by Ingrid Betz
“Ah. We need to talk about that… ”
“You know I can’t sleep in this place. Didn’t get a wink last night.” She flung her thin arm around the ward. “Mrs. Slezak had nurses coming and going like it was a relay race. Days are just as bad. Mrs. Bonelli over by the window has a family the size of a baseball team.” Several of them were there now, all talking at once in a fluent blend of Italian and English. “And the woman next to me… ” his mother lowered her voice dramatically and gestured at the partially-drawn curtain, “is a… ”
“You haven’t had your juice,” interrupted Landesberg hurriedly, noting the brown-skinned hand resting on the sheet, which was all he could see of the occupant in the neighbouring bed. “Don’t you want it?” He picked up the cup and held it out to her.
“It’s pineapple from a tin. Nasty stuff. You know I can’t stand it.” She batted the cup away, sending the hinged straw flying and spattering the sheet with yellow drops. “Now look what you’ve done! You always were clumsy. Anyway, stop changing the subject. When are you going to take me home?”
He pulled a wad of tissues from a box and mopped at the juice. In the process he knocked the umbrella clattering to the floor and the baby in the corner began to whimper.
“It’s not that simple.”
“What’s complicated about it?” His mother’s voice rose querulously. “You don’t want me home, is that it?”
Had the room been this quiet when he came in or were people listening? Even the Bonellis had stopped talking. Not that they’d have to listen very hard. You could always tell the schoolteachers, he thought, by their penetrating voices; even with age, his mother’s volume output never seemed to lessen. He aimed a furtive glance around him. Several faces turned quickly aside. “Shh, Mom. Please…”
A nurse looked in. She scooped up the umbrella and leaned it in the corner. “Everything all right here?” she said.
“Fine.”
She nodded and disappeared.
“Don’t shush me. You’ve probably got a fancy woman in the house every night. Drinking and carrying on. Naturally you don’t want me there.”
He told himself that his mother didn’t really believe what she was saying. It was a hoary old accusation intended to make him feel guilty, and it succeeded. Driving home the point that he couldn’t attract decent female companionship. He took off his glasses and wiped the lenses; there were juice spots on them, too.
“You can’t come home, Mom.” He tried to keep his voice down and at the same time sound forceful. “Think rationally for once. How would you manage alone in the house? You can’t even get to the bathroom without help.”
She stared at him for an uncomfortable minute. “You’ve got it all planned. You’re putting me in a nursing home, aren’t you?”
She’d guessed, of course. She’d always been two steps ahead of him and he was struggling for nothing, trying to come up with an easy way to break the news to her. He leaned forward earnestly. “It has nothing to do with me not wanting you at home. I talked to the doctor. He strongly advises…”
“What does he know? A pup young enough to be my grandson. If I’d been lucky enough to have one.”
He flushed. “You weren’t managing properly even before you broke your hip. Remember? You slipped and fell…”
“Only because the woman from the agency never showed up.”
“Or she did show up and was informed she wasn’t needed,” he said heavily. This was tired ground, trampled flat; they must have been over it five times every day since the accident. The baby was crying in earnest now and the young couple got up to leave just as a bunch of school kids shambled in from the corridor and headed for Mrs. Bonelli’s bed. A rhythmic pulsing emanated from some electronic device that arrived with them and Landesberg glanced nervously at his mother.
“No consideration.” She glared. Her voice rose. “Young people weren’t like this in my day. If they had been, I’d have soon taught them manners.”
“I’m sure you would, Mother.” His soothing tone was wasted.
“Five and a half hours I had to lie on those cold tiles in agony. While you were out wining and dining.”
His anger got the better of him. “I was out with clients,” he hissed. “Making a sale. Keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table.”
She tossed her head. Wisps of white hair had worked loose from the bun at the back of her head and her scalp showed the familiar pink in the overhead light. “So you say. Clients! Chinamen wanting to grow mushrooms in a cave. You expect me to believe that?”
