One Brother Shy

by Terry Fallis

  By the time Malaya left at around 4:00 p.m., the apartment was so sterile, open-heart surgery could have been performed in the kitchen with no fear of infection, though our overhead lighting wasn’t quite up to OR standards. She’d washed all the sheets that had come with the rented hospital bed and folded them neatly. I’d phoned the medical supply company earlier, giving me yet another check mark, and the bed and linen were picked up at about 3:30. By then, Mom’s bedroom was nearly empty. With my blessing, Malaya had worked her way through Mom’s dresser and closet, packed up her clothes in green garbage bags, and piled them near the front door. The good folks from the Canadian Diabetes Association clothes drive were going to pick them up the next day from the loading dock at the back of the building. Check mark. I carried the bags down and left them near the back door with a sign so no one would toss them into the big steel garbage bin.

  It was a busy afternoon. It was good to be busy. It kept me from experiencing what it would be like not to be busy. And I wasn’t quite ready for that. Not yet. Did it feel strange moving so quickly to cleanse my mother’s own room of her presence? Yes. Yes, it did. But I was following her explicit instructions. This is what she’d asked me to do. I was working my way through her “To Do” list. She also wanted me to move into her bedroom. I understood her reasoning. Her room was larger and offered a better view. But I couldn’t put a check mark in that box. Not yet.

  Just before she left, Malaya, her eyes still red and puffy, pulled a pan of lasagna from the freezer, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten anything since my morning trip to Starbucks. I wasn’t hungry, but she turned on the oven, shoved in the pan, and set the timer. Then she grabbed something from the kitchen counter and walked to where I sat on the living room couch.

  “Alex, I found this under your mother’s pillow this morning,” she said, handing me an envelope.

  One word was written on the envelope in the most frail and feeble version of my mother’s hand I’d ever seen. “Alex.”

  “She hasn’t been out of her bed for three weeks. Where did she get an envelope?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. All I know is that she asked me to bring her a purse from the shelf in the front hall closet yesterday. I gave it to her and then went out to the store for more dish soap. When I came back, she said I could put the purse back in the closet.”

  “Did you look in the purse?” I asked.

  “No, no. I would never do that. I just put it back on the shelf.”

  “Which purse was it?” I asked. “She keeps a few up there.”

  Malaya retrieved the purse and handed it to me. It was a very old, very shiny black leather purse with sharp edges.

  “She hasn’t used that in years.”

  I put the purse and the envelope on the coffee table. I couldn’t bring myself to open either of them.

  “I’m going to drive you home,” I said, standing up and grabbing the car keys from the pegboard near the front door. I needed to be doing something.

  “No, no, Alex,” she protested. “I’ll just take the…”

  “Malaya,” I interrupted. “I’m driving you home.”

  We didn’t say much in the car. She lived with two other PSWS in a clean but lower-market apartment building near Carleton University. When I stopped in the parking circle at her front door, she slowly raised her hand toward me. I smiled at least a little, raised mine, too. When we tagged, she held onto my hand. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I performed another full-body clench-up but held it together.

  “Alex, I’m coming tomorrow,” she started.

  “Malaya, you don’t need to. Take the day off. You deserve it.”

  “Alex, I’m coming tomorrow. You don’t need to pay me. But I’m coming tomorrow. I need to come tomorrow.”

  I nodded and gave her hand a final squeeze.

  “Of course we’ll pay you, um, I’ll pay you. That’s not a problem,” I said. “You can come as long as you like.”

  “Thank you. There’s still lots I can do around the apartment till you get settled.”

  “Thank you for all you did today,” I replied. “I couldn’t have managed without you.”

  She stepped out of the car.

  “Don’t forget to eat the lasagna,” she said as she closed the door.

  While I knew there really wasn’t much for Malaya to do at the apartment, I was glad she was coming back the next day.

  —

  I wasn’t hungry until I stepped into the apartment and smelled the lasagna. Then I was ravenous. I devoured at least a third of the pan before I looked up from the kitchen table. I suddenly realized it was the first time I’d been alone in the apartment for more than a year. I looked at the closed door to my mother’s room. It was hard to fathom that she was no longer where she usually was. I understood and accepted that she was gone. There was no doubt, no denial. I’m an engineer by training. I accept logic and reason and facts. They drive the universe and the decisions we make every day. I knew she was gone. It was just that when my mind would drift to something else, I would, for just a few seconds, simply forget that she was gone and wasn’t in her bed behind that door. Now, even the bed was gone.

  I still wasn’t up to opening the envelope she’d left. Instead, I pulled out her list again and grabbed my iPad.

  Financially, we were fine. I made good money at Facetech and banked most of it, as my expenses were very low. Mom wouldn’t even let me contribute to the rent. She had never been particularly forthcoming with the state of her finances, beyond noting that she was not living beyond her means and that I’d be able to see it all clearly when she’d gone. In the bottom left-hand corner of the list, she’d written her banking log-in information. We banked at the same institution so I opened my online banking app and logged in as my mother.

