by Alix Ohlin
“Was he planning …,” she said. His parents waited for her to finish, her father’s elbows propped on the white tablecloth. “Was he coming back here?” Back to Marcie, she meant, but wasn’t sure if they understood.
They looked at her, both of them aged, stooped, the skin on their faces wrinkled and loose, as if the events of the past few weeks had weighted them physically, pulled them toward the ground. Tug’s father shrugged. “You know as much as we do.”
It seemed a terrible thought. All three of them knowing so little about him.
Sitting at this table, Grace realized that she had come because she hoped it might help her to decide what to do about the baby. But now she saw that his parents had no answers; they had as many questions as she did.
So many patients wanted her—or somebody, anybody—to make their choices for them, partly to absolve themselves of any blame. She always told them that no one else could live their lives for them, that they had to take ownership, and they were never pleased to hear it. What was worse than having to take responsibility for everything you did or felt or said? For the way your actions radiated out to change not just your own life, but those of the people around you? She understood fully now how hard it was to follow her own advice.
And Marcie. Grace ached for her, and for her sake truly wished she hadn’t come. And to say that she was pregnant—that was impossible, even if she decided to keep the baby. It would cause everyone so much more pain, and introduce endless complications. To keep the secret was terrible, yes, but to share it was even worse. She thought of what Tug had said about life in the “comfortable nations.” This house was a comfortable nation, she thought, or at least it wanted to be, to safeguard its borders and tend to its citizens. She shouldn’t disturb it any further.
“I’m sorry,” she said for what seemed like the hundredth time. “I’m sorry I came here. I didn’t mean to intrude.” Her voice trailed off, as if noting its own insincerity. Obviously intruding had been the entire purpose of her visit, but Tug’s parents were too polite to point this out. Silent Canadians.
Her heart throbbed for them, for the loss they had to bear, so much deeper and harder than her own. “I didn’t know Tug very well, or for very long,” she said, her voice gathering strength as she went on. “We were just friends. I’m a therapist, and he talked to me a little about his problems.”
Joy sat with her head bowed, as though receiving a benediction or a blow.
Grace was determined to make it the former. “He talked so much about you,” she said. “And Marcie. All of you. How much you had given him over the years. He felt terrible that everything he’d been through kept him apart from you.”
His mother sniffled.
“He loved you so much,” Grace went on. “He told me that often.”
Neither of them spoke, and she wondered if they would ever speak again. She stood up, but then Joy did too, throwing her arms around her with surprising speed and force. She was short and frail and it felt like being hugged by a sick child.
Grace spoke through tears into her short gray hair. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help him.”
She put her arms around Joy’s shoulders, a tentative, constrained hug. She had told what comforting lies she could, and she didn’t regret it. If anything, sad as she was, she felt closer than she ever had to Tug, who had told so many lies. The notion that he could go on, survive, find some happiness in the world—this was the biggest lie of all, not because it was outlandish or fake, but because it had been so possible and so close to coming true.
When she left a few minutes later, the rain had stopped and the sky was pearled and gray. She was holding a box of cookies that Joy had insisted she take—a memento she never would’ve imagined bringing home. As she got into the car she looked back at the house, where most of the curtains were drawn. But on the second floor a window was open and a lamp was shining, and she could see Marcie pacing back and forth with her hands in her hair.
Grace felt utterly alone. Having isolated herself within the miniature universe she and Tug had created together, so intent on rescuing him, she had almost forgotten how to live in the actual world. Now that he was gone, to emerge from that experience felt like waking from a drugged sleep.
Behind the steering wheel with the engine running and the heater on, she shivered not from the cold but from a sense of possibility, of the enormity that lay ahead. She knew she would have the child of a person she had loved for just a few months. Despite her pain and sorrow, it somehow felt like exactly what she’d always wanted—for her life to change in a way she couldn’t foresee. She said a silent farewell to Tug’s family and drove off into the future, and the unknown.
TWELVE
Montreal, 2006
AS THE FALL went on, Mitch’s work life settled into a routine that was, if not exactly easy, then comfortably regimented. Group-therapy meetings took up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Tuesdays and Thursdays he devoted to paperwork and individual counseling. It was the one-on-one sessions that spooked him most. With just one other person in the room, the narrowness of the equation struck him as dangerous and potentially explosive: eyes either glancing away from his or boring into him with pain or anger. It was simply too intense. To cut down on these, he volunteered to take on every administrative task he could instead, from grants and project management to a review of hospital procedures. At lunchtime, he’d close the door to his office and eat a sandwich he’d brought from home while listening to sports radio. Hockey season was starting and he let the predictions and opinions wash over him, defensive pairings and forward lines, who was being called up or traded, gambling scandals, injuries. Sometimes he even took notes, picking and discarding players for his fantasy team. When people knocked and came in, they often saw him scribbling away and frowning in concentration, and he let them think he was absorbed in work.
One weekend he went to visit Malcolm in Mississauga. His brother and Cindy lived in a messy, rowdy house in the suburbs, where they managed the chaos by constantly adding to it. Three children, two cats, and a dog; video games, toy pianos, televisions. To their menagerie they had recently added a rabbit, who sat in a cage in the living room, cowering inside an empty tissue box, though the children kept trying to tempt it out with carrots and celery and once, in an unattended moment, a hamburger.
