This Innocent Corner

by Peggy Herring

  They were taking machines off his battered body when I arrived. His skin was pasty, except for a huge bruise on his face. His head was cut open on one side, and swollen. He was small on that hospital bed, as though he had sunk into not just the mattress, but himself.

  An anemic nurse with white hair pulled an IV out of his wrist. I cried to see that arm I knew so well punctured and blue.

  “These things happen,” the doctor said, “though we don’t know why so many more young men are experiencing them these days.”

  Was this consolation? To be honest, I barely took in what he said.

  And then I remembered: I needed to call Surinder. She picked up the phone after the first ring.

  Seventeen is young to lose your father. And thirty-nine is young to be a widow.

  *

  I dragged myself around the house for weeks. I would have been happy to go with Graham, to choose death, in spite of Surinder. She’d already proven she could take care of herself. Self-confident, proficient, resourceful – she didn’t really need me. She’d make a great orphan, though god help me if she ever found out I said so.

  Graham had been trimming a laurel hedge high as a house, cutting off summer’s least hardy growth, shaping the edges for winter. When his heart stopped, he fell from his ladder. No one noticed. Until the family came home to find the parked truck, the tumbled ladder and a half-dead gardener on their lawn. I suppose he had broken bones, too, but no one had told me that and I didn’t want to know.

  Among the shadowy yews and the pink rhodos of Dunbar, I lost everything.

  I sought revenge in our garden. Pulled up the perennials he most loved: purple snapdragons and the apricot foxglove. Mounds of pink Japanese anemones. They were still in bloom.

  I didn’t want anything to grow around me.

  *

  The tattered schoolhouse offered reprieve from grief. The floor was rough, but I knew where its soft spots lay. I replaced the broken windows myself with glass from Mouat’s in Ganges, and duct-taped plastic sheets over them in winter to keep the draft out, the silver tape crisscrossed like thick spider webs. As for the toilet, we reached an uneasy peace. A 100-foot-long power snake with three alarmingly pronged blades that looked like they should be in the hands of Neptune or Lord Shiva guaranteed our harmony.

  I slept in a corner, in Surinder’s old bed. I ate at the small table she and I shared with Graham half a lifetime ago. I read and lounged and napped on an old sofa dumped on the property (I beat the dust out of it and covered it with a purple crocheted throw from my friend Fee). I had a fridge from the second-hand store and a propane double burner I chanced across among someone’s trash the day I moved. My only connection to the bigger world outside was through a portable radio that ran on batteries, which, at night, if I held the antenna, could pick up campus radio from Anchorage.

  But no more. All has been buried in the stone graveyard.

  Everything I need to work is rubble, too – my books, my textbooks and the table where I tutor the kids from the high school. I help them with their conjugations, their articles and prepositions, their pronunciation, dentals and reflexes, rolling their rrrs, chewing their shchs and breathing their way (or not) through nasal vowels – in French, Spanish and German. I don’t know what I’m going to do when the first one comes back for her tutoring in a couple of days.

  I won’t even be able to find a pen in this catastrophe.

  *

  Six hours after discovering my collapsed roof, I awake to a tap on another door. “Fancy a toddy? Or a cup of tea?” My friend Fee’s voice is muffled, like a faulty phone connection.

  “Go away! I’m asleep!”

  She mutters something halfway between a foreign language and a curse. But I get my wish. Her feet patter down the hall.

  Her house was the only place I could think of to go. She took one look at me on the doorstep and pulled me inside. “No,” I said when she showed me to the guest room. It’s directly over her cold cellar, and I was suddenly, deliriously terrified a spindly potato eye or colourless carrot top would push through the floorboards and choke me.

  I don’t recall exactly how she cajoled me into this bed. But here I am, jet-lagged, hungry, and sickened. My fever has gone down, but this is no improvement. At least, under the influence of a hundred and one degrees, I could pretend my life was nothing more than a bad dream.

