Everyone puts on a good face, though, when they wheel mom or dad inside for the first time, chatting away about the facilities and the food and the views of the park and the spacious rooms, while mom sits there with wild eyes and folded hands, or dad with his chin raised in a heavy mix of pride and defeat.
Of course, that’s not always how it goes. Just the way it’s settled in my memory.
—
Colette was down with mono the week Bob and Sue-Ann Strallen arrived, so I wasn’t there, but I imagine it was their daughter, Judy, who helped carry their things and led the charge in setting up their double suite. No nonsense, that Judy. Still running a law practice deep into her sixties, kids, grandkids of her own. A marathon runner. Straight grey hair cut in a perfect ruler line at her chin, the colour of her eyes to match. Not the kind to sugar-coat things, but then again, there wasn’t much to sugar-coat when she moved them in here. Lucky was the word you heard a lot when it came to Bob and Sue-Ann. Lucky they still had each other. Lucky they were still in love. Lucky they weren’t alone in the dark when the door clicked shut behind them at night.
Even I envied them. My Russell was no good from the start. Should have seen it long before I took Colette and fled, but fear has this way of casting shadows and whispering fantasies when the truth would be too much to bear. Then I found him standing over her while she napped that September morning, one hand pulling down his pants and, well,
Well.
Probably best he was so much bigger than me, so much stronger, best I couldn’t get my hands on a gun, because he would have been dead right then and there and I’d be in jail and Colette would have had no one. Instead I wrapped her sleeping body in flannel sheets and took off into the black pit of that night, my way forward, our way out, lit by rage. Even now the hot white of that wrath, that terror, can blind me out of nowhere. Even now when I search her face, her movements, her words for some lingering nightmare memory, for some jagged scar he left on her, even now I could kill.
I never connected with anyone else after we left, what with shift work and my girl to take care of. Never had the chance, and never wanted it, I guess, after all that. Besides, Colette and I alone had love enough for twenty.
But, sometimes, when I see these grown kids wheeling in their parents, sister pushing the chair, brothers carrying the bags, when I see the hope and love on their faces, sometimes I think it would have been nice to have a normal family. A bigger one, with a good mom and a good dad and brothers and sisters and cousins, all those hugs and laughter and tears they’d churn out, all those hours that would turn into years’ worth of memories to smile back on when you’ve got nothing left to do but stare at the ceiling. And, if you’re lucky, someone there to lie beside, to describe each moment, when you can’t remember much yourself.
—
Sue-Ann raises a shaky hand from her walker to touch the cedar sign that hangs from their door, Our Happy Place carved into it on a diagonal.
“Now that’s a lovely thing, isn’t it?” she says. She always says. “What’s it for?”
And I tell her again (and again) that it was from their cottage, a gift from friends long ago on their twenty-fifth anniversary. She lets that settle in and smiles again, looking like she’s landed on a memory. I’ll admit that when the door is closed and there’s no one else in the hall to see me, I bring my nose right up to the weathered wood and inhale. Pines, rain, dirt. I love that smell. I imagine that sign hanging by their grassy driveway under a canopy of breezy green, marking the end of a winding, hilly gravel road, the sun baking it greyish white with decades of summertime heat.
Slowly, we make our way back into her room and Sue-Ann pauses, as usual, to look at the cottage pictures that cover one whole wall like a gallery of joy.
“Look at that,” she says, dentures clicking as her smile broadens. “Aren’t they just having a ball?”
Black-and-whites of golden hour barbecues, of tanned shirtless men with cigarettes and stubby beer bottles, of bathing beauties lined up along the dock. Pictures of wet-haired grandkids huddled together in towels by the fire pit. Burnt noses, mosquito-bitten legs. Babies on the laps of aunts and uncles, in the arms of grandparents. Friends raising glasses up to the camera, eyes rinsed with laughter. Whole families lit amber, smiling at the setting sun. Empty wine bottles, cobs of corn, squeezed-out tubes of sunscreen, towels slung over the railing to dry. Look at that wall long enough and you’re there, the tires of your car crunching up the gravel road to the sign that creaks in the breeze as you peer through the trees at the glittering lake just beyond the cottage. You can hear the kids screaming bloody murder, chasing each other around the grass, Sue-Ann yelling from the deck to Slow down! and Be careful! as they race to the dock, launching themselves one by one into the water with squeals and shrieks and a quick succession of splashes.
