“How’re you feeling?” Claude asked amiably as he locked up the shed.
“Okay.”
Claude patted Luc’s midsection and tousled his hair. “Sorry about that.”
Luc nodded, then looked away.
“How’s about we sit on the bench here and rest up awhile? Then we’ll get some breakfast.”
As they sat, Claude flexed his hands and arms, which ached from the hard labor. He looked at his blood-spattered boots. He’d have to throw them out when he returned home, a pity to be sure. But a beauty of a morning was beginning in Oslo—that sweetness of a cloudless sky, the air still cool. The din of the March pulsed in the background and he was grateful to have a job that he could count on. These were the things that made sense, and Claude now felt content, even optimistic. He glanced at his watch—just after seven. His stomach growled in the best way and he found himself looking forward to a filling meal of eggs, potatoes, juice, maybe a donut too. No coffee, but a beer to take off the edge. Then home for some solid, well-deserved sleep. Because his family was safe.
“You can’t talk about this. The moose and all. Right?” Claude said, poking Luc in the arm.
“Yeah,” Luc said.
“You sure? This is important.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s got to be like it never happened. ’Cause if anybody ever found out that you butchered that moose, especially the way you did it? I don’t even want to think what that would do to your gram.”
“I know—”
“Do ya?” Claude broke in. “It’d break her in two.”
Luc nodded.
“And my son,” Claude continued. “He knew that moose. Now he’s going to wonder what happened to her and I’m going to have to feed him some bullshit story about the ways of nature. And Pierre’s no fool.”
“I get it.”
“I hope so. Because the other thing is, you stole that moose from Mrs. Kimbrough. It was her crash, so the meat’s supposed to be hers. You took it and that’s a crime.”
“A crime …”
“No. I need you to understand. When I say it’s a crime, I mean you could get in trouble with the cops—”
“Can we get breakfast at the IHOP?” Luc interrupted with a massive yawn. His head dropped to the side and landed against Claude’s shoulder. The snuffing regulated down to shallow breathing and just like that, the man fell asleep.
From a distance, the scene might have looked like they were friends who shared a long history that made such proximity reasonable. But for Claude, contact between men was uncomfortable because he couldn’t trust where it came from. Like fancy food—manipulated beyond its natural state. It certainly wasn’t natural that Luc could fall asleep like a baby after having just decapitated a moose. And it wasn’t natural, or even fair, that Claude himself had labored like a farm animal to yet again clean up this fool’s trail of mindless destruction. No. On this perfect Maine morning, nothing on the Lord’s planet was in any way natural. Because, Luc. Who’d brought Pierre to the shed, which led to his memory loss. Luc, who then defied Claude by not burying that moose calf. Luc, who finally did manage to pick up an animal on his own—but the exact wrong animal. Luc, who was trying to play at life like a man but would forever be a child. And Luc, who now wanted his breakfast at the IHOP?
Luc never saw it coming. The left jab that smashed his orbital bone. The right hook that caught his jaw and propelled him a foot in the air. The hard kick to his groin. The one, two cheap shots to his kidneys. The pummeling, pummeling, pummeling at his midsection. Claude, staring at Luc flat on his back, his limbs pinwheeled to the ground, not moving. Claude, panting like a bull, not caring if Luc ever took another breath. Claude, walking away.
GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY
TWO CHAIRS AND A ROLLING TABLE littered with canisters filled with cotton balls, tongue depressors, and nasal swabs took up all but a few square feet of the claustrophobic examination room. When Claude dropped into a chair on one side of the table, he immediately felt uncomfortably moist. It reminded him of his office at the March: virtually zero ventilation and a portending of no way out. Sweat tunneled down his face, his breath shallowed up. He rubbed clammy palms back and forth on his thighs.
“Do you know your blood type, Mr. Roy?” the technician asked as he labeled multiple glass tubes.
“Isn’t that what you’re here for?” he answered with a smirk. Claude had no clue about his blood; he’d never been curious about such things.
“Just making conversation,” the man placated.
“Just get on with it,” Claude said, rolling up his sleeve.
He wrapped a tourniquet around Claude’s bicep and flicked two fingers at the crook of his elbow, like in some movie about heroin addicts. Claude had always wondered if they really needed to do that. As the needle disappeared into his vein, he averted his eyes, landing on a poster listing the Twelve Steps with the Serenity Prayer tagged at the end. His bowels moved an inch. When the guy asked him to squeeze his fist, no doubt another cliché, Claude winced. That the swelling and bruising on his knuckles had lasted this long surprised him, because Luc had submitted to the beating like an agreeable punching bag. In fact, he couldn’t recall any particular blow severe enough to have made his hand ache this badly, let alone cause Luc’s coma. Going on a week, now.
