by Joan Thomas
Sylvie scoots over to make room and their eyes briefly meet. Liz turns back to the wall and reaches to fill another nick. All these marks, she thinks, from the careless way we swing the chairs around. My mother crocheted little booties for her dining room chairs, to avoid exactly this sort of damage. Oh, and marks on her hardwood floor. She smoothes the plaster with deft cross-strokes, and her mind drifts to dinner. To the snow peas in the fridge and the tofu in the freezer. She’ll make a stir fry. No, not a good idea to turn on the stove – they’ll order from The Bangkok. And tomorrow or the day after, she’ll drive to Western Paint and pick up colour chips. She’ll ask for a green product. To please Sylvie, who’s still on the floor in the archway, hugging her knees, deep in thought.
Though Sylvie is not thinking, exactly. She’s back to listening for her baby. At five this morning, she woke up when somewhere, in a crib in a stranger’s house, the baby started crying for her morning feed. It was around six by the time she let herself fall back to sleep. I made myself stay awake for my baby, she explains to the nurse, who’s standing at the counter in the nursing station in her bubblegum Crocs, counting pills. The nurse looks up with those knowing little eyes. Get a grip, she says.
16
Spontaneous Combustion
LATE ONE AFTERNOON, WHILE SYLVIE IS UP IN her room, a worker from Child and Family Services calls and Liz answers. When that conversation is over, Liz stands looking out the kitchen window for a minute, and then she snatches up her keys and goes out to the car.
The Maryland Bridge is already backed up. She inches her way across it, her hand tapping the steering wheel in a furious percussion and her conviction growing with each tap: that since the day Mary Magdalene glided up these steps in a red coat and a cranberry caftan, a systematic attack has been going on. And Liz has been too preoccupied to realize it. She’s been like someone slumbering in bed, hearing the small sounds of a crime being committed in the dark rooms of the house, and lazily weaving it all into her dream.
It’s an old neighbourhood, River Heights, with wider lots than Wolseley and brick houses set back from the street, a smugger attitude to money. The house is not what Liz expects, though. It’s an infill property circa 1964, a modest stucco bungalow with that most pathetic of suburban affectations, a fake brick façade on the front. But the concrete steps are painted purple and a batik sunflower banner flutters from the eaves, and on a wrought-iron bench at the edge of the yard, among the goutweed and spent lily-of-the-valley, Liz spies Krzysztof Nowak’s mother, her black babushka tied under her chin and her hands stacked on the head of her cane.
“Is Maggie home?” The baba glowers and doesn’t answer.
Liz climbs the purple steps. She ignores the doorbell and thumps on the aluminum screen door with the side of her fist. She can smell mown grass and grilling meat. Somewhere nearby, little girls are shrieking. She thumps again, staring back boldly at Krzysztof’s mother.
Krzysztof opens the door, clearly startled to see her. He launches into a concerned friend routine and she cuts him off. “Stop the fucking act. My daughter’s in crisis. She was lost in the bush. And this is what you people think of – running to the social workers to tell lies about her?”
“What are you talking about?”
“CFS just phoned. So Maggie’s behind this! Trying to have our daughter declared an unfit parent. Charging her with all sorts of negligence. She’s been into the child welfare office. With a list. In writing! We were named, Aiden and I. Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”
But he frowns in a lame approximation of surprise and confusion and steps back to invite her into the house. She steps back as well, off the steps and onto the front walk, so he doesn’t have much choice but to come out. He’s wearing tasselled slippers and dorky-fitting chinos. He’s changed in eight years, Liz thinks. In the hard summer light she’s seized with a new conviction, that Mary Magdalene knows everything. Only the wrath of a wronged wife can account for this. “You’ve told her,” she cries. “About us.”
His face hardens. “Us?” he says. He’s changed in eight years, but he hasn’t changed enough. Back then, when she was in the kitchen of that retreat house in Minnesota making coffee for the searchers, she glanced over her shoulder to see Krzysztof and Melody, the babysitting grad student, together in the hall. She saw Melody reach for Krzysztof’s hand and cling to it, trying to lift it to her face, and she saw Krzysztof twist his wrist away with a patronizing smile.
