He had just filled the wheelbarrow when something caught his eye, something red disappearing in the wild apple trees. Her hoodie. ‘Jenny!’ he called. ‘Where’re you going?’ He still talked to her, even though she couldn’t understand speech. There was nothing wrong with her hearing. She didn’t react, just kept walking. He took off after her. What was she doing? All there was beyond the apple trees was a wetland, full of Joe Pye weed and cattails.
‘Jenny! Wait for me!’ he yelled. He ran. God knows what could happen if he lost sight of her. If she got lost. It was cold at night. And there were coyotes around now. Some nights he heard their eerie high-pitched yelping. And in the winter he saw their tracks in the yard. He was thankful that there had not been any when Santana was a child.
She had once taken off on him just like this when she was a toddler. On an impulse, he had decided to let her go, follow her from a distance. He was curious to know how far she would go on her own. What she was capable of. It had surprised him to see how fast she was, how quickly she made it through a bank of spruce into the darker woods. How easily she picked through the moss and fallen trees and limbs. From behind a big spruce he saw her trip and fall face-first. She sat up and looked around, her face and mouth muddy. Then she began to cry. She was already far from the house. Eric didn’t think he would have heard her crying from where he had been working in the garden.
‘Hey sweetie,’ he had called out. She did not look surprised to see him appear. As if she had been just sitting on the living-room floor.
Jenny, however, was a lot faster.
‘Come back!’ he yelled. She turned to look at him and began to run. He took off behind her. He couldn’t lose sight of her. What would he do then? Keep going, hoping to find her? Get lost himself? Lose precious time going back to the house to call 911 and wait for Search and Rescue? He pressed through the sharp stalks, the thorny whips of the variegated roses. Another pestilence that had moved in. Like the coyotes. The place once so benign now in revolt against them. It was wet here. He had to pull his shoes out of the mud at every step.
Up ahead, the red hoodie leapt like the white tail of a deer.
‘Jenny, for fuck’s sake, stop!’
Her flight ended as Santana’s had. Mother and daughter trip. And fall. Unlike Santana she stayed down, and he worried that she was hurt. But when he reached her he saw that she was laughing. As she always had whenever she fell when skiing.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, taking her hand. But she didn’t want to move. He pulled on her arm, eventually getting her to stand. She struggled. He hooked his arm into hers and held on tight. He knew he was probably hurting her but he didn’t know any other way: he wasn’t letting go until they were in the house.
He was tired by now – it was before he began to run, he was in poor shape then. He could hear his laboured breath. Panting, he propelled her through the mud and wet, the dead and dying vegetation. He held on to her with effort, and with equal effort she resisted. They walked together, struggling, the jailer and his prisoner. And which one was he? He could hear her breath, too. It reminded him of something, he didn’t know what. And then he knew. It was of their lovemaking, once.
It reminded him of love.
.* * *
Back inside the kitchen Eric kindles the fire and sets the kettle to boil on the electric stove. He makes coffee. Drinks it black, as he has since they got rid of the cow. Then he laces up his joggers. These are the constants in his life: he runs five kilometres a day, usually in the morning. He drives a school bus five days a week. He feeds his wife her supper. He is grateful for the first two. And the fact that Santana lives next door. She and Liam had rented the house from Annabel when she moved to town. Poor Annabel, she had not lived long after that, and the house had gone to Lucy. So for a while Lucy owned two houses. He and Santana and Liam – everyone – had assumed that she would want to sell the twin uncles’ property in Blue River and keep Annabel’s house for a summer place. It was in much better repair, and handier to town. And the beach. A better investment if she wanted to sell it one day. But she hadn’t.
She was a bit of an odd duck, that Lucy. Not that he would say this to Santana. The two were ‘mad-tight’ as she liked to say. Like sisters. Lucy didn’t fit any category of woman. Even physically. There was something unformed about her, a tentative, nebulous quality. For a long time she looked thirteen with her small round face and short hair, her boyish clothes. But looking closer you saw the lines in the thin skin around her serious eyes. Jenny had called her an old soul (an expression that Eric had never liked, he thought it was meaningless). She was a loner; had few friends beside Santana and Liam, no man in her life that he knew of. The other thing he didn’t know was what she did for a living.
