John’s kids were over at the rented cabin, fighting and watching television, too big now really for cabin vacations, big enough to be surly and to roll their eyes, big enough to be on the edge of being actively-disagreeable adults.
He had discussed this with Heather before they left. He was excited enough about the idea of recapturing the fun of old vacations that he had carried on about it for more than a week, his words fast and almost without punctuation, excited enough that he hadn’t realized that he was the only one paying attention. Heather had thought the trip a bad idea, saying he was trying to make up for time hopelessly lost, trying to recreate time he had wasted through inattention, and that the children, one now a teenager and the other twelve, would not be the laughing, beach-loving kids he seemed to be expecting. But, uncharacteristically, he had forced the issue, made the plans and booked the cabin, talked excitedly about how much fun it would be, even while the other three had taken turns telling him he was wrong, that it was a bad idea, that, like so many of his ideas, it was destined to fail.
And now it seemed like they were right, because it had unravelled quickly into fighting in the too-small cabin, bickering first over who would get which bed, and tumbling downhill from there to the easy, sibling back-and-forth that is both effortless to take part in and exhausting to listen to.
Four o’clock, and he watched Heather walk evenly across the grass towards the enclosure where the outdoor swimming pool and hot tub were, the hot tub up high enough so that he could easily see over the fence. He could tell his wife was angry by the way she pointed her toes inwards with every step, purposefully putting each foot down in line, like a cat’s tracks in shallow snow. She was looking at the ground, walking the anger tightrope, wound up tight as a drum. And he knew why, this time, knew she was frustrated that he was in the hot tub while she was at the cabin, and he could imagine the kids fighting offhandedly, her irritation growing as sharp as the sound of a knife drawn hard against a plate. He watched her come in through the gate, carefully latch it, and walk to the edge of the hot tub without even putting a step out of line. It was, he thought, beautiful, but in a dangerous way, like plum-coloured flames skipping toward you across spilled gasoline.
“Come back over to the barbecue,” she said quietly, smiling. “Come back over to the barbecue and I’ll get you a beer from the fridge.” But he didn’t answer, looking at the ruler-straight line of green that was the front edge of a farmer’s field across from the cabins. Wheat, he thought, or maybe oats. Maybe oats; he didn’t know. Forty-one years old, he thought, and I don’t know wheat from damned oats.
Heather leaned in close to him.
“Get out of the fucking hot tub,” she whispered quickly and angrily, her face turned away from the swimming pool so the kids from Quebec couldn’t hear her. “Get out of the fucking hot tub and get back to the cabin, and we’ll talk about it there.” John wondered about her face then, wondered if the skin under her eyes always got darker when she was really angry. He was studying her like she was a science experiment, not like her face belonged to someone he knew, and he realized it was only the three otters in the pool that were keeping her from exploding.
When she walked away, he could tell by each line of her body, by the precise straight swing of her arms, by the way she was holding her shoulders, that she was beyond furious. That she was so angry that she was depending on the rigidity of her body to maintain control over her temper. He could almost hear the words zinging around her head, “So stay there. You can drown for all I care.”
By six, still floating, he had figured out that it must be a hawk that was hanging in the sky over the field, hanging up there with its wings peaked like surprised eyebrows, swaying slowly back and forth on the shifting thermal updrafts. John wondered what it was the hawk was seeing, whether the bird was focusing on one small patch in the field, or whether it was looking across the whole panorama beneath it, seeing as part of the view a pale man banked against the light blue side of the hot tub, seeing the three children as they left the pool with their mother, closing the gate behind them. She had come over to the hot tub before that, surprising John, asking him how hot the water was, trailing her fingertips in the bubbles for a moment. She called out goodbye when the gate was closing. Someone was mowing grass – he could hear the distant, regular purr of the mower, although he couldn’t see it, and occasional breaths of wind brought the clear, sweet smell of the cut grass. It was the time in summer when seconds drag and minutes trail, when the day limps weakly towards evening under the weight of the summer heat.
