Natural Order (34 page)

We’ll both be dead before we know it
, I think.

Walter arrives shortly after ten, looking more than a little winded.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Mrs. Pender was sleeping when I got to the home.”

He’s wearing a new shirt. It’s electric blue with yellow lightning bolts. Does everyone dress like this in Miami? When he takes off his sunglasses, I see that his eyes are puffy.

“Don’t ask,” he says with a wave of his hand. “The last thing I want to do is give the old crow that kind of validation.”

I invite him in. “I can put on some coffee if you like. I’ve got cookies.”

“No thanks. I don’t have time.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“My dear, I’ve already been too much of a nuisance in your life,” he says, reaching into his back pocket. He pulls out an envelope. “I thought you might like having these.” He passes it to me. “Just a couple of pictures of Fred. One when he was young and the other one taken a few years ago, before he got sick. We were in Vegas, which explains all the drunk Midwesterners in the background. But it’s a good picture. You can see him as he was.”

There’s a scalloped edge sticking out of the envelope and I pull out a black-and-white photograph. “Thank you,” I say. When I look at it, my heart contracts. It’s Fred in his white suit, the one he was wearing when he led the band that day, so many years ago. I was a young girl then. I still remember what Fred meant to me that day. The dreams I held close.

I leave the other photo inside.

“There’s a story behind this white suit,” I say to Walter. “Do you know it?”

He shakes his head.

“Let me tell you.”

Fern calls later.

“Do you want to try out that new restaurant on Langley tonight? I heard it’s cheap and the portions are a fair size. The desserts are good, too. I haven’t had a decent slice of pie in I don’t know how long.”

“I don’t have much of an appetite,” I say.

“You will by supper. It’ll do you good to get out of the house.”

She asks me how I’m feeling and I’m not sure what to say. I could say “fine.” It’d be easier. But even if I wanted to tell the truth, I don’t know how. This is my problem. I’m buried inside myself.

“I’m surviving,” I say. It’s as close to the truth as I can get.

“It’s certainly been an interesting couple of days.”

“Yes.”

There’s a pause and I close my eyes and wait. I know she’s struggling, too. We’re a lot alike, Fern and I. Too much of our lives goes unspoken. The same could be said for my sister. This is what’s kept us together all these years, huddled with our silences, talking
around
the things that mattered most, rather than talking
about
them. But we used to talk. I remember those days, those conversations. When did they stop? When did we start living only on the surface?

“Maybe we can go for dinner tomorrow night,” Fern says. “Would that be better?”

“I can’t tomorrow night.” I’ll be on my way back from Port Locke. But she can’t know this.

“You were lucky,” she says abruptly. “To have had a family. I know that, given everything, it might not seem that way to you. But you had something. And you still have it, even if it seems like sometimes you don’t. I don’t know if I’m making any sense.”

“I’ll call you about dinner,” I say.

I dreamed about John in the years after his death. Sometimes the dreams took place at his apartment in Toronto. Other times, at our house in Balsden. I dreamed of running after him. I dreamed of knocking on his door to no answer, even though I was certain he was there, on the other side. I dreamed of the shape of his back, his silence, his attention focused on everything else but me. Sometimes John was a boy. Other times he was a man. I never dreamed of him as I most wanted to see him: as he’d be now if he were alive. My mind couldn’t picture his face in the present. My imagination didn’t have that capacity. Perhaps it was for the best.

For years, I had a recurring dream. I was standing on our street, but not in front of our house. Things were off balance, a mixing of details, the way dreams always are. John came up behind me. He was sixteen or so, a backwards baseball hat on his head, wearing an oversized jean jacket. (I don’t know why. He never wore baseball hats, let alone backwards ones, and I don’t remember him owning a jean jacket.) He wanted something from me. Change for the bus. I looked down the street and saw a bus turning the corner. A flash of light. I pushed my hand deep into my pocket and pulled out whatever coins I had and passed them to him. He took them and the bus pulled up. John stepped inside and I watched him take a seat next to someone.

Charlie.

John put his head on his father’s shoulder and closed his eyes. Charlie placed his hand on my son’s head. Then the doors shut. I watched as the bus disappeared in the distance like a popped bubble.