I could see Colette like that, in a place of our own, like that. Flying off a rope swing into a summer lake sparkling with sunlight, free and laughing. No memories, no worries, nothing but that place, that light, that shock of cool water.
“Oh, isn’t that wonderful?” Sue-Ann gushes, admiring a blown-up Instamatic shot of a couple dancing on the deck.
“You two sure had a wonderful time up there,” I tell her. “Look at your face.”
She leans in closer, her nose almost touching it. Hard to tell if she’s trying to get a better look or hoping she’ll slip right through, back to that moment.
“Yes,” she smiles. “What a time we had!”
Jazz used to tinkle out of their room all the time. I’d pass their open door a few years back, see her sitting in her pink velvet wingback with a crocheted blanket over her legs, her fingers tap-tap-tapping to the rhythm as Bob heel-toed his way around the room as best as he could manage, arms wrapped around some invisible partner, the ghost, I imagined, of a younger Sue-Ann.
“Judy coming today?” she asks in her wavering voice as I help her into bed. “She said she brought me a scarf. From Paris.”
“I bet it’s a beautiful one too,” I say, tucking the sheets around her. “With her taste?”
“I hope she comes today. I could wear it to Betty’s luncheon.”
“You’ll look just gorgeous.”
She smiles, and for a second I see her as she was at fifty, at sixty, petite and confident, with a datebook full of lunches and bridge games. And then, with a blink of confusion, she’s gone. A lost kid wandering a bus terminal.
I turn on the overhead TV and flick through the channels.
“Ah. Here’s that artist you like. Look now, Sue-Ann. He’s painting a sunset. Look how he makes those clouds with his brush. Makes them right out of nowhere.”
Better to distract before she asks too many questions about Judy, before she starts wondering where Bob’s gone. I used to think that people had a right to know the truth when they couldn’t remember things, when they kept slipping back in time to summers and winters long ago when their kids and spouses were still alive. Thought it was unfair when we were told to just keep them calm, keep them happy, let them live in their worlds of warped memories.
I see it different now.
Sue-Ann watches the screen, her eyes fixed, her jaw lax. I bring the water straw to her mouth, let her drink, and put the cup back on the table. I pat the sheets at her knee and continue on with my rounds.
I could lie and say I’m like this with all the residents. You work in a place like this and every day someone’s out to be hollering to you from their bed, distraught about one thing or another, remembering some baby that died eighty years ago, some teacher who whipped them with rulers, some uncle who slipped into the room where they slept with their sisters. Calling to you to throw them down the stairs, to hold a pillow over their heads, to hold their hand. Weeping, moaning, throwing shit around. Or lying there dead still just waiting for time to stop. Can’t pay attention to all of it, can’t let it get to you. Take that big gulp of air when you walk out the door at the end of your shift, drink it up like it�
��s the first taste of oxygen you’ve had in a month, and dig to the bottom of your purse to find your car keys.
It’s different with Sue-Ann. Has been, ever since Judy died. When I first heard about what happened, I thought it was a mistake. I thought she must have been just so damn tired what with being a lawyer and raising her kids and running marathons and worrying about her parents that she must have just pulled her car into the garage and fallen asleep right there in the driver’s seat. I could see her shifting it into park and thinking, I’ll just take a little rest, just for a minute, while I have all this peace here to myself.
Agnes had the centre’s psychologist come in with the police to give Bob and Sue-Ann the news, to say it in a way that might soften the blow. Whatever he was supposed to do, though, didn’t work because as soon as we all piled into the room, the cops following some old habit of removing their hats, Sue-Ann knew something was wrong. A rabbit with ears perked in the grass. They barely got a word out before whatever resolve she had gave way. I saw it coming and was there to catch her. Thought I’d have a stroke of my own when she collapsed—so wholly did I feel her pain, the shock of it. The very idea of losing Colette.
