Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

  By late afternoon, the room started to darken, too early for twilight to arrive in July. He could see through the window that the sea was tossing steel-grey over green. The wind had risen and a fever was rising in the room. His shirt was sticking to his skin again as though he was exerting himself. His mother’s hand in his was still cool, her eyes steady and neutral. But when the first flash of lightning lit up the room and the thunder was so loud it shook the building, she brightened suddenly. Looking around her with a kind of anticipation. The thunder sounded again and again. She wouldn’t hear the wind, or the sharp rain pelting the window, but the thunder reached through her indifference. She watched the streaked window, him, the walls where darkness and light were flashing. He remembered how she loved thunderstorms when he was a child, would sit with him on the front step as the atmosphere thickened and the wind started up. They would run inside after the first thunder that was close enough to bring rain. And she would laugh her soundless laugh, all jagged breath.

  When the storm was over, she still seemed alert.

  “Would you like to go out?” he asked her, not knowing how possible this would be.

  “Yes,” she signed with her left hand, the first language she had used since he arrived.

  It was complicated, and involved a special wheelchair with a neck brace, two people to lift her into place, but the nurse he had talked to arranged things. He pushed her along a boardwalk outside the facility to the beach.

  He moved around to the front of his mother and asked her, “Do you want to go further?”

  Again, she answered yes. So he pushed her onto the sand. The beach was lined with black residue, soft coal dust, and the wheels of the wheelchair were mired down, but still he pushed, moving them closer to the water. The waves were moving in one at a time now, spaced out and rattling on the small pebbles like the breath of someone sleeping. The storm had lifted coal dust from the ocean floor so that each wave stood up black before cresting with pure white foam. All around them the stones on the beach were still wet. Then the sun cut out from beneath a heavy cloud and lit them up, green, red, purple.

  “Stop here,” she signed, and he sat beside her, catching his breath. He picked up a stone, still cold from the rain. It was a swirl of layers, soft red and green, the colours still so close to the organic matter they once were, silting through sunlit water, compressed, then broken and polished to smoothness. The stone warmed in his hand and he turned to offer it to her. But she didn’t reach for it. Instead, she reached down and touched his hair. She stroked his head, and he looked at the stones beneath him and absorbed her touch.

  Snow Moths

  SAKINA CARRIED A TOMATO into Andy Glover’s room, but it was the wrong thing to do. He grimaced and turned his face away from the table on wheels where she had placed it like an offering. He was terribly pale, washed out by the sheets, the white venetian blinds, the dirty white walls. The only colour in the room seemed to come from the tomato and the Kaposi’s sarcoma, purple welts on his neck and right arm.

  He reacted to the movement of her arm as she reached to lift the tomato and place it to the side. He turned his face towards her again and said, “In one of my past lives, I was an apothecary. Nobody ate tomatoes back then.”

  “People didn’t eat tomatoes?”

  “No. They’re poison. Like deadly nightshade. You heard of deadly nightshade?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Same family.”

  “Oh,” Sakina said. She couldn’t think of any other way to respond.

  “Girls would come to the back door. Girls in trouble. I mixed them up something strong—deadly nightshade, a little valerian to help them sleep through it.”

  “Where was this?” Sakina was confused. He didn’t look like a medical person. He was missing one of his front teeth and a tattoo of the sign of infinity was poking out of the sleeve of his hospital gown.

  “I don’t know. A long time ago. In England, or maybe Germany. They started burning us earlier there. They caught me in the end.”

  “Who?”

  “The men in skirts.” He snickered. “I don’t remember the fire when they’d had enough of me, but fuck, I remember the fingernails. They pulled out my nails one by one.”

  He held out his hand and she saw that he had fingernails, although they looked brittle and pale as the rest of him, with a hint of purple where the white moons should be.

  She reached out and held his hand. “You’re so cold,” she said.

  “Better than fire. Better than fire,” he said, closing his eyes. She stayed there holding his hand.

  Sakina was only one day into her internship at the nursing home, and this was her first encounter with Andy Glover, a young man dying of AIDS. She had just started the second year of Social Work at the community college, having transferred her university credits from England the summer before. Her supervisor had told her that she had been selected for this assignment because of her Moroccan background and ability to speak Arabic.

  The neighbourhood where the nursing home was located was seedy by Canadian standards, but familiar, more like her home in Birmingham than any other place in Canada, which seemed deserted and overly private. There were many small shops, prices advertised in Arabic script, their produce lining the sidewalks in boxes: green and red peppers, gnarly branches of ginger, the deep blush of pomegranates vivid under the low November sky. Although she didn’t read Arabic, she liked to bargain in her mother tongue, cajoling the shopkeepers, lobbing, catching and tossing back prices, just short of insult. No matter what price was decided on, the shopkeepers always added a few extra tomatoes to her bag. It was one of these tomatoes she had carried into Andy Glover’s room.

  She sat, feeling slightly ridiculous holding his hand, so she turned away from him to look around the room. She found his sleeping face too vulnerable. She wondered if she should reach over and put the tomato in her pocket.

