Darren Effect

by Libby Creelman

  “I just told you. Mandy and I saw a memorial cross in the woods.”

  Her mother put her cards down on her lap. “Can I just say one thing?”

  “If you criticize, you leave. That’s the rule.”

  “Yes, the rule, I know.” She raised her cards again. “One of the rules. Your discard.”

  Heather laughed. “I don’t have that many rules.”

  “Don’t smoke. Don’t criticize — though who distinguishes criticism from comment, I don’t know. Don’t ask any personal questions.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is.”

  “Then how do you know so much about my life?”

  It had been years since Heather had seen her mother in slacks, though she could remember her wearing them every day, and in summer, a pair of white shorts. Now she wore one of two polyester skirts, which she claimed fit her so comfortably she could not bear to put anything else on. Her blouses were continually coming out and gathering folds at her waist, the one part of her body that had gained weight. Each day she sat pencil-straight on the edge of Heather’s bed, and Heather marvelled at the endurance of her back.

  Her mother said, “I suppose it helps to be a shrink.”

  “I’m not a shrink.”

  “Do you know what I read recently? I read a very interesting article about something called disenfranchised grief.”

  “Don’t you think I know about that?”

  “I’m just trying to help. You don’t have to snap at me.”

  “Labelling doesn’t help. It doesn’t make any difference. I’m angry you would even bring that up.”

  “What would you say then to a patient in your position?”

  “Clients. They aren’t referred to as patients.”

  “What would you say?”

  “I’d say, I can see you are experiencing a lot of pain and it is real.”

  “You’re being deliberately cold.”

  “I’d pass over a box of tissues.”

  Heather’s backyard was turning green. The sky was bright blue, but all morning round cold-looking clouds had been passing quickly overhead — a sign it wasn’t as warm outside as it looked. Many people were interested in clinical psychology because they were curious about themselves; it was a means of self-discovery. Heather had not thought this was the case for her. She’d thought, at one time at least, that she simply wanted to help people.

  Disenfranchised grief was for those unable to publicly acknowledge their loss — homosexuals, the families of AIDS victims, women who miscarry and, yes, women in love with other women’s husbands. Heather found it difficult to compartmentalize her feelings, or her relationship with Benny, in that textbook manner. The study of grief — the models, stages, expressions, process — it all seemed pointless in the face of grief’s blind impersonal energy.

  Her mother closed her hands around her cards. Occasionally, like today, she went without the considerable makeup. Heather found the more familiar racoon look impossible now to recall. Her mother appeared defenceless, just-born.

  “Go ahead, open the window and have a cigarette if you want.”

  “Absolutely not. You’re pregnant.”

  Heather shrugged and her mother stared at her.

  “I’ll step outside.”

  As she watched her mother slip stiffly from the bed and back into her shoes, Heather considered the task of waiting for Benny to die from afar. But the truth was, she had longed for it to end.

  She heard the back door open and close and her mother exit the house.

  Waiting with tremendous dread and almost unconsciously, but she had been waiting all the same.

  The day Heather visited Benny at his house, they had stood together at the foot of his bed. They did not touch each other, did not even graze an elbow or hip. After greeting Heather, Inky settled at their feet. Why were they in this room — the master bedroom? By then, she was aware of feeling fragile. There had been the walk up the stairs, all those family photographs.

  He was telling her about something. A new chapter in his life? The management of his illness? A need for self-preservation? The challenges ahead?

  He sounded jittery and elated.

  When she reached out to touch him, he stepped back. He had become slightly unrecognizable.

  He asked, “Do you think a person can change overnight?”

  He was being patient. His patience was giving him power, feeding him.

  “I’m trying to explain something very important to you, sweetheart, and you seem distracted.”

  Was he saying his illness had already changed him so much he didn’t love her anymore?

  For six years she had allowed their relationship to be what it was: alternating periods of longing and joy. She wondered if he’d told his wife this news. Of course. First his wife, then Heather. It would be a reasonable progression of events.

  There was a peculiar look about him. He seemed calm, almost tranquil, while she was racing to keep up with everything. Shouldn’t there be a team of experts in the room with them — people to whom she could make some medical inquiries? What about expectations? Hope?

  “Heather, you don’t need me.”

  Was he trying to let her go?

  “Of course I need you.”

  “Tell me why you need me.”

  “Because . . . ” She wanted to say: because of your face, your eyes, your hands, your hair. But how would that sound?

  “Tell me. Heather, tell me.”

  “Because I think about you constantly.”

  It was the right thing to say. It was as though he had been holding her over an embankment, a precipice, a crashing falls, and was considering releasing her. Was it only a sense of responsibility that stopped him, an inability to hurt this woman who loved him and thought about him constantly? By the time they heard his son coming in, he had changed again — retreated. He wouldn’t let her go, not yet.

  “When will I see you again?” he asked, just before they went downstairs.

  Chapter Six

  A few weeks after Benny told her he was sick, they went to Spruce Cove for the weekend. It would be their last trip.

