by Don Gillmor
“When can we see her?” Harry asked.
“Soon. We’ll monitor her. Your mother will have to modify her habits.”
“Meaning?” Erin said.
“How much does she drink now?”
Harry shrugged, “It’s hard to say …”
“Between twelve and sixteen drinks a day,” Erin said.
“Every day?” Shakeesh said, trying to suspend judgment.
“Today would be an exception,” Erin said tersely. Harry could tell that Erin was beginning to dislike Shakeesh.
“She may need to abstain entirely.”
Felicia in one of their homes, without gin. They would have to abstain themselves, Harry thought. It would be impossible to have wine with dinner while their mother sat, thirsty and insane, at the table. What would this situation look like after forty-eight hours? After two weeks? It was unlikely that she would quit drinking. It might not even be possible. Though she had renounced so much lately. She might be one of those people who just quietly abandon alcohol without clinics or counselling or confessing to grey strangers in church basements.
“If she doesn’t stop drinking?” Erin asked.
Shakeesh shrugged slightly. “We’re doing an ultrasound. I’d like to see that liver.”
“It’ll be a lulu,” Erin said.
Shakeesh got up and shook their hands again. “A nurse will bring you to her.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Harry said. They watched him stride away. Neither of them wanted to start the conversation about caring for their mother. Harry finally said, “Tommy Bladdock told me some money is missing from BRG.”
“How much?”
“Roughly $30 million, he thinks. Some of it could be Dad’s.”
“Who took it?”
“Tommy doesn’t know. But August Sampson has been missing for three days, apparently.”
“Hard to believe that August took it. He’s got to be eighty. He has cancer of … what, the liver?” Erin took her cellphone out of her purse and stared at it briefly, then turned it off. “Maybe he was the only one smart enough.”
“He called me,” Harry said. “Before he disappeared.”
“August? What did he want?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
A nurse came in, a middle-aged woman with a tired face. “Come with me,” she said. They followed her down the corridor and through a set of doors and down another corridor that smelled faintly of bleach. She marched through an open door and checked her clipboard and pulled back a green curtain. There were three other curtained beds in the room. There was only one chair in Felicia’s cubicle, and Erin sat. Harry peeked through the curtain beside them, where an emaciated man lay motionless, attached to an IV. Harry took the chair there and placed it beside his sister’s.
Laid out on the hospital bed, their mother looked heartbreakingly petite, her face dull and colourless, the small lines collapsed in intricate patterns under the yellow light.
“Do you remember when we were in London?” Harry asked his sister.
“When we were kids, you mean?”
“Staying at that house. Just one night, I think. In South Kensington, sort of grand but run down a little. We had to leave early the next morning.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Mom was hungover, poisoned. The place was a mess. I think she might have slept with the host. The guy who owned the house. He had a moustache.”
Erin shrugged. “Mom would have been what, thirty-eight, thirty-nine?”
“Remember the next day? It was raining and we stayed in that hotel all day, playing card games, and she hardly said a word.”
“Wasn’t it always raining?”
“Do you think she can hear us?” Harry asked, and they both stared at her.
They stayed for an hour, rooted by duty. Harry said he’d come by in the morning to be there when she woke up. Erin would come later in the day.
Driving home through the valley, he stared at the river, sluggish and brown, a shallow line of water that hadn’t quite frozen. There were tiny snowflakes, a sleety assault carried on the west wind. There wasn’t any traffic. Near the ravine he saw something at the side of the road, like a load of clothes that had fallen off a truck. When he got closer, he slowed and saw that it was a group of men, huddled over something. His headlights landed on them, and one of the men stood up and turned into the glare. There was blood on his coat and his face. He was holding a knife. Harry stopped the car, transfixed. He wondered if a movie was being shot, if he had somehow missed the line of trailers.
