Any Day Now (5 page)

No one called. Not “Hi, Ma!” or “Al, I'm back!” Just footsteps down the hall, men's boots, snow boots. Had Benoit locked the door? No, the last one to leave was Jacinthe. Had she opened the door to let out the cat? Where was the cat? If the cat — Miss Minouver, the kids had named her about a hundred years ago — was inside, she was in your face, at your ankles. The boots stopped at the closed bathroom door, then continued. Joey, shivering, began to whimper. “Ssshh!” she ordered him and he stopped.

The boot steps softened as they crossed the carpet of the bedroom. She heard the sliding closet door bang open, metal hangers hit each other, a box being dragged. Mathieu! He'd come home to borrow something. Her sewing machine! He was fixing up his new place, sewing curtains and pillows, he'd told her, trying to economize so that he and Chuck, his roommate, could save to put in a new kitchen next year, then a new bathroom the year after. He had plans, Mathieu. When he met some nice girl, which she was sure he would soon, then he'd buy Chuck out. But why didn't he call for her? Mathieu, the sweetest of the whole lot of them, always came waltzing in with hugs and kisses. “Dream Mama,” he called her. And Mathieu knew better than to clomp across her bedroom with boots on.

“Holy fucking shit!” she heard someone yell from the kitchen. Now there were two people in the house, and it came to her slow as a prayer that she didn't know either of them.

She tried to reconstruct it faithfully afterward for the cops. (No one had listened to her this carefully in years, been so interested in every little detail.) The people, men, she assumed, ran back and forth in their snow boots for five minutes, tops. They never checked the bathroom where Alexandrine had climbed into the tub, pulling Joey on top of her. “They were speaking English?” the cops asked at least three times. “Yes!” she finally exploded. “How would I understand ‘Holy fucking shit' in Spanish?” The cop had smiled at this. She was a live one all right.

Benoit found them there in the bathtub when he finally came back around 7:00, five hours after he'd left. She was soaked through from the water left in the tub from Joey's bath. She'd used her sweater as a shawl to wrap around the boy's shoulders, and her long skirt, the grey wool one she liked to wear to mass this time of year, was tucked into the backs of his legs. “I sure as hell wasn't going to get up with those guys here,” she told the cops. “Not a friggin' chance!” With help at hand, with all this attention, with her back aching and her head thumping, her tongue was unleashed. Let the shit fly. She really didn't care.

They were probably used to hearing everything anyway as they sat around people's kitchen tables, their big-cop bodies filling their deep-blue uniforms, sighing, nodding, drinking whatever was offered. Benoit had made everyone coffee, even said he could make cornbread if they had the time. “I wish I had something else to offer you good folks,” he said. “Usually there's, well, something…” Since he'd arrived, he'd hardly said a word with his mouth, but his eyes had told Alexandrine over and over, I'm sorry. He kept patting little Joey, who now sat obediently at the table drinking a glass of chocolate milk, having made a miraculous recovery since his grandfather and the cops arrived.

“Careful there, young man,” Alexandrine told him when he burped. “We don't want another puke session, do we?” The cops grinned.

“I wish I could say my mother would have handled the intrusion” — that's what they kept calling it, the intrusion — “as well as you did,” the younger cop, said. “Knowing Mémé, she would have started yelling her head off and then who knows what would have happened.”

They told her she was one brave lady. Cool-headed, that's what the older partner called her.

“But why would anyone want to break into our house?” Benoit asked, and they all turned to look at him.

“Mr. Lachance, there are a lot of very desperate people out there,” the older cop said. “People steal things to sell them. From the looks of it, these guys weren't pros. They just needed some fast cash. Drugs probably.”

“When what they really needed was some Kraft Dinner,” said Alexandrine. No one laughed, though she'd kind of meant it as a joke. “Well, that pearl necklace of mine will keep them smoking and snorting for a few weeks.”

Her jewelry box was the first thing she'd checked, wading across a sea of fabric. Every dresser drawer had been up-ended. Panties, nightgowns, hose, scarves, stirrup pants lay like riches on the beige carpet. Where had all this stuff come from? It must have taken years, a whole adult life, to accumulate. The necklace was gone from its maroon velvet box, as were the 18k-gold chains and earrings, mostly gifts from Benoit and the boys. The robbers may have been amateurs, but they'd gone for the good stuff.

