z
Winter has always seemed for me like a country more than a season, a state of being more than a landscape. I’ve seen ninety of them, but this winter seems especially cruel. It is not only the ghosts from my past who appear to me, but the young versions of my own children visit at night; my daughter as a girl, dressed in a school jumper, the boys jostling and loud, “scuffamuttons” I called them. I will surface from moments in the kitchen of the house where they grew up and I will be here with another, older version of my daughter, frowning at me. She looks foreign, this woman, and yet there is still enough of the young girl to surprise me. “Hi, Mom,” the conversation usually starts. But it’s the young girl I miss, the smallness of her, braiding her hair in the morning sun, putting her to sleep in the evening. In the middle of the night when I awake and look up at the ceiling, when I can hear the traffic reduced to the rare careening stroke of sound, I can often hear her and her brother whispering and laughing in the corner of the room and I wonder how I will ever be able to say goodbye.
z
The next day I awoke into a fog. Amy’s face came into view as she bent toward me; she had the pinched look of someone in pain, her eyes dark, an inversion of stars—she watched me with open sadness, not sure if I could see her. A few moments later she asked me how I was, but I didn’t answer. She sat in the chair at the side of the bed and I forgot she was there, until one of the attendants came in and saw her, “Oh, Amy,” she said. And I heard Amy respond, “It’s like I’m losing her in stages; like she is being persuaded away from me and how I feel just isn’t enough to keep her here.”
“I know, I know,” said this woman who did not in any true sense know, who saw in our situation what she sees all the time: a dying parent and a grieving child. Common and therefore simple. And it strikes me that what I’ve learnt is it’s the love, the affection created over the years that is hard, permanent, far more permanent than those chairs, the bed, dresser that cluttered my hot room.
Still during the afternoon or the evening, when I close my eyes, a huge weariness overtakes me and I find myself back in my childhood home, in the upstairs hallway where I can hear my sisters in the kitchen, my father running water in the washroom, where the dust of a day in 1927 falls into the bands of light that stretch from the front room to fall before me. I hear my mother call and the sound seems to travel from a distance; there is warmth in the voice and perhaps the linger of a laugh, I hear it clearly as I answer her and descend the stairs.
Evandie
Evandie stood outside the glass shelter at the bus stop in a crowd of early morning commuters. It was a cold winter day and she’d heard on the radio before she left home that a snowstorm was expected to start before noon. A neighbour from the townhouse complex where she lived, a woman named Marianne, stood beside her. “Damn bus,” she said. “What’s taking it so long?” Evandie nodded and looked down the street toward the bend in the road as if her concentration alone could will the bus to appear. Both women were in their early forties, both formidable shapes in their bulky overcoats. Evandie wore a kerchief on her head, tucked into the collar. Under her coat she wore scrubs, the loose polyester trousers and smocks that all the attendants at the nursing home wore.
More than twenty years earlier, Evandie had moved to Ottawa from Montego Bay on the northeast coast of Jamaica. In Canada, during summer nights with the back door open for a breeze and the sound of the streets wafting in with the heat, Evandie would remember her first home—the surf, cars along the nearby boulevard, the sound of her younger brothers and sisters playing. Her husband grew up on the same block and it was he who convinced her to move to Ottawa, where he found a job providing maintenance for buses in a large depot. His name was Percival, and that was what Evandie called him, although his friends in Canada called him Percy. Like Evandie, he enjoyed living in Ottawa; he liked the camaraderie of his job and the neighbourhood where they lived, the rows of townhomes and the children in noisy groups playing on the sidewalks and parks. He and his friends, most of them immigrants who also found employment in the factories and warehouses of the same industrial park, would go out for a beer after work, or a baseball or hockey game on the weekend.