  It’s ten o’clock at night. Now that Fee’s knock has brought me back to consciousness, I am not the least bit tired. I consider getting up and having the tea. But then I will have to talk to Fee and maybe Mac if he’s here, and even Jason, too, if he’s up, and I’m not ready for explanations. How can I explain what I hardly understand myself? I try to chase the images of corpses and scars, wreckage and dust from my head, but they seem burned into my brain. I scuttle down under the duvet, and will sleep to take their place.

  And it does, eventually, though I do not know how or at what time. I dream I fall from a ladder whose top rung is indiscernible in the clouds. I tumble so slowly, I can count the rungs on my way down. But then I realize it is not me falling. It’s Graham. Everything accelerates. I want to scream but my lungs are empty and I cannot inhale. My mind says stop, but my mouth forgets how to form the words. Just as he is about to hit the earth, I realize there was no mistake. It is me falling. And I wake up.

  It’s dark outside. I have no idea what time it is. When my breathing slows, I become conscious of my pounding head. Ravenous, I creep to the kitchen.

  I easily find bread and butter. I can’t locate the bread knife though, so after one attempt to cut the loaf with a table knife, I settle for tearing it apart. I spread butter thick as icing, because I crave the grease and salt. Such habits always disgusted Surinder who, once she was old enough to both identify and correct her mother’s many flaws, told me I would end up a poster child for obesity or in the hospital getting my arteries roto-rooted.

  An irritating girl. Mouthy. And beautiful. Also sharp as a tack. She is a rare combination of qualities, and I have often wondered how I could have had anything to do with her creation.

  I finish my bread, and the hunger is gone. But eating has had no effect on my head. Though it’s still impossibly dark, the birds will stir shortly, and I want to be home when they do.

  The floor rushes up to meet me when I try to stand. A pair of hands on my shoulders guides me firmly back down.

  “Now, now. Just where do you think you’re off to?” Fee.

  “Home.”

  “In the middle of the godforsaken night?”

  “The sparrows beg to differ. As do I.”

  She sighs. “You’re not fit to walk out this front door, the shape you’re in, let alone face the mess that’s waiting for you, but if you’re hell bent on going, lord knows it won’t be me stopping you.” She removes her hands.

  Unsure what to do now I’m unfettered, I fall back in the chair.

  “That’s better. Can I get you that tea now?”

  I nod.

  Fee quietly busies herself with the sink, the kettle, the teapot. She darts from here to there, like the tiny bushtits that come to the Garry oaks around my house every summer. Her stubby fingers are busy with soothing little movements.

  “Feel any better?”

  “Except for my head.”

  “Sorry about your place,” she says. “Len’s boy told me.”

  I manage half a shrug.

  “So how was the trip?”

  “Horrific.” I don’t even need to consider the appropriateness of the word.

  “That good?”

  “No, worse. I never should have gone. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”

  “Oh. Did you mean from conception onward? Or just birth?” I normally share her sense of humour. But in the dark, everything is warped. All that’s happened in the past few days merges into a confusing, black
void that threatens to swallow the little left of me. I do something I have not done in years, and never before Fee. I cry.

  “Ooh. Sorry.” She hands me a mug and sits down. I am grateful she’s not patting my shoulder or holding my hand. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  It takes me a minute to recover. When I do, I lift the cup to my lips and blow across the hot tea. The surface flutters. “Did you ever do something that you were convinced was absolutely right, only to find out years later that things didn’t turn out the way you planned?”

  “Hmm.” She studies my face. “What kind of something might that be?”

  “I helped this girl I knew,” I say. “Hell, she wasn’t a girl. She was nineteen. And she was in love. I was sure it was the right thing to do.”

  Fee listens for details which I do not give. They seem too complicated. Finally she speaks. “And what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. She’s missing. She might be dead.”

  I feel rather than see Fee measuring me against this new information. I do not have the courage to look her in the eye right now.

  “You just found out?” she finally says.

  I nod. “After I left, I had no contact with anyone. It was – impossible,” I say, not wanting to explain all the reasons now, all the reasons that seem pathetic and unworthy.

