“What do you mean? He looks pretty okay to me, no missing parts.”
“No, I mean from his childhood. I want to get him out psychologically intact and undamaged. Do you think that’s ever been done? How many people do you know who aren’t carrying substantial childhood baggage?”
“Not too many,” says Peter.
“Think about my dad for instance, what he might have been like with different parents.”
“Well no one’s going to have a perfect childhood, and you can’t blame your parents for everything. Your dad made his choices.”
“I know, but I just wonder if it can be done.”
Eben was a spring baby. Bernie watches the poplars in the playground just starting their transition to September yellow, and a woman walks by pushing one of those new whizzy strollers. Bernie turns the key in the ignition, and after some quibbling the minivan starts up. She pulls away from the school, drives down the quiet side street and then turns left onto busier Sixteenth Avenue. Angus needs a walk, but before she does that, she will go see her dad’s old house. All she can manage today is a drive-by, but that’s a start. Then she’ll go home and take a nap. Bernie moves west opposite the downtown-bound morning rush hour, past the strip malls, the college, the stadium. In her rear-view mirror, she sees the black coyote profile of Angus upright and alert. The older, greener subdivisions pass them and then she takes Shaganappi Trail north and turns left onto Crowchild, past more malls and car dealerships. Then she enters the land of monochromatic beige, treeless subdivisions that eat up the countryside. How long, she wonders until the city merges with the little town of Cochrane where she grew up? Finally, she reaches open foothills, now divided into acreages.
Bernie exhales a long breath. Knolls and coulees roll out, their flanks carpeted with golden-leafed aspen, alternating with grassland or sheared fields of grain. The vast sky fills four-fifths of the landscape; clouds pile and rearrange themselves in endless variation against the cerulean blue of fall. On the horizon, the Rocky Mountains beckon to her; beyond them a new land and the possibility of driving and never coming back. Bernie rolls down her window and feels the quiet heat of a fall day, and smells the stubble drying in the fields. The highway curves to the west and then begins its long descent to where Cochrane lies tranquil in the valley. She hears the blast of a CP train as it snakes through the town, its red engine nose keeping company with the curve of the river. Her father is gone. No longer will she fear driving through this town.
In the flat of the valley she turns right, onto the road at the foot of the bluff, cut off from the rest of the town by the highway. Then the final turn onto the last road, Fifth Street. The pavement gives way to gravel, and at the very end, tucked between the toes of the coulee, sits the old house of Cochrane brick, where she grew up. The wheels crunch to a halt and the van sits idling. The house looks out from under the poplars with its peaked dormer face resting in the sun. “What has he done to you?” Bernie wonders. Fifteen years since her mother left. Seven years since she walked out the front door for the last time. The curtains drawn over the windows are the ones her mother sewed and meticulously lined with white sheeting. Suddenly it occurs to her that she doesn’t have a key and has no way of getting into the house. She turns off the engine, walks to the back of the minivan, and opens the hatch. She just manages to grab Angus’s leash as he leaps towards freedom.
“Where do we start?” asks Fabian. They are seated, he assumes, back where they began, though there is no way to mark or recognize their location. He wishes he could scratch an X in the turf to mark his spot. “Are we going to go around the circle and tell the group a bit about ourselves and what brought us to Corridor Nine?” he asks.
“It’s a very small group,” says Bune. “We could just talk if you like, and we can use visuals. The Membrane makes an excellent projection screen. Let’s start with something nonthreatening and general . . . ”
“I’m not threatened, why would I be threatened?” barks Fabian.
Bune looks at him, his face worn and grained with compassion.
“We’ll be looking at your life, how you think it went . . . ” begins Bune. Fabian gets up, his outsized testicles dangling between his legs. “How it went? How I think it went?” He paces a circle twice and then begins to bounce very hard, his head almost touching the ceiling. He has to hang onto his balls with one hand. Why have they so overendowed him? With Bune watching he feels silly. After about twenty bounces he calms down and stops, turns to face the demon, his knuckles on his hips.
“Considering the ridiculous nature of the assignment,” says Fabian, “I think I did pretty well.”
“How so, ridiculous?” asks Bune.
“Well my mother first of all. Who assigned me such an inadequate mother?”
