Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  From a market below the hotel, she bought a bag of apples and a box of clementines, which had just made their appearance in stores. They’d scent the room of home and fall, and if she’d had so much as a hotplate, she would have boiled a cinnamon stick on it too. In the room, she peeled three of the clementines and scattered the skins under the beds and along the wide ledges, and sucked on the sections while standing in the middle of the space, looking for gaps where the hotel’s soul showed through too plainly. She unloaded her books and papers, and organized them in piles on the west-facing ledge, as much in categories as she could manage, so she’d be able to find sources if she needed them. She suspected she would not need them: in the main, her work was observation. She’d brought the books, books he had loved, to have his company while she was there.

  SHE IMAGINED Bridget’s voice trapped in the cul-de-sac of the disconnected phone. She looked at it from the window — just a harmless thing when unplugged — and resolved to keep it off the hook for a couple of days. Knowing it would not ring made the room feel a little more lonesome, and she went to sit at the desk beside the television where she kept her copy of David’s monograph, leaning upright against the wall. She’d wrapped the cover of the little book in a protective plastic sheeting, and when she sat at the desk at a certain angle — which she avoided doing — she could see her face in it. The cover said:

  A Deduction Using Forensic Topographical Methods in Conjunction with Archival Source Materials of the Location of the Plate Negatives of the 1856 Toronto Panorama and 352 Other Items, with Some Comments.

  And centered below it:

  David M. Hollis, Ph.D., A monograph published to mark the opening of The Symposium on the Victorian City in Canada, University of Toronto, May 30–June 2, 1997.

  She picked it up, as she did many times in a day, and tilted it into the light from the window. It reflected the white-and-blue sky and elided his name in clouds. She put it down and crossed to the window. Maybe the hotel would not be an unpleasant place to be holed up with grief, she thought. Its windows drew in a clear bright light from the north and the west, and it would not be any harder to sleep alone in one of its two double beds than at home. There were sounds of machines from outside, and voices through the walls, and even art to look at: two lithographs on the walls, of the models of the solar system preferred, in one, by Copernicus, and in the other, by Ptolemy. They flanked the television set.

  BRIDGET SAID, “WHAT I understand is that you’re acting like a madwoman.” She looked across the living room at John, who was sitting at attention on the couch, a book open in his lap. “Mum?” She shook her head slowly. “She hung up on me.”

  “Let her be for now,” John Lewis said.

  “Do you know what she’s doing?” He closed the book and pushed himself up from the couch, took the phone out of her hand. He tried to kiss her and she pulled her head back to see his eyes. “Do you?”

  “She’s taking a break.”

  “She’s living at the Harbour Light Hotel. Watching the Union Arena excavation.” She took the phone back from him. “Now do you think she’s crazy?”

  He slipped the book back into its space on the shelf, running two fingers along its spine to ensure it was flush with the others. It was the sort of gesture Bridget noticed and made fun of from time to time, but she was silent now, looking through him. “I think you should leave her alone,” he said. “It’s been two months. She should do whatever she needs to help her cope.”

  “She doesn’t want me down there.”

  “You shouldn’t take it personally.”

  She laughed at him.

  “I have to go to Howard’s,” he said. “I have stuff for him. Have a drink, take Bailey for a walk.” The dog snapped to attention at the sound of her name. “You’ll feel different later.”

  “That would suit you.”

  “It’ll suit you too.”

  She stood with her arms crossed, an obelisk. Then she seemed to decide to drop it for now. “Will you ask your employer to actually pay you?” she said. “Tell him you can’t wait until his next hit play.”

  He kissed her and held her face against his. He felt the tendons in her neck standing up beneath his palm.

  TWO

  TWO YEARS EARLIER, on a spring afternoon, John Lewis had been in the Hollises’ living room waiting to see if he ‘d be needed. TV Guide open in his lap. Jerry witnesses an accident — and is attracted to the victim. In the kitchen, two rooms distant, all four Hollises were around their table, discussing what they knew, what they could not know, what they feared to know. David Hollis had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. John heard Bridget crying and he readied himself, wiping his palms on his pants, but then there were voices again.

  Bridget said, “Normal for who?” and then he heard the murmur of David’s voice, calming some rush to judgment. Her father brought a measure of courtesy to a household of bull-headed women. He had honesty on his side, the women had bluntness and charm. If one of them disliked something you said or did or wore, you knew about it immediately. You heard We’re not having this conversation or Are you done with this? or Are you really going to wear that?

  From the kitchen, Marianne: “We are getting a second opinion. And a third if we have to.”

  “You can’t shop for a diagnosis you like,” said David. “This is what it is. But we don’t have to lose our heads over it.”

  A chair squeaked backwards and there was the sound of a pile of something hitting the tabletop.

  “Get those fucking handbooks off the table, Bridget. He’s a person, not an appliance.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about these.”

  “Mum sent them down to me.”

  “Well, of course she did.”

  “Trust me, the only thing they don’t have is a chapter on how to slit your wrists. They’re total downers.”

  “Well, he doesn’t have the flu!”

  “Come on, girls.”

