February (12 page)

Yes, and talk, his mother says.

For some bloody reason, John says. And strangely, he feels as if he could cry. He is standing at the foot of the Empire State Building, looking up. The building tilts over him. It seems to slant. He feels as if a force coming from the centre of his chest is holding the building up. He feels the weight of the building, but it is only jet lag and a hangover from drinking on the plane. Drank his face off on the plane. There’s a baby coming.

He has a meeting in New York and another plane to Toronto tomorrow night. Then he will meet up with Jane Downey.

How foolish his parents were to love like that. How foolish to have so many children. They had no money. He wants to ask his mother, What were you thinking? Didn’t you know what you were getting into? Why did you love each other so very much? It destroyed you. Don’t give that much, he wants to say. People don’t have to give that much. How foolish to keep going.

And in childhood he had felt it: something is going to spill over. This is what he would ask his mother: Was it strange before Dad died? Did we know what was coming? Even back then, John had known it could not last.

Of course you can stay here, his mother says.

She’s smart, John says.

A smart person, his mother says.

Attractive too.

I’m sure she is.

I don’t know what she is, John says. I hardly know her.

It has nothing to do with knowing. His mother sounds irritated.

What she’s like. Jesus, Mom, John says.

There’s nothing to know, his mother says. Just come home.

I’m looking up at the Empire State Building, John says. His parents had believed what people said about risk back then. They had believed that there was a new science devoted to the assessment of it. Risk could be calculated and quantified. The risk, they had believed, was worth it.

. . . . .

Putting Down Hardwood, November 2008

THE SKATES ARE
sharpened and Helen is taking the kids skating at Mile One Stadium. Family hour. Timmy has run across the street to get Patience.

A family of Sudanese had moved in across the street: Patience, Hope, Safire, Elizabeth, Melody, and an older brother, Michael. Their mother is Mary. Helen first saw seven-year-old Patience standing in the middle of Long Street with her head tilted back, trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue. Her dark face even darker circled in the white fun-fur of her winter jacket. Patience with her eyes closed and her tongue out, and then she skipped around the corner.

Later she knocked on Helen’s door, collecting for a school marathon.

Put me down for five bucks, Helen said.

Patience played with Timmy when he was over, or Patience would knock when she needed help with her homework. Drawings in her science exercise book: the sun, the flowers, the soil, the rocks, all the layers of the earth labelled neatly, and beneath, the boil of lava.

Timmy did his best to beat up Patience, but she gave as good as she got. They rolled in the grass, tearing at each other’s hair, kicking and punching, and when they heard the front door they’d jump up and get away from each other as if nothing had happened.

What is going on over there?

Nothing.

Just playing.

Timmy, what are you doing?

He’s not doing nothing, Helen, Patience would say. But they looked as if they might kill each other. Once Patience came downstairs with a wad of bloody toilet paper held to her nose. Timmy came down after her with a bump over his eye.

What happened?

Nothing.

Or they’d get under the blankets in the guest bedroom like an old married couple and play Nintendo.

Or once they let the basketball roll into traffic and Helen heard the screech of brakes and the angry horn. Or they climbed the new scaffolding next door: Get down, Jesus, get down, do you want to break your necks?

They scraped their knees and hands—finely shredded filaments of skin curling over bits of gravel and stone, blood coming up in little red beads—taking turns with the skateboard.

Today Helen takes them to Mile One and Patience clings to the boards. Then she skates with little steps that slip backwards as much as forwards and she grips Helen’s hand. She swings her arms like windmills and falls on her bum with a
thump
. Timmy zips past, pretending he’s never seen Patience or Helen before in his life.

The ice is etched with swirls and cuts, the faint colours of beer ads and soft drink logos under a pale blue. Helen runs into Gary O’Leary, whom she’s known since high school. Still at Aliant, he says. Gary has a daughter who plays in the orchestra. And Sylvia Ferron and Jim, they are here with their granddaughter, same age as Timmy. A cashmere hat with kitten ears and a knitted strap under the chin. Helen has a chat with Mike Reardon; she heard Mike on the radio talking about solar panels and geothermal furnaces. She says about the renovations.