A summer evening when Jenny was still living at home. She had gone to bed early and he and Liam were drinking gin and tonics on the porch. Talking about Lucy.
‘Travis says she’s a spy,’ Liam says.
‘A spy?’ Santana says. She is standing just inside the screen door: the blackflies are bothering her.
Liam shrugs. ‘That’s what people are saying.’
‘Oh for God’s sake!’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Liam says.
‘Travis Fraser is obsessed with Lucy. Have you ever noticed that?’ Santana said.
‘Can’t say I have.’
Eric was enjoying the exchange. An end-of-day, end-of-responsibility gin-and-tonic contentment had settled over him.
‘He always wants to talk about her. I think he has a crush on her, that’s what I think.’
‘But think about it,’ Liam says. ‘She’s always going somewhere different. All these troubled places.’
‘She works with the UN.’
‘Doing what?’
‘She’s a consultant, something to do with water.’
‘Anyone can say they’re a consultant. It doesn’t mean a thing. Do you know what she does exactly?’
‘She works with Mohammed.’
‘What do you think, Eric?’ Liam said.
‘Definitely a spy,’ Eric says. ‘The only thing I’m not sure of is what side she’s on.’ Santana opens the screen door and starts to pummel his shoulder.
He would always be grateful to Lucy for selling Annabel’s house to Santana. He had not expected to have his daughter living in the same province, never mind next door. Most of the young people left. For Halifax and Toronto and Montréal. For Alberta. Sometimes he thought he would never see anyone under forty if he didn’t drive a school bus.
Santana and Liam had done a complete reno on the house. Expensive, he knew (he had done some of the work), and he knew the cost of things. Hardwood floors. A granite countertop. A sunroom.
He had never asked them, but he didn’t think they would have children.
Running past their house that morning he saw no lights. It was Saturday, which was why he could do an early run, and Santana was still in bed. The pickup was gone, however. Liam was already at the wharf, maybe even setting out on the Andy and Mary-Dee. If the lights were on in the kitchen when he came back he’d stop in. Much as he liked Liam he sometimes missed having Santana to himself.
He hasn’t decided if he will tell her about yesterday.
Jenny had punched him in the throat. Hard. He didn’t think it was random. She was venting and he was a safe target. He knew the rage that was inside her, had seen it first-hand when the aphasia first manifested. Some people would turn the anger inward. But not Jenny. She burned.
It had happened right after her food tray arrived. He was helping Belinda to restrain her. Because she would not sit to eat. At home he’d had to leave food out everywhere so she could grab a bite on the way by. But here they tied her to a chair. The punch had thrown him back against the bed. Belinda had buzzed for help right away but he told her he was okay.
‘Are you sure?’ she said.
He sat on the bed, winded, his Adam’s apple throbbing, tears of pain in his eyes. He wanted to punch her back. Belinda and Susan settled her back in the chair.
Then he fed his wife her supper.
When Jenny was first admitted, he and Santana had requested a vegetarian diet for her. But the nursing home’s meatless offerings – too often a blob of cottage cheese or a boiled egg, did not tempt Jenny’s appetite. She began to lose weight.
‘Maybe it’s the adjustment,’ Eric said to Santana. ‘Doctor Afridi says she could be depressed.’
‘I’d be depressed, too, if I had to eat cottage cheese every day.’
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘White rice and white pasta: she’s going to get sick eating that.’
‘Maybe she should eat what everyone else is eating. The food looks pretty good, actually.’
‘Not meat!’
‘She used to love meat, you know. A long time ago. She didn’t give it up because she didn’t like it.’
‘We can’t give her meat. It wouldn’t be right.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it would bring back good memories. Comfort food and all that. ’
‘She’s been a vegetarian way too long. It might make her sick.’