  WHEN HE WOKE up, he smiled at her.

  “My name is Sakina,” she told him. “I’m a social worker in training. I’m here to help with any family things you might need. Or just to talk.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said.

  “Not what?”

  “Your name’s Constance. Even classy ladies like you come to my back door. I saw your carriage out by the churchyard, curtains closed.”

  “That’s just my English accent you’re hearing. I haven’t been in Canada long.”

  “Ah, Constance. It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I’m sorry. Did I do something?”

  “Take it easy, Connie. No blame here.”

  He closed his eyes, his breathing deepened. For a few minutes, she sat watching his bony chest rise and fall, then she slipped away to talk to the nurses.

  While Andy Glover was sleeping she came to understand from the staff that the Muslim patients had plenty of family around them. The real need for her was in keeping Andy Glover from calling out to every nurse who walked by, disturbing other people, even visitors of other patients, with his wild stories of past lives. He pushed the button constantly, and the light was usually lit above his door. He had been on the street for no one knew how long, had been a junkie and probably a sex trade worker before the lesions made him a pariah in the shelters and back alleys. Now he was dying. He had no visitors, no next of kin, yet he clearly had a great need to talk. Maybe she would be able to find a way to connect him to his own past, to calm him down.

  The sun was gone as she put on her winter boots and coat for the walk home and, finally, she could drink and eat. Observing Ramadan in Canada felt easier than it had in Britain where the interval between sunrise and sunset seemed longer. In the hallway, she bent over the water fountain and drank in the musty cold water, tasting of caves, cisterns and secrets. It was an old fountain, recessed into the stone wall, and it was dark, like poking your head into a dungeon. But the water slid down into her empty stomach in a long tingling line like an icy scarf. The sensation stayed with her as she stepped ou
t into the dark evening. Cold surrounding her, cold within her—she felt pure.

  Josh was there when she got home, took the bag of tomatoes from her as he kissed her and she imagined their ripeness squashed between their chests, the stain they would leave.

  “Dinner’s ready. You must be weak.”

  He thought Ramadan was a hardship and was solicitous, making sure that hot food was bubbling away on the stove before she stepped in the door. This had been his way even when she wasn’t fasting, and she felt a slight flare of annoyance. They were still getting used to each other after a long-distance courtship conducted mostly by telephone.

  Two years before, she had had a car accident, and he wrote to her in England, having heard about it from her friend, whom he had met when he was backpacking. He started to call regularly during her stay in rehabilitation. During that time, every person in her life was deeply focused on her body, noticing how much she drank, how well the bone graft had taken. Cranked up in a lift, she was bathed by the nurses, their washcloths bristly as the exposed hair between her legs. Her body belonged to the world. Once she could eat again, her mother spooned soft food into her mouth. Her aging mother sat beside her on the bed, tending her body as though she was a child again, an old woman dragged back to the cradle. Even her own voice had been made harsh by the breathing tube left for three weeks, threaded down through her larynx, into her lungs. Her mother sang softly to her, old Moroccan folksongs, and she knew those songs were lost to her. Only a rasp remained that eventually softened to a normal speaking voice, but she would never sing well again.

  When she was in the hospital, Josh had seemed like fresh air she could draw into her aching lungs, pure voice on the phone. He was words on the page sent from a place unmarked by her losses. She had felt the pull away from her family, and interpreted that pull as having something to do with him.

  Her parents had let her go, and she had joined him in Canada last spring, once she could walk easily again without a limp. She had been a change-of-life baby and her sisters were already married, living close by, with children. Although she did know that the quiet way they agreed to her leaving had something to do with her accident too. Her mother, having almost lost her, was protecting herself. But she was already gone. The three weeks she had spent in an induced coma to give her brain a chance to heal had sent her off on a journey, searching for something she would never find close to home. Maybe it had been Josh, but gradually over the six months she had been in Canada she had started to wonder if she had made a mistake. She couldn’t get over the strangeness of his physicality, the way he had been waiting all this time for her in the flesh.

  “Does it hurt?” he had asked soon after she had arrived, touching gently the scarred line of red along her thigh where the stitches had been. They were getting to know each other the old-fashioned way, like an arranged marriage in which suddenly they were intimate and strangers at the same time. She told him, no, not anymore, lifting his chin so that he would look at her face, but he stopped again at the scar on her throat where the tracheotomy scar had grown silvery. “I wish I’d been there for you.”

  “You were,” she had told him. “Your calls reminded me of something outside of that awful room.”

  “But I wish I’d been there in that room for you,” he had said. “So many scars. I didn’t understand how badly injured you were. I mean I knew intellectually, but touching them makes it all so real. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

  “You were there in the way I needed you to be,” she said, trying to pull him back to the present. After being forced to focus on her body for two years, after the hard work of rehabilitation, she just wanted to move on.

  JOSH KISSED THE END of her nose and said, “A drachma for your thoughts.”

  “That’s Greek money, not Moroccan.” He was always making comments like this, reminding her of how different, how exotic, she was to him.

