Charity

by Keath Fraser

  I turned to him. “What?”

  “Those Ski-Doos. You need ear muffs these days to plan a picnic.”

  Her laughter exploded like a galaxy, wave after wave bursting over us in echoes against the windshield, even after we thought her last boom had run out of powder and its ruinous disorder died back. We had to roll down our windows.

  It helped to reassure us that if she wasn’t in control of her future our Greta was able to see its bright side. This was our hope. Time would tell—or else I would. I wasn’t going to let Judy have the last word, by any stretch.

  “I can’t get her to drop it,” said Judy, “or to drop by.” Judy lived in a subsidized flat in False Creek. So the two of them shared a long lunch at Au Comptoir, where Margaret ate freely of the mussels and said nothing to her to suggest she might change her mind and return to school. We had just shelled out a quarter million dollars for this year’s textbooks, wondering now if their past-use date would lapse before she got back in time to use them. Patrick’s own medical books were outdated not long after copper was discovered.

  “Have you ever noticed how loud her laugh sounds at a zinc bar?” asked Judy. “It’s getting wheezy. A pulmonologist might help.”

  Patrick thanked her for trying. He sounded more distracted than I remembered. I repaid Judy for the tab. The thought of his gifted daughter giving up medical training, while not exactly the case, was preying on him.

  So too the smoke, he not knowing how best to counsel patients coming in complaining of sore throats, even of despondency, occasioned in this last half of August by hundreds of wildfires raging in the north half of the province and drifting south to sock us in day after day. Even I, normally stirred by such redolence, found the haze spectral. The sun at noon, once as yellow as a Giotto halo, resembled a small apricot, its watery light not a colour on sidewalks you recognized when filtered through leaves. Across the bay, islands and mountains offered only faint outlines—in truth, you couldn’t see them. I walked down the hill carrying a hanky sprinkled with lavender oil against ground-level ozone. Face flags like mine were now plastering citizens of a new universal suffrage in favour of the Greens. Huddled Chinese families picnicked in the dead grass. A cool wind blew little tornadoes across the sand, where fewer than half the volleyball nets were strung out on the sparsely populated beach. I had heard the Adams River sockeye run was schooling around the point, gathering mass at the river’s mouth, but doubted you could’ve spotted two gillnetters from the lowest-banking drone.

  We didn’t believe yet in her departure. Arriving to take her for their “last” visit to the Living Room, Rudy sat barking at Alex Trebek, immoderately jolly for a man supposedly on his way to the gallows in Sierra Leone. He pounced on the category of Good Sons and beat Patrick to the buzzer on every answer but one.

  “What is Edmund!” called Patrick.

  “Opie!” cried Rudy, late. Acting the fool, knowing full well he was wrong, just to give Patrick a bone.

  “Gosh darn it,” said Greta, descending the staircase in a chiffon dress with pink shoulder ribbons. Not, I guessed, a gown she was going to pack overseas nor one Judy would donate to a rummage sale. “You’re just kidding him, Barney.” And hooting something awful seemed determined not to sound at all like a college girl. Maybe never had. She resembled the Appalachia belle Daisy Scragg—although her “Barney” didn’t look a bit like Ab Yokum, pole-tall blood enemy of the Scraggs and destined to marry their daughter. This was worse. We were living in a lapsed comic strip, the pair of them swapping caricatures whose merriment had long passed.

  At least for us it had.

  “Smarten up, Kim,” she told him in the same village voice. “You let my father win that one ’cuz you want him to remember you for your kind, paternal side. You’re no sharper than a geezer and you owe me a last supper out. And I don’t mean kitchen leftovers.”

  What would the mentally challenged downtown make of this stoked pair serving them dinner like two loonies? Their intimacy had warmed considerably, if mock insults and pet names meant anything—calling her “Grit” on their way out, offering his arm, which she swatted at, suggesting they at least had one another’s backs.

  By mid-September, smoke suddenly gone, our March/December couple had embarked for the dark continent without her medical degree or his paying for the traffic violation on his amphibious car.

