by William Bell
“The micro—Mom, take a few deep breaths.”
She did as I asked but still couldn’t force any words past the sobs.
“How about a nice cup of tea?” I suggested.
She nodded. I got up and followed the blue footprints painted on the hospital floor indicating the route to the cafeteria. I bought two teas, loaded one up with milk and sugar, and turned to go back.
“You can’t take those cups away from here,” the cashier said.
I ignored him and returned to my mother. She took the tea, tried a smile that came out like a grimace and sipped the hot liquid. It seemed to do the trick.
“The microwave broke,” she began again. “I called your dad—he was working on Chestnut Street near our house—and he came over. It was the fuse.”
She stopped and drank some more. “He was drinking coffee while he worked on the microwave, and just after he finished up he got this pale, stricken look on his face—you know, sort of surprised and pained all at the same time. He put down his cup and sat down, rubbing his chest and groaning. I called 911 for an ambulance. They took him in there”—she pointed again at the double doors—“and I’ve been waiting here since.”
“Nobody came to speak to you? They didn’t tell you anything?”
She shook her head.
I walked across the crowded room to the reception. A woman sat behind a glass partition at a long desk littered with forms and files and equipment. She was typing.
“Can you tell me anything about Mr. Blanchard?” I asked.
She didn’t look up. “Someone will come and speak to you.”
“Can you tell me where he is?”
“I don’t have that information.”
“Can you call someone to ask?” I said, pointing to the telephone.
“I—”
“You just pick it up and push the appropriate numbers.”
Her face blanked. “You don’t have to be—”
“I’m making a simple request,” I said. “Do me a favour. We don’t know whether he’s alive or—We just want to know what’s happening.”
“What was the name again?”
After I repeated our name, she advised me to take a seat and lifted her telephone handset. Instead, I returned the cups to the cafeteria and went back to the waiting room. Mom twisted her scarf between her fingers, breaking into tears every few minutes. I didn’t know what to say. I sat there trying not to ask myself what I would do if I didn’t have my dad in my life anymore. I pushed away images of our kitchen without him in it, sitting at the table, hunched over a mug of coffee. I tried to recall the sound of his voice—and failed. What would Blanchard and Son, sole prop., be without Blanchard? I bit back my own sobs, taking deep gulps of air, and took a walk down the hall.
I got back in time to see my sister, Janine, swoop down on Mom like an overly enthusiastic guardian angel. She looked as if she had just flown out of a business meeting—power pantsuit and low heels, briefcase, trench coat over the arm. I was glad to see her, and hugged her hard to show it.
Janine took after my mother. She had the same small, light build, the same barely contained vivacity. Her academic training had made her self-possessed, calm and methodical, but in times of stress her high-energy genes elbowed their way to the front of the line and asserted themselves.
“What do we know so far?” she asked, sitting beside my mother. She set her briefcase on the floor and draped her coat over it.
Mom shared what little information we had. “Jake just asked that nurse over there to find someone to talk to us.” A fresh gust of tears hit her. “I’m afraid of what they’ll say!”
“Mom, don’t assume the worst,” Janine soothed. “I’m sure—”
Then the doors opened and a man in green scrubs appeared. It seemed every eye in the room focused on him. He had a mask hanging from his neck and a file folder in his hand.
“Blanchard?”
The sounds of the waiting room fell away as I stared intently at his face, searching for a sign, a clue indicating what his message might be. He had a day’s growth of blue-black beard, and his wire glasses sat crookedly on his nose.
My mother leapt from her seat. “Here!” she shouted.
“Mrs. Blanchard?” the man inquired, approaching us.
She nodded, her face hopeful and terrified at the same time.
“Your husband will need an operation,” he began.
“A bypass?”
“No, his—”
“An angio-whatever?”
“No, Mrs.—”
“Oh, God, don’t tell me! A heart transplant?”
“Mrs. Blanchard, there’s nothing wrong with his heart. We checked that first. It’s as strong as a fifteen-year-old’s.”