  “She thinks ‘Be Positive’ is a treatment option!” John could see Bridget gesturing with both her hands. About now he imagined she looked like the Greek men who sat all afternoon in the cafés near their apartment. “Are you going to sit here and meditate? We have to get to know this thing whether we want to or not.”

  “The storm before the storm,” David said, and he laughed alone. John heard one of the sisters begin to cry. His money was on Alison, “the passionate one.” Her domain was the big emotional moment. Bridget’s famous story about her sister involved a drive from Toronto to Disney World when they were kids, during which they had so enraged Marianne with their incessant complaining that she’d made David turn around at the Florida border. An hour later, stopping for gas near Glynn, Alison used every last penny of her spending money to buy them all plastic Mickey Mouse ears. Then she sat weeping in the backseat until everyone put them on and Marianne agreed to point the car south again. Sometimes Alison frightened John, but she simply infuriated Bridget, and her living in the U.S. suited them both. John heard the passionate one say: “No matter what, you can’t give up, Dad.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. Of course he’s not —”

  “I know he won’t.”

  “Well don’t even suggest it.”

  “Maybe I should move back,” Alison said. “To help you guys. Just for a while.”

  John could hear Bridget’s thoughts as if they were being megaphoned from a passing truck: GOD NO. She said, “You have a six-month-old. He needs you too.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “I know,” said Bridget, and there was relief in her voice. Her sister would get credit for the intent.

  Alison’s penchant for emotional cabaret came from David, who once cried during a Campbell’s soup commercial. He’d wept when Alison called with the news that she was going to have a baby, and he’d cried when John and Bridget announced their engagement the previous fall. He even hugged John before he did his own daughter. They’d announced it in this very room, and J
ohn had been sitting in this same chair, with the same view of the closed television cabinet, appliqué flowers over yellow paint. He’d felt frightened then, as if what he and Bridget had chosen could be annulled by a secret word. This fear had translated itself into the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the small room. David came over to John and clasped both his hands in his. “John Hollis!” he said, laughing. “You really think she’s going to let you keep your own name?”

  “Lewis-Hollis actually sounds really nice,” Bridget said.

  “Or Hollis-Lewis.”

  Marianne had not moved, and when David sat back down she said, “Any reason in particular why now?”

  Bridget gave her mother an underwhelmed look. “Do you mean am I pregnant?”

  “I know you would tell us that news first.”

  Bridget was sitting with her arms crossed, physical shorthand, John knew, for come and get me. Because she was innocent of her mother’s accusation, Bridget would refuse to say so. “If I am pregnant, then have I done a bad thing by not telling you first, or because I’m getting married for the wrong reason?”

  “I’m saying I’m certain you would give us the benefit of the right context and then we could be very happy to hear all of your news.”

  “So you would be equally pleased with Mum, I want to get married and Mum, I have to get married, as long as we told you the news in the right order? It has nothing to do with the fear that you’d look bad in front of your North Toronto chums if I were standing at the altar already knocked up.”

  “We’re not pregnant,” said John. “We’re not.”

  “A wedding!” said David, clapping his hands together. His wife and daughter looked into their laps.

  After another moment of silence, Marianne breathed in brightly and said, “I’m sorry. You caught me by surprise is all. I’m thrilled for you both. For all of us.”

  “YOU’RE NOT MY frigging valet.” Bridget was standing in the doorway of the living room. “Why do you insist on waiting out here?”

  “I don’t want to intrude.”

  “If anyone’s the intruder here, I am. To judge from how much Alison already knows.”

  “You guys should keep talking. Anyway, I don’t think your mum wants me in there.”

  Marianne’s voice carried from the kitchen. “I don’t care where you are, John. At least if you’re in here, no one will think you’re eavesdropping.”

  “See?” said Bridget, and then more quietly, “If you’re in there, I might be able to keep myself from garroting my baby sister with her own fucking necklace.”

  He went in and sat down. Cups of tea in front of them, David at the head of the table, spent and pale. John had met Alison only once before, at her wedding two summers ago. The last happy family occasion? She was living in Philly with her husband, a baby, and another on the way, but she flew up as soon as she heard the news. She said, “John,” as if they were meeting in a boardroom, and he took a seat beside her.

  There was a pile of pamphlets at Marianne’s elbow. The one on top was called Living with ALS: Managing Your Symptoms and Treatment. She saw him looking at it and slipped it over to him, and John instinctively covered the title with his hand. “We all know what it says, John. You can read it.”

  “Plenty of good stuff in that one,” said David. “Cramps-slash-spasms, urinary urgency, swelling of hands and feet — none of which I have. Fatigue — I have fatigue, but I’ve always had fatigue —”

  “But not like this, Dad,” said Bridget.

  “Drooling-slash-salivation, thick phlegm–slash–postnasal drip, quivery jaw . . . anyway, what I’m trying to say is we need to be vigilant, yes? But for now: I’m fine. We don’t have to fight amongst ourselves, we don’t have to call in the army —”

  “No one is calling in the army,” said Bridget. “But shouldn’t we be prepared? We have to know what to look for. Because we know you won’t ask for help when you need it. Right?”