  A moth rests on her kitchen window, its wings partly translucent. I’m afraid to look at Fee, afraid I may see in her eyes the same judgment the Chowdhurys have bestowed upon me.

  “I offered to help, but the family won’t let me. They won’t have anything to do with me, for god’s sake.” I know this sounds petulant, but it’s all because of the threat of a new flow of tears. “And now my goddamn roof’s collapsed and all I have left is a fucking pile of rubble and a headache.” I push my mug away.

  “Well, that pushes things over the edge, doesn’t it? That headache, I mean.” Fee rises. “Can I get you breakfast?”

  I glower. “I’m not hungry.”

  A frying pan clatters on the stovetop and she opens the fridge. “Once Jason’s packed off to school, I’ll walk you home. How would you like your eggs?”

  “Fee – ”

  “And we’ll clear up the mess. Toast?”

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  She cracks an egg on the edge of the counter. “I know.”

  *

  Even in the hopeful light of morning, my schoolhouse looks bad. Though we agree it might be unwise, Fee and I chip broken glass out of a window and carefully climb through. Slants of sunlight illuminate the full extent of the damage. The floor is punched out in places. Stones are set in the holes like diamonds on a ring. Fallen beams sprawl like a wooden ribcage. Shards of glass glitter beneath each window. The sofa hides under a heap of debris that looks like it will collapse any moment. The table is splintered like firewood. The stove’s tin chimney pokes out of a mound of waste like a periscope. Everything’s soaked with rainwater.

  The kitchen shelves have fallen. Food is everywhere, as though a bitter and disturbed intruder has scattered it in revenge for some ignominious and unresolved act committed against him in childhood. Even jars of beets Fee and I pickled – when? Last fall? Garbage. Red vinegar stains what’s left of the floors. The puddles are at once unsettling and beautiful.

  “A mess indeed,” Fee says.

  I look into the bathroom. The huge mirror I never removed is now on the floor, and as I expected, most of the wall has followed it. The tub is filled with stone, wood and plaster-dust. The toilet’s cracked open. A jagged wedge of porcelain lies beside it like a meat-eating dinosaur’s tooth. Water drips from an unseen source.

  I look around for something intact.

  “You might think about calling someone,” Fee says finally.

  “But I can’t afford anyone.” I have no insurance. I couldn’t afford that either.

  There’s my radio. Its plastic shell is cracked but it might be salvageable. I prod it with my toe. Static comes from it, then fades and dies. I kick it.

  “Careful,” Fee says.

  The radio skids to a stop against a heap of shirts, skirts, jeans, and underwear. The wet, dirty fabric is tangled with scraps of building material. It’s impossible to tell any of it apart. Almost certainly, there’s nothing to salvage here. Almost certainly, all I have left is what I took to Bangladesh – one suitcase and the Chowdhury’s box.

  I can’t make up my mind whether to cry or laugh. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Back at her house, Fee scans the phone book. “Will you look at this? Three pages!” There’s a cluster of new contractors in the phone directory. But when we review the listings, we find Ed Malone is still the only one who actually lives on the island. I know him to see him, and by reputation. He’s supposedly a bit of a drinker, not the only one this island has spawned or attracted incidentally. But Fee and Mac hired him a decade ago to build the spare room on the back of their house which I now occupy.

  “He’s a good man,” she says. “Stayed off the bottle while he was working. I heard it said he dried out since.”

  Before lunch, Ed and I meet at the schoolhouse. He has a funny, lopsided gait, and I wonder if he’s drunk.

  “You got a situation on your hands, for sure,” Ed says, his voice clear. His breath seems free of alcohol. He lifts his cap and brushes a thinning thatch of yellow-grey hair off his forehead. As he replaces the cap, I see the sweaty band inside attesting to years of work that no washing machine could ever erase now.

  When he moves again, I wonder if one of his legs is shorter than the other. Then, I get a whiff of something. Stale alcohol? Mouthwash? I’m not sure. I look for other signs of drunkenness, but see none.

