by Joan Barfoot
So many aspects to be leery of, with a still-unfamiliar man who came with a jam-packed history: a dead wife growing, perhaps, increasingly golden with time; the naturally passionate attachment to offspring, which Isla herself knew something about; even a susceptibility to miraculous places. Isla wondered why he had taken her there, what reason she’d imagined for going there with him. “And now you’re here,” he’d said then, “and that seems right, too.”
So it was. And oh, she wants to be there. They should not have left, they should not have stepped from that porch, climbed into that truck, gone off for ice cream. They could have been safe.
But instead, here she is; and now here he is, too, back in this strange off-white room. He is lowering himself beside another hospital bed, leaning carefully over another wife, his features looking pinched, the lines that run from the side of his nose down past his lips deeper than normal. He looks, this man to whom Isla edged closer and closer before finally giving up, giving in, falling into faith, weary now; nearly old. God knows how she looks. “Mirror,” she says.
He is clearly alarmed. “Oh no, not yet. You’re still kind of wonky.” Wonky: which means distorted and skewed. Which may also mean scary.
He can’t realize it’s not just about seeing her face, it’s seeing that she has one; that she’s still real at all. “Mirror,” she repeats, and he sighs and stands and moves out of her line of vision.
In a few moments he’s beside her again, holding a round green-plastic-framed mirror to his chest, arms folded across it. “Listen,” he says, “it’ll probably look worse to you than to anyone else. It’s too soon, you’re still puffy and bruised. Partly because of the tubes. So don’t be shocked, okay? You’re going to be fine.” If she could, she would gesture impatiently. He sighs and steps forward, turns the mirror away from himself, aims it directly above her.
Oh. He should have warned her. Somebody should have said.
This is a gargoyle. Grey-skinned, except for some bruising near her nostrils. Tubes, a nasty yellowish colour, holding those nostrils wide above a plastic span joining them. Eyes, her wide blue eyes diminished to slitty, peering things in a bed of charcoal flesh. Her skin is stretched thin over cheeks, chin, jowls — she has jowls! — that have bloated, look full to bursting. Her curly, cropped auburn hair, discernibly grey at the roots from this angle, is spiked and dirty. And clamping the whole thing, a metal frame, curved and padded. Which accounts for why her head doesn’t move, and why she has to look straight up into this mirror or slant her eyes as best she can sideways.
Oh. This is the horror Lyle’s been looking at. For how long? If she could do one thing, one single thing, she would put her hands over this face.
“Tell me,” she says, and watches Lyle’s lips turn briefly inward, as he takes a difficult breath. She is relieved that she can see and hear even minor events exceptionally clearly, and wonders if that’s supposed to be some sort of compensation for loss, for what she can’t put her fingers on.
For what, if she could put her fingers on it, she wouldn’t be able to feel.
Where are her fingers? What are they doing? Lyle’s hands are down there somewhere, around where hers should probably be, his clever deft hands she would like to be holding. When they were in court, in the moments before Jamie’s verdict was announced, Lyle’s hand was the strongest, most comforting, sturdiest and most reliable set of bones and flesh in the world. She wondered right then how she would have managed to sit there without that hand, and what on earth she’d hung onto before it came along. She squeezed it, he said later, numb. Maybe now he’s squeezing hers numb.
She not only looks grotesque, it seems she exists now only in her head. This is like an old horror movie: a laboratory run by a mad, wild-haired scientist, with a disembodied head in a jar, a battle between the proud but horrified scientist and the furiously calculating, raging brain. The scientist is a victim of his own sacrilegious ambition to create. The head, reliant on wits and ruthlessness, is also a victim of that sacrilegious ambition. Nobody wins. Everything is destroyed, for the error of hubris, the mistake of going too far.
They were only going for ice cream, not far at all.
“Tell me!” Because terror does not improve for its causes being unknown.
Vertebrae. Surgery. Bullet.
In bitter moments James used to look at her, narrow-eyed, narrow-lipped, threateningly low-voiced, and say, “Don’t ask anything you’re not ready to hear the answer to.” It eventually became obvious what he must have meant. Isla would say there are some questions for whose answers there’s no such thing as being prepared, but which there’s also, as with the mirror, no option about asking. She also thinks that her outlook always was more complex and interesting than James’s, who turned out to be disappointingly simple-minded, really.
“Do you remember any of it?” Lyle’s voice is low, slightly trembling, determinedly gentle. And oh, of course, he’d have no way to know what she knows and what she does not. He has no idea where gaps begin and end, and where he should start filling them in. Funny how she must have assumed he would know. Funny how much she has come to imagine he understands.
Perhaps his deepest desire at the moment is to run out of the room. Or to rage, or to weep. At any rate, likely his deepest desire is not to sit here regarding her, looking old and speaking further words she’s pretty sure she’s not keen to hear, but must. “I’m sorry,” she says, meaning in a general sort of way, sorry for imposing, taking his energy, time, generosity of spirit, for looking hideous and for being a burden in a way she doesn’t yet understand, and which she has to rely on him to make clear. Even that, the explanation, is something he signed up for, marrying her.
