Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  Marie-Ève’s baby boy was born. Lucy waited a week and then she took the metro to her apartment. Renaud was a big baby, exactly four kilos, Marie-Ève said proudly, but when she put him in Lucy’s arms he felt anything but big. She had never been around babies much. She remembered holding only one, her high-school friend Celia’s sister Anastasia. In his tight cocoon of blankets Renaud was a neat little bundle, as light as one of her teddies, but so warm and alive. She looked at his face, at his lips, so tiny, but so perfectly drawn, and was filled with wonder and love. How happy she was for Marie-Ève.

  Six months passed.

  One evening she is sitting in a carell at the library, checking citations. She’s hungry but she’s not going home until she’s finished the section she’s working on. When she feels another sensation. She looks up from her laptop, puzzled: a tingling in her nipples, a kind of puckering and gathering up. A letting go. Her hand goes to her right breast. Then her left: her t-shirt is wet. Her first impulse is to look up at the ceiling. As if the moisture had come from above. From outside of her. She looks back at her chest. The wet spots are growing. She saves her document, stuffs the laptop in her backpack, which she hugs against her wet chest to walk to the bathroom. Inside a stall, she lifts her t-shirt and bra. Both her breasts are leaking what looks like a bluish white liquid. Milk.

  She sits on the toilet. This can’t be happening. Therefore she is imagining it. Dreaming it. Having a psychotic episode. She sits there for a long time, not knowing what to do. In the bathroom people come and go. Toilets flush, faucets run, the hand-dryer whirs. There is a procession of boots and shoes in the next stall, puddles of pants around them. It finally occurs to her to hold wads of toilet paper against her dripping breasts.

  Then it stops. She stands up, puts on the damp t-shirt. It looks like Marie-Ève’s often did the first months after Renaud was born. She had seen mother and child the day before, at a cake shop in downtown Saint Laurent where Renaud was content to sit on Marie-Ève’s lap while she talked to Lucy. They had spent much time admiring him, and agreeing that he was a perfect baby.

  She touches the t-shirt again. It’s wet, all right: she’s not dreaming this. Walking home her heart is pounding. This is fucked, she thinks. Milk doesn’t come out of your breasts unless you’ve had a baby. Could it be that seeing Renaud has triggered some kind of sympathetic lactation? Like the labour pains fathers-to-be can have? Does she want a baby? Is that it? Or is it Marie-Ève’s pure happiness that she desires? Whatever it is, she’s one sick puppy. At home she looks up the number for the counselling service on campus. But the next day she doesn’t call for an appointment. She does not tell anyone.

  It happened again. The third time she noticed that along with the physical sensations there was a brief but intense feeling of sadness and restlessness. But it went away quickly, leaving her perplexed and anxious.

  And then it happened while having sex. The look on the guy’s face as she pulled away, both their chests wet.

  It was real.

  A tumour was pressing against her pituitary gland – hence the headaches – and secreting prolactin, hence the leaky breasts.The doctor didn’t think it was malignant, but they wouldn’t know for sure until it was removed.

  What’s worse? Having to tell your mother that you have a mental illness or a brain tumour?

  Antar looks well. Unchanged, really, except for his hair, which he keeps very short now. He likes the college, he loves teaching and he likes Rimouski. It has a mosque now. Well, not a real mosque, he says, but a mosalla. And he has met a woman he wants to marry.

  ‘You’ll meet her tonight,’ he says.

  Looking at Antar Lucy can’t help thinking that she has had a small part in all this. His success, maybe even his happiness. But she knows that’s not true. He’s done it all by himself.

  They meet for dinner at a chic Indian restaurant. Antar’s fiancée is a tall, attractive woman. She wears a headscarf, tight jeans and heels. Her name is Nasim, and she also teaches at the college. Antar orders all the food, mango lassis for him and Nasim, a carafe of pinot noir for her. When the waiter brings the drinks Antar lifts his glass.

  ‘To the woman who saved my life,’ he says.

  The two smiling faces in front of her begin to blur a little. Lucy wipes at her eyes. She’s feeling weepy tonight. Because of Annabel, sick and alone at the hospital. And she is still weak, she hasn’t yet recovered from the surgery, all the stress and uncertainty of the last few months. All that and defending her thesis. The wine doesn’t help (should she even be drinking?).