I haven’t dreamed of John lately. This has bothered me, because as painful as the dreams are, at least I get the chance to see him again. Sometimes, I tell myself that the absence of dreams means his soul is at peace. But I also know it’s not John’s soul that’s in question.

There’s a knock on the door shortly after dinner. It’s Mr. Sparrow, holding an ice cream pail full of greenish-red tomatoes.

“I didn’t get as many this year,” he says with an apologetic shrug. “Just set them on your windowsill for a few days. They should ripen up.”

I have no idea what I’m going to do with this many tomatoes, but I take them. “Thank you.”

I invite him in, but he declines. He has to get back home. He needs to start clearing out his closets.

“I have to get organized.” He turns slightly when he says this and I feel a tug of concern.

“Oh? For what?”

“After our talk the other day,” he says, “about you moving, I got to thinking. Things are becoming too much to handle. Even this blasted garden. I never eat half the stuff. I don’t know why I grow it in the first place. I suppose to keep myself busy, but I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason anymore.”

“Of course it’s good enough,” I say, stepping out onto the porch.

“What I mean to say is that people should have a purpose in life,” he says. “And if your purpose is something you’ve invented for the sake of having one, well, that seems to me to be even worse than having no purpose at all.”

“Mr. Sparrow, what is it you’re getting at?”

He surveys the black iron rails surrounding my porch. “I called my nephew the other day. Gerald. I told him to put me on the waiting list for some seniors’ homes in the area.”

“There’s no need for that. I’m not moving anytime soon. It was just talk—”

He holds his hand up. “It’s got nothing to do with your plans, Joyce. I need to start being practical. My fall shook me up pretty bad. What if you weren’t home? What if you hadn’t come over?”

“But I
was
home. I
did
come over.”

“But what about the next time? I don’t want anyone worrying about me. I don’t want to be anyone’s burden.”

“But you’re not a burden,” I say, my voice rising. “Mr. Sparrow, you’re part of this neighbourhood. You’re the reason I’ve stayed in this house for as long as I have. We take care of each other. That doesn’t have to change.”

He slowly shakes his head. “It does, Joyce, whether we want it to or not. And better we’re the ones making that change than have life do it for us. We keep a little piece of our dignity that way. We’ve been lucky to have had one another. Just think of all the years we’ve been here.” He turns around and begins to make his way down the front steps. “It’s time for some new blood on this street. Young folks. People with energy and dreams to spare. Kids. Remember the sound of kids?”

He’s halfway down my driveway now, the evening closing in around him.

“Mr. Sparrow!” I want to call after him. “Who will make sure my blinds are up?”

This morning, I wake up early (although I didn’t sleep well throughout the night) and, after breakfast and the morning news (a fire in the west end, an increase in property taxes, a chance of showers later this afternoon), I get dressed, put on my makeup and slip out the back door. I’m catching the 8:30 bus. I know I could drive, but I don’t want to press my luck.

The bus to Andover is half empty. I buy a magazine to read while I wait in the Andover terminal to board the bus to Port Locke, but I can’t concentrate. The words slide past me. I keep thinking about her. Marty’s mother. I try to picture what she looks like. The clothes she wears. If she resembles her son.

They’d go up north and spend weekends with Marty’s mother in Port Locke
.

That’s what Angela told me that day in the grocery store. To think of this stranger, this unknown woman, doing the exact thing that I couldn’t: opening her doors, no questions asked, and taking my son in. A true mother. My fist curls and thumps against the side of my leg. This has to work.

The bus to Port Locke is even emptier than the bus from Balsden. There are six of us, a hodgepodge of strangers, making this two-hour trip north on a Tuesday morning in September. The sun slides shyly between the clouds, coming out every now and then to spread its shadows. I stare out the window at the blurred evergreens and church signs with what I assume are messages of hope, the letters too small for my eyes to read.

Marty’s mother can’t be much younger than me. But she’ll be spry. Eager. A woman who has spent her life in open landscapes. A visor on her head and gardening gloves on her hands. She’ll be holding a pair of pruning shears. There’ll be a faint smudge of dirt on her forehead. She’ll feel the tap of my finger on her shoulder. Turn around. Smile politely.

