What We All Want

by Michelle Berry

  Day after day after day of sitting by the window, watching her garden grow over. Hilary trying to keep the weeds back, trying to trim the bushes, but to no avail. They were living that fairy tale where the castle gets covered over with vines. But there was never a prince to come home and chop at those vines and rescue her mother, rescue her. Hilary did it all on her own. First it was only shopping, cleaning, cooking, laundry, then medicine, doctors, bathing, nursing. From mature older woman to thin, caved-in child, her mother ate only applesauce and mushed vegetables. Their preserves. And Hilary bought baby food. Wax beans, summer vegetables, peaches, pears, apricots. The apricots were the best. Hilary took to eating them herself. Standing by the kitchen counter, licking the little jar clean. The sticky, sweet baby smell near her nose.

  Hilary turns off the light and closes the door to her mother’s bedroom. She catches her reflection in the hall mirror. It startles her because, for a brief instant, a flash, in her nose, her eyes, her lips, the way she holds her shoulders, she sees her mother standing there. Her mother before she fell over the edge of the world.

  Billy lies beside his wife, Tess. He listens to her snore and watches the lights of the cars outside roam like rainbows over his bedroom ceiling. He has to pee but he doesn’t want to wake Tess. He thinks of his sister in that big old house, his brother, sleeping in dirty sheets, his daughter, Sue, in her room, seventeen years old and pregnant, and he thinks of his mother dead and lying all undone at Dick Mortimer’s funeral home. He wonders what clothes Hilary gave Dick to dress Becka up in. He wonders if it was Becka’s violet- and red-flowered dress, the one she wore when she used to go out, the one she wore to his wedding. He wonders if Hilary included Becka’s underwear, bra, nylon stockings. What about shoes? Do you put shoes on a corpse? Billy feels his mother is in a nowhere zone somewhere. Hovering. He misses her now but he doesn’t know why. He’s lived only an hour away for at least twenty years yet he still only visited her once in a while.

  His daughter is pregnant and probably doesn’t know who the father is and Billy can’t think of that because it pains him in the chest and he often worries about his heart. His little girl pregnant. Jesus. Sue’s baby will be born in May. And to top things off, to make life even more miserable, he lost his job at the photo shop several weeks ago and his job as a night security guard several days ago and he hasn’t had the nerve to tell anyone about either. Christ, life is unfair. Money is lean. Tess is fat. Hilary is going to fight them over the sale of the house. Thomas is going to give all the money to Hilary. His mother is dead, dead, dead. Everything sucks, Billy thinks, and this thought makes him want a drink.

  Tess pushes her beefy body up against his thin one.

  He hasn’t even told Tess he lost his jobs and he’s not intending to tell her. Why should he? She hasn’t done much for him lately.

  Becka, Billy thinks. Dead. A mercy. After all, she suffered enough. But his mother’s death makes losing his jobs even worse. Although she’s been sick for such a long time it seems sometimes to Billy that everything is happening at once.

  Billy really has to pee. “Move over, Tess,” Billy whispers. “Jesus, just move a bit.”

  Billy slides out of his warm bed. He puts on his slippers and robe and leaves his room to go to the washroom. But on the way he gets distracted and he heads downstairs to the kitchen where he finds several bottles of beer and moves with them to the TV set in the living room. He sits on the couch with the remote control in his hand, twists off a beer cap, and tips the bottle into his mouth.

  Billy has a list in his head of what he wants out of his life and money is the highest on that list. Thomas can’t do anything about their mother’s will. If it’s written that the money is to be divided, then it will be divided. Three ways. Thomas can give his share to their sister but Billy is going to take his share and pay off some debts. He’s going to try and get ahead, he’s going to push himself like he did years ago when he was just married and Sue was a tiny baby. When Sue was sweet and small and innocent. When Billy was king of his house, when he could do nothing wrong.

