by Glen Huser
“Is he still in the hospital?”
“He is, but only certain people can visit him. Family. Specified friends.”
“Gee.”
“I’ve got to get down there.”
“Listen, pal, I’m good at these kinds of plans,” Nathan says.
And I listen.
“We’re just getting ready to start, honey,” Auntie Sophie says when I go into the den. “Livvy’s going to love this show. It was a favorite of Luanne and Laverne’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if they saw it three times.”
I give Livvy the eyeball. She hasn’t even told them she’s seen it more times than Toto has hair on his little doggie chin.
“Can we have Rice Krispie squares?” Livvy refuses to look at me.
“You goose,” Auntie Sophie laughs. “We’ve just got up from the supper table. Tell you what, though. When Dorothy gets to Shangri-La, then we’ll get some munchies.”
Emerald City, I want to say. Get your movies straight. But instead I smile at Sophie and Harold. “I’ve seen the movie a couple of times and I’m a bit tired so I think I’ll go to bed early and read Jane Eyre. It’ll probably put me to sleep in half an hour. Is that okay?”
“Is that okay!” Auntie Sophie jumps up from the sofa and grabs my hand.
“You sleep as much as you want to. You’ve had a pretty stressful time and your body is just telling you that you need extra sleep. It’s the best thing, believe me.”
“Goodnight, then.” I squeeze Auntie Sophie’s hand, smile at Uncle Hal.
“Goodnight, Barbara,” he says through a blast of sound as he adjusts controls.
Livvy looks at me suspiciously for a minute but the MGM logo surfaces on the screen and she settles back into the sofa. “Oh, goodee,” she says, trying to sound enthusiastic.
There are extra pillows in the closet in Luanne’s room. I place them under the bedcovers and lump everything to make it look as much as possible like someone sleeping. I open Jane Eyre and turn it over by the lamp. “Make sure the window is unlocked,” Nathan told me on the phone. I do, and close the curtains.
Uncle Hal has given both Livvy and me a five-dollar allowance for the week. Livvy managed to spend hers in one swoop at the Seven-Eleven, but I have four dollars left. I check that it is still in my pocket, grab the survival bag and tiptoe up the stairs.
From down the hall, Dorothy is singing Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly…
It is two blocks to the bus stop, but Sunday service is not great in the suburbs. It is light enough to do word searches, and I am into my third one when the bus finally comes. Nathan has told me where to transfer downtown, and I wait again for the bus that will take me to the hospital.
I know my way around the emergency ward, and it is easy to slip past everyone and go down to the elevators. Things are quiet on the sixth floor. It looks like visitors are leaving. I wander down the hall, trying to see into the rooms without looking like some sort of a spy. An old woman in a wheelchair glares at me.
Finally, through one door, I see a figure in a bed. He’s all hooked up to hoses and his face is covered with an oxygen mask, but I see the nest of gold hair above his forehead. A woman sits beside his bed, holding his hand. She looks like a movie star, with white-gold hair and clothes that are shiny and silky.
“I’m Barbara Kobleimer, a friend of Cosmo’s,” I say to her. “Can I see him for a few minutes? He was my teacher at the clown work-shop.”
“Sure.” She smiles at me, a tired smile. “I’m his sister, Annette. He may not be awake.”
I stand by his bed. It’s like the last time I saw Mama, but instead of Mama’s thin face trying to smile, here is Cosmo’s thin face with his eyes closed, so motionless I wonder if he is still breathing. But then there is a little shudder and his hand trembles.
“You can hold his hand,” Annette says. “In fact, I think I’ll slip out for ten minutes for a smoke so you have a little visit and I’ll be right back. If he needs the nurse, just press this little buzzer here.”
I take Cosmo’s thin long hand in mine. It’s stopped trembling and it feels cold, so I rub my palm back and forth over it to warm it. I don’t know what to do, but it seems okay to talk to Cosmo even if he is sleeping.
