Wallflowers (20 page)

“Excuse me,” said a voice. “Ma’am?”

An employee stood behind her with a trolley of yogurts, his arm extended in the air between them. She looked at his hand. He dropped it.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” he said. “You can’t combine bulk items.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

He must have been seventeen, his hair combed over his eyes, chin tipped so he could see through his fringe.

“You need to separate them and label each one.”

She looked at her bag. The macadamia nuts had sifted with the other two mixes. She couldn’t distinguish which came from which.

“How?” she asked.

“With the scoop.”

“But it’s all blended,” she said.

He bent toward the bag in her hand and prodded the plastic.

“Are there
three
mixes in there?”

“No,” she said.

“I thought you only added the nuts.”

She drew the bag away from him and cradled it in the nook of her elbow.

“I have to confiscate it, ma’am.”

“Excuse me?”

“You can’t take this bag to the till.”

“But that’s a waste.”

“Please pass me the trail mix.”

“Will you eat them?” she said.

“What?”

“Are you confiscating my dried fruit and nuts so that you may eat them?”

“Please pass me the bag.”

“Because go ahead,” she said. “But don’t waste them.”

She tossed him the bag, but he wasn’t ready and it slid down his chest to the floor. She snatched it from the tile, delivered the mix into his hands, then marched her cart to the till.

Outside the supermarket, she rolled the trolley to their Buick, past the bike racks and sacks of manure, the grow-at-home mint and nasturtiums in cartons of soil. She loaded her groceries into the trunk and wheeled the cart to the metal snake at the store’s entrance. When she returned to the car, she flicked the stereo volume knob to max, though the CD in the drive was Chopin’s
Nocturnes
. She pulled from the parking space and listened to the nocturnes very loud. Something metal clattered into her trunk. She stamped the brake. Nothing appeared in the rear windshield. An SUV stopped behind her and a man in blue jeans leaped onto the pavement. An Asian woman sprinted from the crosswalk with her cart. It looked like the cart wrenched her forward. She felt nervous now. She felt the follicles on her forearms contract. She shut off the ignition and stepped from her car. A cluster of bananas sat ahead on the pavement, and next to that, an overturned flat of blueberries. As she wended around the trunk, she noticed the orange flag beneath her wheel. Then the miniature shopping cart, which had flipped upside down, her car’s fender dipping into the wire basket. Under the cart, a girl lay nose down on the pavement. She wore a rubber jacket with rabbit ears stitched to the hood. The woman from the crosswalk shouted and together they yanked the cart from the fender, off the small girl, who did not cry. The Asian woman gathered the girl in her arms, and the blueberries that had pooled around her on the cement trickled into the storm drain. She herself stood with the cart dangling from her fist, her other hand clamped over her mouth.

=

The firemen arrived, then the ambulance. Lights raked from their trucks. The workers wore neon vests or jumpsuits, the police in darker uniforms. She found them easier to look at. A woman asked her questions while another photographed her tires. When they drove her home, their car idled in the driveway until she opened the front door. Inside, she watched them through the split in the blinds. She waited twenty seconds after the car pulled out before she walked to the bus stop.

At Emergency, she waited in the designated smoking area so the mother would not see her. She watched through the waiting room windows. The girl had been admitted. The mother sat outside the triage doors and stood every time a doctor passed.

Twice, a nurse joined her outside to smoke. The first time, she pretended she smoked too. She searched her pockets for cigarettes, though she knew she would not find any. She opened her purse.

“Leave yours inside?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Here.” He offered her his pack. She withdrew a cigarette and bent forward for him to light it.

An hour later, she leaned into the window with her forehead against the glass. When she stepped back to wipe the condensation, she saw his face in the pane, watching her. He tossed his butt to the curb and walked back inside.