  3. Mould

  Have you made any decisions about your mother?” Dick Mortimer says on the phone to Hilary the next morning. Dick twirls the phone cord around his fingers. He thinks of Hilary’s face as he talks, the way her nose seems to have shifted, her eyebrows are thicker. He sits back in his big easy chair in his dark office. The windows are leaded, old-fashioned, and the glass is thick. Dick can’t see out and no one can see in.

  Dick spent three hours last night embalming Hilary’s mother. He is tired. Liver cancer is not a pretty sight. She was bright yellow. And then he almost used formaldehyde, which would have reacted with the jaundice and turned her green. Horrid green. Dark olive green, almost black. After seeing Hilary and Billy, he was a bit off, he wasn’t thinking. His childhood coming back to him so quickly, so unexpectedly, thoughts of his own mother’s death, memories of sneaking around the funeral home with Hilary. Last night Dick left Rebecca Mount in the embalming room when he was finished with her. He set her features, sealed her eyes, embalmed her, covered her with a sheet, and left her on a table.

  “Not really.” Hilary looks around the kitchen nervously. “We tried to figure out where to bury her but we can’t come up with anything. We haven’t been together in so long. We don’t know each other any more.” She suddenly doesn’t want to put her mother in the ground. She likes this flurry of activity, the action and bodies around her. She wants to get to know her brothers again. She likes talking on the phone to Dick Mortimer, something she didn’t even do when they were young. She knows that if she buries her mother, everyone will leave and she will be all alone. Alone with her dolls and preserves.

  “I don’t know my brother either,” Dick says. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “Steve? What’s he doing?”

  “He’s some big lawyer in New York.”

  “I’d sort of like to keep my brothers here,” Hilary says. “Go back to a time where we all lived together. Thomas is actually staying at the house. He’s sleeping in his old room. I can hear him snore across the hall. I usually sit by my mother’s bed and talk to her. I tell her about the weather or how I’m feeling or I read to her. I read her the TV Guide.”

  “But she’s gone now, Hilary.”

  “I know that.” Hilary twirls the cord around her fingers until her hair gets caught up in it and then she pulls at it, trying to release herself.

  “When my mother died,” Dick says, “it took me a long time to start talking about her in the past tense. I would say, Mom does this and that, instead of Mom did this and that.”

  “What did she do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This and that. What was this and that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Things.” Dick looks at the notepad on his desk.Yesterday, before the doctor phoned from Hilary’s house, Dick was adding up his monthly incomes from the previous year, tallying up how much he had made and deciding if he could give himself a raise. He sees the line of numbers and then he sees a doodle, just lines and circles. But the doodle looks like something to him now It looks like the figure of a man with the head of a chicken. Dick turns the doodle upside down. Now it’s a mountain with snow on top.

  “See,” Hilary says. “You’ve already forgotten her. I’m not going to forget my mother.”

  “She baked cookies,” Dick says. “And watched TV a lot.” Hilary is silent on the other end of the phone.

  “Are you still there?” Dick asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Dick sighs. “I know it’s difficult but you’ll have to make some decisions. She didn’t mention where she’d like to be buried? Usually people talk about such things when they have cancer. It can be such a slow disease.”

  “No.”

  “Not a thing?”

  “Nothing. She said nothing. She wasn’t really dying.” “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, we never believed she was dyi
ng.”

  “She had liver cancer. The odds of survival —”

  “We thought the doctors could be wrong. Doctors are often wrong. I saw a show once where a doctor did prostate surgery on a man who only needed his gallstones removed.” Hilary scuffs her slippers along the kitchen linoleum. She chews her fingernails She wishes Dick were here with her in her kitchen. The phone is hot against her ear and her neck hurts from the position she is standing in. Hilary is not used to talking on the phone. She wonders if people develop phone muscles from stretching their necks to keep the phone under their chins. Maybe she doesn’t have the right phone muscles.