“Would you believe it,” I say. “I finally got to go back to Alberta Beach. Remember when we told about our most special time, and that was mine? Except it wasn’t so special as it was before. I’m not sure why. The sun was shining and little kids were running in and out of the water, and there was even a pregnant lady in a bathing suit that made me think of Mama. But somehow it was all kind of a let-down. I tried to pretend it was really great because these people, the Hetheringtons, are trying like mad to make things good for Livvy and me. You would laugh at Livvy. She’s sucking up to them and they feed her nonstop. I think she’s happy, but she misses Daddy and Grandma. About once or twice a day she asks when we’re going home. The funny thing is, I miss them, too. It’s kind of silly, but I guess they needed me. The Hetheringtons, they’re there for us, but we’re not really there for them. Except, maybe Livvy. I think Livvy is more like they remember their daughters being when they were little. Harold–Uncle Hal–is goofy about model trains, and Livvy is real good at pretending she loves them, too. Auntie Sophie goes like a model train all day, cleaning and cooking and running errands. After supper she generally conks out on the sofa when we’re watching TV.”
I have been looking at Cosmo’s hand all the time I’ve been talking, and now I look up past the tubes and blankets to his face, and his eyes are open. His gentle green eyes are fixed on my face. “Cosmo, you’re going to get better. You have to get better. Livvy and I need you so badly.” I feel a tremor along his fingers. “Oh, Cosmo,” I say, and I can feel the tears starting at the edge of my own eyes, “you made everything different.”
His sister has come back in. “Hey, Dreamboat, how are you doing?” she says.
But he closes his eyes again.
“We’d best not tire him,” she says. “Thank you for coming.”
“Goodbye, Cosmo,” I say. “See you soon.” At the door, I stop. It seems important to say some-thing else. But what? There are no words.
Nathan is waiting for me in a chair by the nursing station.
“S-Sorry,” he says. “Thought I could get here sooner but the old lady went kind of crazy.”
I sit down beside him. For a minute I can’t say anything.
“Are you o-k-kay?”
I find my voice. “He’s so sick. I’ve never seen anyone so sick, since Mama. I’m afraid.”
Nathan holds my hand as we make our way to the elevators and back through the emergency ward. “I’ll ride the bus home with you,” he says. “I don’t really w-want to go home myself right now anyway. M-my mom said for me n-not to come home until I’ve grown up. Guess that means until I’m a few inches taller and have a six-pack in my hands.”
“What started the fight?”
“Who knows. She’s touchy as a h-hornet, because she and the b-boyfriend ran out of cigarettes and beer, and she knew I had cigarettes stashed somewhere but I wasn’t saying where.”
It’s starting to get dark as the bus rambles through the crescents and drives of the south side. Nathan holds my hand and tells me about when his uncle died in the hospital a couple of years ago, his body hooked up to a tangle of tubes with plastic bags dripping fluids into him, and other bags taking fluids away.
“I know,” I say. “It was like that with Mama at the last. I only saw her once in the hospital. She didn’t want me to come, I think.”
Nathan walks me right to the house. The block is quiet. Everything is dark at the Hetheringtons. We move like shadows into the back yard where my bedroom window looks out onto one of Auntie Sophie’s flowerbeds. Nathan pops the outer screen out of place like someone who has done it more than once. He smiles crookedly at me.
“You c-crawl in and I’ll pop it back into” place.
“Thanks, Nathan.” I catch his h
and, and suddenly he has his arms around me, and his face is against my cheek. Where do my hands go? I move them up and feel his long hair and then his lips brushing against mine.
“G-Good night,” he says. “T-Try to call me tomorrow.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Early in the morning Livvy comes downstairs and crawls into bed with me.
“I had an accident,” she says. She has managed to get into clean pajamas. Auntie Sophie has left extra underwear and nightclothes in her room.
“Are you okay?” I let her snuggle up to me.
“I want to go home.”
“We can’t just yet. Daddy isn’t well.”
“Maybe Uncle Hal could take us to see him and Grandma.” She yawns and burrows into my back. We both fall back asleep.
