Happiness of Fish (26 page)

“Not much change,” Gerry says. “Duane and Gretchen were in for a bit. After that we just sat.”

He decides not to tell her about Gretchen singing.

“So do you know when she'll get back to the home?”

“I don't know
if
she'll get back. I've got to talk to a woman from social services on Monday. The doctor says she's improving, but I don't think she knows me from Adam.”

“It's hard,” Vivian says.

“Sort of, but not really,” Gerry says. “I mean, so far, I just sit and wait. I'll call you if anything changes.”

He decides he sounds a little distant. Vivian's being supportive. He needs to add something.

“I miss you, kid.”

“I miss you too. Call me.”

Sunday morning is aimless. Gerry wakes up early again, still running on Newfoundland time. He's up, drinking coffee and playing Space Rocks when Doc gets up.

“What's your agenda like then?”

“Hurry up and wait, I guess,” Gerry says. “I'll arse around until lunch and then go back to the hospital.”

“I'm going over to Marion's,” Doc says. “She has a garage-door opener she wants installed. I'll be over there for lunch.” Marion is his younger sister. Up until a few years ago she'd been an actress. She was the voice of Granny Porcupine in the
Forest Families
cartoons. She was also the nosy neighbour in a successful series of toilet-cleaner ads. Then she split up with her husband and moved back to Ottawa with her daughter. She took a bunch of courses and does something with developmentally delayed adults now. Years ago, Gerry had impressed Tanya by telling her that he knew Granny Porcupine and the nosy toilet lady. Now he's intimidated by Marion's new usefulness and commitment. He remembers when she was eleven and he and Doc were sixteen and they had to sit home with her until Doc's parents came home from Friday night shopping.

Just before he met Patricia, he'd been surprised to meet her at a party, grown-up suddenly, with long legs, ankle-strap platform shoes and Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes in an old ivory holder.

“I had the biggest crush on you when I was a kid,” she said. “I wrote
Mrs. Marion Adamson
in the back of my social studies book.”

She left no doubt that she'd got over her infatuation.

They'd got re-acquainted when she came with Doc to have lunch with Vivian and Gerry, their last visit together. Gerry told her he'd been trading on having babysat Granny Porcupine.

“But everything changes, young rodent,” she said, putting on Granny's voice and screwing up her face. “Sure as acorns, everything changes.”

Gerry blows the morning away, eating at a diner and driving aimlessly around town. He heads in-town, to his old neighbourhood. He hasn't spent much time there since his mother moved into the home in what had once been the suburbs. He drives past his old house and notices that it's got a couple of pretentious urns on the front porch. The paint has been updated to a fashionable cheddar-cheese shade. The old greens, browns and riverboat whites have yielded to the yuppie palette. On previous visits, he has offered to take his mother by the house to see it. She wasn't interested.

“I've moved and I'm settled and that's all there is to it,” she'd said, and apparently that was that.

The neighbourhood is full of four-way stop signs now and Gerry finds he drives through it not much quicker than he used to bicycle. He passes a horse chestnut tree, the ground under it littered with broken twigs and browning nut husks. A warning against climbing it had been read in his school when he was in third grade. He's pleased it's still attracting nut thieves fifty years on.

Gerry drives to the hospital at lunchtime and finds that parking is not a problem on a Sunday. The lot is full but parking meters along the street are not in service. He parks his rental and takes himself to lunch in the hospital cafeteria. He decides he's been overdoing The Jade Gate and diner breakfasts with home fries. He takes a bowl of soup, builds himself a salad plate and takes a pot of tea to a corner table. He has his Chinese notebook in his jacket pocket and pulls it out as he drinks his tea.

The young nurses are wolfing down poutine
, he writes and runs dry. He goes back through the line for another pot of tea and takes a sticky cinnamon bun as well.

Upstairs on the ward, little seems to have changed since the day before. His mother has her eyes closed. Her breathing is noisy and laboured but regular. Her head is thrown back on the pillow. Her various support systems hum and gurgle.

Chairs are at a premium in the room today. In the night, another bed has acquired an occupant, a little stick-figure woman. A fat blonde woman in a lemon jogging suit is feeding her custard from a Tupperware container.