Over at the bench, his mother is hoisting herself to her feet. “Dat man,” she calls in a harsh voice. “Cutting bottles over baby! Why you give him knife? Eh, missus?” She lifts her cane, a parody of the granny from central casting. “Missus! Why you give him knife?”
“Hush, Mama,” Krzysztof says. “I mean it. Sit down. Keep your mouth shut.”
A car pulls up behind Liz’s, a little red car with two women in it. Liz can see Maggie’s grey mop on the passenger side. She and the driver lean into a lingering embrace, and then Maggie straightens up and opens the door, still talking. She steps onto the curb and waves goodbye to her friend, turns, and sees Liz on the front walk.
“Oh, Liz,” she cries, “how are you?” And instantly Liz can see that she’s got it wrong. This is not revenge. It’s just Mary Magdalene being Mary Magdalene. “What are you all standing out here for?” she says warmly. “Let’s go inside.”
Liz takes in her rayon dress with its uneven hemline, her generous breasts in their saggy little hammocks, her tangled silvery hair. “I’ve just been talking to the CFS worker. I understand you’ve been into their office trying to have our daughter declared an unfit parent. Feeding them a list of lies to make sure they don’t let the baby come home.”
Maggie’s smile vanishes. “Lies,” she says softly. Her face opens in sympathy, as if Liz’s outrage is a plea for her help. And Liz recalls with fluorescent clarity that Mary Magdalene will always keep you smaller than she is. It’s futile to confront her – it will never register. There’s no anger in her world; there’s only need, your need for her. “I know this must be terribly upsetting for you,” Maggie is saying. “And I want to assure you, it’s not something I did lightly. I’m just thinking of that tiny baby. That’s all it is. I’m thinking of the sort of home a baby needs, the order and routines, a family where children are at the centre.” She launches into a soft-voiced inventory of her concerns, starting with the diaper rash the foster mother discovered and leaping back to some supposed incident fifteen years ago, the distress she felt when she found little Sylvie three blocks away from home in her pyjamas.
Liz stands on the sidewalk outside Maggie’s house, hearing the screams and laughter of little girls in the next yard, and notes the wrinkles running down from the corners of Maggie’s mouth and the way her jawline is softening. She hears the righteousness in her voice and she taps into an old and nourishing hatred, like an underground spring, for middle-aged women – the whole cohort of them, the way they twist and knead and pummel and bully life into what they want it to be.
Maggie’s moved on to her anguish about the baby being in foster care. “I’m sure you feel the same way,” she says and then her words come out in a rush: “You’re going to hear it sooner or later, Liz, so I may as well tell you. I’ve offered to take the baby myself. Just for now. I was in the office again today – I just came from there – to see whether they might consider releasing her to her father’s custody. With our support, of course. We’d all pitch in to make a home for that little girl here.” With her soft eyes she includes Krzysztof in this touching scenario, and an old impetuousness steps up to Liz like an ally in her time of need – it’s there, shining in the street – wreckage and chaos and all its audacious satisfactions. Except that something else has lit up inside her, a loyalty to something she can’t name, closer to her heart. She turns impatiently and interrupts.
“Does Noah want this baby?” she asks. She looks at the elm trees queuing along the street, diminishing like in a perspective drawing. She flicks her car key open a
nd presses the remote to prompt a faithful blink of her headlights. “Has your son ever shown a single sign of interest in his daughter?”
They’re in a different kind of waiting now. Liz is desperate to broadcast Maggie’s treachery, equally desperate to keep the story quiet. Evenings, she paces the house, ranting. Aiden takes his drink out to the deck and tries to think his way through the thing. He can picture Maggie in the child welfare office, her face radiant with sorrow and resolve as she delivers the infamous list, and he feels some eagerness to see it, to see what light it casts on their whole domestic enterprise. But why didn’t she just drop over to the house and talk to them?
