Mount Pleasant (21 page)

Harry drove north in the anonymity of the Camry. He parked outside his mother’s building, went in through the lobby and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He put his key in the lock and opened up and went in. Felicia was lying on the floor. There was a glass six feet away; the carpet was stained with its contents. She was a talented drinker, so drinking to unconsciousness at seven p.m. was unthinkable. He ran to her and knelt. Her face was a rictus, her leg bent unnaturally. Her eyes were open. A stroke? A heart attack? God. “Mother.” He put his lips to her ear. “Mother,” he whispered again. She was breathing. He ran to the phone and dialled 911. The woman said an ambulance would be there in eight minutes.

“What should I be doing?” Harry asked.

“Make her comfortable. Get her legs straightened out and her head elevated. Check her tongue. Talk to her.”

Harry moved Felicia’s leg so it was straight and got a pillow from the sofa and put it under her neck. Stretched out on the floor, she looked like a child. Her face hadn’t relaxed, and her arm lay like a piece of wood beside her.

Harry wasn’t sure what to say to her, struggled to find some happy touchstone. “Remember that hotel in Rome that served pastries sprinkled with icing sugar at breakfast?” he said at last. “You and Erin and I were there. Dad had to work.” It was 1974 and Rome looked like a Fellini film: sharp suits, women in dresses and heels, cigarettes and Campari. He recalled a boy standing by a red Vespa, his black hair combed back. He was wearing a sports jacket and talking to a beautiful dark-haired girl in a sundress who touched his arm and laughed. They both got on the Vespa and sped into the insistent Roman traffic. They seemed so impossibly adult, and Harry felt like a bumpkin.

“Remember that restaurant near the Piazza del Popolo?” he said. “We went into a hotel and there was a huge interior courtyard that went up the hill toward the Borghese gardens. There were lanterns hanging from orange trees on the hill. It was like walking into a secret kingdom. The restaurant was under that canopy, made of some kind of white fabric. There were hundreds of candles.” Women leaned forward to have their cigarettes lit, their cleavage suddenly exposed. The candlelight made everyone look glamorous. Felicia was wearing a dress and heels, and the waiter lit her cigarette and flirted with her. Harry could feel men’s eyes on his mother. It was almost a physical force, like a wind that blew by him and his sister. Perhaps it was enough for her that she received that attention. It confirmed that she was in the world and that she was desired.

Harry looked at her face, now rigid with pain, the lines deeply etched. “You took me shopping in Rome,” he said. “You wanted me to dress like all those Italian teenagers, who looked so grown up.” Still no response.

They’d gone to Florence on that trip, then Paris and finally London. They were in Europe because of some particularly ugly marital impasse, and the usual distance of the cottage was insufficient. It was also one of Felicia’s rare but determined forays into full-bore motherhood. Harry said, “You wanted us to see the world, to experience other cultures, learn other languages, you said. You thought we should go abroad for a year of schooling. Remember, we visited that school in England and made inquiries. It looked formal and pleasant, and I dreaded the idea of a year there. In London we stayed with a couple that you knew. There was a party.”

A drunken dinner party that Harry and Erin watched from the stairs for a while. A man with a moustache and sideburns
filled Felicia’s wineglass, spilling some and laughing. Later, from the bedroom where he and Erin had been put up, they could hear raucous laughter and glass breaking. There was music and Harry came out of the bedroom to see people dancing, then went back to sleep. At 5:30 a.m. he was shaken awake, opening his eyes to his mother’s face a foot away. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and there was alcohol on her breath and the dead whiff of cigarettes. “Pack your things,” she whispered harshly. “You have two minutes.” Harry got up and looked around at the strange bedroom. The people they were staying with had kids, but they were away somewhere. It was a kids’ room that he and Erin were in, with twin beds and a closet filled with formal-looking clothes. A cricket bat stood against the wall. Harry and Erin got dressed quickly. His mother threw their things into suitcases. It occurred to Harry that she hadn’t gone to bed at all. They left the bedroom quietly and walked down the carpeted stairway. No one else in the house was up. The dining room was a spectacular mess, and there were stains on the carpet. Bottles were tipped over on the table and an ashtray had flipped onto the floor. Harry and Erin went out the front door behind their mother, who marched briskly up the street. She was wearing sunglasses though it was drizzling rain. It was grey and dismal, and it looked like London had died in the night. She finally hailed a taxi and they got in. She lit a cigarette and stared out the window.