“Come on, Mom,” she says, over and over.

A couple in matching green barn coats and Blundstone boots are visiting the big woman diagonally across the room. The man has grey, longish hair over his collar and heavy glasses. He says nothing. His wife has a scouring pad of grey curls and is upset with somebody.

“The least they could have done was call,” she says at intervals. “It's not like they had to come.”

The woman who was moaning the first day Gerry arrived is quiet today. He sees that she's the shrunken double of her visitor, an erect, white-haired little woman in a navy suit.

“My sister,” she says, nodding politely to Gerry. “She had a stroke.”

The visitors fill the room's ordinary chairs and a complicated reclining wheelchair which appears to belong to the big woman. Gerry, feeling spry and virtuous after his salad, hoists himself onto the broad, low windowsill and leans against the sash. He can reach his mother's hand on the bed. Her breath rasps regularly. Occasionally she twitches and mouths something like a distant shout.

“Hey,” she breathes into the clear mask. “Hey.”

The afternoon passes slowly. Gerry discovers yesterday's crossword in his jacket pocket and tackles it again.

In mid-afternoon, a couple of technicians wheel in an X-ray machine and he's sent out while they pull the curtains and position his mother for their shots. By the time they go, the rest of the visitors are starting to leave as well. Gerry now has a chair to himself.

Holding his mother's hand, he feels its chill. He remembers somebody saying an elderly relative's feet had been cold before he died. He reaches
under the blankets and touches the dry, bony feet. They feel cold, but relative to what? He takes her hand again.

The window by the bed looks out across the fields of the experimental farm across the road. Gerry watches the sky get darker blue, and then redden as the shadows lengthen. In the angles of the old hospital building it is already dusk. The room has a deepening gold-red glow. He doesn't bother to turn on the light at the head of the bed. He sits and watches the dusk. He thinks that he'll have nothing to report to Vivian again tonight.

A sudden intake of his mother's breath surprises him. It's a gasp rather than the gurgle he's become accustomed to. He looks at his mother. Her eyes are open. Her head lifts from the pillow. Then she relaxes. The noise from the oxygen apparatus is gone. There is no movement of bedclothes.

Gerry places his knuckles to the side of her neck and feels nothing. He takes her wrist and feels for a pulse.

Fingers on the wrist and not the thumb, or you're taking your own pulse, he thinks, recalling some long-gone first-aid lecture. He feels nothing. He sits for a moment in the gathering twilight. He looks at the quiet forms in the other beds, gets slowly out of his chair and walks down the hall to the nursing station.

The male nurse he met on the first day is on duty when he goes to the desk. He's got his mauve sweater on. In the last day or so, Gerry has noticed that the sweater is there even when he's not. Gerry has seen it hung on the back of an ergonomic chair.

“Excuse me,” Gerry says. “I think my mother has just died. She's Adamson, in thirty-twenty.”

The nurse looks sceptical, as if amateurs might not know death when they see it. Still, he comes around the desk and follows him back to the room. He goes to the bed and places a hand on Gerry's mother's wrist.

“Mrs. Adamson,” he says. Then, a little louder, he repeats, “Mrs. Adamson.”

Gerry stands aside as the man plugs a stethoscope into his ears and moves it quickly from place to place, as though life might be hiding, playing hard to get. He gives a little sigh and straightens. His demeanour softens.

“Yes,” he says. “I'm afraid you're right. She's gone. I'm very sorry.”

“Thank you,” Gerry says. His eyes are prickly and he feels his lip tremble. The nurse shakes his hand and then draws the curtains around their quarter of the room.

“Are you all right?” he asks. “It's always a shock, I know, even when it's expected. I know. My mom died two years ago. She was just seventy-five.”

“No. No, I'm fine,” Gerry says. He feels he's looking down from some vantage point on himself and the nurse having this conversation. “She was ninety-six. It's not unexpected.”

The plump nurse is efficient. He explains how the body will be held and released to the undertaker. He says “funeral director.”

“Do you want her rings?” he asks.

“The engagement ring, I guess,” Gerry says. “I think we'll leave her wedding band with her.”

