Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  Dooley went out through the door first, and I followed.

  He asked me if I needed help with the stairs, and when I said no, he went down the steps ahead of me (“Well, see you, then. Hope your foot is okay. And the tetanus thing, probably not, but better to be safe”) and started back across the lots to the trailer, his wet pants flapping against his long, thin legs.

  I hopped to my car and got in, and then sat watching my neighbour walk away from me, having difficulty believing what I had just heard, that he was Dooley Sullivan. He walked hesitantly, a few good strides and then a slow step, as though he might turn around and offer his help once more, insist on driving me to the hospital, and then I realized that he too was limping, and I remembered the school window and the broken ankle, and then the accident, when he had driven into a bridge and broken his body into a marionette of parts, and who knows what had happened to him after that. The whole town had been grateful for my father’s orchestration of his banishment. In the years that followed, my mother would regularly come home with new stories: dealing drugs, addicted to heroin, living on the streets. A rumour of his death, and then people quit talking about him. But here he was, back in Elliot, a cat with his nine lives.

  Once he was inside the trailer, I returned to the possibility of tetanus and started the car. I drove up Liberty Street and crossed the tracks and took myself to the hospital, which had been rebuilt since my time in Elliot but was still small, a main entrance with a wing on either side. It was remarkable, I thought, that the town had kept any hospital at all. I hobbled inside, my foot throbbing, and found a nurse on duty. Her name was Kelly. She was wearing purple scrubs and looked too young to be a real nurse, but she was, in fact, a nurse practitioner, trained to do some of the things a doctor did because there’s only one doctor, she said, and there’s not enough of him to go around. She cleaned my foot and wrapped it, and told me I was lucky the nail hadn’t hit anything important, like a tendon. Then she gave me a tetanus shot and told me I had seventy-two hours to get the shot, so I should be fine, but to come back if I noticed any signs of infection.

  “You mean if I wake up one morning and my jaw is locked?” I asked.

  “Not expecting that to happen,” she said. Then she explained to me what sepsis was, and provided a further explanation of how antibodies develop after a tetanus shot, and how really I should have kept my shots up to date, especially tetanus—case in point—and of course hepatitis, especially if I did any out-of-the-country travel. Kelly was a talker, it seemed. I wondered if she was paying enough attention to what she was doing.

  “Do you?” she asked me. “Travel?”

  “Not much,” I said. “Ireland recently.”

  “I’d like to go to India,” she said. “And I’ll be getting every shot known to man if I ever do get the chance. Lots of people here go to Mexico or Jamaica in the winter, and they don’t all get their shots. They’ll be sorry when they start turning yellow or get dengue fever.”

  I resisted the temptation to correct, or perhaps refine, her explanation of sepsis and antibodies—to tell her that I was a microbiologist responsible for safe drinking water in the city, or at least I had been until recently. I tried to imagine how old I must look to young Kelly. There was a mirror on the wall behind us and I noticed the lines around my eyes, the dyed blonde hair in need of a good styling.

  After she took my health card information (“Moon, that’s an interesting name”) she left me alone at the admitting desk while she went into a storage room to get me a handful of antiseptic wipes so I could clean the wound at home. I happened to glance at an open binder that appeared to have the names of the hospital’s patients and the rooms to which they were assigned, and I mindlessly read the names upside down, just to see if I recognized anyone. I didn’t, until I saw the name Joe Fletcher.

  Seeing that name should have been less of a shock than meeting Dooley Sullivan. I should have known there was a chance Joe Fletcher was alive. But reading his name on the hospital log was truly like being told that a dead person had come back to life. Impossible, I thought.

  But there it was. Joe Fletcher, room 18.

  Then Kelly emerged from the storeroom with a plastic bag in one hand, pushing an empty wheelchair in the other, and I wondered if she was planning to wheel me to the door, which would be a bit unnecessary, I thought. I looked well away from the binder, not wanting to be caught snooping.

  “Here you go,” Kelly said, handing me the bag. “Just keep it clean and come back if you’re not sure. Sorry, gotta run.” Then she was off down the wing to my right with the wheelchair.

