Leaning, Leaning Over Water (16 page)

I was sorry for him, for the way the nurse had spoken. I thought of Grampa King in his navy suit in the coffin, how unnatural he’d looked when he was not in overalls. I relaxed, for a second.

Mr. Leeson was up and over the end of the bed, sliding backwards, headfirst and down. I caught him before he hit the floor but his head was resting on my shoes. He was too heavy to hoist and the bell was too far to reach, so I had to shout. He was hanging by his feet, which were caught in a tangle of blankets and the end rail. His knees were bent and he was upside down, pyjama bottoms askew, johnny shirt dragging, mouth open, his white hair electrified and brushing the floor. Elvis and the nurse came running in.

“We’ll have to tie him again,” the nurse said to Elvis. She spoke as if I were not present. “Go and get the straitjacket from the linen cart.”

They hauled Mr. Leeson to an upright position and leaned him back into the pillows. He glared at me as if I’d betrayed him. When the straitjacket was brought he slipped into it passively. He did not object when it was laced up the back or when his arms were inserted into absurdly long sleeves. He did not object when the sleeves were crossed and tied to opposite bed rails. He looked like an ancient and bony bird, its wings folded recklessly. I thought of Granny Tracks, who often said, “Much flapping breaks wings.”

“You have to learn, Trude-the-rude,” said Elvis. “You have to learn that when you’re with a patient,
you’re
in charge.”

I looked at him and was almost grateful. But I was Mr. Leeson’s betrayer. I had not kept him safe. I was sent back to Outpatient and spent the afternoon helping Emmy in the examining rooms, replenishing supplies.

Every night, in our new home, Father asked how we liked our jobs, and Lyd and I said, “Fine.” We didn’t tell him the details, though we told each other—every one. I had begun to understand that the hospital was a place like no other. It was like a city within many walls. It had a population, contained. Every day held the adventures of intimate lives and, every day, there was a tallying of stories. Stories were told around the nurses’ desk and at coffee break and in the lunchroom and beside the basement lockers. Doctors, nurses, lab technicians, orderlies, ward aides, clerks and housekeeping staff all exchanged stories. Patients told them to one another while they waited in the pews, and they told them to the cleaning staff who were sympathetic, and they told them to me. Elvis continued to tell his stories and Emmy kept up a running account by my side. There was never a morning or an afternoon when a story was not told. I listened to them all. It was as if each person were recounting a life up to the point of the telling. Bringing the self forward to each new day. I had never heard so many stories.

While these stories were multiplying, our own stories at home had slowed down. The Hilroy scribbler had disappeared with the move. Father had gone back to work for the car dealer, in his cast, and did not seem to be doing strange things.
Nor did he ever speak of or brag about shooting the rapids, though, when I considered the act, I thought it amazing. The second stage of his knee surgery was coming up and I was watching for the right moment to tell him I was leaving. He thought I’d be going back to school in September. I wasn’t making much money at the hospital but it was enough for my trainfare west and to get started.

Throughout the summer, Elvis kept up his banter, trying to shock, always trying to make me react. One day in the cafeteria he told me that a friend of his had taken a girlfriend swimming in the Ottawa River and they had “done it” underwater.

“After they finished, they couldn’t separate,” he said. “They had to be pried apart.”

“My God,” said Emmy. “Are you ever going to let up?”

I wasn’t worried about Elvis. I could see through him and, anyway, Emmy was there as a buffer. I never knew what she was going to say, but I’d learned that she had taken it upon herself to look after me.

I told Lyd about the swimmers when I was leaning into the counter at Woolworth’s.

“Nobody around here tells stories like that,” she said. “It’s a joke. Surely it can’t be true.”

She and I went to the “Y” dances on Metcalfe Street every Saturday night, now that we lived in the city. Lyd was going out with a student at the university. I had met a boy named Ross at a “Y” dance and twice we’d been to the movies. I couldn’t imagine telling him any of the Elvis stories. I couldn’t imagine telling them to anyone, except to Lyd.

Father’s knee repair was scheduled for a Thursday afternoon. He was admitted to the ninth floor on Wednesday night to be prepared for surgery and I had driven his car to the hospital Thursday morning so I could pick up Lyd and bring her to the ward. We planned to be in his room when he was brought back upstairs from the Recovery Room.

