by Tina Chaulk
“Why did you knock?” She pulls her hair behind her ear as she speaks.
I don’t answer and she says, “Oh.”
“I came to get our photo albums. I want to bring them to the hospital and look at them. All of them. Nan’s too. Of Dad and you and Henrietta but mostly pictures of Nan.”
She touches my face and smiles, even though her eyes are sad. “Yes,” she whispers. “Let’s go get them.”
Mom walks into her room but I stay outside, just outside the doorway, thinking back, seeing, without going inside, a new book on Dad’s bedside table. But it’s not Dad’s anymore.
“They’re in here,” Mom says.
“That’s okay. I’ll wait in the living room.”
“No. Come in. They’re just in my bottom drawer.”
“No,” I say more firmly. “I’ll wait in the living room.” I walk away before she can argue again or realize why I don’t want to go in, a look of guilt on her face, a realization of how things have changed.
I’m standing in the living room with my arms crossed when she comes in with a pile of photo albums.
“There’s more,” she says, laying that stack down and returning for more. There are big albums with smiley faces and pictures of trees on their fronts, the pictures inside kept safe on sticky pages under sheets of cellophane, and small ones made of black felt with old, ripple-edged black-and-whites stuck into tabs. Lifetimes of pictures, not looked at in how long, I wonder. Has Mom looked at them since Dad died? Do they make her happy or sad? I wonder how they’ll make me feel.
Mom brings in the next load, a pile of seven books in her arms. I reach out to help her lay them down.
“Got any boxes or bags? I can carry them in.”
“How about I help you with them? I was thinking of going to the hospital again anyway.”
I open my mouth to tell her no. I want to be alone when I look at these. But then I realize why I want to see these pictures. I want to remember the good times. And the only way to really do that is to look at the pictures with someone else. To say out loud that you remember that pumpkin and how Nan cut her finger on the knife while she carved it and had to go to the hospital for three stitches. To ask what the name of that cat was again, the one Nan said Henrietta hugged away as a little girl.
“We’ll still need the boxes,” I say and Mom smiles.
Mom and I have the pictures in the trunk of the car. We wait until Uncle Chuck and Aunt Henrietta leave the hospital before we retrieve them. I make two trips, insisting Mom stay in the room with Nan. Someone has to be with her. Just in case.
It’s not that Henrietta wouldn’t want to see the pictures. It’s just that the memories contained in these albums would be skewed by her perspective on them. Nan’s green dress would make Nan look washed out instead of beautiful — the strong Nan who curled her hair and applied lipstick every morning. Dad’s old car would be the one that Henrietta got transported to the hospital in the time she got kidney stones, rather than the vehicle Mom used to drive me to my first day of school. The black cloud of Henrietta would obscure the view in all the memories in all the pictures. In my mind, I can hear her now, as I open the first book, full of fairly recent shots when Pop was dead but Nan was still Nan: Look at Mom smiling. Poor Mom. She didn’t know there that she’d end up here like this.
Mom and I travel back in time with the photos, our own portable time machine. All of us younger. Many of them taken before I was born. Pop Collins in his uniform before he went to Italy and Africa with the 166th Field Artillery Regiment of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. Mom and Dad’s wedding day, Bryce standing next to Dad.
It pops into my mind: If Dad knew then, I bet he wouldn’t have asked Bryce to be the best man. The thought makes me gasp.
“What’s wrong?” Mom says and looks at Nan, unconscious in the bed.
“I’m a lot like Aunt Henrietta. Aren’t I?”
Mom laughs. “Well, you’re about half her size.”
“No. I don’t mean in looks. In the way I…” I can’t find the words. I can find lots for Henrietta: wet blanket, damper, negative Nellie, black cloud, whiner, moper, complainer, glass half empty. The list could go on but I don’t want to make them refer to me. Even though the more I think about it, the more it’s true.
“You didn’t used to be like her,” Mom says and turns the page of the photo album.
“No?” I say it like a question because I just can’t remember ever feeling any way but shrouded in this darkness.