‘I say we try it.’
‘I say we don’t.’
Santana began to cook extra portions of her own meals (like her mother she was both a vegetarian and a fine cook) to take to the nursing home. For the first few months she delivered the food in the morning on her way to school, where she was a teacher assistant. Then it seemed to make more sense for Eric to pick it up as he was feeding Jenny her supper anyway. So he would stop by Santana’s on the way to the nursing home. Sometimes she’d have a container for him as well. She worried that he was not eating well.
On one such afternoon Liam answered the door.
‘She didn’t get around to it today,’ he said. He looked rueful. ‘I should have called you.’ There was an acrid smell behind him, a smell that, although familiar, Eric could not immediately identify. As Liam stepped aside to let him in, Eric recognized the odour. A pot of beans had boiled over on the stove – Jenny, forever starting something and getting lost in another task. Even before the aphasia. It had irritated him. The smell, the brown scum inside the burners, which Jenny would sometimes forget to clean, so that the next time you put the kettle on it would stink up the kitchen again.
Santana was lying on the mocha leather couch with her knees drawn up and her face against the backrest.
‘She’s been crying all day.’
Santana, her voice muffled: ‘You’d cry, too, if you couldn’t sleep.’
‘She can’t sleep,’ Liam said.
Eric unlaced his shoes. He had noticed that Santana was different of late. Irritable, and touchy. He had brushed it off as PMS, dismissed the thought that she could be pregnant. She was sad about Jenny, he thought. It was normal to be sad. He was sad, too. His wool socks slid a little on the varnished hardwood floor. He sat on the end of the couch and lifted Santana’s feet onto his lap. She began to sob.
She and Jenny had been close. Not that they hadn’t argued – they were too contrary, too similar, ‘your clone,’ he used to say to Jenny. They were linked in ways he could not understand. Maybe because they both had breasts, vaginas, wombs that bled. A bewildering range of emotions. A kind of psychic link (Jenny just had to think of Santana and she would call). Santana had lost her friend and consoler, her keeper of secrets. Now she was suffering and he didn’t have a clue what to do except pat her feet through the grey wool socks Jenny had knit for her. And urge her – after he called the nursing home to say that he wasn’t coming, and Liam went to town to pick up a pizza (and despite what he thought about doctors and pharmaceuticals) – to make an appointment to see her doctor.
Santana had always been reasonable. She began to see someone at the Mental Health clinic and to take antidepressants. She went on sick leave and stopped cooking for Jenny. Her depression had lifted. But now Eric worried about her. He tried not to burden her with his problems. Like the fact that Jenny had punched him.
Tonight he would help Colleen or Rose or Belinda put his wife in a chair so he could spoon macaroni and cheese into her mouth. Wipe it from her chin. Then they would walk the corridors. That’s all Jenny wanted to do now. Walk and walk, and then stop abruptly and enter a room. Many of the dementia patients did the same, came into each other’s living space unannounced, welcome or not.
He has enormous respect for the staff. Living as they do among the relatives and neighbours of their charges, related to some by blood or marriage, all the residents are persons to them. That tetchy ninety-year-old who still insists on having her hair permed and dyed; she taught school and raised seven children alone after her husband drowned. A crippled incontinent old man was once a beautiful Gaelic singer. Their past crowns them with dignity. But only if you know it. Eric rarely does.
He had moved to Cape Breton to get away from people. To live in the woods, do his own thing. Reality had forced him out. It was not possible to live entirely off the land. And having a child changed things. Society barges right in when your child enters school. Now he was driving a school bus, for God’s sake. He was embedded. He knew the kids, the teachers, some of the parents. But his knowledge remains superficial. He is blind to the web of kinship in the community. Blind to the past, the layers of stories stuck to each person like wallpaper in an old house: what Allan D’s father said to the priest when; who Sally was kissing the day that. He can’t see any of the ghosts twirling around them.