Thursday was also gynecology day at the clinic.

“G-Y-N day,” Emmy said in the morning, spelling out the word as everyone did.

“G-Y-N day today,” said a nurse. “All women.” She made a face. The pews were filled with women of all ages, from girls in their teens to the very old.

Occasionally, because the Outpatient Clinic was next to Emergency, a patient was wheeled in on a stretcher when the Emergency Room was full. I was sometimes asked to stand beside someone while the nurses and doctors caught up on the backload of priority cases.

“Just press the wall buzzer if there’s a problem,” the head nurse told me. “Someone will come running.”

Two of our three examining rooms were full when I was asked to go into the middle room and stay with a forty-yearold woman who had been spotting in the middle of a late pregnancy. Emmy rolled her eyes. We were giving out the afternoon juices and the pews were full. We’d been running since early morning.

I was worried about the responsibility but I also knew that there were so many people in our clinic I could open the door and yell if I needed someone. Because it was G-Y-N day, the woman’s doctor was in the clinic anyway; he was with another patient.

The woman smiled at me when I went in and then she closed her eyes. She was wearing a johnny shirt and was tucked up to her chin in a heap of blankets. Even so, she kept shuddering. The walls of the examining rooms were thin and we could hear her doctor in the next room, questioning a patient.

The woman behind the wall did not seem to understand English; a second woman was translating.

“My mother doesn’t want surgery,” said the voice.

“Well, her uterus is falling out,” the doctor’s voice said. “Tell her.” He seemed exasperated. “I’ve inserted a pessary. What happens when she has sex?”

“Ma?” said the younger voice, and a flurry of words was exchanged between the two. I didn’t know the language; it wasn’t French.

“She says my father is rough,” said the voice.

“She has to tell him not to be rough, or I’m going to have to operate.”

There was a long excited conversation between mother and daughter.

“She says my father isn’t going to like it,” said the young woman’s voice.

My patient opened her eyes and moved her head back and forth as if to say, “For God’s sake, do we have to listen to this woman’s private life?” But there was nothing we could do to escape. We heard the door shut on silence and then our own door opened. The doctor came in and I fled.

I headed for Emmy who was across the room but the head nurse intercepted. “I’m sorry, Trude, we’re getting another patient from Emergency. I don’t know what’s going on over there but we can’t staff our own clinic and look after
their
patients, too. I don’t have a nurse or a pair of hands to spare.
If you’ll stand beside the new patient in room three, I’ll have her prepped for surgery as soon as someone’s free.”

Emmy was beckoning with one hand and shaking her head back and forth but I had no choice.

“It’s a young woman,” the nurse went on. “She’s stable now, apparently. I don’t have her name yet—she’s to go straight to the OR from here. Just a kid, I guess. Abortion. She stuck knitting needles up herself. Jesus.” She shook her head. “Jesus, Jesus.”

I went into room three and shoved chairs out of the way. An orderly was pushing a stretcher towards me from the swinging doors. A young woman, small-boned, her face as white as parchment, was wheeled in.

“Mimi?” I said. “Mimi, oh God.”

Mimi lifted a hand out from under the blankets and reached for one of mine. Her fingers were cold; I could feel the bones of them under her skin.

The orderly and I lifted and pushed her over to the examining table. He rolled up the bloody sheets and stuffed them onto the lower shelf of his stretcher and wheeled it back towards his own department. “Watch her, kid,” he called over his shoulder, and he shut the door.

“I really did it this time,” Mimi said. “I’m so scared.”

She reached for my hand again and gripped me as if she would be cast adrift if she were to let go. Streaks had appeared on her face as if someone had pressed long hard fingers into her cheeks. Even so, she seemed to be gathering herself fiercely.

“I think I was bleeding a lot,” she said. “It feels like it stopped now.” She twisted herself to her side and faced the wall as if she didn’t want to see me any more. “I guess you and I never thought we’d be here,” she said. “I really have something to tell the priest at confession, now.”

I felt an edge, a twist to her voice. She flopped onto her back suddenly and looked scared again.

“Get something quick, Trude. It’s coming.” She yanked at and kicked the blankets away from her and I reached for the buzzer.

“No!” she said. “Put something under me. Quick.”