Sylvie can’t be persuaded to go to the Fringe play and Liz won’t leave Sylvie, so he goes on his own. The venue is a narrow warehouse space with hard benches. The nineteenth-century costumes have clearly been cobbled together at Value Village. Yet he’s lifted out of himself the way you hope to be at the theatre. Not as much by the play as by Sylvie’s friends, by the fearless way they step into a spotlight on a bare stage and declare their ideals. There’s Thea striding across the stage with a wonderful judicious demeanour, her pale matted hair arranged like a powdered wig. And that slight, frail, grey-haired kid is wonderful as William Wilberforce, ringingly voicing the abolitionist’s resolve: “We will do less, aspire less, to be better men.” Aiden jumps up for the ovation and takes the program home so Sylvie can see the acknowledgements on the back. Thanks to: Sylvie Glasgow-Phimister, for inspiration. Jaspreet Khan, on the generator bike. Faun Phimister, for the future.
The next day Aiden leaves work at four o’clock and cycles up to the hospital to visit his dad. He finds Rupert dressed and sitting in a chair. They do this in extended care. “You’re up,” Aiden says. “That’s great. Let’s go for a walk.” It takes a bit of coaxing, but eventually Rupert is out of the chair and shuffling along the corridor. He’s beetle-like now in his shape and movements: he’s aged ten years in the past few months. How cruel of life to require such change of the very old. They pause by a drinking fountain and Aiden presses the button. Rupert watches with interest, holding a trembling finger towards the silver arc. Purple blotches decorate his hand, bruising from all the anticoagulants they have him on.
Walking out of the hospital lost in thought, Aiden almost bumps into a small man in a grey suit, heading for the same pod of the revolving door. It’s Dr. Peter Saurette. Aiden defers to him and then calls hello as their separate glass fins release them into sunlight. Surprise, or something else, flashes across Saurette’s face. “Hi, how are you,” he says, and keeps walking. Aiden watches until he drops out of sight in the staff-only section of the parking lot. Lowering himself into a new Porsche Boxster, no doubt.
They’ve only ever had one client in common. He turns back into the hospital. A clerk with black bangs halfway over her eyes sits at the information desk.
“Jake Peloquin.” He spells it.
Her fingers are a blur on the keyboard. “6B, room 803.”
Saurette, the lousy prick. But 6B is not psychiatry. Aiden asks the clerk.
“It’s neurosciences.”
He takes the elevator up to the sixth floor, dread perched on his shoulders. In 803 the curtain is pulled around the bed. “Jake,” Aiden says. He hears a throat-clearing that he chooses to construe as an invitation, and slides open the curtain.
“God, buddy. What in hell happened?”
Defrag is trapped in a medieval torture device. A metal ring encircles his forehead, and bars descend from it, clamped into brackets on his shoulders. Screws or pins in each quadrant of the ring appear to be drilled into his very head, so that his skull is a part of the vise. Through the bars he stares silently at Aiden.
He has broken several vertebrae in his neck – it takes Aiden six or eight questions to extract this fact. Not too much damage to his spinal cord, so they don’t think he’s going to have any permanent mobility issues.
Aiden is still standing at the foot of the bed. “But how did it happen?” In his mind he sees the treacherous catwalks in Defrag’s building.
“Oh, just one of those things,” Defrag says, as if a weakness in his throat makes talking a huge effort. His skin is waxy pale and his forehead is smeared with orange disinfectant. He can’t move, clamped into that thing. And so he can’t laugh, and without laughter to obfuscate his meaning, he’s not going to talk. That’s how Aiden reads it.
“You had a fall?”
“Yeah, I guess you could call it that.”
A sense of Dr. Saurette lingers in the little cubicle. His expensive suit, his rectitude. Aiden himself is shambling, he’s a shambles. He reaches inside, tries to locate his customary professional composure, and comes up empty. Shrinks get to go through psychoanalysis, he reminds himself, as part of their training. It gives them a huge advantage. All that self-awareness, it’s a fucking superpower.
“Where were you, Jake?”
“I don’t entirely recall.”
“How did you fall? What did you fall from?” He wants to be closer, but if he moves to the side and sits down, Defrag won’t be able to see him. In his iron cage Defrag shows a new proclivity for stillness. “Jake. Talk to me. Were you trying to end it?”
“Yes and no. I guess if I was really trying, I would have found a better way.”