  It’s over, she thinks. My first marriage. It was a pretend marriage, not a real marriage at all. But a bond nevertheless. A part of her identity. Of her story.

  NO SECRETS

  ‘Lots of women get breast cancer and recover. Andrea’s been fine for years,’ Wendy says to Lucy.

  They are on their way to Cape Breton from the Halifax airport. Donalda had called Lucy with the news: Annabel had ‘a tumour the size of an orange’ on her left breast.

  ‘Andrea had cancer?’ Lucy says.

  ‘You knew that.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I’m sure I told you.’

  ‘It’s the first I hear of it.’

  ‘She had a mastectomy three years ago. I’m sure I told you. Maybe you were tree planting. We don’t talk for months when you’re tree planting.’

  ‘And she’s okay now?’

  ‘Maybe if you called more often.’

  ‘—’

  ‘Joanne and Maeve call each other every single day.’

  ‘That’s a bit much don’t you think?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Wendy says.

  They laugh.

  ‘Donalda says when she was admitted the nurse couldn’t find any record of her,’ Lucy says. They have stopped for coffee in Antigonish. ‘She had never been to the hospital, not even for a blood test.’

  ‘She must have at some point.’

  ‘Apparently not. I assumed she was taking care of herself. I never thought to ask …’

  ‘Neither did I, Lucy. She just seemed so healthy.’

  ‘It’s my time,’Annabel said to Lucy. ‘We all have to go some day.’ It was the day after they had learned that the breast cancer had metastasized to her brain and liver. Lucy looked at her lying under the white hospital counterpane. She didn’t look that sick. How could she be about to die? It had to be a mistake.

  ‘Nana,’ she said, reaching for her grandmother’s large, strong hand. Her grip was the same as ever. She could still fight this if she wanted to. But she didn’t.

  ‘Better this than a heart attack,’ she said. ‘At least I get to say my goodbyes.’ Lucy knew she had a fear of dying suddenly and alone, like Curly. That was one thing she’d talked about. But whenever she’d brought it up Lucy had either dismissed her fears or changed the subject. A mistake, she realizes now. Had she been willing to listen Annabel may have expressed some of her other fears. Like the lump on her breast. Because she had to know about it: she would have felt it every time she bathed or dressed or turned over in bed. She’d had so few people to confide in after Curly died. Especially after Donalda moved to Ottawa.

  Annabel blamed Donalda’s mother for that. Because instead of leaving her house to Donalda – the proper thing, everyone said, after everything Donalda had done for her – she willed the property to her eldest son. Kenny lived in Toronto and had no interest in keeping the family homestead. ‘The Germans are crazy about places like this. Neil MacMaster sold his for a hundred and fifty thousand last year.’ He would not consider lowering the asking price for Donalda: hadn’t she ‘lived there for free’ all those years? And wasn’t she set for life with that inheritance from Uncle-Paul-who-turned-out-to-be-a-woman?

  ‘Fuck you,’ Donalda said to Kenny and she moved her belongings out the next day. She was so angry she couldn’t even f
eel sorry for herself. Annabel tried to convince her to move in with her but Donalda declined. She’d had it with living with old ladies. She was getting old herself – had turned sixty that year, which meant that she qualified for the CPP and could apply for a seniors’ unit.

  In no time at all she was living in town. ‘Love it,’ she’d say to everyone. ‘I should have done it as soon as Ma moved to the home. It takes all of five minutes to clean. If I want company I walk to the Co-op. If I need something fixed I call the housing commission. No more shovelling, no more mud and no more blackflies.’

  That first winter she became reacquainted with David MacInnis, who was one of the Anggie D’s. After his retirement from Revenue Canada in Ottawa and his subsequent divorce (‘she took everything, even came after my pension’), David took an interest in genealogy and decided to move back to his hometown. He and Donalda met on the boardwalk, where they both liked to take their exercise, and soon became a couple. David’s enthusiasm for living among his people was short-lived, however. He had moved back to Ottawa, and Donalda with him. Annabel had relied on Donalda for company and gossip, but also for rides to church, bingo and the Co-op. With Donalda gone, she had no choice but to move to a seniors’ unit.