I looked between her legs and what I saw first were two tiny feet. They were the colour of red rubber erasers and were hanging out of her. Then, membranous knees and perfect miniature legs, the whole tiny body emerging from Mimi feetfirst like some bad voodoo joke, veins and arteries attached on the outside.

I reached to the shelf for the first thing I could grab and shoved a basin between Mimi’s legs. The baby slipped into it and lay there, its rubbery body coiled into permanence against the cool silver sides. It was about seven inches long. A complete human being. A dead and still and purply red miniature being with sealed eyes like membranes, and a tiny penis, and fingers and toes all separate and complete. It might have washed up on a shore of some remote and bloody river, the name of which we had never known.

I pressed the buzzer on the wall and heard Mimi at the head of the mattress, a new hardened Mimi in a new hardened voice, staring up at the ceiling, saying, just as blood began to pool and the door opened and a nurse ran in: “Is it out yet? Did you get it all out?”

I drove to Woolworth’s to get Lyd and thought about Father. I’d gone upstairs to the surgical floor during my lunch break. He’d been wearing a hospital robe and was standing at the window
looking down over Ottawa’s streets. I knew he hated traffic, did not like being in the city, did not want the suffocation of its throb and beat around him. I knew, also, that now that he was free of St. Pierre, he’d never go back. He had told me once that what a man wanted was a house he could drive up to. Where he could park his car at the curb and know that his family was safe, inside. Where he could walk down the street and be greeted occasionally by a handshake and the warm touch of an old friend.

His surgery was scheduled for the end of the day, the last case in Orthopedics. I told him I’d be picking up Lyd, that we’d be in the room when he returned to his ward. Eddie had an evening paper route in our area and would meet us later, at the hospital.

“This isn’t much,” Father said. He made a gesture towards his knee. “They have to take out the pin, make sure the joint’s okay, that’s all.” He seemed to be preparing himself. I knew he was glad that Lyd and I would be there, later.

I drove downtown and parked on O’Connor. It wasn’t Father I was worried about now—he was okay. It was Mimi’s face that was in front of me. She had tried to grin—weakly—when I’d left the examining room. She’d been wheeled to the operating room shortly after that. Emmy had figured out that Mimi was my friend. At coffee break, even Elvis had been quiet. Warned, probably.

I began to think about the time Bee-Bee had tied us up, Mimi and me, upstairs in their big house. I’d been nine years old, turned ten that summer. Mimi and I had never talked about the incident, after that night. But I’d never forgotten what Bee-Bee’s face had looked like when he’d stood over us in the shadows, and when he’d leaned, slack-jawed, into the
closet door. I wondered what Mimi would do now—if she would go back to being a filing clerk, and if she and Rosaire, the guard from the jail, would keep going out. The look on Mimi’s face stayed before me: she’d seemed so small. And the way she’d gathered herself. Some part of her had already moved on.

Lyd pushed out through the back door of Woolworth’s and I watched as she made her way along the street. She walked the way Mother used to walk; her hair was pinned up neatly and she glanced side to side as she came towards the car. I could imagine Lyd living here forever, being content to stay in one city the rest of her life. I was glad that we were friends and that I loved her as much as I did, but I knew that I would never be like her and settle for the same things.

“Another one of those days,” she said as she got in. “I’ll never eat another western sandwich as long as I live. She sniffed the sleeve of her cardigan. “I smell like oil,” she said. “I smell like something fried. I smell like mayonnaise and bacon.”

I pointed the car towards LeBreton Flats. I had no plan; I suddenly knew where I wanted to be.

“You look like a ghost,” she said. “Where are we going? Isn’t the hospital back there?”

“We have time,” I said. “Father won’t even be in Recovery till around five.” I spoke as if I knew how everything worked at the hospital. I heard it in my own voice.

Lyd settled back. “Surprise me,” she said. “The river?”

I didn’t answer. I drove across the Chaudière Bridge and through Hull and cut down to the lower road. I could see glints of blue through leaves on the left. We passed the golf courses and the old car barns. I drove for twenty minutes and parked Father’s car in front of our old house on Brébeuf; I knew Duffy
and Rebecque would be at work. I headed for the edge of the river and Lyd fell into silence beside me, at the cove.