It was a mistake to tell her anything, would he never learn? “A mine, not a cave. And their nationality is immaterial. They’re business people. It doesn’t matter what you believe. You’re not coming back to the house and that’s final. You’re going into a nursing home.”
This time she was silent. She looked like an elderly child, he thought. Miserable and scared. His anger dissipated like air going out of a balloon. He’d handled the whole thing badly. He’d let her get to him and allowed her, as always, to put him in the wrong.
“I’ve been checking on what’s available,” he said in his most placating tone. “There’s a really nice place that just happens to have an opening. Sunset Rest …”
“Forced out of my own home. By my own son.” Her crabbed fingers plucked at the sheet, a sure sign of distress. “Might as well throw me on the rubbish heap right away and be done with it.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Mother.” He tried to smile and found he couldn’t. Almost, she had him believing that he was putting her into a home out of sheer malice. “‘With every comfort and convenience,’” he quoted, clinging to the text of the brochure as though to a lifeline. “‘Healthful meals and a friendly, caring staff.’ It’s just outside town so I can visit you every day.”
“As if!” she exclaimed, loudly enough for the ward to go quiet again. Even the pulsing noise had stopped, he realized. “I’ll get you a private room. The best they have,” he murmured hastily. Suspicion sharpened her features.
“Since when can you afford a private room?” she blurted out and he thought he heard suppressed titters from the Bonelli corner. He forced himself not to look around.
“Since I made that sale. Would you mind,” he whispered hoarsely, “not discussing the state of my finances in public?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she muttered. And then, in a little girl’s voice, “We wouldn’t have to discuss anything. If you’d just let me go home.” Her head dropped back on the pillow. “You’ve tired me out. Leave now, why don’t you? I know you’re dying to.” She folded her hands and closed her eyes.
Landesberg waited, but she did not open them again. Not even when a nurse bustled in with a bedpan and rattled the curtains shut around Mrs. Slezak’s bed. He picked up his umbrella and tiptoed out of the room. She’d always said he was a coward. Not like Paul St. Denis who, if he’d interpreted his remarks correctly, had stood up to the person who’d gone too far in provoking him. But then, that person hadn’t been his mother.
11.
SEAFOOD FEAST. TURKEY TREAT. Marigold Green picked out two of Red Tom’s favourites. As she turned away from the supermarket shelf, a man loomed on the other side of her cart. She gasped and the tins fell clattering out of her hands into the wire basket.
“You have cat?” said the man in a thick accent.
She registered his eyes, the straight black hair, the muscular torso in a white T-shirt and the skinny black slacks. Asian, definitely.
“No.” Marigold clutched at the handle of her cart. “I mean—he’s not mine,” she babbled. “He visits, that’s all. I don’t know whose cat he is.”
The man stared at her. Trying to decide whether she was the girl in the canoe who’d witnessed them kill Lynn Harmer, for all she knew . Her hair had given her away. Colour like a beacon, Peter was a
lways saying, nobody has hair like you, Mar. She edged her cart forward. “Excuse me. I’m in a hurry.”
The man nodded and stepped aside. Even so, her back tingled in anticipation of a blow as she passed him. Not until she had reached the end of the aisle, did she look back. He’d taken a tin from the shelf—Seafood Feast, it looked like—and was studying the label.
Just a man buying food for a cat. Most likely he couldn’t read English and all he’d wanted from her was advice. She was getting paranoid. Thinking the poachers had tracked her down to London. For a second or two she’d even wondered if they were after cats as well as bears, and that was why she’d explained about not knowing who Red Tom belonged to. How pathetic was that?
She hurried through the rest of her shopping, aware of a prickling need to get out of the store. Milk from the dairy section, a package of chocolate fudge cookies from a discount bin. She’d have pizza tonight, she decided, stopping at a frozen foods case for her favourite double-cheese. Comfort food, the kind she ate too much of, according to Peter. She wheeled her cart past the florist’s display without stopping as she usually did to see what they’d gotten in new. On Tuesday there’d been a shipment of orchids. The blossoms had hovered light and airy as pink and yellow butterflies above their arching stems. He hadn’t had a cart, it struck her. If the man was in the store to shop, wouldn’t he have used a cart?