  It was a sunny spring day. A house for sale caught Benny’s eye just minutes from the cabins and he suggested they stop to snoop around. The house was deserted — a sign with phone number was posted in a front window. They wandered into the backyard past a shed and sagging clothesline, then followed a narrow path through old snow to a view of the coast.

  The pack ice was in. It covered the water as far as they could see, a blanket of white under a sky so brilliant and blue it bore down on the landscape as though it might ignite it. Heather was unable to reconcile it with her expectation of ocean. Just where she thought she would see water, she saw a white sparkling desert. Steeples had formed where the ice rode up on itself, pressing against small grey-green islands where gulls stood silhouetted. It was an environment that seemed to exist with- out reason. Heather stared at it a long time before she noticed the surface undulating slightly, as though a giant animal stirred beneath it.

  “A gazebo would be nice out here,” Benny said. “For the summer.”

  “You’d only need a blanket, a book and sunblock. A gazebo would ruin your view from the house.”

  He took her hand and said, “You’re right.” She tried to feel happy.

  But that evening they seemed to have little to say.

  “Where is it?” she asked eventually.

  “I’m told it started in my stomach.”

  “Started? What are you talking about?”

  He shook his head. She could see how difficult it was for him to speak about it, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Can’t you elaborate at all?” she asked gently.

  For several minutes he was silent. “I was meant to have tests two years ago. I never went.”

  “What tests? You never told me. What tests, Benny?”

  “I can’t talk about it right now. I just want to be here with you, sweetheart, okay
?”

  The following day there was a driving rain from dawn to dusk and they spent most of their time in bed, yet there was a distance between them. Heather began to feel weightless, almost unable to register his hands on her body when they did touch. He was talkative, but only about certain things. He grew cross if she tried to discuss his illness or the future. She realized he had been speaking for several minutes, something about the cold utilitarian quality of these cabins, yet she had heard little of it. Although the desire to touch him, smell him, watch him, seemed overwhelming, she felt banished and void, and eventually so disengaged from herself she would not have been surprised to discover she could no longer form words.

  In the evening he volunteered to make supper. She sensed he found the growing silence between them unsettling. He needed to move about, to act. He dressed and she followed him into the kitchen and watched him crack eggs into a bowl and then begin whisking them. He added salt and pepper and just before dumping the eggs into a pan, poured in too much milk. She wanted to say something but didn’t, though she knew that when the eggs were done she would struggle to finish them. How childish of her, still squeamish about scrambled eggs.

  He scooped the eggs onto two plates, each with toast and slice of orange, and glanced at her. She had done nothing to help him. She had sat there, half dressed, and watched him — when his back was turned, she watched his back and shoulders; when he faced her, she watched his arms and hands; and when she sensed he was about to glance at her, she looked at the table. The eggs were as she had anticipated: grey watery milk was leaking out from them and pooling on her plate. As she nudged her toast to dry safety, she wondered if she should tell the story of staying with her aunt and uncle one of those weekends her parents were working strenuously against divorce.

  But it wasn’t really much of a story; why in the world had she preserved its memory? She and Mandy had awoken in the morning and come down to the kitchen, and there was their uncle, wanting to know what they wanted for breakfast. Heather suggested scrambled eggs and her uncle, who was childless, was delighted. A request he could manage. It was the end of June. Heather had just finished grade six and Mandy, kindergarten — for the second time — but they could both see he had been worried about breakfast. Where had their aunt been? His scrambled eggs must have been one part egg, one part milk, Heather thought now. Mandy was excused from eating them because she was generally excused from things. But her uncle would not allow Heather such grace. She was twelve years old. She better eat up. Hadn’t she said she liked scrambled eggs? Hadn’t she expressly ordered them? But Heather couldn’t eat them. She sat beside her uncle at the table in the dark little kitchen, while her hungry stomach growled and a homesickness she never believed possible climbed into her.

  Heather and Benny went to bed early, the rain turning to drizzle, neither one wanting to go out in it. Worrying, unable to sleep, she was up several times. In the early hours she was there at the kitchen window to see the clouds move off and the moon emerge. She had wrapped herself in a thin blanket that dragged behind her across the spruce floorboards. The electric heaters were on, filling the small room with a biting, strangling warmth. Outside the moonlight fell brazenly on cars, picnic tables, cabin roofs. The light was also making its way indoors, so that Heather could easily read the warnings about water usage and the disposal of garbage taped by management to a cupboard door. Curtains were tied back on either side of the window, their ruffled borders edged with moonlight in a beautifully decisive way that depressed her.

  She had not eaten the eggs, but her uncle had found a means of punishing her later that day. Friends of his had a new swimming pool, and they were all invited for the afternoon. But first, there was the issue of bathing suits. Mandy could wear her underwear, no complaints, but Heather was too old for that, even her aunt agreed. Heather knew this family; she knew there was a fifteen-year-old daughter who would be wearing a stylish suit. Heather herself had a new two-piece, but it was at home. Home. Home was empty this weekend, and locked, but it was not far, a seven-minute drive, and everyone knew where the key was hidden. But her uncle went up into the attic and came down with a bathing suit that had been Heather’s aunt’s. It was perfectly reasonable for her to wear it. Why didn’t she try it on? It came all the way from California and looked to be exactly her size. Why bother everyone with a stop at a locked house when there was a perfectly acceptable swimsuit here in this house? What was the matter with Heather that she couldn’t even try it on?