“I’d prefer, madam,” the driver said, “if you didn’t smoke in my taxicab.”

Felicia waited a few beats, then exhaled smoke. “I’d prefer if you drove us to the Grosvenor Victoria.”

Harry and his sister spent most of the day playing cards in their hotel room while their mother smoked and stared out the window.

“Remember London?” Harry said now to his mother.

The paramedics came in the open door, sudden and brisk. They laid Felicia on a stretcher and took her out to the ambulance, talking in code to the radios on their shoulders. Harry phoned Erin and told her to meet him at Sunnybrook Hospital, then drove there. He could hear the whine of a siren ahead somewhere, maybe a different ambulance.

Erin arrived shortly after Harry.

“Did they say how bad, Harry? Do we know anything?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, didn’t you ask?”

“I just got here, Erin. They said someone would come out.”

They sat in the fluorescence of the waiting room, on cheerless orange plastic chairs. A woman on a gurney was wheeled past them. She might have been ninety, and her collapsed face was startled-looking, her empty mouth open. How could death be a surprise? Harry wondered.

A doctor came out and introduced himself as Dr. Shakeesh. “You are the children,” he said, an odd though not entirely inapt characterization. “Your mother has had a stroke. What is called a transient ischemic attack. So this is the bad news. However, it is relatively mild. Not to say it isn’t serious. There is some trauma to her head from when she fell, too.”

“Will she be able to take care of herself?” Erin asked.

Shakeesh shrugged. “Of course. You will have to see how she is feeling, what she feels she is capable of. I’m going to put her on Lipitor.”

Harry looked at Erin. Felicia might begin reaping the rewards that fifty years of gin (and thirty-odd years of cigarettes) would bring: liver, kidneys, diabetes, a brain withered under the assault. Who would deal with her recovery, which would inevitably feature martinis and recrimination? Which of them would take
her in if it came to that? Half of each day would be spent pulling Felicia’s barbs out of their flesh.

“The TIA by itself is not that serious.” Shakeesh gave a concerned almost-smile. His teeth were unrealistically white, and it seemed as if he couldn’t wait to set them loose in a smile. He had thick black hair combed back, a handsome man wearing an expensive shirt. “The greatest concern with the TIA is that it can be a precursor to a more serious stroke.”

“You have the statistics.” Erin said this as a statement rather than a question.

“A third of TIA victims suffer a more serious episode. This is something you have to be aware of. There are a number of home-care options,” he offered.

“When can we see her?” Harry asked.

“Soon. We’ll monitor her. Your mother will have to modify her habits.”

“Meaning?” Erin said.

“How much does she drink now?”

Harry shrugged, “It’s hard to say …”

“Between twelve and sixteen drinks a day,” Erin said.

“Every day?” Shakeesh said, trying to suspend judgment.

“Today would be an exception,” Erin said tersely. Harry could tell that Erin was beginning to dislike Shakeesh.

“She may need to abstain entirely.”

Felicia in one of their homes, without gin. They would have to abstain themselves, Harry thought. It would be impossible to have wine with dinner while their mother sat, thirsty and insane, at the table. What would this situation look like after forty-eight hours? After two weeks? It was unlikely that she would quit drinking. It might not even be possible. Though she had renounced so much lately. She might be one of those people who just quietly abandon alcohol without
clinics or counselling or confessing to grey strangers in church basements.