“But—”
“The ultrasound examination showed he has gallstones, and one of them seems to have blocked the duct. That causes inflammation and considerable discomfort.”
“Oh,” Mom exclaimed. “Oh, good. I mean, not good, but—”
“If untreated, the condition could cause an inflamed pancreas, which is, as you say”—he smiled—“not good. So we’re recommending the removal of his gallbladder. It’s routine, a simple procedure. He should be home tomorrow.”
“Oh!” Mom said again. “Thank you. Thank you!”
“If you’ll just sign this form, giving permission for the operation.” He held out the clipboard and a pen.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Mom said, her voice flooded with relief.
She signed on the line. Then she fainted.
I was back in my chair, flipping through a six-month-old sports magazine. Mom was lying on a cot somewhere. My sister was outside, making calls on her cell. Dad was on his way to the operating room, doped and groaning, I imagined. All was right with the world.
But I was thinking. The scare I suffered had put me in a kind of free fall, and I had begun to see things from a different angle. My life will never be the same, I had thought when I heard Mom call my name over the telephone. I was right, but for the wrong reason.
A few minutes later, Mom came through the doors, shaky on her feet. She gave me a weak smile. “Let’s go to the cafeteria and have some more tea,” she suggested.
As I passed the cashier, he scowled at me and mumbled, “Stupid bugger.”
“You got that right,” I said.
CHAPTER FIVE
DAD CAME THROUGH THE OPERATION OKAY, but he hadn’t awakened yet and was still in recovery when we left. The nurse told us they’d move him to a room soon and it was probably best to let him sleep right through the night.
It was late when the taxi pulled up at the curb in front of our place. The house was dark. Dad’s van sat in the driveway. He had left the driver’s-side window open, expecting to head right back to work after fixing the microwave. While Mom unlocked the front door of the house, I closed the van window and took the keys from the ignition.
“I’ve got some leftover shepherd’s pie I can heat up,” Mom said.
My sister and I exchanged knowing glances. I set the table while the microwave hummed away healthily. The three of us sat down to the steaming, watery dish of greyish ground lamb with yellowed mashed potatoes on top. I managed to get it all down, and Mom had two helpings. “Boy, this hits the spot,” she said several times.
Janine left right after supper, promising to return to the hospital first thing in the morning. Mom and I cleared up the kitchen, then she went to bed after kissing me goodnight and holding me in a prolonged hug. On my way to the stairs I noticed the answering machine on the hall phone blinking. Turning down the volume so Mom wouldn’t be disturbed, I played back the messages—seven of them, all from Vanni. “Jake, where are you? What happened?” “Jake, why aren’t you answering your cell?” I erased the messages and climbed the stairs.
In my room I checked my cell for missed calls. There were five, all from Vanni. I cleared them without listening, then sat down at my computer and sent her an e-mail, recounting briefly wha
t had been going on, telling her not to worry, that I’d see her soon. I didn’t want to talk to her. I wasn’t ready yet.
I fell back on my bed and tried for the second time that day not to think. I succeeded. “What a day,” I said to myself, then fell asleep on top of the bed with my clothes on.
Mom and I drove to the hospital the next morning in our old sedan. She had phoned for a report—at 5 a.m.—and had learned that Dad was being released that morning at eleven. “They told me not to come until then,” she said at breakfast. “Janine sat with him for a while and then went to her office.”
We got to Dad’s room to find him sitting in a corner by the only window, fully dressed, a plastic supermarket bag on the floor beside him. There were still specks of sawdust on his work shirt and pants. The pale sunlight from the window lit up his round face. He was a little pale and needed a shave but otherwise looked fit.
“They’re kicking me out,” he crowed happily as soon as he saw us. Gingerly he got up from the chair. “Hey, lookit,” he said, pulling his shirttails out of his pants and baring his ample tummy. There were three square bandages taped to his skin. “They took out my gallbladder through these little holes, er, slits in my skin! It’s called liposuction—no, laparoscopic surgery.” He pointed to the bandage near his belly button. “They stuck a camera on the end of a cable in this one. It was hooked up to a TV monitor so they could see what they were doing. They shoved their instruments through this other slit, and snip, yank, done!”
