“You can come with him if you’d like,” the nurse said to my mother.
“Never thought I’d be carted around in one of these things,” Dad said.
“Think of it as a spa,” I told him. “Beautiful women pushing you around.”
“Nothing new about that.” He held my mother’s hand as the nurse wheeled him off.
“I’m hungry,” said Jeremy.
Ezra put him down and took his hand. “I’ll cart him to the eating place. You want anything?”
I shook my head and watched them leave. Then I was left alone in the little cubicle, surrounded by the curtain, staring at the empty hospital bed. The pillow dented with the impression of my father’s head. The poster declaring this a No Scent Zone. The turquoise urinal on the side table. The urinal could have been a vase standing there, awaiting a cheerful bundle of daffodils, if it hadn’t been for the handle. During that first week in the hospital after his stroke, Ezra wanted home so badly that he put one of these urine bottles on his foot, thinking it was his shoe. We laughed over it afterward, that he had mixed up these two parts of himself. His feet were size 13.
He still spoke in sentences then, but his words were garbled and misplaced. He pointed to his right leg and said, “My skin is brass,” to explain the numbness he felt there. When I asked if he knew my name, he said, “Marigold!” Wonderful to be thought of as a flower, by your lover. And there was recognition in his eyes. Even in his thickest dreaming, when he couldn’t remember my name, he still knew who I was; that is to say, he knew we were comfortable lovers, husband and wife.
The nurses had tied Ezra to his bed at night so I could leave to get some sleep, so they wouldn’t have to watch him constantly, because he wandered. But he found his way out of the confines, tugging at the knots beneath the bed, even before I had left the hallway of the ward, and when I turned back I saw him heading out the door of the private room they had given him, in that ridiculous short gown, holding the IV stand, wheeling it down the hall. Earlier in the evening, when I’d asked if he knew where he was, he’d muttered that he was sleeping on the washer and dryer at home, his feet somehow extended miraculously through the wall, and yet, in this dream state, he was still able to navigate his way out of his bed and down the hall, dragging the IV stand that some part of him understood was necessary.
I strode the length of the hallway as a nurse intercepted him and made him sit in a wheelchair. She confined him there too, strapping him in as she might strap a child into a stroller, and wheeled him into position across from the nurses’ station so they could all keep an eye on him.
I crouched by his chair, talking to him quietly, hoping to calm him before I left. But he smiled at me in invitation. In his sickness, as in other men’s drunkenness, his inhibitions were let loose to the wind like ribbons. He leaned into me to kiss my neck, tugged at the arm of my sweater, and began to undress me under the fluorescent lights of the intensive care ward of the Chilliwack General Hospital.
Despite my embarrassment, I desired him. I desired his child. I wanted that echo of him. I understood, then, the story an acquaintance had once told me of rushing home from her mother’s funeral to rut with her husband. They made it as far as the living-room carpet. A neighbour came by with a casserole and saw them at it, through the window of the front door. During that time Ezra was in hospital, I was driven by grief to take that kind of risk of being caught. I helped Ezra sit on the toilet and mounted him like a lap dancer. In the shower I stroked him with conditioner until he came. They should have had rooms for this on the critical wards, rooms for the dying and their lovers to join. Even in prisons there were places where couples could come together; lovemaking was recognized as a force that would unite a husband and wife separated by steel and cement. Ezra and I faced the prospect of being torn apart by death, and yet here in the hospital we were made to feel ashamed. When I sat on the bed to lean into him for a kiss, the Jamaican nurse ripped open the curtain and said, Come on guys, get a hotel, as she groped my husband’s arm for a vein.
THE CURTAIN PARTED AND VAL swept in. She leaned down to hug me. “So, what’s the word?”
“Nothing yet. Dad’s off getting X-rayed. Mom went with him.”