  When they were young Dick and Hilary spent hours in the library together doing homework. They rarely talked about anything more than school work but when they sometimes touched on a subject that was personal Hilary remembers that she would feel her heart speed up. Her brothers rarely talked to her. She had no friends. Her mother was her only friend but sometimes her mother would lock herself in her room, afraid to come out and talk to anyone, overwhelmed by her fears. Dick’s constant presence was reassuring; his bulky figure, the whiff of formaldehyde, his loud laugh, comforted her. Then Thomas left home for university and Hilary dropped out of school to help her mother. Billy was never around, always at Tess’s house. And Hilary lost touch with Dick. Gradually. Hilary was too busy doing laundry, dishes, shopping, cooking, and comforting her mother as her fears grew.

  “I know this is hard, Hilary,” Dick says. “Thomas will help you. Why doesn’t one of you come in to talk to me soon and we’ll sort things out. Or I could come over there and we could talk about it.”

  “I just want her to get up out of bed,” Hilary says. “I want her to stop saying that she hurts.”

  “It’s over now, Hilary.You need to move on.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’ll be in touch, all right? I’ll give you some time to get organized.”

  When Hilary hangs up the phone she feels her cheeks. They are flushed hot and dry. She runs cold water from the kitchen sink over her face. She watches the water fall into the rusty old soup cans, the crusty forks and knives, the banana peels, that are piled up in the sink. She feels like gagging.

  Thomas is suddenly standing in the kitchen. He is wearing the same suit he had on last night but his shirt is hanging out and his tie is in his pocket. He looks wrinkled

  “Coffee?” he asks, rubbing his eyes.

  “Coffee gives you cancer,” Hilary says into the sink, her face dripping wet.

  “Jesus, Hilary,” Thomas says. “I just need a cup to wake up. I’m not going to bathe in the stuff.”

  “I think Daddy probably got cancer and died,” Hilary says. “That’s what I think. It seems to run in the family. Remember Uncle Hugh? And Grandma? Remember Grandma?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Isn’t it too early in the morning to be talking about our family?” Thomas sits at the table. He rubs his hands over the stubble on his face.

  “Why did you sleep in your suit?” Hilary dries her face on a dirty towel that is hanging on the handle of the stove.

  “I was tired, I guess. I forgot to change.”

  “Billy would say something about that, wouldn’t he?” Hilary says. “About you being so rich you can sleep in one-hundred-dollar suits.”

  “One hundred dollars?” Thomas laughs.”I’d like to see a suit that only costs one hundred dollars.”

  Hilary sits with Thomas at the table.”I could make you coffee, but we don’t have any coffee. I could make you toast, but there is no bread. I could make you eggs, but there are no eggs, I could make you —”

  “I get the picture. Looks like we should go shopping this morning.”

  Hilary says, “We can take a taxi.”

  “Whatever,” Thomas shrugs. “Hilary,” he says. “I had a dream last night about Becka.About her death.”

  Hilary stiffens.

  “Did she suffer a lot at the end? I dreamed that she was suffering, that she was crying.”

  “She was in pain,” Hilary whispers. “Why?”

  “I should have come home,” Thomas says. “Why didn’t I come home?”

  “I don’t know, Thomas. That’s all she wanted you to do.”

  “I’m so sorry, Hilary.”

  “It’s over now. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Thomas sits quietly at the table with his sister. They both look at the cupboards in front of them. Thomas sees the stains from sauces and food. Hilary sees whiteness before her. Thomas feels a need to get away from this house right now. He feels itchy here, not really himself, like he’s covered in some sort of talcum powder and he can’t see straight and can’t breathe well and can’t move without leaving imprints all around. Hilary feels at peace here, she doesn’t really want to go out shopping. She wants to stay in this house, here with her brother, forever. She gets up from the table and stretches.

  “Can you help me carry some things up from the basement?”

  “Sure.” Thomas gets up. “What things?”

  Down in the basement, Hilary rummages. She thinks she should spend more time down here. Organizing, rearranging. Thomas looks around at the dolls everywhere, sitting high on shelves, at the water on the floor beside the furnace. The walls seem to be growing some sort of mould Hilary is standing beside a stack of boxes.