  *

  By the end of October we had an email at the clinic, where Patrick had asked me to come back and work after Margaret left. Her message informed us of her assignment to a team screening for malaria and HIV/Aids. Attached was a selfie, showing her neck wrapped in a bandanna of Sierra Leone’s colours and her head, it looked like, in a crown of weeds. It looked weird. A video bearing a soundtrack of her crazy laugh might have better assured us she actually had the tropical sun under control. Rudy, she wrote, was going about his own business “unbonneted.” If we thought she looked funny, we should see him covered in red dust from digging a midden for surgical waste. This in an interior district called Koinadugu, where as well as screening for diseases she was multi-tasking in the neonatal ward.

  “I’ve lost some weight.”

  We heard nothing more of Rudy until learning, three weeks later, she hoped he would recover soon from a fever he’d come down with after collapsing while rigging up a generator-driven windstorm at the “rehabilitated” Kabala hospital to cool its operating theatre. Sunstroke, it sounded like. Holy cow, I said to Patrick. Hadn’t the man been warned off his susceptibilities after climbing Mount Garibaldi? An incorrigible madman, it was now clear, talking himself into an African expedition and our Greta into joining him. Why hadn’t we spoken out? As if all the Ebola ghosts weren’t enough to haunt her future, he was the royal arse who would snatch it from her by commanding loyalty to his decaying presence. We liked Rudy, it wasn’t that . . . well, in the end, it was that. We had begun to loathe him. Our original nightmare, unfolding.

  An email in late November confirmed his worsening fever and suspected renal failure. The travesty of this philanthropic volunteer, scorched by his own hubris and now dribbling away. Followed by an Instagram post, showing not the patient but for some reason the image of a tourniquet, intended perhaps for a Swiss supplier and misaddressed.

  “It’s not the frontline for nothing,” said Patrick. “Prepare for dengue, expect amputation.”

  Along with her other duties, she would now be up to her neck attending his decline. What if he survived but was too sick to transfer home—would she stick by him until he checked out? It didn’t take much awareness of her stamina as a swimmer to know that once she found herself nursing him in palliative care she wouldn’t request a transfer but would continue to carry on.

  Her silence only confirmed this turn of events. Charity far in excess of what she’d volunteered for, akin to caring for a terminal Aids patient in a pup tent. Patrick began to let himself get carried away. Her intimate acts of kindness would be many, he thought, during Rudy’s flagging trajectory. Her “contractual obligations” would loom even larger now in face of his personal withering. The pathos would be comic if it wasn’t so pathetic. Changing his soiled diapers, spoon-feeding the fellow on a leaky air mattress, washing the drool from his white stubble after several days of not shaving his sunken cheeks—all this, continued Patrick, through difficulties involving possible Lassa fever, but more likely complications of peritonitis arising from an impacted bowel, enzymes from a malfunctioning pancreas, not to mention the aphasia that had descended to gibble his speech—a probable stroke he thought, notwithstanding the kidney failure, which would require rudimentary filtration of his blood once a day in an MSF shed to eliminate the creatinine he couldn’t excrete naturally.

  What a pickle. He liked to cover all the bases did Patrick. This was a case study he could prepare without notes. Taking dictation I’d have struggled to keep up. For our old friend Rudy, he concluded, it sounded like curtains
. His normally skinny torso would now resemble a breadstick, his . . . unlike Job, Rudy had lost his innocence and surely deserved his fate by misusing Greta. Her father’s worst diagnosis? “Nihilistic nutter.”

  Our receptionist studied him through her new frames with the purple piping.

  “Sorry, Lucille.” Pause. “He’s not a patient of ours.”

  No longer howling, at least not in the way we’d howled that summer while enjoying ourselves at his expense, we accepted the inevitability of Rudy’s death. We couldn’t say for sure it would not be from another deadly disease, equally tragic. Ebola, eliminated though not eradicated, was hiding in the forest. This was intelligence everyone had and no one credited until someone, either a native of the country or an itinerant health care provider, suddenly waned, slumped, died.

  It was only a matter of time.

