Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

  There were shadowy shapes outside the glass, but the sounds of their voices, one asking her, “What is your name?” over and over were muffled, as though through water, but her name was irrelevant. She accepted that she couldn’t move her leg. Even her left arm was pinned and she kept trying to move her head to make sure she could see if her favourite ring was still there. She accepted her body being trapped with great patience while worrying about her shoes, a plastic bag of vegetables in the back seat, the CDs scattered on the floor.

  All through this time, one or another of the busy people outside the car distracted her from these important thoughts. “Tell me your name.” “Do you know your name?” The glass was broken and a hard disintegration rained down on her, but the figures were no clearer, only louder. The pain came later, unbearable pain surfacing every time her mind lifted into semi-consciousness.

  Someone had been there with her the whole time. A man with sandy hair, sitting in the chair at the head of her bed, and bending at times over her, close to her face, she remembered the sweetest-smelling breath, like jasmine tea. She remembered his voice and the touch of his hand, the outline of him blurry against the overhead lights. The way he stuck by her, attentive to her with the most incredible love. He made her feel safer than she had ever felt in her life. She asked for him once they let her rise up to consciousness completely.

  “I’m here every day. There’s no man,” her mother had told her. She was angry, sure that her mother wouldn’t let him into the room now because he wasn’t Moroccan, wasn’t one of them. All her sisters had married other second-generation immigrants from Morocco and Algeria and she understood before her accident that she would probably do the same.

  “Why won’t you let him come? I need him,” she told her mother, desperate.

  “I’m here all the time,” her mother replied and Sakina could see her weariness. She asked for him every time she woke up from sleep but her mother truly didn’t seem to know who she was talking about. It was impossible to accept that he hadn’t been real. The hardest part of her recovery was giving him up. She knew she hadn’t completely succeeded. Josh wasn’t enough like him and that was the problem. She knew she was holding that against him. Which was unfair because he had no idea what standard he had failed in her heart. Only her mother knew about the man, and after a while she learned to keep this secret from everyone, not wanting the constant reminder that he had never existed.

  JOSH WAS EXCITED when she got home.

  “Look what I found,” he said, giving her a file folder of Andy Glover’s family. “They’ve been looking for him for almost ten years.”

  There were printouts of photographs put in the newspaper of Andy as a boy, springy blond hair, unruly, and the same scar on his cheek. There was his family then, and now, essentially the same but for his absence. Middle-class, living through a normal progression of events in another city: births, graduations, weddings, grandchildren, family reunions. And the plaintive messages sent out through newspapers looking for him, along with photographs. Hilary and Jack Glover still lived in the same house in a distant city, just as they had when Andy ran away. Every year on his birthday, April 23, they put another personal message in the newspapers across the country telling him this. Obviously, he had never responded.

  Sakina’s call to them was heartbreaking. First joy, then grief when they learned how ill he was. They wanted to fly in to see him right away. Sakina told them she needed to prepare him for a visit but they were adamant. They were on their way.

  SAKINA STARTED TO EAT again that night. At midnight, Ramadan was over and she and Josh prepared a feast that lasted into the small hours of the morning: lamb and prune tagine, squash, date and almond rice, salads, apple cake and a turkey with all the North American trimmings. They had never cooked a turkey before and laughed every time they opened the oven door, twisted the leg and discovered that it was resistant, pulling back against their hands as though it still had a will of its own.

  “This bird wants to fly again. It will never be done,” Sakina said.

  But eventually it was. After the apple cake and ice-cream, at 3:00 in the morning, they ate the tough bird by candlelight.

  “I don’t need this,” she told Josh. “Any of it.”

  “You missed Thanksgiving dinner with my parents. I’m not going to let you get away with that. You live here now.”

  “Do I?” she said. The strangeness of sitting in this kitchen with him struck her.

  “And at Christmas, I’m going to teach you all the jingles and carols.”