The man with the knife approached the car. His beard was matted with something, his parka filthy and torn at the shoulder. Behind him, men slashed and pulled. Snow angled in the wind. Another man stood up and also began to walk toward the car, and Harry glimpsed the deer that was on the ground behind him. The other men pulled meat away and cut the tendons. This information came in a horrible snapshot, the details filled in later.
The man with the beard was only a few feet from the car, his dark eyes unreadable. Not anger or shame, but something feral. Harry stepped on the gas and swerved past, and then watched the scene recede behind him.
EIGHTEEN
WHEN HE GOT HOME, Gladys was sitting on the couch, drinking a glass of wine. Harry had called from the hospital to let her know what had happened, to tell her she didn’t need to come. “How is Felicia?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It was a transient ischemic attack.”
Gladys stared, waiting for more information.
“An episode of neurologic dysfunction caused by lack of blood flow.” He’d found the definition on his smartphone after the meeting with Dr. Shakeesh. “Basically a kind of mini-stroke.”
“God, Harry.”
“She’ll likely recover completely, the doctor said. The problem is, it sometimes leads to a full-blown stroke.”
The same kind of unstated fear that had sat between his sister and Harry at the hospital now entered Gladys’s eyes. Who would take care of Felicia? Would she be in their home? How insane would she be? How insane would they be? Gladys and Felicia had never had a warm relationship. Felicia hadn’t overtly disapproved of her, but she had made it subtly clear that Gladys was a disappointing choice. They had little in common. On the other hand, Felicia and Erin had a lot in common and were, after any length of time together, reliably toxic. Harry wondered how any of them would survive this.
“Felicia’s renounced almost everyone in her world. She’s really quite isolated. What’s left?”
“Us,” Harry said.
“Let’s pray for a full recovery,” Gladys said diplomatically. She sipped her wine.
Harry got a wineglass from the kitchen and poured himself some of the Shiraz. “She once told me that she thought she and Dad should have stuck it out. She didn’t think it was a great marriage—it was a terrible marriage—but even so, part of her thinks she would have been better off. When it ended, she lost faith in the institution, I think. She saw marriage as a kind of war—you go out and have affairs and inflict pain on one another and don’t speak for weeks at a time, but at the end, you’re both veterans of the same battlefield. There’s a camaraderie. That’s what unites you: that pain, those wounds, your shared hell.”
“Is that how you see marriage, Harry? A shared hell? Have you lost faith in the institution?”
Harry had lost faith in most institutions. That was one definition of adulthood. “I’ll tell you what marriage is,” Harry said. “When I was a kid, there was a cheesy museum that was on the way to the cottage. We used to pass this homemade sign for it every weekend, and my sister and I kept asking to go, but we never went because my parents were too anxious to have that first drink on the dock. But one day we decided to visit it for some reason. It was essentially in this guy’s house, one of those original log cabins up there. You walked in and there were the skeletons of two moose. They were lying on the floor in a weird position, and their antlers were locked together. It was wild-l
ooking, maybe thirty feet long, prehistoric. The guy who owned the museum said he found them like that. What happened was two males bumped into each other in rutting season. There’s a female in heat nearby. They fight for her. They charge and engage those antlers. You’ve seen them, they’re huge. Anyway, they get their antlers locked up. They can’t extricate themselves. For a while, they probably keep fighting, pushing and pulling, twisting. But at some point, they run out of gas, they’re exhausted, and they realize they’re stuck. They collapse and can’t get up again. They eat the grass around them. In the morning, they lick the dew. They’re still alive when the wolves find them. It’s a banquet. Two thousand pounds of meat.
“The wolves gather round and start eating them. These enemies. Are they still enemies? Did they come to some kind of understanding while they were stuck with each other, slowly starving, before the wolves found them? Maybe there was some fraternity when the wolves started tearing their flesh. I wonder how long the female moose stuck around. Three days? Three minutes? Can you imagine? One minute, you think you’re going to have the greatest fuck of your life, and the next minute you’re being eaten by wolves.”
