The Empty Room

by Lauren B. Davis

  “I don’t want to hear about you and Taquanda.”

  “She’s not comfortable with you and me being so … you know.”

  “Since when do you let some girl tell you what to do?”

  “I’m getting married, Colleen.”

  And there it was, plopping out of his mouth like a toad, a fat, fleshy, slimy toad, the kind of un-ensorcelled toad that never turned into a handsome prince.

  “Get out,” she said.

  Jake sucked his teeth. “She’s a last chance for me and I have to take it. I wanted to show you respect by coming and telling you myself. It’s not like we’re together, Colleen.” He spread his palms. “Come on, we haven’t been together in a very long time.”

  Where was her last chance? After all the years he’d called her, kept her tied to him, falling back into her bed whenever he felt like it. He used to sit in his car across the street for hours, staring up at her window; he had admitted that. This cord had always bound them, frayed at times, nibbled at by other people here and there, but it had always held.

  She stared at him. There was something else. Just there, in that guilty sheen on his upper lip. His eyes flicked away from hers and then back and then away again. She understood, in one slash of truth.

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Jake cocked his head. He smiled in a hangdog way.

  “I said get out. Get out now.”

  “You could be happy for me.”

  “Happy for you? I could slap you. It would feel good to hurt you.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She realized she was on her feet.

  Jake stood up as well. “You are some piece of work,” he said. “I know you’ve got trouble, but half of it’s your own fault and ain’t nobody can help you but you.”

  Tears scalded the back of her eyes. “You do this now, with my mother fucking dying? After I lose my job? You choose today? You selfish shit.”

  Jake picked up his coat and shrugged into it. “You know what? There wasn’t ever going to be a good time to tell you”—he walked to the door and opened it—”because every day is some new tragedy with you. Every day is some new drama. Get your shit together, Colleen, or you’re going to end up like your mother.”

  A wordless, guttural sound escaped Colleen’s mouth. She pushed Jake out the door and kicked it shut. It slammed so hard the air concussed and it seemed the walls shook. She leaned against the door and pressed her fists to her mouth. If she started screaming now, she’d never stop.

  Lori, she’d call Lori. Lori would listen to her and come with her. Lori wouldn’t let her face this alone. She called her friend’s number, but it went through to voice mail. She hung up and called again. Again to voice mail. Her head whirled. Jake. Deirdre. Jake. Deirdre. Their faces flashed in front of her like a strobe light. Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail.

  She was all alone and her mother was dying.

  She dialled the number of a taxi company and gave them her address, telling them it was an emergency, and could they send someone as quickly as possible, please, she’d be waiting in the lobby. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a fair-sized glass of vodka. She drank it right down. It hit her belly like a grenade, sending shrapnel straight to her brain. She didn’t have time to find another salad dressing bottle, and that probably wasn’t a good idea anyway, but still, she regretted having to leave the vodka on the counter. She had no idea how she was going to face what was coming at her next.

  YOU SEE WHAT THEY ARE

  Colleen worked in the English Department when Jake lived with her. It was a different neighbourhood back then. Lots more little shops, family run and a little scruffy. On Yonge Street a few corner stores still eked out a living, and two of them were owned by Poles, who lived in the Roncesvalles area but kept shops here for unknown reasons and had something of a rivalry going. Jake and she liked the one owned by Mr. Żeleński, who had a little sign that read Mówlmy Po Polsku—We Speak Polish—in his window, although since there were very few Poles in the neighbourhood, Colleen wondered why he bothered.

  It was mid-summer, when the asphalt was soft underfoot and everything felt gritty and sticky. Jake and Colleen had lunch and a few beers at a little Chinese place they liked and on the way back to the apartment decided to stop into Mr. Żeleński’s and pick up what she needed for dinner that night.