  “That means you want me to ask now, Bridget, but all I need is my family around me, and for everyone to stop panicking.”

  “No one’s panicking.”

  “Bridget’s right,” said Alison. “We have to meet this head on. As a family. You too, John.”

  Bridget clenched her eyes to slits. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “That he’s part of the family.”

  “No, that’s your way of saying that even though he lost his parents he can probably still understand how these things work.”

  “Bridge, I don’t think that’s what she means.” John tried to take her hand; she slid it away from him. “I consider myself a part of the family, Alison. Thank you.”

  “So how does he look to you, John?”

  He braced himself for Bridget to boil over. She had never mastered the art of letting her sister’s words roll off of her, and in the past couple of weeks her Alison threshold had become perilously low. Marianne had called Alison a week ago to tell her what Dr. Aubrey said about a twitch in her father’s cheek. “Bell’s palsy, right?” she’d said to the doctor, but it wasn’t that harmless, almost comic response to stress. “Never sick a day in his life,” she’d said to Alison, but she waited a week to tell Bridget. “I didn’t want you to freak out while you were cramming for the bar,” Marianne had said, meaning, You have limits, but your pregnant sister can handle anything. It had taken John three days to calm her down after that.

  “Just tell yourself she was being thoughtful,” he’d said.

  “This is what happens, just like I told you. The old alliances.”

  “They’re not an alliance, Bridge.” He remembered the look on her face, as if suggesting that there was no familial conspiracy called his own allegiances into question. “People in families express their love differently to each other.”

  “And are you an expert on families?”

  What he didn’t say was that Alison couldn’t hold a candle to her, but he had to be careful saying anything positive to Bridget when she was in a mood like that. She would take it as coddling and turn into a porcupine. He noticed lately that he was measuring what he said to Bridget more than he had before. He told himself it meant that he knew her fully now, but it worried him that maybe it meant something else.

  “Cadet Lewis, are you going to answer me?” Alison said.

  “Yes,” said John. “I guess he seems fine to me. Right now.”

  “Thank you,” said David, and Bridget glared at them all.

  She took the symptoms-and-treatment book from in front of John and squared it on top of the pile. Four neat color-coded spines with gleaming staples all lined up in the middle of the table: her father’s future spelled out in positive, but firmly realistic, language. (“Power pudding can be a helpful recipe for constipation. It consists of equal parts prunes, prune juice, applesauce, and bran.”) “Never mind,” Bridget said. “He’s not fine. And we’re not lighting candles or going to herbalists or hunting down a doctor with an alternate opinion.”

  “I don’t think it’s up to you what we do,” said Marianne.

  “I want a beer,” said David, pushing himself up from the table. “I’m alive for the time being, so I’m going to watch the ball game.”

  Bridget pushed her own chair back. “You’re not supposed to drink.”

  “Why not? They give you a cigarette when they blindfold you, don’t they?”

  She stood in front of him, as if to block his passage to the fridge, but he took it as an offer to be held. He pulled her to him and Bridget hugged him with one arm around his wide back. John marked Alison’s face, Marianne’s tears, and watched Bridget stretch her other arm out, open a drawer, and put a bottle opener on the counter beside her father.

  THAT NIGHT, John and Bridget slept in the bed they’d bought only a week earlier, the dog wedged into the space between them, and Bridget dreamt about the afternoon, seeing it on the screen of her mind almost exactly as it had happened. Coming up the steps to the door, her mother standing there with that twitchy, ex
cited expression on her face, the four of them in the kitchen, John sentinel behind the wall. Watching her father trying to return a teacup to the tabletop. Everything the same in the dream until her father got up and left the room. In her dream, when he closed the kitchen door, a skin grew over it instantly. It spread in a rash over the walls and ceiling in all directions, fresh pink skin that suddenly dried to a white cake, then cracked and fell away and came down on their heads like old paint, heaping up around their feet.

  She woke, the end of an unconscious exclamation on her lips, and moved closer to John. She wasn’t used to the bed yet; it was softer than the futon she’d slept on since university, and having a proper bed raised off the floor made her feel as if she’d invited adult things to roost in her life. And so now she was living with a boyfriend, engaged to him, and her father had fallen ill, and her sister was pregnant with a second child, and how did this happen, how did you fail to mark the little changes that brought you to such a place in your life? Everything was different now, so much in her life was new, but it wasn’t newness that distressed her, it was unfamiliarity, it was this deeper gravity. As if the ground drew her footsteps down to it. She pushed against him. “You asleep?”

  His breathing didn’t change; she draped an arm over him, the ball of his hipbone accommodated in the crook of her elbow, her fingertips against his thigh. Her eyes were adjusting to being awake and she could make out street light through the curtain, the window behind it was lambent with it. It was deep in the middle of the night. “John? Are you asleep?” She heard him murmur that he was. “Maybe I should ask Alison to stay with us?”

  He shrugged and with the logic of a dream, he saw the release of his shoulders pull a bright light down from the ceiling. It was Bridget switching on his lamp. He burst upright, completely awake. “Where,” he said.