When the paramedics wheeled her out to the ambulance, one of the cops pulled Agnes and me aside.
“You should know,” he said, “that Judy left a note. She included some details that we’re investigating.”
Agnes’s eyes flashed. “Investigating. Into what?”
“Robert Strallen.”
Agnes crossed her arms. I leaned on the wall. The officer said Judy had made allegations against Bob. He said they were old, decades old, but they were clear, specific, suggested what he called “a pattern of behaviour.” He said they had to rule out that there were others. He meant children. He said other things but by then my ears were ringing and it was hard to follow what was happening.
I gathered myself as much as I could when he put on his hat to go, nodded when he said to get in touch if Bob or Sue-Ann said anything that could help with the investigation. I kept nodding as he handed us his card.
I don’t remember much from the seconds after. Agnes walking with him to the door. The din in my ears, everything in strobe. Lyle reading a newspaper at the security desk. The kitchen door flapping open and shut behind me. The hallway sconces passing more quickly than usual on my way to the Strallens’ room where Bob lay alone.
“Help,” he called, lifting his head, desperate, like he was at the bottom of a well, like the fall had broken all his bones, like the walls were crumbling down. “Help me.”
I couldn’t move from the doorway.
“My chest.” His breath shallow and rattling.
The wall, the pictures. I knew just about every face, every smile, every sparkle of sunlight by heart. Faces staring at me now as if from under water.
“Please. Help me.”
The one I loved of Judy on his lap. Ten or eleven years old, hands on her knees, slouching, face turned in silhouette as she looked back toward the setting sun. His mouth open wide in a big laugh, his arm around her waist, pulling her close.
“Help—” It came out on a gasp. The flatline droned and in an instant I was there beside him, my hands doing what they do before I could think. I pressed the emergency button. I started compressions. I felt a rib crack. I exhaled hard into his mouth. I told him she left a note.
No one was surprised to hear he died that day. Everyone murmuring that nothing more than sweet heartbreak had killed him, when they saw how broken up I was.
—
Sue-Ann is sitting on the edge of her walker seat looking at the photo wall, hands limp on her lap.
“You should have called me to help you out of bed, Sue-Ann.” I say, coming in from the hallway. “We don’t want you to fall.”
“Who’s in this one?” she asks, looking at a picture of three grinning boys, sunburnt and piled on top of each other.
“Well, those are the Wilson brothers, aren’t they?” I tuck in her bedsheet. “Phil and Audrey’s kids? Cottage down the road?”
She looks closer, squinting. “Oh, yes. Of course. Aren’t they just full of beans.”
Truth is I have no idea who they are. Could just as easily have said they were cousins, or grocery delivery boys, or aliens who washed up on shore one Tuesday. I don’t even know if it’s Sue-Ann and Bob dancing in the picture on the deck, but that’s what I tell her. I nearly tore the whole wall down the day Bob and Judy died, nearly smashed every one of the photos to the ground. I came close. But it wasn’t my illusion to shatter.
“They look happy, don’t they?” Sue-Ann says, pointing at the picture of Judy on Bob’s knee.
I start folding towels, pretending I can’t hear, assuming she’ll change course soon enough.
But she keeps on. “Judy seems happy, doesn’t she? Even though she wouldn’t look at me when I took it.”
I glance over, see her reaching out to touch the frame.
“She wouldn’t look at me much in those days.” She draws her hand back. “But, I suppose, I couldn’t look at her either.”
“Oh, now,” I say, folding faster, breath catching. “Just teenage stuff, I’m sure. I know all about that.”
“No. She was younger. She was a child.”
“I remember when my girl was young,” I tell her, trying to ignore the new quaver in her voice. “She could be a real handful.”
Sue-Ann pauses a moment. “Are you married?”
I hesitate, put the folded towels up on the shelf. “Not anymore. Now, why don’t we go down to the common room—”
“Widow?”
“No, I left. Now, I really think we should—”
“Brave. We couldn’t do that.”
I point at a picture on the side table, away from the wall. A deer in autumn woods. “Isn’t that something?”
