by Alix Ohlin
“Keep it,” he said.
She grimaced. “You have no idea how itchy a cast is. It’s almost worse than the pain.”
“It sounds awful, Grace.”
“Oh, it’s not,” she said lamely. “They think I’ll be able to go home soon. I don’t know about going back to work.”
“What kind of teacher are you, again?”
She closed her eyes, her voice faint and distant. “Grade six. In Beaconsfield.”
“What happened to your practice?”
“It’s a long story,” she said. It was the second time she’d used the shopworn phrase about this, and he didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure why he was here. Of course he was worried about her, as he would be about anyone he knew in this condition. But maybe there was something else, too. These days he felt disconnected from everything, even his own past, and seeing Grace again after so many years seemed to offer him something: a thread, a hope of stitching himself back together.
“How about you?” she said. “How’s your work?”
That was the last question he wanted to answer. But he could see she was tired of talking, so he told her about his group this morning. The young man who was already forming a crush on the thirty-year-old management consultant next to him (Grace nodded very slightly at this), the older bus driver whose only contribution to the discussion was to say, “My wife made me come.” The mousy, brown-haired woman who didn’t say anything after she introduced herself and then, halfway through, burst into tears. The bus driver, with an immediate, fatherly instinct, patted her shoulder as she buried her head in her hands. And everyone else relaxed, because each of them knew that at least one other person in the room felt just as desperate and injured as they did. Grace listened to all this with her eyes closed; except for that initial nod, she didn’t move at all. Her breathing was soft, and he wasn’t sure if she was awake, if he was keeping her company or simply filling the room with noise. After a while, he ran out of substance-abuse anecdotes. They were quiet together, and he felt strangely peaceful. Between the slatted blinds a ray of late-afternoon winter sun shot into the room, thin but brilliant, streaking across Grace’s face, and she squinted. When he realized she couldn’t move away from it, he got up and closed the blinds.
“Well,” he said, “I guess I’d better leave you alone. Sorry I talked your ear off.”
Grace smiled at him, but her eyes looked tired. “It was nice,” she said, “but you don’t have to keep coming here, you know. It was kind of you to help with the apartment and everything, but you’ve done enough.”
Mitch snorted—the idea that he’d ever done enough seemed ridiculous, given the recent truths of his life—but then nodded. “I don’t mean to intrude.”
“You’re not intruding,” she said. “You’ve been great. But you’ve done so much already.”
This was as direct a request to leave as Grace would ever utter. Yet something bound him there in the room—her wan eyes, or his need to be of help. “Where are your parents?” he said.
She sighed. “My father died a few years ago. My mother isn’t well enough to travel.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her head moved slightly in a gesture that was meant to be a shrug. She was exhausted now, her eyes fluttering open and closed, her hands splayed out beside her, palms up. He moved closer, wanting to touch her arm, to somehow lend her some of his physical strength, because she needed it.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t have a lot going on, so let me help you out. For old times’ sake.”
“That’s not a good reason,” she said, and the dryness of her voice was a reminder that all was not simple between them.
But she must have changed her mind, because a week or so later the phone rang one evening, and it was her, sounding quiet but determined.
“It’s me, Grace. I’m out of the hospital.”
“Congratulations! How are you doing?”
“I’ll live,” she said. “Listen, I decided I’d like to take you up on your offer.”
“I’m glad,” he said, and he was.
“Azra’s overextended, and a couple of my other friends have flaked out on me. Do you think you could help me with some errands and getting Sarah to and from school?”
“Of course I can.”
There was a pause. “That’s, well, it’s good of you,” she said awkwardly.
“It’s not a big deal, Grace. I’m happy to do it.”
The next day he went over. He found her on the couch wearing a gray sweater, the bottom half of her body swaddled in a thick wool blanket, her cast a raised lump beneath it. She looked better than she had in the hospital, but not by much. A small end table was set up with essentials: a glass of water, a box of tissues, a cluster of yellow pill vials.
“Thanks again for doing this,” she said.
“Stop thanking me,” Mitch said. “Please.”
She grimaced a little, as if her pride hurt as much as her injuries. Looking at the place more closely than he had the first time, he noticed that the furniture was slipcovered in her favorite colors, blues and pale greens, and he recognized several of the watercolors hanging on the walls. At a cruel moment late in their marriage, he had told her that her taste was bland; now it struck him as soothing, and he felt peculiarly at home. It was a quiet place, still as a pond.
“Sarah’s over at a friend’s,” Grace said. “Here, I have a list.”
On a yellow legal pad—and Mitch remembered now that she had always used one as a student—she had written down a succession of chores. Laundry. Groceries, with each item detailed down to the brand. Sarah’s schedule, when to drop her off and when to bring her back. The things Sarah liked for lunch. A manual of parenting, with everything explained, in Grace’s round, neat handwriting.
Her voice was all business. “I’ll tell you where the laundry baskets and the machines are,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t mind doing this?”
“Please,” he said. “I’m glad to have something to do.”