  I scanned the account summary page. She maintained only one chequing account and an RRSP account. I opened the first account and spent some time scrolling through the previous six months of activity. Mom was right. We weren’t living beyond our means and it was pretty easy to follow. This was no financial labyrinth with shell companies and offshore accounts. Just a chequing account and an RRSP.

  On the first day of each month a flat $5,000 deposit was made. It was not clear what it was as it showed up as a transfer from another account. This must have been what Mom had always called her “pension.” It was the only monthly infusion of cash over the six months I scrolled through. I thought again about what François Meilleur had told me. It rang true now that I could see the account records. It would be highly unlikely for a monthly pension payment to be a straight-up $5,000 even. Pensions payments were usually derived from a complex algorithm based on years of service and your income from your highest-earning years. The monthly cheque would certainly have been a very strange number: $4,784.23 or $4,681.34. And even then, the number was rounded up to the nearest cent.

  I had no idea how or why a flat $5,000 was arriving in Mom’s account like clockwork every month. To be sure, I checked back several years and the mysterious monthly deposit was always there on the first of the month, as far back as I checked.

  I looked more closely at the monthly disbursements from the account. Again, a predictable pattern emerged. On the second day of every month, $2,000 was transferred into Mom’s RRSP. On the fourth of every month, $1,250 came out to pay the rent. On the eighth of every month, $794.23 was paid out to the PSW agency for our share of Malaya. I knew from doing the shopping that we spent about $400 each month on food and a couple hundred bucks on Internet and cellphone, which was the only other cost not included in our rent. And Mom was clearly banking some dough each month because her only chequing account had a balance of $12,459.55.

  Mom’s RRSP was managed by an apparently really nice and experienced financial advisor with the bank named Doug Evans. He kept track of how much Mom was allowed to contribute each year. She had urged me to get together with him, but since it meant meeting with a perfect stranger, I’d put it off. I clicked on the RRSP ac
count. The balance was $356,871.26. Wow. I closed the banking app.

  There was one call I felt I had to make, even though it wasn’t on Mom’s “To Do” list. I dialed.

  “Dr. Weaver.”

  “Hi, Wendy, it’s Alex MacAskill. I’m sorry for calling after hours.”

  “No problem, Alex, I was still doing some paperwork here. Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “It happened last night and I didn’t want you to read about it in the paper without telling you.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “It’s been a hectic day.”

  “And how are you feeling? Are you okay?”

  “I swing between thinking I’m fine and reeling in shock that she’s gone. There was so much to manage today, I haven’t really had time to process what’s actually happened.”

  “Sometimes it’s the need to manage all the logistics that a loved one’s death entails that keeps us functioning until we’re actually able to deal with the reality of their loss,” she said. “There’s therapeutic benefit in having to write the obituary, deal with the funeral home, and handle all the other little details.”

  “Right. Even so, I think I’m okay. I mean we knew it was going to happen. She’s been planning it for months. And everything unfolded today just as she’d envisaged. It’s a very strange feeling, but I think I’m okay.”

  “Don’t forget about your needs in all of this. I’m here, you know.”

  “Thanks. On the positive side of the ledger, I haven’t given Gabriel a thought all day.”

  We talked for a few minutes, then said goodnight.

  I cleaned up the kitchen and ran the dishwasher. It was getting late by then. I didn’t feel like watching TV, so with nothing left to distract me, I reached first for the shiny black purse. As far as I could recall, Mom hadn’t used it for years. Inside I found three new and unused white envelopes, like the sealed one in front of me. There was also a ballpoint pen, presumably used to write my name on the front. That was it. As I closed the purse, my eye caught something amiss. I opened the purse again and noticed that the inner lining along one side had pulled away from the wall of the purse revealing a perfect and reasonably secure hiding place for something flat and small. You might say the secret space was kind of envelope-shaped. I looked closely and decided the purse lining had been compromised by something other than wear and tear.

  I closed the purse and picked up the envelope with my name scrawled on the front. It was almost certainly the last word my mother ever wrote. I could tell there was something inside other than paper. There was some weight to it, and I could feel it sliding back and forth, changing the envelope’s centre of gravity when I tilted it. Turned out, what I found inside would change my centre of gravity. But I didn’t know it then. I took a deep breath, slipped my finger under one end of the flap, and carefully pushed against the seam. It had not been sealed very well and opened easily. Before I could look inside, something fell out onto my lap.

  Contorted in that strange, unnatural position, every part of my body flexed and curved, but one. A human dowsing stick.

  CHAPTER 3

  A key. I fished it out of my crotch where it had fallen. It was a key. I had no idea what it opened, but it was an old-style, flat, dull, brass key. The number 126 was stamped into the soft metal. Bus station locker? Nope. Wooden treasure chest? I didn’t think so. Houdini’s handcuffs? Unlikely. While I had no real experience in this area, it struck me that it might just be the key to a safety deposit box. I put the key on the coffee table. I figured the envelope had nothing more to offer, but I looked inside just to be sure. It wasn’t quite empty. There was something lodged in the corner. I reached inside, pinched it between my index finger and thumb, and drew it out.

