by Tina Chaulk
For minutes I focus on their chests. The way they rise and fall in such peaceful slumber. I can’t stop thinking about chests. The way Dad’s stopped moving that day, the way it was compressed by Rick as Alan breathed into Dad’s mouth. Nan’s chest and the way she touches it when she can’t remember something, as if she can find it in there somewhere, hiding inside her heart. Mom’s chest and the sigh I heard and felt when she exhaled in our hug this morning.
I’m hoping my body will soon regain some of its feeling so I can move. The only thing I can feel is a sickening ache in my chest. Chests. I try to avoid Mom’s and focus on her face. The contented look I see there worsens the pain, and I crouch down, praying that I won’t get sick, not quite able to stand up and not willing to sit down.
The thoughts come: Where do we go from here? How can I move on now? It’s followed quickly by another thought that’s been my companion for months now: maybe I won’t have to.
Some nights the drinks don’t seem enough to help me sleep, and sleep doesn’t even seem up to numbing the ache inside me. So occasionally I’ve mixed some of the Atasol 30s left over from my shoulder injury with some tranquilizers the doctors prescribed for me after Dad died, and added lots of alcohol. I have been purposely careless. I’d never try to kill myself. I’m just frequently disappointed when I wake up in the morning.
When the feeling starts to return to my body, my muscles ache. I slowly stand up, tingly legs quivering with the effort. Mom’s clock says 10:48 and I have lost twenty-four minutes. Twenty-four minutes of being in the presence of this truth and it still does not register.
For the first time since I got here, I turn away. I look down the hall and see Dad there, staggering with sleep to the bathroom in the middle of the night, his grey boxers on, tufts of hair stuck off everywhere as he scratches his head and walks with half-closed eyes, not seeing me there. How can his ghost walk down the hall? How can it not be standing here beside me, sharing the burden of this moment?
I look back to the bed and nothing has changed. Everything has changed. Eventually they will wake up, I tell myself, and, less prepared to see their eyes open than to watch them closed, I tell myself I must move.
Just turn your head again then let your feet follow. You can do it. One step in front of the other, step by step, until the door, then open the door and quietly walk out. You can do this. You have to. Leave, or stay here and face them. My head turns, and my feet, just as planned, go with it. Once moving, the momentum brings me through the house, and in seconds I have the front door open and am standing where I was half an hour ago.
The wind has picked up outside and it blows through the doorway, rustling the plastic bag from Stockwoods. I cringe, wanting to keep quiet. Stepping outside, before I can stop myself, some part of me slams the door as the sound reverberates outside. I can only imagine what it sounds like inside. My feet carry me quickly to the car. I find my keys in the ignition where I left them when I had no idea how long dropping off Mom’s surprise would take or how my idea of a surprise would change once I opened her door.
The cab light goes out a few seconds after I sit behind the wheel. In the dark of the driveway, I know I have to start the car but I’m trapped in my stillness.
I see lights go on inside the house — first in the hall, then the living room, and finally the porch. The front door opens and he fills the doorway, his eyes scanning the night until they stop on my car.
He stands. Unmoving. Staring.
Minutes pass before Mom appears behind him in the doorway, her robe carefully tied around her waist. I watch as she speaks but he continues to stare ahead. His lips don’t move and hers stop once her gaze follows his and finds me.
I start the engine and back straight out of the driveway, not taking my eyes off them. Unsure again which way to turn the car, I choose left and drive.
7
THE THING I found most confusing about the morning my mother left us, was the lack of tears. I was used to seeing my mother crying or fighting back tears in any sad or touching situation, but that morning her eyes remained dry.
I was excited when Mom said she would drive me to school. It meant that I wouldn’t have to go on the bus and could stay home a little longer and watch TV.
I ran to the TV and switched it on, only to have Mom follow me and turn it off. “I have to talk to you about something,” she said, her right hand rubbing the material on her black polyester pants.
“I want to watch TV,” I said, folding my arms and putting on a practiced pout.