  Mr. Żeleński sat behind the low counter reading Wiadomośri, the Polish newspaper. He was a little wrinkle of a man, wearing a woollen vest over his white shirt, even on the hottest days. His fingers were stained yellow from the omnipresent cigarette that dangled from them. Thin and quick of both movement and mind, Mr. Żeleński was a devout socialist and kept a stack of books next to his mammoth, ancient beast of a cash register—silver, weighing in at over a hundred pounds, with old-fashioned push buttons and a bell that rang for every sale. The books were political in nature—well-thumbed editions of Trotsky’s My Life, The Permanent Revolution and Political Profiles; Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire; The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell; Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Mr. Żeleński enjoyed nothing more than a political argument, and Colleen was sure he kept the books there as a provocation. She liked him for it.

  “Ah, beautiful people,” he said as they stepped in, squinting through the haze of cigarette smoke. “How is my favourite couple?”

  He moved from behind the counter and shook Jake’s hand. He barely came up to Jake’s shoulder, but almost everyone looked small next to Jake. He was boxing then and his muscles bulged and rippled under his Electric Ladyland T-shirt.

  Mr. Żeleński had taken a shine to them the first time they walked in together. They had stopped in for milk (dangerously near its sell-by date, but Colleen hadn’t the heart to put it back) and when they went to pay he came from behind his desk and said, to Jake’s initial alarm, “A mixed couple, so nice! I like you very much. Come often. I, too, am a mixed couple. My wife, she is Catholic, yes, and me, I am a Jew.” He reached up and slapped Jake’s shoulder in a friendly way. “Her family hid me from the pig Germans, may they have stones and not children, in the barn. I slept inside a dead cow for a week. Ack, the smell. She fed me anyway. What could I do when the war was over except marry her, eh?” As he grinned his face crinkled like that of an apple doll. He pinched Colleen’s cheek. “You think this one would do the same for you, my friend?” he asked Jake.

  Jake smiled, looking as much perplexed as amused. “She better, man.”

  “Of course I would.” Colleen punched Jake in the shoulder. He pretended to be wounded.

  “Excellent.” The old man clapped his hands. “Then we are all friends together.”

  And so they had begun dropping in on him at least once a week, to pick up some small thing or another—usually something with a long shelf life.

  Today Colleen needed spices, some rosemary and thyme. Mr. Żeleński stayed at the front, talking to Jake about U.S. president Ronald Reagan. Colleen half listened to the conversation as she scanned the rows of small dusty spice bottles.

  “This is a friendly fascist,” he said. “He wants families in need of public help to first dispose of household goods in excess of a thousand dollars … If there is an authoritarian regime in the American future, Reagan is to blame. He is a capitalist vampire.” He pronounced it vam-PEER, and Colleen smiled, imagining the dark Carpathian Mountains and Bela Lugosi. “America does not want a moral president. It wants a thug in the Oval Office, one that carries the big stick, yes?”

  “I don’t know. I have trouble trusting any white man—present company excepted, of course.”

  “You must read George Washington Woodbey, a black man. A socialist. A Baptist preacher who saw the light.” Mr. Żeleński chuckled, a phlegmy sort of hiccuping noise.

  Colleen came to the counter with rosemary, a can of kidney beans and a package of spaghetti. “I found some rosemary, but not the thyme. Do you have any?”

  “Ah, I don’t know, beautiful, just what is on the shelf. But you want, I wi
ll order some for you.”

  “No, it’s okay, we’ll pick it up someplace else.”

  Mr. Żeleński shrugged. They paid and left the store, promising to see him soon. “Come back when you have time for coffee and cake,” he said, as he always did.

  As they passed the other Polish store, Colleen said, “Maybe he’s got some.”

  Inside, this shop was a little cleaner, a little more modern than Mr. Żeleński’s, with a gleaming counter and a rack of candy bars and glossy magazines. They nodded at the owner, whose name they didn’t know. He never made small talk, never even smiled, but he did nod back, his hands flat-palmed on the counter.

  “Spices at the back?” she asked.

  “Second aisle.”

  They went to the back of the store, Jake carrying the plastic bag with their purchases from Mr. Żeleński’s store. She found the tiny spice shelf and looked, but no thyme. Salt. Pepper. Celery salt. Paprika. That was it.

  “Oh, never mind. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. I can do without it.” They walked back to the front of the store. Colleen raised her hand and said, “Thanks,” and they were just about to walk out.

  “Hold it,” the owner said.

