The Empty Room (28 page)
She tried to remember the last time she had been happy. Blank. She tried to remember any time when she’d been happy. Scenes presented themselves for consideration: the first date with Jake when she’d invited him to her house and cooked sole almandine, which they ate by the light of a solitary candle on that very table there. It had been a nervous-in-a-good-way night and he’d kissed her before he left, but that memory was now encrusted with all that came after. It was tainted by heartbreak. Impossible to think of part of Jake-time without thinking of all of it.
Taquanda
. So, not that. None
of that. What about the Christmas when she was thirteen and her parents gave her a guitar? Her mother, in that spooky-smart way of hers, had hidden clues to where the gift might be all over the house, starting with a note in the over-decorated tree. Each note was written backwards, so Colleen had to hold it up to a mirror to read it, and each was in rhyme. There were at least a dozen notes, leading her on a merry chase, until she finally found the guitar in her father’s clothes closet. Colleen smiled. How surprised she’d been, and how elated. Her mother had gone to a lot of trouble for her. Mother. Best not to think of Mother … She strained to think of other happy moments. That time in Nova Scotia, the falling snow. Yes. There. Brief, but undeniable. And walking in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery one autumn afternoon when the leaves were a garland of garnet and ruby overhead and the sky was rough and ragged with pewter clouds. A feeling of peace there, and rightness. Pixie. Best of all friends. In the fields with the dog. As a little girl, to see the big old horse who ate apples from her hand. Stolen hours in Hart House Library, on rainy days when no one else was there and she spent her lunch hour nestled in the deep stone sill of the leaded glass casement windows, reading C.S. Lewis or Chesterton or Loren Eiseley. A time or two in bed, just before falling asleep, when she thought that if she slipped away, if she died right then, it wouldn’t hurt at all and she wouldn’t mind a bit. Colleen snorted. What a curious image to include among a list of possible joys. It occurred to her that the only times she’d been truly happy, or at least the only times that weren’t tarnished by the stain of future
unhappiness, were when she’d been alone, or in the company of non-humans.
Pixie had lived to the ripe old age of sixteen, but then she’d become incontinent and Deirdre had her put down. Just dropped her off at the vet and left her there one day when Colleen was at school. “You left her there? Colleen had shrieked through her tears. How could you do that?” Her mother looked at her as though she were speaking a foreign language. She said the dog was better off.
The idea of Pixie dying in the company of strangers still haunted Colleen. If she did get a dog, she’d never do that. Never. She thought of Minoche. Cats, they said, were easier to care for than dogs, but she hadn’t been very good at that, had she. Minoche might still be alive but for her selfishness, but for her drinking.
In truth, not only had there been few happy moments, but also Colleen hadn’t done much to make those around her happy.
On the end table was a stack of books. She picked up a collection of Australian poems and turned to one marked by a yellow sticky-note. It was by Edward Booth Loughran, the poem she’d thought about earlier in the day.
And temptings dark, and struggles deep
There are, each soul alone must bear
,
Through midnight hours unblest with sleep
,
Through burning noontides of despair
.
That pretty much summed it up. For her. For all the souls alone.
Those pretty knives. A nice hot bubble bath. A ruby bath.
Tom Waits, bless him. The last note faded away. She could put it on repeat and slip under the waves of her claret bath just as easily as that. Like that time her mother cracked her one across the face when she’d come home plastered. She was so drunk now, she wouldn’t even feel the knife slice. It would be heaven just to make it all go away. So peaceful. All problems resolved and nothing left to do.
She remembered Robert. Was this how he’d felt?
R
obert had worked at the university in the Department of Medical Research Office, where he helped prepare research grant proposals. Colleen had met him at a university Christmas party and they hit it off immediately, in the way two people do when they both feel out of place and achieve that instant level of intimacy one can establish over a double scotch. Blond and handsome in a Germanic sort of way—fleshy with soft lips and rosy cheeks and solid thighs—he’d go to fat as he aged, she knew, but at thirty there was something sensual and cherubic about him. The sort of young man one could imagine in lederhosen without laughing out loud.