“I know but this is very important. You see …” Mom’s eyes searched the room and finally landed on a spot above my head. “I am leaving your dad and going to live with Nanny Philpott. I am not leaving you.” She looked right in my eyes. “I am leaving your father. You are the greatest thing in my life, the most wonderful thing I’ve ever done. And this is the hardest thing I’ll ever do. But I have to do it.” Both her fists were clenched at her sides.
“But why? Daddy is so great.”
“Yes, he is,” Mom said with a smile even my eight-year-old eyes could see was fake. “But …” She paused for a long time and chewed on her lip.
She kneeled down and looked at me. “Sometimes even the best man in the word can’t make you happy.” Her eyes were different than the soft, caring ones I was used to.
“And I can’t make you happy?” I looked down when my voice broke on the word “happy.” One tear escaped down my cheek.
“You’re the one that has made me happy, Jennifer Matilda. And you always will. But I’m starting to find happy a hard thing to feel.”
“Are you feeling sad? I can tell you a joke Robbie Hynes told me in school. It’s about a frog and the frog—”
Her hand gently touched my face and I stopped speaking.
“I’m not sad, sweetheart. Maybe one day you’ll understand that there’s a feeling other than happy or sad. But know that nothing, absolutely nothing, can make my love for you go away.”
“When will I see you again?” I asked, wiping more tears away.
“I don’t know. I need some time first. Then your father and I will talk about where you’ll live.”
“I want to live with Daddy,” I said without a thought about how it would make her feel. “I have to live with Daddy or he won’t take me to the garage.”
She closed her eyes. “Yes, I know. That’s why this is the hardest thing I’ll ever do.” She stood up, turned away and went to her room, returning moments later with a sweater around her shoulders.
At school, when she dropped me off, she hugged me until I told her she was hurting me.
“I’ll see you before you know it,” she said. “I love you so much.” She touched the side of my face. “And I’m going to call you tonight and every single night after that. So don’t be sad, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. And when I closed the door on the station wagon, I didn’t feel any sadness. I felt a certainty that it would be fine. It would have to be. For the first time in my life, my mother had watched me cry, had hugged me tight, and had told me she loved me, all without a tear in her eyes. If my mother, of all people, couldn’t find a tear for this occasion, then her leaving couldn’t be so sad at all. And yet something in my chest ached as I watched her drive away.
After leaving Mom’s house and driving to Conception Bay South, Paradise, through St. Phillips, and up to Portugal Cove, I find myself back at the garage. It’s like the car drove me on its own. I don’t remember the decision to make my way here, to not go to my house. But I’m not surprised. I know my house contains only empty bottles, while at the garage I have a not-so-secret stash. It sits in a place of honour, next to “the cure.”
“The cure” — Dad’s nickname for the contents of the third drawer in a battered four-drawer file cabinet in his office — a forty-ouncer of Canadian Club Whiskey and four lead crystal glasses. I never saw him pour out more than two glasses at a time but Dad was a better-safe-than-sorry kind of guy.
“Cur
e for all that ails you,” Dad would say while he raised his glass whenever he drank the cure in my presence. The first time he gave me a drink, I was seventeen years old.
I’d had an awful experience that day. Lying under a fish truck in the heat of August, trying to remove the starter, I heard something drop on the floor next to my head. I didn’t think much of it until I heard another thing land on the floor, then another and another. I felt something cold land on my hand and saw something white fall on my cheek. Its coldness didn’t startle me, or its colour. It was its movement that caused me to flick it off, turn sideways and see what it was. I pushed my creeper out from under that truck so fast, I heard whizzing as I passed the back tires. I’m not squeamish, but when I looked down and saw what peppered my body, my hair and the floor below the truck, I screamed.
My movements in the garage that day have been forever referred to as the Maggot Dance and never a Christmas party passes without at least one performance of the hopping and squealing I did that day. Every time a new mechanic comes to work, he is warned to check for dead cats under the hood before he gets under any vehicle.