Mrs. Taylor?

Yes?

We stop in a town called Milner. It’s nothing more than an intersection. I watch the bus driver squat and remove a pair of boxes from the luggage compartment before heading into a convenience store that apparently doubles as the post office. The bus door is left open. I eye the blue velour seatbacks and the few domes of hair and consider getting up. Putting on my coat. Stepping down onto ground I haven’t touched before. Someplace new. Unknown. I can leave everything behind. No one will know about my son. My life. The grief I wear like a pair of sandbag earrings.

I can begin everything again. And get it right this time.

The bus driver steps back onto the bus. Closes the door.

“Port Locke,” he announces, “the next and final stop.”

The bus deposits me in the middle of downtown. I go to the bathroom at the terminal and check my makeup in the mirror. There’s a yellow and red plastic container next to the sink for depositing hypodermic needles. I blink at it. Has life really come to this?

I wander along what I assume is the main street. There are bookstores and a couple of women’s clothing stores with vacant-looking mannequins staring out from the display windows. I pass a bingo hall and a flock of teenagers huddled under a cloud of cigarette smoke in front of a Tim Hortons. I spot a bakery across the street.

“I’m looking for Taylor’s Nurseries,” I tell the woman behind the counter.

“That’s out on Highway 4,” she says.

“Too far to walk?”

She nods. “But only ten minutes or so by car.”

“I’ll have to take a cab.”

She says she’ll call to order one and I thank her. While I wait, I decide I should buy something in appreciation. The display case holds neat rows of sugared doughnuts, cookies and pastries. There’s a chocolate cake dotted with ground nuts and tight spirals of icing. I notice a Chelsea loaf on the counter.

I tell her I’ll take a loaf. “I haven’t had a Chelsea loaf in ages,” I say.

“Just made these,” she says, snapping open a white plastic bag.

I’ll give Marty’s mother the loaf. The cab arrives and I get in. The driver’s radio crackles. I hold the loaf, feeling the warmth seep through the plastic bag and spread across my thighs.

Mrs. Taylor?

The nursery is bigger than I expect. A white sign announces that mums are on special. The doors silently slide open and I step through a miniature green forest. Around me are bird baths and shiny wheelbarrows and shelves of painted pots. A voice above me requests that
Joel come to the service desk, Joel to the service desk, please
. I pass a woman in a red smock with the word “Taylor’s” stitched in gold embroidery above her breast. She looks at me and my breath catches. No. Too young.

I walk by the service desk and see another woman standing behind the counter. She’s plump with blond hair scooped high on her head like icing. Older. But still not old enough. At the opposite end of the nursery, I see a sort of teahouse, a small café tucked into a corner, with wrought-iron tables and chairs and surrounded by a white picket fence. Silk vines coil up some of the fence posts. What a nice idea, I think, making my way towards this oasis. With all this greenery, you could almost convince yourself you were in a perfect park setting. A sign announces that the lunch specials of the day are crab quiche and shepherd’s pie. The prices seem a little steep to me, but no matter. They’re running a business, after all. As I’m standing there, a young girl whisks by me with a pair of coffee mugs in her hand. She stops.

“Are you here to eat?” she asks.

I nod, realizing I haven’t had anything since breakfast, and she tells me to take any seat I like.

“I’ll be with you in a moment.”

It’s peaceful in here. Calm. I hear the sound of water running softly. An invisible brook. Lights twinkle from shoulder-height artificial trees. I set the bag containing my Chelsea loaf on the chair next to me. The girl comes back and hands me a menu. I’m told there is no chicken soup today.

“It’s not very good anyway,” she says. “The noodles are always mushy.”

I order the crab quiche and a cup of coffee. If this is a family-run business, she could be Marty’s niece. Her eyebrows are thick. Straight lines of disapproval. She’s tired of her job, I can tell. Just as she’s about to walk away, I say, “Excuse me.”

She turns around.

“Is Mrs. Taylor here today?”

“You mean Jean?”

“I don’t know her first name. She had a son. Marty.”