It is Auntie Sophie who wakes us. “There you are, Livvy. It’s time to get up, you two sleepy-heads,” she trills. “We’ve got a big day ahead. The dentist just after lunch for both of you, and Livvy, you have a doctor’s appointment at 3:30, and I need to stop at the supermarket. I need whipping cream if I’m going to make Boston cream pie to go with the lamb chops for supper. Harold thought he might have time to go for me, but the hobby shop called with some pieces for that new line he’s building, and when it comes to choosing between grocery shopping and that railway, well… I think we all know who wins out there. Oh, and Barbara, you need to get up right away because Mr. Beresford phoned and said he wanted to drop by and see you around 10:30. Said he wanted to take you out for coffee and, of course, I said I hope you don’t mean real coffee, and he said…”
Jim Beresford.
I wait on the front doorstep for him.
“I want to go, too,” Livvy says.
“Well, you can’t.”
“Baa!”
“Livvy, dear,” Auntie Sophie calls through an open window. “You come and help me in the garden. We need a couple of new bouquets and you made such lovely ones the other day.”
“Okay.” She hops up and is gone.
I’ve started A Tale of Two Cities, one of the other novels Cosmo gave us the night we toted books from his place. It was the best of times and the worst of times…
Jim Beresford waves at me from the window of his car when he pulls up.
“Do you mind getting away for a few minutes?”
“No. I’d like to.”
We drive to one of the coffee shops in Old Strathcona. Along the way he asks me how things are going at the Hetheringtons.
“Fine,” I say.
“They let you go down to the hospital last night by yourself?”
“No.” My face flushes with shame. “They didn’t know I went.”
“It’s okay,” he says, ordering a cappuccino for himself and hot chocolate for me. I remember Cosmo placing the same order at the Italian center. It seems like a long time ago.
“He meant a lot to you, didn’t he? Mr. Farber.”
“Cosmo.”
“Cosmo.”
“I phoned the hospital this morning,” Jim Beresford says. He is looking at his coffee, not at me, as if there are cue cards in his cup for what he has to say. “He died quietly at three o’clock this morning. He’d been fighting AIDS, the doctor said, for over twelve years. He’d had pneumonia several times, but each time…You knew he had AIDS?”
I nod.
I don’t want to cry in front of Jim Beresford, so I drink my hot chocolate in slow sips, and hear his quiet, caring voice going on.
Across the street, a sidewalk performer is doing a juggling act on the corner of Whyte and Fourth. He is dressed like a jack in a deck of cards, and the colored balls fly higher and higher. Then, magically, they return to nest in his hands. When he is finished, it seems to me that he bows to us where we sit at the coffee-shop window.
“Barbara?” Jim Beresford is asking me a question.
“There’s a juggler out there.”
“Seems to be a street festival going on all summer long in Old Scona.”
Jim spoons up the last of the foam from his cappuccino cup. “So, do you want to give it some thought? About the memorial service, I mean?”
“Memorial service?”
“For Cosmo. I had a little chat with his sister. She’s the one who told me you’d been up to see him last night. Actually, she phoned the department and got hold of me, said she’d gone back to Cosmo’s apartment and your name was on a note attached to a box of books or something.”
“Cosmo was giving all of his books that he had when he was a kid to Livvy and me. We were supposed to take them a few at a time, but we only had one chance.”
”A Tale of Two Cities? I didn’t think he’d noticed my book when I got in the car.
“And Jane Eyre. Three or four other ones. Livvy makes me read Winnie-the-Pooh over and over again. Can Nathan come to the service, too?”
On the day of the memorial service, Jim Beresford takes time off work to pick up Nathan and me and take us. Auntie Sophie has whisked Livvy away to a shopping mall to look at going-back-to-school clothes. There is a little part of me that thinks maybe Livvy should be coming, too, but then I think the memories she has of Cosmo have way more meaning to her than what people will be saying about him at the service. When I told her that Cosmo had died at the hospital, she went off by herself for awhile and wouldn’t talk to anyone. Since then, she seems to ask questions about him and what happens when people die three or four times a day.
“Is he seeing Mama?”
“I don’t know, Livvy.” I seem to always be searching for words. “Some people think that when you die, your spirit stays around for awhile, sort of checking things out.” I read this once in a magazine at the library. Some people who had been dead for a minute or two had risen above their bodies and had been able to watch everything that was going on. “Maybe Cosmo is watching us right now. I think he’d want us to remember the good times we had with him.”
