Wes finishes.

  We both look at our son.

  “Yes. When Grandma died.”

  Glen gives me a sympathetic look and wipes Joan’s face with a napkin.

  “Dere’s dis boy. He Charlie,” she says.

  “I know,” Glen responds, taking another piece of garlic bread. “You must like that movie.”

  Joan says, “Me love it,” and attempts to explain the plot. “He has to find go-den ticket and dere’s dis big boo-berry.”

  “I used to watch it when I was young,” I tell her.

  She looks at me temporarily then resumes gazing at her father.

  I get up and clear the table and put the Parmesan cheese in the freezer by accident, noticing that half a dozen Freezies I bought in the summer have leaked and re-frozen to the side door.

  I retrieve Wes’s Beavers uniform from the back of his door. The pants look too short. The necktie is cartoonish and makes me think of Willy Wonka. Specifically the ugly kid who plays Charlie. There is something mildly gross about him and his house with all the old people lying in their beds with rickets or dysentery or whatever it is that has made them bedridden. And Grandpa Joe with his dirty Einstein hair, and the way he dances when they find the golden ticket. I want to punch him in the throat.

  “Wes, come get your uniform on,” I call.

  “I can help him with it,” Glen volunteers, and both he and Wes join me in Wes’s bedroom.

  “Arms up,” he says, pulling Wes’s shirt over his head. A lump of ground beef plops to the floor. Glen picks it up with a Kleenex. I gather dirty clothes strewn about Wes’s room and throw them in a laundry basket. My knees make an audible crack when I bend down.

  “You should get going,” I suggest to Glen.

  He checks his watch and hurries Wes along.

  When I open the front door for them, the cold enters. I shiver and kiss Wes on both cheeks and tell him to listen to his Beavers’ leader.

  “Have fun.”

  Back in the kitchen, I clear the table, stepping over the railway tracks Joan has assembled on the floor. She strings together a row of Thomas trains and pushes them along quietly. She drives over my foot with Diesel 10.

  “What do you want to do?” I ask her.

  She looks up at me with her dark grey eyes and her pink cheeks and then makes a pig nose.

  “Charming,” I say. “Shall we have a bath?”

  She nods.

  I fill the bath, strip her down, and plunk her in the tub.

  “Watch dis,” she says, squirting a whale bath toy.

  I do watch. I also sit on the side of the tub and read texts from Cathy. She is stuck at the shop. One of her mechanics called in sick. She asks about the kids.

  I text, Kids are good. Wes is at Beavers with Glen. Just bathing Joan.

  “Look Mommy,” Joan says.

  I tell her “just a second,” and check my email.

  “Mommy!” She tugs on my arm.

  “Don’t, Joan. You’re getting water on my phone.”

  Cathy replies, Sportchek has buy one get fifty percent off right now on sneakers.

  I begin to text her back but Joan starts choking on bath water she is drinking from a plastic tugboat. I gently thump the top of her back. “Don’t drink that.”

  I use the last of the watermelon shampoo to wash my girl’s hair and remember when she had none. It seems like yesterday she was hairless and curious and blithe and I was captivated by her blitheness. Now she bites people and jabs eyeballs with her fingernail and on a bad day I’ve called her an asshole in my head. I really think that’s when being a parent is most difficult. Not the sleepless nights or the fits at the grocery store or the brushes stuck to your head, but when your child does something an asshole would and you actually think it. Asshole. You think it and you feel it and then you feel sick, like you’ve just seen a cat get hit by a car, because when you first held her in the hospital and she weighed five pounds and she gazed in your eyes and you fell in love, did you ever imagine you would one day think she was an asshole?

  Kneeling, I wrap Joan tight in her towel. The blue one, because it’s her favourite colour. The bath mat is damp. I hug her and rock her in the steamy bathroom, feeling guilty, and notice my toothbrush has fallen beside the toilet.

  31

  Winter bows out with little pomp, no grand finale. I only notice its absence when I pull into Sobeys and the snowplow mountain is missing. Left in its place is a pile of displaced gravel my children insist on rifling through. It is spring. My mother has been gone for five months, but there are distractions: fat lilac bushes, third birthdays, and a new toaster oven. And behind the backyard porch light, a nest of baby robins. Heavy-headed, helpless, hungry. We watched them hatch from the back door. Wes on a stool, Joan on my shoulders.

  Our first family gathering since Christmas is the last Sunday in March. It’s also my first look at my sister-in-law since her breakdown. When we arrive Al
lison-Jean opens the door before I have a chance to knock. She looks skinnier than normal, but she’s still big. She holds the door open and helps my kids remove their shoes.

  “Hannah and Liam are downstairs,” she says. “We just put on Toy Story 3.”

  “Toy Story 3 is for babies,” Wes whines.

  “You’re four, Wes. It’s fine,” I tell him. I hang my coat on one of the guest hooks beside the hall closet. “Go down and play. Allison, you look great.”

  “Uh, thanks,” she mumbles on her way to the kitchen.

  “Claudia!” my dad calls from the living room. He’s wearing a white terry cloth headband with a navy stripe.

  “Hey, Dad. Are you wearing a headband?”

  “We’re playing tennis, aren’t we?” he says with his arms outstretched.

  I hug him and look at the remote wrapped around his wrist. “Wii tennis.”

  “Exactly.” He adjusts the headband. “Keeps the hair out of my eyes.”

  My brother doesn’t greet me. He fiddles with one of several remotes until the Wii screen appears.

  “Who’s ready to play?”

  Allison-Jean returns from the kitchen with a bowl of Bits & Bites, which I decline because they have Shreddies in them. Cereal should be doused with brown sugar. Not salt pellets and spicy dust.

  “You’re first, Dad,” Dan says, passing him a Wii remote. “We’re bowling.”

  “I thought we were playing tennis?” Dad says, adjusting the remote around his wrist. But he quickly switches gears, circles his arms as though warming up, and then says, “Here we go,” and takes his turn. He waits in anticipation then yells, “Sttrrriiike!” the way an umpire would call it. He hands me the remote and claps for himself. “Beat that, Claud,” he adds.

  I bowl a spare and pass my remote to Allison-Jean. Looking around the room, I observe that her house does not look like it has been through post-partum depression. The books are still shelved by colour and it smells like Michaels art store.

  Allison-Jean stares at the round avatar ready to bowl on the screen. “Is that supposed to be me?” she asks. “Because I look enormous.”

  “No,” Dan says. “You don’t have a Mii.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you have to go in and make one.”