In two hours and forty-three minutes, the mother changed her seat twice. She moved from the chair by the triage doors to the very back corner. Within five minutes, she returned to the chair by the triage doors. She had removed her blazer, but never set it down. She clutched it as she spoke to staff members. She shifted the jacket to one arm and dialed a number on her cellphone. Even through the window, she could see how her muscles tensed, how the fabric was clinched inside her elbow.

She wanted to buy the mother a coffee. She wanted to buy the mother one thousand coffees, and take her jacket and wait in the chair beside her and hold her hand. Or sit in her chair with the jacket and one thousand coffees to let the mother pee and stretch her legs. Instead, she watched through the glass and noticed every detail. Her hair looked hennaed. Wisps of it bulged from her head, as though that morning it had been pressed into a bun. She wore a high-waisted skirt with a back slit that had rotated to the side of her thigh. Her nude nylons were more tanned than her arms. Her arms were thin. She wore slingback heels.

No one joined her. Not her husband or mother or a neighbour with a foil-tented dinner and a pair of flat shoes. A nurse spoke with her. She could not read their lips or body language. The mother sat back down. Seventeen minutes after the first two hours and forty-three, nothing had changed. She had not brought a sweater. She could hear her forehead tremble into the glass. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders and crossed the parking lot. She jogged home this way—her hands locked to her biceps as though she wore a straitjacket.

At home in the living room, she cleaned the windows with vinegar and an old shirt. She had been watching the neighbours’ yard when she noticed the streaks in the glass, noticed she could spell her name in them. Her husband had not returned yet from work. She thought he should have by then, though she hadn’t phoned to say what happened. While she waited, she climbed onto the couch in bare feet and balanced on the tops of the cushions to reach the upper corners. The trouble with vinegar is that it does not clean windows. The streaks smudged no matter how hard she kneaded the rag into the glass. But she continued anyway, in case it dried clear. She knotted the shirt around her fist and swabbed the cloth with more vinegar. By the time her husband arrived, the pane was coated with milky spirals.

“You home?” he called when he opened the front door.

She heard him sling his coat on the rack in the hall. She stepped down to the lower cushions.

“Did you order fish and chips?” he asked as he walked in. When he saw the windows, he frowned.

“We’re out of Windex,” she said. Then her head felt inexplicably heavy, like it had been filled with stones. The length of her body thudded across the couch.

=

The girl had coasted on the back of her cart like a kick scooter. The woman did not see her because a Volvo had entered the adjacent space and obscured her view. The security tapes revealed this. The Volvo pulled in. The Buick backed out. The girl’s cart rolled under her fender.

The woman sat in the sun on sharp grass. She had overdressed for the heat—her garden overalls and a plaid shirt, a hand towel draped over her head so the UV rays would not burn her. The warmth moored her hips to the lawn. It made her legs soupy; she knew she could not walk on them. So she sat, her wrists limp across her knees. She did not even go inside for a Kleenex. It irritated her when infants did this, when they did not sniff though a cord of mucus shone from their upper lip. Now she let herself leak too. She blew out a spume and felt the snot slink down her mouth. When she could not stand it, she wiped her nose with her shirt sleeve.

She had caught a cold last week, the week of the accident. The thinnest fluids had dried, but she still felt congested. “Flood it out,” her husband said when he left that morning. “Lots of tea.” But he would have questioned the two-litre bottle she brewed it in. She couldn’t find their picnic Thermos, and coffee mugs weren’t deep enough. So she used the Coke bottle and extra tea bags. She had selected five from different boxes: licorice; ginger-lemon; echinacea, which was a word she frequently misread.
Euthanasia
, the label read each time. Euthanasia tea. There were others. Hitler hi-liters. TO LET.

Next door, the German short-haired pointer had shucked its lead. She knew the breed, because her husband had commented when they moved in.

“Handsome pup,” he had said.

“German short-haired pointer,” said the guy-next-door, who later became the cardiologist-next-door, who later  became  the asshole-who-leaves-his-sprinkler-on-when-it’s-raining.

“How old?”