Jacinthe arrived just as the cops were pushing back their chairs and murmuring promises about trying to track down the jewelry in pawn shops. “You might consider putting in an alarm system,” the younger policeman said. “Lots of people are doing that.”

Jacinthe's eyes went from the cops to Joey — pale, but still drinking his chocolate milk — then to her mother.

“We're OK,” said Alexandrine. “We had a scare. Well, actually I had two scares, but we're OK now.”

After the cops left, and Benoit was playing with Joey on the floor in the living room, Alexandrine told Jacinthe the story of Joey and his getting sick and the footsteps and the long wait in the tub as the water slowly drained.

“Oh, Ma,” cried Jacinthe and came to her mother, holding her almost unbearably tight. She was only bones this close in, sharp little bones. “Oh, Ma, how frightening for you.” And then she began to sob, really sob, so that Alexandrine had to take her into the bedroom. “Oh, Ma,” cried Jacinthe, seeing the boxer shorts, the bras, the nightstand photos, the jewelry boxes, the stew of her parents' life spread on the floor.

“You need to get that boy in to a doctor tomorrow,” said Alexandrine. “What happened wasn't right.”

“I know,” said Jacinthe. “It happened once before.”

“Thanks for telling me,” said Alexandrine.

“He doesn't want me any more,” said Jacinthe, sitting down on the bed, which, Alexandrine now noticed, was clear, like an island. Even the pillows were as she'd placed them that morning. “He wants someone else. Can you believe that?” And Jacinthe's face folded.

“Who?” asked Alexandrine, and really, honestly, she couldn't think who Jacinthe was talking about.
Who
didn't want her anymore?“Ma! Who do you think?” And her daughter's eyes looked so despairing…at men, at life, at her!…that Alexandrine could only sit down next to her and stroke her hand over and over, back and forth, smoothing and smoothing, until Benoit came in with Joey and said the little guy was really tuckered out and maybe they should get him home to bed.

They said the rosary together that night, on their knees by the side of the bed. The intruders had left the rosaries at least. Benoit had swept the stuff off to the side, though he'd put away all of Alexandrine's pajamas and nightgowns. “I'll work on the rest tomorrow,” he said. The recitation of the rosary was soothing, the words right there as they'd always been. But when they stood, him helping her up…her back really was going out…she turned on him in a sudden blaze: “Where were you all that time?”

He didn't lower his eyes like he used to when she accused him of some negligence. “They were just overjoyed to have the toaster oven at Father Gilbert's. You should have seen them, Al. It'll make things move faster at lunchtimes and staff can use it, too. But then one of the volunteers had the flu so bad he had to go home, so I ended up cooking and then staying to help serve dinner. And then there was the cleanup.” He looked at her. “You must have been so scared.”

In bed, she told him what she'd wanted to tell him since he'd opened the bathroom door: “It was your people. Those people you try to help, they're the ones who robbed us.”

“What are you going to do, Al? Stop giving because of a few misguided souls?”

“We'll have to ask the Guignolée folks to collect for us this year,” said Alexandrine.

Benoit laughed, a good laugh. That laugh had saved him more than once. And then he said, “Suppose there are brothers or sisters who need clothes and don't have enough to eat. What good is there in your saying to them, ‘God bless you! Keep warm and eat well!' — if you don't give them the necessities of life?”

Into her silence, he said, “Letter of James. I love that passage.”

The boots had stopped at the door just before Joey had whimpered. Minutes later, as she manoeuvred the slack boy into the tub, the plastic rings on the shower curtain had clacked like castanets. The plastic of the flowered curtain — she'd learned every loop of every petal in the hours that followed — had crackled as she inched it aside. The remaining water, displaced by their bodies, then draining, had sounded as deafening as Montmorency Falls. And then there was the sound made by her mortal woman's heart.
They knew we were there.

Benoit sighed, licked his lips. For all the night's excitement, he'd fallen asleep as he always did, with pleasure. A truck grunted by, its gears shifting in the pit of Alexandrine's stomach. This used to be a quiet street. When they'd first bought the place, the kids played street hockey right out front. Now it was as noisy as a highway and as dangerous. People could pull into your driveway, come inside, take your things and leave
. They knew we were there.