Val’s hair was wet. She dyed her hair to cover the grey, the same golden blond she’d naturally had in the pictures I had seen of her as a young woman. With the age difference between us, she had sometimes been mistaken for my mother, rather than my sister. But without makeup she had a little girl’s face, freckled, vulnerable, nearly unrecognizable as I had so rarely seen her without a full face of makeup. In that moment she resembled our great-uncle Valentine, whom she had been named after. She put a hand to her cheek. “I’d just got out of the shower when you phoned.”
“You look fine.”
She rummaged in her purse, then squirted Oil of Olay into the palm of her hand, rubbed it onto her face, and smoothed it down her throat. “Where’s Jeremy?”
“Ezra took him to the cafeteria.”
I hugged my arms as I watched Val pour foundation into a clean sponge and pat it on her nose, her chin, and her forehead. “You look tired,” she said.
“I’m okay.” Although I realized at that moment that I was rocking myself back and forth.
“I imagine it’s so hard for you,” she said. “Being here, in the hospital.”
“It comes back to me in flashes, so real, like I’m in that Chilliwack hospital, like I never left.”
“It was around this time of year, too, wasn’t it?”
I stopped to think of the date. In the rush to get down here to help my parents, all other considerations had been forgotten. But it would be six years this week. Ezra at the kitchen table. He complained of numbness in the right side of his face and his speech became slurred. I asked him to repeat a sentence after me and he couldn’t. Then he fell to the floor.
“Be careful of those anniversaries,” she said. “They’ll jump up and bite you, years after, even when you think you’re over it.” She applied eyeliner and a coat of mascara as she squinted into her pocket mirror. “How was Mom when you brought Dad in?”
“Flustered. Panicked. As you’d expect.”
“We’re going to have to think about getting her into some kind of assisted living situation after Dad passes.”
“It’s not time for that yet.”
“Last week I found the iron plugged in and scorching her nightgown in a basket of clean laundry. I’m sure it would have set the house on fire if I hadn’t found it. When I pointed it out, she blamed me, said I must have done it. I think she actually believed it, too; I doubt she had any memory of plugging that iron in or putting it in the laundry basket.”
“I came in late last night and all the burners were on. Mom was asleep so I didn’t think it could have been her.”
“The burners have been on a number of times when I’ve stopped in lately. I’m going to have to talk to Dr. Ellis about weaning her off those sleeping pills, or trying something else. She’s been getting increasingly forgetful since she’s been taking them.”
“If it’s just the pills, then there’s no need to think about moving her into some kind of care facility.”
Val shook her head. “It’s not just the pills. She was growing more forgetful before she started taking them. Strange, isn’t it? She remembers a story from fifty years ago in detail, but she’ll phone me up three times within an hour with the same question: when is her doctor’s appointment, or when am I going to pick her up?”
“So we put up a whiteboard near the door and write her appointments down. I had to do that for Ezra.”
“But so much of her behaviour makes no sense. This past spring she kept buying macaroni, boxes and boxes of the stuff. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then I started finding dry macaroni all over the house, in the weirdest places. I asked her about it and she made out like it was a big mystery to her. Then I was over here for supper one night. Dad and I were watching the news, and I happened to glance ov
er at Mom. She was wolfing down a handful of uncooked macaroni.”
I could picture this, my mother with one eye set keenly on Dad and Val, to see that they were absorbed in the television, as she gobbled crackling bits of pasta, half-moons of dry macaroni clattering to the floor. “So what was that about?”
“Hell if I know. When I confronted her, she denied she was eating it. She said she’d dropped the box and was just picking the bits up.”
Val looked into her purse mirror as she applied her lipstick. “I ran into Jude in the Safeway parking lot Saturday. He said he had a box of yours.”
“I picked it up this morning.”
