In the Field

by Claire Tacon

  “Did they give you an estimate?”

  “They deal directly with the insurance company. They’ve worked with your mom’s broker a few times.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “It’s the most productive day I’ve ever had with a hangover.”

  Richard squeezes me. I feel his usual shift to tickle my waist, waiting for his fingers to start wiggling into my ribs. His hands drop to my hips. Part of me wants to pick them up and make him keep going.

  “Thank you for doing this,” I say, leaning my head back onto his collarbone. “Thank you for all of this.”

  He nudges me up so that we can talk face-to-face. “I also called the BBC people. I let them know there’s no way I can get the article to them.”

  “Can’t it be delayed?”

  He frowns and shakes his head. “They understood the circumstances.”

  I start to protest that we can work something out but he silences me. He’s made his decision.

  “I’m sorry.” I reach around to run my fingers across the nape of his neck. His hairline’s straight as a ruler. I tell him that I’m so happy he’s here.

  That’s all that matters right now, that the four of us are together.

  “Part of me’s worried it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t insisted—”

  It’s my turn to shush him. If I hadn’t had to pick him up at the airport, if I hadn’t gone alone, if my mother hadn’t made fish and chips . . . if I hadn’t lost my job. It’s pointless.

  It’s a tighter fit in the tent once we’re all inside, lying in our neon sleeping bags like parallel glow-worms. Luke and I squish into the middle, where there’s no room to shift to a different position. Despite the disastrous past two days, with all of us huddled under the cheap nylon dome, it feels like we’re at a family carnival.

  I lie on my back staring up at the intersection between the tent poles. “I just want to say that I’ve never been more proud of the two of you boys. Especially Stephen.”

  “Here, here.”

  Stephen unzips the opening of his sleeping bag and starts flapping the top.

  “Too hot?” Richard asks.

  Our youngest starts shrieking before Stephen can answer.

  The reek hits. It’s like he’s digested a rotten egg.

  Stephen howls, “You smelt it, you dealt it.”

  The fast food strikes us all over the next half-hour. There’s only a brief moment of calm, the four of us finally closing our eyes, before the next person erupts. Luke props his little bum against me through the sleeping bag and forces out a stinker so bad I can feel the heat against my leg.

  “Check your pants,” Richard says, leaning his face against the mosquito netting like a fish bobbing for air.

  It feels like I don’t sleep at all, but I must, because at half-past four I’m woken up by a crying Luke. He’s had a nightmare about my mother’s burns and I take him out of the tent and into the car so the others can sleep. He wants to go home. I make him sip some bottled water and try to explain that we can’t leave until my mother’s better. He’s equated going home with everything returning to normal and it’s difficult to convince him otherwise. By the time he falls asleep again, the dark’s already thinning.

  My mother is with the physio when I get to the hospital. In scrubs and sneakers the physio looks impossibly young, her corkscrew curls bobby-pinned off her face—more candystriper than therapist. Her name badge reads Joanne.

  The colour in my mother’s face is much better and she’s vastly more alert. When she speaks, it’s only the very bottom corner of her mouth that still dips towards the chin. “This is my daughter Ellie.”

  “Spitting image,” Joanne says.

  Apart from our similar build, I’ve never really thought of my mother and me looking much alike. I’d always thought my face was closer to Dad’s but there’s something comforting in Joanne’s assessment, even if it’s just an aside.

  “Now, Lynne, I’m going to get you to close your eyes.” Joanne tests to see if my mother can identify where her body’s being touched. She does well as the physio taps her arm but my mother doesn’t have much leg sensation. Joanne moves my mother’s big toe up and down like a light switch but she can’t tell if it’s on or off.

  “You’re doing really well,” Joanne says, still cheery. She gives my mother a ball to see if she can hold it with one hand. She can open her fingers, but can’t quite make them grasp the circumference. Her foot she can’t lift at all, but she can wiggle her toes a little bit. Finally, Joanne gets my mother sitting up on the side of the bed, showing her how to safely support herself. The whole process tires her out. She needs assistance to lie back down.

  After the session, I follow Joanne into the hallway. “Did she do all right?” It comes out wrong, like I’m grilling a coach about my kid’s tryout.

  “Baby steps.”

  My mother can barely sit up. I think about what Dr. Bellingham said yesterday—get her on the list. I take the phone outside and make the call, feeling guilty as hell. It’s decades off from the time when I should be stepping in to make decisions for her. But even if she makes a speedy recovery, the house won’t be ready. They’re not going to send a stroke patient home to a tent.

  By late afternoon, the nurses have done a swallowing test and my mother’s placed on a liquid diet. She sucks away at a strawberry flavoured energy drink, the alarming pink travelling up the bendy straw. Her bandages have been changed so only the more severe burns on her palms are covered.

  Now that she’s looking more herself, I broach the subject of notifying family. I take a pen and paper out of my bag and pause like an old-time stenographer. “Is there anyone you want me to call?”

  She shrugs, noncommittal.

  “When you’re ready, Richard wants to visit.”

  She slumps into the pillows. “I don’t want to see the boys.”

