Turtle Valley

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  “Ezra!” I said. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Ezra fingered the driver and the man fingered him back. The sticker on the window of the SUV read: Know Fear. “He’s the asshole, not me.”

  The rage in his face. I took a breath and mentally paged through the responses the counsellor had offered me to deflect his anger in situations such as this, when his judgment was compromised. “How about I take a turn at the wheel?” I asked him, as cheerfully as I could.

  “You don’t like city driving.”

  “It’s my hometown. I’m sure I can manage.”

  “You think I’m a shitty driver?”

  “You’re a very skilled driver, but you sometimes drive differently when you’re exhausted. You often help me out. I’d like to help you here.”

  “Don’t give me that patronizing therapist shit.”

  I turned away, blinking back the sting of tears, to look out the passenger window. A couple walked along the side of the road, carrying a branch between them from which a jack terrier dangled, its jaws locked around the stick.

  Below us, the town followed the curve of this arm of Shuswap Lake. The town of Salmon Arm was named for the fish that were once so abundant that farmers pitchforked them from the lake, and the river that fed into it, to slash into the land for fertilizer. Now the highway cut the city lengthwise, drawing curve-nervous Albertans down to Shuswap Lake and into houseboats. A tourist town. A town I didn’t leave until I was twenty-five, when I was jerked from these comfortable waters like those salmon caught silver and pink in surprise. I both thank and blame Jude for this. When I left the area, I left him.

  As we came down the hill near McGuire Lake, our truck began to slow and drift toward the centre lane. Ezra smacked his lips and his right hand circled in his lap. Seizure.

  I grabbed the steering wheel. “Put your foot on the brake!” I said. “Your foot on the brake!”

  His foot was off the gas, sitting loose against the floor. I couldn’t reach over the console between us to brake the truck myself. “Ezra! Your foot on the brake!”

  My mother leaned forward. “What’s happening?”

  I honked the horn, keeping it pressed to warn other drivers as we passed through an intersection. Ezra turned to me, his tongue still pushing against the inside of his lip. His eyes were yellowed and glazed and his cheeks drawn. “Your foot!” I cried. “On the brake!”

  He kept looking at me, and not the road, but he did brake slowly. I finally steered us to the side of the highway near the Dairy Queen and put the truck in park.

  “Daddy, put your foot on the brake!”

  “It’s okay. We’re okay now. Daddy had a seizure.”

  “A seizure!” Mom said. “Good God! We could have been killed.”

  A semi barrelled by, shaking our truck as it passed.

  “Are you all right?” I asked Ezra.

  He nodded. “Silly,” he said, struggling to find the word sorry. He said it again and again, “Silly. Silly.” Caressing my arm. Trying to let me know that he was okay, that everything was okay. As if either of us could believe that now.

  “Sorry,” he said at last.

  I led him by the hand to the passenger side and buckled him into his seat. Then I got behind the wheel and signalled to get back on the road. I waited too long, unsure now how to merge with the stream of traffic. After a time a hole opened and I pulled quickly into the right lane. Too late I saw that I was nearing an intersection.

  “You just scurried through a red light!” Ezra said.

  “I know, I know. I didn’t see it!”

  When I finally parked in the Safeway lot, I sat a moment staring at my hands on the wheel. They were trembling.

  Ezra put his hand on my thigh. “I’m so sorry I got into flames at you when you offered to drive. I should have listened.”

  “You’re always sorry. After.”

  “When I’m stuck in it, I can’t see. It feels like it’s your fault. I think, if you’d just be hushed. But you keep talking and I can’t keep up, can’t think. I can’t get myself out of it. My head is clay; my words come out all balled up. I feel like I’m in the middle of a lake.” He waved his arms as if swimming, or thrashing.

  “Like you’re floundering,” I said.

  “Yes. That’s the word. Floundering. I see myself acting badly, but its not me. It’s something else up here.” He tapped his head and for that moment, at least, I understood what it was like for him, to be inside his skull, watching, helpless, as anger drove him.