After I showered off the remnants of the little creatures, Bryce told me Dad was waiting for me in the office. I went in there with some hesitation, fearing that he might be angry, that I may have embarrassed him. Instead, his smiling face and two stiff drinks of whiskey greeted me.
“A day like this calls for the cure,” he said as he handed me a drink.
“For the love of Jesus, don’t tell your mother,” Dad said as I sat down.
I winced with that first taste of whiskey. I drank the full glass, cringing with every sip, while Dad laughed.
“You might be a rum girl,” Dad said.
And he was right. Next to “the cure” I keep a bottle of Bacardi Dark Rum so I can have a drink if I need one. No one is allowed to touch the other bottle in the drawer, the one that’s two-thirds full and smeared with greasy fingerprints.
I don’t even bother with a glass before I chug down a good hard slug. The office is dark and I decide it’s best to keep it that way. I consider that I should do something worthwhile as long as I’m here. I don’t like wasting time at work and it seems insane to sit here at midnight, drinking in the dark.
This is it. I have to change things and it has to start now. I have to work out how to go forward. Maybe it’s as simple as making one step—turning on the light. I just have to turn on the light and I can start again and figure things out and everything will be okay. Flick the switch to on and step into the world of fine.
But the light stays off and I continue to drink, trying to will myself to make a move, to do something other than feel angry and hurt. Finally I move my hand to the radio and turn on the classic rock station. Music I listened to in my late teens blares at me. How is that classic rock?
The song changes to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” perfect for anything — drinking, dancing, driving, anything but crying and that sits well with me.
I turn it up and start to move, start to sing along with Bruce and the band, begin wailing about Wendy and tramps like us. I’m singing and dancing, playing air drums with the hand that’s not clutching the bottle. Bruce is the man and we are getting to the good part, to the big, roaring, drumming, climax when someone turns on the light. I scream, turn around and raise my fist.
“Whoa!” Jamie yells, his hands out to fend me off.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” I say, smacking his arm. “What are you doing here?”
“I just dropped by to check on the garage.” He shrugs. “I do that all the time.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. They called you, didn’t they?”
He closes his eyes. Even Jamie doesn’t know what to say or do with this revelation I’ve been punched with tonight. Unflappable Jamie. Lucky Jamie. Jamie with the horseshoe up his ass, as his friends call him. Jamie who always lands on his feet. Jamie who never has anything bad happen to him. Jamie who saunters through life without being touched by anything bad. The only thing he ever lost was me and even then he got a partnership in a thriving business. Jamie just doesn’t have wrongs. They’re all mine.
“Are you okay?” Jamie asks. He crosses one arm over his chest in a pose he must have patented. I’ve never seen anyone else cross only one arm. It’s like he’s wearing an invisible sling.
“I’m fine.” I take another drink. “No big deal. I can’t believe they called you. My real friends not available?”
“I don’t know. I just know they’re worried about you. Both of them are. You know you should be happy for—”
I cover his lips in a fierce kiss. I lay the bottle down on the desk as my tongue slips in his mouth. His hands explore familiar, foreign areas. I press my jeans against his, feeling how ready he is for what I want. He pulls me even closer to him so my back arches and I lean back, a moan escaping my lips. His hand goes around the back of my neck, pulling me back to him. He pushes his hungry mouth on mine. I reach down to his button-up jeans, stretched tight across his hardness, and frantically try to get the top button undone, claw at it, would rip the buttons off if I could just get my fingers to work right, and then he pulls away.
“No,” he says, hands on my shoulders, pushing me away.
“No?” There’s a no?
“You’ve been drinking and you’ve had a big shock. I don’t want to take advantage.” He touches the side of my face. His eyes are the colour of pity. “I know you’re hurting. I can’t make that go away.”
It starts at my toes—a wave of something inescapable I can’t name, an intense urge for something, anything. It moves up my legs, through my torso, out my arms, up my neck and lingers at the edges of my eyes in the form of tears that hover, waiting for me to do something, wanting me to break. It will only take a word to make it happen and it comes out in a desperate whisper.