Mere love doesn’t encompass burdens like that. Marriage does. Lyle and Isla are tied up, bound down in ways that are not necessarily permanent, but which do apply, without doubt, to this moment. Just as Jamie and even Alix, who are irretrievably permanent, surely have no real choice but to come.
“Cholesterol,” she manages, although the word comes out somehow backwards. “Ice cream.” Even that’s slurred.
“Really? That’s what you remember?” He sighs slightly again.
If a sudden traffic jam had occurred in the freeways of his arteries, would she have sighed? Would she even, maybe, have felt trapped, or doomed, to have him entirely reliant on her, and her goodwill? Now she can’t look at him. What if she saw in him that kind of despair?
“Dr. Grant said you might not remember,” Lyle says. “He said that often happens with shock. I mean, some shocking event, not that you’re in shock. That it goes blank, but might all come suddenly back.”
“What else?”
“Did he tell me?”
“Yes. What will happen. To me.” Words are exhausting, she is getting worn out.
“Well, nothing really, right away. They want to wait, do more scans and tests, see what happens. They think it might work its own way out, which would be the best thing. If it doesn’t show signs of doing that, or if the tests start to show differently, then surgery. Likely surgery anyway, even if it does work itself free, but in that case it wouldn’t be as difficult. It’s a good thing you’re healthy. Well, healthy, you know what I mean. Strong to begin with. Anyway, they’ll see. We’ll see. They’re really good here, and they have high hopes. They think your chances are good.”
Has she never noticed before that he leaves out crucial words in just about every sentence, or is this newly acquired, a dodging and weaving response to whatever this is? What is the “it,” would it be the bullet the doctor referred to? And what are the “hopes,” and what are the “chances” they have in mind? She looks for a word she might be able to say, and comes up with “vague.”
Lyle nods. “Yes, well, it has to be, for a while, anyway. They don’t like committing themselves, too many lawsuits, probably, or warnings from lawyers like me about sayin
g anything’s a sure thing. But you and I know this isn’t permanent, and of course you’ll be moving and walking again. Very soon. This is just an interruption, but we’ll get through it, and you’ll be back to normal in a flash.”
Her listening stops after “permanent,” when he gets to “moving and walking.” Although she catches the “we” and is grateful.
His determined optimism sounds not only incomplete, but ominous. And also undependable, which from him is a blow in itself. “Tell me,” she says again. “Now,” she demands, and he bows his head, and takes another deep breath.
A Strange, Faraway Sky
Roddy came to this town, to his grandmother’s house, kicking and screaming. That was ten years ago. Now, lying flat on his back in the tall grain, watched over by two alert dogs and a thousand stars, he is dumbfounded by loss: that he cannot go home.
He finds things out too late. His rhythms are clumsy, he’s too often a beat or two off. That would account for today.
Some of his most momentous, although not always best, moments have been spent just like this: lying on his back, very still, looking upwards.
It’s how, when he was seven, he spent the first night of his and his dad’s long stay at his grandmother’s house. He never threw tantrums, but the day they moved, his dad’s loaded car leading the small moving truck that was enough for all they had left, Roddy screamed the whole way. When they reached town, he started kicking the dash. When they pulled up in front of his grandmother’s stuccoed grey house, he gripped the steering wheel, then the door frame, as his dad hauled him grimly out of the car. He even kicked at his grandmother, who held her arms around him hard.
By the time the three of them finally had supper, he was worn out. He was packed off to his new bedroom at the top of the house, while his grandmother and his dad made room downstairs for the things Roddy and his dad had arrived with. Roddy’s grandmother left a blue, teardrop-shaped nightlight plugged in by his bed, and its faintly reflecting light made the ceiling look like some strange, faraway sky.
He was very angry. About being uprooted from everything that was familiar; but also, if his mother went back to their little house in the city, and they weren’t there any more, how would she find them?
One morning his mother was there, giving Roddy a hug and a pat on the bum as he went off to school, and then when he got home the front door wasn’t locked and when he let himself in, nobody was there. Well, sometimes she wasn’t home, so that wasn’t strange for a couple of hours, even though she usually said if she was going to be out, maybe off to a movie, or on what she called one of her rambles.
Usually his dad went away in the mornings and came home at night and ate supper and turned on the TV and, sometime after Roddy did, went to bed. He’d tap Roddy’s shoulder sometimes, or ruffle his hair, call him “pal,” and if Roddy wanted or needed anything, he took care of it, like he brought home Roddy’s first two-wheeler, even though he wasn’t around much to help him learn to ride it. It was Roddy’s mother did that, running up and down the sidewalk holding the seat, keeping him more or less steady. She was fun. Like one time, she put up a pup tent in their tiny back yard so she and Roddy could camp out together, and they stayed up late while she told scary stories and made shadows with her hands on the canvas walls. At the park down the street, she screamed and laughed louder even than he did while she pushed him as high as the swings would go, higher than he could have ever gone on his own.
But then sometimes she got really tired and sad, and wouldn’t get out of bed, or off the sofa, day after day. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she’d say, “I’m just not myself today.”