“I know you like hamburgers, but Snowball doesn’t,” Cindy explained soothingly to her sobbing daughter after throwing the meat away. “It’s just not his thing.”
Malcolm was laughing. “Snowball was at school,” he told Mitch, “but he’s allergic to the fluorescent lights in the classroom or something. So we’re foster-parenting him, I suppose. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
From a skinny, spastic boy Malcolm had grown into a round-bellied, amiable, balding man with a moustache and a constant smile. Being around him relaxed Mitch when nothing else would. On his visits to the house he felt like just one more happy addition, inconspicuous but loved, with little demanded of him, much like the rabbit. It didn’t matter that he slept on the couch or, when he woke up in the morning with a burning sensation in his leg, found a Transformer action figure wedged under his thigh, or that Emily, the youngest, threw up on him in the backyard after a game of tag they were all playing got a little too rough. The children beat up on him, included him in their games, and left him alone when he said he was tired. The place was dirty and hectic and he could disappear into it, losing track even of himself, like he couldn’t anywhere else.
He didn’t know how Malcolm had managed to become such a good father without having a model for it, nor did he know how he and Cindy still managed to laugh at each other’s jokes and argue cheerfully about whose turn it was to cook or do the dishes. Malcolm wasn’t an especially successful engineer; he had made it to a certain level and hadn’t been promoted further in years. He wasn’t a particularly good cook, either, or hilarious or even all that hardworking. Cindy complained that he was disorganized, useless at home repairs, and not
very good with money. He wasn’t good about asking Mitch questions about how things were going. His sole talent, one he’d had since childhood, was the best imaginable, and it had surrounded him his entire life, flexible, capacious, grown to embrace his wife, their family, their house, and, when he was around, even his brother. He had the gift of being happy.
It was always a shock for Mitch, after leaving those crowded confines, to find himself back in his quiet apartment in Westmount. He could hear his downstairs neighbors, a gay couple, entertaining a group of friends to gales of laughter.
The future he was looking at was without color, without noise. Hopelessly quiet. He spent the night awake, unable to shut out the silence that had taken over his life.
And so he was alone. To combat this solitude he had but few weapons: his job, his routine, and, increasingly, Grace and Sarah. October became November and he continued to help them as best he could. Grace’s cast had been removed and she was walking again, though she still winced at times and there was a stiffness in her movements, in the hunch of her shoulders, that made her look older than she was. Four days a week she went to rehab and returned home exhausted, close to tears, even though, as she told Mitch, most of the time she was lying down while the trainer pushed her legs in one direction and then another, working on her mobility. “You wouldn’t think it would hurt so much, but it does,” she said. “By the end of it I want to throttle this poor nice woman who’s just trying to help me. It’s like when Sarah was born and I told the doctors I hated them.”
“You hated the doctors? Why?” Sarah called. She was in the other room but had the smart child’s habit of listening closely at inconvenient times.
Grace grimaced. “I didn’t really hate them,” she said. “I just thought I did.”
Sarah came into the kitchen, where Grace and Mitch were sitting at the table, with a drawing dangling from her hand. Her forehead was creased with concern. “Because it hurt when I was born?”
“It hurt a little at first,” Grace said carefully, “but then it didn’t. And then you came out, and I was so happy.” She drew her close and wrapped her in a hug. Sarah buckled her arms around her mother’s waist, squeezing hard, and Mitch saw Grace clench her teeth in pain. She kissed Sarah’s head and said, “Now go back to your drawing. Don’t you have homework to do?”
“I finished it,” Sarah said, and left the kitchen, her troubles apparently forgotten.
Mitch brought Grace a glass of water and a couple of Tylenols, knowing her well enough to tell when she needed some. There was an extra weariness to her face, as if her head weighed too much for her neck, and her eyes grew blurry and vague.
“Thank you,” she said.
Mitch had stopped coming around as much, since now she could do almost everything herself. But he continued to run a few errands, adding their usual weekly groceries to his, stopping by to change lightbulbs, take out the trash, fix the shower rod, things she wasn’t up to yet. He had grown used to the shape and purpose these activities gave to his days, and he looked forward to Sarah’s happy greeting and his chats with Grace. By this point he wasn’t sure if he was helping or being helped, or whether the distinction even mattered. He and Grace were casual together, having slipped into a practical, easygoing friendship. Eventually she wouldn’t need his assistance at all, and he didn’t know if they would continue to be part of each other’s lives.
One day, Azra was coming up the steps as he was leaving the apartment. He had last seen her in mid-September, back when Grace was utterly prone.
“Hey!” he said, and gave her a quick hug, only noticing as he drew back that her expression was less friendly than quizzical.
“Hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
She looked flustered. “Nothing, I guess. You’re still helping out? That’s nice.” It was a poor recovery; obviously she found his presence unexpected and strange.