It was even hotter in the tub: John could feel the fat beads of sweat rolling out of his hairline, rolling down his cheeks and narrowly missing the corners of his eyes. Now and then, he’d lay his arms on the deck, and once, he stood up to pull a towel over towards him. The sudden movement made him dizzy for a moment, stars and snow jumping in front of his eyes – he twisted the plastic cap from the big bottle of water, and drank deeply.
Two families came out to play a game of catch in the grassy open field directly beside the pool fence, kids and parents and a ball and bat, and even with his eyes closed John could picture the loosely-played game, could hear the hard wooden thwack of the bat and the rush of feet, the crowded, eager yells of children scrambling for the ball.
The robins started their late, liquid songs, and the ball players left, and still Heather didn’t come back. He had heard her call his name once or twice, short, sharp yells, cut off abruptly like someone calling a disobedient pet. John. John. Then a door slamming, hard.
By nine, the sun was tilting down. Sky orange along the horizon, the upwards-reaching arms of the trees suddenly and sharply jet black, branches set so sharply against the sky that they were matte and completely without depth, just simple cut-outs pasted up against the whorled depth of the sky. The pool was lit up blue in the fading evening, the white underwater lights playing off the blue-painted bottom, the brightness of the water sharpening with each subtle darkening of the sky, until the lights made it glow electric and unnatural. Strings of coloured patio lights wobbled along the fence top, teetering in the slightest breeze. To John, the water surrounding him no longer felt hot, hardly even warm, and not because it was cooling. By then, the skin on his hands and feet felt waterlogged, and he could imagine his feet, naked and stark-white and horrendously wrinkled, soft as sponges and never again needed for walking.
I am, he thought, acclimatizing, learning to live in the heat like the peculiar sea-bottom bacteria that thrive around volcanic fumeroles.
Fumeroles, he thought. What a strange word, what an awkward word, to have stuck in memory, to be remembered instead of discarded like so many others. He could picture a fumerole from some once-watched nature special, videotape shot through the thick glass eyepiece of a deep-diving submersible, the hot water and silt boiling up like smoke. He let his back slide down until his chin reached the water, then pulled his whole body under. I am a submarine, he thought, diving to the fumeroles. But at the last moment he decided not to open his eyes, and came back up to the surface gasping when his breath ran out. The water that ran into his eyes stung like fire.
At eleven, they turned off the lights between the cabins, and the stars suddenly sprang out in the sky. He could hear the fizz of the water, and smell the alkali-chlorine hot-springs breath of it. Heather had given up calling by then. She clearly planned to wait him out instead, and the echoes of other daytime voices had long since stopped ringing off the sides of the cabins.
Fire pits were lit in front of some of the cabins now, burning sappy wood that snapped and cracked and filled the air with a thin grey smoke that smelled strongly of pine. Slab wood, the bark-covered, outside-edge leftovers from sawmill lumber, rough-cut and splintery and dry as dust, and, from around the fires, John could hear low voices, fragments of conspiratorial sentences, tossed out haphazardly from the chairs grouped around the small pools of firelight.
“Right over the green, and he said…”
&nbs
p; “I couldn’t believe…”
“Just one more time and I would have said ‘No way, you’re gone,’ but…”
They were soft words, almost murmurs, escaping only occasionally from the fire’s edge as if each individual syllable had tunneled its way out under the blanket of darkness.
His attention was wandering – his body strangely heavy and his face felt flushed with sunburn. The water bottle was more than half empty. He hung his arms out over the edge of the hot tub, watched them loll, over-fat, fleshy and almost beyond his control. He imagined himself as a drowned man, caught in the ebb and flow of the tide, seaweed and sea-wrack all around him. He could imagine lying limp in the Irish moss washed up at the edge of the ocean, the delicate, rolled edges of the pink seaweed curled around him, the iodine smell thick in the air, face up to the sun and the blue sky. He could feel how the shallow, lapping waves would lift his ankles, then the rest of his body, could hear their light, open-handed slap against the shore.