  “I’m looking for the red pepper jelly,” she says. “I don’t think it’s in the upstairs closet. And I want to bring up some canned fruit and pickles. Then we would have something to eat. Then we wouldn’t have to go shopping.”

  “Canned fruit and pickles for breakfast? No thanks.” Thomas tries not to touch anything. He feels damp and cold. “We’ll have to get the basement fixed before we sell.”

  Hilary ignores him.

  “Where is the water coming from?” Thomas moves over to the window where he sees a large crack. Every time it rains, water must just pour through. “Jesus, Hilary, look at that crack.”

  “It’s been there for years.” Hilary picks up a box and moves it. She opens the one underneath and looks inside. “Here we go. Baby dills. I’ve got chutney somewhere but we don’t have any bread to dip.”

  “Years? Do you know how much money you’re losing through there?”

  Hilary stops searching through boxes and looks curiously at the window. “How can money go out the window?”

  “The heating bills. All the heat seeps out through here.”

  “Oh,” Hilary laughs. “I thought you meant that I was being robbed or something. I pictured money flying out the window.”

  “You are being robbed, almost,” Thomas says. “And this mould on the walls. It can’t be healthy living with that.”

  Hilary looks at the mould. “It’s never bothered me. In fact, I never realized it was mould until last year.”

  “For someone worried that coffee will give me cancer —” Thomas begins.

  “That’s different.” But Hilary stands back from the wall. “Isn’t it?” Then she walks quickly up the stairs. “Bring up the baby dills,” she shouts down. “And a jar or two of red pepper jelly in the box beside the pickles.”

  When Thomas comes up the stairs carrying the preserves he finds Hilary sitting in the living room, her slippered feet on the rocks. She is holding one of her dolls, a redhead with long braids and freckles.

  “I’ll have to get the mould removed,” she says. “Do you know how much that will cost?”

  “Hilary, we’ll just get someone to paint over it,” Thomas says. “Before we sell.”

  “Sell,” Hilary says. “I told you I’m not selling this house.”

  Thomas sighs. He walks across the rocks, careful not to twist his ankles. “Tell me about Becka,” he says. “What was your life like after I left? What was she like?”

  Hilary doesn’t even pause to think. She says, “Mother was afraid.”

  “She was always a bit paranoid.”

  “No, she was afraid o
f losing people. Afraid that if she got to know anyone, then that person would leave her, they would get hurt or killed or just leave. And it got worse. She never went outside except to garden because she thought she might meet someone outside. There were days when, talking to me, she would start crying. She would touch my hair—like this—touch my cheek. She loved me but was afraid to love me. Do you know what I mean?”

  Thomas stands, steadies himself on the rocks, and walks over to the window. He stares out at the cold day, the leaves blowing on the street. He can see a man walking, hunched over in the wind.

  “It’s funny, though,” Hilary says.

  “What?”

  “Mother was never afraid of getting sick and dying herself. She didn’t believe the doctors when they told her she was dying. Even at the end, she thought she would live forever. She was saying, ‘Don’t you leave me now, Hilary, don’t ever go away,’ as if I would be the first to go.”

  “But you’re afraid of that, aren’t you? Of getting sick?”

  “Isn’t everyone afraid to die?” Hilary asks. “You are. You’re afraid to fly and that’s because when you fly you take a chance that could lead to your death.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  Thomas watches the man walk away from them, down the street. He crosses over to the opposite sidewalk where he stops to light a cigarette. He cups his hands together over the cigarette and his hair rushes up in the wind.

  Hilary has moved to Thomas’s side and is watching the man too. “And liver cancer? She didn’t even drink. She smoked. But she never drank.Why did she get liver cancer? Why not lung cancer?” She signals to the man outside.

  “It tells you that you can never be sure about anything, doesn’t it?”

  “I have to get rid of that mould,” Hilary says. “What if it was the mould that made her sick.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you don’t know, right?”