Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  The siblings laughed. But then, as always happened when the name of their dead brother was mentioned, they became solemn. ‘Poor Blaise,’ someone would say. And they would be silent thinking about him, and maybe of the second unfortunate Blaise, Lucy’s father.

  ‘Now one thing that Alec and I loved better than anything else was boxing,’ John A said. ‘But Mama wouldn’t allow it in the house. So that day, as soon as she and Papa were gone, Alec and I put up our dukes. Mary Catherine started hollering at us to stop but we were just going to town. Then Alec gives me a big whopping punch in the face and my nose starts to bleed. I was some mad, trying to get back at Alec, and the blood was flying everywhere. You get the picture. Mary Catherine broke it off finally by telling us we could go play in the attic. This was something Mama used to let us do in the winter sometimes when we couldn’t go outside. She kept a barrel of flour there, and her spinning wheel and such, so there was lots of room to run around. We had to wear our jackets it was so cold but we loved playing there. Now the reason Mama only allowed us up there in the winter was because that’s where they kept the storm windows. Mary Catherine hadn’t thought of that. Well, we weren’t up there half an hour that Alec manages to fall – ’

  ‘You pushed me!’

  ‘ – fall on the stack of windows and break a whole bunch of them. ‘Well. The fun went out of that day like the air out of a balloon. “Papa’s gonna have to make a trip to town special to fix all them windows,” Mary Catherine said. “Maybe two trips. It’ll cost a fortune.”

  ‘Alec and I knew we were in for one helluva spanking. We wanted Mary Catherine not to tell them right away, to wait until the next day at least, but she said No, she had to, it was her job. We thought she might change her mind if we behaved so the rest of the afternoon Alec and I were good as gold, playing with Jimmy and Blaise and Annabel and all that. By the end of the day, I could tell that Mary Catherine was starting to feel sorry for us.

  ‘ ‘‘I know!” she said. “I’ll put some padding on your behinds. So the spanking won’t hurt.” So she got some old rags and such and made us each a little cushion to slip into our britches. The only thing is, when she told Mama and Papa about the broken windows, it wasn’t us they were mad at. It was her, for letting us go up in the attic. So she’s the one who got the spanking! And she had no cushion on her arse …’

  Laughter erupted. John A held his trembling belly, Alec wiped his eyes, and Annabel, who was asthmatic, began to wheeze, each person’s mirth fuelling the others’. Lucy joined in, too. But if their laughter was a river hers was only a boat bobbing on the surface. She had noticed the same thing when she was with Wendy’s family. Siblings, among other things, seemed to share a sense of humour. Something she would never know. Or maybe Wendy was right. She was born without a funny bone.

  THE DEATH OF THE LIBERAL CLASS

  ‘You’re always so serious,’ Wendy is saying. Lucy looks up from her book. ‘Serious, serious, serious.’

  ‘Well, that’s the way I am,’ Lucy says.

  ‘Don’t you want to have a little fun sometimes?’

  ‘Fun?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Go out, party a little.’

  ‘Drink, you mean.’

  ‘Don’t start.’

  ‘You’re the one who started.’

  ‘—’

  ‘I have fun …’

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  ‘Reading a book in the middle of the day on a tropical island: some people might think that was fun.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘I told you about it yesterday: The Death of the Liberal Class.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Sounds like a barrel of laughs.’

  Lucy puts the opened book on her lap. ‘I like the beach …’

  ‘That’s true. But only because you’re working on your breaststroke.’

  ‘Why are you analyzing me like this? Are you bored, is that it?’

  ‘You’re my daughter. I’m trying to figure you out.’

  ‘Maybe I take after the Finn.’

  COUP

  Tumbling in and out of sleep. Of dreams. She wakes, but not quite, sinks into the shallows, floats up again just long enough to hear a grackle, a car horn, the voice of the paperboy’s mother who, she knows, is following him on the sidewalk with a plastic wagon full of rolled-up newspapers: ‘T’as oublié l’cinquante-deux soixante-six!’