  I looked at the list again. Joe Fletcher, room 18. I hadn’t imagined it.

  But Joe Fletcher was a common name, much more common than Dooley Sullivan, so this was not necessarily the same man. I considered following Kelly and asking, but then I looked up the hallway where she had gone and saw that it was dead quiet. I looked at the directions posted on the walls; room 18 was the other way, to my left.

  Finding out what had happened to Joe Fletcher—if it was in fact him—had not been among the things I’d expected to accomplish that day, but how could I not take this opportunity? I remembered what I’d heard many years ago, perhaps around the time of my father’s death, that he’d moved to the interior of BC. It was possible he’d returned, also many years ago.

  Could I just walk by the door and peek inside and see for myself that the patient was, or was not, Joe Fletcher? If it turned out to be, he wouldn’t recognize me, not in a million years. I would likely not recognize him, but the age would be a clue, one way or the other, and if there was a chance, then I could ask my new friend Kelly whether it was the same man.

  I couldn’t resist the possibility of knowing, couldn’t stop myself from hobbling down that hallway, even with my foot wrapped, even though it hurt like hell now and what I really wanted to do was go home and lie down with my leg elevated, as Kelly had suggested I do. I left the admitting desk and, with a quick glance in the other direction to make sure Kelly wasn’t watching, limped down the hallway that housed room 18 and someone with the name Joe Fletcher.

  And just like that, there was the room. I was so taken by surprise that I didn’t have a chance to feign an innocent walk by the door, peeking inside as I passed. I found myself staring full into the room, with an old man staring right back at me, saying, “Help me, help me.” I looked into his eyes and tried to recognize the man I had known, but he wasn’t there. It wasn’t him. Then I realized the room had two beds in it, both occupied by old men, and my gaze shifted to the far bed, and there he was, most certainly the same Joe Fletcher. I wanted there to be doubt—how could I be sure, after all these years?—but there was none. Absolutely none, even though the man in the bed was old and thin and grey-looking and possibly comatose, or was he just sleeping?

  I couldn’t look away. The first man’s voice kept saying, “Help me, help me,” but it faded into the distance and nothing existed in the room but the man in the far bed, Joe Fletcher, the man I had married, the man to whom I was still married. It was not like stepping into my past, not like facing the dairy farm or the graveyard or the things stored in the basement—things I knew I could do but just hadn’t. Seeing Joe Fletcher was different, because for so many years I had lived as though he hadn’t happened, didn’t exist. I was tempted to walk over to the bed and get a better look, poke him the way you might poke a prostrate dog to see if it’s dead. On the other hand, I regretted that I had ever stepped into the hallway. I thought of his sister, Martha, could almost see her waving her Bible at me. And I thought too of Silas Chance for the first time in years. What I knew, or maybe knew, about what had happened to him.

  Then the man in the bed near the door grew louder, more demanding, and I saw that he was reaching out to me and trying to disengage himself from the tight wrap of the bed linens, as though he were desperate to escape. It appeared that he thought I was someone else, a person he knew, someone who could save him from whatever hell he was in.r />
  I looked away from the man, not knowing what to do, and I backed away from the doorway, desperate now to leave, and when I saw an exit sign at the far end of the hallway, I limped toward it. I wanted only to escape, get out of the hospital as quickly as possible, run back to Uncle Vince’s house, where I could hide.

  I made it to the exit and pushed on the door without seeing the sign that said Fire Exit Only.

  The alarm went off.

  “Fuck,” I said, looking at the outside through the open door, wanting to run, to hell with my foot.

  But I didn’t. I did the responsible thing and went back inside and let the exit door swing closed again, and when I saw Kelly coming, I said, “Sorry, that was me. I didn’t see the sign.” She headed back the other way to turn off the alarm, and when she passed room 18, I heard her say, “Mr. Weins, you get in that bed right now, you hear me.” I was forced to hobble down the hall toward the front entrance, and by now there were several visitors and patients standing in doorways to see what the ruckus was about.