Perhaps two early beach-walkers, wearing serious walking shoes and multi-pocketed khaki shorts, would be the first to find him. Big, safe, sun-shielding, sensible hats, sunglasses dangling on strings, they would be faced by the wreckage left behind after the shrimp and the seagulls and the crab and lobster had all taken their turn at his exposed flesh. He could imagine their shock and horror, how they would step back and hunt in their pockets for the handy efficiency of a cell phone. In his imagination, John drew limply-flapping yellow police tape around himself on the beach, sand grains thick in his hair and in the corners of whatever might be left of his eyes.
And then a different thought: he imagined Heather and the kids walking along the beach, walking above the tide line on the ruled-flat, fine sand, their footprints webbed out behind them, their eyes downcast, faces serious, as if they expected to find something important in all that sand. He imagined them walking and walking, their steps stretching out behind them in ever-longer sentences of explanation and regret, rambling words unspoken, unheard, unread.
As the lights inside the cabins were winking out, he began to smile – a thin, hard smile that made his mouth seem all wrong inside the round softness of his face.
By two in the morning, lit only by the single streetlight near the outdoor phone, he was asleep, lulled by the gentle whirr of the pump, bubbles coming up in waves under his armpits, lingering across his chest. Almost floating, he dreamt about rain, about the ditches filling quickly with fast brown water, about the brush on both sides of the road heavy with rain, branches trailing down to the ground. The ditch water overflowing, forcing itself into culverts. Branches and small uprooted trees rushed by in the flowing water and, in his dream, he could hear the sibilant speech of the gravel wicking over the ridges in the metal culverts. The water was undercutting the edge of the road’s shoulder, then sweeping away falls of gravel that toppled into the water. Small rocks hissed and sang, and the water pulling down into the culverts built brown sucking whirlpools capped with dirty round hats of brown-flecked foam. And in the dream, he swept through the culverts and rushed towards the sea himself, bouncing over the short falls in the ditches and fleeing into the stream that ran deep and silt-dirty under the road to the river, going exactly where he was sent by the rushing waters, arms and legs limp and dancing in the ridges and valleys of the waves. There was no point grabbing at the trees along the sides of the water; he knew that they would either give way or his hands would fail to get a proper grip, that the effort of getting out of the water would be profoundly exhausting.
While he slept, a late-night thunder storm grumbled off to the west of the cabins, big clouds piled high and grey against the night, backlit by the occasional flash and wink of lightning, the kind of storm whose laconic travel along the horizon ticks like nature’s clock, measuring with soft and imprecise strokes.
And he dreamt about the woman from Quebec, dreamt that he knew her, that he should know her name, that it should come to him unbidden at the simple memory of the brush strokes that shaped her face. But her name stayed disturbingly out of reach, a feathery thought that would not allow itself to be grasped.
He dreamt that she came to the pool, alone, stepping with long, incautious steps, and walked to where he lay, his head canted back against the side of the hot tub. That she reached out and ran a long, cool fingertip across the curve of his upper lip, over that shallow valley directly beneath his nostrils; all the time without speaking, just smiling gently. And he smelled a fragrance he had not smelled since high school, a perfume that he could always place and never remember having smelled again, the perfume the wife of his grade 12 English teacher used to wear. Tall and willowy, she had always seemed to move without walking, had seemed to float past the enraptured high school boys before they were even in a position to recognize the magic of her motion.
But when he opened his eyes, there was only the black, cool night and the gentle fizz of the sounds in his ears. This time, he knew he was smiling. And this time, he knew why.
Dawn often starts as a grey line on the morning after a sunny day, a grey starting that widens like an eye opening slowly from sleep in a familiar room. Then the arc of the sky blues, ever so slightly, and the periphery of stars begins to fade, leaving only the most energetic behind. The first birds start to sing awkwardly, throwing out fragments of their songs, as if every morning they have to learn the full melody all over again. The streetlights turn off, one by one, their sensors snapping away their pools of orange light, and the sky fills with light like singers singing. The gradient lightens from the bottom up, and the blues of the sky develop as if they were photographs gently rocking in a tray of darkroom developing fluid.