“Well, not all the time or anything,” he answered lamely, wondering, even as he spoke, why he was acting like it was something to be ashamed of. “Grace hasn’t mentioned it?”
“No,” Azra said, “she hasn’t.”
Together they absorbed the implications of this remark. The only way he could think to end the awkward pause was to tell her he had to be going.
Back at the apartment, he resolved not to call or visit Grace unless she specifically asked him to, and felt a flush of shame whose source he couldn’t explain. Should he feel bad for having been there in a time of need?
But it turned out he couldn’t keep the resolution. He enjoyed the time he spent with the two of them, and he and Grace were getting along well. There was no reason, he told himself, that they couldn’t be friends. The following weekend, he called her up and proposed various plans for an afternoon outing. This was what Martine would have expected: an exhibit at the museum, or a new children’s movie, or he could teach them how to fly a kite. He had researched the possibilities beforehand.
Grace sounded touched but puzzled. “That seems pretty ambitious,” she said. “We’re more like not-goers. Not-doers. Sometimes we go to the park.”
This took him aback. “So what do you usually do on the weekends? Or used to, I mean, before the accident.”
Every child he knew—and this included his niece and nephews—faced a battery of activities and playdates on Saturdays and Sundays. They started playing competitive sports before they were five, and their lives were enriched by music lessons and art classes as soon as they could walk. For Grace to buck the trend so completely was not, he thought, quite like her. Then again, maybe he didn’t really know what she was like.
“Not much,” she said. “Why don’t you come over?”
So he did. Grace sat on the couch, as she had throughout her recovery, surrounded by a disassembled newspaper, some unanswered mail, a mug of tea, and a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. Sarah lay in front of her on the carpet, working on a jigsaw puzzle, her long blond hair in two braids. In the kitchen, talk-radio voices debated some issue, though Grace didn’t seem to be listening.
She offered him a cup of tea, a snack, maybe a book—should he have thought to bring one himself?—all of which he declined. Instead he sat opposite the two of them in an armchair, with the front section of The Globe and Mail in his lap. He was thinking that this was the most feminine scene he had ever witnessed in his life. Maybe his mother would have liked to have a Saturday like this, instead of taking him and Malcolm to the park and watching them beat each other over the head with sticks.
The atmosphere felt so serene that he was surprised to notice Grace staring worriedly at her daughter. He knew she was still concerned that the accident had marked her psychologically, but if this were so, the damage was subtle and well concealed. Sarah was lying on her stomach, wearing blue jeans and a white sweatshirt, her legs kicked up in the air. She had pushed her puzzle aside and was reading a book, propping her chin on her hands, her eyes so close to the pages that they were almost crossing. Mitch waited for Grace to scold her—his mother certainly would have—but she didn’t.
“What’s institutionalized?” Sarah asked. It was clearly an adult book, and Mitch wondered if she should’ve been reading it.
Grace, however, seemed unfazed. “What’s the context?”
“The girl was institutionalized against her will, and she stayed under doctors’ supervision for five years.”
“Okay,” Grace said. “So if it was against her will, what does that imply?”
“That someone else put her somewhere.”
“Good. And if there are doctors there?”
“That the somewhere is like a hospital?”
“Excellent. To be institutionalized is to be placed in a facility, often a hospital, when you can’t care for yourself.”
“My father was institutionalized.”
Mitch looked up. It was the first time he had heard the father mentioned.
“No, he wasn’t, Sarah. He was never institutiona
lized.”
“But he was sick.”
“That’s right. He was sick, and he died.”
“In a hospital.”
“In a—oh, I see what you mean.” Grace’s tone was very calm. If the subject upset her, she didn’t show it. “Usually, to be institutionalized means in a mental-health facility or a prison, something like that.”
“And my father wasn’t in any of those.”
“No, honey,” Grace said, “he wasn’t.”
Sarah went back to her book. Grace looked up and her eyes skated over Mitch’s. The expression on her face was one he had seen before: part guilt, part pain, part unidentifiable something else. As if she were listening to some inner voice, some call that no one else could hear.
A few minutes later, tiring of the book, Sarah asked Mitch to play with her. Flattered, he got down on his knees, but she shook her head and led him into her room. Holding his hand, she showed him around and explained everything in great detail: her dolls, her schoolbooks, her winter clothes, her summer clothes. She had a collection of seashells she had brought back from a holiday in Prince Edward Island, and another of barrettes that she’d been adding to, she told him very seriously, “her entire life.” She held out a piggy bank and asked him to guess how much it weighed.
“Heavy,” he said. “Maybe five pounds.”
“Lots of money in there,” she said airily. “I’ve been putting it away for a rainy day.”
“Very responsible of you.”
“I’m mature for my age,” she said. “My teacher told Grace. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did.”
This was an affectation, he knew, calling her mother by her name, to tell him she was grown up. Was this childish flirting? Certainly it made him uncomfortable. His niece, Emily, was a tomboy, and his nephews were hooligans who cared only about hockey and wrestling. A simple fake-out punch to the gut was all it took to get the ball rolling with those three. It was like playing with a bunch of puppies, all laughter and flung-out limbs. Sarah was a different animal altogether.