The usual after-five lineup straggled past the Eight Items Or Less cashier. People like her who stopped at the Metro on their way home from work, looking for a quick and easy fix for supper. The cat food man wasn’t one of them; she didn’t see him waiting in line at the other cashiers, either. Chances were he’d already left the store with his purchase and she was working herself up for nothing.
Peter was partly to blame that she was paranoid.
Ever since she’d returned to work, he’d adopted a secretive new style of behaviour that she couldn’t help connecting with his talk of illegal operations, and hush money, and putting the screws on. He’d taken to closing his door when he was on the phone, sometimes even while he was working on the computer. Researching stuff, he said. He’d never cared befor, if she knew what he was doing or saying. “You’re my right hand, Mar,” he’d say. “We sink or swim together.” She had entered the office without thinking on Monday, intent on a test result, and he’d placed his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and hissed, had she never heard of knocking before she came barging in? Why, what was so secret? she’d blurted out, her mind still on the blood sample she’d just analyzed. The office itself looked as it always did: the desk tidy with its few objects neatly arranged, up-to-date charts on the walls, memos printed on the calendar in Peter’s self-important upright script. Next to the little orange kalenchoe she’d given him as a thank you for picking her up from the hospital, stood the framed photograph of Darlene modelling an upswept hairdo. Nothing had changed as far as she could see.
“I just need you to take a look at this. It’s Mrs. Walker’s INR result. The values seem awfully high…”
He’d practically torn the paper out of her hand and muttered something about checking it when he had time and wasn’t a man entitled to conduct a private conversation with his wife? But she didn’t think he had been. When he was on the phone to Darlene, his end of the conversation consisted mostly of monosyllables, and now that she thought about it, she’d distinctly heard him using what she thought of as his salesman’s voice. Ingratiating and boastful, with a wheedling undertone.
This afternoon he’d met his pharmacist friend, Kim, for coffee and when he came back his eyes were bright as blue agates and his balding forehead was flushed with excitement.
“The universe is unfolding, Mar,” he’d said, getting out his car keys. He checked the fridge and nodded at the winking sample vials of urine lined up on the shelves. “You want to earn yourself some overtime? Come back tonight and finish those.” They were really Hussein’s job but their assistant technician had asked for the day off to attend a cousin’s wedding in Toronto.
“Actually, tonight’s my evening to volunteer at the Humane Society.”
He stopped jingling the keys. “You think that’s a good idea? Going back so soon. Stirring everything up again.”
“I owe it to Lynn.” She raised her head from the microscope, brushing back a lock of hair. “The animals always came first with her, no matter what.” At least she could say Lynn’s name now without a lump forming in her throat and the tears welling in her eyes. Peter frowned. She could tell he was trying to think of something sympathetic to say and failing.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I can go another night instead.”
His face lightened like a boy’s let off the hook. “Thanks, Mar. I owe you one. Lock up for me if I’m not back by the time you leave? I’ve got an important appointment.”
She didn’t ask what kind of appointment, or with whom. She didn’t want to know. He was hatching something up to do with Chinese medicine, she was sure of it; still convinced he could make money off the men who’d shot them and snatched the bear cubs. Even though he’d clammed up about that lately, which in itself made her suspicious.
Emerging from the air-conditioned Metro into the humid heat of mid-summer felt like walking into an invisible wall. A smog alert had been issued for London today, the second one this week. As Marigold headed for the sidewalk, she became aware of movement in the parking lot. Sunlight glinted off the hood of a black Honda SUV gliding down the aisle. Some impulse she couldn’t account for made her stop and retie the laces of one of her trainers, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the vehicle stop. The instant she straightened up, it started to move again. A coincidence, she told herself, but her heart knocked against her ribs.
