He made a few jerky stabs. The unit bucked and dropped slightly, then veered one way and another. Before long, though, he seemed to get the knack, and began carving swooping lines into the cold air over what looked like a horse paddock.
“This is awesome,” he said again. “Like, really awesome.” And he laughed like he’d gotten away with something.
“You’re doing pretty good. I’ll have to make you your wings. Little button. Maybe with tinfoil.”
“‘Licensed drone pilot.’”
“Co-pilot. You still have to log the hours.”
“Fine by me. This is so cool,” he said. Then, jerking his head toward the timber-and-glass building, he said, “So, are we gonna do this?”
I raised my arms above my head and said, “Convey the fucking grandeur, Seb!”
We got more footage that day, owing to Seb’s greenness, so it took a lot of extra editing. But in the end the video was pretty great. There were four offers and the place sold by Christmas.
***
While our bank accounts swelled, Connie shrank. It was like every time she coughed, some weight flew out of her. She could only sleep in little stretches, before waking up and moaning, pain running through her like electricity. I moved a cot into her room to be closer, so I could help when she needed me.
When you hear something like I might need you to help me die, you know, that’s something that’ll put you on your heels. But then she presented me with a checklist of small, easily accomplished tasks, and told me it would make the whole thing digestible, or doable:
Fill this prescription.
Buy syringes, some cut flowers, and that scented oil I like.
Run a bath.
Roll a joint.
Dry me off and dress me in a new nightie.
Blow dry my hair, set it in curlers.
Turn on the TV and let me watch something dumb while I have that joint.
Take the curlers out.
Bring me a mirror and let me do a bit of makeup (not too much).
Turn off the TV and play the CD with “Love Me Tender” on it.
Roll the bed out into the sunroom.
Open the windows.
Fill the syringe.
Sing along with Elvis to me.
Put the needle in my arm.
Give me a big kiss.
Say goodbye.
“See? Easy. You can do all that, babe,” she said. “I know you can.”
“Sure I can,” I said.
But the next day, I went to the pharmacy and, instead of filling a prescription, bought a little vial of saline solution. What can I say? I never wanted to stop hoping things could turn out okay.
Time moved on two tracks over the winter. On the first track, professionally, things were great. Wonderful. I was getting jobs in Ottawa: commercial real estate listings, luxury homes, a big executive development with a golf course. Aiello’s client list was swollen, and he wanted my help with just about all of them. I was conveying grandeur all over the place. I even ordered a night-vision camera to install on one of the units, with secret thoughts that I might use it to do something arty, or edgy, or weird, if there was a property that called for such a treatment. I was maybe entering my auteur phase.
The other track was winding and slow, uphill. Connie’s health, trending downward. I was so used to her being skeletal and weak and discoloured that I couldn’t remember the old Connie. She got through the winter but things weren’t good. I could tell from the look on Dr. Parvinder’s face, even if he kept saying the same things about prudent courses of action and prognoses and promising new studies, patting Connie’s shoulder and reassuring her that she was remarkably courageous and strong and whatnot. We had a physical therapist who came to the house once a week, Wednesday afternoons, a woman named Kat, and her tone of voice had changed from cheery to apologetic.
Some nights, I’d sit with my triple rye and wonder how I’d know when she was just about to die—or if Connie would know—and if she’d still ask me to do something about it beforehand.
***
We planned her birthday party anyway, because I guess it’s important to have things to look forward to, even if you might not get there. Her birthday was May first. I always told her that if I knew anything about music, I’d write her a song called “May Day Baby.” Empty words, since I was as useful with a guitar as I would have been in an operating room.
May first was a Friday that year, but Georgia couldn’t get out of her shift, so we planned the party for the following night. The weather had turned beautiful. The crocuses were up and the spring peepers were out, making their noise. The air smelled earthy and felt soft. I’d bought nice wine and gone into Costco and picked up a bunch of little frozen appetizers and some big steaks to grill. Connie couldn’t eat much but she said she wanted me to cut her thin little bits of good, rare beef.