  Heather turned from the moonlit window and walked to the doorway to look in at the sleeping body alone in the bed. She imagined an invisible bubble around Benny. She was permitted to pass through this bubble, but once inside, communication was strained, as though they were being watched.

  The suit had been a floral one-piece with a weighty zipper the length of the back. Pink ribbons served as straps and also tied around the waist in a tired-looking bow. But it was so loose that when she tried it on the ribboned waist sat on her hips and her rear end was lost in the baggy seat. She had stood in the hall outside the bedroom, embarrassed by the bodice, which stood stiffly inches from her chest and might have been quilted, Heather thought now, and her uncle asked, What’s the matter with that? while her aunt added cheerfully, You’re all ready for the pool party now, dear.

  At the pool Mandy swam happily and without shame in her transparent white underwear while Heather, fully clothed, sat in the shade. Fortunately, the fifteen-year-old daughter never appeared. The hostess, a tanned woman in an orange bikini that revealed a strangely corrugated belly, offered Heather the loan of a suit, but Heather, embarrassed, shook her head. She barely spoke the rest of the weekend, shunning her uncle altogether, and wrestled with an ache for her parents to return and to be reunited with her own house and family.

  Heather got back into bed, careful not to wake Benny, then realized he was awake.

  “Did I wake you?” she whispered.

  “No. I was already awake.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t mind.” He put an arm around her.

  The next morning they awoke and, never touching, dressed and packed. They drank their tea in silence. She was paralyzed by his remoteness, by his inability to let her know more. It was unlike anything between them before. She was sitting with her legs tucked under her when he passed her, heading for the shower. He looked down at her, about to speak, then closed his mouth. He might have been concerned or, just as easily, irritated. She thought it possible that she didn’t know him at all.

  It was mid-morning when they left. Sunshine had returned. They decided to stop for an early lunch at the only restaurant in Spruce Cove. They sat inside at first, but on seeing there were tables in the back, facing the water, Benny wanted to move. Heather took up their cutlery and the saucer of coffee creamers and they went out. They agreed the view was spectacular in the sun, but still, it was cold and the wind was picking up. Much of the snow had melted as a result of the previous day’s rain, and a treeless landscape was re-emerging. The restaurant was situated along one high arm of the bay, with a view onto the water and steep cliffs on the opposite side. The pack ice had moved out slightly, exposing water like a strip of belly glimpsed unexpectedly. Birds, possibly gulls, were calling from below, yet were not in view. Their cries rose up abruptly, then just as abruptly, faded. They seemed to be saying, Look-at-me, look- at-me, look-at-me. Heather thought they sounded hysterical.

  They had both forgotten to pack coffee for the weekend and Benny was looking forward to a decent cup.

  But the coffee was terrible. Heather figured it had been sitting there since early morning. Neither of them could drink it.

  He said, “Shall I ask her to put on a fresh pot?”

  “No,” Heather said. She had seen the coffee pot. It was nearly full.

  “Why don’t I do that?”

  “Better not.”

  With their cups of coffee sitting full before them, they both ordered tea.

  But they ag
reed the fish and chips was fabulous.

  “When she comes back, I’ll tell her the coffee was too strong,” he said.

  “Who is your doctor, Benny? Will you tell me that much?”

  “What’s that flavour? Horseradish in coleslaw? That’s unusual.”

  Heather said it was probably just the taste of cabbage, which could be sharp.

  He said it again.

  She said, “I really don’t think it’s horseradish.”

  He leaned towards her. “What is it then?” he whispered.

  She shook her head, smiling.

  “No, Heather, there’s horseradish in this coleslaw.”

  “There isn’t.” She watched his face, thinking how much, now that their weekend was nearly over, she craved him.

  “I’ll ask the waitress,” he said.

  “Want to bet?”

  “Five dollars?” His hand came up for the handshake. He was grinning.

  “You’re on.” It was partly an excuse to touch him.

  But when the waitress, polite and worried, said no and proceeded to list the ingredients — everything you’d expect — Benny looked so downcast Heather was embarrassed. The waitress left.

  “Benny — ”

  “I don’t want you to interfere.”

  Then he saw her face and said, “He’s not a local doctor. He’s not someone you grew up with, or I grew up with. I’d never met him before. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “It will not improve matters to have you making calls.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “Everything is going to be fine. Can we just . . . be ourselves? Please.”

  “Of course.”

  But on the drive home they did not seem to be themselves. Heather knew the situation inside her head would be impossible to describe. She was not here and yet, she was excruciatingly here.

  “The weekend went fast,” Benny said quietly.

  The sun was streaming onto their laps and torsos. She put a sweater over her bare arms, saying sunburns were worse through glass. Benny laughed and told her less UV light gets through glass. No, she was certain, she had read it.