“I think that's a nice idea,” says the nurse and manages to get the engagement ring over the arthritic, swollen knuckle with less difficulty than Gerry would have imagined possible. He wraps the ring in tissue and tucks it in the pocket of his wallet where he normally stashes lottery tickets. The nurse assures him that the hospital will handle all the details and bustles away. Gerry stands alone inside the curtain by the bed for a minute. He finds he's holding his mother's hand again. He bends, kisses her forehead and goes down the hall and calls Vivian.

Vivian picks up on the second ring. “How are you?”

“Okay, I guess, sport, but the old lady's gone. She died about fifteen minutes ago. She just faded out with the sunset.” Gerry's eyes prickle again. He hears a sniff from Vivian. Vivian is kind-hearted.

“I'm sorry, Gerry.”

“I know, sport.”

“So I guess I'd better come up,” Vivian says. “I'll book tonight.”

“Call Krista at the travel agent's. I told her you might need to travel in a hurry. She gave me her cell number. I left it on the pad on the fridge.” Gerry is starting to feel efficient, glad to be doing something.

“Okay. I'll call you at Doc's later on and tell you how I get on,” Viv says. “You're sure you're okay?”

“Yeah, kid, I'm fine. Call me later,” Gerry says. “Love you.”

Going down the elevator, Gerry feels strangely light-headed. He has rehearsed his mother's death in his head hundreds of times. He has braced himself on flights up from Newfoundland a couple of times for false alarms. The reality has been so much simpler than anything he'd imagined that he feels unreal, floating.

Shock, he thinks. Give warm sweet liquids. You're getting old. Go sit and have a cup of tea and make sure you're not going to have some kind of anxiety attack trying to drive.

He goes to the hospital cafeteria, buys a mug of tea and dumps two envelopes of sugar in it. He sits and drinks it, watching himself for shakes. Nothing happens. He wonders what should happen. A ninety-six-year epoch has passed. A chapter of his life, nearly sixty years long has closed. A guilty thought insinuates itself that he feels lighter, the way he used to when he left the retirement home at the end of a long visit. Whatever he does or doesn't do with his life now, there's one less person to answer to. He hikes his jacket collar up under his ears and walks briskly out of the hospital. He collects the rental car and drives slowly back to Doc's.

Mort is at Doc's when Gerry arrives. He and Doc are leaned back in overstuffed chairs, drinking Doc's homemade beer.

“How's the hospital?”

“It's all over. She just slipped away. I was sitting there and she just stopped.”

“Oh shit, Gerry, I'm sorry,” says Doc.

“Yeah. That's tough. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I mean she just stopped. No fuss really. She wasn't a fussy sort of person, I guess. At least I was there. That's about all you can say.”

“Yeah, that's something.”

Mort and Doc sit and talk quietly while Gerry takes the phone to the table in the kitchen part of the loft. He's filled pages of his notebook with the family numbers. He sits down and starts punching numbers, passing the word.

Telling the bees, he thinks. I read somewhere that that's an old Irish custom. Go around to the hives and tell them so and so is gone. Hey bees, Katherine Florence Adamson is dead. She hated “Florence” or “Flo.” She said it was a name for a cow. Dad always called her Kit.

It all takes a surprisingly short time. Some people volunteer to call other people. Some people aren't home and he leaves his short message on their answering machines. Duane and Gretchen are among the not-at-homes. They go to evening church. He calls his friend Bob, his mother's lawyer.

“Oh gosh, Gerry, that's a shame,” Bob says. Bob is one of the very few people Gerry knows who say “gosh.” “Land o' Goshen” floats into his head, but he can't remember if he ever heard anybody say it for real or if it came from a hillbilly movie. Bob says the paperwork should be straightforward. He'll get started on it. They agree to get together.

By eight o'clock he has finished. Vivian rings from St. John's to say she's booked a flight. She'll get in the next night about nine-thirty.

“I'm going to Toronto first and then coming back to Ottawa,” she says. “Isn't that weird? They say it's an hour quicker than going by Halifax.”

“The new geography,” Gerry says. “I'll be there to meet you. I miss you.”