“So thin it melts on my tongue,” she said.
She would probably throw it up soon after, but before that she might feel like she’d indulged. I got her some fresh weed, too, and washed and ironed her green cotton dress, the only one that still fit her. We were going to do this right.
It was warm enough to have the windows open. I had some Hank on the stereo and I could hear birds. Connie was in bed, coughing and retching, but in high spirits. Seb and Georgia pulled into the driveway around four, and when they came through the door, I handed them each a gin and tonic in a tall, thin glass.
“Well, all right,” Seb said.
“Where’s the birthday girl?” asked Georgia.
“I’m in here, come in, Georgie,” Connie yelled through the bedroom door.
Georgia walked down the hall. She knocked gently on the bedroom door, then hunched her shoulders to make herself small, opened the door a crack, and disappeared into the darkened room. There, I imagined, they began talking about sisterly things.
“Boss,” said Seb. “The Cheap Executive Officer. What’s our next gig?”
“Don’t let’s talk business now,” I said. “I just want to enjoy the evening. You have to see these steaks I bought. Thick as a mattress.”
“Delish.”
“Oh, but okay, there’s one thing. That night-vision camera came. I’m gonna put it on that black Phantom. We should play with that later. Very cool.”
“Very cool. So, like, it takes good video at night? Does it use heat or something? Infrared?”
The jerk knew he could get me going if he asked about tech stuff, but I didn’t want to get into it.
“I’ll show you later,” I said, putting the frozen hors d’oeuvres in the oven alongside the roasting potatoes. As I did so, I sang along with Hank: “I’m going down in it three times, but Lord, I’m only coming up twice.”
Seb rolled his bulgy eyes. His freshly shaved head shone like a wet pearl.
The women emerged from the bedroom. Georgia held her glass in one hand and her sister’s elbow in the other, taking her weight and helping her along. Connie was wearing the green dress, with a yellow scarf tied over her head.
I said, “Well, okay, here’s the lady of honour!”
“Oh, jeez. Some honour,” said Connie. “God, I wish I could have one of those G and Ts.”
“Why not,” I said.
“Come on,” she said.
“No, really. I could mix you a little one. Just a splash of gin. It’s your birthday, babe. Your goddamned birthday.”
“What the hell,” she whispered, as Georgia helped her down into a chair.
I sprang up and made her a drink before she could change her mind, and we all held our glasses in the air. “Happy birthday, May Day Baby,” I said.
“Happy birthday to me,” she said, and then brought the glass shakily up to her lips. She closed her eyes and sipped, wincing as she did. It had been a long time since she’d had a drink. “Hoo,” she said once she’d swallowed. “Hoo, boy!”
We all sat around the table, the three of us nibbling on the hors d’oeuvres and putting back our drinks. Conn
ie was smiling and looked happy, though tired. She sipped very slowly. The light was going outside.
I said to her, “What do you want to do, babe? What would make Connie happy right now?”
“I wanna play a round of Uno,” she said.
“Great!”
I got the cards and we played and Georgia won. I fixed new drinks for everyone but Connie, who was still slowly making her way through her first. I made real howitzers this time, very generous pours. You could light these drinks on fire.
“You tell me when you want to eat,” I said to Connie, “and I’ll fire up the grill.”
“Oh, whenever,” she said. “I think I should move to my chair now, though.”
It was true that she was looking a little run over—her colour had changed a bit, her eyes yellower and swimmy—so Seb and I moved her. Georgia brought her drink over and set it down next to the chair.
“I can’t finish that,” Connie laughed, which lifted my heart, to see that she was still trying to make things happy. “I’ll save myself for the steak. I don’t want the puking to start too early.”
“Of course, hon,” Georgia said, and whisked the drink away. I could hear the ice tinkling in the sink as she poured it down.