“Your Sponsor, you mean? You must have chosen her yourself, following your sixth rupture of the Membrane, although your choices would have been limited, it’s true. Now sit down beside me and let’s have a look at her.” Fabian plants his small bottom on the turf, and sits cross legged, slightly behind the angel. From his vantage point he studies the folds of Bune’s gown. He can make out no warp or weft in the fabric and a faint light moves through it. Very slowly he reaches out his hand.
“You can touch it if you are curious,” says Bune, and Fabian snatches his hand back.
“I tried to touch the wall and it didn’t feel like anything,” he says by way of explanation, “and besides, the turf bites. Nothing is reliable here.”
“Different rules apply, it’s true, and you may not have time to get used to them before you have to go. Look, I think I’ve found her.”
“Found who?” Fabian stares at the Membrane as the opalescence begins to thicken and converge, and he realizes he is watching a moving photo coming into focus.
“Your mother, Evelyn Mary Eddy. Her maiden name, Evelyn Macomber. Here she is just six months old, how adorable . . . ” A warm wind, smelling of clover, blows through an open kitchen window. Sitting belly-deep in a porcelain sink in front of the window, a baby with wrinkles like bracelets around her fat wrists coos and hoots and chews on a washcloth to ease her itchy, teething gums. Two graceful and solicitous hands cup water over Evelyn’s shoulders, trickle it down her spine so that she tips her head back and gurgles a laugh.
“Those are my grandmother’s hands?”
“Yes, Bernadette Mary Eddy.” The hand holds a small comb and runs it carefully through the platinum wisps of the baby’s hair, combing them up to the top of her head and twisting them into a kewpie doll curl. “Do you remember her?”
“Yes,” says Fabian. “I wish she could have lived with us, she was so kind. Look how she touches her, my mother never . . . ” The hand reaches under a chubby leg and pulls a rubber stopper out of the drain by its silver-beaded chain. “I hate babies,” says Fabian. “I don’t like to look at them,” and he turns his back to the Membrane. The picture flickers on behind him, the baby is lifted out and wrapped in a worn, but clean, towel.
“That part’s over. Turn around, watch now,” says Bune. Evelyn nestles against the ample breasts that would one day droop to the belt of Fabian’s grandma Bernie. The baby reaches out and wraps her paw around a gold locket that lies in the indent between her mother’s collarbones, mangles it into her drooling mouth. “No, Evie don’t eat that. Where’s daddy got to?” Late evening sun washes them as she rocks and jiggles the baby gnawing on her necklace, and stares out the window down the road.
“He was a drinker and a charmer. Mama hated him.”
“Well now you know where you got it from. The addictive element, if not the charm.” Bune chuckles, “I’m teasing. You had the same black humour and reprobate lure that good girls find so irresistible. At least for a time.”
“I wouldn’t know. I never met him. Show me more pictures.” Bune rubs his hands together, and the mother and child dissolve. Flickering light and shadow emerge, a grove of aspen surrounds a lawn. Women in white calf-length dresses, hair curling and c
oiling into naped buns, tendrils escaping around their laughing faces. Young men dressed in rusty black suits, some with pomade-slicked hair, assist and interfere in the ladies’ game of croquet. The focus moves across the roughly shorn grass to a picnic table full of revelers.
“There he is,” says Bune. “There’s Harold. The man at the end of the table opposite the young blonde.”
Fabian watches fascinated, the young man leans forward across the table, both hands encircling his stubby glass. The blonde blushes and glances down under the intensity of his gaze, and Fabian exults. “Grandpa was a smooth operator all right, look he’s working her, he’s working her!” Harold turns and looks towards them, tilts his head disdainfully in the shade of his hat. His eyes don’t condescend to smile. “My God, he looks like a prohibition Bob Dylan,” says Fabian.
Lola lies in bed reading Swiss Family Robinson. Her hedgehog, Cynthia, digs and snuffles, and the impassioned rooting distracts her from her book. She gets up and walks to the cage.