Mom shakes her head and starts to sing. “My little ray of sunshine, you’re my little ray of sunshine, shine through the day and all through the night, you’re my little ray of sunshine.”
I hadn’t heard the song in years.
“The last time I heard that was my wedding day. You sang it at the reception and then Jamie sang it.”
The moment, the memory, is like a blow to my body and I suck in air then blow it out, but it still doesn’t feel like any breath is getting in my lungs.
Mom singing in front of everyone, the song she sang to me as a child and even through some of my adulthood. Jamie coming up to sing with her then Mom sitting down, Jamie finishing the song. I was his ray of sunshine then too. Not a dry eye anywhere at the wedding. Such a feeling of joy in me and a certainty everything would always be wonderful.
“I have to go.” I’m almost to the door before I finish the sentence.
“What? Why?” Mom stands and the photo album in her lap falls to the floor. Pictures that had been carelessly inserted in the back of the album scatter all over the floor.
“I forgot I have to do something.” I bend to pick up the pictures but stop and turn around instead.
“But I don’t have my car.”
“I’ll come back for you,” I say. I nearly crash into a nurse as I run down the corridor. Unlike so many times before, when I’ve run away from something, I know exactly where I’m going and exactly what I’m going to do when I get there.
When Jamie arrives at the house, seven hours have passed since I left the hospital. Six phone calls have come in, although I only heard the phone ring once. After I heard Mom’s voice on the machine, asking when I was coming back for her, I unplugged the phone and turned down the answering machine. Five other messages have gone unheard but they are there. I heard the clicking of the tape as it engaged for each message, the whirring as it rewound the outgoing message every time. No voice mail or digital answering machine for me. Only the mechanical whirring of the cassette can ensure that a message gets taken.
One bottle sits empty on the coffee table and the second is three-quarters full in my hand. I’ve passed out once and woke up again. I’ve eaten a slice of bread with nothing on it, just to help the burning in my stomach. I’ve taken four Atasol 30s for the pain, in my side and other places. I’ve watched soap operas, a game show, and the evening news. The top story was that the price of gas is going up again tomorrow.
Jamie doesn’t look happy when he enters the house with his key. The one I gave him. The one I just loaned to him so I wouldn’t have to keep letting him in. Jamie stands there.
“Where have you been? Your mom’s been trying to call you.”
“I’ve been right here.” I stand up and fall back into the chair, unable to balance on my feet.
“You left your mother stranded at the hospital.” He places his lunchbox down and takes off his workboots, flashing me back to Dad doing the same thing every day. Something in the way he unlaces his boots reminds me of Dad, the way he flicks the laces away once they’ve been unwrapped from the top hooks, the way he pulls the laces out a bit, leaving them slack for when he puts them on again.
“Bryce is really pissed off,” Jamie continues.
“With me?” I try to make it sound like that but it comes out a slurred mess, even to me.
“Yes, with you. I can hardly understand you, you’re so drunk. Why don’t you just go to bed?”
“Bryce is pissed off with me?” I bang my chest on t
he word “me,” harder than I want to. “Well, fuck him and fuck my mother too. Oh, right.” I slap my forehead. “He’s doing that already, isn’t he?”
“Come on, let’s get you to bed.” Jamie puts his hand under my arm as if to help me up but I push him away.
“You are my little ray of sunshine, my little ray of sunshine,” I sing.
“What?”
“That’s me, Jamie.” I burp and continue talking. “Don’t you remember? You sang it to me.” I point to him, hit his shoulder by mistake on the word “you” and hit myself on the word “me.”
“I remember.” He stands up and looks down at me.
“I think that’s funny. Don’t you? I mean I must be the world’s littlest fucking ray of sunshine. You must need a magnifying glass to see me.”
“Stop swearing. You never swear.”
“No, the little ray of fucking sunshine doesn’t swear.”
“Jesus.”
“Ooh, now you’re swearing too. Only you’re taking the Lord’s name in vain. That is some serious shit, man.”