  She pulls the sheet over her head. In the blue tent light Mohammed’s skin is dark gold.

  ‘Hrrhamed!’ Exclamation, announcement, call to arms, it issues from the back of their throats, harsh and imperious. It’s usually Hana, whose name, he tells her, is John in Arabic. Or the giant Aziz, standing in the gloom at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Hrrhamed!’

  ‘On t’appelle,’ she says, but Mohammed is already standing beside the bed looking sleepy, grim and confused. She falls back to sleep to the thunder of feet in the stairwell.

  When she wakes the apartment is silent. Walking into the kitchen after showering she is surprised to see Mohammed there. He is standing at the window, looking at the brick wall across the lane.

  ‘Il faut que je parte immédiatement,’ he says.

  ‘Est-ce qu’ils vont te déporter?’

  ‘Non, non.’

  There had been a coup. Mohammed’s father, she knew, was high up in the military. Was he implicated? Mohammed wouldn’t tell her. He was grim and distracted. He wanted to be alone.

  He left the next day. Everything: the apartment, his things, his doctoral thesis.

  Her.

  ‘Did you hear from him yet?’ Santana says. A late-night telephone conversation, a bottle of wine.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s been what, three weeks? You’d think he could call or send an email.’

  ‘I don’t know if they have the Internet where he is. I don’t know anything except what I see on the news.’

  ‘It sounds like it’s settled down a little.’

  ‘He could be on the airplane back for all I know.’

  But he wasn’t.

  She would go through all the stages of loss in those first few months. She didn’t recognize them at the time but later, rereading her journal – which began as a daily letter to Mohammed – it was a textbook case: Anger. Bargaining. Depression.

  The physical pain of her heart breaking.

  He called eventually, then sent a short letter: he wasn’t coming back to Canada. He loved and missed her and was sorry. But it was over. She wouldn’t see him again for five years.

  She decided to keep the apartment until the end of the lease, in June. This was a problem because the rent was high. She hadn’t known what it was until the landlord showed her the lease. Because Mohammed had never let her pay her share. His family was wealthy, he said, it was taken care of. She closed off the ornate pocket doors in the living room, hung a curtain in the other doorway and made that her bedroom. Found two roommates on Craigslist. One of them was a Concordia student named Cole. He was a tree-planter.

  ‘My dad planted trees once,’ Lucy said to Cole one night. This was part of the story of Blaise and Wendy. How they had met after he planted trees.

  ‘Oh yeah, where?’

  ‘Northern Ontario somewhere.’

  ‘You can make a lot more money in B.C.,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe you can,’ she laughed. ‘I hear you’re good.’

  ‘You could be good, too. Some of the best planters are girls. It’s mental, not physical. You should try it.’

  She thought of the shit job she would have that summer. Of having to find another place to stay and get along with new roommates. Of how unbearably hot and humid Montréal was in the summer. On some days the only way she and Mohammed could cool off was to take turns lying in a tepid bath.

  Of how everything about the city remind
ed her of him.

  ‘Can you get me a job?’ she said.

  BASTA

  Someone is pushing the gurney. An orderly, a nurse, who knows? They all look the same in their scrubs, materialize at her bedside with no introductions so that she must constantly search her memory – Is it the lab technician who came for blood yesterday? One of the nurses? The resident? It’s a man, she thinks, although she can’t really see him, taking her back to her room. She would like to know his name, how he came to do this, what it feels like to push sick people around like this. What it feels like to her is a bad dream. Flat on her back, helpless and vulnerable on the narrow gurney, at the mercy of a stranger. The geometric pattern of black dots in the ceiling tiles; the pot lights; the shapes of people following the red footprints on the floor to Optometry, the yellow to Oncology, standing outside closed doors wishing they could go outside for a smoke but what if their name is called and they miss their turn? The tops of brown black grey heads in wheelchairs with their husband daughter sister mother. Or alone. She used to be among them, the hopeful, the despondent, the irritated and overheated. Waiting for your name to be called, for a prescription, a referral, a date for the surgery. An absolution. Cool air flows along her face and neck. Exhibit A, ladies and germs, of what happens when you get a bad report: on parade with the intravenous, her pale fishy flesh exposed. ‘All I ask,’ Annabel always says, ‘all I ask is when you come see me at the home and they’ve got me sitting in a little nightie, for God’s sake cover my legs!’ More cool air, then an abrupt stop: the attendant is like a kid with a shopping cart outside the grocery store. He’s going to hop on the back at any moment. The elevator bell, the swoosh of the door opening. Dull jade walls. Lucy can see him now, a stocky young man with a ponytail.