  They stopped. Another couple stood at the counter, older than Colleen and Jake. The man was buying cigarettes and a bottle of soda.

  “Yes?” said Colleen.

  “Come back here,” the man said.

  Colleen looked questioningly at Jake. His face had gone stony, in that way it did sometimes just before a confrontation. He pulled into himself. Went blank. He stared flatly at the store owner.

  “You want me to come back, huh? And you wanna tell me why?”

  “I want to look in the bag.”

  Jake’s nostrils flared and he pressed his lips together. He held out the bag. “So look.”

  “Bring it here,” said the man.

  Jake stayed where he was.

  “You think we stole something?” Indignation rose in Colleen. “Are you kidding me?”

  “What you got in that bag, you didn’t pay for.” The man came around the counter and Colleen thought he’d take the bag, but he walked past them, stood between them and the door.

  The hand that hung by Jake’s side opened, flexed, and then closed into a fist.

  “We bought those things at Mr. Żeleński’s. You have no right to accuse us,” she said.

  The man and Jake locked eyes. “I don’t accuse you. I accuse him.”

  “I did not steal anything from you.” Jake’s voice was dangerously low, dangerously level.

  At a party earlier that year Jake’s best friend, Dalek, a Slavic guy who matched him pound for pound, egged him to throw a punch, just so he could see how it felt. Half an hour and a good deal of weed and whisky later, Jake obliged. Dalek’s head snapped back, his eyes rolled and he went down like an axed oak. He called the next day with a swollen jaw and no memory of the incident. The shop owner was at least five inches shorter and seventy-five pounds lighter, but he looked like a fighting rooster.

  Colleen knew if she didn’t do something, and quickly, things were going to get ugly. She almost wanted them to. It would serve the racist little shit right to get knocked out, but then Jake would end up in jail … “Oh, for God’s sake. Give me the bag.” She snatched it from Jake. “We’ve got a receipt, you can see for yourself, and then you owe this man an apology.”

  Where was the goddamn receipt? She took everything out of the bag. Rosemary. Beans. Spaghetti. No receipt. “Jake, did you put the receipt in your pocket?”

  His eyes flicked to her. He shook his head.

  The man’s lip curled. “You see what they are?” he said to the couple who still stood silently near the cash.

  “We’ll go and get Mr. Żeleński. He’ll tell you.”

  “You go.” The man pointed at Jake. “He stays.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous; he’s coming with me.”

  “Go get Żeleński,” said Jake.

  She didn’t want to leave him there. She would have done anything not to leave him there, but there didn’t seem to be any other way. She touched his arm, his back, his shoulder. “I’ll be back. I’ll be right back. I won’t be a minute.” She glared at the man. “Get out of my way.”

  She pushed past him and ran down the block.

  “Mr. Żeleński! The other store—the Polish man, he’s got Jake. He says he stole from him.” The words came out in a breathless rush.

  “What? What you say?”

  She repeated it as he came to her. She realized how wide-eyed and mad she must look. She didn’t care.

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “I fix this! The kafin kup!”

  He didn’t bother to lock the door to his shop or even close it. Colleen would remember this later and love him for it. He marched up the street and into his rival’s store.

  “Kurwa ma?!” he bellowed. “You skinny dog-mothered barbarian! You accuse my friends of theft?”

  The other couple had disappeared. Jake had not moved from the spot where Colleen left him. He seemed made of wood. Only his eyes were alive. They glittered, but revealed nothing.

  The man said something in Polish and waved his hands in the air. The two shopkeepers faced off and screamed at each other, their spittle meeting in the air between them.

  “Odpierdol si!”

  “Kutwa!”

  “Palant!”

  Mr. Żeleński said, “You think anyone would steal the dreck you carry? Maggots and weevils, that’s all you’re good for.” He took Jake’s arm and pulled him to the door. “You no come in here no more. You come to me only. This is no good place with no good man.”

  Colleen followed them, and the other shopkeeper yelled, “You are not welcome here! Any of you. You are not welcome in my store. You come again, I call police!”