  It was a small colour photo of me as a newborn. I recognized myself in the shot immediately. To be more accurate, it was only part of a photograph. I assumed it was originally a 3-by-5 print. The piece I held in my hand was about 3 by 2½, cut vertically down what I assume was the centre line from top to bottom. The standard white border ran along the top, left, and bottom sides but stopped at the cut right-hand edge. I was holding the left half of a colour photograph. I had no idea where the other half was.

  The shot must have been taken very soon after I was born. I was swaddled in a light blue standard-issue hospital blanket, and my face had that just-delivered, pink pinched look. What little hair I had appeared still damp from my journey. I was cradled in the right arm of a man wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, no belt. But the man’s face was not visible. In fact, the photo’s top border cut off his head just below the chin, as if on purpose, by design, while the photo’s cut right edge sliced off the other half of his body. Yes, it was a photo of a headless half-man with a newborn nestled in his right arm. With me nestled in his right arm.

  I turned the photo over. There was nothing on the back except for an inked “0” written in blue ballpoint just on the left edge. A zero? The letter “O”? An egg? The mouth from Edvard Munch’s The Scream? Who knew? I turned it over again and looked at the baby once more. The only certainty was that it was a photo of me shortly after my birth. I’d seen many baby pictures of me. But I’d never seen this one.

  I put the photo and the mystery key back into the envelope, closed the flap, and sat it beneath my wallet on my dresser for safekeeping. Then I went to bed and slept deep and long for the first time in a while. There were no dreams that night.

  The next morning, I decided I could no longer put off calling the funeral director about the final burial arrangements. (I guess when using the word “burial,” it goes without saying that the arrangements were “final.”) I’d avoided phoning the funeral director yesterday. It wasn’t calling her in particular that I was trying to avoid. I didn’t really like calling anyone. (Though I guess I’d much rather call them than meet them face to face. I know. Weird. You can thank Gabriel.)

  “Susan Granger.”

  “Hi, Ms. Granger, it’s Alex MacAskill calling.”

  “Oh, Alex, yes. I’m so sorry for your loss. I hope you were satisfied with our team yesterday,” she said.

  Well, to be honest, I bailed out for most of their visit. But they seemed very nice. Hard to believe their job is to drive around and pick up bodies. A great conversation starter in a bar, I guess.

  “Yes, they were very efficient and helpful. Thank you,” I replied. “I just wanted to confirm that the burial is in fact set for tomorrow at ten.” Mom and I had met with Ms. Granger about fourteen months earlier when there was no longer any doubt about how my mother’s illness would end.

  I heard her clicking a mouse in the background.

  “Yes, we’re on track for the short graveside service and burial Thursday morning, that’s tomorrow, here at Beechwood, at ten.”

  “Good. Thanks. Do I need to do anything?”

  “Not a thing. We already have the outfit your mother asked to be buried in. She is already resting in the casket she chose. Our minister will preside, and it will be a very short and traditional committal service that will end with the casket being lowered into the ground. As you’re the only family, we’d ask that you stand next to the minister. The service will last less than fifteen minutes from start to finish, as we discussed when we met with your mother and you.”

  I’m still stuck on the idea that someone had to dress my mother in her burial outfit. How do you get used to doing that? How hard is it to do for the very first time?

  “So I should just arrive at the cemetery at 9:30 or so?”

  “Yes, that would be fine.”

  She gave me directions to the actual plot on the cemetery grounds, and we concluded our call. It was nice to get off the phone.

  Ever practical, my mother had insisted on a quick burial. She abhorred the idea of cremation, and there was to be no church funeral service and definitely no reception with its mandatory egg salad sandwiches and lemon squares. I followed her instructions to the letter, despite my affection for
lemon squares. I wanted to honour her and thank her by carrying out her wishes. My mother’s parents, the only grandparents I’d ever known, had both died about ten years earlier, within four months of one another. My grandfather died first of a bad heart, then my grandmother of a broken heart, fifteen weeks later. They’d had no other children. So I was the only one left. The end of the MacAskill line.

  I referred to Mom’s list, steeled myself for another call, and dialed.

  “Royal Bank Rideau,” the woman’s voice said.

  “Yes, it’s Alex MacAskill calling. I’d like to speak to the manager, Shelagh Dunn I think it is, please.”

  “One moment, please.”

  “Shelagh Dunn.”

  “Hi. It’s Alex MacAskill. My mother has an account with you, or had an account, and I also bank with you.”

  “Oh, Mr. MacAskill, I’m so sorry to hear about your mother.”

  What are you, psychic? Is the bank so all-seeing and all-powerful that you instantly knew when a customer died?

  “Um, how did you know that she had, you know, passed away?” I asked.

  “I read the obituary in the Citizen this morning. Lee MacAskill is not that common a name, and I’d dealt with your mother on more than one occasion over the years.”

  Wow. You are good.

  “Of course. I’d forgotten it ran this morning,” I replied. “I’m just wondering how we deal with my mother’s account, now that she’s, um, gone.”

  I heard her fingers flying over her keyboard.

  “Well, it’s really quite straightforward. You see, her account is jointly held. Both of your names are attached to it. With her passing, you become the sole account holder.”

  Wait, it was my account too? We had joint custody of the bank account? Why didn’t she tell me?

  “You’re saying her account has also been in my name all along?”