By the time John woke up, the sky had rinsed itself to blue. When he opened his eyes, the caretaker, an odd-looking thin man with a small head and arms too long for his body, was skimming leaves from the surface of the pool with a long-handled white net.
John saw that the caretaker was staring at him, and lifted one wet, puffy hand in an awkward wave. And the caretaker took one hand from the net and waved back, and then quickly looked away, scooping up the leaves and the struggling insects that had been lured into the pool by the rippling nighttime lights.
Looking towards the cabins, he could see the woman from Quebec hanging beach towels over the railings on the deck behind her cabin. The quadrangle of grass was empty, except for a small flock of star-lings hopping along, bending their heads and pecking fitfully at the ground. She turned towards him, and smiled a knowing smile, the kind of smile that is more a shared answer than a question. With one long finger, she touched her upper lip.
And he knew then that he was rushing towards the surface, still able to feel and touch, that while his skin felt waterlogged and heavy, he hadn’t really drowned. Not yet. He lifted himself out of the water, feeling the air on his skin and the ordered sense of muscles and bones moving as he stood up and climbed over the edge of the hot tub. The water streamed down his skin, staining the brown wood of the stairs. With deliberate effort, he took that strange and unfamiliar first step.
On Call
“YOU CAN’T BE TOO CAREFUL,” HE SAID, AND he put the knife right in front of my face. He was right. You can’t.
It’s funny how my head works at times like that – I measure, examine. Useless information – a flick knife, about four inches long, blade with a channel, wooden handle held together with brass rivets. Blade long enough to permanently damage internal organs – liver, spleen, lungs, heart. Longenough to do slapdash punctures through roping yards of intestine, long enough to nick the jugular or aorta on its knifely travels, long enough to open a femoral artery, the big leg bleeder.
I’m always doing that – prepping for what comes next, trying to visualize the damage you don’t have time to get tests to con firm.
I should have been thinking “walk slowly for the door, get away,” but instead, I was assembling information – still diagnosing. I should have been thinking about why we didn’t have panic buttons in the exa
mining rooms, and why I was in there alone with him, anyway.
Sometimes you get an early hint. And he gave me one – I’ve been an emergency room doctor for enough years now, and usually the first clue is early in the workup, while the door’s still open and no one has their clothes off yet.
His was right inside the door, the first few words already filled out on his chart.
“Name – Miller, Robert.”
You try to jolly them along, sometimes, try to get them away from focusing on their symptoms. Especially when they’ve been waiting a long time, and this guy had been.
“How are you tonight, Robert?”
“Don’t call me that,” he said. The tone of his voice should have said it all.
“That’s not your name?” I asked – I hate it when the triage nurse gets it wrong.
“That’s the name they gave me. My real name is Elephra.” He spelled it for me – it wasn’t the name on his medicare card, clipped right there at the top of his chart.
Wind it all back and I should have known right there. I should have stuck my head out the door and gotten one of the big orderlies, the guys whose uniform shirts strain at the buttonholes all across their chests, the guys who like putting the wild ones into restraints. But I didn’t – and that was the first mistake.
The second mistake was purely positional. Picture a hospital examining room, door in one corner, everything pretty much white, the gurney – you know, the bed you sit on – in the middle of the room, cupboards with everything from stitches to basins to bandages. The big light overhead. If I’d been thinking, you see, I’d have been on the door side of the examining table, facing him. Any doubts at all, have your back to the door – it gives you a couple of steps, anyway, a chance to get out into the hall and to start yelling at the top of you lungs.
But I’d walked to the other side, with my back to the cupboards. He was between me and the door I’d closed so he could take off his shirt and show me his back.
The Hour of Bad Decisions Page 4