Evandie was a strong woman, five feet ten in her stocking feet, with a thick head of black hair and wide-set, chocolate brown eyes. The whites of her eyes were a creamy colour and her teeth flashed white when she smiled, which was often. By this winter day in 2006 Evandie had worked at Aldridge Lodge for six years. It was hard work: dressing patients, lifting them into wheelchairs, bringing them to the cafeteria or to the toilet and changing their diapers. Although there were parts of the job she found arduous, in general, she enjoyed the work for she knew how essential it was and how grateful some of the patients were, the women in particular. Those women who had spent their entire lives feeling in control of their own homes and who had held themselves straight and proud, now waited for the soft pad of Evandie’s step and the comfort of her clear voice as she told them about the weather, the day’s menu, or her own children.
z
Born and raised in a hot climate, Evandie didn’t like the cold. But then not many people would have liked standing on that street corner, where the wind whipped across the adjacent field and swirled about the crowd as if they were pebbles in a frigid stream. People were rocking from foot to foot in an effort to stay warm, crossing their arms in front of them, stuffing their hands into their pockets, or sinking their chins into scarves around their necks.
She looked up at the sky, heavy with clouds. Snow was imminent. She thought about her favourite patient at the nursing home, June, a ninety-one-year-old woman who had moved in a year or so earlier. She’d noticed that lately June was spending her days drifting in and out of sleep, speaking less and less.
The ward where June lived and Evandie worked had twenty rooms off a long hallway, with a nurses’ station in the center of the hall. Each room had a bathroom and a large window that looked out either to the grounds rimmed by a line of trees or a garden courtyard.
“I can’t understand what’s taking so long,” Marianne said, as she put the hood of her jacket over her head. After a few minutes the bus turned the corner, and the young man standing close to them threw his cigarette on the ground, crushing it under his boot. On the bus, Evandie found a seat near the front by a window and, once settled, her thoughts turned again to June. During the months since she’d moved into the nursing home, Evandie and she had become friends of sorts. It made her happy to see June each morning, and she’d often think if something amused her during the day that she’d have to remember whatever it was to tell June. She spent hours listening to June’s stories about when she was a young wife and mother or later when she was a widow—the life she had before the broken hip had made her bedridden.
Evandie too shared stories of her home and family, her life as a girl in Jamaica with her three sisters and four brothers. One morning while discussing their children, Evandie said, “My Mom still looks after kids, her grandkids mostly but also kids from the neighbourhood.” Beside June’s bed was a cart with a breakfast tray of boiled eggs, toast, and tea. She was sitting up in bed, smiling at Evandie. Always a petite woman, she now was tiny; bird tiny, Evandie thought, with twigs for fingers and the smallest of branches for arms.
“Seems there should be a time when that stops, but I guess for a mother, it never does,” June said. That day her eyes were bright against her translucent skin and her face looked smooth and remarkably young, so that Evandie could see the girl she once was. “Children, they change everything.” She picked up the spoon and scooped egg from the eggshell. “So tell me Evandie, what it was like growing up in Jamaica. Tell me about your mother.” And Evandie sat at the end of her bed and recounted how she and her sisters used to play on the street until the night came in, how her mother’s laugh and the sound of music filled their house. That had been a good day for June, a day when she was able to recount the stories of h
er life in a spirited way, full of humour, that hid, if only during the telling of them, the frailness of her body or her mind’s increasing inability to concentrate.
z
One afternoon when Evandie was folding clothes on hangers and placing them in the wardrobe, June said, “I had a blender in my apartment in Montreal.” Evandie was accustomed to conversations starting like this, without any obvious context. “I kept it on the counter beside the window that looked down into the back alleyway, by the fire escape.”
“My Mom had an old blender too. She was given it by a woman she worked for,” Evandie said as she folded trousers.
“One day when I moved something on the counter, a horrible black spider came out from behind it. I was alone, William was at work, the kids—I think Natalie was two by then and the baby must have been eight or nine months old—both of them were sleeping. And I screamed. God I remember how black it was against the white counter. Isn’t that strange, to remember a spider after so many years?” Evandie thought, it’s going to be a good day, she wants to talk.