  “I expect this means you won’t be driving for awhile then?” Mom asked him.

  “Not until we get the seizures back under control,” I said.

  He rubbed his face with both hands. “Each time this happens I feel like my wings are pinholed.”

  “Why don’t you stay in the truck and rest while we go into Safeway?” I said to Ezra. “Would you like me to pick up anything for you?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I’ll go in with you.”

  I pulled a package of earplugs from my purse and held them out. “Sweetheart, you just had a seizure. I really think you need to take a break.”

  He wouldn’t take the earplugs and I could see him struggling to keep his anger at bay. “I’m not sick like you think.”

  I glanced back at Jeremy but he was looking out the window. Beside him my mother fretted with a Kleenex, rolling it over and over between her fingers.

  I got out of the truck. “Okay. Fine. Let’s just go.” I slammed the door and stood a moment to allow the palpitations in my chest to pass. The heat and smoke clung to my face, leaving me breathless and panicky, and yet others in this parking lot relaxed into the warmth as if into a hot bath. Ice-cream cones and cheerful faces, even as the mountains above us burned.

  I led Jeremy over to the shopping carts, with my mother and Ezra trailing behind, but when I slid a quarter into a Safeway cart it just popped back out. I tried a second time but couldn’t get the carts apart. A young man in his twenties, wearing a baseball cap and a fluorescent safety vest, pushed a line of carts toward us. He stopped and mumbled something to Ezra as he and my mother approached the store. “Pardon me?” Ezra asked.

  “I know you, don’t I?” the boy said.

  “I don’t think so,” said Ezra.

  “Yes I do.” Saliva foamed at the corner of his mouth. His voice was cracked and his speech was garbled. When he turned I saw a seam of skin in the close-shaved hair at the back of his neck.

  “People don’t always understand me,” he said. “I have a brain injury.”

  “Huh,” said Ezra. “I had a stroke.”

  “How long were you in the hospital?”

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “I was in a coma for seven months,” the boy said. “Na, na, nana, na. Beat you.” He waved as he pushed the carts toward the store at the far end of the parking lot. “It was nice to meet me,” he called out. Too late, I thought of asking him for one of his carts.

  “What’s the matter with that guy?” Jeremy asked. “He talks funny.”

  “He had a brain injury, sweetie,” I said.

  “What’s a injury?”

  “His brain was hurt.” I glanced at Ezra. “I’ll explain later.”

  Ezra took several steps away from us, and leaned against the entranceway to watch the boy rattle away. He wiped tears out of his eyes. I should have walked over to him, and held him. I should have told him that everything would be all right, that we would find a way through this as we had through everything else. Instead I tried inserting the quarter again, and when it still didn’t work, I read the instructions, which didn’t make sense. The panic rose up, the feeling of being alone in a strange city and not knowing where I was. A feeling I’d had many times since Ezra’s stroke. Then the skipping, rapid-fire heartbeat. I gave the cart a good, swift shake.

  My mother put a hand on my arm. “Oh, honey, what is it?”

  I tried jamming the quarter in the cart again, and lowered my voice. �
��I just don’t know what else to do! How to deal with him.”

  “You haven’t been driving much lately, have you?” she asked.

  On the sidewalk just ahead of us a woman, beautifully dressed in an indigo jacket and skirt, rifled through the garbage can. A plastic bag filled with pop cans was slung over her arm. A widow, I imagined, in her early sixties, reduced by her husband’s passing to cashing in returnables.

  I looked up at her. “Not much, no.”

  “For years your father drove to town, and I didn’t. Gus liked driving, and he always got into the truck first, to wait for me, because I was always late getting ready. So when I came out, I just got into the passenger side. I never really thought anything of it. I just assumed that I would drive again. But then he got sick and when I tried to drive I found I couldn’t anymore.”