  “Okay. You’re a million miles away.”

  “Sorry, I’m a little distracted by a man at the nursing home. He has no family. No one at all.”

  “That happens to too many old people in Canada. Not like your culture.” He tended to romanticize her family background, but she ignored what he said and continued.

  “But he’s not old. He’s as young as we are. He told me my name was Constance. That I turned him in to the torturers 500 years ago. And that he forgives me.”

  “You torture my heart every single day,” Josh said. “I forgive you too.”

  She laughed, but pushed him away, and then to make amends, she asked him to do her a favour. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, she asked Josh to help her track down Andy Glover’s family. And he was eager to help her, give her whatever she asked for, even if it was the life of a stranger. Against all the rules of her profession, she gave Josh a few details: birth date, middle name, and he was off to his computer like a bloodhound. It would give Josh something to focus on besides her and maybe she could use the information to help Andy Glover.

  “ … OUT ON AN ICE FLOE. They’re gone,” Andy Glover told her when he opened his eyes after waking from a brief doze. Sakina had been sitting at his bedside, watching the grey November light fail at the dirty window and wondering how to broach the subject of his family. How could she make him care about who he really was?

  In the last week, he had told her about being sacrificed and put in a bog in Denmark, about being grabbed at night and locked into the hold of a slave ship in Africa, being tortured by Mengele at one of the Nazi death camps, about being one of Michaelangelo’s apprentices and carving the left bicep of David. He said that the muscle had taken three months because he’d had to practice muscle after muscle following the Master’s specifications, on little chunks of marble before he was allowed to touch the real thing. And every night he had an education in male flesh. At first he was unwilling and cried from the pain of it because he was only a child, but later he was willing. Then he could carve the male form perfectly.

  Sakina had wondered if all these stories of past lives were metaphors for what he had really experienced. Living on the streets and fending for himself the way he had, must have felt like being buried alive. Or did the stories speak to his earlier life—the shadowy life with his real family?

  At the same time, he was clearly growing weaker from opportunistic cancers growing unchecked by his failed immune system. Now he needed nurses to change and reposition him every few hours, and he slept restlessly, mumbling often and moving his head from side to side. Day by day, his bones seemed to be sharpening, his flesh consumed by fever dreams and visitations by the most horrific events in human history. She wanted him to be free of at least these nightmares, these terrible past lives, to give him some peace.

  “What colour were your mother’s eyes?” she asked him, trying yet another time to anchor him in something tangible.

  “Black. You couldn’t see anything but black.”

  “But you’re so fair. Were you adopted?”

  “I remember how black her eyes looked out there on the ice, when we had to let her go. And then my turn came when I was old. She was there with me after they left. The ice is really blue. You think you should be able to see right through it, but you can’t. Not until the end. Then her eyes were watching me. Her eyes were on me until everything faded away.”

  “Did you grow up in the north?”

  “I lived there once. It’s not bad, you know. My mother was left on the ice. And me too. You just fall asleep. Easier than this way.”

  He’d never referred to his coming death before. She thought maybe he was ready to say more.

  “What about your own family?” she asked him.

  “I’ve had so many.”

  “Were you a foster child?”

  Andy Glover just lifted his hand and swiped it dismissively through the air—the biggest gesture she’d seen for days.

  “Let me ask you this—how will you talk about this life when you’re gone, when you’re in the next one?”

 
; “Some lives are there to hold a space open. I’m just killing time,” he said and grinned, but it changed immediately into a bitter grimace. “Or maybe I’ll remember some dark angry bitch not letting me move on and asking me all these stupid questions.”

  She was offended by this, but realized that if she were a psychiatrist, she would probably be pleased with this little display of pique. She must be getting to him, so she pushed on.

  “Don’t you want to remember, maybe see someone from your family before you go? I feel I should talk to you about this.”

  “I’ve seen plenty.”

  “There must be someone … ”

  He looked at her then, and she felt restless and nervous suddenly with his gaze. Then her stomach rumbled from hunger. He heard and smiled bitterly. He hadn’t eaten in a long time because of the thrush infection in his throat.

  “Somebody else wants something,” he said as though it was an innuendo.

  “It’s Ramadan. I eat after sundown.”

  “Do you pray ass-over-teakettle on one of those little rugs?”

  “No. It’s more cultural for me. I grew up fasting. I like it.”

  “Why?”

  “I feel free. And clear.”

  Then he closed his eyes and said quietly, “That’s just how I feel.”

  FREE AND CLEAR. That’s what he said he felt on his deathbed. As she walked home, she tried to imagine that. Her own experience had been very different, although she did realize that she no longer feared death. Life seemed so much harder than death. Of the accident, she remembered little. Only that she had reached down for a bottle of water and somehow skidded out of control. She didn’t remember the ditch or the tree and only bits and pieces of the four hours she was trapped in the car as they sawed away metal, chunk by chunk. During that time, she was worrying about a new wicker side table she had been transporting back to her friend’s apartment, hoping it wasn’t damaged. And her shoes were gone. They were new shoes with pointy toes. Where were they?