  ‘Look at the view!’ she said to Lucy the first time she visited. From her bedroom window it was the ocean. And from the living room, the three places where she was ‘going next’: the nursing home, the hospital and the cemetery.

  ‘Nana.’

  ‘Well, it’s true!’ She laughed.

  ‘Do you miss having a yard?’

  ‘No. But I miss my clothesline.’ Which was no doubt true, Lucy reflected. Annabel had never spent much time outside. Her universe had been her house. She also missed the wood stove.

  ‘There was a chill this morning I had to put the heat on,’ she’d say on the phone.

  ‘It’s July, Nana. It can’t be that cold.’

  ‘Maybe where you are. The wind is cold coming off the water.’ She knew because she always left the bedroom window open a little, even in the winter.

  ‘Heating the yard,’ Curly would have said.

  Walking in to the small tidy apartment with Wendy and Donalda the day after the funeral. The smell of stale cookies, overripe bananas and Vicks, even though Donalda’s sister Jessie had cleaned the fridge and cupboards a month ago. Lucy opens all the windows. There is not much to pack. Annabel had taken few possessions with her when she moved in and had accumulated little else after that. Donalda wants to keep one of her fancy teacups and saucers, Wendy a framed photograph of Blaise. Lucy takes a heavy cream-coloured mixing bowl. She made her first cake in that bowl. And her first pie crust, which was so tough that she never attempted another one. Annabel was a pro: she could roll out pie dough with her eyes closed. Lucy thinks of the lemon meringue pie she always made for her when she came home. Because she had gotten it into her head that it was Lucy’s favourite. (It wasn’t.)

  They pack up the rest for Donalda’s nephew Jason, who is about to move in to his own place with his girlfriend. His father would pick up the boxes and furniture the next day.

  Annabel’s bedroom. The smell of mothballs when Donalda opens the closet door. Lucy can’t bring herself to look while Wendy and Donalda stuff the clothing in garbage bags.

  ‘Throw them out,’ Lucy says. ‘Don’t give them to the opportunity shop.’

  All that’s left is the top bureau drawer, where Annabel kept her papers. It, too, is nearly empty. There are no old letters or journals, no child’s Valentine or Mother’s Day card.

  No secrets.

  But then. ‘I wonder what’s in here,’ Wendy says. She pulls a small wooden box from under the bed. She hands it to Lucy and they sit on the edge of the bed.

  ‘That’s a butter box,’ Donalda says, joining them. Lucy lifts the cover.

  ‘Those were Grampie’s,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ Donalda says, patting her shoulder.

  ‘Grampa, John A, Nana – everyone’s dying,’ Lucy says.

  ‘Not everyone, sweetie.’ Wendy puts her arm around her daughter. ‘It just seems like that because a lot of the people you know here are old. It’s normal for old people to die.’

  Inside the box, a mound of translucent sea glass in the pale colours of the past.

  LIMBO

  In the morning Eric’s feet are fused to his ankles. He winces as he hobbles across the bedroom. Pressing his palms on either side of the window he lifts his heels in turn to soften the ligaments. He had diagnosed the condition himself after researching the symptoms online. Achilles tendonitis, common in runners. He had stopped running for a month and the pain went away.

  But he has to run.

  While he stretches his calves and heels he looks out the window. The sky is a uniform grey. It’s calm, as it often is this early in the day. One of life’s ironies: after a lifetime (his so-called best years) of painful, protracted awakenings, he can no longer sleep past five-thirty anymore.

  It was always Jenny who started the fire and made the coffee that he drank in silence, leaning against the railing of the wood stove. She had accepted the futility of engaging him in conversation then. His absence.

  Downstairs he feeds the cat, turns on the radio, worries the embers in the cook stove. Sees that he has forgotten to bring in kindling. In the yard the long wet grass paws at his rubber boots. The lower half of the barn wall is dark with splashback from the night’s cold rain. He has never installed proper gutters. Or windows; a frame of nailed boards holds rectangles of plastic tarp over the openings, making the interior dark. Jenny had often complained of it.