“So you saw him. Already.” She put her index finger in her mouth, withdrawing it through puckered lips. A trick she had taught me when I was a child: the excess lipstick came off on her finger and not on her teeth. She wiped lipstick from her finger with a Kleenex. “Are you going to see him again?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think seeing him again would be … dangerous?” When I didn’t answer, she grinned. Her front teeth were short, in need of caps, because she ground her teeth in her sleep. On those nights when Ezra was in the hospital, when she had come down to stay and we had shared my bed, I had lain awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the crunch of her teeth as if she had a mouthful of rock candy.
The nurse opened the curtain and wheeled my father back to the bed, then helped him into it, as I gave up my seat to Mom. The nurse set Dad up on a morphine drip and he settled back into the bed, more comfortable now.
Ezra returned and stood next to me holding our son. He nodded at Val. “We got one truckload piled up, at least.”
“You can drop it off at my place before you head back this evening. I’ve left the garage open.”
“Don’t forget to take those boxes you stored in the barn,” Dad said.
“I imagine that’ll be the last of what we pack out,” I said. During our move to Alberta that past spring, Ezra and I had left a number of boxes at my parents’ farm in order to make room in the U-Haul for a last-minute gift from my mother, the table and chairs that had once sat in my grandmother’s parlour. I had no idea what was in the boxes we had left behind. I hadn’t yet unpacked the many stacked in the basement of the house we rented in Cochrane.
“What about the cattle?” Ezra said.
“It’s all arranged,” said Val. “I phoned Uncle Dan this morning and he said he’d take them. He’ll be bringing the trailer around as soon as he can get away from the dairy.”
Dad ran a hand over his mouth. “He’s got enough to worry about without us bothering him.”
“What will we do with the cats?” Mom asked.
“The SPCA has set up an animal shelter on the fairgrounds. We’ll have to round them up and take them there for now.”
“No!” Mom said. “They’ll be terrified.”
“I can’t keep them at my place, Mom, there’s just too many.”
Jeremy clapped in excitement. “Are we going to chase the kitties?”
“Wouldn’t that be fun?” I said. I looked up at Val. “How about the chickens? I doubt we can catch all those wild bantams.”
“Oh, we must!” my mother said. “Imagine what it would be like for them, caught in a fire. I so love my chickens.” She turned to me. “My favourite, of course, was Lady Barred Rock.” This was a bird Ezra and I had years before, not long after we were married, at the small farm we owned in Chilliwack. The bird would hear our movements in the house and run to the front or back door as we exited, looking for leftovers that she’d peck from our hands. One day I noticed the bird’s comb was pale, and the next I found her dead within the roost. I buried her under the maple and planted tulips over her body. Mourning a chicken.
Dr. Ellis pulled back the curtain. “Well, Gus, the rib is broken. A cough could have done it. I’m afraid the bone was eaten through.”
“The cancer?” Dad asked.
Dr. Ellis nodded. “It will take us a few days, as the room is currently in use, but I suggest we admit you to our palliative care room. It’s a suite, really. Beth or one of your daughters can stay with you around the clock.”
“I don’t want to stay another night in this hospital,” Dad said to Val. “All my life with your mother, we hardly ever slept in separate beds, except for these damn hospital stays. I can never sleep.”
“You will need more care than your family is able to provide at home.” Dr. Ellis looked down at the clipboard he carried. “Beth says you’ve been having trouble swallowing. I suggest we stop giving you the medications, and switch the morphine from pills to injections.”
“You’re giving up on me then?”
“Nobody’s giving up on you, Dad,” Val said.
“But I am dying, aren’t I?”
“At this point the treatments will have little if any effect,” said Dr. Ellis.
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“A matter of weeks?”
“Maybe less.”
“I don’t want Grandpa to die,” said Jeremy.
I took him from Ezra and held him, rocking him back and forth, trying to think of something to say to comfort him, to comfort us all.
“I want to go home,” Dad said. “Now.”
“We can’t, Dad,” I said. “We may have to evacuate at a moment’s notice.”
“And the smoke from the fire will continue to be a problem,” said Dr. Ellis.