Tucking his shirttails back in, he added, “Amazing!”
“Stop talking for a minute and give me a hug,” Mom commanded, and she was immediately engulfed in my father’s brawny arms. I was next.
He talked non-stop all the way home, which meant he had been scared, like us, and was now swept along on a tide of relief. I drove, and Mom, who didn’t know how to drive, gave me advice on what lane to take, how fast to go and which buses seemed to be aiming themselves at us.
As soon as we got home, Dad said it was great to be back, but he was tired. I decided to go for a walk. I needed to think. As I passed their bedroom, I saw Dad curled up under the blankets, his head on the pillow. Beside the bed, my mother sat in a chair with a magazine in her lap. But her eyes were on my father’s face.
It was a sunny afternoon, the kind of late February day that gave you a little hint that spring just might come after all. I crossed the street and entered 11th Street Park, crunching over a thin crust of snow toward the lake. That part of the park had once been a creek bed about fifty metres wide, and the land rose steeply on either side. Each time I went there I remembered the day I happened upon the filming of a battle scene and its unplanned, comical ending. I never saw the movie, but that accidental event had changed my life.
I stood on the pebble beach. The grey-brown waves lapped the shore, each one receding with a prolonged hiss and clatter of stones. During the time that passed between my mother’s telephone call and the doctor’s reassurances at the hospital, I had felt lost and disoriented and scared, as if I had wandered into an unwelcoming room, cold and bare of furniture, with a hard floor that echoed each footstep. The sky outside the windows was grey and cheerless. Everything I thought I knew seemed to be in doubt. Everything that mattered seemed to shift, some things blurring at the edges, others coming into sharp focus, like the edge of a knife.
And today, standing by the lake in the park, I knew one thing with certainty. I had made the biggest mistake of my life, and it had nothing to do with my father.
ACT FIVE
CHAPTER ONE
I WENT BACK TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY. I wandered into Locheed’s room, lost in thought, a few minutes before class started and was immediately encircled by Vanni, Instant and Daneale. I gave them a quick update on the events at my house since the disastrous performance of the excerpt from The Taming of the Shrew, which Vanni now referred to as The Tempest.
“Don’t look so down, Jake,” Daneale said. “Everything’s okay now, right?”
I nodded, but I wanted to say, No, everything’s not all right.
“Glad to hear your dad’s fine, Jake,” Instant said as Locheed made his stately walk to the lectern and we took our seats.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Vanni was really—”
“If you’re quite ready, Mr. Grady,” Locheed interrupted.
The Vulture took the roll call and gave a sheaf of papers to the person at the head of each row, to be relayed back. He announced that today’s lesson was to critique a paragraph of descriptive writing.
“It’s from a modern novel,” he said in his reedy voice. “As is the custom, I won’t tell you the title or the author’s name, so that your assessment will not be influenced.”
We knew this to be a sham. For these exercises, Locheed chose only writing he thought was great. Our duty was to come up with reasons why the writing was brilliant—not to make up our own minds. Vanni often complained about these lessons. Most of us just went along with the pretense. I usually tuned out.
“Now,” Locheed began, “please follow along as I read. ‘On the floor, beside the dishevelled bed, lay an empty bottle of wine. Through the greasy window, watery sunlight—’”
“Excuse me, sir.”
It was Vanni, with her hand up. Instant smiled. Daneale sat back as if she was settling in to watch a movie.
Locheed glowered at Vanni as only Locheed could. “Yes?”
“Isn’t that a contradiction? ‘An empty bottle of wine.’ Can that be? I mean, if the bottle’s empty, it isn’t a bottle of anything, is it?”
Locheed began to bleed contempt. “Ms. O’Riada—”
“Shouldn’t it be ‘an empty wine bottle’?”