“If she doesn’t stop drinking?” Erin asked.

Shakeesh shrugged slightly. “We’re doing an ultrasound. I’d like to see that liver.”

“It’ll be a lulu,” Erin said.

Shakeesh got up and shook their hands again. “A nurse will bring you to her.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Harry said. They watched him stride away. Neither of them wanted to start the conversation about caring for their mother. Harry finally said, “Tommy Bladdock told me some money is missing from BRG.”

“How much?”

“Roughly $30 million, he thinks. Some of it could be Dad’s.”

“Who took it?”

“Tommy doesn’t know. But August Sampson has been missing for three days, apparently.”

“Hard to believe that August took it. He’s got to be eighty. He has cancer of … what, the liver?” Erin took her cellphone out of her purse and stared at it briefly, then turned it off. “Maybe he was the only one smart enough.”

“He called me,” Harry said. “Before he disappeared.”

“August? What did he want?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

A nurse came in, a middle-aged woman with a tired face. “Come with me,” she said. They followed her down the corridor and through a set of doors and down another corridor that smelled faintly of bleach. She marched through an open door and checked her clipboard and pulled back a green curtain. There were three other curtained beds in the room. There was only one chair in Felicia’s cubicle, and Erin sat. Harry peeked through the curtain beside them, where an emaciated
man lay motionless, attached to an IV. Harry took the chair there and placed it beside his sister’s.

Laid out on the hospital bed, their mother looked heartbreakingly petite, her face dull and colourless, the small lines collapsed in intricate patterns under the yellow light.

“Do you remember when we were in London?” Harry asked his sister.

“When we were kids, you mean?”

“Staying at that house. Just one night, I think. In South Kensington, sort of grand but run down a little. We had to leave early the next morning.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Mom was hungover, poisoned. The place was a mess. I think she might have slept with the host. The guy who owned the house. He had a moustache.”

Erin shrugged. “Mom would have been what, thirty-eight, thirty-nine?”

“Remember the next day? It was raining and we stayed in that hotel all day, playing card games, and she hardly said a word.”

“Wasn’t it always raining?”

“Do you think she can hear us?” Harry asked, and they both stared at her.

They stayed for an hour, rooted by duty. Harry said he’d come by in the morning to be there when she woke up. Erin would come later in the day.

Driving home through the valley, he stared at the river, sluggish and brown, a shallow line of water that hadn’t quite frozen. There were tiny snowflakes, a sleety assault carried on the west wind. There wasn’t any traffic. Near the ravine he saw something at the side of the road, like a load of clothes that had
fallen off a truck. When he got closer, he slowed and saw that it was a group of men, huddled over something. His headlights landed on them, and one of the men stood up and turned into the glare. There was blood on his coat and his face. He was holding a knife. Harry stopped the car, transfixed. He wondered if a movie was being shot, if he had somehow missed the line of trailers.

The man with the knife approached the car. His beard was matted with something, his parka filthy and torn at the shoulder. Behind him, men slashed and pulled. Snow angled in the wind. Another man stood up and also began to walk toward the car, and Harry glimpsed the deer that was on the ground behind him. The other men pulled meat away and cut the tendons. This information came in a horrible snapshot, the details filled in later.

The man with the beard was only a few feet from the car, his dark eyes unreadable. Not anger or shame, but something feral. Harry stepped on the gas and swerved past, and then watched the scene recede behind him.

EIGHTEEN

W
HEN HE GOT HOME
, Gladys was sitting on the couch, drinking a glass of wine. Harry had called from the hospital to let her know what had happened, to tell her she didn’t need to come. “How is Felicia?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It was a transient ischemic attack.”

Gladys stared, waiting for more information.

“An episode of neurologic dysfunction caused by lack of blood flow.” He’d found the definition on his smartphone after the meeting with Dr. Shakeesh. “Basically a kind of mini-stroke.”