Except if somebody wasn’t herself half the time, wouldn’t that be herself too? It was kind of confusing, but also dependable. He knew she’d be one thing or the other. It sometimes felt, in his friends’ houses, as if the adults were unreliable because even though they could smile or speak sharply, it didn’t always feel true, either one. Like they were wearing Hallowe’en masks. His mother wasn’t like that.
Sometimes she bugged Roddy’s dad until they went out, to a movie or dancing, even though his dad usually didn’t want to. When they went out, Roddy’s mother got all sort of glittery in the eyes. She looked happy.
When she still wasn’t back that day by the time his dad got home, and when his dad wasn’t surprised and was carrying pizza and started putting it out on two plates, that was strange too. He put a hand on Roddy’s shoulder and said, “Come into the living room, son, I’ve got something to tell you.”
Roddy was narrow and everybody said he looked like his mum, who was little and thin and had hair nearly as short as his, except curlier. In the living room, he perched on the edge of the sofa, like he did the days she was lying there with a blanket over her, just watching TV and sleeping, the days she wasn’t whooping around making up things to do.
“I don’t know if you understand,” his dad began finally, “that your mother has had some problems. You know how sometimes she’s happy and sometimes she isn’t?” Roddy nodded. “Well, look.” His dad leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, letting his big hands hang down loose. Look at what? His dad wasn’t even looking at Roddy, he was sort of staring into a corner, or maybe at the blank TV screen.
“Look, what that is, it turns out, is, it’s a kind of sickness she has. Most people don’t feel as good as she does sometimes, and for sure most people don’t feel as bad. It’s been hard on her going one way, then the other. Well, it’s been hard on us all.” Roddy shook his head; not hard on him.
“Anyway, today was a really bad day and what happened was, she hurt herself because she was feeling so terrible. So where she is, is in a hospital. She’s been to two hospitals today, actually. The first one was because she made her wrists bleed pretty bad, so we had to get that fixed up. And then she had to go to another hospital where they’re going to take care of her for a while and make sure she doesn’t want to hurt herself any more. You see?”
No. Roddy stared, but he sure didn’t see.
How did his dad know all this, for one thing? He worked all day. “She phoned me,” his dad said, as if he could hear what Roddy was thinking. “I called an ambulance and met her at the first hospital. See though, that’s a good thing, that she called. It means she didn’t want to, uh, she didn’t want to hurt herself too bad. And she didn’t want you to be scared when you came home from school. Because she was real sick today, but she was thinking of you and that’s a good sign.”
Roddy slid off the sofa and stood in front of his dad. “Let’s go see her.”
His father shook his head. “We can’t, I’m afraid. The hospital doesn’t want us to. Anyway she’s too sick.”
“Has she got bandages?”
“Some, yes. Just on her arms.”
She’d cut herself? On purpose she made herself bleed? When Roddy skinned his knees, or had a nosebleed, his mother got a wrinkly look while she put on the antiseptic and bandages or had him tilt his head back and wrapped ice cubes in tea towels. She didn’t like blood. Why would she make herself bleed? His eyes narrowed. Could his father be lying? Had he made up this story to hide something different, or worse? “I want to go see my mum.”
“I know you do, son.” His dad sighed. “But we can’t. I’m sorry, but we can’t.” He did look sad. Not the way Roddy’s mother could look sad, like her face had gone dead, but like he might cry. And then he looked right at Roddy and put his face into another arrangement and said in a new, louder voice, “So it’s just us boys, we can do what we want, so what do you feel like? We could go bowling, or a movie, whatever you’d like. Or we could make popcorn and watch TV till bedtime. What do you say?”
What Roddy would have said, if he dared, was how come his dad didn’t always go to movies or whatever with his mum when she wanted? He shrugged. “I don’t care. When’s Mum coming home, tomorrow?”
�
�Not tomorrow. I don’t know. We’ll see.”
“We’ll see,” was never a good thing.
Who turned up the next day instead of his mother was his dad’s mother, with a couple of suitcases. She didn’t live all that far away, only in a town instead of the city, and Roddy liked her but only knew her from visits, really. She kept hugging Roddy. Watching TV, she’d reach out and draw him into her cushiony side and they’d sit together on the sofa like that. But days went by, and she couldn’t tell him enough about his mother, and he still wasn’t allowed to go see her. “I know you miss her, honey,” his grandmother said, “but she’s too sick to have company.”
He couldn’t figure out what sick meant. Was she throwing up? He kept trying to find different ways to ask because maybe he just wasn’t saying it right, so nobody knew how to give the right answers.
“No, honey, she’s not throwing up, they could probably fix it more easily if she was sick that way. She’s sick another way, inside her head where it’s harder to fix.”
“Is she going to die?” The first time he asked that, it took all his courage, but after that it got easier because the answer was always the same good one. “Oh no, it’s not the kind of sickness that makes people die, don’t you worry about that.”
“Is it catching?” Like measles, or mumps, which would explain why he couldn’t go see her. When people had things other people could catch, they had to stay by themselves, except for whoever looked after them. Who was looking after his mother? She’d be scared if it was strangers.