  All the way down the street Mr. Żeleński cursed his rival and the food he sold. It was old, it was rotten, it was tainted, infested with vermin, like the man’s soul. Jake and Colleen said nothing. They came to Davisville, thanked the little man, who hugged Jake and called him his brother. Jake rolled his lower lip between his teeth and nodded, but said only a quiet thank you.

  As Colleen and Jake walked along Davisville, Colleen heard herself talking about how unfair it was and what a racist bastard that man was and how they should put in a complaint with someone, or picket his shop or do something. She felt as though the man had dug some chasm between her and Jake and she didn’t know how to cross it. She kept patting his back. If he wasn’t going to talk, then she wanted to sense, through her fingertips, how he was feeling and get some clue how to reach him, to tell him … what? What on earth could she tell him?

  She reached to take his hand, but as she did he transferred the bag of groceries to that hand and kept right on walking, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk a few feet in front of him.

  MY WEE GIRL

  Colleen arrived at the hospital, chewing a handful of mints, and asked the receptionist which room her mother was in. A matronly woman directed her with a minimum of interest. They must see this sort of thing all the time, she thought—distraught relatives, broken hearts, all just part of a day in the cream and brown halls, under the watchful eye of the St. Michael statue, known as the “Urban Angel.” She had not slurred her words at all. She felt adequately muffled, insulated against bruising. She would not think about Jake, not now. She would concentrate on this next thing before her, on the next impossible task this mythologically bad day asked of her.

  A silver-bearded man with uneven teeth and a female doctor with glossy black hair and a diamond stud in her nose waited at the elevator bank. Colleen did not make eye contact. She did not want anyone speaking to her, because if someone started talking she knew she would talk back, and she wasn’t quite sure what she might say, or if she’d be able to stop talking once she started.

  When the elevator came and they stepped inside, it smelled of disinfectant, and a soiled bandage lay abandoned in the corner, against all health code r
ules, surely. Both the man and the doctor got out on the floor below the one Colleen wanted. When the doors opened up they revealed a garishly lit hallway, painted a bluish grey. Colleen walked to the nurses’ station, that bulwark against human contact, and waited until a mousey little nurse wearing pink scrubs looked up from her computer screen.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for room 1462—Deirdre Kerrigan. I’m her daughter.”

  The nurse looked puzzled and consulted the screen again. “Deirdre Kerrigan, you said? I don’t see that name here, but I just got on shift. Hang on a minute.”

  The nurse stepped away to consult with another nurse. The second nurse, a tall, heron-like, beaky creature, glanced at Colleen and said something, consulting a chart. Colleen’s heart pounded. Her mother was dead. She was too late. Somewhere down the hall a buzzer went off with a bleating complaint and the heron-like nurse sighed and rolled her eyes before sauntering off in the direction of the call. The mousey nurse came back, shaking her head.

  “Who told you your mother was here?”

  “The nursing home where she lives called me and said she was brought here after a fall and that she was in a coma. They told me downstairs she’s in room 1462. What’s going on? Has she …?”

  “Well, she’s not in a coma now and I doubt she ever was, or they’d have kept her here. She’s in the other wing, the North Wing, apparently. Right through those doors, go past the elevators, down the hall, turn left and then another left and through the double doors. I don’t have her file anymore, but they’ll tell you more over there. She just got moved about an hour ago apparently, before I came on shift, so I don’t have any more information.” The phone rang. “Okay? Excuse me. Through those doors.” The nurse pointed, wiggling her fingers.

  Colleen tried to remember the directions, but her mind wasn’t holding onto details. Through the doors, and past the elevator. She got that far and then the words unravelled. Her mother was out of a coma. Had never been in a coma? What did any of that mean? She made a left turn, and then another since there was no other option, and passed through a set of swinging doors. The hallway was full of people all of a sudden. Gurneys and wheelchairs and a woman walking around hooked up to an IV drip, her pasty legs naked, her ankles swollen and sore looking. Orderlies pushed carts of food trays filled with leftover scraps of gelatin, green beans and mashed potatoes. A female janitor wearing a hairnet and blue gloves swabbed the floor. Colleen edged around her cart, which was full of mops and brushes, paper towels and disinfectant spray.