  Finishing the barn was a perpetual item on the spring to-do list. The first few years, anyway. But every spring it was the same: the garden had to be tilled and planted, and fences or corrals mended. It rained. Calves and sometimes lambs had to be cared for. Their ancient house always needed some pressing repair. Then his paid work shot him through the summer. And in the middle of all that and making hay a person had to live a little. Hike to MacKinnon’s Brook at least once. Go to the beach with his family and attend a gathering or two because summer would be over in a wink and everyone stuck in their houses again. The fall was a race against the calendar to finish a painting job, a roof. The potatoes and carrots and beets had to be harvested. The truck needed fiberglass around the doors and a new handbrake to pass the inspection. The firewood had to be split. It rained. And then it snowed. The people who hired him to build kitchen cabinets and renovate and build houses wanted perfection. He couldn’t deliver perfection but he tried his best. At home, however, it was the good-enough that reigned, the temporary and the some-day. He got used to the worn, the peeling, the rotting. The crooked and the half-painted, the unfinished.

  He didn’t even see it anymore.

  In the barn, the long-ago sweetness of hay and old manure. He had scrubbed and whitewashed the stalls after he sold their last cow but the smell lingered. Doreen had gone to one of the few remaining small farmers, a couple in West Mabou. Few people kept cows now except for the big dairy operators. And even they were getting scarce. Young people were reluctant to take on the debt, never mind the seven-day workweek. It’s house arrest, a farmer once told him.

  People still called his house looking for the butter and curd cheese that Jenny once made. It was mostly in the summer, when the diaspora returned, looking for a feed of nostalgia. Did they think it ironic that the only person who made the traditional cheese anymore was a come-from-away? And now even she had stopped.

  They had both cried watching the truck driving away with Doreen, whom they had raised from a calf. Goldie’s last. But it wasn’t just about Doreen. They both knew, even Jenny, that it was the end of something. The life they had built together. That they had dreamed and then created.

  The bees were next. The hives had not survived an especially cold winter and he had taken it as a sign, put
away the boxes and white overalls. The horses stayed longest, because Jenny loved them so much. But then she couldn’t take care of them, and he did not have the time.

  It was only after she became ill that Eric realized all the things she did for the family. And how dependent they had been on the income she made from giving riding lessons and selling cheese and butter, honey and eggs. A little of this, a little of that, that’s how they had survived here. And by keeping their overhead low.

  The school bus job had been a godsend. While he did the morning run Santana and Liam took turns staying with Jenny. He hired a woman for the afternoon shift. The rest of the time he was housebound. Or he had to take Jenny with him. He made his errands quick. She had a strange gait now. She grunted. Children stared, adults looked away. It was worse with the people he knew. To cover their discomfort, their pity, their fear and embarrassment, they either talked too much or acted as if nothing had changed, it was just Jenny and Eric getting groceries; they forgot that she couldn’t understand speech anymore. Some people ignored Jenny and some ignored him. It was always ‘How’s Jenny doing?’ Sometimes he felt invisible, reduced to the role of caregiver.

  They both enjoyed going to the shore, however. It was one place he could relax: there were no people to deal with and he didn’t have to worry that she would run into the woods or in front of a car. It calmed her. He smoked a joint while they walked. All the way to the end of the beach, sometimes. The other thing she enjoyed was working outside. Seeing her poke around in the garden, it sometimes felt like old times.

  Their last carrot harvest.

  He had put if off too long. Waited for a sunny day so the carrots could dry outside before he put them in the root cellar. Then he forgot. So the rust fly had gotten to them and he had had to throw away half the harvest. Why did he even bother? He didn’t have time to grow vegetables anymore. It was over. Why didn’t he understand that?

  The wind was cold that day and the wet soil would not release the carrots. The tops broke off in his hand so he had to use a fork to pry them out, which damaged them. Jenny’s job was to lay them out on the tarp in front of the barn. She walked back and forth from the garden. Sometimes he saw her standing beside the bright orange tarp looking lost and he knew that she had forgotten what she was supposed to do. He’d walk over and get her going again.