  If Greta didn’t die, she would become increasingly addicted to giving herself over to Rudy as he died. Her mandate, the mandate of doctors since Hippocrates, was do no harm. No less a charge, in avoiding any heroic intervention clear of easing Rudy’s pain, was applying this dictum equally to herself.

  “I don’t have to guess,” said Patrick. “I know from clinical experience elder disease can take its toll.”

  She was loyal to, if nothing else, her validation of adventure. Even by dating an old man our daughter had discovered an act to prove the risk she seemed willing to welcome. A hypothetical the real, afflicted world was never likely to . . . etc. In other words, yes, something of a joke. Cosmic joke? No, we should think of it as a career move, Patrick decided, since it had got her to Africa, where her breadth of experience would look good on an application to specialize, after she returned to her senses, in advanced geriatrics.

  “Still, she could’ve carried on flirting hereabouts with gerontology and stayed in school.”

  A month later another email to say Rudy was dead. He’s gone. I’m not. Relief—or grief? We were surprised he had lasted as long as he had, in a country like that one. Not a place for old men, you knew, or for that matter young women. Exhausted and eager to come home, she would now need to be released from her contract on compassionate grounds (we were confident of this) given what we were told by one of Patrick’s young physicians, who had served time with the good doctors in Jordan—adding, though not in his finest doctorese, “The worst is not . . . so long as she can say, ‘This is the worst’.”

  So at least that part of our nightmare was over, and possibly sooner than we expected. R. Skupa, R.I.P. Although we had admired Rudy’s refusal to let himself molder as a retired clubbie, living off his golfing handicap and an RRIF, he had no business introducing our daughter to his irregular lifestyle before going completely bush.

  Her own adventure over, a supreme corroboration of her worst hypothesis, she might now return to laughter and school. We waited in hope. When she got home we would certainly refrain from any we-told-you-so’s.

  And we did.

  “Well then, I’ll tell her,” said Judy. “I never trusted her faith in him. She was dating the wrong end of the binoculars.”

  *

  Early in his absence abroad we had driven by Rudy’s house and noticed he’d rented it to a family, there were toys on the porch. We wondered what would happen to them now, this family, no doubt a disadvantaged one recommended to him by the Baha’is or maybe by a United Church acquaintance on behalf of Syrian refugees. Rudy might be resolute but he was also capricious, and this had had consequences. No one else drove his vehicle for a lark into the salt chuck, unless showing off to a girlfriend young enough to be his grandchild, whom he’d managed to charm or at least challenge with a dare, before he blew it all by dying ignobly. Not, said Patrick, the legacy he might have wanted.

  “He made a good living out of air conditioning, only to suffocate her with his last gasps.”

  A twisted bike straddled the sidewalk and a long dog chain parted the uncut lawn. The flowerbeds looked neglected. As to the house, we’d never thought of Rudy as having an heir—so why, we casually wondered, might Margaret not be his choice? It would be compensation for her saving his life on Garibaldi and agreeing to accompany his liabilities abroad. At his age you didn’t run away to darkness without considering the possibility of not coming home.

  We expected her return within the month and I dusted her bedroom. Patrick said he had a patient we could call if and when it came to putting Rudy’s realm on the market. This realtor could arrange to clean, landscape, and—should Mr. Skupa have failed to exorcise an old environmental ghost—to remove his buried oil tank. She would also employ a photographer, and, if needed, a Cantonese/Mandarin translator.

  “Estate agents have become stage directors,” said Patrick. “Your house is her production for the time it takes to sell. It wouldn’t surprise me if she hires actors to talk up offers at the open. In this market, she probably won’t need them.”

  He seemed unaware the market had cooled and that his patient was probably now fishing for any inventory that might attract families without an inheritance equal to one of the minor nobilities. Not that Rudy’s house wouldn’t attract deep pockets keen to clear it swiftly of all traces of Rudy’s house.

  Margaret stayed in Africa for another eight months. Never mentioning in emails her friend’s last will and testament, or anything concerning the disposal of his remains. Knowing Rudy we supposed arrangements for his internment had been made before his departure—probably as far back as when he’d had his oil tank unburied—but we refrained from asking for fear of unsettling her at a time made worse by her poor choice of staying on. “I don’t understand her,” said Patrick, whenever we talked by telephone. “She always sounds so abrupt.” I suggested maybe it was because she was busy attending deliveries of women with complicated uteruses.