“So who am I in this scenario?” Gladys asked. She poured a little more wine into her glass, then topped up Harry’s. “Am I the ungrateful female who abandons them, or is that you and me on the ground, our horns locked, dying.”
“You tell me.”
“I can’t imagine you fighting over me, Harry.”
“Would you find that romantic?”
“As an antiquated abstraction. Not a real fight.”
“I could take Dean if it came to it.”
“Dean?”
“Bang, a fast one right on the beak.” Harry threw a halfhearted punch into the air. “Float like a butterfly, sting like an untenured professor. The junkyard sculptor hits the canvas.”
“He’s one of those narcissists who flirts with everyone. It wasn’t personal.”
“How about Mr. Audubon. Could I take him?”
Gladys was silent for a moment. “You’re not going to use this, are you, Harry? It isn’t going to become a thing between us, is it?”
Harry took a sip of wine. Gladys moved into the kitchen, and Harry sat on one of the stools on the other side of the counter.
“How much are we paying Tommy Bladdock?” she asked.
Harry shrugged. “One point six, one point seven,” he said facetiously.
“Should we be thinking of selling the house?”
“Tommy might find something.”
“He might find himself $5,000 richer. How are we paying for this?”
“We’re running a deficit. Governments run deficits.”
“We’re not a government. Well, maybe the Greek government.”
“If Tommy finds something, we’ll eliminate both the deficit and the debt.”
“If Tommy doesn’t find anything, or if there isn’t anything, or if he finds that there was something but now it’s gone, then he is simply part of our problem.”
Harry stared at the wilting flowers in the vase on the counter and tried to recall their name.
“Harry, I have applied for thirty-six jobs in the last six months. I got three interviews, which ranged from discouraging to humiliating. It may be that my professional life is over, that if I want to work it will be as a greeter in a down-market cocktail lounge for minimum wage. I’ll come home at midnight, tired and humiliated and near tears, with stories about how everyone at work is a brute.”
Harry’s stomach lurched as he briefly contemplated the secrets they withheld from one another. “What did you apply for?”
“Jobs I didn’t want—school librarian in a rural school district that’s a two-hour drive from here, editing government reports. I applied for things I don’t even know how to do, Internet and web work that is beyond me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were applying for jobs?”
“For the same reason you haven’t told me how indebted we are—we both know we can’t bear much more discouraging news.”
She opened a drawer and pulled out the large pan and put it on the stove. She took eggs out of the refrigerator, along with some Morbier cheese and fresh basil. She broke the eggs into a bowl and added pepper and a splash of milk and whisked them for an omelette, then took out beets to make a salad. She toasted some pecans and put butter in the omelette pan. As a cook, she moved with economy and instinctively understood the order in which everything had to be done to be ready at the same time. Her movements were sure and balletic, and Harry had always found his wife in the kitchen quietly seductive. Food as sublimated sex. He remembered Alan Bates lasciviously eating a fig in Women in Love, Albert Finney tearing into his dinner in Tom Jones. Gladys still had a lightness to her movements, the way she glided, the way her hand came to rest on a beet, caressingly, before the intrusion of the knife.
Lying in bed, awake, Harry deconstructed his life with Gladys in the kind of detail that can only come in a dark, sleepless room after several glasses of wine. The first apartment they shared was above a crummy furniture store. Harry was in his second year of graduate school, and when he rented it the landlord didn’t tell him there was an upstairs neighbour who had no separate entrance and entered through their apartment. The landlord’s name was Cecil LeMay, a corpulent former hippie with an unconvincing ponytail. The apartment had been trashed by the previous renter, but the vacancy rate in the city was essentially zero, and Harry got nervous and felt if they didn’t grab it they’d be out in the suburbs somewhere, renting someone’s basement. But he also saw romantic possibilities in the space. It was large and loftish and in a louche part of town.