It sounded more pathetic than he intended, as if he didn’t have anything else to do, which wasn’t exactly true. Or possibly it was a little bit true. But he busied himself around the place for an hour or so, then went out to Loblaws and came back to unload the groceries into the fridge and cupboards. All the while Grace lay on the couch, drifting in and out of consciousness. At first she seemed to make an effort to raise her head when he came into the living room, but when he told her to rest she closed her eyes gratefully.
He did laundry in the basement, nodding at a neighbor who glanced at him curiously, and ran a few errands off Grace’s list during the washing and drying cycles. When the clothes were dry, he brought them back up to the apartment and put her things away in her dresser, trying not to look too closely at the underwear. Sarah’s impossibly small clothes went into the white dresser in her room. When he came back into the living room, Grace’s eyes were open, but her expression was even more strained.
“Are you okay?” he blurted. “Is the pain worse?”
“I have to ask you to do something,” she said. “I am so, so sorry about this.”
Right away he knew what it was, and oddly enough felt no hesitation. It was a relief to have another specific, physical task that needed to be accomplished. “It’s all right. Remember when you got food poisoning in India? I’ve already been through the worst.”
“Thanks for bringing that up,” she said, but then she smiled.
He crouched near her. She smelled both gamy and chemical, like a specimen left unattended too long in some dusty lab. An unwashed scent mixed with the must of bandages and ointment. She pointed at the bedpan under the end table, and when he arranged it beneath her, tears glistened in her eyes from the pain of the jostling. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“It’s not your fault.”
He left her alone for a few minutes, then collected and emptied the bedpan. When he came back again, Grace had cleaned herself and he disposed of the trash s
he’d left in a container by the couch. Her eyes had a burning, febrile expression, part humiliation, part pain.
“Worse than India?” he said.
“Much worse,” she said.
He squeezed her hand and put his arm around her as gently as he could, and her head collapsed against his chest, her body buckling with a sob. For a few minutes they sat like that, then she shook her head and wiped her eyes. The most awful moment, he understood, had passed.
At five o’clock Sarah’s friend’s mother brought her home, and Sarah approached the couch with the same fearful care that Mitch had noted in the hospital. He microwaved some pizza, poured juice, and set up a video for her to watch on the TV. She was very quiet and sat beside her mother on the couch with her knees curled up to her chin, leaning timidly into the corner cushions.
An hour later, when a friend of Grace’s stopped by to help them get ready for bed, Mitch said it was time he left.
“Thank you,” Grace said, her eyes again filling with tears.
“Please,” he said. “It’s all right.”
So he slipped into her life through the side door. He didn’t think that much about it, or wonder if it was right or wrong. What he’d told her was the truth: he was grateful to have something to do.
Over the next two weeks, he stopped by Grace’s every few days. He stocked the apartment with food. He drove Sarah to school and back home. He did laundry.
When he mentioned to his brother on the phone what was happening, Malcolm laughed. “I never pictured you as Mr. Mom,” he said.
Mitch was annoyed. “That’s not it,” he said, and explained that other friends of Grace’s were also taking turns in the rotation. But it was true that he never much bothered with these domestic tasks in his own life, where he had only himself to look after.
“Okay,” Malcolm said good-naturedly. “Isn’t it weird, though, hanging out with Grace and her kid?”
“No,” Mitch said. “Not after such a long time, anyway.”
But parts of it were, in fact, a little weird. Sarah, for example, was totally different from Mathieu. If he lived in a universe boundaried by his own mind, a planet of dinosaur facts and physics equations, she craved constant interaction with other people. She always ran to the door to let Mitch in, less out of any particular affection for him than a burning desire to talk to someone. She told him stories, put on costumes and danced for him, held his hand and asked him to play. Her need for attention was infinite. He wondered if she had been like this with Grace before the accident or if her clinginess came from knowing that her only parent was fragile and could disappear. He often came home exhausted, not from doing chores but from playing with Sarah.
As for Grace, she sometimes had bad days when her pelvis was hurting—she was trying hard to cut down on her pain medication—and would snap at him or barely register his presence. Other days, desperate for company after lying alone by herself in the apartment all day, she wanted to talk almost as much as her daughter.
One night the three of them played Sorry!, a game Mitch hadn’t seen since he was a child and was amazed still existed. Sarah clasped her hands together in feverish concentration as she bent her head over the pieces. She knew all the rules, about bumping and sliding and the safety zone, and explained them to him carefully, condescendingly, as if he were the nine-year-old. But he kept messing up—doing things with his pawn that he wasn’t supposed to—at first because he didn’t remember how to play and later just to get a rise out of Sarah, who rolled her eyes, stuck out her palms with exaggerated irritation, and exclaimed, “Mitch! How many times do I have to tell you about this!”
“Sorry, Sarah. I’m old and slow.”
She nodded. “I know that. You can’t help it.”