So Jacinthe had lost her man and Joey might be…what, epileptic or something? And the pearls would never be found and Benoit wasn't going to change and those men had spared them, her and little Joey, and suddenly she was weeping. Maybe it was true. Everything she'd been taught by the nuns, the priests, all those sermons dished up and delivered, all those words from the apostles. Maybe God did protect them. And love them! Loved them to distraction, without limit. She wept at the thought of all that love, wept for all the years before she'd known this.

Don't stare! Don't point! Hearing Pa's usual on-his-ass alerts in his head, J-P turned as coolly as possible to check out what was happening at the back of the church. Sylvain and Antoine were in a huddle around the casket, short look-alike uncles in black suits, and J-P wished again he'd just stayed home.

“You can if you want,” Ma had said as late as yesterday morning. “You're old enough. We trust Jean-Pierre alone in the house, don't we, Norm? Norm? Don't we?” And Pa had just closed his eyes. It was only later yet, at a point in the afternoon where somebody had to decide something, that Pa had said: “Everybody else's kids are going to be there. It'll look bad.”

And because at sixteen he needed to feel as if a decision or two belonged to him, and because
ma tante
Jocelyne had been pretty cool and because Isabelle and all the other cousins would be there, J-P had said, “Yeah, I'll go.”

The organ started up and Sylvain and Antoine turned to face the congregation, none of whom were even
pretending
not to stare. J-P caught sight of Pa — Normand again now that they had left Massachusetts and were back in Quebec — directly behind Sylvain. The three brothers, plus Alain, Antoine's oldest son, bent on one knee as if genuflecting and hoisted the casket to shoulder level. Jocelyne had weighed only seventy-nine pounds at the end, J-P had heard his mother whisper earlier, so it must have been the casket itself that made the two brothers in front stagger slightly, then recover, under its weight. J-P couldn't decide whether the casket, pearly royal blue with silver fittings, was really pretty or really ugly.

“Don't ever set me out in one of those,” Pa had said to Ma when they'd arrived for the last sitting at the funeral home the night before.

The pallbearers were chugging up the aisle now, as if in a rush to drop their load. As they passed, J-P got a flutter in his gut remembering the way Jocelyne had looked laid out at the wake. She wore a maroon dress that the aunts had had to pin in back it was so big now. Her hands, crossed around a crystal rosary, already looked as if they were made of something other than skin. Tante Jocelyne, the funniest of the Quebec gang, the one who swore and chain-smoked, the only one who'd never married, was inside and she was dead. J-P almost reached back for Ma's hand; stuck it in the pocket of his too-tight suit pants instead. He heard her crying softly. Everything got to Ma. Every little thing, and, of course, this wasn't a little thing. Jocelyne was Pa's baby sister, “The only person in that family who ever really loved me!” Pa had blubbed when the call came.

But now as Pa came up the aisle, he looked his normal stick-up-the-ass self. The pouches under his eyes were bluer; his hair neater. The four suits bent again, placed the casket on some kind of bed frame thing at the foot of the altar, took their places in the empty pew in front, and Ma took a break from her crying. Then the French started and J-P was lost. Two years of high-school French — plus summer vacations spent here in St. Cyrille — and J-P still didn't get it.
Je comprends, je
comprends!
He was used to waving everyone off with this, grinning, throwing in a couple of not too objectionable Québécois swear words so none of the cousins would come to his rescue.

The first reading was from Isaiah, he understood that much. Then he was adrift again, looking around with his eyes only so that no one would tell Pa later, “That boy of yours, he wasn't paying attention.” He let his eyes stroll up to the aqua and cream ceiling, down the awesome columns with their big swirls of gold. He'd loved this church as a kid. It was just so old, not like boxy St. Mary's in Granby with its abstract stained glass windows and plain pews. His eyes dropped to the altar. This had been the favourite thing, the best thing, because behind the altar was a window painted like the sky, blue with streaky clouds. And in the middle of the window was a miniature cathedral with a three-dimensional dome. God lived there, that's what he'd thought when he was seven, eight. God lived in that church in Pa's hometown.