Much of that night had gone missing. Similar to when, every now and again, he’d allow himself a major drunk and wake up not remembering (or caring, for that matter) who he’d pissed off. Now, sitting in the chair, trying very hard to not stare at the chronic acne on the technician’s face, Claude was only able to claw back sensory memories. Such as sound. Screaming, surely his own. Fist on flesh. Crying, which he assumed came from Luc, but it seemed plausible he’d joined in at some point. Then color. Red spread across grey. Dirt-brown fur. The bluest sky, just before something about the IHOP. But what Claude could conjure up with too much clarity was the condition of the moose. Holes. Shredded bones. Floppy tendons. A missing dewlap. Its nose. And those scars. All week long, he’d fallen asleep to these particular indignities floating behind eyes slammed shut. Even dreamt about them as assaults to his own body. Then he’d wake and for about an hour feel ambivalence about the hurt he’d caused Luc. But coma be damned, Claude simply couldn’t forgive Luc’s butchering work, the likes of which no Mainer with a quarter brain and a sliver of a heart would ever stand for. He closed his eyes and felt the needle nudge around in his vein as the technician switched out the tubes.
“Almost done. Only the donation bag now,” the man said.
Claude grunted. As if this were some comfort. Leave it to Luc to be even more “special,” as Edna recently christened him, with a weird blood type. Then of course, the Saint couldn’t help herself from butting in. She rallied the entire town around this bloodletting nonsense, hyping it into an all-out campaign to root out an equally special donor, and while they were at it replenish the blood banks. Claude viewed the pressure as a cheap threat. Like, either run five miles for the cure for cancer or forever be seen as a layabout. Besides, everyone in Oslo knew if you got any sort of cancer, what with local pollution, you were pretty much a goner. Now all the jabber at the Robinet, the hardware store, Shaw’s, and even at the March, was how every last cousin twice removed had opened their veins. Just the other day, Claude had been cornered at the car wash by no less than three people who, when he’d admitted he’d not yet donated, called him heartless, selfish. A man could barely tend to his daily chores without being reminded of Luc’s blood and his coma.
“There you go, Mr. Roy,” the man said, ripping off the rubber strap. “Better grab a glass of orange juice. You might feel woozy for a while.”
Claude rolled his eyes and headed directly for the john. The three urinals were already in use; it seemed everyone was pissing Tropicana. He stepped into a stall, pushed his jeans down to his boots and landed hard on the toilet seat. Damn. He did feel dizzy, and now regretted ignoring the nurse with the nice set of boobs when s
he tried to shove a plastic cup into his hand. As he’d walked past her, she winked at him, and now Claude remembered that she was the bartender that night with Luc at the Robinet. Did she know?
During the past week, Claude had retraced his steps by spritzing the shed again and then personally dismantled all the traps. He even burned the ledger and crushed the calculator with the heel of his boot. A few days later, he made like a real executive and took apart his makeshift office. This meant the business was officially dead, the moose up in ashes. And the wink was surely nothing more than harmless flirting.
But dear God. Now he couldn’t feel his feet. Claude dropped his head between his knees. The black and white penny tiles on the floor seemed to wave at him. Dragging his arms up, he managed to place his hands on the stall door to keep himself from falling forward and passing out. And he couldn’t understand why he felt so shitty because things were, at least at home, looking up.
Celine had pulled herself off the pills. The day after the Luc thing, and while Claude slept well into the afternoon, apparently Celine had a heart-to-heart with herself. And eureka, he woke to find her scrubbing the floors with a rag soaked in Clorox. Purging the mudroom of a thousand paper bags, so for the first time in forever the space didn’t pass as a firetrap. Organizing her shoes and clothes with the precision of a poodle groomer. If that wasn’t enough hallelujah for one lifetime, later that night while eating a proper meal together for the first time in weeks, Pierre let it out that he’d begun to remember. As proof, he recited what he’d done for the last two hours in minute detail, which took a good twenty minutes. Celine went completely apeshit. They group-hugged and this time meant it. And though Claude was glad to have his wife functioning again—sex twice in subsequent days—and Pierre back to his preadolescent, quirky self, he couldn’t trust it. Something nagged at him. Something he didn’t know about. Or had forgotten. He should have been happy, or at least relieved. But sitting on the john at the hospital, Claude couldn’t locate those emotions.
He groaned. The piss he’d been holding back finally sputtered into the toilet. He heard the men wash their hands and leave. And not a moment too soon, because not only did his shit let loose but worse, Claude began to cry. Embarrassing, racking, heaving sobs. During which he remembered that on the drive to the hospital that morning Pierre had explained the big bang to him and predicted that in their lifetime this would be replaced by some new theory. And for all his caution and covering of tracks, Claude now worried that he too would be exposed as out-of-date, and replaced. He opened the stall door and saw his puffy face, his hair like a zombie, his eyes haunted. Claude barely recognized the creature in the mirror.
Celine and Pierre, Edna, and the Kimbrough duo would be waiting for him in the cafeteria. Claude had been the last to donate, and he was surprised to see that between the bloodletting and his bathroom breakdown, over an hour had passed. After throwing water on his face, he hurried back down the corridor, passing the nurse who now ignored him. All at once a bunch of doctors clustered around him, blocking his path. One, whom he recognized as the head honcho of hematology, grabbed him by the arm and hustled him into a large office with a huge desk and tons of bookshelves and walls smattered with degrees and citations and probably even the bronze Medal of Freedom. The doctor impatiently gestured for Claude to sit in a too-small chair, then towered over him from behind his desk. The positioning made Claude feel puny and trapped. Guilty as charged.