“How about I start up dinner now, then?” I said.
Connie nodded, pressing her thumbs into her eyes and sighing. It was taking a lot out of her. I thought, Are we only pretending this is for her?
“How about changing the music, too?” she said. We’d been listening to Hank all this time. “I’ve had my fill of the yodelling and all that.”
“Sure, sure, of course. What do you want to hear?”
“Let’s get some Elvis going.”
“I’d love to,” I said, and I put all the King’s stuff on shuffle. I checked the potatoes before going out to fire up the barbecue. Then I brought out the steaks—four thick, bloody slabs of meat—and laid them across the grill, letting the hot flames just barely kiss the cuts before pulling them off.
Seb, who’d been standing quietly—reverently—next to me, whispered, “Nice.”
We took the steaks inside, and Georgia handed us fresh highballs when we stepped through the sliding door. “Try this,” she said, the ice cubes clinking and chiming like a swaying chandelier.
“What is it?”
“A Salty Dog.”
“What’s a Salty Dog?”
“Gin, grapefruit, salt.”
“I’m into it,” said Seb.
I sipped mine. Georgia had a beautifully heavy hand for an experienced server; the gin leapt up into my head and filled me with warmth and pale light.
We got Connie all settled in at the table. I opened the wine, pouring it into big, fat-bottomed glasses with delicate stems, then served out potatoes, salad, and the big cuts of steak. I sat down next to Connie and said, “How are you feeling? You need me to cut that up for you?”
The knives, which we almost never used, were these great bone-handled things that once belonged to her grandparents. The year before, I’d sharpened them so they could slip right through the toughest gristle. She picked hers up and turned it over in her skeletal hand, looking at her plate.
“Yeah,” she finally sighed, deflating, “I guess I do.”
I cut her the finest little slivers of steak and fanned them out for her in a pretty little pattern. “Potatoes, too?”
“I guess,” she said.
When I was done, I looked up into her bruised face. She tried to smile for me but there was nothing behind it. She was on the way down, I could see. We had to hurry up and get this done.
She ate three of the little slivers, then put her fork down and said, sadly, “God, that was amazing.”
Georgia and I finished our plates, and Seb went back for seconds of everything. Connie’s wine was untouched, but the rest of us were ready for a refill. Things were just shy of jumping off the tracks. Seb did an imitation of me, a little hillbilly dance in the middle of the dining room with his hands on an imaginary belt buckle, throwing his heels out to the sides before finishing with a Vegas-period Elvis karate kick. There was a lot of laughing, and even Connie had tears in her eyes.
“Oh God, stop,” she said. “You’re gonna kill me.” She rested both her arms on the table, out in front of her like the sphinx, and a peaceful look came over her. She tapped her brittle fingernails a couple of times and then said, “Is there cake? There better be cake.”
“Ice cream cake,” I said, and I pulled it out of the freezer. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CONNIE, it read, in looping pink letters against the vanilla background. I put a pair of fake candles on it, little battery-operated LED tea lights, because I thought maybe the smoke would make her cough. We sang “Happy Birthday” and I put it down in front of her. She pretended to blow them out, then Georgia picked them up and flicked the little switches so they blinked off. I ran a big knife under hot water and carved off a slice for the birthday girl. She poked it, picked up a forkful, and put it in her mouth like she was testing it.
“Mmm,” she said.
I served everybody else great heaping pieces. After, we all felt like stuffed and mounted game.
“Holy jeez, I’m full,” said Georgia.
“I haven’t eaten that much in months,” said Connie. She sighed and patted her bloated belly. “And I won’t do it again. What a party. But I’m feeling kinda flat. I better lie down for a bit.”
“But the gifts,” I said.
“Later,” she said, waving her hand at nothing in particular.
“Later is perfect,” I said.
Georgia went over and helped her sister up. Once Connie was standing, she came close, looked at me with misty eyes, and said, “Thanks, babe.”