The priest, a young, balding guy, got up and started talking about Jocelyne's
bonne
sense d'humeur
. J-P checked out again through the blessing of the bread and wine, but then he did that at home, too. He caught sight of Antoine's three other kids, Noël, Christophe, and Isabelle, in a pew on the other side. Isabelle was busting out — J-P felt a little flush building — of a short, black, clingy dress. (Pa would have a thing or three to say about that dress.) She was only eighteen, but could pass for twenty-three easy. They'd missed her last night at the wake. She'd had to work, Antoine had said. In front of them sat Philippe, Sylvain's oldest son, with his wife and their new baby. Philippe kept bouncing the baby in his arms when it began to make noise. He looked older and heavier than he'd been at his wedding two summers before, the last time they'd all been together.

J-P let his eyes wander, his mind bounce, tried to keep a tick down in his left foot. He studied the backs of heads, seeing for the first time that Pa and the uncles all parted their hair the same way — long strands brushed up and over to the right. They sat there like balding triplets, probably thinking they were fooling everyone with their comb-overs. There were ways to get old, thought J-P, and this wasn't one of them.

And then there was Tante Jocelyne, sitting on the aisle of the second pew behind her brothers. J-P put his hand on his stomach, looked down to reorient his head, scrunched up his eyes. Yeah, it was her. She was wearing her usual outfit: tight jeans with a long T-shirt; but she looked as if she'd just come from the hairdresser's. Her short, auburn crop was fluffed. J-P turned to see if anyone else saw, but everyone was crying too hard. Jocelyne had been the baby of the family, only forty-one. Lung cancer. Everyone was shaking their heads over that. They'd
told
her to quit.

Tante Jocelyne turned around and smiled. Was she smiling at him? They'd always had a special something, even if he'd barely understood her.

Then she wasn't there anymore and J-P was glad and sad, disappointed and relieved. Some tears finally came. He rubbed them away fast, but Ma, sobbing away, didn't notice anyway. Ma lived with her black dogs, as she called them, so much of the time that a funeral, a really good reason for crying, was almost a relief. J-P checked the second pew, in dread and hope, for the rest of the service.

On the short walk from the church to the cemetery, Pa practically had to hold Ma up she was so limp with grief. J-P held back, falling in alongside Isabelle. The sky had greyed over while they'd been inside, bringing with it a razor wind. It was too soon for it to be this cold, only early October, but then it
was
Quebec. Isabelle turned a teary face to J-P and pulled his arm through hers. “
Ce n'est pas juste. Elle etait la meilleure chose dans cette famille
.” Isabelle sounded angry, though J-P couldn't be absolutely sure of what she'd said. He wanted to tell her about seeing Jocelyne. If anyone wouldn't freak out, it would be Isabelle, but he couldn't think of the word for ghost, and if he said, “I just saw Jocelyne,” Isabelle would probably think he'd screwed up his verb tenses.

Isabelle put her head on his shoulder, but they couldn't walk easily this way since they were the same height, and soon she let go of his arm. By the time they reached the circle of people at the gravesite, she went off to stand by her parents, her black high heels getting stuck, then unstuck, as she walked across the grass.

J-P kept his eyes open. Not for his parents, whom he couldn't see at the moment. But for
her
. He'd heard of stuff like this, seen his share of life-after movies. Jeez, he watched
Six Feet Under
, even though Pa thought it was creepy and “inappropriate” for TV. Still, you could know about these things and not believe any of them.

After more prayers and lots of huddling and sniffling, they made their way back to the cars. Ma and Pa were already in theirs, Ma now comforting Pa who, she told J-P, had nearly collapsed in the cemetery. “Be nice to him,” she said. “He really needs us now.” J-P looked away, out the back window.

Antoine and Sylvain were directing traffic out of the small lot, but Sylvain broke away to come to the window. “
Bonjour, bonhomme
,” he waved to J-P in the back seat. He gave Pa a slip of paper, directions to the hall.
“Ça va?”
he asked Pa, who nodded only slightly. Sylvain gave him a reassuring grip of the upper arm, then slapped the roof of the car.

“He said to follow him,” said Pa, rolling up the window. “He says things have changed around here. He always says that. But honestly, Marie, has it changed? Has it changed a bit?” Ma stroked the arm of Pa's suit coat, and turned to give J-P a meaningful look.