They spent the evening swapping gossip about how the research fellows in the Department of Medicine stored their lunches and bottles of booze in the vast refrigerated rooms where the rabies vaccines and various bacteriological cultures were left to grow in their Petri dishes; which professor was most likely to be forced out because he was sleeping with his students, again; and indeed, who was most likely to pair up at the end of that very party. They laughed a great deal, and by the time they realized almost everyone
else had left and the bartender and wait staff were looking at them pointedly, they had recognized each other as kindred spirits.
Thus began a friendship defined by frequent lunches on Baldwin Street, mostly at John’s Italian Caffé, where the wine was served in little jam-jar-style glasses. At first the conversations were all gossipy and fun, all about movies and books and Robert’s fabulous and utterly eccentric friends, but as the months passed, clearly all was not well in Robert’s world. Darryl, his boyfriend, had a wandering eye, it seemed, and the lunches regularly turned maudlin, with Robert in tears.
By July Darryl had left him for an art dealer with a gallery in Yorkville, and Robert was one big soggy tissue. He ate too much and was putting on the pounds. He couldn’t sleep. He walked the streets at night, finding himself time and again in front of the gallery Darryl’s new boyfriend owned.
For some reason, Colleen and Robert’s friendship was confined to lunches; but these lunchtime therapy sessions seemed so important to him. Colleen held his hand and told him that of course he was grieving, that the loss of love was not unlike grieving after a death, but that there were thousands of men who’d be thrilled to have Robert in their lives.
“I don’t want thousands of men. I want Darryl,” Robert wailed. “He’s the one who always wanted more. I’ve always wanted less. And even that seems like too much to ask for.”
As the weeks passed, it was as if Robert were in a room with no door, just feeling his way around the same walls, day after day.
And then, in August, he brightened; he laughed again, even told wicked little jokes about his co-workers (“he’s so dumb he thinks the English Channel is a British television station”), and the subject of Darryl’s betrayal no longer came up. Robert was going to be just fine after all, Colleen was sure. And what a relief it was to have him back, since even Colleen’s patience had begun to wear thin.
He said he was planning a dinner party for everyone who’d been so kind to him in the face of his recent “troubles,” as he put it.
“Come Friday,” he said. “I’m in the mood to cook—stroganoff, I think.”
“Oh, honey, I can’t on Friday,” she said. She and Lori had plans for a girls’ night out.
Robert merely shrugged. “No worries, darling. Next time, then, yes?”
“We’ll have lunch on Monday and you can tell me all about it.”
That Monday, in the morning, she called his phone, but he didn’t pick up. It went straight to voice mail. When he hadn’t called back by noon, she walked over to his office to pick him up. He wasn’t there, and his desk was completely cleaned off, a bland expanse of oak veneer. Puzzled, she asked the departmental secretary where he was.
“You’d better ask Dr. Klinehoff,” she said, and she wouldn’t meet Colleen’s eyes. “There he is.”
Colleen turned and saw tidy little Dr. Klinehoff, the departmental Chair, just coming in the door with a bunch of papers under his arm.
“Dr. Klinehoff? Excuse me, I was looking for Robert.”
He stopped and regarded her over the top of his pince-nez. “And who are you?”
“Colleen Kerrigan, I work over in St. Mike’s. I’m a friend of Robert’s. We’re supposed to have lunch. Is he sick?”
Dr. Klinehoff took her by the elbow and moved her into his office. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but … Robert died.”
She felt as though someone had slammed a crowbar right in the middle of her chest. She couldn’t breathe.
The story came out over the next few days. The dinner party had been a going-away party. A little gift had been given to each of the six people who came—a thank you, he’d said, for seeing him through his hour of darkness. An antique copy of Peter Pan for one, a hand-blown glass vase for another, a watercolour painting, a ring … his own things, chosen especially. Robert said he was like Bilbo Baggins, having an un-birthday party.