  “That’s not quite how she put it,” he said. “Are you this casual itemizing accounts of our expectant mothers?”

  If anything, her experience abroad was toughening her up for the enervating grind of family medicine—far less exciting, he claimed, but just as draining as emergency care—once she got home and finished school.

  She came back in August. We hadn’t seen her since the previous summer, and, longing to welcome her at the airport, expected a wiser, well-seasoned young woman, her propensity for extreme charity and even extreme swimming chastened by her sobering exile from a perk like cinnamon buns, which she hadn’t realized she missed.

  “I’ll just bring along this box from Solly’s.”

  We were shocked though not surprised, given the ravages of frontline medicine, to see how much weight she had lost. Only her suitcase was heavier than we remembered, which we put down to an African cooking pot with doo-dad markings. Patrick thought it a wry souvenir of the so-so food she couldn’t stomach and hadn’t eaten. Dehydration, her anxiety over the dying Rudy, and a climate she’d mentioned in sporadic emails as either “un-redemptive” or “diabolical”—all such tribulations would winnow any overeater and help knock off the feeble. No longer obese, she wasn’t even fat; her once chubby cheeks sagged when she smiled and wrinkled vertically. She did not look twenty-three. Her laugh had also changed; she’d lost it, or more correctly had lost the hysterical edge that used to relax, we felt, her angst incubated since adolescence by chronic obesity. This new laugh sounded a touch rehearsed. And she no longer burst into spontaneous song hoping to annoy us. Even speaking, she devoiced as if to echo her unfamiliar reticence.

  “She sounds shell-shocked,” said her father, “like she’s still lost in the woods.”

  I was now trying to please her in a way I never had before, silly things, tracking down smoked salami and cream puffs. Pork chops and trashbean soup. I issued her a hunting license to buy Beefaroni. She was now free to binge in the way Oprah, until recently, had allowed herself to binge on cold ribs between meals. I would have served eight meals a day to plump her back up. At the PNE that month, a spont
aneous distraction we hadn’t suffered through since she was nine, I insisted we treat her to candy floss twirled from a glass sarcophagus fed on sugar. The cholesterol choice of angels, joked Patrick. He bought a bouffant cone for himself. She tongued the evanescence but its sweetness left her removed from any ensuing high.

  “Sugar is all it is,” said Patrick. “Gross sucrose.” He was lapping at his with the furling tongue of a large lizard. “Not as tasty as a tater dog. Let’s get her a candy apple. Fructose is healthier.”

  At home she nibbled at whatever she found on her plate and would barely finish a taco. It was not a matter of refusing something, but rather of never choosing anything. It began to seem everything was tasteless to her. “Malaise over mayonnaise,” observed her disappointed father. She made few choices beyond flushing the toilet. We heard her flushing it a lot.

  “Bulimia,” he decided without consultation. “The purging sort.” Circumstantial at best, this diagnosis lacked therapeutic or nutritional scrutiny to support it beyond his subjective impression of her appearance. That plus the frequent toilet. “I guess it’s understandable,” he said. “But good god, not that.” This after a Sunday brunch at which we were tickled pink she had eaten a sausage.

  Far from lifting, the cloud obscuring her future darkened further. Her father changed his tune and re-diagnosed anorexia nervosa based on her nearly total lack of appetite and indifference to exercise. “What happened to her swimming?” She had not submitted an application to return to medical school, and Patrick, beside himself, went on to speculate that if she had once gained admission on a fat-person’s quota, a committee would now need to reconsider her eligibility on some new concession. He very much doubted there was a quota for ex-students with “anorex,” so she would have to take her chances based solely on past high marks. “It’s a shame, really. She should be a shoo-in.”

  But failing to reapply, when she might happily have rejoined her program a year late, and with estimable field experience, she was neither shooed-in nor reconsidered as a nervosa minority with affirmable but resolvable issues. Patrick called it a personal and social tragedy.