  “They’re fine now. They’re doing okay.”

  “I’m so embarrassed.” She looks at me to see if I understand.

  I don’t know what to say to her. I remember the chocolates from Linda that I left in the nightstand yesterday. She takes the package and tilts it so the sunlight reflects off the plastic top and onto the cloth room divider.

  “My favourite.”

  “They’re from Linda.”

  She drops the box on her lap and uses her good arm to shift her right elbow across her body. Her shoulder’s been bothering her all day. She opens her bad hand slightly, then tries and fails to make a fist. She wants to know about the house.

  It’s too soon to describe the extent of the damage. “We’ve got some people in to fix it up.”

  “Get the plates out,” she says. “The ones with the ships. And the pictures on the fridge.”

  The decorative plates were a wedding present from my grandparents. They would have fallen from their display above the stove early on. The photos curled up and flaked off like dead leaves.

  “I made such a mess,” she says, shaking her head and trying desperately to make her fingers work again. “And after you did all that scrubbing. Sin.”

  There’s no room to park in the driveway. It’s half-past seven and the crew is still at it, laying out the debris on massive blue tarps like it’s Hell’s garage sale. The crew leader, a tall man with an Australian accent, tells me we need to decide what to keep. They’ll truck it off to storage and cleaning and send the rest to the dump.

  The big appliances are all out. The dials have melted off the stove and the plastic on the display panel’s poured across the element. The fridge is also charred, the plastic handles completely gone. They’ve taken what’s left of the cupboards out. Only a few pieces of wood from the far side are really recognizable, even the ceramic tile surface is cracked. There’s a separate pile of obvious garbage: plates, coffee pot, glasses, and a clump of plastic and metal that I only recognize as the blender because of the pitcher.

  I walk through the rows like a magpie looking for anything shiny to grab o
nto. They are bringing the couch out from the living room, the synthetic green upholstery melted down. I stop one the workers before he goes back in.

  “Is the coffee table okay?”

  “Mostly just soot damage. You can refinish it.”

  “What about the hutch and dining-room table?”

  “Same.”

  They’re all pieces that my father made or stripped and finished himself. They’re the only things worth saving. The rest can be carted away.

  Richard arrives with the boys as they’re loading up the truck for the dump.

  “Shouldn’t you wait and ask your mother?”

  At this point I don’t want to worry her. Once she’s out of the hospital, we’ll take her shopping. With the insurance money, she can come home to something new.

  The holiday Monday, the restoration crew only works a half-day. The bulk of the dangerous work is finished—the downstairs completely gutted and the few things we’re saving already in storage. The team leader gives me a company brochure and an itemized list of work completed, along with an estimate for the remainder. I’ll need it for tomorrow’s meeting with the broker. After only two and a half days, they’ve worked through eleven thousand eight hundred dollars worth of restoration.

  It’s only a third of the total repairs and doesn’t cover cosmetic work like repainting, let alone contents replacement. There’s still no electricity or running water but it’s now safe for us to go inside.

  There’s a soccer game in the evening and I’m hoping it’ll be a bit of normalcy for the boys. Since they’re playing Windsor, there’s no danger of Brad’s father making an appearance. Stephen spends the drive catching his father up on the games so far, like they’re episodes of a serial that Richard’s missed.

  On the pitch, Max’s nervous when I greet him. He doesn’t make eye contact or ask questions like he usually does and it takes a moment to register why—I’d almost forgotten about catching him drinking. I wasn’t going to say anything, but there’s no way to let him know he’s off the hook. The past few days I haven’t thought much about what happened with Bernie, but Max’s embarrassment sparks my own dread of Richard finding out.

  Bernie has brought baseball gloves and a softball to play catch with the younger kids while the soccer teams warm up and Richard quickly joins in. The two of them have hit it off, I suppose. I know Richard’s grateful for all the help Bernie’s given us. There’s something so incongruous about watching the two of them together. I catch glimpses of past and present versions of myself and it’s hard to imagine either interacting with the other. Six months ago, if Bernie had run into me downtown, what would we have had to say to each other?

  Linda slouches next to me on the bleachers and lights a cigarette, asks how my mother’s doing.

  “Coming along.” The boys are out of earshot, so I add, “The doctor’s told us to look into long-term care.”

  Linda scrunches up her face. “Like a nursing home?”

  “Or a seniors’ residence. Maybe just until the house is fixed.”

  “I’d rather be shot than thrown in one of them. Before I started on at the Superstore, I worked food service at a home over on Main. Most depressing thing I ever seen—all these old people parked at the tables. The management’s got it arranged so the droolers are all at the same table, the shakers at another.” She jerks her hand in a spastic twitch, getting ash on her jeans. “Soft food, real food, self-feeders, assisted-feeders, all separate. They had to do it so the ones still with it wouldn’t get depressed. All the food was shit.”

  Richard tosses Bernie a pop fly and he has to lunge to the right to catch it. The exertion almost knocks his cap off and he grabs his hat with his free hand to steady it. The whole thing has a vaudevillian effect. Linda yells out encouragement then turns back to me. “You wouldn’t really put her in a place like that would you?”