  Marie-Ève had told her of the first time she had taken a corpse down to the morgue. Alone in the elevator of Sainte Justine, praying, ‘Please don’t break down, please don’t stop’ – what would she do if she got stuck in an elevator with a corpse?

  Lucy can see the floor numbers above the door. Six. Seven. Eight.

  Whoosh: Ponytail pushes her out the sliding door. Her room, she knows, is on the ninth floor. Not the eighth. Nine she wants to say. Nein, nein, nein. But no words leave her mouth. Movie dream sequence morphing into silent scream: the attendant is a zombie, a CIA asset come to kill her.

  Ponytail is whistling under his breath as he pushes her down the hall on the wrong floor. He locates the room – number 24 (at least he’s got that right) – pushes her through the wide doorway.

  The sunshine of a yellow flowered tablecloth spread over the hospital bed. The smell of garlic. Tupperware containers of food. A family, having a picnic. They look Italian, or Portuguese. They look surprised: you never know who will come in the door in this place, bursting in at all hours, not letting you sleep, asking you if you’ve had a bowel movement, saying, ‘This is going to pinch a little’ but this, a pale woman on a gurney, weak as a baby, barely able to retch from the smell of the food? Basta. Enough.

  Ponytail does not miss a beat, has remembered (or checked the form they gave him in surgery). Back to the elevator they go, up to the ninth floor to Room 24. The woman who shared the room until this morning has gone, her bed empty, ready for the next hapless patient. Two nurses approach the gurney. Lucy closes her eyes. She feels their hands under her. ‘You’re as light as a feather – we’re not going to need a lift for you!’ Their happy banter, their laughter. The laughter of good people who do not take life too seriously. Of people who laugh at jokes that, in her opinion, do not merit more than a smile. Marie-Ève says that nurses laugh all the time, sometimes even at the expense of patients. But never in a mean way. ‘It’s laugh or go crazy,’ she says.

  When Lucy wakes she sees Wendy sitting beside the bed. And Antar has left four messages on her mobile.

  She had been waiting for his call. She herself can never reach him. Antar doesn’t trust email or landlines, is forever changing his mobile. But he always checks in around their anniversary. Last year was the year but he was busy with a new job and a move to Rimouski. He wanted to do it but the timing was bad. ‘There’s no hurry,’ she told him. She was busy herself. And what was another year? Or two or three, when it came to that? It wasn’t a burden being married to Antar.

  Now he’s set things in motion for the divorce. He wants her to come to Rimouski to sign the papers.

  ‘I can’t right now. I’m in the hospital,’ she says.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I had surgery.’

  ‘So when can you come?’

  ‘I have no idea. Can’t they just mail the papers to me?’

  ‘No-no. Voyons. We have to do this together. It would be better, don’t you think? And I want you to meet someone.’

  Which is why she’s in Rimouski when Donalda calls. In a quaint motel on the outskirts of town. The furniture is old-fashioned but pristine. The room smells of soap and water and the new grass outside, the briny Saint Lawrence River. The washbasin and mirror are in a little alcove beside the bathroom. It is there that Lucy removes the red chechia (she wore it for Antar, who always laughed to see her with a man’s hat) and examines the dressing, and the rest of her baby-bird skull. She still feels weak. But mostly she feels relief. Remembers the look on her mother’s face when she woke up after the surgery.

  ‘Baby Doll,’ Wendy said, standing up.