“Maybe he’s remembering the bike accident.”
“Maybe. Was that a good time? You did a lot of crying.”
“I remember sherbet. That was a good time, wasn’t it, Barbara?”
“Do you want me to go to the memorial service with you, honey?” Auntie Sophie asked. “Sometimes it just helps to have someone with you.” I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but I definitely did not want Auntie Sophie sitting beside me. That’s when I suggested it would be nice if she could get Livvy off somewhere for a couple of hours.
“Jim Beresford says he’ll stay with me and drive me home after.”
Nathan is waiting on his front step, smoking a cigarette. In the daylight, I see his yard is filled with stuff that looks like it wouldn’t quite fit in the stucco townhouse. A freezer, a cabinet-TV with a cracked screen, an armchair. Nathan butts out his cigarette. He’s wearing a white shirt and a bolo tie.
“H-How do you like the lawn ornaments?” he says, squeezing himself into the back seat of Jim Beresford’s compact.
“Better than plastic pink flamingoes,” Jim says, introducing himself. “You were in Cosmo’s workshop, too? Did they end up canceling it?”
“NNo. Cosmo’s friend JJanice Jellicoe is doing it. She says call her J. J. She’s supposed to be there today. At the service.”
Jim Beresford and Nathan chat about the class as we drive to the Unitarian Church, but I catch Nathan’s eye in the rear-view mirror. We have only talked on the phone a couple of times since Nathan took the bus home with me the night Cosmo died. I’m glad I’m wearing Mama’s pink skirt and beads that I wore over to Cosmo’s when Livvy and I visited him and he gave us gingerbread. They hadn’t been in the box of things Jim Beresford brought with him the day he delivered Livvy to the Hetheringtons, so he visited Daddy at the treatment center and got the key. I went with him over to the house.
It was strange going into the house with no one there. Just the noise of the fridge running, but the television silent, and everything left just as if we’d all been suddenly sucked up into a spaceship by aliens.
Grandma’s cigarette butts in her ashtray, a bone china cup and a teapot on her TV tray, an empty sherry bottle on the floor by the sofa, a half-eaten package of potato chips, some videos on the end table, Titanic on the top of the pile.
“These need to go back to the video store,” I told Jim.
I made another box of my things and Livvy’s from the upstairs bedrooms, taking down the photos from my room and tucking those on top.
“You look great, Barbara,” Nathan whispers to me in the parking lot at the Unitarian Church. “Pretty skirt.”
“It was Mama’s,” I say. “You look good, too. I like your tie.”
“Uncle T-Ted’s,” Nathan grins.
The church is filled. I recognize some of the kids from the workshop.
Jessica-Marie in her lumberjack shirt and overalls. The boy with the ponytail is wearing a velvet vest embroidered with flowers and bees and butterflies. He and Nathan say, “Hey, man,” to each other.
At Mama’s funeral, I remember, a minister did just about all of the things there were to do, but here a lot of different people get up to talk.
“ThThat’s J. J.,” Nathan nudges me when a young woman with a tangle of red curls, a Barbra Streisand kind of nose and a wide friendly mouth takes her turn at the front. She smiles and nods at everyone, stops for a second and roots in her pockets for something, pulls out a red clown nose and puts it on. A titter ripples through the room.
“You might think this is for comic effect,” she tells us, “but Cosmo, very aware of the Jimmy Durante protuberance midway between my eyes and my mouth, always said this was a cosmetic improvement for me. And, Cosmo, I do want to look as cosmetically perfect as possible for you today.”
Cloud has slipped in late and sits beside us. Her hair is strawberry-colored today, and she’s wearing something that looks like a black cock-tail dress along with logger’s boots.
“Cosmo never thought of himself as a brave person,” J. J. continues, “but, like many people living with AIDS, he had the courage to look at the future, to sense and prepare for closure. Most of you know that he lost his longtime companion, Roberto, five years ago, and I know he believed that what lay ahead was a step toward a reunion with the person he loved most in the world. He didn’t talk about it as a possibility, but a certainty.”