The men sway from side to side in cable-knit sweaters and eiderdown vests, blades whispering
shick, shick, shick.
Couples hold each other by a light touch on the elbow, moving in unison. The smell of the cold air and french fries and vinegar from the canteen. Carols over the loudspeaker.

Her ankles hurt when Helen hobbles into the dressing room and unlaces her skates. The ground feels inert and too hard. Her toes are cold. She drops Patience at home and takes Timmy back to his mother. It is dusk. The snow of the morning has lost its bluster. There are big flakes now that fall in a slant and loop up with the breeze like handwriting.

Helen unlocks her front door, holding an armful of groceries, and there are three empty floors and silence. It is a relief. Solitude, she thinks, is a time-release drug, it enters the system slowly and you become addicted. It’s not an addiction; it’s a craft. You open the closet doors very carefully so loneliness doesn’t pounce out.

There’s the war in Afghanistan and some woman held prisoner in Mexico without a trial for laundering money, Obama and Clinton, and then just Obama, a volcano in Chile. The
Globe and Mail
hits the screen door every morning with a
thud
. The guy throws it from his car window. She gets the
Telegram
too. Forty thousand died in an earthquake in China. Helen cannot conceive how that many can be lost at once. What does her life add up to in the face of that?

She has paid off the house. She and Louise have gone to Florida three times. They went to Greece last year. She has Patience and Timmy, and there’s a houseful of young men who play in a band just two doors up. The boys in the band have a Newfoundland flag hanging in one window and Che Guevara in the other. Helen hears the drums and the bass late on Saturday nights. They shovel her out after a storm.

The television says there’s a problem distributing aid in Burma, just a few roofs left in each village after the cyclone. She sees a clip, a long line of men handing cartons of bottled water to each other down a line, a mass of people waiting behind a rope. Then something about polar bears. A mother bear collapsing on top of her cubs, suffocating them.

Helen cleans the cupboards. She cleans the fridge. She listens to the radio and she scrubs a pot and the yellow of her rubber glove looks weirdly yellow and the colour seems separate from the glove. The doorbell.

Just a second. Just let me find my purse. The yellow is a separate thing all on its own and she has tears in her eyes. She is lonely after all. Her eldest child is going to be a father. John is coming home and there will be a baby.

I know I put that purse somewhere. The paperboy is a grown man with a disability and he bangs on the door. He hits the aluminum screen door with the flat of his hand and the sound rings through the house.

I had it a minute ago. If I just put the damn thing where it belongs.

That’s all right, Missus.

No, I have some change.

I’ll come back later, Missus. The man’s mother, she must be seventy, parked on the hill with the engine idling and her headlights coming through the door so her son is lit from behind, like an angel of some sort.

Here it is, she shouts. And what do I owe? What do I owe. Patience’s father was killed by the Janjaweed, Helen has come to understand. She gives the paper a little snap and holds it out to read. There on the front page: Genocide in Darfur.

Keep the change, Helen says. She closes the door and locks it. A car swings past and long rectangles of light and shadow slide down the hallway to the kitchen. The house smells of sawdust. The sub-floor has been laid. Thick sheets of opaque plastic over the sofas and dining room table. Louise had demanded that she renovate.

You’ve got to put down hardwood, Louise said. Do something about the kitchen. You want to keep up the property value, you’re going to have to renovate. You have to hire somebody.

Cal has been dead twenty-six years and she is capable sometimes, for a stretch of time, of forgetting Cal has died and how he died. She talks to her daughters every day. She is taken up with the house and her yoga. She sews wedding gowns, a kind of business venture that grew from a hobby.

I’m a young fifty-six, Helen thinks. Her grandchildren need her. She plays bridge. She took up curling but she hated the bloody curling. Her sewing gives her satisfaction.

Helen has mastered loneliness; nobody thinks of her as lonely any more.