“Eighteen months.”

“So a year and a half.”

“Yep,” said the cardiologist. “Eighteen months.”

Her husband had flown to Seattle that morning for work. He offered not to. He could have phoned “Clayton or Steve” to cover him, but she told him to go. She wanted a weekend alone. Now she sat on the wheatish grass that would cling to her poly/cotton overalls when she stood, and listened to the dog rattle the clematis on the other side of the fence. She could see his snout bobbing, and when he ducked his snout, his hay-coloured eyes. She scooted closer. She crouched opposite him and slipped her hand between two pickets. He sniffed her palm. He licked the space between her fingers.

At the end of the yard, the fence yielded to the Garry oak tree. A bough had sagged and split the wood, wedging enough space for a person to shimmy through. She whistled to the dog and tiptoed in that direction, dragging her fingernails along the planks. He swished after her on the other side. When they reached the tree, she clucked her tongue, and he thudded through the gap in the fence. He was a funny creature up close—his coat marbled like a horse, but brown as mud above the neck. The colour disembodied his head. And his ears were broad. He looked like he might tip over. He brushed past her toward the house. She stood and watched, unsure what to do. He trundled up the steps of her porch, sniffing the wood at each level. She had left the door open. He walked right in. She gathered her hand towel and tea and followed his path across the yard.

The hall was dim inside—she had not opened the drapes that morning. Once she closed the door behind her she could not see. As she walked through the living room, the lines of furniture crisped into shape. Light peeled through the slit between two blinds, the sun dust suspended like a third curtain. On the floor, the dog gnawed the leg of her wingback armchair. She continued her path into the kitchen.

She had not cooked a meal since the accident. They ordered in the first few days, and then her husband started barbecuing chickens. Entire birds, balanced on the grill with a beer can wedged up their rectum. It made her sick. He barbecued one last night, which sat in the fridge half-carved, its thighs still hugging a can of Pilsner. She lifted the plate from the shelf and pinched a slab of breast with her fingers.

“Hey, dog,” she whispered, as she walked back through the French doors. He wasn’t wearing a collar and she didn’t know his name. “Hey, dog,” she said again.

When he smelled the chicken, he barrelled for her, his tongue slack in his jaw like a wet sock. She guided him away from the carpet and tossed the meat on the floor. He licked it off. She pinched another strip.

She fell asleep. She did not mean to. Later, when she woke and wandered back into the living room, she found a bulge in the blinds, and the dog’s docked tail trembling on the hardwood. He heard her footsteps and dashed out from the awning. He scampered down the hall to the back door. She tugged the cord and rolled the blinds up to her eye level. The cardiologist’s SUV had not returned to the driveway, but she suspected it would by seven. It must be six now. Six thirty. The dog whined from the hall. She returned to the fridge and sliced some chicken into a Ziploc bag. She met the dog at the door and slipped into her leather sandals. He smelled the chicken off her fingers and barked. She hushed him. She opened the door. He bolted down the steps and across the yard. She whistled. She patted her knees, quietly so the neighbours would not hear her. She joined him at the fence and scratched his neck and fed him chicken. He licked her fingers. She lured him with her fingers down the road.

They walked to the sea. They followed the path she liked, to the rocks that rose from the sand at low tide. She liked this phase of summer, when the leaves bloated with so much green sun that the trees appeared to stoop. Oaks and alders cottoned from the beach and their dye seeped into the water. She picked her way across the rock, lunged over barnacles and mossy pools. The dog panted past her. He halted at the edge and backed himself around. He sniffed a crab shell. Beyond the reflection of trees, the water dimmed. It was a calm day. You could skip rocks. She crouched to her heels at a pool. The anemones slumped in the crevasses like seedy figs. They were green, mostly. Dark and loamy. Two starfish cleaved to the side of the rock, their legs aimed to her chin. She liked to find batches of them, their sodden limbs arced to a common point. She liked that the tide could mould them.