‘Where are your people from?’ the old sometimes ask him. Mistaking him for one of them. Needing to know their connection, who are the weirdos and saints, the drunks and nuns in his family. He has no people. He is a mystery and a menace; a man with no stories, a man who does not go to church or watch hockey, who does not play darts or coach baseball. A man with no past except the few years (only twenty-nine!) he has spent hiding from them.
He is way past Santana’s house now, has begun to climb the first long hill on the Northfield Road.
He looks up at the sky. All he knows is that he has a wife and he does not have a wife. And that the sun will not come out today.
BLUE RIVER
Slowly, down the steep wooden stairs of the house. Her house. Her bare feet against the treads – satiny from the last coat of floor paint, bumpy from the many layers beneath. Maroon and brown and beige. And buttercup yellow. She saw it when she scraped all the way down to the bare wood. Thought of the person who had chosen this colour, maybe during some endless wet spring. From the window halfway down the stairs all she can see is pale gold grass, the haze of the sky, the green wall of alders, closer every year. Even this early, there is the smell of dry grass on the hot wind, of bitter flowers and sharp weeds. Closer to the earth, the buzzing of insects, the floppy green and stiff yellow grasses, the dabs of white foam the spittle bugs have left. The sparkling webs of spiders. On days like this she leaves the door open. Mice trickle over the threshold, flies career around the kitchen, the wind visits all the rooms.
She makes Turkish coffee, which she takes outside. The smell reminds her of Antar, then of Mohammed. The last time she saw him was in his office in New York. After Karnataka.
She’s standing by the window while Mohammed takes an urgent call. She is reading a letter from Katie, her neighbour in Blue River. Lucy has become friends with the older woman. They visit often and like to go for long walks together. Katie admits to being a little lonely now that her children have grown up and moved away. She is from Montréal and has no family in Cape Breton. ‘A transplant,’ she calls herself. In the letter Katie tells her how her husband was pinned to the barn wall by his tractor that winter. Lucy already knew about Frank’s accident; Santana had emailed her as soon as it happened. Katie prefers writing letters. She keeps every one she has ever received i
n a box in the attic. ‘You don’t just get a letter, you get an envelope and a stamp. There’s the person’s address at the time (with email you have no idea where anyone is) and then there’s the handwriting. How beautiful is that?’
Katie’s own script is angled to the left: ‘Frank is doing much better. I can tell because he’s cranky now. But he still can’t do much. I had to learn to make kindling. It’s something I never got around to learning.’
At last Mohammed hangs up the phone. Lucy turns towards him but now he is tapping furiously on his keyboard, frowning at the screen of his laptop. She looks out the window again, this time at the grey street outside the office. A man sits on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk, wrapped in dingy blankets. He has a paper cup in front of him, for offerings.
‘Désolé, Lucie,’ Mohammed says finally, smiling at her. His temples are greying and there is a little more flesh on his bones. He seems to have settled into his body as he has in his life. He appears happy. With his work, his Tunisian wife (also at the UN) and his two children. With their relationship, which is all business now. They can never be the friends that she and Antar have become. But she suspects that he wants to have her in his life again. That’s why he sought her out for this work. There are times when they share a look. Never for long, but she knows he remembers, too.
On a summer day when the dew has dried early, and after Frank MacKay has finished haying, he drives up with his tractor to mow Lucy’s fields. Something always goes wrong. With the tractor, sometimes, or the mower or baler or tedder, rusty prima donnas that have to be stroked, petted and appeased. There is a flurry of greasing and adjusting, of praying and swearing. Once, the tractor caught fire. Another time the baler began to spit lengths of orange baler twine. And as soon as the hay is winnowed it is bound to start raining. Lucy keeps some of the bales to stack around her foundation in the fall. Frank takes the rest. But with no livestock to fatten the land, the quality of the hay is poorer every year. Soon it will be of no use to Frank or anyone else. But she will continue to have the old pastures mowed. Every field she can keep open honours the memory of Annabel’s people, who worked so hard to clear it.
Lucy Cloud Page 23