  “You know what Frank Lloyd Wright used to say about roofs? If it don’t leak, how would you know it’s a roof?” When he sees the look on my face, a chuckle dies on his lips, a short, merciful death. “Or something like that –” he murmurs.

  Skip the levity Mr. Malone. Let’s get this over with.

  “So what do I do now?”

  “Well, your roof’s just the beginning. Look at the walls.” A few stones have tumbled from along the upper edge of the roof and left behind concrete hollows like fossils. “And we might need to repair the foundation. I can’t see any cracks, but I’d need to get right down into it to say for certain. Then you’ve got the inside – the floors, the windows. The bathroom from what I can see. Never mind your furniture.” He tallies up my damage on calloused, dirty fingers.

  “I can go over everything and give you an estimate – maybe tomorrow. But yeah, I’d say this qualifies as a pretty big job.”

  Though numb after Ed’s assessment and exhausted from jetlag, I force myself to stay awake for dinner. Jason, Fee’s insect-shaped ten-year-old, pulls his chair so close to the table, his thin chest is sandwiched between the chair back and the table edge, and his gangly elbows have nowhere to go but alongside his cutlery. Fee must have told him not to talk about Bangladesh or my house because the subjects are mercifully absent – as is all chatter. None of us knows what to say.

  Fee’s made spaghetti and meatballs. Dinner is hot and tasty. I’m as grateful for it, as I am for the silence, broken only by the tinny sounds of utensils colliding with crockery. I concentrate on my plate and its contents, but it’s hard not to notice what’s happening beside me.

  Jason twirls his pasta around and around and around again. Then, when it appears the fork may bend from the weight, he jams a massive blob of dinner into his mouth. He chews. Bits of spaghetti, like beheaded worms, swim between teeth and tongue. My reverie shatters; I am sorely reminded of Hasan.

  “Jason, love, do close your mouth. No one here needs a lesson on the digestive system.”

  He closes his mouth, continues to chew and winds his fork up for a second time.

  Fee sighs. “May as well shout into the
wind as try to teach you to eat like other than a shoat in a sty. I’ve news. Your father called. He’ll be back from Kitimat next week. Maybe Wednesday.”

  “Yeah,” cheers Jason, and the worms re-appear. He fills his face again, then abandons his fork and with fingertips, picks vegetables out of the tomato sauce. Unexpectedly dainty, unmistakably like Amma.

  “I thought you liked green peppers,” Fee says.

  Mac’s return means I’ll have to clear out of the guest room, the space he occupies when he’s in town – and has occupied ever since he and Fee called it quits. Though I cannot understand how they manage this ménage, it seems to work as well as any other arrangement between ex-couples.

  “I’m sure I’ll be back home before then,” I say, though the notion is so improbable as to be laughable.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The welcome mat is out as long as you need it. You’re no more trouble than a bad rash.”

  “I do have other options,” I sniff. But she knows the only other option I have – Surinder – is out of the question. If I show up on her doorstep in Toronto, she’ll make Mr. Chowdhury’s greeting look like the Welcome Wagon.

  “Anyway, it’s just for a few days. Mac’s contract’s been extended again. Eat the mushrooms at least, for heaven’s sake, Jason. He thinks they’ll be working on that marina clear through September.”

  “Why can’t I get a boat, Mom?” Jason says.

  “You’ve got a boat, and I’ll be happy to pump it up for you one of these days.”

  “That’s not a real boat. It’s a dinghy. And I hate mushrooms.” He grimaces as he puts a tiny piece of mushroom in his mouth. “Can I go up north with Dad?”

  “Well, you’ve already mastered the necessary table manners. If you don’t mind sleeping in a bunkhouse that smells like a cowshed, I suppose it could work. Can I fetch anyone more water?” She heads for the kitchen sink.

  The tap runs. “He’ll miss Hayley’s convocation.” Their eldest was finishing up at Simon Fraser. “He missed her high school grad, too.” She refills her glass and mine. “These are important.”

  I missed Surinder’s convocation. I wasn’t even invited.