  “Sorry,” I said all the way down the hall, to no one in particular. The people in the doorways stared at me when I walked by.

  They knew. They all knew who I was and exactly when I’d arrived, that I’d been staying in the Liberty Street house and keeping to myself. They all knew I was Frances Moon, who’d married Joe Fletcher and then left him immediately after. Joe Fletcher, who was in room 18, the one I was now walking by without giving a glance inside—only I did glance, and I saw that Joe had not moved a muscle and Mr. Weins was sitting on the edge of his bed looking lost. I limped by on my bandaged foot, and just as I reached the admitting area again, the alarm stopped ringing.

  Kelly was there waiting for me.

  “Okay,” I said. “There’s no use my trying to ignore what the whole town probably knows. I was married to that man, Joe Fletcher. I haven’t seen him for forty years. What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s dying,” Kelly said simply. “Congestive heart failure. Some kind of cancer, but we can’t find it. He’ll pass soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon. A few weeks at most.”

  “Does he have any family?” I asked. “His sister?”

  “No one,” Kelly said. “If he had a sister, she must be gone.”

  “Does he talk, or is he in a coma?”

  “He drifts in and out. Sometimes he mumbles a few things. I wouldn’t say he talks. I doubt that you could have a conversation with him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It’s not,” I said, “but thank you. Sorry about the alarm. And thank you for . . . well, you know, the foot.”

  I turned to walk—hobble—toward the door, and Kelly said something else.

  “He hasn’t had a single visitor since he’s been here. You feel bad for them, but I don’t have time to sit and hold a person’s hand. We’re not Florence Nightingales anymore. Think about it, if you’ve got time.”

  Time for what? I wondered. Surely she wasn’t suggesting that I, now that I’d admitted to being married to him, should visit?

  I pushed my way through the entrance door without responding and drove home and lay down on the couch. I didn’t feel well. Maybe it was the tetanus shot. Maybe it was the heat of the day and the antiseptic smells of the hospital, the fact that Joe Fletcher was still in this world, although barely. I missed Ian. I missed having another person around. I missed being able to pretend that a big lamentable chunk of my life hadn’t happened. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

  I woke up at midnight to the boom of thunder and the flashing light of an electrical storm. My foot hurt like crazy and the storm was so loud and violent that I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I made myself a pot of tea. I got a jar of peanut butter from the fridge and a box of crackers from the cupboard, and I sat on the couch with a knife and the jar, and drank tea and ate crackers and watched the storm. With each bolt of lightning the world outside the window was illuminated, and when the hail began to rattle on the roof, I wondered what it sounded like to someone in a trailer—hail on a tin roof.

  The power went out. I got up and looked out the window, and when lightning flashed, I saw that the ground was white with hail. There was a terrible wind. I saw things tumbling across the lots, but I couldn’t tell what, or from where. Something blew against my living room window, but by some miracle the glass didn’t break. I found myself worrying about Dooley Sullivan in the flimsy trailer, could picture the roof flying off, the trailer being blown apart. When the wind died down and the worst of the storm had passed, I put on my rain jacket and went outside and waded in my flip-flops through the mounds of hail in the lots between Uncle Vince’s house and Dooley’s trailer, my feet freezing, the bandage on my foot soaked through.

  The trailer was still there and not blown into a hundred pieces, as I had imagined it might have been. I opened the door to the screened porch, and just then there was a flash of lightning and I saw that Dooley was sitting at the picnic table. The checkerboard was on the table in front of him and it looked as though he’d been playing against himself before the power went out.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I saw you coming. Hola.”

  “Is everything okay?” I asked. “I was worried you might have blown away.”

  “Still here. How’s the foot?”

  “I’ll live,” I said.

  He invited me to sit down and I did. Then his long, tall shadow slid itself out from the bench he was sitting on.

  “Don’t go away,” he said, and he went inside.