Gladys spent four hours cleaning the small, questionable bathroom. They painted the entire apartment off-white (Desert Sunrise). Harry bought two rolls of whimsical pink linoleum and laid it over the decayed brown lino in the kitchen. He replaced four light fixtures. LeMay said he’d pay for half the paint. That was it. “Supply and demand,” he said, a trace of hippie whine in his voice. “I didn’t invent the system, man.”
Harry took the disgusting carpet off the stairs, pulled the nails and staples and did the hot, horrible work of sanding the wood, the mixture of ancient sawdust and toxic oil-based paint settling on his sweating body in the constrained, airless stairwell. He was halfway through painting the stairs an elegant grey (Storm Cloud Steel) when LeMay arrived. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
Improving your slum property, you faux-hippie weasel.
“Where’s the carpet?” LeMay asked with mock incredulity.
“I threw it out.”
“You threw it out? Man, you do not fuck with other people’s property.”
“Capitalism 101,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Look,” Harry said, “it was thirty years old, it was toxic, it wasn’t even carpet anymore.”
“Well, who’s going to compensate me?” LeMay asked. He was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt.
“That carpet had a market value of absolutely nothing. It was a health hazard.” Harry was aware that he could, with little effort, sound like an entitled university student, but felt that, in this instance anyway, he wasn’t. LeMay was a creep, and Harry was improving his property at his own expense, and LeMay’s phony counterculture aesthetic irked.
“Well, the value of that carpet might have to come out of your damage deposit.”
“It didn’t have any value. What does have value,” Harry said, “is my labour. Sanding your stairs, cleaning the pigsty that you should have cleaned, painting the walls, installing new floors. How exactly would you calculate that, Cecil?”
LeMay looked up to the iron fire escape that had rusted into an immovable, code-violating sculpture. “I could toss you out on your ass, man.”
“No, you couldn’t,” Harry said. “Have you read the Landlord and Tenant Act? We could stop paying rent and sacrifice live goats in the living room, and it would still take you two years and six lawyers
to get us out of here.” Harry had no idea what the Landlord and Tenant Act actually said, but recalled a stoned late-night conversation with a guy at a party who said it was more or less impossible to evict people. Harry hoped this was true.
“You are treading on thin ice, man,” LeMay said, pointing his chubby finger at Harry. “Do not push your luck with me.”
“Fuck you, man,” Harry said, the adrenaline pumping.
This was day twelve of their occupancy.
The streetcar ran all night and shook their bed, and the cockroaches survived the nuclear assault of Harry’s poison. They had been there two weeks when the upstairs neighbour invaded. They were in bed when Gladys heard the slow horror-film march of footsteps on their stairs.
“Harry, someone’s in the apartment.” She sat up, frozen.
The footsteps were ominously heavy on the stairs that Harry had restored. Had he not taken the mouldy brown carpet off, they might not have heard him. Harry grabbed a bathrobe from the hook, which he realized was Gladys’s as he pulled it closed, and went into the hallway, his mouth dry with anticipation. He was heading to the kitchen to get a knife, but the door to the top of the stair opened just then and Harry stood in that dull, bluish light to confront a man with long dark hair and construction boots.
“Whoa,” the man said.
“Get out,” Harry said, as forcefully as possible. A simple, visceral command, issued in a woman’s bathrobe.
“Oh, you’re … I guess LeMay didn’t … Well, he wouldn’t. I live here.”
“We live here.”
“Upstairs,” the man said, pointing to the ceiling. He produced a key and held it up, and then fit it into the locked door in the hallway that Harry had asked about when he looked at the place. LeMay had said, “Oh don’t worry about that.”
“I’m Win Oatley. I live upstairs. Sorry, man. It’s kind of late. LeMay should have told you, but, well …” He went through the door, and Harry heard the sound of the lock sliding back into place. His first thought was of nailing the door shut. He listened to those construction boots walk up the stairs and move loudly across his ceiling.