The Vulture’s eyelids lowered slowly, then rolled back up like window blinds. “I think,” he drawled, “we all realize—”
“No,” Instant cut in as if Locheed hadn’t said a word, “if the bottle’s empty, it’s just a bottle. It can’t be a wine bottle unless it has wine in it. A bottle can hold anything. Rum, whiskey—”
“My da likes whiskey,” Vanni said, taking one of her illogical sharp turns.
“So,” Instant continued, ignoring her attempt to distract him, “it should say ‘on the floor lay a bottle.’”
“You never really see a truly empty bottle, though,” Daneale joined in. “It may look empty, but it’s full of air. The author should have put, ‘On the floor lay a bottle of air.’”
I figured I might as well get in on this. “First, ‘bottle of air’ sounds demented. Second, the reader has to be told that the bottle used to hold wine, because it implies that whoever is in the bed—we don’t know yet because Mr. Locheed was rudely interrupted by Ms. O’Riada—drank all the wine and got drunk and fell asleep.”
“How do you know that?” Daneale demanded.
“Because the bedclothes are all jumbled up.”
Locheed tried to get a word in. “If we could just—”
“That could mean anything,” Daneale shot back, trying to hide a smile. “Maybe he had a nightmare. Maybe he had a companion.”
The room broke into laughter, with one abstention.
“Maybe they were going at it hot and—”
“Yer like a bunch of sheep,” Vanni interrupted. “You’ve wandered off the point.”
I smiled to myself. The queen of tangents accusing someone else of digressing.
“The notion that the bottle is full of air is not going to work,” Vanni continued.
“Sure it is,” Daneale replied.
“Who ever heard of a bottle of air?”
“Every empty bottle is full of air.”
Vanni laughed. “Didja hear yourself? ‘Every empty bottle is full of air.’ If that isn’t a contradiction, what is? You’ve brought us back to where we started, only you’ve changed wine to air.”
“Isn’t that in the Bible?” Instant asked innocently. “A miracle? At a wedding or something?”
“You’ve been blowing your horn too loud
ly, you nit,” Daneale scoffed. “The Bible story was about water turned into wine.”
“Oh. Anyway, I still say it should read, ‘an empty bottle.’”
“What kind of bottle, though?” I asked.
“A wine bottle, obviously,” Vanni offered.
“Then it should say, ‘an empty bottle of wine.’”
Vanni nodded knowingly. “I see.”
“So,” I said to Locheed, “you were saying, sir?”
“Nice one, Jake,” Daneale said with a big grin as we left English class.
“Thanks. Always a pleasure to clip the Vulture’s wings.”
“Don’t get too cheery,” Vanni cautioned as the four of us pushed through the throng in the hall toward the drama room. “We’re about to have our own wings clipped.”
Alba and Chad were already there, sitting at a round table near Panofsky’s desk. I hadn’t seen Alba since the performance. She looked stunning as usual, anticipating spring with a bright yellow V-neck T-shirt. Chad slouched across from her, every inch the cool senior. The four of us took the remaining chairs. Alba gave us a cold greeting. Chad nodded as if he was too bored to speak to us.
All BPs received an adjudication along with the grade. The supervising teacher, in this case Call-Me-Saul, gave the adjudication in person, pointing out the strong and weak points of the project and giving the final mark. We were about to get the news about the fiasco in which we had all taken part the week before.
Panofsky swept into the room and took his seat behind his desk, hands fluttering to a file that he didn’t open. He looked at us the way a kindergarten teacher would regard a bunch of kids caught with their pockets full of stolen candies. He wasn’t Call-Me-Saul today; he was Mr. Panofsky.
“Well,” he began.
Alba dropped her head. She was embarrassed. She knew she had no excuse for what had gone on. Chad seemed as if he was going to try to bluster his way through. Good luck, Petruchio, I thought.
“Well,” Panofsky said again. “This is going to be difficult.” He cleared his throat. “I think it would be best to keep it short and bitter.” He smiled at his lame play on words.