If only one in ten feels grief, Aiden thinks, that one carries the grief of ten. An old fantasy washes over him, more seductive than ever: he’ll take Defrag up to Otter Lake to recuperate. That wooden recliner his dad built, he’ll drag it onto the lichen-covered rock, and Defrag can lie out there with the Hudson’s Bay blanket over him and sink into the small events of an afternoon in the northern wilderness. Watch the fish jump, the blue heron lift from the reeds, dragging its long legs after it. What’s stopped him inviting Defrag in the past? The rules, or conventions, or principles – he wonders at how slavishly he followed them. But now it’s just a matter of a few iron bars.
He’s still standing at the end of the bed when a nurse comes in to check Defrag’s vitals. Aiden watches her attach the blood pressure machine. She’s slender, fortyish, a lovely natural blond wearing yellow scrubs. He tries to judge her level of professionalism, whether she’s likely to tell him the whole story if he corners her in the hall. He puts his chances at low to nil.
“That’s really something,” he says.
“The halo?” says the nurse. “You’ve never seen one before? They are the cat’s ass. We used to keep people with this sort of injury in bed, with sandbags around them to keep them immobile. And then their muscles atrophied and they got pressure sores and pneumonia. But with this brace, Jake can get up and walk around. Soon. You’re looking forward to that, aren’t you, Jake.”
“Terrific,” Aiden says.
As though Defrag has spoken, the nurse bends over him with sudden warmth, and it seems to Aiden that the hum and clatter of the hospital quiets. She fiddles with the IV feed in his arm. She straightens his blanket and cranks his bed up a notch. She sweeps a pudding cup and plastic spoon off the bedside table and into the garbage, graceful and quick. Before she leaves, she pours Defrag a fresh glass of water. Resting one hand gently on his shoulder, she holds up the glass so he can drink through a straw, and he lifts his eyes in silent gratitude.
When she’s gone, Aiden finally moves to the side of the bed. Close up like that, he feels a visceral shock at the sight of those pins – steel, or maybe titanium – bored mercilessly into Defrag’s skull.
“Any idea when you’ll get out?” He stands with his fingertips on his friend’s hand and adds – because what else is there to do? – “The Tuesday slot is yours. We can work on a pro bono basis for a while.”
Defrag says something, but at that moment, a cart crashes in the hallway and a nasal voice blasts, “Dr. Fairfax to Obstetrics, Dr. Fairfax to Obstetrics” and Aiden misses it. He bends over. “Pardon?” he says, but Defrag’s drawn his hand away and closed his eyes. He won’t respond. Aiden has to give up, he has to say his goodbyes an
d walk to the door, left to construct what he will from those few low syllables, left with the punishing conviction that what Jake Peloquin said just as the hospital leapt back to life was, “I’m afraid I can’t take you on at the moment.”
“Sit outside with me,” Aiden says to Liz after supper.
“It’s too hot.”
“Come on. There’s a breeze.”
“Let me finish putting the food away, then.”
He gets a rag from the garage and wipes down the mesh and iron chairs on the deck. The sun glowers from above the Callaghans’ garage across the back lane. Just before supper, a valve in the sky opened for about ten minutes and a ton of water was dumped on the city. Water that should rightly have fallen somewhere else, stolen from the poor and given to the rich. Now it’s sunny again and silver pools glint in the grass. This whole river city is a bowl of unfired clay – the water’s got nowhere to go. Wendy’s backyard elms are massive, verdant with all the rain. They look like broccoli. By next year they’ll be dead.
He tramps downstairs and drops the rag in the laundry, and then he gets his little cylinder of pot out of the basement freezer. A gift from Defrag the Christmas before last, this is the end of it, and mighty fine weed it was. His papers are in a tin on a rafter. He lifts down the tin and rolls his joint over the freezer, enjoying the taste of the paper on his tongue. An old impulse grips him, a familiar urge: to bottom out, to get a toehold on the lowest rung of his self-contempt so he can kick himself back up.
Out on the deck, Liz waves away the joint. She hitches her chair away from his. She’s wearing sunglasses.
“Can I get you a drink, then?” he asks. “How about a G and T?”
“No, I’m okay.”
They sit and stare at her flowerbeds, where all the shade plants are drooping, shocky from the sun and the heat.
“Did you go in to the office today?”
“No, I just did my email and calls from here.”