“Are you hungry?” Lola opens the tub of hedgehog chow, and tips some into the food dish. Her hedgehog, Cynthia keeps rooting. “Here, eat your kibble,” Lola slides her hand under the furry belly and lifts her over to the food dish, but the wet snout recoils. “Okay, okay,” Lola walks naked through the dark house to the kitchen. She opens the fridge door and sees herself reflected in the kitchen window, that new conical swelling under each nipple, and she squats down out of view. From the cheese drawer she takes out three of the waxy squirming mealworms, shuffles backwards, shuts the fridge, and returns down the hall. Passing the French doors, she sees flames glowing and sparking in the portable fire pit on the deck. Her mother stands in the light holding a white piece of paper before her, as if reading to an audience. Lola pauses, then returns to Cynthia’s cage and scatters the worms in the wood chips. Cold now, she pulls her pajamas out from the pile of laundry on the floor and puts them on. When she returns to the back doors her father stands looking into the dark. He puts his arm around her shoulders.
“Why aren’t you asleep? It’s ten-thirty.”
“What’s Mom doing?” Outside Bernie kneels in front of the fire, folds the white sheet into a paper airplane, and lights the tip in the flame. It catches, and she lays it in the hottest part of the fire, watches it burst, ducks her head as if in prayer. Peter sighs.
“They cremated her dad today. I imagine she’s praying for him. She’s worried he won’t be able to reincarnate or something, because he . . . I mean, you know your mom. Something to do with her Hindu stuff. Now go to bed, buddy. School tomorrow.” He kisses her on the top of her head and directs her towards her bedroom by her shoulders.
“Well, what do you believe in Daddy?”
“Mmmm, I don’t know. I think we’re all energy, and when we die, we maybe join a big energy blanket that surrounds the planet. Our bodies compost, maybe our energy composts?”
“Well, that’s pretty weird too, you know. I think reincarnation makes sense. I hope to come back as a snow leopard, or maybe a horse.” Peter tucks her into bed.
“How do you sleep with that hedgehog making so much noise?”
“I’m used to her. It helps me sleep actually.”
“Good night, then.”
“’Night Daddy.”
Bits of grit dig into Bernie’s knees. She closes her eyes and watches the red glow inside her lids. Receive him, she thinks. His angels, his keepers, please catch him, bring him to where he’s safe and can grow. Let him know I do love him. I am sorry I hurt you. Forgive me. Go in peace and start again. Please, please, catch him.
I’ll just walk around the house, Bernie thinks. The long grass lies dry and matted and the poplar leaves she used to watch from her bedroom window murmur above her. She imagines they are trying to give her courage. “Keep me safe, keep me safe,” the mantra starts, the words that had rolled with her down the highway to see him, until she couldn’t visit anymore. Bernie walks along the gravel path that splits at the front door. She goes left, past the south wall where she and David stacked firewood each fall, the space empty now. The two small basement windows are encrusted with dust. In the window wells leaves collect where she hid in games of hide and seek, where once a vole took a wrong turn and tunnelled into that dead end. David picked it up by the stubby tail, showed her the white underbelly and disgruntled rodent face before he let it zip into the grass.
She remembered their phone call the night after she’d identified the body.
Hey, Bern, how’s it going?
I don’t know how to say this, are you at home? You’re not driving, are you? I just pulled into the driveway. What’s wrong? I have to tell you something hard. I don’t know how to start. A policeman came today. Daddy, um, Daddy finally did it. He offed himself. Sometime last night. What?? How? Helium, they said, and a garbage bag. I waited until you’d be done work. Where’s Louise? Will she be home soon? How? Helium? I guess it’s a painless way to go, he hooked up a hose to a tank of helium and fed it into a garbage bag he taped around his neck. Oh my God. I think it must have been painless. He looked peaceful at any rate. Peter and I went to the morgue and we saw him. I don’t know what to say, wow I, boy. Yeah, I know, what is there to say? Do you think you could come? I don’t know, it’s a bad time right now with work Bern, I doubt it. Son of a bitch never wasted much effort on me. I have to think. I’m sorry. Are you, all right? I don’t know. I’d be all right if I could stop thinking I caused this, you know? That if I’d stayed in touch . . . He was too crazy for human consumption Bern, he had a gun collection, remember? You were worried about your kids. I know. Why can’t I make that stick in my brain? The guilt always wins.