Jamie just stares at me, looking down.
“Don’t do that. Don’t look at me like that,” I scream, and try to push him away. He moves in the second before I reach him, and I fall out of my chair onto the floor, rum tumbling after me, pouring onto the hardwood floor. I grab the bottle and hold onto it like a drowning man holds a life preserver.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re mad and like you’re pitying me. Don’t fucking pity me.”
“I don’t pity you. I pity the rest of us that have to put up with you.”
I’m lying on the floor hugging the bottle. My shirt is getting wet from the puddle of rum that’s spread its way over to me.
“You’re sucking us all down into your darkness. Your grandmother is dying and all you care about is yourself and your bottle.”
“Aww, Jamie’s mad. You hardly ever get mad, Jamie. Why are you so mad?” I know how much he hates to be pushed, to be made fun of, and I push the button.
He walks out of the room and I hear the bathroom door close.
“Jamie fucking perfect Flynn is mad. Call the newspapers,” I shout to no one. “Jamie’s sooky. I’d say Jamie came home tonight figuring he’d get some. Figuring good old Jennifer would go down on him. A good screw maybe. Ha. Oops. I shouldn’t use ‘Jamie’ and ‘good screw’ in the same sentence.”
I start to laugh. I’m laughing for a couple of minutes and still no Jamie appears. No rise out of him.
I lay my head back on the floor and start to sing, “You’re my little ray of sunshine, my little ray of—”
I’m being lifted off the floor. The bottle falls out of my hand and I hear it crash on the floor, an explosion of glass. I start to kick, but in what seems like three strides, Jamie has me in the bathroom.
“What are you doing?” I scream and start hitting him with my fists. He’s carrying me in a fireman hold, at least until he plops me in the bathtub.
“My ribs,” I call out as Jamie turns on the cold water in the shower. I kick out at him but he moves away and I miss. I try to stand up but he easily pushes me back.
“Jamie.” I start to cry, shivering, my clothes soaking through. He is wet too, his hair down in his eyes until he slicks it back with his hand. He starts shivering with me and with his hair out of the way I can see again his eyes, the pity still there, mixed with rage and determination. He holds me and I sob into his chest, hitting him at the same time.
“I used to be a ray of sunshine, Jamie. How did I get here? How did I get here from there?”
“Something broke,” he says over the water pounding us. “Something inside of you broke. And you haven’t tried to fix it yet.”
“How do I fix it?”
“I don’t know. You just have to let it go. Let it go, babe.”
It feels like we’re back in the parking lot and all I want is him not to say the words that will change everything. Only this time I want him to say something that will make it all right, will heal this part of me.
Jamie turns off the water and slowly takes off my clothes. I’m quiet, letting him hold me and dry me all over. He winces at the now purple shoeprint on my side.
“Sorry,” he mouths.
“I know.”
He wraps the cotton robe that hangs on the bathroom door around me and starts to gently dry my hair. After a couple of moments, he lifts me up again and walks me to the bedroom where he lays me on the bed. I reach up to him, to his lips, but he pulls away.
“Good night.” He doesn’t wait for me to say anything. He closes the door before I can think of what I want to say.
In the silence and the darkness of my room I find myself feeling sleepy. It surprises me after a cold shower.
As I nod off, I hear Jamie in the bathroom and I know he is cleaning up the mess in there. My last conscious thought is that of all the wrongs in my life right now, without even trying, somehow, he’s the only right I have.
16
ONE NIGHT, ALMOST seven months after Dad died, I worked extra late, picked up a bottle on the way home, dropped by the cemetery, and was ready to collapse when I walked through the front door of my house. Jamie greeted me with a scowl. He was waiting on the couch, sitting in his pyjama bottoms.
“What is it?” I asked as I put my keys down on the little table next to the door.
“What is what?”
I pointed at him. “The face. Did something happen? You look … pissed off.”
“I’m surprised you noticed.”
“So, I’m the one you’re pissed off with?”