  “Oh, I already know them. Impossible to escape.”

  “ … walking in a winter wonderland … ” he sang. “You couldn’t really know what that’s like. Just you wait.”

  “Why do you always assume that I don’t know anything about being here?” she said, surprised at the anger that flared in her too-full stomach. As he cleared the table silently, she watched him, not rising to help. Who was this man? He wasn’t familiar, or not familiar enough, despite his solicitousness. His voice wasn’t right, and the way he was moving around the kitchen wasn’t right either.

  By Tuesday morning, she was sick to her stomach, probably from all the food she’d eaten in the middle of the night after a month of fasting. Something transient, but irresistible, and the metal rod that had been put into her leg to help it heal after the accident was aching in the bone. Josh was at work for the day and she would be able to sleep privately, quietly. She called the nursing home to tell them she couldn’t come in. After she hung up, she remembered that she hadn’t told the nurse coordinator about Andy’s parents planning to see him as soon as they could get there. But thinking about how persistent he was in his refusal to say anything direct about his own past, she thought maybe it was just as well that they would make contact without giving him a chance to put up defenses. Later still in the day, she admitted to herself that she hadn’t cleared any of this with her supervisor from the College and now it was too late. The next day was a holiday, Remembrance Day, and she wouldn’t be able to talk to her until after that. It could wait a day, she decided. Andy Glover’s parents didn’t know when they would make it across the country. She would let it unfold as it would and be there on Thursday to help Andy Glover put his past together.

  The government building where Josh worked was closed for the holiday and they had planned to take a rare mid-week walk into the hills north of the city. Even though she still felt a little weak and the pain was still throbbing slightly in her left leg, they set out. As they moved higher into the hills, the air clamped down, steely-cold. They rasped through dead grass with their boots, their breath swirling around their heads and lingering behind them as they walked. Cold crept in under her hat, making her nose run, and it tingled along her earlobes. If this was the beginning of winter, what would it be like in a couple of months? Josh seemed to be reading her thoughts.

  “Do you mind this? The darkness here, winter coming?”

  “I’m used to gloom. To rain and fog, but cold … I don’t know what that will be like.”

  “Can you make a life here?” She knew he could only ask this because he was looking down at his feet and not at her. She felt a sudden pity for him and the way he had been competing all this time against a man who had never existed. That man had been comforting, Josh was comforting; that man had sat at her bedside and kept her company through the darkest nights of her life, just as Josh would if she needed him to.

  They walked from luminous hardwood forest where the bare trees put up no resistance to the sky and into the low light of evergreens. The wind was suddenly gone although it was no warmer. Her breath rose around her face, the icy smoke of it riffling along her eyelashes. Frozen leaves cracked like crystal under each foot. All sound was underfoot. The ache in her leg had gradually faded as her muscles had warmed up. The sky was breathing easily, the awful rattling of the leaves gone. She felt quite calm.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” she told him and he let her s
top there.

  After a while she noticed white lights fluttering up from the dead leaves underfoot. At first she thought she was seeing snow-flakes, but squatting to take a closer look at what would be her first glimpse of Canadian snow, she realized they were tiny white moths stirred up by their feet.

  “Josh, what are these?” Their wings had a slightly shredded outline. “How can they live in such cold?”

  “They won’t make it through the night,” he said. “I’ve never seen them before.”

  They had to be warm—little sparks too late for food, or sex or eggs, rising from the leaves only to show themselves alive this last time.

  Then flakes of snow really did start to meander here and there through the air, corkscrewing down and landing on the frozen ground. Soon, they couldn’t tell which white flecks moved deliberately and which were moved by the light wind. The difference between the snow and the moths dissolved.

  “Snow moths,” she said. “Amazing.”

  How sad, she thought, that this is how it would end for them. Flying, then frozen, lost in the snow as though they had never existed. An accident of timing, perhaps, led them to this. Just as she had been led to Josh. The pieces of her life were still flying from the velocity of that accident: some things would be shattered, some would be retrieved and put somewhere new. Josh would be part of what shattered once it landed. She didn’t know how she had not understood this until now.