Bernie stares into the basement window well and wishes David lived in Calgary instead of Toronto. He won’t fly out she knows, a silent agreement on both their parts. Bernie was Fabian’s favourite and she carries her father’s guilt as her own without question. She must protect David from further harm. She walks around the corner, and pauses, her hand on the sun-warmed brick. At the back of the house facing west they had tacked on a deck. Above it, the four-ply beam that supports her old bedroom balances on three skinny steel poles, their weight transferred into concrete Sonotube pilings — an ugly addition to an historic old home. The Adirondack chairs sit sun bleached and rickety now, one tipped on its side. He never got rid of the half whiskey barrels filled with dirt that her mother had planted with tomatoes and marigolds every summer. Someone has been digging in them, knocking dirt onto the deck. Maybe squirrels, she thinks. Bernie wraps Angus’s leash twice around her hand in case one should show up suddenly. She arrives now at the stairs to the deck; on one side is the collection of rocks she brought home from trips and hikes as a child. Among the stones they hid a spare key in one of those plastic imitation rocks with a secret compartment inside. She pokes around with her toe, thinking it couldn’t possibly still be there, but then she sees it through the open risers of the stairs, flipped over to reveal the rusty metal cover underneath. She kneels on the first step, and with her other arm reaches through and pulls it out. It rattles. Sliding out the metal cover, with her thumb she sees the old blue key laying there, just a little tarnished. How many times had she let herself in with that key after a day at school? Which would be worse, Bernie wonders, driving home now and not knowing, or knowing and then wondering what to do next.
“Come on,” she says to Angus and walks up the steps. The key fits into the deadbolt and with some fiddling turns stiffly. The door releases inward a crack and she pushes it the rest of the way with her foot. Smells hit her. First cat shit, then incense, and last the odd musky smell that her father had always given off. Sunshine spills in through the venetian blind that hangs askew over the sink, slats in disarray. The counters are covered with dirty dishes. Dry cat food and spilled coffee, kitty litter, and cereal encrust the linoleum. Angus twists and hops around on his leash pulling her arm almost out of its socket as he hoovers up the cat food, dragging her into the house to find the actual cat.
“The cat’s long gone Angus.” The neighbour had apparently taken him in. Mrs. Gotslieg. She must be seventy now. She was the one who had found him that morning, the door blown open by the wind and his cat mewling at her kitchen window. Bernie feels she should go talk to her, apologize, like one would for a dog that barked all day because you left him out when you went to work, or for the leaves that blew onto the neighbour’s lawn because you were tardy with the raking.
She and Angus walk across the crusty floor and into the dark living room. The sun dimly illuminates the paisley through the mustard drapes. Her mother’s hippie curtains. She walks to the window and pulls them open, dead wasps and flies litter the window ledge but now, at least, the sun fills the room. She turns and faces the detritus of his life. Coffee cups and glasses everywhere, piles of clothes, blankets on the couch, a big screen TV. When had he bought that, she wonders. A Japanese painted scroll of cranes flying over mountains hangs askew. In the corner sits a needleless Christmas tree, each branch encrusted with dusty glass ornaments, some cheap Zellers specials but most beautiful and ornate. The floor puzzles her, so soft under her feet and then she realizes he has layered cheap oriental carpets all over the living room, in some places five or six thick. Her father’s preferred alternative to vacuuming.
She looks briefly in the other rooms but doesn’t go into the study where Mrs. Gotslieg found him. She shuts the door to close in the stink of the diarrhea in the carpet. His bedroom is piled with laundry, the bathroom sink spackled thickly with toothpaste. Empty shampoo bottles and old tubes of ointment litter the floor. In every room she finds empty plastic prescription bottles, beside the couch, the bedside table, by the kitchen sink. The few she reads prescribe Percocet or Oxycontin, but some of them are for Tylenol 3s, what he used to take when she was a teenager. Percocet and Oxycontin, she will look them up when she gets home. Angus’ furry black side warms her leg, and she hasn’t loosened her grip on his leash since they came in. Peter was right. She would go home and get a dumpster delivered to the driveway and find a company that could clean out a place like this.
Corridor Nine Page 4