He wriggled on the couch, moved over a little, pulled his hand through his hair. It was only then that I looked behind him and saw the table, set with silverware and candles burned down to nubs. I searched my mind and found the date I had been writing on work orders all day.
“Shit.” I tapped my forehead with a closed fist. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how I forgot.” I walked toward him, stopped by his stare.
“I emailed you to make sure you came home at a decent time. I know better than to expect you for supper without a special invitation.”
I started to walk toward him again. “I said I was sorry.” I could smell candle wax and food I couldn’t quite place.
“It’s not like it was forty-seven years or anything. It was five years, for God’s sake. Five years.”
I walked to the kitchen, opened the oven and looked in. Steak and baked potatoes in a casserole dish, looking like they’d been there for hours. It was 10:12 at night. I’d had two bags of potato chips and four coffee all day but still didn’t feel hungry. Something told me to take the food out anyway.
“I didn’t forget. I knew all day that there was something about the date. It bugged me all day.”
I tried unsuccessfully to pick up the dried-out steak by attempting to stab it with a fork. I gave up and dumped the contents of the casserole dish onto a plate. There was silence and when I turned around Jamie had one arm crossed and his jaw clenched.
“That makes it worse, Jen. You knew and tried to think of it and couldn’t.”
I sighed and shook my head. “Jamie, I’m tired. I don’t have—”
“You’re tired? You’re tired. Well, maybe it’s because you worked sixteen hours today. And yesterday and the day before that and the day before that.”
I pulled the bottle of Bacardi out of the paper bag I’d laid on the counter and poured a large glass.
“Maybe you’re tired because every night you come home and lower down that shit before you pass out. Well, I’m tired too.”
I sipped on the drink and turned away from him.
His hand grabbed my arm and made me spill some of my rum.
“Don’t you dare touch me like that,” I shouted as I wrenched my arm away.
“What other way can I touch you? Like this?” He pulled me close, his face an inch or two away from mine. “Like this?” His left hand groped my right breast.
I brushed his hand away, tried to push him away from me. “Don’t.”
He pulled me close again, his breath in my ear, his hand gentle on my shoulder. “I want you, Jen. I want to be with you.”
I pushed him away again, harder this time, with the force of the sudden anger that rose up in me. “That’s what it’s always about with you, isn’t it? Is that what this poor, angry man act is about? Not getting it enough? You’re horny, is that it?”
“No.” He raised his voice enough to make me jump. Jamie never raised his voice. “That isn’t what this is about. I want to hold you, to be your … your husband, your partner. I want to be there for you. I haven’t held you in months.” He touched my hand.
I stared at him, seeing how much he meant it. I watched his sad eyes look into mine and I tried to find any part of me that wanted to be held by him.
“Let me go,” I whispered.
“I don’t know why I thought you’d remember today. Or why I thought you’d want to spend it with me. I mean I’m alive so I’m not worth your time.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you mad at me because my father is dead?”
“No. I’m not mad. I’m so frustrated.” He shook his fist at nothing. “It’s like you’ve cut me out of your life. All you do is work all the time and then you go to the cemetery and then you get drunk.” He looked away then back to me. “My therapist says that you—”
“Your what?”
“My therapist. I’m seeing a therapist. About you, about us.”
“Oh my God, you’re not serious.” I put my hand up in the air. “You make everything into such a big deal.”
“It is a big deal. You are stuck in this grief. And your work. Dr. Morgan says that you—”
“I don’t care what he says,” I screamed. I pointed at his face. “Do not talk to him about me. I’m none of his business. If you think you need to talk to some shrink then you can but it has nothing to do with me.”
“It’s everything to do with you. You’re a workaholic, and that and your grief are destroying us.”
“I am not a workaholic. I just work a lot.”
He stabbed the air with a caustic laugh, a sharp “ha” that made me jump. “That’s a good one. Like you’re not an alcoholic, you just drink a lot. Like your nan doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, she just forgets a lot.”