  The trailer wasn’t much more than an aluminum box and I could hear him rummaging around. While I waited, I wondered if he’d had things to settle when he made his way back to Elliot. Perhaps, I thought, the means to one of them was now sitting at his picnic table, the only person left with even a dubious connection to his grandfather, and Esme Bigalow’s will. Did I have an explanation for the gifts left on my porch? He’d been paid to leave town, but had that been a legal settlement? I had no idea how much of Esme’s money my father had given him. Maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe Dooley’s inheritance had funded my education.

  He returned a few minutes later with a couple of gaudy crocheted afghans and an old-style coal oil lamp. My parents had had a similar lamp, and we’d used it whenever the power went out. Dooley lit the lamp’s wick and placed the glass chimney over the flame, then set it down next to the checkerboard. He handed me one of the afghans. I realized I was shivering as I took off my wet jacket and draped the throw over my shoulders. Dooley set up the checkerboard for a new game and said, “Your move, Señora Luna.”

  Luna. Moon. I moved a checker forward, a black one.

  “I apologize for not recognizing you,” I said. “I do remember you. Not because of the house fire. Before that. We danced together at an anniversary party when I was a little girl. You were a teenager with your leg in a cast from jumping out the school window.”

  He made his move on the board and said, “As I recall, it was a long way down. I obviously didn’t think that through.”

  We played checkers until we both had queens on the board, but the game seemed like a prelude to something else, and it was as though we were both waiting for whatever that was to begin. The hail was melting now, and ice-cold water ran into the porch and pooled under our feet. I lifted my injured foot out of the water and rested it on the bench. A sudden gust of wind blew a new sheet of water through the porch screen and across the table. We both jumped up and moved out of its way, and stood pressed up against the trailer’s exterior. Dooley retrieved the checkerboard and set it on the little step leading into the trailer. The lamp blew out.

  “I should probably go,” I said. “I just came to see if you were all right. And to say thanks for the food gifts, which I should have done sooner. It was all delicious, much appreciated. You’re quite the cook.”

  Dooley said, “Come inside. You don’t want to walk back in this rain.”

  I though
t of him doing his crazy chicken dance, but I went inside with him anyway. I was not afraid of Dooley Sullivan. I never had been. He offered me a La-Z-Boy recliner that he’d somehow squeezed into the small trailer, and he placed the lamp on his kitchen table and relit it. The small flame cast a surprising amount of light now that we were inside. On a shelf under the little kitchen window, I saw a neat row of well-worn cookbooks, and I could even read some of the titles: The Spanish Kitchen, Flavours of Italy, French Cuisine. Dooley put the kettle on the propane stove, and he saw me looking at the cookbooks.

  “The rummage sale in the church basement,” he said. “They belonged to my grandfather. I recognized them as soon as I saw them stacked up on a table. Who knows how many hands they went through, how many times they were bought and then given away again. They’re the only things of his that I own. I’m not sure why I brought them home. At first I thought I could smell smoke on them from the fire. Maybe that was it. They’re my version of a hair shirt.”

  I knew what he meant.

  When the kettle boiled, he made tea and handed me a cup, and then he sat down at the banquette and set his own tea on the table in front of him.

  “I’m not sure what I was hoping to accomplish,” he said. “The food, I mean. But when you didn’t respond, when you left the tray while I was out, I thought the hard feelings must have been passed on from your father. Or maybe you were afraid of me. I never thought of the possibility that you had no idea who I was, which says more about me than it does you.” He paused and took a sip of his tea, and I did the same. In the lamplight, I could see traces of the old Dooley. Not the angry one who had paced around his battered red truck, more the Dooley who had come to me in dreams after the other fiery accident on the bridge. The boy I’d wanted to save.

  “When I saw you coming through the rain,” he said, “I knew that no matter what you thought of me, I was going to have a chance to speak to a Moon.” Then he cleared his throat and said, as though he were reciting wedding vows, carefully rehearsed, “I didn’t mean to set my grandfather’s house on fire. I was drunk. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, especially not his wife; none of my problems were her fault. I’m relieved to finally get the chance to say that to you, the only person I can think of who might appreciate an apology.” Then he laughed, perhaps to defuse the awkwardness, and said, “You’re never done with penitence.”