  “I suppose it was the same with Ezra and me. Just habit. I’ve never much liked driving.” I looked over at Ezra and he turned away. He knew as well as I that this wasn’t true. “Why can’t I figure this thing out?”

  The woman with the bag of pop cans turned to us and tapped the coin slot on my cart. “You push the key against the quarter,” she said, and showed me. “The key on the next cart pops out, see?”

  “Ah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She patted my hand. “I’m forever helping people with these stupid carts. I don’t know why they don’t just get some ordinary ones and hire somebody like Marshall there to collect them.” She pointed at the brain-injured boy. “God knows there’s lots like him who need the work.”

  Marshall waved at her and she waved back. A man driving a Volkswagen Beetle honked at him. So Marshall had become a fixture in the town, a character everyone knew, a mascot.

  I lifted Jeremy into the cart and pushed him into the store as my mother held onto the side to steady herself. Ezra followed behind.

  “I’m going to gather a few things on my own,” he said. He put a coin in one of the carts inside the store and pulled it smoothly from the stack.

  My mother stood next to me as I watched him head down the aisle. “He’s not shopping with us?”

  “Where’s Daddy going?”

  I turned my cart to push it in the opposite direction. “I don’t know what he’s doing.”

  Mom followed Jeremy and me. “There were times when my father couldn’t drive,” she said, “and either my mother or I had to drive him to town. He hated that. He said it made him feel useless. A woman didn’t drive then if there was a man in the car.” She nodded back at Ezra. “I imagine this is all so very hard for him.”

  I turned the cart down the baking aisle and Mom picked up a small bag of pastry flour for the pie she wanted to make for Dad. “In any case, in a year or two none of this will seem so bad,” she said. “My mother always said that time was like a great flour sifter.”

  “Flour sifter?” I thought of my grandmother’s flour sifter that my mother still used, the handle that turned the flour over the screen.

  “You sift flour not only to get rid of lumps and impurities,” said Mom, “but to aerate the flour as well, so you can measure it accurately. Measure unsifted flour and you’ll have a dense cake indeed. My mother used to say that time works like that: it not only sifts out the lumps—takes the sting out of events that seemed so painful at the time—but it allows you to measure those events properly, with some perspective.”

  “I keep thinking if I just did things differently, handled Ezra differently, then we wouldn’t argue.”

  She shook her head. “I remember a day when my mother and I took tea and scones out to my father. He was working on a well near that stand of cottonwood, yet another site where he said he was going to build a house for my mother. As he climbed out of that hole to have his lunch he was grey and shaky, but he wouldn’t stop digging. ‘You need to rest,’ my mother told him, just like you told Ezra he needed rest just now. That’s all she said. But he yelled at her. ‘You just don’t want me to finish,’ he said. ‘You want me to look bad in front of the neighbours, so it proves what you’ve been saying about me all along, that I’ll never build this house. You think I’m useless.’ It was a thing she would never say, of course, even if she thought it. As I picked wildflowers in the grasses next to her, she reassured him that yes, she knew he’d finish the house, that yes, she loved him for it, using the tone of voice a mother uses when her child has an upset.”

  As she told this story, I saw my grandparents in my mind’s eye, as if from a distance, their hands gesturing in argument. My grandfather’s hands were clenched mountain cliffs, and my grandmother’s were at first trees, outspread, imploring, and then two trays, palms open as if serving a way forward. My grandfather took both her hands in his, and it was within those prayerful hands that the whole of my own future was contained. Those hands as rough as wood, the desperation with which they clung to her, a drowning man’s.

  “What was wrong with him?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything for a time and then, “There were a lot of things wrong.”

  “Daddy!” Jeremy called out and we both turned.

  Ezra stood between bins heaped with green peppers and bananas, caught at an intersection where a man was filling a water jug from a dispenser. The man blocked the aisle to the dairy section, causing a traffic jam, and my husband, stalled by indecision, was unable to navigate his cart through those other shoppers. Women with children in their buggies and old men with baskets over their arms passed him. I lifted Jeremy onto my hip, to leave the cart with my mother, and slipped through the congestion to come up behind Ezra. “Why don’t you just go?” I asked.