  “I do love you, Josh,” she told him for the first time, knowing that she would be leaving him soon. “Whatever happens, it’s not because I didn’t love you. Always remember that.”

  BEFORE SHE REACHED his room, Sakina found out that Andy Glover had died. One of the night nurses met her in the hallway on her way home. She was clearly exhausted and didn’t tell more than this fact. The senior nurses had left by the time she reached the station, but one of the older practical nurses was still there. She was someone who had scowled at Sakina initially, probably not liking the look of her black hair and brown skin, but once she’d heard her voice, her English accent, she’d adopted a confidential, gossipy way with her. She told Sakina what a crazy night it had been. Sakina half-listened to her, more intent on checking the records to find out if Andy Glover had had any visitors the day before.

  But the practical nurse wanted to relish the details and wouldn’t let her read. She told her in a low voice about how he had cried and thrashed around, trying to get out of bed all night. The older nurse complained, “We’re not even allowed to have railings on the beds anymore. Well, let all those high-minded bureaucrats spend a night keeping a dying man in his bed and see if they change their tune.”

  Sakina felt queasy hearing this.

  “What happened? He was so weak last time I was here.”

  “We could have used you here last night, let me tell you. He was so much easier to handle once you started coming around. Last night, he had the strength of Goliath. And swearing. You never heard such swearing and carrying on. It took two nurses to hold him and give him a shot to calm him down.”

  “So, what happened?” she asked. “Did something in particular happen to set him off like this?” She couldn’t bear to be direct in her question, but the nurse didn’t pick up on this, instead continuing on with her blow-by-blow description of Andy’s death.

  “He must have worn himself out,” she finally said, concluding her story. “As soon as he stopped fighting, he passed away. The undertakers were here about an hour ago. We haven’t cleared the room. If you know someone who might want his things, go ahead.”

  She was afraid of what she’d done. It was only a matter of time before she would have to admit what she had set in motion. In a minute, she would ask about contacting his next of kin, and then she would know, and do her best to make things right, at least for them. But she needed a quiet moment first.

  She opened the door and sat on his bed. The sheets were stuffed into an overflowing hamper beside the bed and the hard plastic mattress was cold. Her body’s warmth would soon make it comfortable and then she would sit and sit, unable to leave this spot, to stand up and walk out of this dingy room. So she got up and looked around the room for his possessions, whatever they were. If his family had come yesterday, there would be some clue, something they left behind. But there was nothing except what the nursing home provided: terrycloth bathrobe she’d never seen him wear, skin lotion, mouth swabs, half-full glasses with bent straws. What things did the nurse mean? She wanted something of his to remember him by, and pulled open one drawer and then another, but they were all empty.

  Where All the Ladders Start

  SHE EMPTIED A SHELF of books into her backpack, shifted them around so that the sharp corners wouldn’t jut into her spine, and slid into the harness. Her husband, Luke, was holding the weight in the air as she adjusted one strap, and then the other, snapping the two together across her chest.

  “What did you put in here? Rocks?”

  “The Bible, all five volumes of the Collected Papers of Freud. And my old high school biology textbook.”

  “You surprise me. No novels. All work and no play?”

  Deirdre smiled at him. She knew that beneath this banter, he was genuinely worried, so she tried to keep things light to reassure him. “Paradise Lost. Heart of Darkness. Does that make you happy?”

  “If you’re going to be weighed down by baggage, you might as well make it the whole history of Western thought.”

  Then he released the weight and her vertebrae contracted with the shock of it. Automatically, her breath was pushed out of her lungs and her knees almost buckled with a panicky weakness. The feeling was familiar. She had been very ill throughout the winter and the more weight she lost, the more leaden she had seemed. Through the coldest months, she had not stirred much from her bed. Noise, light and movement had been too disorienting for her to be part of the world. The icy tick of snow against the window had mirrored the static in her head.