  ‘Mom,’ Lucy said, and they burst into tears. Wendy moved her chair close to the side of the bed that didn’t have the I.V. stand and snuggled alongside Lucy’s arm. What a comfort it had been to Lucy to have her mother beside her. When the doctor told them that the tumour was benign they cried again. Hugged and laughed and cried some more. The anxieties of the previous months, the tensions between them, dissolving.

  She is rinsing her face when her phone rings. It’s Donalda. Her sister Jessie had phoned to tell her that Annabel had passed out at the Co-op that morning. An ambulance had taken her to the hospital. ‘They’re keeping her in. They’re not sure if it was just a dizzy spell or what.’

  Or what.

  ‘What’s her room number? I’ll call her.’

  ‘She doesn’t have a phone. You can call the desk. Do you want the number? The nurses will go get her. I just talked to her and she seemed all right. She’s embarrassed that everyone in the Co-op saw her leaving on a stretcher. You know how she is.’

  But when Lucy calls the hospital she is told that Annabel can’t come to the phone, she is resting. She calls Santana. While the phone rings she looks out the old-fashioned picture window at the motel across the street. It has a restaurant and a bar, parking out back. The neon sign above it says Danseuses nues.

  ‘I just found out,’ Santana says. ‘I didn’t know if I should call you or not …’

  ‘Could you do me a favour, San? Could you go see her?’

  ‘Absolutely. I was going to, anyway. I’ll go tonight and call you back. And what about you? How are you feeling?’

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ Wendy says on the phone. ‘Vertigo, maybe.’

  ‘Vertigo?’

  ‘Do you remember when I had it? Mmmmm, maybe you were away … I couldn’t even turn over in bed I was so dizzy. I had to hold on to the walls to go to the bathroom, it was awful. John’s had it, too. (John is her latest love interest.) And every second person you talk to, it seems. It’s not serious, just a pain in the ass. Unless it’s Ménière’s. But that won’t kill you either.’

  Antar laughs when he spots the maroon chechia. But then he sees that her hair is gone. Cancer, everyone thinks.

  ‘What happened?’ he says.

  ‘It was a tumour, but benign. I’m perfectly fine.’ She tells him about the migraines. But not the rest.

  She thought they were stress headaches. She had too much going on: the thesis, the job at the coffee shop, the volunteer work with Eau Secours. She was sick o
f the thesis. She had hoped to do a Ph.D. but now she wasn’t sure anymore. The problem was that without it her other degrees had little value on the job market. Especially since her only work experience was waiting on tables and planting trees. On top of all this one of her roommates was a bitch. She was tired of having roommates. She was twenty-six years old and she had never lived alone. Marie-Ève said it was because she insisted on living on Le Plateau. She and Yannick had a place in Ville Saint-Laurent that was cheaper by a third than the one she had to share with two people. The irony was that she now owned a house. John A had left her the property in Blue River in his will. But all it meant to her now was a tax bill. And an added responsibility.

  The headaches began to get more debilitating. Everyone she talked to had an opinion and a cure:

  ‘My stepdad was getting really bad headaches,’ Josh said – he was the ‘good’ roommate. ‘He thought it was stress, too, but he went to a naturopath and he found out he was allergic to gluten. As soon as he stopped eating it his headaches went away.’

  ‘When I have a headache I do a headstand and most of the time it goes away,’ Nina said. She had met Nina the first year she planted trees and they had become friends. They practised Ashtanga yoga in the winter to stay in shape for planting season. But no matter how many headstands she did the headaches would not go away.

  ‘Just two weeks of work left!’ Marie-Ève said when Lucy called. She was about to go on maternity leave.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Great!’

  When Lucy told her about the headaches she said, ‘They could be migraines. Va voir le docteur.’

  The doctor at the campus clinic said that migraines were difficult to diagnose. She gave her a prescription and told her to come back in two weeks’ time. The medication helped: Lucy worked even harder on the thesis, convinced that as soon as it was finished her headaches would disappear.