You want something light, Louise said. On the floor.

A bloody fortune, Helen said.

Something with shine.

You’re talking cosmetics.

I’m talking basic upkeep. I’m talking, do you want this place to be condemned or what?

But if Helen is, say, driving or sleeping or stretching on a yoga mat, she’ll remember and live through a fresh fierce wallop of grief. It can take her by surprise. Knock her silly.

I’d get rid of these walls, Louise said. She was standing in Helen’s living room, her hand raised, and gesturing in the direction of the bookcases.

I’d open this place up, she said. It’s too goddamn dark in here.

And now there are two ragged gaping holes on either side of the fireplace where the bookshelves had been.

. . . . .

The Dog, 1975

HELEN AND CAL
were walking along a beach and there was fog and the dog was with them. The dog flew, his paws barely touching he was going so fast, lunging with his head and neck, gathering all that muscle and shine, hardly marking the dimpled sand. Then he snagged to a stop. He yanked back as though on a chain, and circled, half-crazed, and started digging. A concentrated fury, the forepaws sending up arcs of sand.

Helen was thinking that whatever the dog found would be putrid and half decayed. The skin or feathers or fur fluttering in the breeze, detached or softening, coming apart, and an ugly truth protruding like the teeth still attached to the jawbone, a relishing grin.

The dog would lie down in it and press his shoulder in, squirming in the filthy stink. The dog’s hindquarters moving in a half-circle while the one shoulder pressed into whatever kind of carcass, emitting bitter snarls and coaxing whimpers. The dog would be panting, crazed by the smell that floated towards them, tail thump-thumping, and they should get over there and haul him out of it.

Cal took off his shoes and his jeans were rolled up, and the waves crashed and foam rushed in over his feet. He bent down and put his fingers in the water and then put three fingers in his mouth to taste the salt. He sucked the salt water off his fingers. That was all.

But Helen felt his mouth tugging on his fingers, the fast suck of it, over her pelvic bone, and it was the baby, moving for the first time. She felt it.

A swatch of a memory that has held together only because of the sun burning through the fog that day. Or because her senses were torqued by the pregnancy, the bliss factor, and how sensual Cal’s fingers looked in his mouth.

Were they having an argument? She remembers the dog and how it stank of death. How they drove home with it in the back seat and her eyes watered.

But they were full of bliss. There might have been some minor rage earlier that day, odd rages took them over sometimes, but in the wake were utterly ordinary moments, or there was bliss.

Is this what a life is? Someone, in the middle of cleaning the bathroom, remembers you tasting the ocean on your fingers long after you’re gone. Someone draws that out of the fog, draws out that memory, detached from circumstance, not locatable on a timeline. Was it her third pregnancy? Or her second?

It was an afternoon long before Cal had applied for the
Ocean Ranger
, Helen thinks. They had heard about the jobs and Cal decided to apply. It was not what he wanted to do, but he had three children and a wife. He decided. He went to the office on Harvey Road twice a week for two months. It was all about who you know, he’d been told. He had a cousin put in a word. But everybody had a cousin.

Cal pulled his fingers from his mouth and Helen can’t even remember the season—was it September?

Tasting the ocean. She knows they had the dog then, and they were broke and didn’t care about money. They had thought about university, but they didn’t go. Odd jobs and cobbling together a life. Trips to the beach. Cal could wire a house, though he didn’t have official papers. He painted in the summer, renting the scaffolding. He did construction. Three children, and then they started to care about money. They had Cal’s resumé typed professionally.

There was a guy behind a desk, big fat guy, taking the applications, Cal said. He would come home and Helen would be cooking or getting dressed for work. She was waitressing then.

Every day you hear something different, Cal said. She remembers him heading up the hill towards the office on Harvey Road. He walked with his hands drove into his pockets and his jacket open to the wind and snow. She thinks about the fluorescent light, greasy looking on the high-gloss walls of that office, the big cylindrical ashtrays on either side of the row of wooden chairs, and how he would have had to force himself through the double doors because it was like begging.