He had made up his mind, it appeared, in the weeks preceding the dinner when Colleen thought he was getting better. The change of attitude Colleen sensed, the calm and return of good humour, had been the result of his having made the final decision. There was nothing left to worry about. The pain he felt would soon come to an end. He tied up all his financial affairs, selling his car and some of his furniture to wipe out a debt he shared with Darryl, so that his ex-lover, who apparently had no head for money, wouldn’t be left holding the bag. He rented a room in a motel by the lake and it was there, on Sunday, that he hanged himself.
On Wednesday a little package arrived in the mail for Colleen. It was a tiny gold Celtic cross on a chain.
Because you believed in me
, the note read.
Love, Robert
.
H
ow awful that had been. She let her head flop onto the back of the couch as tears trickled from the corners of her eyes. The terrible finality of it all. When it happened, she told herself that if he’d lived, after a few years he would have been with someone else, happy again and caring little for the callous Darryl. Suicide was, as they said, a permanent solution for a temporary problem.
She went to the funeral. It was a sad little affair, with Robert’s mother and two sisters, a smattering of cousins and a few people from the university. A depressingly low number of his friends attended, and Darryl was not among them. Nor was Robert’s father, who Colleen learned had disowned his son after he informed his parents he was gay. No, at the time, she hadn’t understood why he couldn’t have held on just a little while. Now, she understood perfectly.
And how quickly life had gone on after Robert’s death. It was as if his life were little more than a hand in a bucket of water. Once the hand was pulled out, there was no evidence of its having been there. She never even wore the cross. She couldn’t bring herself to. It lay in the bottom of her jewellery box.
It would be the same for her, if she did what she was contemplating. A few tears shed, but just a few; many who would say they saw it coming. And a lot of tsk-tsking. Now that she thought about it, she realized she knew quite a number of people who had committed suicide—a boy named Gary in her high school who locked himself in the garage with the car engine running; the sister of a friend who injected herself with an overdose of insulin and left a note so bitter and filled with rage it took one’s breath away; a girl from high school who upon graduation went out to Vancouver and stepped in front of a bus after checking herself out of a mental hospital; B.B. Gabor, the musician Jake had been friends with and who’d been over for dinner a number of times. He’d hanged himself. Aunt Flo, Deirdre’s aunt, had jumped from the cliffs back in Ireland, and some cousin Colleen never met put rocks in her pocket—very Virginia Woolf—and went into the sea. And Liam, of course. When you went looking for them, suicides were everywhere.
And, thought Colleen, let’s not forget Mum, who had threatened to kill herself so many times that one afternoon about six months before she’d had those fateful strokes, when Colleen called her and was met with another conversation that began, “I’m going to kill myself. I’ll do it this time. What’s the point? It’s not like you give a damn,” she finally said, “You know, Mum, if you really want to kill yourself, you’ll have to be careful about it. You don’t want to do it only halfway and end up drooling and incontinent. Pills will work, if you have enough, but you need to take anti-nausea medication first, so you don’t just spew them all up, and you should
drink quite a lot of alcohol. Do you still keep the bottle of medicinal scotch? Because that will certainly work. But the thing you must remember is that, just before you nod off, you should tie a plastic bag around your head. That’s the important bit. The sure thing. If the pills and the booze fail, you’ll suffocate.” Her mother hung up on her and for a few days Colleen told herself, every time the pangs of culpability flooded her, that her mother was the one who should feel guilt, for she’d hung the Damoclean sword of her suicide over Colleen ever since she was a little girl.
In fact, Deirdre never mentioned suicide again. For a while Colleen thought she just might do it, but if she meant to, Deirdre had left it too late. Timing was the trick, of course; timing was everything. Colleen doubted now that her mother could even remember wanting to.
If Colleen were gone, Deirdre would be utterly alone in the world—tiny as a broken, wizened child beneath the thin hospital blanket. The government would step in, assign a trustee. This pierced her, but dully. She thought of Pixie at the veterinarian’s, without anyone she knew to hold her in the final moments. Was it not at least equally horrible to contemplate leaving her own mother to a similar fate? It was, but even as she knew this, and thought it a decent enough reason not to kill herself, it simply didn’t feel like a strong enough reason to stay alive. Her mother might even understand.