“Please.”
The sobs come the same time I do, the same time Jamie does, and he holds me, lying naked on his jacket on the office floor as I weep onto his chest until I’m gasping for breath.
Half an hour must pass before I realize I’m shivering and that Jamie’s arm, resting under my head, is covered in goose bumps. I lift my head to look at him. His tear-stained face brings me back to now, brings me back to then, and rips the moment away.
“I’m so sorry, babe.” His voice is barely audible and I wonder if he spoke the words out loud or just moved his mouth to form them. I know this isn’t about Bryce or Mom or the divorce. It’s about us and the parking lot. Just when I think I can’t cry any more, a memory proves me wrong.
8
IT WAS THE sound that turned my head, a person falling to the floor, a thump as flesh met concrete. How I even heard it above the noise in the garage, I don’t know. Shouts and words bounced off walls and came into the office where I was talking on the phone, receiver against ear, in the last seconds of the life I’d loved. Just a quiet thud and it was gone. In a heartbeat. In the loss of one.
I ran to the sound, ran in cold tar, legs moving quickly with little forward momentum. How is it possible that so many steps, in such rapid succession, could keep me in almost the same spot until what seemed like long eons later I was standing over Dad? His ashen face seemed devoid of Dad, like the absence of him was lying on the floor. His cheeks looked sunken even though they puffed out every time Alan breathed into Dad’s mouth.
Everything seemed distant, like I’d been sucked away and was suddenly watching it, smelling it, from far away. There was just a faint whiff of garage — grease and sweat. It was all lessened in the moment. Except the sounds, as if all of my other senses had diminished and joined together to make footsteps echo like cannons and the puffs of air into Dad’s mouth sound like Wreckhouse winds. My heart thudded in my chest, in my ears, in my eyes, in the tips of my fingers and the bottoms of my feet. The piercing siren of the ambulance made me cringe with pain in my ears, like music in earphones on bust, undulating back and forth from ear to ear with each revolu
tion of the siren.
But when Bryce spoke to me—held my arm and guided me away, telling me he was taking me to the Health Sciences Centre where the ambulance would take Dad—his voice was almost drowned out, coming from some remote place, muted by the electric sound of the defibrillator as it jerked Dad into the air, arched his body in some kind of sick ballet. I nodded at Bryce and followed him to the car.
As we drove, Bryce spoke, said words I couldn’t comprehend. Just muffled mutterings that filled the car but stayed outside of me. Except three words that stood out, seemed louder and clearer than the rest: “He’ll be okay.”
At the hospital, a nurse ushered us into a family room. In the centre of a ring of chairs was a chipped laminate coffee table with the name Carla G carved in it. A phone sat on the table. Seeing it, I spoke for the first time since the sounds started.
“Mom.”
“Let me,” Bryce said. It seemed like only a second later that his lips moved into the phone receiver.
The family room door opened time and time again. Mom, Aunt Henrietta and Uncle Charlie, the guys from the garage. Mom held onto me like I was a life preserver and she was about to go down for the third time. But nothing came into focus until Jamie walked into the room. The world resumed. Touch, sights, even scents were back as I felt Jamie’s arms around me and smelled him — coconut soap and Neutrogena shampoo.
I withered in Jamie’s arms. I felt a hand, Mom’s, I think, rub my back as I sobbed into his chest.
“He’ll be okay,” Jamie said, sliding his palm over my hair and down my back in one fluid motion.
“I don’t know,” I said between sobs. “You promise?”
“I promise,” he whispered.
I paced, cried, hugged, and most of all, prayed. Prayer comes in three forms: ritual, desperate and grateful. My petitions were of the second variety. “Please let him live, please let him live, please let him live,” repeated almost every second until the door opened again and I heard the shuffling of chairs, felt Jamie stand up, felt myself standing with him, pulled by his embrace.