  “It’s not my first choice.”

  “You got room in your house in Toronto?”

  “She wouldn’t want to live in the city.”

  Linda seems to agree with me. “Probably best to leave her where she is. Maybe rent out a room to a nurse or something. Sometimes people do that with cops.”

  Ever since Richard’s arrival, Linda has relaxed around me, has almost treated me like she would Gail. It surprises me how quickly I sink into an ease with her, how I feel almost sisterly towards her. Of course, after Three Pools, I don’t have the right to think of her that way.

  Early in the second half, Stephen steals the ball on a forward rush and quickly pivots to his own net. He passes straight across to Max and the two of them zigzag up the field.

  “Hustle! Swerve it!” Richard calls out, already impressed with how well they work together.

  We all cheer as the boys advance up the field. Twenty yards from the goal, the other team pens Max in, but he pops the ball up and over the crowd. Stephen leaps past a kid who’s lunged feet first at the ball. Stephen regains his balance and drives the ball hard towards the net. The keeper is off by a foot. We all whoop like it’s the playoffs, waving our arms above our heads and shrieking. Stephen scans the stands for his dad.

  When we settle back down, Bernie leans against the rear bench, resting on his elbows, and I do the same. Richard and Linda are upright, still clapping. Bernie smiles at me, the first real interaction since the party. We’re surrounded by people, but I quickly look away. For the rest of the evening I try to avoid meeting his eyes.

  After the game, as we return to our respective vehicles, Richard keeps turning back to wave goodbye. There’s a lightness to the interaction, as though the eight of us have been friends for years. When we hit Port Williams, however, the weight of the day sets in. We pull up to the gutted house and go about our new rituals of getting ready for bed—brushing our teeth by the bushes, taking turns pissing in the shrubbery, passing around wet-naps.

  Tuesday morning our luck gets worse. My mother has no insurance.

  I’m informed by her very concerned ex-broker that she did have an insurance policy for almost thirty years, but it has been lapsed for the past ten months. The brokerage tried to get in touch with her after she failed to return the renewal payment, calling and sending letters. My mother doesn’t have an answering machine and never replied to the correspondence. In the end, he decided she’d gone with the competition.

  “A lot of people get those deals at the grocery store or through their bank now,” the broker explains. “Sometimes they see a number on TV.”

  He ushers me into an empty office so I can call the hospital. My mother’s in a state. Her shoulder’s bothering her a lot, she’s fed up with the soft food and she hates needing assistance to the bathroom. She says she’s not sure if she wants to go on if this is what going on is like.

  It’s an annoyance when I ask where she has her house insurance.

  “Allen’s in Kentville. Almost thirty years.”

  “Do you know when you last paid the premium?”

  “No,” she says, getting defensive. “Just ask for Barb. They all know me in there.”

  I walk back into the broker’s office, hoping against hope. Barb retired a year ago.

  I drive back to the house and tell the restoration crew to stop. Richard and the boys aren’t there—he must have taken them for a swim over at Lumsden’s. The crew head is alarmed when I relay the situation. He wants to know who’ll pay the bill.

  “Just send it to me.” I’m going to have to get power of attorney over my mother’s finances. She’s got a pension through the co-op and some RRSPs but I doubt she’ll have that kind of cash accessible.

  As quickly as the crew got here, they’re gone. They take their tarps off the driveway and leave the charred contents on the gravel. After they drive away, I realize that they still have my father’s furniture.

  Bernie drops by with some leftover cookies from the party while I’m still waiting to hear from Richard. “I’d have brought squares too, but you don’t have a fridge.” He looks around at the debris o
n the drive. “Boys on break?”

  I shake my head. “Murphy’s law.”

  He gapes when I tell him how much it’s already cost.

  “We can’t afford to keep going.”

  He puts the cookies down on the roof of the car. He looks up at the house with his hands deep in his pockets and his body tilted to the left, like he’s battling a strong wind. After a moment, he starts to whistle softly and walk towards the door.

  I’ve avoided entering the house before but I follow him into the hall, now emptied of the usual line of shoes. The living room’s bare except for a box of my mother’s records still in the corner. At the back, there are a few that haven’t melted but father’s favourite album, Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee, is concave. As I flip through the LPs, Bernie raps on the walls. He raises his eyebrows at the different sounds, like he’s conducting a private interview with the carpentry, able to interpret the wall’s thudding replies.

  We can see the bathroom through a hole in the kitchen ceiling. Bernie sighs. We visit the damage up there but he doesn’t say anything. Whatever they used to remove the odours has worked well, but the soot’s still everywhere. The mosquito coil rug from my old room has been tossed and my clothes have been bagged. They’ll either need to be heavily laundered or destroyed. The boys’ room and my mother’s have been left untouched by the crew because the damage was so minimal.

  “Okay,” Bernie finally says. “You’ve got to start with the electrical. I’ve got a buddy, he’ll do it quick and right. It’ll cost, but I’ll get him to knock it down to something reasonable. I can help with the plumbing. Then it’s just getting some boards sistered onto the one wall in the kitchen.”