“I always hated spiders; they scared me. When I was a kid I had to have one of my brothers get rid of them, but here I was alone in my apartment with my kids and I had to deal with it. So I took a serviette and you know the way they cringe down when you touch them, well I was able to grab it and put it outside. I was so proud of myself for dealing with that spider.” She folded her fingers over the cuff of the blanket and looked toward the window. “Years later, of course, I had to deal with them by myself all the time, but this was my first time alone, and I remember it was that night that Will did not come home for dinner. He stopped for a drink at the pub and stayed, even after his buddies had left.” Evandie raised the top of June’s bed and June moved her arms to the outside of the blanket. “That day, the day I saw the spider, I made meatloaf, his favourite, and that’s when it started, his coming home late. And when he did arrive home chances were he’d be drunk.” June again turned toward the window, to where trees were shedding leaves and swaying in a strong autumn wind.
“Ah, yes,” Evandie said with a sigh. “My Dad, well he used to come home often in that state—we just learned to stay clear.” She stopped folding the clothes and remembered the night before, when her own husband had been drunk and fell asleep in the living room with the television blaring.
“That apartment in Montreal, I remember it well, the back stairs, I’d hear him come home and I’d pray he wasn’t drunk.” In the ensuing silence, sounds of the nursing home: the intercom, people in the hallway, televisions from nearby rooms, grew pronounced.
“So, what did you do?” Evandie said, resuming her folding. “I mean about his drinking?”
“Well, I tried to ignore it at first. Don’t get me wrong, he was a good man. Good with the children and there were many happy times, it was to change, of course, when he became sick. But those days, when Natalie was a baby...”
June’s voice trailed off and Evandie said, “Here, let me change the pillows.” She rearranged June’s position to make her more comfortable. “So when did you move back to Ottawa?” She went back to the wardrobe.
“When he became sick. TB. It was terrible back then, so many people died. We had to stay at his Mom’s place and live in the basement with rooms separated by curtains.” June leaned her head back and stared at the ceiling. “That was during the war. And after, when I got TB, his mother said Lawrence could stay, but not Natalie. Can you imagine, her own granddaughter?”
“That must have been hard, leaving them.”
“Awful, just awful. They were so young.” June’s small feet under a blanket were peaked in front of her. “There’s a time when you see what has to happen, when you realize you may not always be happy, that happiness somehow is no longer the point. Well, that’s what happened to me in Montreal. Some people, like my sisters, would say I grew up.”
Evandie stopped her folding, she knew what June meant; it had been a long time since she had thought of her own happiness. “So what was it like at the sanatorium?”
“We were forced to rest and there was supposed to be no excitement, but of course there was. It was a hotbed of gossip and intrigue.” The tone of June’s voice was now relaxed. “And that’s where I met my second husband.” Looking away, she smiled. “People didn’t have as much as they do now. It was at the end of the war and it seemed everyone had a terrible story to tell.” Yawning, she fell back into the bed. “You are such a sweet soul,” she said, “listening to me like this.”
Evandie closed the wardrobe doors and walked back to the bed where June had closed her eyes and fallen asleep. Over the years, she’d come to recognize the way death comes in, the patient’s slow retreat inward, coupled with an unwillingness to speak and on other days a sleepiness so profound it was impossible to wake. At times, like this day for June, there would be a reprieve and almost a joy in the recounting of their lives, days when they’d accept a cup of tea or cookie and sit up, alert, and want the lights on. But always other days followed, when it was impossible to rouse them and Evandie saw in sleep’s irresistible persuasion the final lull that would steal them from their life and families.
z
The bus was waiting at a stoplight when it began to snow. The driver turned on the wipers that swept across the two large windows in front of him. Evandie moved her purse closer to her chest and thought, this is going to make me even later. She could see children on the sidewalk, walking backward against the wind and snow. They reminded her of her daughter Carolyna and then of the night before.