Across the table, Grace’s eyes met his, sparkling with suppressed laughter, and he smiled. He was having a good time. And it was peculiar to find himself once again in the company of a single woman and her child. Not that they were replacements for Martine and Mathieu. The time he spent with them was at once less stressful, with no element of romance, and more uncomfortable, because his role was less defined. Sarah was less extreme in her behavior than Mathieu, and Grace was far less tempestuous than Martine. It felt not like a repetition of the previous triangle but a new version of it, from another angle. A pattern stretching across the recent years of his life.
They let Sarah win, and Grace read her a story, and then the two of them helped her change into her pajamas. Mitch took her into the bathroom and helped her brush her teeth, gently guiding the toothbrush around her small mouth, afraid of hurting her. She bared all her teeth in the mirror, a crazy person’s smile, and said, “All clean.”
She climbed into bed, muttering some story, her room dark except for the blue glow of the nightlight. She was whispering herself to sleep, casting a spell, and didn’t seem to notice when he left.
Back in the living room, Grace was sitting on the couch. As he walked in, she examined him so openly, so curiously, that he felt self-conscious. “My friends think you’re a saint,” she said. “They say no other guy would do what you’re doing.”
He shrugged, blushing a little.
“I said you’re just feeling guilty about something,” she went on. “So what is it?”
This was Grace all over. She didn’t let you get away with anything. He shrugged again. “I let people down,” he said.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Would you like a glass of wine? I think there’s a bottle of Bordeaux in the cupboard.”
Mitch was touched by this. When they were married he drank Bordeaux almost exclusively, the most expensive he could afford, afraid of seeming unsophisticated. These days he drank whatever was offered or on hand. In the kitchen, he uncorked the bottle and poured himself a glass, then went back to the living room and sat down in an armchair kitty-corner to Grace. The color was back in her face, and Azra had come by the day before and helped her take a bath and wash her hair. She no longer had a wince of constant pain. She raised her mug of tea in a toast.
“You’re looking a lot better,” he said.
“No I’m not,” she said firmly. “I look like forty miles of rough road. As my grandmother used to say.”
He laughed, and they sat in silence over their drinks. Without a specific task to do, being with her did feel odd; the familiarity, combined with the distance between them, set him on edge. It was like seeing yourself in a funhouse mirror, with your features distorted and your body torqued yet insistently, regrettably, your own. Only now, sitting in her living room, did he realize what a good job he’d done of burying the painful aspects of their divorce, and how violently they still pulsed beneath the layers of the intervening years.
Stymied, he said, “Why aren’t you practicing anymore?”
“Oh, I’m practicing,” she said. It was a long-standing joke between them, so old he was surprised she even remembered it. “I’m just not very good.”
“Elementary school teacher,” Mitch said. “Tell me how that happened.”
Something flitted across her face—pain, of course, but other things too, maybe memory, even humor, in some elusive combination he couldn’t decipher. She was older and less beautiful, his ex-wife, and he wasn’t in love with her anymore; but seeing her pain was like feeling his own, because for so long he had had a part in it.
“It was the usual, I guess. Burnout.”
He didn’t believe her but didn’t think it was his right to press. “I never pegged you for that, somehow. I thought your energy was endless.”
Grace looked at him thoughtfully. “Maybe the problem was that I had too much. That I thought you can accomplish things you really can’t.”
He waited.
“I had some patients,” she said slowly, and then stopped.
“You realized you couldn’t do as much for them as you’d hoped.”
She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, tears brightening her eyes.
&nbs
p; “But sometimes we can do too much,” he said. “We almost have too much power, don’t you think?”
She shook her head. “I think people do whatever they want, no matter what we say.”
“Maybe so,” he said.
“Anyway, so I closed my practice and went back to school and became a teacher. It works well with Sarah, too, because we have the summers together. And what about you, Mitch? You still like your job? It seems like you’re doing well, from what I hear at the hospital.”
“Oh, there’s not much to report,” he said.
Grace’s smile was tight. “Lucky you.”
Afterward he walked out into the breezy night and strolled around the neighboring park before getting back in his car. He was a little tipsy from the wine, and the cool air felt good on his face. Plenty of others—dog walkers, hacky sack players, groups of teenagers—were in the park, reluctant to give up on the long nights of summer, with fall looming dark before them.
He walked along Monkland, on a route they might’ve taken together a long time ago. People were sipping drinks on the outside terraces, laughing and chatting. The door to the Old Orchard pub was open, the high, quick notes of a Celtic fiddler embroidering the air. Then he left the bustling avenue and drifted back to the side street where he was parked, the noise dampened by the leafy trees.
The windows of Grace’s apartment were dark. Before leaving, he had asked how she thought Sarah was doing, and from the small nod that greeted the question he understood this was the first thing he should have said.
“She seems good. Her teacher says she’s doing great. I don’t know, though. I worry that she’ll be affected by seeing me like this. I feel like I should talk to her about it, but everybody says I should just let it go.”
“Is that what you’re going to do? Let it go?”
Grace met his eyes. “No,” she said.
In the lamplight her face was burnished and sallow. She looked both hopeful and sad, so much like she had when they were younger, and he drew closer to her, drawn by memory or habit or some instinct that would never die in him as long they both lived.