He knew about the shit that had gone down in the family, decades of shit. Ma had told him and Isabelle had tried once. There'd been rough times up here on the farms back in the fifties, not enough work and too many kids, and so lots of families had had to send some of the older children south, mostly to places like western Massachusetts where they could find work in the mills that made paper or shoes or textiles. That was how Pa had met Ma, whose parents had moved from Quebec a generation before. That was how it had turned out that they lived down there, while everyone else lived up here. It could have been a happy story maybe, except that nobody seemed happy with it. According to Ma, Sylvain and Antoine resented Pa's being able to escape the family dramas, to go to the great U.S. of A., learn English, attend trade school and become a mechanic with his own garage. Meanwhile, Pa resented being sent away. He'd missed out big, he said, on the important stuff, like family, like feeling he belonged somewhere.

J-P looked back at the church, the massive doors now closed. Was she in there? Would she follow them? He'd heard about spirits staying, well, afloat, until the actual burial.

The hall turned out to be only five minutes from the church, a Knights of Columbus kind of place. They got out of the car, J-P as slowly as he could. This was what he most looked forward to and most feared: the party, if you could call it that, after. Post-wedding, post-funeral parties up here were like high school dances, with a buffet table against one wall, and long, chair-lined tables covered in plastic, where everyone ate a lot and joked and gossiped while the little kids horsed around in the middle. You couldn't really tell the difference between the weddings and the funerals, as Ma said. This was the best part of any visit, but the worst, too, because it was when he had to talk.

Ma ducked into the bathroom right away, so now he wasn't going to be able to hide behind her. Ma was mostly a social disaster, but her French was OK, and she somehow rose to these occasions. She'd put on lipstick and a little blusher and come out and…talk. Alain's three kids were already tearing around the place, Isabelle was talking to two girls he didn't recognize and Pa was talking with the older nephews, Alain, Philippe and Noël. Or rather, he was talking
at
them. Pa liked to hold forth.

“J-P! Bonjour!” and Tante Yvonne was giving him lipstick kisses and talking about the weather (he thought) and how big he'd grown (he thought) and about the complications of Jocelyne's illness.

“J-P!” Another aunt circled in. It always took him by surprise hearing his initials pronounced in French — Jee-Pay! — though by the end of any visit it felt as if this was the only way to say his name. Truth was, by the end of most visits he didn't feel much like going home. Home was a cooler, quieter place where people didn't fuss over him much. Granby, Massachusetts, was OK as places go, and he had some good, old friends like Josh whom he'd known since kindergarten. But life wasn't thick with people like it was here.

“Why can't we move back?” J-P had once blurted from the back of the dark car, heading south once again.

“It would only be fun for a while,” Pa had said.

The kids were yelling something familiar.
Un, deux,
trois, soleil!
J-P hadn't played this in years. He'd hated that game, but Jocelyne had always yanked him by the arm, pulling him up from whatever corner he'd claimed in one of these hall-type places, or at the chalet in the summer or mon oncle Antoine's finished basement at Christmas.
“Viens, viens!”

The game seemed pretty lame now, but when he was young, it had been a challenge. When you were “It,” you stood at the front of the room, back turned to the others. Then you'd count out loud:
un…deux…trois —
the other kids inching up behind you — until you called out, “
Soleil!
” and spun around to face them, nabbing whoever was still moving and sending them back to the wall. As a player, you had to have good balance, but also good radar. When would Christophe or Isabelle spin around? Would they do it fast or slow? As the youngest cousin, J-P was used to getting caught with a jiggly foot. Back to the wall.

But even more frustrating was being It and knowing the others were gaining on him.
Un, deux, trois…soleil!
He'd spin round and there they'd be — closer still, but not moving, not even an eyeball. How did they keep moving forward without looking as if they were going anywhere at all, springing on him finally before he could call out a last
soleil
?

“
Bonjour,
J-P!” She was there in jeans and her springy hair-do, arms crossed and watching the whole damn room.

“Is it really you?” J-P knew this sounded like a line from a stupid movie, but he had to say something.

“
Bien sûr
,” said ma tante Jocelyne, and said something else in French that he didn't get.

“Please,” he said. “Can't you speak English for once?”