Percy and a friend had been sitting in the two easy chairs facing the television in their living room when Evandie returned from work. They were dressed in their work clothes, flannel shirts, overalls and heavy socks, drinking beer and laughing as they tried to blow up balloons for Carolyna. “Here, here, you go,” Percy’s friend said as he tied the stem of a red balloon and passed it to her, and then, “Well looky here, if it isn’t the missus,” when he saw Evandie stomping snow off her boots in the hallway.
She had walked from the bus, carrying grocery bags of food for dinner, and when she opened the door to a mess of coats and scarves, she smelled beer. She let go of the bags and put her mittened hands to her cold ears. “Percival,” she said, “can I speak to you?”
“Sure, doll,” he said, yanking the chair’s lever down so that he could follow her.
In the kitchen, she said, “I need a bit of help here.”
“Alrighty, hon, once Jack leaves, I’m all yours.”
“And when will that be?”
“Soon, once the show’s over.”
His eyes were rimmed in red, he was grinning and Evandie was reminded of the young man he had been in Jamaica, when he was full of plans. He’d knock on her back door, jumpy and animated, and her father would say dismissively, “Evandie, it’s your young man.” Even then, years before they were married, she found it difficult to stay angry with him.
“Okay, Evey. Just start dinner and we can talk later.” And Evandie let him go back to the living room, was in fact glad to see him leave so she could be alone in the kitchen she loved with its new appliances, its island counter and large window that looked out onto the neighbourhood park.
z
On the bus, Evandie watched the snow accumulate in lines at the wipers’ edge. Marianne, who was sitting behind her, moved forward in the seat and because they were stopped for no perceptible reason, said, “Must be an accident up there.” The snow was growing heavy so that they were unable to see beyond a few cars ahead of them. Evandie leaned back and remembered the day before, when June’s daughters had mentioned their mother’s condition, that she was sleeping most of the day and not wanting to eat. Evandie told them it was normal. “She’s had a long life,” she said. “You have to expect some days all she’ll want is sleep.”
The bus route did not travel into the grounds of the nursing home so Evand
ie was forced to trudge along the long pathway from the bus stop to the central entrance. The snow had drifted into peaked mounds and the winter trees stood strong above her, their branches interlaced. When she reached the front door she stopped and took off her scarf, which was encrusted with snow, shaking it out in the vestibule.
“Look at it out there,” one of the doctors said on the way to his car, but there was a gay tone in his voice. When Evandie had first moved here, she was surprised by how storms of this sort often filled people with a sort of excitement or enthusiasm. She hurried to the nurses’ station, dragging her scarf behind her, calling out “hello” and “good morning” to patients and co-workers.
The attendant she was replacing was writing at the desk, her head down, and when she heard Evandie, she said, “Hi there. Has it started to snow yet?”
“Yes, crazy out there. I’m so sorry to be late; there was some kind of accident.” Evandie said. She hung up her coat and bent to remove her boots when she heard the woman, without raising her head, say, “June Grosford died twenty minutes ago.”
“What?”
“Yeah, the family was called in the night and the doctor just left.”
Evandie stood with one hand on the wall to balance herself, the other still holding a boot.
z
After June’s family left, Evandie visited the room where June’s body was resting, the covers pulled to her chin, her knees still raised on a pillow as they were in life to give her comfort. Evandie had often placed her in just this position, so that once she was without pain, she could fall asleep. And that was how she looked, pain-free and sleeping. There was a smell of antiseptic in the room, subtle but distinct. The sounds of the hall, an intercom, the call for an attendant, the scuttle of wheelchairs and the pill dispenser cart, all disappeared, and Evandie herself with her soft-soled shoes did not make a sound as she approached the bed. She leaned down close to June, as she had done so often in the past, when she attempted to wake or entice her to eat or drink. June’s skin was smooth, erased of strain or expression and there was no flutter to her eyelids, only stillness, an extension of the room and white light from the window that looked out onto the snowy courtyard.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 18