She could make out the shadowy shape of heads behind the windshield but the glass was too heavily tinted for her to recognize features. The SUV reached the exit at the same time as she did. Exactly as though the driver had timed it, she thought, as the vehicle idled beside her. Like a film unreeling, she pictured the passenger door swinging open and an arm snaking out to grab her. Panic propelled her off the curb and into the street. A car horn blared, brakes squealed, and she sprinted for the opposite sidewalk, her plastic bag bumping against her knees as she dodged oncoming traffic.
She didn’t stop running until she’d passed the bus shelter and ducked into Norman Avenue. “Making a public spectacle of yourself,” Peter would have said. Thank heaven he wasn’t here to witness it. Her hair was coming down and her shirt had pulled free of her waistband. Breathing hard, she tucked it in as she walked. Peter was right when he said, only half joking, that some days she shouldn’t be allowed out on her own. Every time a car passed, she flinched. Being snatched off the street wasn’t the only thing that could happen to her. Drive-by shootings were a popular method of eliminating people; just last month there’d been a case on the news right here in London.
Even in a quiet neighbourhood like hers, it could happen.
Marigold had lived on Norman for four years, ever since she’d started working for Cormier Labs. After her first year’s raise, Peter had said surely she could do better than a dingy flat at the back of someone’s house, he was paying her enough, wasn’t he, but by then she’d felt at home there. It was only a five-minute walk to the lab as well as handy to the Metro and the bus downtown, and the mix of people who lived and worked on the street was similar to the one she’d known as a child growing up in small-town Mount Brydges. Marigold found this reassuring.
Besides, her landlady was a lovely Indian woman who’d been married to a London Fruit and Vegetable Importer named Devinder Patel. Mr. Patel was gone now, off to greener pastures, as were their three children, but Mrs. Patel had held on to the house.
Marigold knew most of the people in the neighbourhood to say hello to. The elderly couples, the single mother who worked at the hairdresser’s at the top of the street, the Yoga Your Way lady who had
a sign on her front lawn offering classes in her home; one of these days she’d join up and emerge with a figure that would make Peter eat his words. She knew most of the animals in the neighbourhood too, by sight if not by name. The cats who lurked under spirea bushes, the nondescript white curly-haired dogs not much larger than the cats, who strained at their owners’ leashes. Her favourite was the pitbull halfway down the block—the last of a doomed tribe Lynn called them after the Ontario ban went into effect. He belonged to a soft-spoken young man who played guitar and fixed motorcycles in his garage. Walking past the house, Marigold could see the dog now, his pale broad face glowering behind the patched screen door, a prisoner waiting for his chance while the guitar riffed freedom songs in the kitchen behind him.
The house she called home was a modest single-story brick and wood-clad bungalow. Before turning into the walkway that led around to the back, Marigold cast a final glance up and down the street. She’d never be able to sleep, if she thought the men in the SUV knew where she lived.
A board fence enclosed the backyard, most of which was taken up by a vegetable garden. Bent double amid the tomato plants was her landlady, a familiar figure in a brightly-coloured sari. “Stupid cat,” she muttered by way of a greeting. “He uses the garden for a toilet.”
“Hello, Mrs. P.” Marigold paused, key in hand. “Which cat?” she said cautiously.
“Always the same. The red one. The tom.” With the economical movements of long practise, Mrs. Patel pressed the soil in place around a drooping Bonnie Best. Gnats danced around the thick coil of her black hair.
“You’re sure it was him? Lots of cats around.”
“Sure I am sure. Big. Ugly. Dig, dig.” The woman straightened up, one hand splayed across the small of her back. She gestured at the tidy rows of vegetables. “Last week I lost two courgettes. If I ever catch him, his career is finished. Over.” She had cunning black eyes set in a tawny face and she fixed them now on her tenant. “You don’t feed him, I hope?”