“Happy birthday, best girl,” I said.
“I love you,” she said in my ear, then wiped her leaking face across my shoulder.
“I love you, too.”
Then Georgia led her down the hall and they disappeared into the bedroom.
“Goddamn,” I said to nobody, feeling a stinging in my eyes. Seb put his big hand on my shoulder. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Help me with these dishes.”
When we were done, we opened beers and I led him outside. A light misty rain had fallen while we were eating, and the cool night smelled like frogs and worms. Seb—who I, at the moment, was feeling fond of in a fatherly kind of way—trailed after me as I went across the wet lawn and over the gravel drive to the garage.
The motion-sensor lights flared on when I opened the door, illuminating my lair. Deep metal shelves lined one wall, piled with UAVs and their parts, controllers, cameras, and the dense black plastic cases the units travelled in. On the adjoining wall was my workbench, a bunch of tools hanging from a pegboard, cords, power bars, and batteries plugged in, blinking. On the floor were six bigger drone units, like giant bugs at rest.
“Here’s the night-vision,” I said, pulling a small cardboard box with a shipping label down from a shelf. “Just came the other day. I haven’t even opened it.”
“So cool,” Seb said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
Installing it was a pretty simple matter. I pulled the black Phantom 3’s old camera out from inside a little protective cage on the bottom of the machine and popped the night-vision camera on.
“They design ’em to be modular like that,” I said. “Gives the end-user greater freedom.” When I’m drunk I like to talk about things like I know what I’m talking about, using words like modular and end-user.
“So cool,” said Seb.
I powered the Phantom up. Everything seemed to be in good order, so I flipped off the lights in the garage. Seb and I appeared on the tablet I’d plugged into the controller, colours inverted, our eyes glowing in stray light like green fire. We looked like raccoons caught raiding a Dumpster.
“Holy shit,” Seb said, “it totally works.”
I rolled open the big garage door and the night came in, with its coolness and its smells and the wet grass catching bits of light like t
iny polished jewels. I jammed my thumb up against the joystick, the four blades whirred to life, and the Phantom rose off the ground and into the air.
“Let’s play with it a bit,” I said.
A small flashing red light and a soft insect-like buzzing sound were the only indications that there was anything in the sky above our little bungalow, but the images coming back showed the house and everything around it in perfect, though skewed, detail. It looked like wartime news footage.
“See what the girls are up to,” said Seb.
“Yeah, we’ll give them a little scare.”
I piloted the Phantom around back, maybe ten feet away from the eavestrough, and the tablet showed us the kitchen window, then siding, siding, the bathroom window, and then Connie’s room. Inside, the ghostly image of Georgia sat on the edge of the bed while Connie, cheeks shining, spoke. We couldn’t hear them, but I was certain they were seconds away from noticing the hovering machine outside the window, then maybe giving a little shriek before starting to laugh. But they didn’t. They didn’t see it. I held the unit steady with the joystick, and the image came back so still it was like it’d frozen in place. I zoomed the camera in.
Georgia took Connie’s hand in hers, then began sliding her grip up toward the elbow. Her other hand came up then, and I could see it, plain as day. Weird and green, like it was radioactive, the syringe was small but unmistakable. There was no missing it.
They still hadn’t seen the Phantom.
Connie’s smashed-in chest rose and fell sharply, but she was nodding her head. Georgia took her hand off Connie’s arm and tapped the syringe. Connie curled her fingers into a fist.
I pressed the controller’s Return To Home button, handed it to Seb, and started sprinting toward the house. The UAV passed over my head on its way back to the garage. I shouted “Connie, no! No, babe!” as I ran into the house, scampered down the hall and into the doorway of her bedroom.
“What are you doing? You said. I was supposed to. Connie?”
They looked at me in the dim light of a lamp on the bedside table, their expressions shocked at first, but then Georgia’s turned angry while Connie’s slid into sadness.
Lands and Forests Page 8