  But now it was early summer and she had almost regained her strength. They walked together through their neighbourhood, and she carried the backpack strapped tight to her body. She planted each foot in its hiking boot squarely on the asphalt. Kids playing on their front lawns stopped throwing a ball and stared. Neighbours waved, looking curious, but not wanting to stop her to chat with such weight on her back.

  “They probably think I’m leaving you,” Deirdre told Luke.

  “Maybe they think I’m escorting you to the edge of town. Good riddance.”

  She laughed. It felt so good to laugh with him again. Throughout the winter, he had brought her drinks she couldn’t swallow, tried to coax her downstairs for a change of scene, lay with her as her tears soaked the front of his shirt.

  She sighed, remembering. Ever vigilant, he reacted to the sound she made, moved behind her and lifted the weight from her shoulders.

  “Let me carry that. We have a long way to go to get back home.”

  “No. You won’t be there with me. How will I get stronger? I don’t think there’ll be either gentlemen or sherpas on the West Coast Trail.”

  “Are you sure you should be doing this? You’re still not back to normal.”

  “I may never be back to normal. What is normal anyway?”

  “You know what I mean. This might be too much, and Zoe will be the one who has to deal with things if you’re not up to it. Is that fair to her?”

  “She’s been planning for this all year. It’s not fair not to go. I’ll be all right.”

  THEY WALKED ON QUIETLY. She had to concentrate on her breath, one in for every second step of her left foot. Although she tried not to let on to him her doubts, she didn’t know how she would negotiate eighty kilometres of slippery headland. The trail had been built in the nineteenth century for survivors of shipwrecks dashed onto the rocks by Pacific storms. They would complete it in eight days—up and down ladders bolted to the sides of cliffs, scrambling over boulders between surge channels, balancing their way across gullies and small ravines on fa
llen tree trunks, pulling themselves across rushing rivers in small cable cars. The backpack was so heavy that she started to see spots in her field of vision. She reminded herself of all the hungry and shivering survivors who had been forced to stumble along treacherous headlands without the help of ladders or boardwalks or maps. When Zoe had returned from Vancouver for her grandfather’s funeral in the fall, she had said, “We should still do the trail. It will be something for you to look forward to.”

  Deirdre had been touched by her daughter’s care. The funeral had been brief, a simple Catholic mass, with no visitation before, no reception after. The blunt fact of her father’s suicide, finally successful after three attempts, had silenced everyone, even the priest, whose sermon only focused on the gospel, with routine platitudes about loss and forgiveness. Her father had been barely mentioned.

  After the funeral, she went back to her parents’ house where she had grown up. The tasteful suburban houses along the street still looked new, but the trees had matured, making the light more ominous than it seemed in her earlier years. Shadows at midday, while she remembered a sun so hot and bright on the front lawn that she used to have to construct a tent out of an old sheet so she could stay outside reading a book. She always felt a need to be out of the house. The house was sad, too many things unexpressed, just as it was on the afternoon after they had buried her father in a grave that was still unmarked. She wondered if her mother would ever get around to arranging for a headstone or if the fact of his death, or even of his life, would slip away into silence, as was the habit in her family. To escape the shame she, her mother and brother seemed to feel when they met each other’s eyes, she had gone down the basement steps to the room where her father had spent much of his time. No doubt there were still bottles of rye hidden behind the furnace.

  THE LAST TIME she had descended the stairs, only a month before he died, he had been there. She had brought dinner to her parents, nothing home-cooked, just the Chinese takeout that they liked. He hadn’t answered when she called from above, so she started down to find him. She had been greeted by framed photographs of young men on a table at the bottom of the stairs, hair combed back, wearing black robes of graduation. Similar photographs were framed on the desk across the room. Her father’s easy chair and television sat between the two sets of photographs.