  “Go, go, go!” Jeremy said.

  “I’m waiting for the passengers to scurry out of my way.”

  “You’ll wait forever. Just say Excuse me, then step out in front of someone.” I demonstrated with Jeremy in my arms. But Ezra didn’t follow; he stood where he was, watching the other shoppers march by. Bombarded and confused by the terrific business of the store, he turned his head to every sound. I felt my irritation slip into resignation, and I took the lead, as I did every day in the dance that was our lives. I put Jeremy in Ezra’s cart and headed through the store with Ezra following behind. “How about you sit on the bench by the door with your cart while we finish shopping?” I said, knowing that he wouldn’t argue now, and he didn’t. He shuffled beside Jeremy and me like a dutiful sentry through the maze of carts, shoppers, and grocery displays, to the bench by the door.

  MY MOTHER WAS IN THE pet-food aisle when I found her, instructing a pimpled young man on which flat of cat food to take down from the shelf. The clerk set the flat under the shopping cart and reached for another. “You must have a lot of cats,” he said.

  “Five,” said my mother. Not exactly the truth of the matter; more than a dozen had greeted me that morning when I stepped outside.

  I smiled to allow the clerk to leave. “You have quite a bit of cat food at home already, Mom.” Her cupboards were full of the stuff.

  “I’m just stocking up. It was on sale.”

  “Why don’t we pick out some fruit for Dad and head home? I think we’re all getting tired.”

  I hooked my mother’s arm within my own and pushed my son in the cart to the produce aisle, and together we paraded among the oranges, chose fragrant Fuji apples, and squeezed avocados until my mother came across a plastic one that squeaked in protest. The produce manager had put it there, evidently, to stop customers from bruising his merchandise. “These grow in pairs,” I told her, holding two ripe avocados. “On trees they call testicle trees.” We laughed and for that moment, at least, my father’s illness, Ezra’s seizure and confusion, and the fire on the mountain were all but forgotten.

  8.

  MY SON CRIED OUT and I listened from my parents’ room a moment to see if he would fall back to sleep, but when he let out a frightened howl, I ran into Val’s old room and found him thrashing in the bed as if frantically trying to find something, or to escape. I left the door open so I wo
uld have enough light to see what was going on. He was sweating and his eyes were wide open, terrified. “Mommy! Mommy!” In the second single bed my mother whistled in her sleep, her eyes half open and moving eerily within dream, apparently deaf to his cries.

  “What is it?” I said, and I wrapped my arms around him, but he pushed me away.

  “Make him go away!” he cried.

  “Who? Who’s scaring you?”

  “Mommy! Make him go away!”

  “I’m right here.” I held his face. “Look at me, I’m right here!”

  But he was lost in some dark place and couldn’t find me. He slid from the bed to the floor and tossed about there, in the shadows, calling for me. “Go away!” he yelled.

  I sat on the floor beside him, not trying to touch him any more because I knew from what I had read that holding him would only agitate him further. He had experienced night terrors here in this house during previous visits, though never at home. I assumed that the excitement and wear of travel triggered them. I knew that in the morning he would remember nothing of it. But that knowledge offered little comfort as he thrashed about beside me. He was so afraid and there was nothing I could do for him. He pushed himself backward into the corner of the room, trying to flee whatever chased him, and I followed him there, staying close, murmuring over and over, I’m here, I’m here, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.

  After a time Ezra shuffled into the room in his underwear and T-shirt. “You need a stop?” he asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You don’t think I’m capable of gentling him?”

  I threw up my hands. “I can’t reach him,” I said. “I can’t pull him out of it!”

  He put a hand to his temple. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I came here to help, not to add to your load.”

  I squeezed his hand to say it was all right, and let go.

  “How about I dawdle with you awhile?” He sat on the floor and wrapped an arm around me and I felt myself relax a little into him.