“We didn’t do that.” She’s still looking at Bob and Judy. “They do look happy now. Don’t they? Not so hard to see. Not so hard to believe.”
Bile burns the back of my tongue.
“Where are we going?” she asks, looking around. We haven’t moved. “I don’t want tea. I’d like to rest my eyes and sleep awhile. You do what you need to, dear. Before we head out. Just need to rest my eyes. Long drive up and all.”
I help her back into the bed, sweat beading along my hairline. I leave her staring at nothing beside her as I step back into the hallway and close the door. I reach for the wall. I try to catch my breath. I pull my phone from my pocket and touch her name.
“Mama?”
Her voice.
“What’s wrong?”
Ah, Colette. My sweet, sweet girl.
“Ma. Listen to me. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath in. Like this. In,” she says, slowing her words and inhaling deep, just like on the tapes she bought for me. “…aaaand out. Let me hear you breathe.”
I slide down the wall. I try to ride her waves of breath. I keep my eyes open.
“Sorry,” I say, when I can manage. “I’m so sorry.”
“Stop. It’ll be all right, Mama. I can come get you.”
No, I say. I want to say. But I just sit. I just try to breathe.
“I’m right here,” she says. “It’s going to be all right.”
But that’s not true. That’s not true at all.
“Yes,” I tell her with all the breath I have. “Of course it is, my sweet girl. It’s all going to be just fine.”
A ROAD IN THE RAIN
It was the crack of her voice in the message that made me go. Raspy, sleepless. Asking could I please get the rest of the things she’d left behind in her hurry to get out.
It had been raining for days. Damp jeans as I slid into my car, fog blanketing the windshield. Cold air blasted from the vents of the old Skyhawk. I breathed into my hands.
His kitchen smelled of coffee and cat food, Caterina von Kittenburg performing figure eights around my ankles while I leaned against the counter and tried to look at ease. I had never been there alone with him.
It felt like a different room, a different place now that it was his not theirs, even though everything in it looked the same. He was different without her too. Quieter. Humourless.
He took a pull off a joint and asked if I wanted some. Silky coils of smoke rose to the ceiling above us. I felt him watching me as I inhaled. I passed it back without looking up from my hand. He bent down into the fridge to find cream for the coffee, his movements athletic as he shifted the ketchup, the Coke, the leftover Thai food containers.
“Fuck it,” he said, closing the door and opening the freezer above. He pulled out a frosty bottle of vodka, reached for two glasses on a high shelf.
He clinked his glass with mine. I drank fast, most of it at once, icy hotness lighting up the back of my throat. A few feet away he leaned against the oven, petting the cat’s arched back with his bare foot. I stirred the last of my drink with my finger, made a comment about the rain to crack the air.
It wasn’t all quiet. Cat von Kit’s motorized purr. The chug and gasp of the coffee maker. Jangly music from a TV commercial in the other room, gay and bouncing. I’d seen that ad a thousand times, a smiling, peaceful wife, mother, alone, flapping out a clean white sheet over a bed in a sunny white bedroom.
I was picturing her beatific face when he closed the gap between us. His arm against mine, his glass clacking down on the counter. The tips of his fingers, then, on the back of my hand, barely,
barely,
before he took my drink away.
Old Spice deodorant, booze on his breath. His nose, my nose, his lips, our mouths, his tongue, rigid and cold. The cool damp hand that had held his glass slipping up under the back of my sweater, pulling me into him. Skin to skin. Goosebumps.
—
Two nights earlier, Kendra had picked me up on her way to their apartment to get her things.
“It’s like a mutual letting-go,” she’d said of their breakup, jerking her head to get the long bangs out of her eyes.
Unravelling was more like it. Unhinging. I could think of other words, but I kept quiet and smoked the one cigarette she said I could have in her sister’s car that night, so long as the window was all the way down and my head was as far out as I could get it. I winced against slivers of cold rain and tried to shield the shaft of my cigarette, but it got wet in no time. Resigned, I tossed it, watched it disappear into a fold of black and turned my face up to the sky.
The Dead Husband Project Page 10