“We’ve been looking for you,” the doctor said, pushing his glasses up onto his bald head.
“Yeah?” Dear God, Claude thought. How could this doctor know?
“Mr. Roy, did you know you have AB negative blood?”
“Not really. Maybe … no,” Claude stammered with confusion.
“It’s the rarest type.”
“So?”
“The reason I mention this is that Luc Sibley also has AB negative.”
“So?”
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“Why would it?” Claude didn’t like the tone from this know-it-all and sat back, crossing his arms.
“One of the reasons we’re having trouble getting Luc matched is that we discovered he also has an atypical antigen in his blood. The people we’ve tested who have AB negative don’t have that antigen and so aren’t close enough matches. But you have both. Which makes you a very close match.”
“Okay, okay,” Claude said, annoyed. “I’ll give more blood. That what you want?”
“Well yes, that would be expected, of course. But you should know that only a relative could match the way you have … with such specificity.”
“Uh-uh, no,” Claude said, shaking his head. “No. We’re not related. No.”
“What I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Roy, is that you are related.”
“Not possible,” Claude whispered to himself.
He jumped up out of his chair, causing it to slam into the bookcase. He backed against the closed door, trying to gain distance from the doctor and the entire subject.
“This is not possible,” he repeated, this time louder than he meant.
“Science doesn’t lie,” the doctor responded quietly, now sitting at his desk with his hands folded.
Claude sat back down and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Blood. The doctor handed him a paper-towel square and Claude blew furiously, examined the mess, and balled it into his fist. He scanned the wall again and now saw that the awards were mostly for the guy’s kid, his scholastic achievements, soccer-team wins, a spelling bee.
“Have you told anyone?” Claude asked, still staring at the wall.
“This is a privileged conversation.”
“What do you want?”
“Give us more blood now. We’ll make sure Luc can tolerate it as we suspect he will. Then we’ll ask you to come in again. Could be as soon as tomorrow.”
“Just get on with it,” Claude said for the second time that morning.
The big shot drew the blood himself. A real pro, he didn’t bother with flicking his fingers at Claude’s elbow or the fist-squeezing routine. While the blood drained from Claude’s vein, they passed the time talking about the doctor’s kids. One had skipped a grade in junior high because he was superbright, but was having a hard time adjusting emotionally. The younger had recently been diagnosed with autism spectrum, and his wife had quit her job to care for him full time. Claude found himself warming to this man and was thinking about disclosing Pierre’s memory loss and recent recovery, maybe buck the guy up a bit. But the conversation came to an abrupt halt because the bag was full. The doctor pressed a cotton ball onto the second puncture in Claude’s arm, then handed him the roll of paper towels.
“Apply pressure to that,” the doctor advised, pointing to Claude’s nose, which had begun to drip again, then sprinted out of the room.
Claude found them all wedged into a corner of the cafeteria. Saint Sandra was just returning with drinks on a tray. Jim and Celine sat at opposite ends of the table, both reading different sections of the Oslo Penny Saver.
“That took a long time, Dad. What happened?” Pierre asked without looking up from his book.
“I got a bloody nose and couldn’t get it to stop.”
“That’s weird,” Pierre mused, and continued reading.
Claude sat next to Edna, who barely registered his arrival. She wore a dowdy housedress with a limp scarf around her shoulders. No lipstick. Her hands quivered as she continually wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Why didn’t I call the police that night?” Edna groaned, ignoring the cup of tea Sandra had placed in front of her.
“Nothing you could have done would have made a difference,” Sandra said. “Not even calling the police. They’d never have found him. Just thank God that guy happened to wander out for a smoke when he did. Come on. The tea will feel good.”
Sandra began to spoon sugar into Edna’s cup, when the hematologist approached.
“Mrs. Sibley, we have good news.”
> “You do?”
“We found a very close match. Luc’s receiving the blood now.”
“Who is it?” Sandra asked.
“The donor wants to remain anonymous,” the doctor responded quickly, avoiding Claude’s stare. “But since Luc isn’t in danger anymore, I suggest you go home and get some rest.”
“But I want to be with him,” Edna pleaded.
“There’s nothing to be gained by staying. We’ll call you immediately if there are any changes. But I’m fairly confident that Luc will regain consciousness before too long.”
After much cajoling, Jim convinced Edna to go to lunch with him. Celine asked Sandra to come back to the house and help her sort through the kitchen pantry. That left Claude in the cafeteria with Pierre, who continued to read his book and sip a Coke with a cherry at the bottom of the glass.
“Don’t eat that cherry, son,” Claude advised.
Pierre looked up, suspicious. “Luc eats them.”
“True. But I know for a fact that Mrs. Kimbrough says they stay in your stomach for an entire year.”
“Actually, it’s only a week. She warned me, too.” Pierre heaved a great sigh, licked his finger, and turned a page.
“How’s about you and me go back to the house and on the way, you can tell me all about this book you can’t get your snout out of,” Claude suggested.
Pierre looked at him as if he were an alien. “Really? You probably won’t like it.”
“I’ll risk it.”
Oslo, Maine Page 19