“Put me on oxygen if you want. I don’t want to die in some damn hospital with a bunch of strange women watching over every bodily function. I want to go home.”
“The decision is entirely up to you, but I don’t advise it,” Dr. Ellis said. “Why don’t you discuss it further with your family and I’ll check in later.”
After he left we all looked at the floor for a time, saying nothing.
“How long will it take to get Dad into that palliative care room?” I finally asked Val.
My father slapped the table beside him, upsetting the urinal and his glass. Water slid off the laminate to the floor. “I’m not going to die in a damn hospital! I want to go home.”
“All right, Dad,” said Val. “If that’s what you want, I’ll make it happen.”
“Nobody’s asking me what I want,” said Mom. “I want him to live! He won’t get better at home.”
Dad took my mother’s hand in both of his. “You remember how Valentine went?”
I had visited Uncle Valentine in the hospital with Mom during his final illness. He was curled into himself, his body as thin and out of proportion with his head as a fetus’s. My mother pulled the blanket back up to my uncle’s chest and we stood for a time at his bedside, listening to him whisper in Swedish. “What’s he saying?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She picked up his round brush from the bedside table and brushed his hair in the way she so often brushed mine, not to preen, but to comfort; to comfort herself as much as me. Valentine’s hair had grown long in his illness; his white locks fell about his shoulders as she brushed them. “People often return to their pasts when they’re dying,” she said. “I imagine he’s in his childhood, talking with his family.”
Valentine had told me stories about his childhood in Lapland, of the Sami in their richly ornamented blue, yellow, and red costumes who herded reindeer through his father’s farm in winter, camping out in tents on the snow-covered fields and buying hay from his father to feed the reindeer. These families travelled on skis and on pulkas, sleds pulled behind harks, castrated reindeer. “They went like the dickens,” Valentine told me.
As a child I had imagined myself as one of these Sami on a sled, hanging onto the reins of a reindeer as it snorted in the effort to run through snow, its breath clouding the night air under crystal stars and northern lights. I liked the idea that Valentine had returned to these winter fields and was flying over snow with the Sami into an endless, starry night.
“I hate the thought of drifting away slowly like t
hat,” Dad said, “spending months in hospital drugged up because of the pain. I want it to be over fast.”
“I’ll arrange for a hospital bed,” said Val, “and for the nurses to come in to back me up. But I can give you most of the care you need.”
“And if the fire does threaten the place?” I asked.
“Then we’ll wheel Dad out to the truck and get him the hell out of there.”
“You have to work.”
“I’ll take time off.” Val put a hand on Dad’s shoulder. “I’ll need a day to get things set up. Make some room for a hospital bed. But I’ll get you home. All right?”
Dad, still grasping Mom’s hand, lay back into the pillows. “All right.”
7.
AS WE HEADED TO SALMON ARM after dropping the load off at Val’s place in Canoe, Ezra nodded at the SUV riding our tail. “They should hammer together signs that you can bolt to your truck,” he said. “So you can flash messages at the car behind you, like Back off asshole!”
I glanced at Jeremy and then at my mother, to see if they had heard, then looked away. Ezra acted like this when he was tired. I knew he shouldn’t be driving now, that we were courting disaster, but I’m ashamed to say I was afraid to take the wheel. There had been a time when I would drive off by myself with no particular destination in mind; I was just out for the pleasure of the drive. But after Ezra had the stroke it became important to us both that there was some aspect of our lives together where he took the lead. So when he was allowed to drive again, he became the driver. I still did all right on country roads and on side roads in town, but highway driving threw me. The thought of driving in a city like Calgary terrified me.
Ezra stopped for a yellow light at the intersection next to the McDonald’s, and the driver in the SUV honked for him to keep going. “Fucking asshole!” said Ezra. When the light turned green and Ezra started off again, the SUV stormed past over a solid line. Ezra swerved into it, nearly hitting the vehicle. Both my mother and Jeremy cried out.
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